Tortoise Soup (30 page)

A wariness crept into Brian’s eyes that hadn’t been there before.

“Sorry, but I can’t let you do that. It’s against policy rules for visitors to roam unaccompanied, with all the heavy equipment around. And right now there’s no one to spare.” He looked pointedly at me. “There was a recent theft in the freezer room, and management’s come down hard. That means no exceptions—even for you. Pilot will turn up eventually. Besides, if he’s in here, he’s safe.”

I shook my head in disagreement. “That’s just it. He’s not safe at all.” I was damned if I’d play the good girl and meekly go home. “There was a dog that was shot while wandering around Golden Shaft’s grounds. I’m not going to let that happen to Pilot.”

Brian zoomed in on me with the precision of a top gun jet pilot. “Who told you that?” he brusquely demanded.

I was startled by his reaction until I realized what I had just let slip. As far as I knew, the only dog that had been shot on Golden Shaft grounds belonged to Dee.

As my mind raced to cover my tracks, Noah nonchalantly replied, “She got that mixed up with something I told her. It was my dog that was shot, when I worked at Los Alamos.”

Brian momentarily lasered in on Noah as if I weren’t even there, then finally swung his attention back to me.

“Stop worrying, Rachel. I swear that no one will harm Pilot.” Brian smiled reassuringly, his old self once again. “Hey, they’d have to answer to me. I’ll even keep him safe in my office as soon as he’s found.”

Anderson slipped out of my grip, giving my hand one last indifferent pat, before walking off to join Ed Garrett.

“I believe that’s called the classic kiss and dodge technique,” Noah pronounced, donning his Ray Bans. “Too dangerous, my ass. Speaking of which, you can thank me for saving yours, by telling me what all that was about.”

“Let’s just say I might have blown the cover on a source,” I distractedly replied.

My attention was on a series of dragmarks, each approximately six inches wide. The marks could have easily been made by rocks pulled along the ground, except for the tiny foot impressions running laterally alongside. They were desert tortoise tracks. Leading off into the distance, the tracks angled around to the side of the mine. My best guess was that the tortoises had found a source of water. I wondered if they had made it to their destination or if their carcasses were now stacked inside the mine’s freezer, replacing those I’d previously stolen.

We drove past the gate, leaving Pilot behind. Sick to my stomach, I cut the engine and climbed onto the Suburban’s roof, refusing to give up my search. Finally Noah joined me with his cooler of beers as I called Pilot’s name over and over until it was branded in the desert air and seared into my heart.

It wasn’t until midafternoon,
when my voice was as raspy as Roy Jenkins’s dogs’, that Noah managed to drag me back inside the Suburban. The unrelenting sun had turned my skin hypertender by the time I was finally deposited home. I gave a moment’s fleeting thought to straightening up some of the bungalow’s mess, but the walls began to close in on me without Pilot around. I decided to head for the office to bury myself in work.

Once there, I discovered I had as much ambition to tackle that debacle as the one I’d just left at home. Fortunately the blinking red light on the office answering machine temporarily solved the problem for me. I hoped it would be Brian, calling to say he’d found Pilot. But it was Henry Lanahan’s voice that boomed out loud and clear.

“Hey, Porter. I’ve got some information that I think you’ll find intriguing. God knows, it’s proven to be enthralling for all of us here at the lab. You might want to get in touch with me ASAP. Better yet, haul your butt on over as fast as you can. And I ain’t talking sometime soon. I mean NOW!”

I stepped over the ragtag piles of wire, plaster, broken glass, and papers that were strewn about, and locked the door to what remained of the office. Jumping inside the Blazer, I hightailed it over to Lanahan’s lab. If he’d found that the tortoises had indeed been run over by the mine’s haul paks, it would give me a legitimate reason to head back to Golden Shaft and search the grounds to my heart’s content!

I sped through Vegas and down the Strip, cutting off senior citizens who poked slowly along in rental cars. I waved in silent apology as they slammed on their brakes, surprised to find such discourteous behavior west of the Rockies. Siegfried and Roy fumed down at me in mute disapproval from atop their marquee as I beat a red light, scaring an unsuspecting tourist who’d stepped off the curb. Quarters and dimes flew out of his plastic bucket, glittering brighter than stars as they were embedded in steaming black asphalt by the trail of cars behind me. I spotted my ponytailed prophet with his crucifix still strapped to his back. He spotted me as well, stopping long enough to release one hand from his cross and flip me the finger, damning me to hell for eternity.

