The Stones Cry Out (17 page)

I wondered if he was advertising his services. In which case he wouldn't like my response. "Forty-five percent means more than half your patients don't conceive."

The smile tightened. "But the chance that they could conceive offers these people great hope."

"Enough to go into debt."

"Perhaps. But it must be a tremendous comfort to the widow."

"You mean, having a child?"

"Well, that, certainly. But --” he turned the file so I could read the balance page. “The Falcons are paid in full."

A two-inch red stamp marked the account CLOSED.

I stared at it, trying to do the math with a cop’s salary.

"Was there anything else?" he asked.

“No,” I said, recovering. “Thank you for your time. I’m very grateful.”

So grateful that we now had a tacit understanding: Neither one of us would be reporting the other for breaking privacy laws.

I was leaving, then he said, "Miss Harmon?”

“Agent Harmon.”

“Don't take this the wrong way.” He smiled. “But I hope we don't meet again. For your sake, and mine."

Under the canopy of old elm trees, Route 5 felt like a ribbon of road, leading back to another time. On my right, the James River plantations rolled toward the river, harkening to a bygone era of wealth and oppression, heroism and tragedy. It was my belief that living in that hallowed atmosphere was what caused the Fieldings to behave as though the rules didn't apply to them. They were people who didn't seem to belong among the rest of us. But the mighty James River continued to make its way to the sea, bearing sediment and history with equal indifference.

After the last stretch of Route 5, I wound through historic Williamsburg, and I parked behind the colonial village. I rummaged through the K-Car's backseat and found a wide straw hat. There were two to choose from. My backseat looked like it belonged to somebody who went on auditions for a living. I had an extra set of clothing for every conceivable circumstance, since I'd been pulled for late duty too many times without any chance to get home and change. Besides, the backseat closet saved me from having to explain to my mother why I was changing clothes and heading back out to work, in the dark, when I was a geologist. But my geology equipment was back there, too, along with gym gear that rarely got used because I preferred to run outside.

I merged with the tourists who shuffled down Duke of Gloucester Street, past the colonial taverns and wooden stocks sanitized to theme-park standards. A small boy was blowing a tin whistle, the kind that the kiosks sold along the oyster-shell roads. I crossed the street to the campus for the College of William and Mary, headed for the geology department.

During summer breaks from Mount Holyoke College, I worked for the Virginia Department of Mining and Mineral Resources. While the state kept precise records of its mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers, and streams, it didn't know what was beneath the surface. With subdivisions like King's Charter devouring the terrain, the state decided to catalogue its soil, noting the mineralogical resources. I was part of a crew that hiked across the Old Dominion, taking soil samples and sketching exposed rock beds. My boss was a man named Richard Burke. During my second summer he crossed land in Petersburg that belonged to a long line of impoverished farmers. For centuries the families had tried coaxing harvests from fields of black sand. They told Richard that the Yankees probably put it there, but in reality the black sand was biotite, a mineral highly prized for a wide variety of manufacturing capabilities. The day Richard published his paper on the biotite in a peer-reviewed geology journal, a dozen mining company reps descended on the farmers. Nature's lottery: The dirt farmers became millionaires.

Richard's college office was a small shack covered with vines. When the mapping job ended, he went back to part-time teaching at William and Mary.

He gave me a big bear hug. "Looks like you've been in the sun. I'm surprised the Feds even let you outside."

I touched the red skin on my face. "It's an even better story than you think."

"Is that so?

The office had that magnificently musty smell, like an old library with cherished books. Olive-drab map cases lined the walls and columns of textbooks stretched to the ceiling like stalagmites. After we spent the next ten minutes countering each other's rock hunts, I told him the real reason behind my visit.

"When we were mapping the state, you swore us to confidentiality. Can I get that from you now?”

He stared through his thick glasses and stroked his white beard, pulling on it. Richard had sworn us to confidentiality because the mining reps were notorious. Their questions would seem innocuous, until you slipped and bragged about finding aluminum ore outside Abingdon.

"Why?"

"I need that same promise from you now."

"A criminal case?"

"Yes."

"For the Feds?"

I nodded.

Like my sister Helen, Richard maintained a political stance that nursed a strange dislike for the government -- unless the government happened to be doling out welfare benefits, or punishing big business, in which case the government was good. I liked him anyway; I liked him a lot.

"You have my word," he said.

I described the minerals found in the roof soil—glauconite, pyrite, acrylamide -- but that was all I could give him. If the case ever went to court, I didn't want a defense attorney alleging that an outside geologist knew too much information, compromising my investigation.

Murmuring the mineral's names, Richard walked over to the map cases and yanked open the shallow drawers. The U.S. Geologic Survey maps were stacked in order and thirty minutes later we had covered two tables with the entire cross-sectional analysis of Virginia's Coastal Plain. The area was Richard's specialty, covering Richmond to the Chesapeake Bay.

For cartographers, Virginia posed some serious challenges. The state had a multi-layered geology that could only be explained using every color in an artist's palette. In some parts of the Old Dominion, ancient molten lava was directly covered by archeologically significant marine sediments that had been deposited by glaciers which had eroded the mountains which were produced by earthquakes that created fault lines that criss-crossed one another like a wild game of tic-tac-toe. The result was a geologic map so aesthetically beautiful that as a girl I kept it pinned it to my bedroom wall. My sister Helen actually thought it was a brilliant abstract lithograph. She was less than happy when I said, "The artist is God."

