Occam's razor

3

It was four o’clock when Patrick Mason showed up from the Agency of Natural Resources, looking tired and a little bored, as if reluctantly prepared for yet another delicate jurisdictional dance with a hypersensitive police department. Traditionally, cops can’t get rid of hazardous materials cases fast enough. But possession of any case is instinctively territorial in this profession, so yielding control-even of something he doesn’t want-can sometimes stick in the point man’s craw.

I therefore did my best to set all such misgivings to rest, meeting Mason out in the hallway by the dispatch window where he’d announced himself. “Thanks for getting here so fast. I’m looking forward to working with you,” I said, shaking his hand warmly.

Although seemingly in his twenties, with a smooth, pink face and enviably thick black hair, he had the look of a man who’d been sweet-talked before.

He raised his eyebrows slightly. “You are?”

I had been assigned to enough special units in my time to appreciate the skepticism. I smiled at him. “You can draw your own conclusions later.” I motioned toward the door he’d just used and brandished the overcoat I was carrying in my hand. “We might as well start with the truck. It’s still parked where we found it.”

We traded small talk on the drive to Bickford’s, and I discovered that Pat Mason had much the same background ascribed to his much-maligned colleagues on the non enforcement side of ANR-privileged upbringing, environmental studies in college, some Greenpeace-style early political activism. Yet he held those very colleagues largely in contempt. He described them as gung-ho at inventing new rules and regs, tucked away in their offices but having no idea how or whether those edicts were working-and having little sympathy for the tiny squad trying to enforce them. I also found out he was in his late thirties and had been investigating for ANR for over ten years. He’d just been transferred from the northern part of the state, which explained why we’d never met.

Mason brightened when we pulled up next to the battered Mack truck, however, seeing in its appearance, I guessed, something of what a doctor must detect in a sick patient-the opportunity to get down to some real work.

“How long’s it been here?” he asked, reaching into his back seat and pulling out a bulging canvas briefcase.

“Several days. We don’t know for sure.”

We slid out of the car’s warm embrace and approached the truck.

“You know why it was abandoned?”

“It broke down.”

We both stopped by the puddle under the Mack’s rear gate, where Mason, apparently unimpressed by the sharp odor, crouched down, placed his case on the ground beside him, and opened it up. Inside were a variety of vials and small bottles, stoppered test tubes, and packs of swabs. He rummaged among them, selecting what he needed, and collected a sample from the dark ooze before him.

After several minutes of this, he rose and glanced up at the dump body’s rim. “Anyone been inside that?”

“We looked over the headboard from the cab, just to see what was there. That’s as close as any of us wanted to get.”

Mason smiled grimly and returned to his car. “Smart.”

He quickly outfitted himself in a billowy white jumpsuit, booties, gloves, and a respirator, speaking as he did so. “Pretty toxic stuff, so far. Probably a cocktail mix of solvents, oils, and God knows what. The lab boys’ll have to sort it out. My guess is it was either in drums or more likely, crushed bales, which would explain how it got mixed together. Course, some of it’s just old-fashioned engine oil. It’s that time of year.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“When they carry these loads in winter, a lot of it sticks to the bed if they don’t coat it with oil. Even these idiots know enough not to want to wade in there kicking it loose.”

He finished suiting up and waddled like an albino penguin back to the truck. With surprising dexterity, he scaled its side, paused on the rim, and vanished from view. I heard him land with a hollow, resonating thud on the inside.

“You okay?” I shouted, worried about the oil he’d mentioned.

His voice sounded distant and muffled through the respirator. “Okay.”

Half an hour later, from the relative warmth of Pat Mason’s car, I saw him reappear, his white suit smeared and dripping, holding several more samples in his fist. He disrobed standing on a small cloth square and then stuffed both the square and his suit into a clearly labeled, red plastic bag, which he carefully stowed in his trunk.

“What’s the verdict?” I asked him as he went through this much-rehearsed ritual.

“Well, whoever they are, they’re guilty as sin. They even had remnants of medical waste back there-worth its weight in gold when it comes to disposing of it. And I was right about the load being baled. That’s why there was so much leakage. They bundle up all sorts of junk-construction debris, motors full of PCP, medical waste, you name it, and then they pour additional liquid waste all over it. During the trip, it either gets absorbed, drips out the back unnoticed except by the poor bastard tailgating, or simply evaporates into the wind.”

“Where do they get it?” I asked, not having had to deal much with this type of crime. Brattleboro was considered a poor dumping spot, eighty percent of Vermont being sparsely populated and covered with forestland.

“Surprisingly, it’s often from legitimate sources,” he explained, storing his collection of samples into his canvas case. “Places like hospitals and construction sites get contacted by supposedly legit haulers. They might do a cursory check of the hauling license and paperwork, but they don’t know how to tell a fake from the real thing. So they pay whoever it is a huge amount of money-in perfectly good faith.”

“What kind of money?”