My head told me to slow down, but my adrenaline kept my foot pressed to the pedal until the Forensics lab came into view, beckoning me like a beacon to a ship lost at sea. I rushed into the building and hurried down the hall, passing lab employees as quiet as the corpses they attended. I rounded the corner, the pounding of my heart echoing the beat of my shoes on the white-tiled floor. By the time I reached Lanahan’s office my pulse was tap-tap-tapping as fast as Lizzie’s feet. I poked my head into Lanahan’s office to find him hunched over his desk, working on a report.

“I made it,” I croaked. My throat was still raspy and sore as I stepped into his lair.

Lanahan glanced up and grimaced at the sight of my swollen, sunburned skin and frazzled mass of red hair.

“My favorite woman. What the hell did you do to yourself? Stand in front of an atomic blast? Haven’t you ever heard of skin cancer, Porter? For chrissake, use a self-tanning lotion if you’re so concerned with being fashionable,” he lectured.

“Thanks for the advice, doc. Next time I’ll be sure and take a beach umbrella along. So what did you discover?”

Lanahan leaned back in his chair and laced his hands behind his neck. He gave me the once-over before shaking his head.

“If nothing else Rachel, you certainly liven things up. There’s always some sort of surprise whenever I see you,” he replied.

“Are you telling me the tread marks weren’t made by haul paks?” I asked. My heart dropped like a molten lump of lead, heavy with disappointment.

“Let me fill you in on something, Porter. Right now, if I were to tell my employees who was sitting in my office, you’d probably be strung up like a plucked chicken and heaved above a large pot of boiling water.

“What the hell did I do?” I asked, completely flummoxed by having added an angry mob of scientists to the list of people out to nail my rear end.

“Sit down and I’ll walk you through it, Porter,” he ordered.

Lanahan got up from his chair and poured two cups of java from the coffee machine. I watched, making sure he didn’t slip anything tasteless, scentless, and deadly into my brew before handing it to me. I waited until he took a sip of his coffee before tasting my own.

“We examined those tortoises you foisted on me. It appears they weren’t killed by tires,” Lanahan began.

“Jesus!” I exploded in disgust. “So you’re saying that they just dropped dead while they were crawling around in the desert and then were run over?” That was the lame explanation Brian would have handed me.

“Hey! Do I have to call in my employees, or are you going to shut up and behave?” Lanahan threatened.

I squirmed in my seat, trying to find a patch of skin that didn’t hurt, as I impatiently waited for him to continue.

“I handed your stack of reptilian buffalo chips over to our rookie pathologist for analysis. It seemed a pretty cut-and-dried case. I figured all you were looking for was some official paperwork to nail the bad guys with.”

He was right, which was why this momentary holdup was driving me crazy. I bit the tip of my tongue as he took the time to slowly stretch. If Lanahan was out to torture me, he was doing a good job. I decided to take my chances with his troops.

“Those torts looked pretty well crushed to me. Maybe your rookie made a mistake. How can he be so sure it wasn’t a truck that killed them anyway?” I demanded.

Lanahan glared at me a moment. “Because there was no bleeding in the capillary areas. That’s why.”

I looked at him blankly.

Lanahan took a sip of his coffee and rubbed his eyes. “If a truck had caused their death, there would have been internal bleeding. There was none. Their hearts had already stopped pumping by the time those tire tracks were made,” he explained.

“Maybe it was cyanide ingestion,” I suggested. “Did you check for that?”

“Yes, Madame Curie,” Lanahan retorted. “The tortoises were handed over to our toxicologist, who examined tissue samples for a multitude of poisons. They came up spanking clean. Ted even checked to see if they might have died from lack of water. But the critters were relatively well nourished.”

I made one last valiant stab at remaining outwardly calm. That lasted all of two seconds before I erupted in a firestorm of frustration.

“All right! I’m impressed. You’re thorough. You checked everything out. That’s great. But dammit, something killed those tortoises and I refuse to believe it was nothing but old age!”

