The Stars Shine Bright (21 page)

Rosser pinched what clay remained on the glass cutting board. Once again, he put it in his mouth. “It's the consistency of toothpaste.”

“Only it's not toothpaste. And it might be poisonous.”

As he worked the soil around in his mouth, his eyes were focused on a middle distance between us. I could see light in his dark eyes and thought of what Newton once said, how his scientific work made him feel like a boy standing on the seashore, staring out at the undiscovered truth. “The great ocean,” Newton called it.

Under the heat lamp, the dried clay had turned a pearly white color. Rosser dusted the grains on a glass slide and placed them under the stereoscope. A simple device, almost elementary, the stereoscope had two magnifying lenses that worked separately to give a three-dimensional view of the specimen.

“No maggots.” Rosser stared into the lenses. “Don't see any excrement either.”

“You didn't want to check that before eating it?”

“That's no fun.” He looked up from the lenses. “But then, you probably forgot how to have fun. Working for the government does that to a person.”

He coated another glass slide with petroleum jelly and sprinkled more dried clay over the surface. That slide went under the polarizing light microscope. PLMs were used to find subatomic structures. Beams of white light struck the magnified grains at precise angles, and the refractions revealed a mineral's “invisible” architecture. When I taught elementary geology—otherwise known as Rocks for Jocks—during my senior year at Mount Holyoke College, I used to explain the PLM to students who hated science by having them read their textbooks through a clear calcite crystal. With a cubic atomic structure—shaped like a sugar cube—calcite produced a double refraction of white light, which showed up as doubled letters on the page. Once a geologist had a mineral's atomic structure, he was that much closer to pinpointing its identity.

“I thought you rode back to Virginny.” Rosser gazed through the PLM's lens, turning the knob that adjusted the optical axis. “Couldn't stay away from Seattle, huh?”

“Something like that.”

During my disciplinary transfer last year—banished to the Northwest by my boss in Richmond—Rosser had run some soil exams for my missing person case. Not only did he nail the mineralogy, but he got provenance down to a pinpoint. It was quite a feat: Washington State had almost forty-three million acres.

He looked up from the scope. “Seattle grows on people. Always check for moss behind your ears.”

I smiled.

He went back to the lens. “Still like working for the FBI?”

“It's okay.”

“Mmm.”

He looked up again, but I had already turned away, staring at the computer monitor attached to the PLM. It showed the same view as the microscope, where the grains, magnified by hundreds, appeared as random objects tumbling across a clear floor made luminous from the petroleum jelly. I saw linear pieces, oblongs, which looked to me like random bits of hay. Maybe hair from the horses. But some cubic shapes were pronounced. Their sharp edges glowed in a way that reminded me of Richmond's streetlights on summer evenings, when humidity produced auras around the lamps.

“Haloes,” I said.

“You got it. First guess?”

“Zircons.”

“What I was thinking too.”

I leaned into the monitor, trying to get a closer look. I'd seen zircon with haloes, but nothing as powerful as this. The crystals beamed like flashlights, and I knew only one source could produce that much energy.

I said, “Those are radiation haloes.”

But Rosser had already picked up a dry slice of clay, toting it across the lab, ducking his head under the ropes that hung from the exposed steel I-beams. Nooses and slipknots, forensic samples of restraint and torture and death. I followed him to the Scanning Electron Microscope. It was shaped like a large metal box and produced a near-constant din of squeaks and whirs, like a clock about to break a cog. Rosser tapped a carbon plug into the dried clay and slid it into the SEM's side opening.

“See if we get a direct hit,” he said.

A metal filament inside the SEM produced electrons, similar to what happens in a lightbulb. But the SEM had magnets that focused the electrons into a single beam. When aimed directly at an object, the beam could draw an object's shape and structure, down to the finest details. SEMs were essential to crash evidence forensics, detecting structural flaws that may have existed before impact—weaknesses in airplane wings, faulty headlights. It was used on excavated pieces of the
Titanic
and revealed how the cold water caused the ship's hull to become brittle and more vulnerable to impact with ice. Although it worked best on cleaned samples, I didn't have time to wait for the grains to settle from the brackish water. Rosser, sensing my urgency, hadn't even asked if I wanted to wait.

“Thanks,” I said.

He nodded and clicked the mouse that switched the monitor from a 3-D display of shapes to bar graphs. We knew these minerals were cubic; we needed to know what they were, exactly. Several “unknowns” were already appearing on the screen. Hay, I figured. Dust, barn particles. But kaolinite appeared. Then zircons, identified as zirconium by the SEM.

“I'm two for two,” Rosser said.

“Quit gloating.”

“There's your radiation.” Rosser pointed at the screen. Thorium and uranium were the next minerals identified.

I glanced back at the beaker on the counter. A thin dark line of sediment was beginning to form across the glass bottom. Heavy metals dropping out first. Thorium, uranium. While I waited for the SEM, Rosser walked back across the lab. Turning left at the ropes, he opened the bottom drawer of a file cabinet and removed several boxes that were wrapped in a lead apron.

“Washington's got a passel of radioactive deposits.” He carried the metal containers to the stainless counter. “I keep samples for comparison purposes.”

“Wrapped in lead blankets.”

“I look stupid to you?” he asked.

“You ate that clay.”

As if to say
touché
, the SEM pinged. The scan was complete and the bar graph looked like a rigid rainbow, each color representing another element. The “unknowns” were there, but with high levels of aluminum and silica. The kaolinite, I decided, the aluminum silicate minerals. I read down the rest of the list.

“Selenium,” I called out to Rosser. “In high concentrations, right behind aluminum and silica.”

“Check the periodic table.”

“Come on, just tell me.”

“I'll give you a hint. Arsenic's neighbor.”