Around Richmond, there were eight rock formations, Richard said, that could have produced the green sand. Eight was far too many -- like I told Eric, glauconite was too plentiful to be forensically helpful. But pyrite was another matter. A substance otherwise known as fool's gold, pyrite narrowed my search considerably.

"And," Richard added, "pyritic sands with glauconite are unusual. We don't see that combination often within the Coastal Plain." He pushed up his thick glasses. "Would it compromise things if I knew where the soil sample was taken from?"

"All I can tell you is that it was an urban setting."

"Construction site?”

I shook my head.

Reaching into one of the textbook stalagmites, he pulled out a geochemistry tome, flipping the pages as he offered me a re-primer on acids and alkylides. In simplest terms, acids burned, alkylides felt slippery and the difference was pH levels.

"Have you ever driven along Interstate 295?" Richard asked.

"Sure."

"Noticed some gray-green soil on the roadside?"

"Can't say that I have."

"No grass or flowers are growing there. And if you look closely the concrete barriers are crumbling. The soil is so highly acidic it can literally eat through steel rebar."

"The soil's exposed, next to the highway?" I felt a sinking sensation. Anybody could walk through it, getting the soil on their shoes. A cop pulling over a speeder, for instance.

"Oh, it's way up, far above the road," Richard said. "The only people stepping in it are the guys replacing the concrete barriers."

Then it didn't fit with Holmes and Falcon. “Anywhere else?”

"I tell my students--think of the earth as—"

I finished his sentence, "A layer cake."

He chuckled. "I'm an old broken record."

"You're a good teacher. So what’s in this cake?"

"Thanks, Raleigh.” He nodded. “Glauconite and pyrite, they're at the bottom of the layer cake. Lower Tertiary deposits. And to expose them on the surface, we need a knife, slicing into the cake."

"Highways. Road cuts."

"Those work. But here the knife is water."

With an index finger, he traced areas where the cartographer had swirled a mustard color with pine green, meshing ribbons to indicate pyrite which sometimes appeared brassy yellow, and glauconite as dark green sand. The first spot was northwest of the city beside the South Anna River. The second was east of Richmond, next to the James River.

"Two rivers cutting through to bedrock," Richard said.

"And anybody could pick up that soil on their shoes," I said.

"Except for that third element, acrylamide."

"That threw me at first."

"Don’t feel bad. Synthetics do that to me too. But in this case I know something."

He said that several years ago, a large industrial manufacturing company wanted to build a production facility north of Richmond. Hoping to bring jobs to the area, the state commissioned an environmental impact study. Richard was hired to run it. "And we now have the largest paper manufacturer in the mid-Atlantic region."

I suddenly remembered something Eric told me. "Acrylamide. It's used for making paper."

"Good, you already know.”

The company received approval to build the paper plant, he said, although Richard noted some dangers posed by acrylamide leaching into sandy soil. "The decision to build basically came down to the fact that the area's already so full of pyrite nothing can grow there anyway. So what's a little poisonous acrylamide?"

He drew his finger along the South Anna River, following the knife that served up glauconite and pyrite with a garnish of acrylamide. "Right there,” he said. “That's your spot."

When I got back to the office that afternoon, every cubicle had cleared out. A laurel of graphite clouds gathered at the edge of the sky like an army awaiting a gun-fired signal to advance. Thunderstorms kept Richmond hopping all summer and my fellow agents were rushing through the parking lot, rolling up car windows that had been left open to temper the day’s heat.

Phaup, of course, was still here. And she must have seen the K-Car limping into the parking lot because my phone rang before I could sit down.

In her office, taking the same chair as always, I told her about the lab results and explained how the roof soil occurred in only two locations near Richmond, and with the acrylamide it was only one place. I told her this soil was so distinct that if it matched the soil on both men's shoes, they probably met before -- before plunging to their deaths. "It would help explain why they were on the roof together. But to match the soil I need their shoes. And Internal Affairs refuses to share material evidence."

Phaup picked up a yellow pencil. The polyhedron planes were dented with chew marks.

"Raleigh, do you not remember what I told you, about civil rights? We can never know what really happened. And we’ll never know what happened on that roof."

"I'm about to find out."

“Opinion, totally subjective. I asked you to close this case. Immediately."

I tried again. "Can we at least ask the U.S. Attorney’s office to subpoena the police evidence?"

“Call the attorneys.” She pointed the pencil at me. "Good idea."

I couldn't believe it: Phaup agreed with me? I was pushing myself out of the chair, ready to make the call, when she once more pointed the pencil. I stopped.

"Call the attorneys, ask for a declination."

A cold feeling went through my gut. "Pardon?"

"A declination. We decline further investigation and prosecution of this case," she continued, as though I asked for the definition. "We have no witnesses. Our physical evidence is sketchy. And there's no way we can go to court and prosecute anyone. We decline."

"But the evidence isn't sketchy, ma’am. It's just withheld, there's a huge difference."

"Raleigh,” she sighed. “Consider this a rite of passage. Ninety-nine percent of civil rights cases wind up this way."

"But one percent—"

"If this case was that one percent, I wouldn't assign it to a junior agent."

The insult barely scratched. "Ma'am, I have reason to believe the detective asked Holmes to meet him on the roof that day. I can prove it."

"With the dirt? Yes, very interesting angle." She smiled. Like ice. "You have the attorneys' number, or should I give it to you?"

I stood up.

She waved the pencil like a wand. "Dismissed."

===============