A Dime a Dozen (38 page)

“He got kind of mad and disgusted. He said he really didn’t think we could do business together, and that he would appreciate it if I would look elsewhere for a construction company.”

“How do you know he wasn’t onto you?” I asked. “I mean, he knows you’re here with me. Don’t you think he’s smart enough to have figured out you might be testing him?”

“Oh, I’m positive he didn’t suspect a thing. I saw his gut reaction, Callie, and it confirmed for me that he is a man of character.”

Pulling up next to a small roadside fruit stand, I wrapped up the phone call. I would have to have a serious talk with Harriet later about “detecting.” By taking her along to the bowling alley last night, I realized now that I had created a monster. I only hoped I could nip this new proclivity of hers in the bud. Just as you wouldn’t operate on someone unless you’d been to medical school, I would tell her, you shouldn’t go out detecting unless you have the training and a license.

Forty-Three

My lunch ended up being a wonderful assortment of vegetables and fruits. I bought a tomato, a cucumber, and two plums, and when I got to the office I washed them, sliced them, and ate each one in turn.

Though I was eager to touch base with Dean and Natalie, they were currently out of the office. It was just as well, because the thing I wanted most to do was to get on the phone with the medical examiner and find out what new information had been uncovered about the body of Enrique Morales.

When I reached Dr. Grant, he remembered who I was and pulled the file on Enrique so he could give me the information without error. Fortunately, he still assumed I was somehow entitled to this information, so I didn’t disabuse him of that notion.

“Let’s see… All right, the chemical that ate him up was a combination of sodium hydrosulfite and sodium bisulfite.”

“What is that?”

“They’re both reducing agents, and they’re used in a variety of ways, primarily in manufacturing.”

“Manufacturing? Are you telling me he was drowned in a vat at some production plant?”

“It’s possible. Though it’s just as likely that he drowned in a water treatment facility or in a bucket of stain remover. These chemicals are very versatile.”

“What about the glitter?”

“Also versatile. The glittery substance is actually small flecks of mica.”

“What’s mica?”

“The micas are an important group of minerals. There are more than thirty different kinds, and they’re used for a lot of industrial purposes: as a lubricant, in paints, in roofing shingles, and in insulation. I think years ago the pioneers used mica to make windows. In the rough, it’s very pretty and shiny. It can come in big sheets, or in much smaller chunks and flakes. It is often ground up for industrial purposes. Nowadays, you can find mica in all sorts of products. I think they even use it sometimes to put the sparkles in ladies makeup.”

He went on to describe the mica mining process, but I was only half listening. I was still stuck on his list of products that contained mica: paint, shingles, insulation.

In other words, construction materials.

“So if I theorized that he died at a construction site,” I said when he paused to take a breath, “that wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption?”

“A construction site? Well, yes and no. The chemicals could be used in a variety of ways in a construction setting. But the mica… hmm… I’m not sure.”

“But you just said they put mica in shingles and paint and insulation. The man disappeared near a construction site where there were pallets of shingles, not to mention other building materials.”

“Yes,
ground
mica. But the mica in the subject’s lungs wasn’t ground up at all. It was in flakes, the way that it comes in its original state.”

“What about glitter?” I asked, thinking of Go the Distance. “Could he have drowned in a bucket of cleanser that had flecks of glitter in it, like the kind you’d find in a school?”

“Again, mica is used to make glitter sometimes, but these flecks were unprocessed. So, no, it’s not glitter.”

“Then what are you saying?” I pressed. “Given the chemicals and the mica, where do
you
think he was killed?”

“If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say it happened at a mica processing plant.”

“Are there such things in the area?”

“There aren’t any in Greenbriar, of course, but there’s one in Asheville, and probably ten more within a sixty mile radius. The hills around here are full of mica, so it stands to reason that it would be processed nearby.”

“So you think he was killed at a processing plant and then brought back to the orchard and put into the apples?”

“Doesn’t sound likely, does it? Yet I don’t know how else you could account for all three elements to be present at once—sodium hydrosulfite, sodium bisulfite, and mica flakes.”

I took a deep breath and let it out, wondering when, exactly, this case got so complicated.

“So what have you concluded about the manner of drowning?” I asked finally.

“Only that the body wasn’t fully immersed. As far as I can tell, only his head was submerged. My guess is that someone grabbed him by the hair and shoved his face into a vat or some kind of container that had the chemicals and the mica in it. It wouldn’t have taken long for him to die, so while it wasn’t a pleasant end by any means, at least it would’ve been mercifully brief.”

I thanked the doctor for his help, gave him my numbers in case he came up with anything further, and concluded the call.

After entering all of the information in my database, I went online and did a search for “mica.” Right away it was obvious that I would need to be a bit more specific. I checked out a few websites, but they were mostly filled with processing specifications, so finally I gave up and went into my e-mail.

Sadly, there was nothing there from Tom, but I was glad to see that the e-mails I had sent out for references on MORE the day before had come pouring back in. I went through them one by one and entered them into my database. I was thrilled that every single contact had returned a glowing review. When I finished assembling the data, I began typing up my report, summarizing some of my conclusions. Harriet was in with the director of development, but I hoped that when she came back to the conference room we could review the entire investigation.

