The Rivers Run Dry
A sneak peak: passages from the bookIn the clerk's office on the first floor, a homeless man stood at the public computer, pile-driving a soiled middle finger into the Return key. When the computer froze, he cursed the pretty woman standing behind the counter, his spittle gathering at the corners of his chapped mouth. He picked up a rumpled paper bag from the floor, promised to return, and shambled down the hallway, leaving behind a scent of salt and paranoia.
* * * * *
In all these encounters, I've learned that when people are unaccustomed to the transformations that great wealth brings, they tend to wear their new identity with peculiar self-consciousness. One moment gripped by an arrogant insulation against the daily rigors of making a living; the next so deeply needy and insecure, so profoundly fearful that the former definitions might surge forward and steal the recent foothold in their new strata, that their moral code disappears. But new money was still money, and the morning after my visit to the VanAlstynes, I was reminded of how it exerted influence where money mattered most.
* * * * *
"Let me offer a wager," she said. "The FBI thinks one of these players had something to do with Courtney's disappearance."
I didn't reply.
"And odds are you don't suspect me, or you wouldn't be here asking the early questions. You could be tailing me or bugging my phone or putting the squeeze on one of my bodyguards, perhaps with incriminating photos from her private life." She tapped the cigarillo against the cut crystal ashtray. "And you'd be right to suspect the men. They're pigs, every last one." She smiled. "Of course, I've made a fortune playing with swine. But they're still pigs. All men are."
"When's the next game?"
"They called me this morning, after the story ran in the paper. They're assuming Courtney won't show. And the game must go on. Swine, I tell you, pure swine."
"The game?"
"Tomorrow night." She arched an eyebrow, a painted feature resting above her eye as though applied by template. "I will gladly forfeit my place so you can stare into the trough."
"I've never played poker."
"Are you good with numbers?"
"Not particularly."
"Pity. You're cute enough to make a killing." She revealed the perfect teeth again. "Bad choice of words. But the offer stands. I'm not particularly eager to play. I leave for Monte Carlo later this month."
"Business or pleasure?"
"There's a difference?"
When I stood, offering my business card, Kit Carson remained seated on the white couch. She looked up at me, placing the cigarillo in the ashtray, tilting her head coquettishly.
"Have you ever shot anybody?" she asked.
"No."
"I'm disappointed," she said, almost pouting.
* * * * *
He pulled the finished sieve sample from the shaker. I didn't want to appear hovering, so I walked over to the window, staring out at the small courtyard. A maintenance worker wearing denim coveralls waved his leaf blower at the ground, his work boots melting the frost on the grass and leaving dark impressions from his steps. He worked the dead leaves around the cultured stone table in the middle, and my mind flashed to the sound of Jack's voice on Stacee Warner's phone, "You okay?" What did he mean it was a close call? Did it have something to do with the soil from Mt. Si matching the soil in Stacee Warner's boots, in her wheel well of her car?
"Raleigh."
I walked over to his desk.
Rosser said, "This clay, I'd know it anywhere. I stepped in it once and it almost took my boot clean off."
"Where?"
"It was a case that came into the state police, involving some vandalism of mining equipment. There's a company that mines this same clay for bricks, and I had to get the samples to link the suspects to the crime scene. It took me weeks to get this stuff off my boots. And there's only one place it's exposed like that. Want to take a guess?"
"Yes and no."
"Cougar Mountain, in Issaquah," he said. "It's the same area where your coal and arsenic show up."
Most clays were notoriously indistinct; they were all basically sticky brown or gray mud, unless the soil carried a particular chemical element. "Do you have a marker for it?"
"Not yet. But I'm gonna find one." He stood up and placed some of the clay in a glass Petri dish. Then he carried it into the small side room with the scanning electron microscope, the room that sounded like refrigerators working overtime. Just like he'd done with the fabric sample before, he placed some of the clay on a carbon plug and inserted it into the scope.
The Gateway monitor erupted with spikes of color, the chemical elements flaming into relative peaks and ratios.
Al, for aluminum.
Si, for silica.
S, for sulphur.
And the final spike was As. For arsenic.
The geologist grinned.
"Rosser," he said to himself, "you've still got it."
* * * * *
Armies of cedar and fir and hemlock marched up the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, their long limbs glowing with a peculiar shade of green I'd seen only once before: when a six-carat emerald had rolled across a stainless steel examination tray in the FBI's materials analysis lab. That gem's green facets glowed with a hue so verdant, so luscious, it whispered sibilant promises in the ears of greedy men.
* * * * *
Forty-nine minutes later, I walked outside, heading toward the courthouse on Jack's orders. The sun was still shining and the west side of the city's skyscrapers reflected the view of Puget sound. The glass panels made it look like the ferry boats were navigating vertical reaches, cruising up an ocean of concrete, sailing for the bright and distant sun.
* * * * *
In the nightstand drawer, I found a red Bible courtesy of the Gideons, this copy dedicated to a woman named Jacqueline Harris, from her four children. When I turned to the book of Luke, the spine crackled as though never opened, and I read about the woman at the well. I kept reading through the night and when I looked up, a dove-gray dawn was spreading across the sky outside and the clouds were curdling the way they will just before heavy rain.
* * * * *
"Do you always sleep like that?" I asked.
"Like what?"
"Dead to the world."
She bent down for her socks. They were red, the heels worn to nothing but a net of threads.
"Where I come from," she said, "dead to the world keeps you alive."
* * * * *
"My father has a phrase: Eat for the hunger that's coming."
* * * * *
Even if I were arresting him he didn't have to talk to me. But why ruin a good thing? I gave him my card, asked him to call if he thought of anything.
Anything, I wanted to add, that came to light under the torch he still carried for Courtney VanAlstyne.
* * * * *
I counted to twenty—fifteen never being long enough—and Jack jumped into the silence.
* * * * *
But after several long moments, when all I heard was air moving, air crossing an invisible networks of wires from one side of the continent to the other, I felt my heart open. And the feeling seemed more real, more tangible, than the phone that I held in my hand.
* * * * *
I closed my eyes again. The preacher kept going, hours left in him I listened to people sing out "Hallelujah!" and "Amen!" and the melodic voices of black people washed over me, rinsing away some of my homesickness. carrying me back, way back, all the way back to Virginia
* * * * *
I gently closed her door and walked back to my bedroom. The walls offered faded shadows of my father's accomplishments, a series of blank squares to represent his life on earth. When I stepped into the closet, I smelled a damp chthonous odor rising from the wet clothing on the floor. I lifted my face, and spoke to the one who knew everything, the one who knew this mortal life.
The one who knew love, and how it always brought suffering.
