High Chicago

CHAPTER 22

At nine o'clock the next morning, I was back at the Earth Sciences Building on Willcocks. News of Will Sterling's murder had hit the students and administrators hard. I approached a group of people who were crying and consoling one another. One red-eyed young woman walked me over to a man in his early twenties with a mass of dark curly hair pulled back in a ponytail and a soul patch that grew two or three inches past his chin. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve when we were introduced. His name was Jason Eckhardt and he had been Will's lab partner in their analytical chemistry course. We walked slowly down a polished hallway to a brightly lit lab with white walls, white countertops and white fluorescent lights buzzing in the ceiling like trapped, angry flies.

He sat next to some kind of spectrometer and told me to pull up a chair. "Before I say anything," he said, "I want to know everything Will told you."

"That won't take long."

"I'm listening."

"I know that there is something wrong at the Harbour-view construction site. Will all but confirmed yesterday that it has something to do with PCBs."

"Not just any PCB," he said. "One of the most toxic of all, something called Aroclor 1242. Extremely dangerous for people and other animals. A known carcinogen-that means it causes cancer-the liver being the most common target organ. It's also a developmental toxicant, meaning it's very bad for unborn children. And it's suspected of causing a host of other illnesses or symptom clusters in shore birds, reptiles, amphibians and most likely humans as well."

"Where does it come from?"

"Most commonly from coolants in electrical transformers and turbines."

I thought of the decommissioned generating station across Unwin Avenue from the Harbourview site, the transmission towers along Commissioners Street and the other heavy industries north of the site, and wondered whether long-buried toxins could have seeped into the earth.

Jason showed me a printout from a gas chromatograph. It looked like the results of a polygraph done on someone who made wild swings between truth and lies. "Our course requires us to collect and compare soil and water samples from different sites, one clean and one dirty, analyze them and report the results. Will did most of the collecting." Jason looked away and swallowed and sucked at the inside of his cheeks. "We were perfect lab partners," he finally said. "I love the machines. The mass spectrometer, the gas chromatograph. Loading up the tubes and watching them cycle around. Interpreting the results and confirming the hypothesis. Will was the outdoorsman. There's nothing he liked better than collecting samples, getting all muddy and buggy. I used to wonder if he actually rolled in the muck like a dog, he'd come back so dirty. He didn't have as much patience for the tech side, which was cool, because that's my thing.

"This first sample," he said, "came from soil we knew to be contaminated with this stuff, on a site that once housed an oil refinery but hasn't yet been cleaned. As you can see, it clearly identifies a high level of Aroclor 1242. Dirty, dirty soil, not the kind you'd ever want to build on, not without extreme remediation."

He laid a second sheet of paper beside it. "This was supposed to be the clean sample, the one we compare the polluted soil against. But look at these peaks and valleys, the way they scan from left to right. It's Aroclor 1242 again."

"Where did this one come from?"

"Down along the lake, near Tommy Thompson Park."

"At the Harbourview building site?"

"Yes."

"The lakefront parcel, where the park is going to be."

"That's why I thought there must have been a mistake, that maybe I had gotten the samples mixed up. I told Will we should collect new samples and run them again. He didn't want to. He wanted to call the developer of the site and get in his face about it-he's a lot more confrontational than me-but I told him our final marks depended on it. So he collected another sample. It took time to run-there's only one chromatograph here and it's constantly in demand-but in the end the same results came up. That's this third sheet here. Same chemical makeup as the first two. Confirmed presence of Aroclor 1242."

"When did you tell him?"

"Yesterday morning at class."

Will had told me before class yesterday morning that he could guess what Maya and her father had been arguing about… that he'd know more about it later in the day.

"Did Will ever mention Maya Cantor to you?"

"The girl who killed herself? Sure. Her father is the one building those condos."

"Did he tell her about the samples?"

"Definitely. He was hoping she could-I don't know, pressure her dad into doing something about it. That's why he was so bummed when he heard she died. I think he felt like she bailed on him just when they were getting somewhere."

Neither of them knew how close they really were, I thought. And that's why both were dead.