Authors: Sarah Andrews

Killer Dust (8 page)

BOOK: Killer Dust

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I was only too happy to comply with the idea of eating, having been up flying since I couldn’t remember when. We swam through the hot, humid air beyond the building to Guffey’s car, which was what I’d have to call unbearably hot, even though the windshield had been armed with a set of telescoping covers. The seats were searingly hot. The car’s air-conditioning unit did its best, but was just getting the interior temperature down from scald to broil as we pulled in at our destination.

Chattaway’s is an outdoor lunch joint set off from the road and the parking lot by a bulwark of pink claw-foot bathtubs planted with the most enormous philodendrons and trailing plants I’d ever seen. We sat down at a wooden picnic table under a big canvas umbrella and were handed menus by a young thing wearing short shorts and an incredibly tight tank top. I might have thought she was being provocative in interest of grubbing for tips except that she was no less clothed than half of her customers. I flapped the placket of my shirt, quickly realizing that Florida was a place where clothing seemed almost optional.

I turned my attention to my stomach. The menu featured something called grouper, which could be had fried and in a sandwich or batter fried and served with french fries, aka a ‘Tony Blair Special.’ “Does everything here come fried?” I asked.

“Darlin’, you are south of the deep-fry line.”

“Oh. What’s grouper?”

“It’s a kind of fish,” my host replied, “but if you haven’t never had it, you should come to the house and let me barbecue some for you first.”

Okay
… So I ordered the bacon-cheese Chattaburger, and Guffey had one without the bacon, saying he had to look after his boyish figure. After dispatching the waitress with our orders, Guffey waved at several colleagues who were just wandering out of the open-air bar that surrounded
the grill, then turned back to me and opened with, “Molly Chang says you’re looking for a thesis project. That right?”

“Possibly. My background is in oil and gas, but I’ve been around blowing dust before, growing up in Wyoming.”

“Oh yeah, you got illite clays that blow clear to the Chesapeake. But I hear you got another trick or two up your sleeve.”

“Excuse me?”

“Beyond your oil and gas experience.”

The waitress brought us each a giant glass of lemonade, and I used the distraction to collect my thoughts. I considered pouring the lemonade over my head, but instead drained it rather quickly down my throat. Thus more fully hydrated, I began to mind the heat a little less. I said, “You mean the work I’ve done on crime scenes. Yeah, I was thinking my angle might be to treat the project as just that: a crime scene. The forensic geology of African dust.” Having made my pitch, I watched him carefully.

Guffey took a healthy draw on his own lemonade. “I like that. It’s got panache. But it looks like we got us two crimes to solve, now don’t it?”

I took another swill of lemonade and pondered this. “You got me there. I just rode into town as it were, and you say there’s been a fight. What’s your evidence? I mean, the part you didn’t tell the police or the press.”

Guffey nodded. “We been having all kinds of problems with this funding picture,” he began. “First off, there’s the point-source guys who don’t want us to be right, because then they lose
their
funding. Then we got the agribiz guys who don’t want people even thinking about what’s getting into the food supply. And that crosses right over into the medical field. We got docs saying if you blow the whistle on certain things that’s flying around in that dust, you’re likely to find yourself in a one-car accident way out in the boonies.”

“You mean a Karen Silkwood kind of story.”

“Essackly.”

“You said at the press conference that the Center for Disease Control isn’t interested.”

“The CDC won’t ante up ’cause they want proof it’s a health hazard before they’ll add it to their list of woes. And even if we do, they got their rigid parameters about how they go about things, like maybe if we find a big enough red cape to wave at them they’ll find a spare bull to give it a charge.”

“Got their own funding problems, no doubt.”

“Essackly.”

“And let me guess: Congress doesn’t like it because the source is out of our control. As in, even if we identify the problem, they can’t make the Africans quit stacking their camel dung where the wind’s going to pick at it.”

“Essackly. My, I do see why Molly likes you.”

I considered feeling puffed up by the compliment but remembered that I was being worked over by a pro. Molly Chang might or might not have said anything nice about me, but this Miles Guffey was in the business of recruiting free labor. So I did my best to ignore his bait. “I’m looking for something that would give me some good training in forensic work,” I said noncommittally.

Guffey cleared his throat. “Oh sure, I can set ch’all up with a project. We got arsenic showing up in cisterns in the Caribbean, and we got to show where that’s coming from. That could be a good way in for you. Prove the source terrain for that, maybe. See if you can fingerprint some of the minerals, maybe attach them to mining being done in North Africa. What d’you think?”

