Supervolcano :Eruption Read online

  “She is,” Susan broke in. “Claudia can drive me nuts sometimes, but she’s one of the best in the country. That’s why I came here.”

  “Cool.” Bryce stayed in soothing mode. He still didn’t call Professor Towers by his first name, and wondered if he ever would. But then again, Professor Towers’ first name was Elmer, so chances were nobody called him by it. That was neither here nor there, though. “Like I was saying, if she’s worth anything, she won’t let you go up for exams unless she’s sure you’ll do fine.”

  “She told me the same thing. I don’t know whether to believe it, though,” Susan said.

  “Believe it,” Bryce said firmly. “When you look back on them, doctoral exams are more a rite of passage, like, than anything else.”

  “They don’t feel that way when you’re looking forward to them.” Susan sounded fretful-and who could blame her? Disasters did happen. The year after Bryce passed his orals, a woman doing ancient Rome gruesomely flunked hers. No one but the profs who examined her was supposed to know what happened, but word got out all the same. The guy under whom she’d studied had retired a few months after the fiasco. UCLA was still searching for a full-time Romanist. With upcoming budgets looking as starvation-lean as the current one, the university might keep searching for a long time.

  But Susan wasn’t like poor underprepared Joanna. Bryce didn’t know much about Western medieval history. He knew a solid scholar when he saw one. And he’d done a Roman minor field himself, as Susan was going to with whatever temporary lecturer held the slot come fall. He’d tutored her after they started dating, but not for long-she had a better grasp of the Romans than he did.

  “Hey, you know your stuff,” he said. “The only thing you have to fear is fear itself. You don’t come down with stage fright, do you?”

  “Not usually. But I’m not used to going up on this big a stage, either.”

  “They’ll cut you slack for that. They’ve seen panicked grad students before. If I got through, you can do it. You’re way more outgoing than I’ll ever be.”

  “I’m just afraid I’ll forget everything the second they start asking me questions.”

  “Won’t happen. Honest to God, babe, it won’t. They started me out with softballs so I could loosen up a little before they started hitting me with the tougher ones. From everything I’ve heard from other people, that’s how they usually do it.”

  “They know so much, though.” Come hell or high water, Susan was going to worry. “If they want to flunk me, they can.”

  “Sure they can. They can flunk anybody if they want to. They sure could’ve nailed me to the cross. But that’s the whole point. They won’t want to.”

  “Really?” Susan said in a small voice.

  “Really. You’ll do great,” Bryce answered. They’d been through this before. If she needed a shoulder to cry on-or to fret on-he was glad to lend his. He’d got through what she was approaching; he knew the bumps in the road. He sometimes thought grad students were the only people fit to associate with other grad students. No one else understood the peculiar pile of shit they had to shovel.

  He also sometimes thought people who’d gone through messy breakups were the only ones fit to associate with others of their kind, for similar reasons.

  “Thank you, Bryce,” Susan breathed. No messy breakups in her past, so Bryce hoped like hell he was full of it.

  VI

  A secretary dumped the latest pile of printouts on Colin Ferguson’s desk. “Here you are, Lieutenant,” she said.

  “Thanks, Josie.” Colin spoke Spanish after a fashion: small vocabulary, bad grammar, heavy accent. It often came in handy on the street, but he knew better than to trot it out with Josefina Linares. It would only piss her off. She went out of her way to show how American she was. Chances were he knew more es-panol than she did. He also knew she’d had family in the States longer than he had.

  He went through the printouts one by one. They were DNA records from convicted felons. Plainly, the South Bay Strangler had never been nabbed for anything that required him to give a DNA sample. But if someone who was closely related to him had, the near miss might point the cops toward the real perp.

  It could work. It had worked. The LAPD had busted the bastard they called the Grim Sleeper after his son’s DNA made them look in his direction. He’d got away with murder-and with a whole swarm of other crimes-for more than twenty-five years. But he sat in San Quentin now, going through the endless appeals that came with capital-murder cases.