He paused, stretched, and looked up at the gray clouds overhead. So far this winter, it hadn’t snowed once. “Well, let’s see. One case we worked on not too long ago had a transfer station sending roll-offs to a construction site at fifteen hundred dollars a pop. When the station took back the full roll-offs later, they separated the contents, made money turning lumber into illegal bark mulch, which they dyed dark brown and sold to gardening supply stores, and more money on the scrap metal, which they sold legitimately. The rest they had trucked off, paying six hundred per roll-off, except that since the contents of each container had by now been compacted, they could fit the equivalent of maybe seven roll-offs into a single truck, which brought the total paid to the trucker to around forty-two hundred. That trucker in turn added to his profit by picking up some liquid waste, which he cocktailed into the load he already had, and then he cruised around till he found a recipient-in this case a landowner-hungry enough that he didn’t care he was filling his water table with pure shit. The landowner got two hundred a load. The trucker pocketed the rest. Everybody came out with a lot of spare change, most of it tax-free.”

“Except the landowner,” I said.

Mason laughed. “Don’t kid yourself. The one I’m talking about made forty thousand dollars in two months, just for standing by his back gate in the middle of the night with a flashlight in his hand. This doesn’t happen just every once in a while. It’s an ongoing business.”

I pulled the scrap of paper I’d found in the truck cab from my pocket, now encased in transparent plastic. “This may be just what you’re after, then. Directions to a farm near here. It was wedged between the seat cushions.”

He took it from me and studied it closely. “You know this place?”

“I’ve driven by it. I don’t know the owner. You up for a visit?”

Pat Mason smiled, returning the scrap of paper. “With you along as backup, sure. Some of these guys can get a little testy.”

I circled around to the car’s passenger side. “My pleasure.”

We headed north on Route 5, out of Brattleboro and toward the Dummerston town line. Technically, I might have contacted the county sheriff to let him know I was stepping onto his turf, but-also technically-this was now an ANR investigation, and I was going along by invitation, which, since any certified police officer in Vermont has jurisdiction throughout the state, I could do with a clear conscience.

“Do you think what you just described is what we’re looking at here?” I asked Mason, as we exchanged the congestion of the Putney Road for the gentle curves of its extension into the countryside.

“Gauging from the age and shape of the truck, I’d say it’s something more low-key-something like what another bunch was doing till we nailed ’em last month. Rented a U-Haul truck, got paid by local gas stations to get rid of their excess used tires-at two bucks per-and either paid someone fifty dollars to absorb it all, or-and this is how we found them through the paperwork they left behind-rented a storage unit, filled it with the tires, and walked away with over a thousand bucks in profits.

“Given the load I just sampled, though, I’d say we’re dealing with someone working between those two extremes, where the money’s in the midrange. Which still ain’t too bad, by the way-medical waste is more expensive than low-level nuclear stuff nowadays. I know one legitimate operator who gets about five hundred dollars to dispose of a single fifty-gallon drum of it. Even cocktailed, there might’ve been several of those drums in that truck.”

We ended up on a dirt lane, winding up a steep hill with woods on one side and fields on the other. Vermont is one amazing, lumpy, crazy quilt of highways, roads, paths, and trails, all heading off somewhere, often with authority, sometimes just to peter out for no apparent reason.

In this case, we came to a gate held shut by a piece of wood stapled to a loop of barbed wire. I got out, let Mason drive through, and closed the gate behind us. Over the top of a cleared hill and to the right eventually appeared a broken-back barn with one wall caved in, standing drunkenly next to a sagging wooden house that seemed to be sinking into the earth beneath it.

A bent, leathery man emerged from the house as we approached, our car slowly lurching over the pits and ruts of what was little more than a grassy path by now.

He waited for us to get out of the car, his gnarled hands empty by his sides, a mournful, bitter look on his face. We both showed him our credentials. I let Mason do the talking. “I’m Patrick Mason, of the Agency of Natural Resources Enforcement Division. This is Lieutenant Joe Gunther, of the Brattleboro Police. Could we have a few words with you?”

The man paused before answering, looking disgustedly from one of us to the other as if deciding who was the lower life-form. “You already have.”

“You own this property?” Mason asked, unfazed.

“Not if you count the bank.”

“How many acres do you have?”

“Hundred seventy.”

“All under cultivation?”

“Some.”

“But not enough.” Mason assumed. “Must be tough to make ends meet.”

The farmer didn’t answer, but his expression made it clear he wasn’t in the mood for sympathy.

“What’s your name?”

“Norm Blood.”

“Well, Mr. Blood, we’d like to see where you’re letting those trucks dump their loads, especially the one about four or five nights ago.”

His tone of voice did the trick-as if this conversation were just the latest in a long string they’d already had on the same subject. It left no room for guile.

Norm Blood shifted from anger to resignation. “You bastards. What do you give a damn?”

Mason, unrepentant, merely answered, “We can use my car.”

I placed my portable radio on the kitchen table without a sound, as quiet as I’d been while negotiating the building’s collection of locks. The security lights had come on when I’d nosed into the driveway, as always, but Gail’s office faced in a different direction, and from the lack of any sounds upstairs, I assumed she hadn’t noticed.

I was saddened by the small surge of relief that gave me. There had been a time when I’d have pounded upstairs to find out what she was up to, or when she’d have kept an ear peeled for my arrival, so we could share a late-night snack.