Arsenic was number 33 on the periodic table. “Thirty-two or thirty-four?”

“Four,” he called out. “And sometimes as poisonous as its neighbor.”

“Good thing you ate two servings.” I walked over to a bookcase across from the SEM and used both hands to pull out the monstrous
Kerr's Optical Mineralogy
. The definitive source,
Kerr's
described more than five hundred different minerals. The tome was my personal manual when I worked in the FBI's mineralogy lab, and the pages of clear photographs felt as familiar as a family album.

Selenium's periodic table symbol was Se, and
Kerr's
described it as a grayish-purple semimetal. Selenium often formed poorly shaped crystals but sometimes appeared as tiny acicular—hair-like—structures. The mineral was used in glassmaking, paint pigments, and photovoltaics. When I suddenly heard a series of distinctive rolling clicks, I looked up from the book.

Rosser was waving the small instrument over the clay. The closer it came to the soil, the louder and quicker the clicks.
Click-click-clickclickclickclick
. Radiation detector.

I said, “The clay is used for therapeutic purposes.”

“Where—death row?”

I went back to
Kerr's
. The notes mentioned selenium's toxicity but without much detail. I walked over to another computer, set aside from the exam equipment. Rosser told me the lab's security code and I logged onto the Internet. After several Google queries, I had some basic information. Selenium was necessary for good health, but in high concentrations the mineral was toxic. In humans, symptoms of selenium poisoning included weak and/or rapid pulse, labored breathing, bloating, abdominal pain, and dilated pupils. In animals, the symptoms were about the same, and included a stiff gait. North and South Dakota had soils that carried naturally heavy concentrations of selenium, and in that area pastured animals were known to accidentally poison themselves by eating too many field-grown grains. However, it was difficult for farmers to catch the toxicity early because symptoms were vague—stomach problems, difficulty breathing, disorientation . . . symptoms that sounded eerily similar to “Emerald Fever.”

I turned to Rosser. He was placing the radioactive materials back inside the metal boxes, covering them with the lead apron.

“Any chance you get provenance,” I said, “before you ride off into the sunset?”

“It's that serious?”

I stared at the screen. Most people recovered from selenium poisoning, the article said. There was an antidote, which was easy to administer.

But animals were another matter. Particularly horses. There was no antidote. Every incident of selenium poisoning was fatal.

“Yes,” I said. “It's that serious.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

T
he Ghost demanded speed, ripping across that flood-scoured bedrock all the way back to Seattle. Traveling this fast, this effortlessly, was a total thrill. Maybe close to what it felt like to ride a thoroughbred down the track, surpassing human limitation, melding with the wind.

I downshifted over Snoqualmie Pass and floated across the Cascades into evergreens that unfurled as rich as emeralds. When I-90 came to an end in the city, I followed the curve of road toward the saltwater basin cupping pieces of the Pacific Ocean. I parked in an alley off South Jackson, thanked the car for a truly marvelous ride, and walked over to an unmarked metal door. Lucia Lutini was waiting.

The official profiler for the Seattle field office was long-limbed with olive skin. In winter she wore cashmere and merino wools; in summer the finest linens. Tonight her skirt looked spun from sun-bleached Tuscan fibers.

“Fair warning,” she said as I walked through the door. “My sister showed up.”

We passed a dishwashing station with an industrial sink and nozzle that snaked from the ceiling. In the kitchen, her father, Donato, stood at a blackened grill. He was short, powerfully built, and wore a white chef 's jacket. A young woman stood next to him, stout with curly black hair. I drew a deep breath, smelling sautéed garlic. Simmering tomato sauce. Pork browned, seasoned with soft green sage and fennel. My mouth watered.

“I no wanna say it again!” Donato yelled. His Italian-immigrant English swooped like vines, every syllable swinging to the next. “You make-a me say it again!”

The young woman had olive-toned skin like Lucia, but she was even prettier. “Papa,” she said, “you can stop. I get it.”

“You no get it! You got a head like a rock. I'm a-telling you, no oregano in the sauce!”

“I just said it could use a little.”

“Thirty-seven years!” His arms shot up. “I run this place thirty-seven years. You see me askin' you for a recipe?”

Lucia grabbed my sleeve, tugging. I followed her along the outer wall, past the work island and pot rack. My eyelids were almost fluttering with the scent of meat falling off its bone.

“You might want to try adding some oregano,” the woman said.

“Merone!”
His fingers gathered on his thumbs, his wrists circling the air. “You wanna know why you got no husband? Because you no listen!”

Lucia opened the door to the janitor's closet and pushed me inside, closing the door behind us. She leaned her back against it and sighed. But the argument pushed through the door.

“Your sister, she knows how to listen.”

“Lucia? She's an old maid.”

“But she no want to ruin my red sauce.”

“Ruin it? All right. That's it. Where's the oregano?”

I heard a Vesuvius-like eruption of Italian from Donato, punctuated by banging pots and yelling from the young woman. Lucia's eyes were closed. I watched her clavicle rising and falling with each breath, the delicate bones as symmetrical as a bridge span.

“Is this a bad time?” I asked.

She opened her eyes. They were sloe eyes, large and brown.

“No,” she said. “Papa will be glad to see you. The problem is Giuliana. My sister. She's unemployed. Again. But now she's decided Papa needs her help. Believe me, that kind of help will send him to an early grave.”

Donato's restaurant was a literal hole in the wall. No tables, no chairs. But the line for lunch circled the block Monday through Friday. The window closed for the weekends, and Friday nights the Lutini family gathered here for a meal. Lucia had extended an open invitation after she chose Raleigh David's wardrobe piece by piece from Nordstrom's flagship store a few blocks north of here.