  Maybe one of these days he’d get the lethal injection he deserved. (Colin thought he did, anyhow; he’d met only a handful of cops who opposed capital punishment.) Or maybe he’d die of old age first-he was up around sixty. The way justice worked in California, old age seemed the better bet.

  None of these DNA tests was even within shouting distance of the South Bay Strangler’s genetic material. Except for rape and murder-details, details-the Strangler was a good citizen. He came from a family of good citizens, too. Or if by some chance he didn’t, his relatives were also careful criminals.

  Colin muttered darkly. You couldn’t give up too soon. Just because none of these samples led anywhere, that didn’t mean some other one wouldn’t. Maybe it would come in the next batch. Wt was that song about tomorrow, tomorrow? You had to hope it looked better than today.

  He’d had to try to convince himself of that too often lately. Sometimes it was true. He’d had that enormous hole in his life after Louise walked out on him. Kelly filled… some of it, anyhow. Did he love her? Did she love him? Even thinking the word scared him more than a crackhead with a shotgun. How long would he need to work up the nerve to say it?

  And Vanessa had dumped (or been dumped by-she couldn’t tell the story the same way twice running, which made Colin’s bullshit detector go off) the old guy she’d been seeing. Colin came out with sympathetic noises whenever he talked to her, but he was anything but brokenhearted. The couple of times he’d met the guy, Hagop had been perfectly-almost greasily-polite. The Armenian didn’t have a record; Colin had quietly made sure of that. But the notion of Vanessa sleeping with a man his own age had still given him the willies.

  So he didn’t need to worry about that any more. What she’d do next, whether she’d stay in Colorado or come back to L.A… Whatever she would do, she hadn’t done it yet. So he didn’t need to worry about it yet. So he wouldn’t.

  Unless, of course, he did.

  He still had plenty to worry about here at the cop shop. Not just the South Bay Strangler. His thoughts about a crackhead with a shotgun weren’t free association. Somebody with a shotgun had blown the head off a Korean who ran a liquor store near the corner of San Atanasio Boulevard and New Hampshire. That was only a couple of miles east of the station, but it was anything but a prime part of town.

  Most of the time, people robbed liquor stores to get money for drugs. Most of the time, they started shooting because they were already amped to the eyebrows. That made crack and crystal meth the two leading candidates. A surveillance camera showed that the perp was African American, so crack seemed more likely. No guarantees, but more likely.

  Three different news shows had run the surveillance video-including what happened when a charge of double-aught buck caught the luckless so-and-so behind the counter square in the face. “This footage may be disturbing,” they’d all said, or words to that effect. It was a hell of a lot worse than disturbing, as if they cared. If it bleeds, it leads.

  With luck, somebody out there would recognize the asshole with the scattergun. With more luck, whoever did recognize him would have the nerve or the moral indignation or whatever else it took to call the police. It did happen. Not always, not even often enough, but it did.

  No matter what the TV shows claimed, though, that wasn’t why they ran their “disturbing footage.” They ran it for the same reason they preempted things to show car chases: it made people watch. Once you’d said that, you’d said everything that needed saying, as fa
r as they were concerned.

  The phone rang. Colin picked it up. “Ferguson-San Atanasio Police.”

  “Hey, Colin. Nels Jensen here.” Jensen was a Torrance police captain also chasing the South Bay Strangler. “Any luck on the DNA profiles?”

  If there was, Nels would find some way to take credit for it. He was a pretty fair cop, but he liked seeing his own smiling face in the paper and on TV. He’d be a chief one day, and probably of a department bigger than the Torrance PD. Because he was a glory hound, Colin might have been tempted to tell him no even if the answer were yes. If he wanted yes so much, he could dwork that produced it instead of scrounging off other people.

  As things were, though, Colin could say “Diddly-squat” with a perfectly clear conscience.

  “Ahh, shit,” Jensen said. “I’ve got one of my sergeants plowing through them, too, but he hasn’t found anything close to a match. I was hoping you’d do better.”