But there’d been little of that lately. The early novelty of living together had fallen prey to a distracting metamorphosis I wasn’t sure she’d even noticed.

Gail and I had met more years ago than I could remember, at a political rally for one of our Washington senators. She’d been an enormously successful Realtor for years by then-a big change from the New York hippie who’d come to Vermont to explore her soul in a marijuana daze. But the transition hadn’t undermined her fundamental beliefs. She’d maintained an ideological anchor line to her wealthy, liberal upbringing, getting on the boards of most of the left-leaning nonprofit organizations dedicated to salvaging society’s downtrodden. In fact, her hooking up with me had struck most of her friends as consorting with the enemy.

But we had made a good pair, despite our difference in ages, backgrounds, experiences, and goals-a weirdly successful catamaran of a couple, demonstrated by the fact that for years we’d comfortably lived apart, while retaining the same chemistry that drew most couples under a shared roof.

I walked through the dark, silent house-it was almost ten o’clock by now-and settled onto the living room couch, my feet on the coffee table, my head against the cushions, looking out onto a moon-bathed wooden deck with a tree through its middle, stars glimmering through its skeletal branches. A tableau in variations of wintry blue-freezing cold.

Gail had been raped a few years ago. The man responsible had been caught, and Gail had weathered the emotional and psychological upheaval with her usual levelheaded strength, bartering for her sanity and survival with a carefully considered array of needs, wants, and hopes. She’d traded her physical independence for the security of living with me, her freewheeling lifestyle for an assortment of alarm systems.

But she’d also examined what she’d done with her life and had come to some major decisions-dusting off a law degree she’d never utilized, passing the Vermont bar, and becoming a deputy state’s attorney. What had started as an extraordinary reaction to a traumatic loss had led to a driving ambition to do more than make money and sit on the boards of well-meaning groups. It had ignited a desire to reinvent herself.

I had rarely seen her more self-fulfilled. Working for the SA, swamped daily with cases, sorting through the lives clogging the legal system, she was discovering things about herself she’d never expected. Her brain had become adrenalized, and despite the long hours, the grueling pace, and the depressing nature of many of her cases, she was thriving-confirmed in the choices she’d been forced to make.

But I’d been sensing a drag line threatening this resurrection-the slow evolution I was assuming she hadn’t noticed yet. To my sorrow, I was also pretty confident that when the time came, she’d be strong enough to recognize it for what it was and leave it behind.

That drag line was me, of course. Older, less driven, not as bright or quick on my feet as she, I was one of the few remaining things she’d have to shake loose if her momentum were to be preserved. I believed we’d become each other’s best friend, and didn’t expect that to end. But our history together had rarely been conventional, and now that it had been that for the few years we’d shared this house, I didn’t expect it to last. She was slowly drifting off, as yet unaware, and I was sadly watching-pain laced with relief-as the gap inched even wider.

Not that such insight was helping me prepare for the inevitable, of course. I was keeping my mouth shut, hoping against the mounting evidence that I was making this whole thing up.

I rose from the couch, resolved to stop these self-eroding reflections, and went upstairs.

I found her as I often did, half buried in a huge armchair, surrounded by paperwork in a small office down the hall from our bedroom. She tilted her face back to receive a kiss and smiled at me, her eyes warm.

“You must be bushed.”

“I could do with some sleep,” I admitted, settling on the floor opposite her, my back against the wall. I thought she looked beautiful, her hair tangled, the reading light next to her throwing the angles of her face into relief.

“I heard about it in the office. It sounded horrible.”

“Not too bad, really. The train did such a job on him there wasn’t much left.”

“Any leads yet?”

I shook my head. “I’m oh-for-two today. Had an illegal dumping case that came up empty, too. We got the guy who received the stuff-filled a whole ravine with all sorts of poison, over several years-but he says he doesn’t know who delivered it. He’s an older man, in lousy health, trying to hang on to a family farm on the skids. I’d love to cut him a deal so we could swim upstream and nail the people behind it, but I don’t think it’ll happen.”

“Is he too scared to talk?” Gail asked, her professional curiosity stirring.

“I don’t think so. The dumping was always at night. He never knew any of the drivers. Sometimes didn’t even see them. And the arrangements were made on the phone. He’s just the one left holding the bag, pure and simple.”

I rubbed my eyes and stood back up, heading for bed. “It’s not up to me anyway. It’s an ANR case now. And maybe we’ll get a lead on the train track guy from the medical examiner tomorrow-either that or a witness we haven’t talked to yet. It’s still pretty early.”

I paused at the door by her chair and looked down at her. “Something interesting did come up, though. Kunkle claims Sammie’s fallen for someone she met during the canvass.”

Gail smiled. “It’s about time. You know him?”

“No,” I admitted. “I’d like to, though. Be interesting to see who could turn her head so fast after all this time.”

Gail looked reflective and echoed my own concerns. “Yeah. Does seem a little unlikely. Hope she’s thinking straight.”

I kissed her again and told her I’d see her later in bed. She said she’d be done in a while. Then I wandered down the darkened hallway, mixed feelings buried deep, hoping against odds I was wrong, and wondering how much time I had left.