Zodiac (23 page)

“Yeah, I get the secret message loud and clear. If I go out there and try to get evidence—to find some of these bugs and blow your company away—I won't find zip. They're all dead.”

“Which is fine, isn't it? Because we don't want genetically engineered bugs in the environment.”

“And we don't want PCBs either,” Dolmacher reminded us.

Laughlin smirked at Dolmacher behind his back.

“You guys went out and stopped pollution, huh?” I said, beating him to it.

“We stopped pollution. No PCBs left in the Harbor. No bugs either. No evidence to harm our company. The only person who's screwed is you, S.T.”

Suddenly Dolmacher turned nasty. “Yeah, S.T., you're screwed.”

“Everywhere except in bed,” Laughlin added.

“Laughlin, my man,” I said, “I didn't realize it was going to be that kind of fight.”

He dropped into a boxing stance, waved his guard around, snapped a big meaty right hook into thin air. “Fight's over,” he said. “First-round knockout. Ever do any boxing, S.T.?”

“Nope. I prefer to kill helpless animals.”

Dolmacher cleared his throat with a sound like pebbles rattling in a can. “What we're hoping is that we can get you on our side.”

“That's not what we were going to say, Dolmacher,” Laughlin said. “We were going to say, ‘What we're trying to demonstrate is that we're already on the same side.'”

“You and us,” Dolmacher continued, right in stride.

“Lumpy, you ever get your boss up there for the Survival Game?” I asked. “I could slip you some dum-dums.”

“It's a stupid game,” Laughlin said. Dolmacher looked a little wounded.

“All your boss's ammo is on the bottom of the Harbor,” I said. “In his chrome-plated revolver.”

“I got a new one,” Laughlin said, “even bigger. To protect myself from terrorists.”

“How's your son?” I asked. “The Pöyzen Böyzen fan. He been spending a lot of time on the Nautilus lately?”

“Christopher lacks the maturity for a concerted power-building program,” Laughlin said, showing a little tension.

“I'll say. He and I had a chat, out there on that big mound of garbage in the Harbor, where he hangs out with the rest of the Junior Achievement League. How old is he—fourteen, fifteen?”

“Seventeen.”

“Oh. Well, I was impressed with him. He throws a mean beer bottle.”

“Thank you.”

“What's his ambition, then? Arsonist?”

Laughlin started for me, quick little boxer's steps. I just sat there. Harder to punch a guy's face when it's down around your waist.

“Think about lawyers, Laughlin,” I said. He did, and he stopped.

“Let's get to the end of this,” I said, “because we're both about to kill each other. You want me, noted eco-asshole Sangamon Taylor, to come out and say that your PCB-eating bug is a good thing. That it should be rushed into general use right away.”

“All of which is the God's truth,” Dolmacher said.

“Before you ever used that bug, you knew I might fuck it up for you. You heard from Christopher that I was hanging out on Spectacle Island, and you were afraid that I'd discover the old Basco transformers leaking PCBs there.”

“Continue.”

“The ones buried under the north shore of the island. The ones that accidentally got ruptured by that old barge during Hurricane Alison, and spilled a whole lake of PCBs down into the Harbor. You were afraid I'd figured that all out. Which, actually, I hadn't. As you noticed, I can be pretty slow sometimes. But you tried to scare me off, to slow my investigation down, so that you could use the bug to wipe out the evidence before I went public.”

“And it worked.”

“It worked fine. The question is: did the bug really eat all those PCBs? What about deep underneath that old barge? Maybe there's an unruptured transformer down there. Or maybe there's a pocket of bugs down there, still working on some PCBs, bugs that I could sample and show before the public. You're still worried about that. You want me off your trail, you want me on your side.”

“Why shouldn't you be on our side?” Dolmacher said. He really meant it. “S.T., there are no covalent chlorine compounds left in Boston Harbor. Isn't that what you wanted?”

“Sangamon's Principle,” I said. “This plasmid, it's a huge molecule you're messing around with. You don't know what it's going to do. The answer is no.”

Laughlin didn't bother to show me out. Dolmacher followed me, going on about the Survival Game, until I body-checked him into a wall. He gave me a vacant yet somehow piercing look, and as I rode the elevator down, I got to thinking that Dolmacher was nothing but a big complicated molecule himself, and you never knew what he'd do either.

Rebecca came around for our appointment about half an hour after I got back. I'd forgotten about it. Damn it, I was still just stewing in my emotions, trying to wash Laughlin's perfume off my hand. I hadn't had time to consider anything. I wanted to tell all, but first I had to come up with a plan. I shoved my clippings under some other crap when I heard her voice approaching; she walked in and said she had some interesting stuff for me.

She did, but nothing better than what I'd already seen. There was another copy of that same picture. The intern had also discovered a vague little article from the late Sixties saying that Basco had put some “junk machinery” on the floor of the Harbor, giving the usual feeble excuse.

