Fatalis (18 page)

When Professor Thorpe didn't show up for class again, and the usual graduate student substitute was missing and presumed jerking off, sophomore and aspiring naval officer Vlaskovitz-warming a seat here because it was required- glanced over at superskinny, dark-haired Tim Douglass and stocky Pancho d'Escoto, who were sitting in the last row. Vlaskovitz gave his college roomies the high-raised eyebrow "fuck it?" look, to which they responded with the pursed-lip, single-nod "fuck it!" response. And together the three of them walked out of Dr. Thorpe's Geological Sciences 1103A, Structural Geology class. They left the building and strolled into the brilliant orange sunset and out to Douglass's van.

Twenty minutes later they were changed into their black sailing spandex and pulling their Hobie Cat from the garage of the off-campus student residence where they lived.

Forty-five minutes after that they were in the choppy, wind-slapped waters off Goleta Beach.

Ninety minutes after that they were over two miles from shore between Montecito and Summerland with a broken rudder and seriously unhappy dispositions.

Hannah Hughes reached Jim Grand's office in the Humanities and Social Sciences Building just over a minute after he did. The reporter was wearing tight black jeans, a loose white blouse, a stylish black blazer, and a very unhappy expression. She had hair-clipped her bangs from her face. The rest of her hair hung straight as a result of the sea spray baking on her sweaty head on the beach during the morning.

"So tell me," she said.

"What?"

"Do I look more like my photo now?"

Grand smiled. "Yes, you do."

"Well, I feel like it," Hannah said. "It's been a day and a half without much to show for it."

"Then relax," Grand said. "I'll be right back."

Grand left to appropriate a chair for her from the office of Associate Professor Wildhorn, who was teaching.

Hannah slid her red bag from her shoulder, put it on the floor, and dropped a pair of paper bags from Chris's Crinkles beside it. She stood there, enjoying the moment of peace. The window was open and the room was filled with cool sea air. Fading sunlight turned the bare white walls amber. There was a small television and VCR on top of a filing cabinet beside the desk, and a map of the region on the wall behind her.

Darker patches of wall above the desk marked spots where pictures had once hung.

Grand came back with a swivel chair. He put it down and shut the door. Hannah sat down.

"I brought us late lunch or early dinner, depending on how you look at it."

"It'll probably be both," Grand said. He cleared a space on the gunmetal desk between a pile of overstuffed folders and videotapes on the right side. He placed the thick bags of take-out there. The desk was also stacked high with ungraded papers, rubberbanded diskettes, unread journals, un-catalogued photographs, and boxes filled with stone arrowheads and spearheads.

"How was your class?" Hannah asked.

"Fine. So tell me about your day and a half. What's the latest from the front?"

"From the sheriff's office? Not much," Hannah said. "Gearhart's a master at presenting this image that everything's under control without telling you how, why, and whether it really is. It's infuriating."

"What did he say?"

"According to the afternoon press conference the search is continuing, widening, and there's no cause for worry. But enough about the dog-and-pony show." Hannah shook her head. "Jim, I don't know what to make of everything that's been happening. Maybe there isn't anything
to
make of it, but I had to talk to you."

"Okay," he said patiently.

"I told you about the truck accident in Montecito and the possibly missing driver and the fact that none of us was allowed close to the site."

"Right."

"What I didn't tell you was that Gearhart called the owner of the fishing company, who happens to be a friend of mine. He asked if the driver was traveling with a dog." She paused. "Jesus, you know what?"

"No."

"Now it sounds crazy."

"What does?"

"This whole unformed idea of about a million parts," Hannah said.

"Tell me."

Hannah took a short breath. "I'd been thinking that the disappearance of the two engineers was related to what happened to the truck driver, which is why I wanted to ask you about a possible tunnel route from Painted Cave Road to the foothills overlooking the beach. When the sheriff found hairs in the truck cab and my friend told me the driver didn't have a dog, and then
you
said you'd found hairs in one of the caves, I thought that an animal might be killing people."

"Has that been ruled out?" Grand said.

"I don't know. No one's talking."

Grand thought for a moment. "It could have been a scavenger in the truck. I've seen raccoon footprints on deserted beaches. But there is something else that might suggest the involvement of an animal."

"What?"

"Remember the backpack we found in the creek? The lacerations?"

"That's right," Hannah said.

"I'm sure the crime lab will give them a complete examination," Grand said. "They'll check for animal hairs, any saliva the fabric may have soaked up-"

"And we'll never find out the results," Hannah said bitterly.

"Everything comes out in time," he said.

"Maybe, but I don't have your kind of eons to wait," Hannah replied. "When will you know what kind of animal your cave hair belongs to? I'd love to hit Gearhart with that before tomorrow's edition."

"That data should be ready now," he said as he booted his computer, "along with the results of the radiocarbon and gas chromatography tests."

"Radiocarbon I know about," she said. "Gas chromatography is…
?

"A process in which a substance is broken down to molecular pieces which are hitched to a carrier gas and then sent through a liquid or solid absorbent," Grand said. "The components are then sifted so they can be identified and measured."

"Oh.
That
gas chromatography," Hannah said.

Grand smiled. "It's like blowing smoke through a tissue and seeing the gunk that's left behind."

"Ah," Hannah smiled. "That I get."

"Every living thing metabolizes chemicals in very distinctive proportions," Grand said. "In case the first two tests aren't enough to tell us where the hair came from, the breakdowns give us a precise map to compare to other chemical maps."

"Got it. I want you to know I really appreciate this," she said as the computer's hard drive whirred. "Not just the information but being able to talk to someone. Someone who understands."

"I'm glad I can help," he said.

