HALF AN HOUR LATER, I WAS STANDING BESIDE A BOOT that still had a foot in it. The foot was attached to a battered and rather flattened leg. I was sorry I had eaten after all.
We had driven down a long ramp road into the pit, following a conveyor belt constructed to carry gravel uphill to the sorting machines. Loaders and ore trucks thundered away in the far reaches of the workings, hauling away sand and gravel to make concrete for the foundations of the new housing that was quickly filling the Salt Lake Valley.
The sun was barely on it, but the gravel was already beginning to cook, superheated air rolling off it like the breath of Cerberus. I wondered what that was going to do to the dead flesh that now lay exposed to the desert air.
The bank of gravel that had fallen had been almost two stories tall. Trying to abstract myself from the corpse, I stared up at what was left of the bank. A mass at least twenty feet wide and perhaps ten feet deep had collapsed. At 120 pounds per cubic foot, or a ton and a half to the cubic yard, that would add up in a hurry.
“I can’t figger out how it let go,” the heavy equipment
operator was saying. “I work these faces all day long, so I know how to be careful. I was just workin’ this one yesser-day, so I remember real good. I swear I dint leave it too tall or over-steep, and you can see where all the rest of them is fine.”
A woman detective from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department was asking the questions. “Was it like this yesterday when you left?”
“No! Hell no! It was standing. I just thought it must’ve caved during the night.”
“So whoever this is wasn’t there when you left yesterday.”
“I swear it! I tell ya, I got no idea who that is!”
In contrast to the equipment operator, who was clearly at the edge of his wits, the detective was cool and matter-of-fact. She was about thirty and very fit. She had a halo of strawberry blond hair and loads of freckles and the kind of ease about her that comes from knowing that men will find her appealing. She said, “What time did you say you came to work this morning?”
“Six,” the operator said. “It’s been so hot I like to get started early, and it keeps the dust down. Wind doesn’t get strong for another couple hours.”
I looked up over the brink of the quarry toward the mountain front. The constant winds were why the hang gliders liked this area. On any sunny day, there were always at least three hang gliders or parasailers hovering over the nose of rock known as Point of the Mountain. Had this man flown in over the fence?
The operator was apparently thinking along the same lines. “The place was locked up like always. Really. And them hang gliders stay on the other side of the highway. Just hover, like.”
I thought of the scrawny fence we had passed coming in. I wasn’t impressed by their security measures.
The woman nodded. “Okay, I got it. Funny thing that
you should choose this pile first thing and find a leg sticking out.”
The man’s eyes shone with horror. “I went to it because it was all loose, like. Makes it easy to move the stuff. You gotta think of these things!”
“Just tell me what you saw.”
“Nothin’! I tell ya, I saw nothin’! I was just backin’ away from takin’ my first load outta the pile and I saw … I saw … it’s a boot, right? With a leg in it, for crissake!” The man’s face was beginning to swell with a nasty cocktail of emotions.
Ray, who had conjured excuses to hang around, leaned toward me and mumbled, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He was right, this one was bad. My stomach had gotten all spongy on me the instant I saw that boot sticking out from under the trailing edge of the pile of loose gravel. Geologists are too often exposed to unstable quarry and mine faces. But I didn’t want Ray to think I couldn’t take it. I had trained hard to do this job. It was time now to do it.
I crouched down and focused on the boot. It had old-fashioned hand-sewn welts. The edges to the rubber soles were worn completely round, and there were knots where the laces had broken. When new, the boot had obviously been expensive, but after years of wear it was about worn out, and after being subjected to catastrophic burial, it and the leg protruding from it looked like so much road kill. In fact, that’s what the remains reminded me of most: a jackrabbit after it’s been run over by three or four tractor-trailer rigs.
I took a deep breath. “Size 45,” I read from the center of the arch. “European sizing.” Knowing what size boots the dead man wore made him a little more real, and that increased my queasiness. I slipped into the kind of flippant, dark humor that can help separate the living from the dead. “Is our John Doe a Juan Gama?” I inquired, murdering a little Spanish.
The woman looked at me. “Nah, the Spanish make the cork sandals. That boot is from Switzerland or maybe Italy, so let’s call him a Johannes Damhirschkuh or a Pinco Pallino.”
I glanced up at her. The day had just improved immeasurably.
The woman held out a hand for me to shake. “We haven’t met. I’m Michele Aldrich.”
“Em Hansen.”
“You’re the geologist.”
“Guilty as charged.” I stood up, dug into my wallet, and handed her a business card. “I’m with the Utah Geological Survey. It’s a state agency.”
“What do you survey?”
“Huh? Oh, I get it. Yeah, a geological survey is literally that, a survey of the geological wealth and hazards of a state. Most states have one.”
“And you are their forensics specialist?”
“Sort of. Most days I’m a mild-mannered, rank-and-file geologist evaluating mineral resources and such, but when a case like this comes in, I’m it.”
Ray scowled for the second time that morning. He said, “Em, don’t exaggerate. This is your first case.”
Michele looked from me to Ray and back again with the micrometer eyes of a trained observer.
I counted to ten but said something defensive anyway. “While this is in fact my first murder case since coming to work for the Utah Geological Survey, it is my tenth overall. More often, forensic geology runs to civil cases.”
“Civil cases?” Michele inquired.
“Sure. Someone puts expensive stone tile in a bathroom and it starts to fall apart right away. Did the contractor install actual Italian marble or was it Italian something else—serpentine, for instance? A common misperception. Not a gram of calcium carbonate in it. Or—”
“You lost me already.”