  Because I’m a lieutenant, not just a chickenshit sergeant? Colin wondered. At least Nels had somebody in his department checking through them. But if that hardworking sergeant did find a DNA close to the Strangler’s, two guesses who’d announce it. Not the guy who did the work. The captain who’d assigned it to him.

  “I always hope,” Colin said. “I don’t expect too much, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, I know that tune,” Jensen agreed. He was a cop. “Okay, I’ll check with you later-and I’ll let you know if we come up with anything juicy.”

  Uh-huh. I’ll believe that when I see it. Colin kept his mouth shut there. It was usually the best thing you could do. “Right,” he answered. “Thanks.” He hung up. From the desk next to his, Gabe Sanchez raised a questioning eyebrow. “Jensen,” Colin said.

  “Oh, boy.” Gabe silently clapped his hands together. “He’s got everything wrapped up in a pretty pink bow, I bet.”

  “Yeah, right,” Colin said. “Torrance is looking at the DNA, too-I will give them that much.”

  “Yippy skip.” The sergeant was good at curbing his enthusiasm. “I notice you aren’t saying Jensen’s doing it himself.”

  “Nah. He gave it to a sergeant. Not like it’s important or anything.”

  Sanchez flipped him off. “So what was his High and Mightiness doing instead? Getting his teeth whitened for the next time he goes under the lights?”

  “He didn’t tell me, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

  “One of these days, the guy will fuck up,” Gabe said. Colin wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the Strangler or Nels Jensen till he went on, “Assholes almost always do. They never think they will, but they do. It’s part of what makes them assholes.”

  “Yeah,” said Colin, for whom that was also an article of faith. “I just hope to God he does it soon.”

  When he got home that night, he grilled a couple of lamb chops with paprika and garlic powder and nuked a package of frozen mixed veggies. It wasn’t exciting cooking. It was an imitation of Louise’s, and she wouldn’t show up on the Food Network any time soon even if she did watch it. After they broke up, at first he’d eaten out almost every night. That got expensive fast, though. This saved him money, and it was more what he was used to.

  Half the veggies went into a plastic icebox dish, then into the refrigerator. He wrapped half a chop in aluminum foil and stuck it in there, too. It would do for lunch when he had a day off. When he was done eating, he washed the dishes and left them in the drainer to dry-he hated drying dishes. The kitchen had a dishwasher, but using it for one person was another money-wasting joke.

  He pulled out a mystery after dinner. Most of the time, he read them to laugh at them. What the authors didn’t know about police procedures would fill fatter books than the ones they’d written. Every once in a while, he had the pleasure of finding a good one.

  This one seemed betwixt and between. Not silly enough to laugh at, not good enough to keep him turning pages. He tossed it aside and grabbed the remote. ESPN was showing the World Series of Poker. Poker was a fine game-he’d won several grand in his Navy days-but it was not a goddamn sport. Colin changed channels.

  A talking head on Fox News bellowed his opinions to the world. Colin changed again, just as fast. He had opinions of his own, and didn’t figure he needed anybody else’s secondhand ones.

  CNN was showing… What the hell was CNN showing? A long-distance shot from a helicopter. Snowy ground, with dead pine trees sticking up through the snow like whiskers on a corpse’s cheek. A big plume of black smoke climbing high in the air. Mountains in the distance.

  “Fuck,” Colin said. “That looks like Yellowstone.” He shook his head. What could be going on in Yellowstone in the middle of November? It looked like a forest fire-a big old forest fire, like the one they’d had back in the last century. But that was crazy. How could you have a big old forest fire this time of year? Wouldn’t the snow on the ground and the snow on the trees control a fire’s size?

  Then a graphic appeared in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. YELLOWSTONE ERUPTION, it said.

  “Holy shit!” Colin yanked the phone out of his pocket. Kelly was in Yellowstone, doing more seismic research. When he dialed her number, he got voice mail. That didn’t surprise him; cell-phone reception in the park was spotty at best. “Hey, hon, it’s me. Just saw the news. Call when you get the chance. Hope you’re okay. ’Bye.”

  The anchor had started yakking while he was delivering his message. “-eruption in the Lower Forty-eight since Mount St. Helens in 1980,” he was saying. “It began this afternoon in Yellowstone National Park, near Ranger Lake.”