I bit into the hamburger that had just arrived. It was succulent. I could see why the USGS gave Chattaway’s its business. It offered the perfect fuel for the discerning geologist: cheap, unpretentious, al fresco, yummy, and plenty of it.

I used the time it took me to chew and swallow to decide how I was going to play things now that I knew a little more. I had read up on Miles Guffey’s reputation during my brief sortie through the university library, and he was
highly respected. He had umpteen-jillion publications and had served at a number of prominent posts within the profession and had taught highly regarded short courses. Judging by his white hair and heavily sun-blasted skin, he was somewhere between sixty-five and seventy, definitely nearing the sunset of his career, at least as a federal employee. But he also had the bearing and crowd-handling technique of a carnival barker. And that, for me, was a red flag. He was skating right to the edge of sensationalism. Did I want my career associated with that?

The answer was no, and yet I was intrigued. So I said, “Tell me more.”

Guffey’s lips curved almost clownlike around the job of chewing another bite. “Here’s a little book y’all oughtta read,” he said. He prized a slender trade paperback out of the satchel he’d brought with him from the car and handed it to me ever so casually, facedown and bottom for top. “It might appeal to the feminist in you or something, give you a place to dig in historically.”

I didn’t like being played as a feminist by a male of the species, but I turned the book over. It was entitled,
The Garden of Their Desires: Desertification and Culture in World History
by Brian Griffith. “Okay,” I mumbled. “I’ll give it a read. Funny, I didn’t find this one in the university library when I was doing my literature search the other day.”

“You wouldn’t. This is pretty obscure. Most of the literature and data we deal with is pretty far off the beaten path.”

“Okay,” I said, half delighted to be invited into a small club and half ready to bolt for the tall timber.

“Great,” he said. “And for your part, you can tell me more about your work with the FBI.”

I decided not to mention Jack, and certainly not his present assignment. “Mostly I’ve worked with a guy named Tom Latimer, but he’s retired from the Bureau now. He married my friend Faye and went into security work.”

Guffey chewed assiduously. “Faye. That’s Nancy Wallace’s niece, who got you down here.”

I stopped with my burger half an inch from my lips. “How’d you know that?”

“This be a small town, my friend.” Guffey gave me a ha-ha smile. “Okay, my wife was at the veterinarian with our schnauzer this morning and ran into Nancy. She said her niece was coming down from Salt Lake and bringing a friend who was coming to see me. Doesn’t take a genius to patch that one together. You know the theorem: There are six and a half billion people in this world, but only 10,000 of them get around, and sooner or later they all know each other. So, did you ladies bring this Tom Latimer feller to Florida with you, too?”

I allowed myself a deep sigh. It didn’t take a genius to see where he was going with this one, either.

Accurately reading my hesitation as a guarded yes, Guffey said, “That’s neat. So here’s what we’ll do. Y’all bring him along to the house tonight, and anyone else in your retinue that don’t mind a good party. I’ll barbecue some grouper, and we can all get acquainted.”

My mind chunked up a tiny little squeak of a question that was something like,
What if the person Miles Guffey really wants to get at is Tom Latimer?
I sat there with my mouth hanging open and my hamburger dripping juice down one wrist.

Miles Guffey stared back with a grin so big and sloppy and seemingly innocent that it scared me silly.

– 9 –

The afternoon sky was building from a mixture of soft-edged cumulus clouds to towering black cumulonimbus when Miles Guffey dropped me off at Nancy Wallace’s residence. I term her dwelling “a residence” because you don’t call something that big a house. She lived in a sprawling mansion, about 4,000 square feet of Spanish Colonial splendor laid out in a lush patch of tropical paradise, all palm trees and philodendrons and other things with enormous leaves that seemed to have been designed by an angel in heat. Her housekeeper answered the door and showed me in, through the house, and out the back into a vast jungle completely enclosed in screening. The structure was two stories high and even the roof was made of screening. Deep in the shade of this jungle I found a kidney-shaped swimming pool, and on the pool deck I found Nancy and Faye, who had donned bathing gear and arranged themselves on chaise lounges, and were sipping iced tea from tall, expensive-looking glasses. “Hello, Em!” Nancy hollered. “How’d it go with your science friends?”

“We might see it on the evening news,” I said. “I think there was a TV camera there. Or certainly it will be in the newspaper.”

Faye’s eyebrows shot up from behind her Ray Bans.

I described the press conference.

“I’ve seen your Miles Guffey in the news many a time,”
Nancy drawled. “Interesting character. Highly respected around here. He has a decent boat, and his wife plays bridge very well when she’s not out running up the price of real estate.” She paused ruminantly. “But I’ve often wondered whether the cheese might have slid a little ways off his cracker.”

