Unknown Means (3 page)

Her hand on Grace Markham’s arm, Evelyn turned to the two men. “So what we have here is a locked-room mystery.”

“A what?”

“It’s impossible for anyone else to have gotten into and out of this room undetected. Yet she obviously didn’t kill herself. A locked-room mystery. I used to love those when I was a kid.”

“Good,” David said. “Solve this one.”

C H A P T E R

2

AMERENGUE BEAT SPLIT THE AIR, TRILLING FROM THE

Nextel on her hip. The trace evidence lab’s number glowed from the screen.

“Evie?” Marissa asked. “How’s it going, chica? Tony wants to know if you’re done there.”

“Not yet.”

“There’s another disaster for you to visit. And I’m being literal.”

Evelyn’s nose itched, and she rubbed it with her forearm since her gloves were covered with black powder. Next to her, Riley flipped through the Markhams’ address book. “I have three more rooms to fingerprint, and I want to fume the table with superglue.”

“Sorry, but there’s been an explosion at the salt mine.”

Evelyn held the talk button on the radio–wireless phone she had been issued by the county, resisting the urge to bang it on the table.

“Excuse me?”

“The Alexander salt mine, the one under Lake Erie. The building is about a two-minute walk from where you are right now.”

Tony expected her to go into a mine? Beads of sweat burst from the pores on her forehead. “Wouldn’t that be an Occupational Safety and Health matter?”

Marissa’s sympathetic sigh floated from the walkie-talkie. “I

know it’s the last place you want to go, Evie, but there’s five guys dead of nonnatural causes. That makes it an ME case. Tony says all you have to do is photograph and supervise getting the bodies out.

OSHA will do the rest. Hang tough. You can do it.”

“I have my reservations about that.” Evelyn snapped the phone shut.

“Salt mine, huh?” Riley asked.

Grace Markham’s apartment suddenly felt unbearably stuffy.

Evelyn buried her face in the sleeve of her lab coat.

“Ever been down there? It’s pretty neat.” He dropped the book back on the victim’s desk and glanced at her. “You have a black smudge on your nose.”

THE FIVE-STORY BUILDING perched on the corner of Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River, a gleaming construction of fresh brick.

Evelyn hated it instantly.

The Flats, the banks along the mouth of the river, had been an industrial depot before developers in the go-go eighties converted it to trendy bars. As the nineties went bust, the area began to go back to its roots, and the new salt mine building had been built over the rubble of the landmark Fagan’s Pub. Evelyn had been to Fagan’s only twice in her life (at seventeen, too young to drink but pretty enough to get past the bouncer, and at twenty-six, plenty old enough to drink but sufficiently young-looking to get carded), but that didn’t matter. Fagan’s had watched over both the lake and the city for generations, and she mourned it.

The parking lot attendant checked her ID, and a hefty man in a hard hat emerged from the structure to guide her in. It did not comfort her that he appeared even more harried than she felt.

“I’m Phil Giardino, plant manager. You can come this way. I don’t know exactly why the ME’s office needs to be here,” he added

without apparent malice. “OSHA will be out in full force any second now.”

“Any industrial accident is an ME’s office case. I won’t take too much time.” Believe me, I’ll set a record getting back to the surface.

“Where are we going?”

He held open a heavy glass door, and they entered the lobby—not one designed for public use but a small area with a time clock, lockers, and a secretary. Giardino moved with such a quick pace that she had to trot to keep up with him. He tossed information back over his shoulder. “We’re opening a new vein. This whole building is new, an expansion of Alexander’s main operation, at East Eighty-eighth. This morning’s blast went wrong, somehow.” He stopped at a heavy metal door and slid a magnetic-stripe key card through a reader to open it, leading her into a large room with file cabinets, two elevators, and three men sitting at a table covered in papers. A fourth man in a green uniform crouched in front of the elevator doors, tools spread across the floor.

Evelyn struggled to picture the situation she was going to have to analyze. “It caved in?”