“Sorry. Your command of foreign languages suggested—”
“I was a military brat. My dad was attached to a couple of different embassies. But rock-ese is not one of the languages they spoke there.”
“Okay …” I turned my attention back to the gravel bank. It was bad enough being grilled for my bona fides by your average cop, but being fried by a smart, young, pretty one with abundant self-esteem had the potential to get downright unbearable. “I’ll try to speak English.”
“I wish I’d taken some geology,” Michele said.
I winced, thinking that she was now trying to mollify or, worse yet, play me. Was I that much older than she? I had blown out the candles of my fortieth birthday cake, yes, but what did she think, I was her mother’s age? I didn’t like to be reminded of all the years that had stacked up around me, particularly because there were so many things I thought I’d have done by now.
Like marry, and yeah, become someone’s mother,
I grumbled to myself, remembering what hadn’t worked between Ray and me. “Geology’s a good time,” I said tersely.
“I can see that it might have been an addition to my criminal justice major,” she said evenly.
She’s not deferring,
I decided.
No, she’s setting the ground rules. You’re there, I’m here, you do this, and I do that.
Ray observed us intently, as if watching a good tennis match. I wanted to kick him in the shins.
“So what do you look for?” Michele inquired, turning her attention to the collapsed embankment. She had her pen poised, ready to take down evidence.
I decided grudgingly that I admired her style. “Geology has its own kind of clues,” I said. I began wandering along the foot of the bank, examining it from a respectful distance. “Most of the landslides I’ve looked at—recent ones, anyway—will have a sharp edge to the top of the slide
block. That’s what we call the mass that fell. See? It rotated and flowed a bit as it came down. That’s typical. The toe of the slide shoots out away from the cliff—in this case spreading into a loose fan—and the top kind of sits down on top of it, riding it down. But I look up there and I don’t see a sharp edge to the cliff, so I wonder: Is this normal? Would sediment this loose hold its shape as it slides? Or did something other than gravity or the vibration of passing trucks set off the avalanche? When we’ve got an unexplained corpse lying underneath it, we have to ask these questions.”
“You can tell if someone triggered this slide?” Michele asked.
“Maybe. It’s gravel. Loose stuff.” I shrugged my shoulders. “So I compare it to other gravel banks I’ve seen over the years. I look first at what looks right about this one, and then I can begin to spot the features that might have been changed by human activity.”
Michele said, “The natural versus the unnatural.”
“Well … we’re part of the natural world, too, you know. But what you’re saying is that we’ve learned to influence our surroundings by machine. Or explosives. But someone wanting to trigger a slide could’ve just stomped on the top of the cliff for all I know, although he’d be risking getting caught up in it himself. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We don’t even know who our John Doe is. For all I know, he had every reason to be here and just got unlucky.”
Michele raised a reddish eyebrow. “I somehow doubt that.”
“Me, too.”
“So what do you do next?”
“I look at the way the grains of gravel stacked up—what we call its bedding planes—and look at that pattern within the context of the greater geologic picture. You ask how the corpse got here, and I ask how this gravel got here.”
“Okay, how did it get here?”
“It was deposited by rivers flowing out of canyons in the mountains.”
Ray decided it was time to stick his nose into the conversation. “An alluvial fan,” he said, returning one of the terms I’d taught him back when we were dating.
I nodded. “And in this particular case, the fan was building into a wide, deep lake.”
Michele glanced around at the dry quarry walls that surrounded us. “There was a deep lake here. Okay …”
“No, really. Nowadays, the shore of Great Salt Lake is what, twenty miles from here? We call it ‘Great,’ but it’s really just a little puddle next to what it was during the last Ice Age. You see, when the climate was cooler, things didn’t evaporate as much, and Great Salt Lake grew much, much deeper and covered an area at least five times as big as today—and we called it Lake Bonneville. The glaciers that filled the valleys up in the mountains above here acted like great big bulldozers and sanding machines, grinding away at the valley walls and floors as they slid downhill under their own weight. As the glaciers melted, they left all the ground-up rock and gravel in the bottoms of the valleys. The rivers driven by the melt water carried the gravel out of the mountains, and where the rivers hit the lake, they dropped their load. When streams slow down, they can’t carry as much sediment along.” I pointed at the notch in the mountain front from which it flowed. “There was a great, rushing stream at this particular position, and it dumped a lot of gravel, as you can see.”
Ray blinked.
Michele said, “Okay.”
I turned toward the kill site, where that horrifying leg was sticking out from under a different geometry of gravel. I cleared my throat and forced myself to continue. “So because I know how this gravel was deposited, I know what the geometry of its bedding planes ought to look like.” I pointed at the wall that had collapsed. “This gravel was deposited by a natural system, by moving water. It was wet,
and the water was moving downhill from the mountains into the Salt Lake Valley … or, more accurately, into Lake Bonneville. Wet gravel has a lower angle of repose—the slope at which it will stack up—than dry. See those big lines running diagonally through the bank? Those are the bedding planes I’m talking about. Those formed as the gravel avalanched out of the foot of the river into the lake, one layer deposited on top of the next.”
Now I pointed at a stockpile the heavy equipment operator had pushed together some other day. “That gravel was deposited in a heap by machines driven by humans. The machines drop dry gravel straight down from buckets. The gravel avalanches out every direction from a central point and stacks up at a much steeper angle of repose. See? The angle of repose of dry gravel is about twice that of wet.”
I was beginning to run out of steam. Pretty soon we were just going to have to uncover the rest of that corpse, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I turned and faced the music—literally. The wind for which Point of the Mountain was famous was beginning to pick up, stirring the hot, rising air of the quarry. Little rivulets of dry sand cascaded down its walls and blew into my eyes.