Faye snorted.

I was about to ask Nancy to enlarge on that metaphor when I realized that Faye was smiling at me a little more broadly than the joke warranted. Something was up. “What?” I asked.

Her smile went to full toothiness. About then I began to notice voices coming from the guesthouse that joined the far end of the screened enclosure. The front door to it lay some distance away, past the far edge of the pool. Closed windows and the drone of an air conditioner muffled the voices. One voice was Tom’s. He was shouting at someone, but I couldn’t make out his words. He went quiet for a moment, during which time I heard snatches of a second voice, from which I deduced that Tom was not alone in there expressing rage into a telephone. I had about time enough to start wondering who in St. Petersburg (apart from me and Faye) Tom would shout at when he began bellowing. This time I heard each word quite distinctly. He roared, “Jack, you are one stupid son of a bitch!”

My jaw dropped.

“Yup,” Faye announced. “He’s here!”

I charged off toward the guesthouse, barely skirting the edge of the pool in my haste. My mind bounced like a puppy.
Jack’s here? Oh, this is wonderful! We can go to the beach together, or the Everglades, or
—About there, I realized that Jack was now yelling, too.

“I
can’t
!” he shouted.

“You
have
to report this!” Tom hollered back. “You
have
to!”

“Then I’d have nothing!” Jack roared. As I got close enough to the door to put an ear to it, I heard him say, his voice tightly drawn back down to a normal level, “I make
a grab for it and the whole deal comes apart.”

Tom said, “Whole deal? What do you mean, ‘whole deal?’ You got some romantic notion about all this, but let me tell you, this thing’s a whole lot bigger than your little fantasies can handle.”

There was silence for a while, then Jack said, “I was
this close
! We call in the posse and you
know
what’s going to happen. They’ll jump all over this and we’ve got nothing. The guy takes off and we don’t know where he got it or if there’s another, or ten, or a hundred of the damned things. That’s
it. No
second chances.”

Tom bellowed, “You’re way off the mark! You come down off your high horse and do the right thing!” Then, more pleadingly, he added, “What about the rest of the program?”

There was silence for a while, or if Jack said anything, I couldn’t hear it. Then I heard Tom speak again. “I know you’ve got to protect your family. But you’ve got a fine woman waiting for you, Jack. You’re worrying her, and I’d say she has good reason this time. If she catches wind of this … well, I wouldn’t blame her a bit if she took a walk. You want that? You got to set your priorities, Jack. Let the other one go.”

My breath caught in my throat.
The other one?

Jack said, “Em doesn’t need to know about this. I can handle it.”

“Oh, bull
shit
. Come on, you’re throwing your career in the toilet, too, if you go on with this. I called the office before I came down here, and they said you had one week to come back, or it’s off with your head this time and that’s final. No more of your little leaves of absence. No more, Jack.”

I heard Jack say, “This is more important than last time. This is the whole bag of doughnuts.”

“No shit.”

“You going to help me or not?”

There was a longer silence, and then Tom spoke again. “No. Absolutely not. You’ve got to stop this kind of shit,
Jack.” Then, with almost frantic exasperation, he added, “Be real, Jack. I got a baby coming. I got a wonderful wife. You’re the guy throwing your chances in the shitter, not me. And I’m not even giving you a week. You’ve got forty-eight hours, then I’m blowing the whistle.”

I heard a low mumble.

Tom said, so low I could barely hear him, “And you leave a copy of that goddamned map here. Give it to me. I’ll stuff it through my copier right now.”

I heard the sounds of movement and hurried back toward the pool, hoping that the foliage and narrow blinds on the windows had obscured my presence. I was just settling into a chair and kicking my feet up onto an ottoman when the door opened and Tom came out, carrying a piece of paper that he quickly folded up and shoved into his shirt pocket. “Em!” he growled, when he saw me. “Good. You’re here. Get over here! I got a little surprise for you.”

I think I managed to conceal my excitement, but my heart was hammering wildly, both with the anticipation of seeing Jack again and with confusion over having heard him raise his voice. Until that moment, I had thought Jack constitutionally incapable of getting flapped, so in the mix of my feelings there was a bit of trepidation. “What’s up, Tom?”

Tom pointed in through the doorway. “Get in there and see if you can nail both his feet to the floor,” he told me. “You’d be doing him a kindness, trust me on that.”

I trotted down the path again and stepped into the refrigerated air of the cottage, all ready to throw myself into my lover’s arms, but as I caught the scene inside that room, I stopped cold.