“No!” Giardino snorted, as if that were funny. “Salt mines don’t cave in, never have. For every room we excavate—that’s a square area about sixty by sixty feet—we leave one room untouched. You get a sort of checkerboard effect, and it’s plenty secure. No, it seems the dynamite charge had about twice the power it should have, knocked a front-end loader off its wheels and onto a group of guys.

It killed three men right away, and two more died on the way to the hospital. I’ve got six wounded too.”

He recited these facts as concisely as possible, his jaw muscles tight. Then he paused only long enough to push the button for the elevator. She hoped that didn’t mean what she thought it meant.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and asked. “We’re going down?”

“Yep.”

“How far down is it?”

“About eighteen hundred feet.”

She tried to frame that image in her mind, and the idea of it made her step back, knocking into the uniformed man’s gear on the floor. “Sorry,” she murmured, righting a bottle before it could drip more than a few spots of oil onto the floor. “Is the elevator working?

It’s not broken, is it?”

The man grinned at her, without the benefit of his right front tooth. “Just routine cleaning—oiling the cable and wiping up the dust from the carbon brushes. You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

Yes, she wanted to say. Yes, I am, and eighteen hundred feet down into the earth is about the last place I want to go. Why the hell do I have to investigate an industrial accident anyway? It’s not like I’m going to know what I’m looking at.

But she already knew the answer. A bad industrial accident like this one could wind up in lawsuits for everyone from the company and the dynamite supplier to the workers’ union. While OSHA would complete the official investigation, her first-on-the-scene photographs and notes would be used by all the parties. She wiped her hand on the hem of her lab coat.

“Come on,” Giardino said and stepped into the elevator.

Its plain, metal-paneled interior looked normal enough, except for the rust spots that covered every visible inch. Eighteen hundred feet. The elevator rode smoothly, but could the floor, underneath the tile, be as rusty as the rest of it looked? Enough simply to collapse under their weight? Giardino had to weigh 250 if he was a pound.

“This seems a little rusted.” Her voice creaked from her dry throat.

He grinned without mirth. “Everything rusts like crazy down there because of the salt. But it’s secure, don’t worry.”

“What about fire?” She became aware of each breath. Was there sufficient oxygen in the mine? “Did the explosion cause a fire?”

“Just the initial burst. It burned the guys pretty bad, but then it died out. There’s not much down there to burn, other than the seats off the machines and some jackets and stuff that they had thought were in the safe zone.”

Nothing that a couple million gallons of lake water wouldn’t put out, anyway. She grasped a handrail, and the gritty, flaking surface bit into her palm. “What about the lake? Did the explosion crack any walls, cause any leaks?”

Her persistent questioning finally penetrated his worry. “You don’t have to be nervous. I’ve been in this mine five days a week for the past twenty-five years, and a few smashed fingertips is the worst I’ve ever suffered. We’ve mined salt from under Lake Erie since 1933. There’s fifty miles of roads stemming from the original mine.

They’ll be mining salt here for the next three centuries.” The car began to slow. “Besides, there’s at least sixteen hundred feet of lime-stone between us and the bottom of the lake.”

The bottom of the lake! Evelyn began to pray. Then the door slid open.

Instead of a cramped, coal black tunnel, the salt mine “room”

stretched wide enough to accommodate two backhoes, a handful of men, and a coffee machine station. Anything metal showed the effects of the salty atmosphere. Plenty of lighting ran across the high ceiling. Every surface gleamed a muted white, like quartz. The air felt only mildly stuffy and the temperature pleasantly cool. It looked like a large parking garage made of salt.

“So this is where salt comes from,” she said, relieved.

“Industrial salt,” Giardino said. “Stuff used in chemical processes, for refrigeration, and for snow removal. You’ll never be sprin-kling any of this stuff on your eggs. The site is this way.”

She followed him onto a large golf cart, nodding toward the curious stares of a group of men. They perched on the backhoe, dwarfed by its size. One of the men had a few smears of blood on his pant leg.

