and petrochemicals had found its way twenty-five miles up the Hudson River, and finally thought I had an answer. 'A tanker,' I said.
'Come again?'
'An oceangoing oil tanker flushing out its bilge, ballast, and holding tanks after making a delivery. That's how that stuff got in the river.'
He gave me a nod, but it was tentative. 'That could be the answer, I suppose; but to get these concentrations, you'd have to collect your samples right at the port virtually as a tank was being flushed, or you'd get more dilution with river water.'
Which would explain why Tom Blaine had been diving at night, in the deep channel, beneath a tanker.
It didn't explain why Tom had died, but it hinted strongly at a grisly conclusion. If a tanker was in the process of flushing its tanks, it wasn't going anywhere at the moment. But in this case the main turbines had been turned on. It seemed inconceivable to me that a captain would choose to murder a man over some bilge water, but it was beginning to look as though that was exactly what had happened.
'Frank, you don't know anything about pollution laws, fines for dumping, that sort of thing, do you?'
The chemist shook his head. 'Can't say that I do, Mongo.'
'Well, then,' I said, gathering up the jugs and printout sheets, 'I guess I'll just have to go find somebody who does.'
Chapter Seven
The nearest Coast Guard Command station was located in the New York Harbor, on Governors Island. It was a short subway ride for me, but a trip into the city for Garth. Nevertheless, when I called to tell him about the lab report on the samples, and what I intended to do next, he insisted that he wanted to go with me. I hung around the office catching up on paperwork until he arrived, and then we headed for the subway.
We actually got in to see the top man himself, one Captain Richard Marley. Marley was a beefy man with a pleasant manner, curly brown hair, and light brown eyes that, to my consternation, seemed to glaze over when I explained why we had come, and started to hand him the computer printouts.
'Excuse me,' he said, taking the papers from my hand, then setting them off to one side of his desk before sinking back into his leather swivel chair. 'This wouldn't have any connection with that riverkeeper up in Cairn, would it?'
Garth and I looked at each other, then back at the Captain of the Port of New York. Garth said, 'As a matter of fact, it would. Those are laboratory analyses of water Tom Blaine took out of the Hudson north of here. He died getting those samples.'
Marley blinked, sat up straight. 'Died?'
'He got chewed up by the propeller blades of some tug or tanker.'
Marley winced, half turned away. 'Jesus. You're sure it was a tug or tanker?'
'It's what the coroner said. A normal powerboat, even a cigarette boat, would have sliced him up, but not into the sushi he ended up as.'
'He could only have been run over by a big boat if he was in the deep channel. What the hell was he doing diving in the deep channel?'
'Getting those samples,' I said with some impatience, pointing at the sheets of paper on the corner of his desk. 'Or samples just like those. There's more than one ship involved. The samples I had analyzed came from two different ships, almost certainly tankers, and he was probably killed by a third.'
'And you two have been hired to look into the death?' Marley asked in an even tone. 'Or are you working on a pollution case?'
'We haven't been hired by anybody to do anything. You might call what we're doing a labor of love.'
'I'm sorry to hear about Tom Blaine's death, Frederickson,' the burly man said, once again leaning back in his chair. 'I'll admit I considered him a pest, but he always thought he was doing the right thing, and he worked damn hard at his job. Just what is it you want from me?'
'For openers,' I said tersely, 'an investigation into the circumstances of his death-which I understand is your job.'
He didn't like that, but at least it got his attention. His jaw muscles tightened, and his light brown eyes glinted. 'Where did you get that idea?'
'From people who claim it isn't their job-local cops, and presumably the state police, since they never showed up. I haven't checked with the FBI, CIA, or United Nations, but I'm sure they'd tell me the same thing-that whatever happens on the Hudson is your jurisdiction.'
'You want to know what my job is, Frederickson? I'll tell you. This is the largest operational command in the Coast Guard. Six thousand ships a year pass through this harbor. I'm responsible for monitoring oil spills, polluters-'
'Aha,' Garth said with quiet intensity.
'And a few other little things. It's our responsibility to enforce the laws of marine navigation; we're responsible for averting terrorist threats. I command three hundred and forty men and women, and thirty-two ships on the Hudson River all the way from this port up to the Canadian border. Now, gentlemen, we love the environment, the seas and rivers, as much as the next person-probably more, or we wouldn't have chosen to serve in the Coast Guard. But we're not an arm of the Environmental Protection Agency; we're armed forces. We're not pollution detectives. We don't have the manpower. One of Tom Blaine's problems was that he thought we should be pollution detectives, and that we should spend all our time helping him clean up his relatively small bailiwick up there around Cairn. If you've got a major oil spill from a tanker, we'll be on the scene in minutes; but if I had to cooperate with every environmentalist, every individual who brought in a lab report about some bad water and asked us to do something about it, there wouldn't be enough hours in the day to do that work, much less carry out our mandated responsibilities. Blaine wouldn't accept that position, and I finally had to bar him from this facility and stop our people from taking his phone calls-not because I wanted to, but because I had to. The reason your local police don't want to handle it is because they have to answer to the local politicians, and the politicians don't want to rattle the cages of the local industries that pay a lot in school and property taxes. In short, if you want something done about a minor pollution problem upriver, you're going to have to rattle the politicians' cages, not mine. I'm not saying that whatever's on those sheets doesn't represent a real problem; you're just going to have to take it someplace other than the Coast Guard.'
'This may be more than just a minor pollution problem, Captain,' Garth said quietly. 'Tom Blaine was killed collecting samples like those. Maybe he was murdered.'
'Murdered?' Marley said it as if the word itself had a bad taste.
I stepped closer to the edge of the desk. 'Yes, Captain. Tom wasn't stupid enough to dive under a moving ship. There would be no reason for an oil tanker captain to power up the props while he was at anchor and flushing out his tanks.'
'Who says Blaine was killed by an oil tanker, and who says a captain was flushing out his tanks in the river?'
'It's the conclusion the chemical analyses on those printouts points to-if you'd care to look at them.' I paused, waiting to see what the Coast Guard commander would do. He glanced at the sheets, then looked back at me. I continued, 'Garth and I think there's a good possibility that a captain of an oil tanker turned on the engines of his ship, knowing Tom would be killed, to stop Tom from collecting samples of what that captain was dumping in the river. If you'll look at those printouts, you'll see there was all kinds of toxic crap in the samples. I take it flushing out tanks in an inland waterway is illegal, right?'
Captain Richard Marley ran a hand through his thick brown hair, which immediately sprang back into place. 'I think you're looking at the problem from the wrong end, Frederickson, and it's leading you to make unwarranted conclusions. A certain amount of leakage from bilge and ballast tanks is unavoidable-even though Tom Blaine would certainly have argued otherwise. There would be absolutely no reason for a tanker captain to risk a fine by flushing out his tanks in the river, because he'd have nothing to gain; he has nothing to transport back to the refinery in those flushed tanks. He delivers oil, then goes back to his shipping point in the Middle East, or wherever, to pick up