Jack sat with his head hanging. He wasn’t looking at me, even though he must have known I was coming, and that in itself scared me. He looked bedraggled and diminished. His wonderfully muscular shoulders were bowed down as if under a tremendous load of failure. His clothes were so soiled and rumpled that he looked like he’d slept in them for several days. And even at a distance of ten feet,
my nose told me that in fact he probably had, and without bathing.

Jack is a master of the subtle disguise, a man who can look like someone else just by shifting his posture—forty points higher or lower IQ, for instance, or notches higher or lower on the scale of who’s in charge and who’s a putz—but this took the cake. This time, the effect was no act. I whispered, “Jack?”

He took a moment to raise his head and look at me, and then only made a flickering of eye contact. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his face was blurred with several days’ growth of stubble. He tried to smile. It seemed forced. “Hi, sweetie,” he said. His voice came out tired, almost ghostly.

I moved toward him. Raised a hand. Laid it on his head.

His hair felt greasy.

“Want to take a shower together?” I inquired, immediately seeing the foolishness of offering sex to a man in his condition.

Jack took my hand and pulled it down to his lips, but seemed to forget to kiss it. “Not now, hon. Sorry.”

“Oh. Can I get you anything? A beer? Glass of water?” I felt stupid, like a flight attendant trying to figure out what to serve to a stray yeti that has somehow gotten onto the plane. I cringed. Nowhere in our relationship had I felt moved to servility before.

“Water would be nice,” he said hoarsely.

Growing numb, I found my way into the kitchenette at the far end of the L-shaped room, got some water, and brought it back. Jack had not gotten up. Had not hugged me. Had not kissed my lips. I felt that I must have done something wrong, and at the same time knew that I had done nothing at all. Except come to Florida …

Jack sipped at the water for a moment and then set the glass down on the terrazzo floor next to him. Without looking at me, he said, “I think I do need a shower, but I think I need to take it alone.”

“Okay. I’ll … just be outside if you need me.”

“Right.”

I waited a moment longer, hoping he’d stand up and at least kiss me, but he didn’t, so I left, closing the door behind me.

I sat back down by the pool and pretended to listen to Faye and Nancy’s conversation, which, with my sudden return, became notably stilted. They watched me out of the corners of their eyes. I waited.

About ten minutes later, Jack came out of the cottage wearing the same clothes, but his face was freshly scrubbed and his stubble shaven. His shirt stuck to him in patches where he had put it back on without having fully toweled himself off. He came up to me, took me by the hand, and led me through the main house to the driveway, where he stopped by a forgettable-looking beige car. He leaned on it, and then took my hand and squeezed it. Hard. He still did not look at me. When he began to speak, he stuttered slightly, almost as if he were cold and shivering. “I—I … g-got to go again. Sorry. I’m … I’m sorry.”

“Jack, what in the hell’s name is going on?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“You’re scaring me.”

He bowed his head. His lower lip stuck forward. “Yeah. Well, I got to go.”

About then I began to lose it. “I don’t even get a kiss? I mean cripes, fellah, I flew all the way down here to …” I trailed off, struggled to pull my thoughts and words together. I took a deep breath. Said, “Sorry. That’s not fair. You didn’t know I was coming.” I squeezed his hand back. “I know you didn’t expect me to show up here, and I hope I haven’t gone and done something you don’t like. But I …”
I what? Love you but am so immature I can’t put your obvious distress before my own?
“You sure there’s nothing I can do to help?”

Jack shook his head. He let go of my hand, opened the trunk of the car, and rummaged around in an open duffel bag for a clean shirt. He peeled off his dirty shirt in preparation for putting it on.

At the sight of his bare chest, the wave of desire swept over me again, almost making me sick with its force. The humid air pressed in around me, adding to the intensity of this instantaneous meltdown.

Perhaps Jack felt me begin to swoon, because as he came back around the car toward the driver’s door, he grabbed me into a fierce hug, and kissed me almost violently. Then, just as abruptly, he got into the car, fired the ignition, and drove away. As the car disappeared from sight around a curve between tall rows of palm trees, my heart gave a sickening lurch, as if someone was tugging at it.

His moist scent lingered against my skin.

The wind was picking up, all cool and wet, presaging rain.

A chaos of emotions pulled me in every direction at once, and one panicked edge of my mind asked,
What am I going to do?

Totally at a loss, I did what any self-respecting woman would have done: I threw back my head to the bleary Floridian sky and screamed bloody murder.

BOOK: Killer Dust

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