The Whale's Footprints - Rick Boyer (31 page)

"Don't, Mare! We don't know what it is. How do
we know they aren't explosive or something?"

Well, we watched them awhile and they just sat there,
so we took all seven cylinders out onto the deck and placed them on
the picnic table under the yellow beach umbrella and stared at them.
I noticed Mary was drumming her fingers, her eyes bugged out with
curiosity. I wanted to wait a minute or two, at least, to see if they
started ticking or humming. As a diversion, I asked to see the letter
from Fountainhead Press. She went and got it:

Dear Ms. Lockewood:

` We have now read the four sample chapters
of your book, Hills of Gold, Men of Bronze. I am pleased to inform
you that the reaction from our staff so far has been quite favorable!
We look forward to seeing the completed manuscript as soon as it's
available. Meanwhile, don't hesitate to call us and keep us informed
as to your progress.

Incidentally, we urge you to overcome any
shyness you might have in writing your love scenes, Ms. Lockewood.
While quite descriptive, we feel they certainly could go a lot
farther in conveying the physical passion that obviously plays so key
a role in your fine novel. Quite frankly, we're asking you to be more
explicit with the sex, Candace. After all my dear, these are the
eighties. As they say on the street,
let it
all hang out!

Sincerely,
Louisa
Latour,
Managing Editor

I put down the letter.

"More explicit? Did I read that right, Mary?"

"Yep. Well, I guess I better stop pussy-footing
around, so to speak. No more beating around the bush. Get right to
the meat of the problem . . ."

"Louisa Latour? I bet that's not even her real
name."

"So? Candace Lockewood's not my real name,
either."

"This whole operation is downright tawdry, Mare.
You've already got a novel that's just this side of X-rated and what
do they want? More sleaze!”

"Can do," she murmured, smiling implishly.
"Caaaaaann dooo . . ."

I returned to the picnic table and carefully hefted
one of the paper-wrapped cylinders. I don't have an extraordinary
fondness for paper-wrapped cylinders. My mercenary-commando buddy,
Laitis Roantis, carried one with us during the Daisy Ducks' escapade
in the mountains of North Carolina. It was packed with
extra-high-grade plastique, or cyclonite, and was powerful enough to
blow a mountain apart. Still, it wasn't nearly this heavy . . .

I pulled the paper softly. It unwrapped, and I
realized the paper was folded over several times. I unrolled all of
it and found myself staring at a hunk of grayish rock in a perfect
cylinder, two inches in diameter and maybe nine inches long. I was
almost positive I knew what it was.

"Huh? Is it rock? Granite?"

"It's rock. I remember when I was a kid in high
school my parents had friends who lived in central Indiana. He was a
part-time oil prospector, and he had pieces of rock exactly like
this. It's a core sample, from a special drill bit that carves out
these cylinders deep in the ground."

"What are they for?"

"They tell what kind of rock there is at various
levels below the earth's surface. By the color and texture, I'd say
this is limestone. And I know a way to find out, too. We have white
vinegar, don't we?"

While she went into the kitchen, I carefully
unwrapped another cylinder. This one had a dab of flat gray paint on
one end, and some numbers written on the gray in heavy black ink. The
rock looked different, though; it was tan colored and softer.
Sandstone? Caked mud? I sure couldn't tell. Mary came back with a
bottle of white vinegar. I spilled a little on the gray rock.
Instantly, there was a fizzing and bubbling.

"Wow, Charlie!"

"It's limestone. That's the acid test, as they
say. Limestone is pure CaCO3: calcium carbonate. It reacts strongly
with acid, just like the old soda-acid fire extinguishers. I learned
that trick back in high school chemistry."

"What about the others?"

"I don't know. I think if Joe takes these to a
lab he can—"

"Charlie! Look!"