This isn’t too bad, she told herself as the car took off with a jerk, bumping over the rough floor. Just don’t think about being eighteen hundred feet down, connected to life and air by only a rusty elevator shaft. Or having an entire lake full of water on top of you, possibly beginning to snake its way downward after an overpowered explosion . . .

“You have to wear this.” Her guide handed her a yellow hard hat.

“We moved everyone out of the area, once the fires were out and . . .

and we could see there was nothing more to be done for these guys.”

A yellow, rust-flecked front-end loader lay on its side like a fallen dragon. Pipes and black soot streaked the white walls and ceiling.

Smaller carts and trucks sat scattered as if hastily abandoned.

Portable lights on stands filled the room unevenly, brilliance alternating with shadow.

She pulled out her camera, adjusted the flash. She put the viewfinder to her eye and instantly felt calm. Absorbing the area through the camera lens detached her from her surroundings, made her feel as if she were watching it on TV and wasn’t actually eighteen hundred feet below the surface of the earth.

What appeared to be bloodied rags protruding from underneath the loader turned out to have human arms still in them. One man had been crushed only from midchest down, his head and arms un-hurt. The two others were almost entirely buried. The metallic smell of blood wafted around the odors of oil and smoke.

Giardino stood to one side, allowing her to photograph the scene.

“We’re going to have to take this apart to right it, we don’t have anything large enough to pull it up. We had to disassemble it to get it down here in the first place. It’s going to take a while. This whole thing is going to take a while, set us back months.”

She glanced at him before zooming in on one victim’s upturned palm. She always did close-ups of hands, back and front, no matter the cause of death. Defensive wounds, discolorations, dirt smears could give a clue to what people had done immediately before they died.

Giardino, meanwhile, read censure in her look. “I don’t mean to sound callous. That guy there, he lived on my street. We’ve been friends”—he broke off, his voice choking, and fished a bandanna from his back pocket—“for ten years. I don’t know what his wife’s going to do when she finds out.”

Evelyn turned back to the distance of the camera lens, safely removing herself from the tremor in the large man’s voice. She finished with the photos, then asked: “Can I see where the explosion took place? If it’s safe.”

He led her farther into the mine, without using the golf cart this time. The soot here came in more than streaks; every surface had been blackened by the explosion. It also held boulders of salt, some two and three times taller than Evelyn.

“We place the dynamite in predrilled holes. It will bring down eight or nine hundred tons of salt in boulders; we break those up into smaller pieces that get loaded onto trucks and go to the primary crusher.”

She tried to picture the process, the hugeness of the undertaking, both frightening and impressive. What sorts of people come up with ideas like this? Let’s excavate huge salt rooms sixteen hundred feet below one of the Great Lakes. Let’s dig a canal across a Central American continent. Let’s walk on the moon.

“The crusher’s back past where we came in,” he continued. “That breaks the boulders up into football-size pieces that go to the surface.”

She wandered in and out of the salt mountains, photographing scraps of red paper from the dynamite sticks. She did not touch them; that would be OSHA’s job. She would collect only evidence adhering to the victims themselves. “What do you think went wrong?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I’d like to think the dynamite was misla-beled. I might know more when I can talk to the wounded guys.

Most had plenty of experience, but we did have a few newbies in the bunch.”

“I noticed the building seemed brand-new,” she said as they returned to the room with the overturned loader.

“Alexander Mining sank a lot of money into this new vein. I invested part of my pension money in it. If OSHA shuts production down too long, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money.”

“So you had a number of new employees here?”

“I can’t believe Duane—that’s the foreman—would have let them near the dynamite, but who knows?”

“Was Duane wounded?”

Giardino’s eyes grew wet, and he gestured at the floor, where the foreman’s arm stretched out from under the heavy machine, fingers stretching upward in mute appeal.

C H A P T E R

3

THE TELEPHONE SHATTERED THE DARKNESS, SNAPping Evelyn to attention with a painful jerk. 2:16 a.m.

Angel!

No, Angel was in the next room, in bed. She’d come home from her date hours earlier.