Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) Read Free Page A

Scotty.
    “Listen up, folks,” Scotty said, “like I said in the van, there’re places you can go, and places you can’t go. Up ahead, where it’s roped, is the hot zone. Zone runs alongside the road, waaay uphill. Some areas have been metered and okayed—like the area we’re going into, where the truck is. We’ll call that Area One. The area you’re not going into is uphill of that, where the crane’s working—Area Two. That’s where the casks got thrown. Questions?”
    Only one: what’s the weird thing you’re saving up for us? I held my tongue. We’d find out soon enough.
    “Okey-doke,” Scotty said, “let’s mask up.”
    We fitted our facepieces and raised our hoods and opened the regulator valves and the air flowed. We headed up the road to the crash site, where Hector Soliano awaited us. Masked-up now, like us, features obscured, like ours, he was nonetheless readily identifiable by his height and his ramrod FBI posture.
    Scotty led the three of us through the control point into the hot zone.
    Spotlights showed a path already tramped by other feet in the muddied soil. I felt bulky, moving with a truly odd gait in my rubber booties. I carried the field kit in my balloon-tested hand. I scanned Area One for stray casks. Nothing. Nothing but desert, no worry, just the everyday naturally occurring background radiation emitted by the native soil and rock, to which I never give a thought unless I’m doing a chem analysis for a soil profile.
    We came to the truck.
    It was a flatbed tractor-trailer. In essence, a delivery truck. But for the lead shield between the cab and the trailer, it could have been delivering refrigerators. The battered rig had come to rest on its right side, belly facing us, wheels painfully skewed. I pictured it rolling, shooting refrigerators out the top as it tumbled.
    Soliano gathered us. “I will first explain what we know.”
    His voice came tinny over the speaker in my facepiece. I had to ignore the hiss of my air tank and my own Darth Vader breathing.
    Soliano continued. “The vehicle is owned by Alliance Freight. Alliance reports that it was following the correct route, according to its transponder. It was en route to the CTC waste repository, five miles ahead off highway 95.”
    Highway 95 was just visible, the dark strip that bisected the desert.
    “Skid marks indicate the hijacker forced the truck off the highway, onto this road. Tire marks take the vehicles farther uphill, where the truck went over the edge. The trailer portion took the brunt and was breached, scattering its cargo. The truck continued to tumble downhill and came to rest here.”
    I looked uphill, where the truck had gouged something of a bobsled run.
    “Footprints suggest the hijacker left his vehicle and followed on foot.”
    “Hijacker, singular?” Walter asked.
    “A single series of prints, which we attribute to the hijacker.”
    “On what basis?”
    “Location. Direction.” Soliano shrugged. “The scene is difficult—everyone who left a print was wearing protective booties. Including, presumably, the hijacker, since there are bootie prints around his vehicle tire marks.”
    “Hijacker, male?” I asked.
    Soliano waved a hand—the default assumption. “Hijacker, homicidal. The driver has been shot.”
    I gazed up at the dented cab. “Maybe the intent was homicide, not hijacking.”
    “The intent reaches beyond homicide.”
    So now we came to it.
    Soliano led the way to the back of the trailer. I steeled myself for something hideous—there were things beyond murder that qualified—but the first thing I noticed on the crippled back panel was the standard radiation placard. Black fan-bladed symbol in a yellow triangle, RADIOACTIVE in black. The only thing unfamiliar to me was the red Roman numeral III and the number 7. So okay, we rank our soils, they rank their rads.
    I thought, there’s nothing weird about a rad symbol on a radwaste truck.
    And then Soliano stood out of the way so that