She had unfolded one of the wrapping papers,
revealing faint squiggly lines inside. We unfolded it still more. It
unfolded and unfolded, like a road map. When we were finished, we had
a piece of paper a yard wide and almost eight feet high. We took it
into the porch out of the wind and spread it on the table.

"What the hell . . ."

"Beats me," I said, looking at layers and
layers of wavy graph lines in ink.

"Looks like an EKG, only . . . only . . ."

"Yeah, only far more complex, with maybe six or
seven different types of recording."

"What're you two doing, wrapping presents or
what?"

We turned to see Joe standing in the porch doorway.
His arms were full of groceries and bundles wrapped in white paper.
He put the food in the kitchen and joined us, examining the pieces of
core and the strange graph closely, clucking his tongue and smoking
intently. His face looked serious. Deadly serious.

"Where'd you find all this?"

We told him.

"What do you think it all means?" asked
Mary.

"I don't know what it means in and of itself,"
he said, turning the rock samples around and around in his huge,
plump, brown hands, "but I am sure that they're the reason Andy
Cunningham was killed. This is the stuff they've been looking for.
Right here is the reason for the burglaries. And as we were beginning
to suspect, they've got nothing to do with Lionel Hartzell. And maybe
even nothing to do with Eddie Falcone and his friend the Drugstore."

"I'm calling Jack," said Mary, turning
quickly to go inside. Joe grabbed her hard by the elbow.

"
Not so fast, Mary," he said softly. "I
came down here on another bad errand, I'm afraid—"

"
Oh Joey! Did the grand jury—W

"Yeah. Handed it down. Murder one. At
three-thirty today. Sorry."

There was an awful silence in the air, filled with
fear, surrounding us like bad electricity. And a bitter, sick taste
in my mouth, like an old tin can. Then I recovered, or did my best at
it.

"C'mon everybody," I said softly, "we
were expecting it anyway. With Hartzell off the hook, it was just a
question of time."

"Two quick things, both good," Joe
continued, putting his arms around us. "One: bail is set for
fifty grand. That's nothing for murder one, so that shows you how
they're really viewing this thing. And two: this new evidence. Hey!
It points the finger away from Jack."

He looked at each of us in turn, wearing a smile that
was too forced. He then turned his gaze back to the littered table.

"I don't know where the hell it does point,"
he said, "but it's pointing away from Jack."

Walking into the house, I wanted more than anything
to believe him.

And then we were standing around under the lamp
inside. I looked at Mary, staring down at her letter, crying, not
believing that good and bad news could come so close together.
 

TWENTY-FOUR

MARY, Joe, AND I sat opposite Ronnie Henshaw. We had
drawn up folding chairs, and were sitting under the stark glare of
the fluorescent lamp that overhung the kid's desk. He studied my
face, then spoke.

"I remember you from somewhere," he said.
"Aud your wife, too."

"It was at Andy Cunningham's funeral," said
Mary. "I remember seeing you there. So you knew Andy."

"Sure, I knew him. I knew Andy well, in fact. He
used to come and study here. Said it was nice and quiet, and there
was nobody else around to distract him."

He was right about that; the USGS warehouse was a
regular tomb. Sitting there in that single-story building on the
Quissett Campus, we could have been inside the Great Pyramid.

"When did you guys meet each other?" I
asked. "One of the beach parties, maybe?"

Ronnie scratched his dirty brown hair and squinted in
concentration behind his thick lenses. "No. I don't go to the
parties. Nobody invites me. I never hear about them until the next
day."

This didn't surprise me. Ronnie was wearing scuffed
old wingtip shoes over orange and black argyle socks. Baggy corduroy
pants—in July mind you—that he wore so high they were practically
tucked up under his armpits. A baggy, short-sleeved seersucker white
shirt with a plastic pouch in the breast pocket crammed with writing
instruments. A gangly, nerdy kid, he didn't look like the kind of guy
Andy Cunningham would associate with, and he sure didn't look like
anybody Jack had ever brought over to the house.

"So how did you two meet, then?" Mary
asked.

