The Mountains Bow Down (20 page)

“What're you—crazy?”

“Just a ten percent solution.”

“Honey, we
treat
people for stomach acid, we don't hand it out.”

“Then could I have some plain aspirin? Noncoated.”

“That we can do,” she said. “How many?”

“Twenty to start.”

She stared at me. Like she was going to throw me in with the fugitive fever woman. “Twenty,” she repeated.

“With half a cup of distilled water.”

“You want cookies with that?”

Back in the lab, I deposited ten of the aspirin tablets into the half cup of distilled water, then asked Nurse Stephanie for something to test pH levels. She unlocked a cabinet and laid strips of yellow paper on the stainless counter with a laminated card showing the colors on the paper that would correspond with various acid and alkaline levels. I dipped a pH strip in the water, then compared it to the chart. Still too alkaline. I dropped in two more aspirin, swirling the water.

“What's that for?” she asked.

“I'm making an acid solution to dissolve soft minerals.”

The Portland cement was basically limestone and along with gypsum dissolved quickly in a ten percent solution of hydrochloric acid, leaving behind the durable diatoms. The fingerprints. Once again I thought of the rock kit in my cabin with its four-ounce bottle of hydrochloric acid. But I couldn't risk waking my mother, or having to explain what I was doing—or where I'd been.

For now acetylsalicylic acid—aspirin water—would have to do. But it was taking longer.

“Does the microwave work?” I asked Nurse Stephanie.

“I heat my food in there.”

“I'll clean it when I'm done.”

With a sterile dropper, I added the acid solution to a sample of the dust, setting the petri dish inside the microwave, hoping heat would accelerate the processes. As I was tapping in ten seconds, I heard the nurse speaking to someone by the desk.

“Honey,” she said, “you
must
be in violation of something.”

I glanced over my shoulder. Jack.

“Why do say that?” he asked.

“Because you've got
fine
written all over you.” She winked. “Need a shot?”

“If I did, you'd be the nurse to do it.” He grinned.

I suppressed an eye roll and waited for the microwave. The phone at the desk rang. And rang. When I turned around, she was walking slowly around the desk, brushing against Jack. He stared at her, immobilized by her sensuality.

I took the sample from the microwave, then carried it to the microscope.

Jack stood in the doorway, recovered. “Three twenty-three,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“The laundry girls found those pants in the bin at 3:23
PM
.”

“You're sure?”

“One gal was going off shift. She carried the pants into Stilton's office. He wasn't there. And he was supposed to be there. The girls think Stilton's having an affair with the woman who works the folding machine.” He smiled softly. “I got all the gossip.”

I checked the sample under the scope. Still no go. Walking over to the desk, I waited once again for Nurse Stephanie to finish her phone conversation. Somebody had left their medication refill at home. She asked for the name of the medicine and if they had the prescription bottle. “Bring it down,” she said, hanging up. Then she leaned toward me, surreptitiously pointing at Jack. She whispered, “Who's he?”

“A colleague.” I tried to smile. “White paper, sterile?”

“Help yourself.” She pointed to an empty patient room and sauntered back to Jack.

I was on my own. I tore paper from the roll behind an exam table and carried it back into the lab. When I asked for a scalpel, Nurse Stephanie unlocked a drawer, continued chatting with Jack, and practically tossed the knife at me.

“Are you on the cruise with a special somebody?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“Oh. I'm sorry to hear that.”

I took out MJ's dress first, then the blue jeans from Milo's cabin, then the trousers found in the laundry bin.

“If you get bored,” she said, “my shift's over at ten.”

I held MJ's dress over the white paper, scraping dust off the sleeves with the scalpel. I did the same with the jeans and the black trousers, placing each collection into separately marked test tubes. I also searched the trousers for any identification tags, but there were none.

After adding my acid solution to a sample of the dusts, I cooked them in petri dishes in the microwave and pretended not to notice Nurse Stephanie fanning her face.

“Warm in here, don't you think? It's cooler over by my desk.”

Like a man led to slaughter, Jack followed her from the room while I wrote my notes on a prescription pad, making sure I outlined the forensics procedure for any formal documents that might come later. When I glanced at the circular desk, Nurse Stephanie was leaning forward, cleavage front and center. Jack glanced away, a sardonic smile playing on his lips.

Hoping they stayed occupied, I took out my phone and called Aunt Charlotte.

“We're just coming down from cloud nine—literally!” My aunt's breathy voice was full of softness, but only a trace remained of her native Virginia accent. I listened to her description of the helicopter tour around Mendenhall Glacier, the sled dog run on wheels, and the salmon bake. “Raleigh, you would have loved it. And it gave me a chance to say good-bye to Judy. I released her spirit to this beautiful place, and to the universe.”

Whatever
, I thought sourly, before telling her about what happened at the wildlife center. I left out Martin Webb, but emphasized Claire's culpability. “After this stunt, I don't want Claire anywhere near her.”

She started to protest.

“I don't have time to argue, Aunt Charlotte. I'm asking you to please check in on Mom. She was napping when I left the cabin.”

“I'll do it first thing. We should be back within the hour.”

“Thank you.”

“I love you, Raleigh.”

“Love you too.”

I was closing the phone when Jack came back in the lab.

“Need some help?” he asked.

I glanced past him to the desk. Nurse Stephanie was taking the elderly man's vitals. “You can help by asking Florence Nightgown for some mineral oil. But don't tell me what she says when you ask.”