The phone rang while I was waiting for her; it was the medical examiner, and he sounded excited.

“Ms. Webber,” he said, “I hope you don’t mind that I called you back. I just thought of something.”

“Yes?”

“It was your questions, actually, that led to me it. After we hung up, I was trying to imagine a situation other than a processing plant in which sodium hydrosulfite, sodium bisulfite, and raw mica might all be found in the same place. And then it hit me.”

“Yes?”

“Gem mining.”

“Gem mining?”

“Yes! In its natural state, mica is often found in a cluster with other gemstones. Rubies, sapphires, quartz, aquamarine—you name it. I won’t go into the geology of it, but the fact remains that many different kinds of gems are often found together with mica. And an old gemhunter’s trick is to soak the stones in iron remover. It gets some of the marks and stains off, and then they can get a better idea of the quality of the gems.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” I admitted.

“If you went panning for rubies,” he said, “the first thing you might do once you got home would be to take a bucket, fill it with a solution of iron remover—in other words, sodium hydrosulfite mixed with sodium bisulfite and water—and then soak your stones in it. Chances are, there would be some mica in those stones. And, chances are, some mica flakes would break off and float in the water.”

“You’re saying that Enrique Morales could’ve been drowned in a bucket of soaking gemstones?”

“It’s quite possible,” he said. “At least that would explain the presence of all three elements at once. And since a bucket of rocks and stain remover could be found almost anywhere, he could’ve been killed right on the premises there and then easily hidden in the apples. No trip to a mica processing plant necessary.”

“Can you think of any reason why someone would be soaking their gems right out in the open at an orchard?”

“Well, now you’re really getting into conjecture, which isn’t my area. I deal in physical analysis.”

“Oh, come on, Doc,” I urged. “Your job’s not as cut and dried as all that. If you didn’t like conjecture, you wouldn’t be a forensic pathologist.”

He laughed.

“Fine, then,” he said. “I’ll give it my best shot. You said something earlier about a construction site? In these mountains, it’s not all that unusual for stones to turn up—sometimes valuable stones—right on the ground. Right in the dirt. You hear stories all the time about people walking through the woods and picking up a rock that turns out to be an emerald worth a thousand dollars.”

“Really?” I asked, my heart pounding as many pieces of the puzzle began to click into place.

“Sure. I know the stories get exaggerated, but there’s no question that the mountains are filled with important rocks and minerals. I would imagine that a little construction could stir things up, maybe unearth some precious gems. Who’s to say that the workers didn’t find some stones and set them to soaking right there on the site? It’s hard to know what you’ve got, really, until it’s been cleaned. Maybe our man was caught stealing valuable rocks from somebody’s bucket.”

“He wasn’t that kind of guy,” I said quickly. “More likely, he saw the gemstones and threatened to tell the landowner. By all rights, the stones would’ve belonged to him, wouldn’t they?”

We threw around several different scenarios, but I didn’t want to hold the doctor up any longer, so I let him go with a request that he contact the police with the same theory. As we hung up, I had to resist the urge to jump up and dance around the room, just from the relief of finally understanding what was going on. Gem mining! Of course!

Zeb Hooper was mining gemstones, traveling to New York to sell them, and coming back home to launder the profits through Su Casa! I thought about the kudzu-laden field where I had tracked his footprints this morning. I had to wonder if somewhere up there, hidden by the vines, was an entrance to a mine.

I thought of Zeb’s asset report, and I realize that was why he owned so much undeveloped property in the area. He must’ve bought it all for the mineral rights!

How Enrique had stumbled across what Zeb was doing, I could only imagine. But, as the medical examiner said, there was probably a bucket with soaking stones right there at the Su Casa work site.

I felt sad for poor Luisa, for poor Enrique, and for all of the migrants. Despite Karen’s rosy descriptions of life in the migrant camps, one of the driving forces in their lives was pure poverty. I thought back to Enrique’s last day, to the conversation he’d had with his son. He had talked about being poor but honorable, saying that a man’s honor was the most valuable thing he could have.
^“
You can’t put a price on honor” he’d said to Pepe.

Perhaps he had been trying to decide whether it was worth trading his honor for some gemstones.

Forty-Four

Feeling antsy, I checked my watch and tried to calculate where Tom might be at that moment, but “somewhere over the Pacific” was the best I could figure. For some reason, knowing I couldn’t contact him by phone made me want to talk to him a thousand times more! Soon we would be together, I told myself, and that’s all that really mattered.

But if our reunion was to come together seamlessly, this investigation had to be brought to a close before then. Fortunately, Harriet finished her session with the fund-raising person, and she and I were finally able to get down to brass tacks in the conference room. We pulled out the list of ten criteria for judging a nonprofit and went down one item at a time, looking at my data and her records as we wrote out our conclusions.

This part of the job was always very painstaking, but I still enjoyed it immensely. There was such closure in slowly going down a list and tying up all of the loose ends that we had been working with all week.