"He kind of showed up here one afternoon and
asked to take a look around. It's not open to the public. In fact,
unauthorized personnel aren't allowed beyond that door there—"

He pointed to a black steel door with a small glass
window in the center. The glass inside was wire-impregnated. Same
kind of stuff Joe wanted me to get for the Breakers's back windows.

"'He said he just wanted a quiet place to study.
He was sick of all the noise in town, and asked if he could set up a
small desk here in this office, or even just a chair where he could
read. I said it was against the rules, but then I found out he was a
student at MBL, and a premed and everything. So I let him sit at my
desk when I went out for breaks. With him here, sitting in for me, I
could take longer breaks, too. We got to talking sometimes, you know,
and pretty soon we were friends."

"What's behind here?" asked Joe, rapping on
the metal door with his knuckles. He rapped backhanded, facing the
kid.

"Well, a lot of valuable equipment, mostly. And
our core samples. Those are pieces of rock. And then we've got our
SRPs there in the back, in fireproof file cases."

"What are those?"

"Seismic reflection profiles. They're kinda like
graphs. In fact, they are graphs. They're—hey!—that's one in your
hands! Where did you get it?"

"I found it," I said, handing Ronnie
Henshaw one of the folded pieces of huge paper we'd found wrapped
around the rock and stuffed into the bedpost of the day before.
"That's why we're here."

"You're not supposed to have this," he said
after unfolding it all the way and reading the data under the wavy
lines. "This is property of the U.S. Geological Survey. It's not
in public domain yet. In fact it's—"

"We kinda figured that," said Joe, holding
up his palm to shut the kid up. He flashed his badge and cocked a
thumb in my direction. "We're police. We're assisting in the
investigation of Andy Cunningham's death, and we're pretty sure he
was in possession of this profile thing just before he died. We just
wanted you to identify it. And what we'd like you to do now, Ronnie,
is go back behind this off-limits door, walk around the warehouse
there or whatever it is .. . ," he paused, resting his hands on
the desk and leaning over it until his face was only a foot from the
kid's, ". . . and tell us if anything's missing."

Ronnie said he needed to call his superior first. We
said fine. Thirty minutes later a bald, graying man of fifty-five or
so came in and introduced himself as Calvin Beard. We told him our
story, and he opened the black steel door and led us into the big
room, which had three long aisles lined with wooden bins. Our little
procession snaked up and down the rows of bins, with Beard darting
his eyes right and left as we walked the aisles. He stopped halfway
down the second row and rapped the edge of the bin with his fingers.

"Here," he said. "Core samples from
the Nantucket hole are missing."

"What's the Nantucket hole?" I asked.

"In eighty-one we drilled a hole on Nantucket
Island for a ground water study. You said you live here on the Cape?"

"Part of the year," I answered.

"Well then you know firsthand that we've got an
increasing water shortage here, and on the islands, too. I mean, the
population's increased tenfold here in the past thirty years. The
demand for fresh water has increased maybe twenty times. And
geologically speaking, places surrounded by sea water suffer from
saline intrusion when their water tables are depleted."

"That's nice," said Joe. "What the
hell's it mean?"

"What I'm saying is that when you pump a lot of
water out of the ground in a place that's surrounded by sea water,
pretty soon the sea water starts creeping into your aquifer and your
water tastes salty. It can get so bad the water's undrinkable. So
what we did in Nantucket was, we drilled a deep hole in the center of
the island to determine the status of the water table, and to see if
we couldn't dig new water wells there in the future."

"That's it?"

"Yep," replied Beard, peering into the
recesses of the bin. "And I sure wish to hell I knew where those
cores went to."

We said we thought we could help out on that score,
and took him and the kid out to the car where we'd stowed them and
the rest of the big graphs, or seismic reflection profiles. We
carried the stuff back inside, where Beard set them on the big table
in the back room, confirming that these indeed were the missing
pieces.