“Very perceptive, Porter,” Lanahan shot back. “You’re so smart, you want to tell me what it was that did these critters in?”

I opened my mouth and shut it just as quickly.

“That’s what I thought.”

I pounded my head against my own mental brick wall, having little choice but to sip my coffee and wait until Lanahan was good and ready to pick up where he’d left off.

“X-ray machines are potential sources of radioactivity. You’re aware of that, right?” he asked.

I nodded my head. At this point, I would have agreed to almost anything in order to move him along.

“Since our toxicologist and chemists work around X-ray machines, they’re required to wear special badges that can tell whether or not the radiation inside our equipment is contained. The patches are then turned in every thirty days to a company where they’re analyzed.” Lanahan paused dramatically. “Well, all our badges were sent in a few days ago.”

He hauled himself up and headed back over to the coffeepot, where he refilled his cup.

“This morning I got a call informing me that our lab has a potentially huge problem on its hands. In fact, huge is a mild way of putting it. Through the roof would be more exact.” Lanahan’s eyes pinned me down as if I were a mouse about to be dissected. “It seems that badge number 27325 was turned in showing a massive exposure to radiation. That just happens to have been Ted’s badge. It’s the type of news that gives everyone in here a heart attack, Porter. Especially me.”

I held my breath, trying to figure out what he was getting at and how the hell I was involved. Lanahan slowly stirred sugar into his coffee, the clanging of the metal spoon loud as a warning bell.

“The first thing I suspected was that something had gone wrong with the shielding on one of our X-ray machines,” he continued. “So we went into every room where Ted had been working and methodically swept it with a Geiger counter. When we hit the toxicology lab, the Geiger spun right off its scale.”

Lanahan’s body shook as if something had crawled on him that had to be knocked off. “We got our asses out of that room as fast as we could. Our entire staff was also rushed outside, where they kept themselves busy plotting what hotshot lawyer in Vegas to call in case of contamination.”

“What happened next?” I was afraid to think of where all this was leading.

“You mean before or after my coronary, Porter?” Lanahan asked, running his fingers through his hair. A few strands came out and he held them toward me accusingly. “Look at this! Not only am I losing my hair, but it’s also turning white!”

“It was already white, Henry!” I cried out in exasperation. “I’m begging you, get to the point and tell me what this is about!”

Lanahan rested his elbows on his desk and leaned in close to me, his eyes riveted on mine. “What this is about are those damn tortoises, Rachel. They’re radioactive enough to glow in the dark.”

I tried to speak, but nothing came out, my mind having momentarily melted into a giant pile of toxic slush. I’d heard what Henry had said, but none of it made any sense.

Lanahan’s voice cut through my haze. “I need to know where you got those tortoises.”

His eyes remained focused on mine like twin barrels of a shotgun cocked and ready to fire.

My moral compass was gyrating as wildly as Lanahan’s Geiger counter must have been when it hit those torts. Though I felt no loyalty to Golden Shaft, I needed to know what exactly was going on. From past experience, I knew that once the information leaked out, another agency would quickly step in and take over the case. I had no doubt that I’d be kept out of the loop.

I put on my best poker face. “What will you do with whatever I tell you?” I asked.

“I’ll turn it over to the local FBI,” Henry stated.

“Have you told them about this yet?” I pondered what my old boss Charlie Hickok would do.

“No. I wanted to speak to you first,” Henry responded, watching me closely.

“Then you still have the carcasses?” I asked, wondering what the hell I was thinking.

Henry stared at me a moment before answering. “Some men in special-protection suits came in early today and hauled the stuff off for further testing. They need to confirm that my Geiger counter isn’t screwy and that I’m not some paranoid nut whose bolt has been loosened once too often,” he replied. “Other than that, the room has been sealed. As for Ted, I gave him the rest of the week off. I hate to think what he would have done if I hadn’t.”

“Then my name hasn’t been mentioned to anyone?” I persisted. A surge of adrenaline began to work its way through me.

Henry sat back in his chair, his fingers drumming on his desk as if it were a tom-tom.

“Are you involved in this somehow, Porter?” His eyes narrowed in on me. “Or are you just crazy enough to try and take on whatever this is by yourself?”