The cooked petri dishes now held what looked like white powder. I tapped each onto separate glass slides, and when Jack returned with a small plastic bottle, I placed one drop of the clear oil on each slide before adding the plastic coverslip. I shifted the microscope's magnification to 40X.

The limestone and gypsum had burned away and what remained looked like pitted glass Frisbees, their edges fractured.

Diatoms. Geologic fingerprints.

Beautiful
.

“What do you see?” Jack asked.

“It's the dust from Geert's office.” I slid the next sample under the scope. “And now I'm looking for any matches from the clothing.”

The dust from MJ's dress had no diatoms. But I saw cellulose cells, wood. And lots of it. Wood hard enough to resist the acid and heat.

I grabbed the dust from the black trousers, shifting the slide right to left, up and down, until I found three diatoms. They had similar cusplike fractures. It was a start. For the match to stand in court, I would need chemical compositions, relative amounts, and the connection to the safe's manufacturer. That meant a forensics lab, either the FBI's or the state crime lab in Seattle.

“The black pants are a tentative positive match.” I made notes on the prescription pad. “And now we check Milo's jeans.”

There it was again.

Cellulose fibers. Wood durable enough to survive chemical and temperature assaults.

“What's wrong?” Jack asked.

“The dust on the dress matches the dust on Milo's jeans.”

“Dust is dust,” he said. “Isn't it?”

I shook my head. “These cellulose cells are too similar, and too specific.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning MJ and Milo were in the same place, and they both sent their clothes to the cleaners. On the same day.”

“You want odds?” Jack asked.

“I want words—interviews with both.” I checked my watch. “And I want Geert to trace these black trousers to their owner. Whoever wore them broke into that safe.”

We were packing up the evidence when the clinic's automatic door
whoosh
ed open. An older gentleman walked in wearing a baseball cap from the Phillumenists of Philadelphia. It was a different branch than the guys burning with brotherly love. These guys were the Founding Flames.

The man looked tired. “I called you about some medicine for my wife,” he said to Nurse Stephanie.

“Righty-o,” she said. “The Namenda oral?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, that's what happens. You forget stuff.”

She was gone when we headed out the sliding doors to the elevators, leaving the old man standing at the desk. Jack leaned down, whispering to me. “What's a phillumenist anyway?”

“Matchbook collector.”

He nodded. “I should've known you'd know.”

“Years of Greek and Latin,” I said.

“Which is it, Greek or Latin?”

“Both, actually.
Phila
is Greek for
love
.
Lumen
means
light
in Latin. Scrunch them together and you get phillumenist, or lover of light.”

Our hands were full of evidence bags, so I pressed the elevator button with my elbow.

“Hold on,” he said. “You got ‘matchbook collector' from all that?”

I shook my head. “From forensics. One of my cases involved the sulfur content of matches dating back to the 1930s. I got to interview a bunch of phillumenists.”

The elevator opened and Jack stepped inside, holding the door for me. “You're too hard on yourself, Harmon.”

“What do you mean?”

He hit the button for Deck Six. “Most people pretend they know more than they actually do. You tell the truth.”

I watched the elevator doors close.

Sometimes
, I thought.
Sometimes I tell the truth
.

But only sometimes
.

Chapter Sixteen

I
f Claire believed a bitter cloud hung over the ship, she might've been imagining the casino. As I walked through the room, the cigarette smoke was thick enough to flavor hams. Puffing gamblers hunched over the slot machines, their eyes ratcheted to the bright flashing electronics that spun through loss after loss.

Nose itching from the smoke, I waited for the Ninja with the pencil mustache to open the padded wall-door. Though he glanced at the bags of evidence, his face revealed nothing.

In Geert's office, a maintenance worker was removing the old safe. Skin the color of cinnamon, his fingers were stained black with oil, creating topographic maps of his fingerprints. I waited as he lifted a small safe—identical to the ones in our passenger cabins—and bolted it to the shelf. He went to remove the damaged safe, placing it on a mechanical dolly, when Geert said, “Leave it here.”

The Ninja escorted him back to the secret entrance, and I closed the office door.

Geert twirled the mustache. “I got a call from laundry. You took some clothes.”

“Stilton?”

He shook his head. “Gossip, it is the lifeblood of ships.”

I described the black trousers. “Is there a way to trace them?”

I expected a comment about stupid questions. Instead he offered a sigh that sounded like generations of Dutch fatalism. “By sizes, we can eliminate certain workers. But that will take time. Better to check the cabins.”

I waited a moment, wondering if my next two questions would ruin our sudden détente. “What happened to the director?”

“Locked in his cabin. One of my men is posted outside his door. These movie people, they are spoiled children.” He ran his blue eyes over the evidence bags.

“I need to lock up these materials . . .” I didn't finish the question.

“But you don't trust my safe,” he said.

I said nothing. But he was right.

Defense attorneys got a kick out of asking forensic scientists, “Was the evidence ever out of your possession?”

And that's why I carried all the bags. If I was called to testify later, it wouldn't help the prosecution if I had to admit a grumpy Dutch security officer carried the evidence through a smoky casino, then across the midship atrium, passing thousands of passengers who were headed for dinner. At the concierge desk, where I rested my elbows on the teak counter, Geert spoke to an attendant. In the wine bar off the atrium, a delicate-looking Frenchman lectured on the merits of cabernet, his accent like clarified butter.

The concierge attendant lifted a portion of the counter, and I followed Geert back into an office where a man the color of wrought iron greeted us in a mellifluous British accent. Both his white officer's uniform and his black skin seemed to glow, the uniform so bright it stung my eyes, the skin so dark it shimmered violet.