“Yeah? What?”
“Betrayal.”
NINETEEN
THE NEXT MORNING Eddie and I headed out on our easterly jogging route, which took us down around the lagoon and by the WB plant. As expected, the cyclone fence was open and a white DEC van was parked near the entrance with its side door and back hatch wide open revealing racks of expensive-looking analytical equipment.
Eddie flushed Dan out from behind a small outbuilding. He was wearing earphones and holding what looked like a boom mike supported by a thick nylon harness. He pulled off the phones when he saw me approach.
“This yours?” he asked, pointing at Eddie.
“In theory.”
“Scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry. How’s the study going?”
“It’s going.”
“You can’t tell me?”
“Nothing to tell.” He pulled the boom out of a holster sewn into the harness webbing and gently laid it on the ground, then moved his torso around, stretching his back muscles. “You’d think they could make that thing lighter.”
“Field guys always bitch about something.”
He sat down on a windowsill that protruded from the outbuilding.
“We went through the original phase-one study and everything checked out, not surprisingly,” said Dan. “I know the guys who did the work. Pretty thorough. But we’ve only now had a chance to look for those cellars, the crux of the matter. You sure you don’t know where they are?”
I sat on the ground so he wouldn’t have to look up at me while I briefed him on my background, that I’d been on hundreds of industrial sites all over the world that were engaged in processing all manner of toxic and explosive chemical compounds. I hated that kind of talk, because you mostly heard it from people needing to assert their importance in the world. But I needed Dan to know my bona fides so I didn’t have to get into technical debates, or have to listen to the third-grade version of things I knew better than he did. He took it like I hoped he would.
“If you can think of any way to avoid bringing backhoes in here and digging up the place, I’d like to hear it,” he said. “The State pays me either way, but Amanda pays for the holes.”
“I need a closer look at the drawings,” I told him. “Like I said, I’d never seen them before.”
“Fair enough.”
He hauled himself up and walked back to the van, where Ned, also wearing headphones, was glued to a bank of CRTs examining oscillating waveforms and scrolling tables of data. Dan tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped.
“Sorry, Ned. We’ve got company.”
Ned pulled off his headphones and shook his head.
“No, my fault. You shouldn’t be listening to Pink Floyd and radar pings at the same time.”
“Sam wants to get another look at the cellar elevations. I said it was okay.”
He retrieved them from the box and we all went over to the main building where we could spread out on a dusty conference table.
I’d spent a lot of time with the original drawings and their subsequent iterations. Running through the scrolled sheets refreshed my memory and stirred up some odd and slightly unwanted associations. But there was nothing there I hadn’t seen before beyond the cellar elevations.
I used an Agfa lupe I’d brought in the pocket of my running shorts to compare the paper and drawing style, especially the lettering and flourishes that were common to the day. Without a document expert it was hard to know for sure, but the cellar elevations looked like they belonged with the first set drawn in the twentieth century. There are a million little details you could compare on a hand-drafted architectural drawing. A forgery would be an impressive achievement.
“You think they’re real?” I asked Dan, looking up from the lupe.
“Forensics could nail it, of course, but the people in the State’s Attorney’s office thought they were legit, and so do I.”
“Me too. Can you say the same about the other information?”
“They do. Said it’s as clean as it gets.”
“The term toxic waste covers a lot of territory. Anything more specific?”
Ned rummaged around in the box and came up with a report from the DEC lab, basically a laundry list of possible feedstocks, compounds and component chemicals used in the manufacture of rubber rafts beginning around the Second World War and into the fifties and sixties after vinyl was introduced. I once lived in a sea of these technical papers, plans and reports. It was like looking at the faces of your old football team in the high school yearbook. Familiar and strangely distant at the same time. I forced myself to concentrate until I saw it. The bad thing.
“Ah, shit,” I said, despite myself.
“What?” he asked, trying to look over my shoulder.
“Buna-N. I didn’t think they used it for rafts.”
“WB mixed up a lot of it,” said Dan. “That’s all we know.”
“A copolymer. Part acrylonitrile.”
“Right. An IARC Group 2B carcinogen. Could’ve been in a lot of things these guys made. Can you say acrylics?”
I looked out the window at the rusty, overgrown plant site. Then back down at the cellar elevations.
“But why?” I asked.
“Nobody cared about toxic waste back then. You wouldn’t believe the shit we uncover.”
“No, why the missing drawings, why the anonymous tip, and why now?”
“Not my turf, like I told you,” said Dan.
“I know. I’m just talking. Don’t know what else to do.”
I walked outside leaving the DEC guys to pack up the drawings. Eddie was lying in the grass waiting for me. He’d been to the site plenty of times and knew there was nothing interesting there for him anymore. Just as well. I didn’t like him sniffing around the place anyway. God knows what could be in the air, in the soil. Actually, I could guess. So could Dan. Which would be easily confirmed by any junior chem engineer with a simple test kit.
Everything made sense and everything didn’t.
Dan came up behind me.
“I need two more days with this gizmo,” he pointed to the instrument mounted on the end of the boom lying in the grass nearby, “and then we can move to drilling test holes. Give that a few days before we start bringing in the heavy equipment. After that it’ll get harder to keep this thing under wraps. But I’ll do the best I can. I’m not in the business of destroying people’s investments.”
I thanked him and told him to take all the time he needed.
“Nothing’s happening to Amanda’s project till this gets resolved, one way or the other,” I told him.
“You got that right.”
I thanked him again and jogged off with Eddie. We completed our usual westerly route, which included a run though a bird sanctuary, a favorite of Eddie’s, and a stop at a roadside deli for Gatorade and dog biscuits served from behind the counter by the leathery Frenchman and his chubby Cambodian wife who ran the place.
“He like zee
“Mostly the presentation,” I told him. “Don’t give him too many. We still gotta run back.”
Which we did. We passed by the WB plant on the return trip and saw the DEC van still there and Dan walking slowly through the weeds, boom in the air and face creased with concentration. Questions hung like a sickening vapor over the whole scene, and all I could do was jog on by, focus on my breathing and not spraining an ankle on the rutty road that led back up to the tip of Oak Point.
——
