Quicksilver (The Forensic Geology Series, Prequel) Read Online Free PDF Page A

my coffee. “There’s romance for you. Geology gets downright sexy.”
    Shelburne winked. “You put on a good dog-and-pony show.”
    “It’s not...”
    “It’s a compliment.”
    I shrugged. It was really more of a petrology-and-geochemistry show, but never mind.
    “Yoo hoo!” Walter called, from the table beside the map cabinet. “Come on over and let’s see where we are.”
    I trailed Robert Shelburne to the map table. Along the way he detoured to the kitchen sink and dumped his coffee, whispering to me, “Can’t stand the stuff.”
    I didn’t know what to think of that. Of him. He’s considerate of Walter’s need for the coffee ceremony. Unwilling to decline the offer. Unwilling to drink the stuff. Willing to let me in on it. I didn’t know what to think.
    We flanked Walter. He was hunched, hands pinning a map to the table. It was a geologic map of the gold country, with lithologic pattern symbols showing the major rock units. Walter’s crosshatched hands were weathered symbols in and of themselves. Walter’s a seasoned pro, with rocks and clients. If he’d noticed the coffee dump, he ignored it. If he’d paid mind to the dog-and-pony comment, he didn’t mention it. He lifted a hand, patted my arm. Don’t take it to heart.
    I hadn’t.
    “This is the Mother Lode,” Walter said. “It’s roughly three hundred square miles. If we narrow that to likely hornfels neighborhoods, we’re looking at many dozens of square miles.”
    “I can do better than that,” Shelburne said.
    Walter looked up, from map to client.
    “I can narrow the neighborhood down to about twenty square miles.” Shelburne ran his finger across a slice of the gold belt. “That’s where my father searched. That’s where he dragged Henry and me searching. What you need to do is figure out where in the ‘hood this rock came from. That’s where Henry will be searching.”
    “Then we’ll want a larger-scale map.” Walter moved to the map cabinet. “Meanwhile, help yourself to more coffee, Mr. Shelburne. We have donuts, as well.”
    The coffee ceremony was history, I saw. Donuts now. Walter had just welcomed Robert Shelburne onto the team.
    Shelburne threw me a wink and said to Walter, “You have any glazed?”
    ~ ~ ~
    W alter and I spent the remainder of the day on more sophisticated analysis, while Robert Shelburne went out for a long lunch and last-minute errands. Normally we would have spent more time on the labwork but Henry Shelburne set our timetable.
    Find Henry before he finds the source. Hunt for the source to find Henry.
    Out there in the wild. Missing. Looking like the Henry in the photo because I could not conjure up an alternative. Squint-eyed, on some mission, suicidal or not. In need of finding, or not.
    Either way, we’d signed on to find him.

5
    T he following day we left at dawn, taking Shelburne’s pricey Land Rover.
    We had to cross the spine of the Sierra Nevada range, traveling from the austere eastern side to the lush western flank, deep into gold country, deep into the heart of the Mother Lode.
    Walter, in the back seat, was re-reading Waldemar Lindgren’s Tertiary Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California . I’d never read it but I knew it was a classic. An original copy would fetch a price in the hundreds. This morning I’d asked what Walter was downloading to his tablet. He’d said, “The bible of the deep blue lead.”
    That took me aback. I’d thought he used his tablet strictly for online research or sharing docs with colleagues on the other side of the world. But books? He read his books on paper—biographies, poetry, and mysteries, from the current crop all the way back to Sherlock because, he liked to point out, Sherlock Holmes was the first forensic geologist. As for technical books, he owned a worn paperback of Lindgren that would have served him perfectly well in the field. Instead, he was reading the freaking bible of the deep blue lead in pixels?
    I’d said, “Since when did