  “Where the hell is Ranger Lake?” Colin asked-he didn’t remember hearing of it.

  As if on cue, a map of Yellowstone replaced the eruption shot. Ranger Lake lay in the far southwestern part of the park, about as far away from a paved road as you could get this side of the Canadian border. A big red X near the lake presumably marked the spot where the volcano was going off.

  “Geologists tell us that Yellowstone National Park was formed by ancient volcanic activity,” the anchorman went on. “The last known eruption there, though, took place some seventy thousand years ago.” By the way he said it, that was long enough ago to be sure the fire down below was out now. The story he was reporting gave his tone the lie. He went on, “With us earlier today was Kelly Birnbaum, an expert on the geological peculiarities of Yellowstone.”

  And there she was on Colin’s TV, in a heavy jacket and a wool stocking cap kind of thing with her hair sticking out underneath. “No, the eruption isn’t a big surprise,” she said. “What’s probably a surprise is that it’s been so long since the last one.”

  “How will this impact attendance at our most popular and most beloved national park when summertime rolls around again?” asked the reporter who was holding a mike up to her face.

  “No way to tell yet,” she answered. “Also no way to tell whether this eruption is a stand-alone, so to speak, or a forerunner to something bigger.”

  Instead of letting the reporter find out what she was talking about, CNN cut back to the anchorman and the shot of the eruption. He sarted going on about the ash the new volcano was spewing into the air, and about how it would impact-that seemed to be CNN’s favorite word tonight-air travel in America.

  Commercials came on. Colin went back to Fox News, hoping to see something different. The talking head there was trying to blame the eruption on the administration. Swearing, Colin switched to MSNBC. Their talking head was blaming the volcano on Congress.

  No one on any of the news channels said anything about the supervolcano under Yellowstone. They couldn’t all be that ignorant.. could they? After weighing it, Colin decided they couldn’t. So why weren’t they talking about it? Because they hoped this wasn’t the beginning of the big blowup? Because if they talked about it and this turned out not to be the big blowup, they’d look even more like fools than they commonly did? Because if this was the start of the supervolcano eruption, nobody could do anythi
ng about it anyway?

  After a little more weighing, Colin decided any or all of those reasons might be good enough. He wished like hell Kelly would call him back.

  Kelly had never been on a snowmobile before. If God was very kind, she told herself, she’d never be on another snowmobile again. Noisy, bouncy… If you combined the worst features of a motorcycle without shocks on a crappy road and a chainsaw motor, you were within screaming distance. And screaming was what she felt like doing.

  Screaming was also what she had to do if she felt like talking with Larry Skrtel. The USGS geologist was driving the hideous contraption on which she found herself a reluctant passenger. Daniel Olson piloted another one, with Ruth hanging on to him for dear life. The only way she could communicate with them was by shooting off a flare.

  The scenery was beautiful. Most people never got to see Yellowstone like this. Then again, most people never had to worry about whether the ground would give way beneath their feet in the biggest goddamn volcanic eruption since the Paleolithic. Knowing too much could be worse than not knowing enough.

  And her colleagues gave her a hard time before they climbed aboard the snowmobiles. Teacher’s pet, they called her, and went on from there. “They should have interviewed Larry-he really knows what he’s talking about.” Ruth was grinning when she said it. Kelly felt the needle even so.

  “Hey, c’mon, they’re CNN. You can’t expect them to know who to grab,” Daniel put in. “We’re all probably lucky they didn’t talk to that guy who analyzes leftover nutrients in bison feces.”

  “Nah, they know bullshit when they see it,” Kelly said. Everybody groaned. She added, “They crank out enough themselves.”

  Now she was zooming past half a dozen bison. The big, shaggy beasts pawed at the snowy ground with their forelegs, working their way down to the dead but still tasty grass under that blanket of white. They didn’t like the noisy snowmobiles. A couple of them trotted away from the mechanical contraptions. That was good. If they’d charged instead, they could run faster than the machines were going.