"I just don't want to drag you into the politics of it," she added quickly as she punched in a number. "Gearhart is my problem, the stonewalling son of a bitch. And now he's got Andrea Danza on his side-"

Hannah stopped as her phone beeped. She excused herself and pulled the phone from her bag. She spoke quietly while Grand returned to the computer. The conversation was a conference call with her advertising rep, who apparently wanted Hannah to run a series of feature articles about new trends in beach footwear in exchange for a six-month advertising guarantee from a manufacturer of a new kind of beach footwear. Grand was impressed by Hannah's insistent refusal to do "advertorials." He was also impressed by her ability to shift from an outpouring of rage to making quick, calm, confident decisions. Grand had never been able to make fast changes like that. Rebecca, who was always upbeat, used to have to nurse him from his pensive moods, something that usually took the better part of the morning or evening.

Maybe it's a gender thing
. Grand thought. Males were territorial carnivores who found it difficult to leave anything without a struggle, even a state of mind. Females were more adaptable.

Hannah hung up and opened the Chris's Crinkles bags.

The smells brought back memories for Grand and he tried not to think about them. He concentrated on the list of data options. All the results on the hair sample tests were completed; the results of the mineral scraping would be done by early evening.

Grand booted the DNA results first.

As he looked at them, he shook his head.

"What's wrong?" Hannah asked.

Grand said without triumph, "I was right."

"About what," she said eagerly.

He pointed to the bags of food. "This is going to be dinner."

The DNA results presented Grand with an impossibility. They showed the presence of metabolic activity in the hair samples, most actively in the gene that regulates the chemical breakdown of glucose. That ruled out the hairs having been part of a Chumash paintbrush. But the test did not produce a match in the database of mammals indigenous to Southern California. It was possible and not unprecedented that an animal from outside the area had escaped from a zoo, circus, or private collection. Either no one had noticed it or was afraid to acknowledge it for fear of lawsuits or insurance claims.

It also meant that he would have to run a lengthy series of tests comparing the DNA of the hair to the DNA of all the mammals that were in the database.

Before Grand did that, though, he decided to have a look at the other test results. What he found there might help to narrow the search. As he loaded the data from the radiocarbon dating, Hannah asked Grand to explain how the dating process worked.

"Carbon 14 is a more massive form of carbon, one that's radioactive and loses electrons as it decays," he told her. "Since carbon 14 is created by interaction between solar radiation and earth's atmosphere, it becomes integrated in carbon dioxide and is found in all living things. When something dies and the carbon in the system is no longer replenished, the carbon 14 already present begins to decay. Because the rate of decay is constant, we're able to accurately determine when living tissue last absorbed carbon 14."

"Understood," Hannah said. "Then how do you determine the age of nonliving things like rocks and pottery and the Shroud of Turin?"

"All rocks, minerals, and other nonliving matter contain different kinds of radioactive material such as uranium, thorium, potassium-40," Grand said. "Those decay into different states which are also measurable."

"I see," Hannah said. She plucked several fries from the bag and ate them. "So we could test these fries using radiocarbon dating because they were once alive."

"That's right." Grand smiled at Hannah. "At least, you're assuming they were. You have to read the fine print at a place like Chris's Crinkles."

"What do you mean?" Hannah said.

"The last time I went to the movies with Rebecca they had something they called 'buttery topping' for the popcorn and a 'frozen dairy product' where they used to have custard-"

"Are you saying that these may be fake spuds?"

"It wouldn't surprise me."

Hannah shrugged and ate several more fries. "You could be right. But Chris Sheehy is a local businessperson and an advertiser, so I've got to patronize her place. Anyway, who knows? Maybe next week one of your scientific colleagues will find out that eating dead things with carbon 14 is bad for us. Potassium-40 may be all the rage."

Grand smiled as the results of the radiocarbon daring began to appear on the monitor. While he read the data his smile evaporated. "It can't be," he said.

"What?"

Grand finished the file, then scrolled back and began reading the figures again slowly.

"
What
can't be?" Hannah pressed.

"The radiocarbon dating results," Grand said. "They say these hair samples are nearly eleven thousand years old."

"You're joking," Hannah said. "But according to the DNA findings the hairs came from a living creature," Hannah said.

"They did," Grand replied.

"Is there any way something could have contaminated your samples, like microbes or germs?" Hannah asked. "Maybe they were mistaken for signs of life in the hair."

"That can't happen at the DNA level," Grand said. "The tests Tami ran take apart the hair itself. There's no way of mistaking that for a microbe."

"Well, something's obviously wrong," Hannah said. "And if the DNA tests are foolproof-"

"Then there must be a mistake in the age," Grand said. "I'm going to check the DNA analysis. The tests also give us a chemical breakdown. There may be something in the hair, a chemical, mineral, or radioactive element that could have skewed the radiocarbon result."

The fan in the computer hummed quietly as Grand asked the computer to identify elements and chemicals that were present in the hair. There was nothing unusual. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, magnesium, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, and various salts.

Grand brought up the proportions of organic materials and other compounds. When those were on-screen he compared them with elements and compounds found in the hair of local bobcats, gray wolves, foxes, elks, field mice, and rabbits. He wasn't trying to determine that the hairs had come from one of those animals, only that the ratios were relatively similar.

They were, with two exceptions.

"The average water content of the other fur samples is 68.7 percent," the scientist said as he read the ratios. "The hair samples I brought in have an elevated saturation level of 87.6 percent."

"That sounds pretty high," Hannah said.

"Yes, but explainable. The hairs were probably submerged at some point down in that cavern. What I don't understand is this other figure."

"Which is?"

"Carbon dioxide," Grand said. "The random fur samples have levels that are an average of 300 percent
higher
than the hairs I found in the stalagmite. That shouldn't be. The air my creature breathed shouldn't have contained such low percentages unless-"