“They claim that this junk was going to become a habitat for marine life. You don't buy that?”

Bless her, she did know how to blow my lid. “Rebecca, goddammit, since the beginning of time, every corporation that has ever thrown any of its shit into the ocean has claimed that it was going to become a habitat for marine life. It's the goddamn ocean, Rebecca. That's where all the marine life is. Of course it's going to become a habitat for marine life.”

“You think those things pose an environmental hazard today?”

“Nothing compared to those transformers. I've got Basco in my crosshairs, Rebecca.”

“I don't think I can print that in the paper, S.T.”

“I just don't have any ammunition in my magazine.”

“Look. Do you want to do the article? S.T. on Pleshy?”

“Can't. Not yet. Have to figure out what's going on.” I leaned forward and looked ponderous. “If I seem a little stressed out, well… the FBI is after me.”

“You're kidding, S.T.!”

“Recess. I'll get back to you when Basco's in the grave.”

When I'd gotten back from that lovely chat with Laughlin and Dolmacher, there'd been a message waiting for me, a worried message from Gallagher's wife. It was still early enough in the day to catch him on his boat, and I needed an excuse to get out on the water. I persuaded Rebecca to drive me downtown, got on the Zodiac, and buzzed around to Gallagher's berth in Southie. He was still out on the water somewhere. So I persuaded one of the neighboring boats to hail him on the CB, and in about twenty minutes I was screaming flat-out across calm water to intercept the
Scoundrel
, which was just returning from the Bay.

They recognized me at a distance, since I'm the only one who travels in that way, and cut their engines so I could come up alongside.

“Jeez! You guys run into an oil slick?” I said when I got close enough to talk. Maybe it was the late-afternoon light, but they were all dark, greyish looking. They mumbled some kind of defiant, bullshit response. They sounded tired. I tossed one of them my bow line and then they helped me scramble on board.

They all stood around and stared at me, quieter than they'd ever been, sunk, depressed. The reason their skin was dark was that they were covered with chloracne.

“You guys have been into some bad chowder,” I said in a weak murmur, but Gallagher, skipper of the plague ship
Scoundrel
, held up his hands and cut me off.

“Listen. Listen, S.T., we stopped setting our traps there. I swear to God we haven't touched any of them oily lobsters.”

When was this damn thing going to start making any sense? Why did I feel like such an asshole? “You absolutely didn't eat any of those oily ones?”

“Only Billy. The guy you saw at Fenway.”

“How's he doing?”

“Fine. He felt real sick and took a couple days off, stopped eating lobster.”

Billy came up from belowdecks. He was pristine. A little residual scabbing from his old case of chloracne.

“But you guys have been eating lobster and you got sick.”

“Yeah. Real bad, just in the last couple of days. So we switched to Big Macs.”

“Good.”

“But it's getting worse anyway. When I left this morning, S.T., I was okay, I really was. But now I feel like shit.”

“The lobsters that you ate since the last time I talked to you—”

“Goddamn it, S.T., I'm telling you the God's truth. We looked at them all real careful and they didn't smell oily, they didn't taste oily.”

“Where'd you get 'em?”

“All over the Harbor. Mostly Dorchester Bay.”

That didn't help me at all. Dorchester Bay was a pocket of water below South Boston, ringed with sewer overflows—CSOs—but not much industry. It was three or four miles east-southeast of the area I'd been concentrating on.

“Have you pulled up any traps that were oily?”

“Yeah. We put one down near Spectacle, just as a test, you know. See, S.T., we're starting to become invironmintles. Pulled it up this morning. Check this out, S.T.”

I knew it had to be bad because they had just chucked the whole thing into a Hefty bag and left it out on the fantail. I pulled it open and looked. There was no lobster in there, but the trap was still glistening with oil. It had all dripped off the trap and run down into one corner of the bag where I could grab it and squish it around and feel
it through the plastic. Oily, but transparent. This trap had been dipped in PCBs.

This was orders of magnitude worse than the lobster Tanya had found—the lobster had just had a few drops of the stuff, built up slowly over time.

There was more to this business, but I had no idea what. Each new piece of evidence directly contradicted the last.

Billy ate oily lobsters and got poisoned. When he stopped eating them he got better. Fine. But the rest of the crew never did. They got poisoned anyway. They stopped eating them but it didn't help. Where were they getting PCBs?

“The only thing I can think is that you're absorbing them from traps like this one,” I said. “You didn't try burning anything, did you? Any old traps or ropes?”

“Why would we do that?”

“Beats me. But let me just warn you that PCBs don't burn. They just turn into dioxin and escape into the air.” Maybe someone was running a clandestine toxic waste incinerator in Southie. I just don't know.

“Activated charcoal,” I said. “Go home and buy some aquarium charcoal. Grind it up fine, heat it up, and eat it. Give yourself an enema.”

It took me a while to make them believe that. “Or you could grind up some briquets very fine. Don't use the self-lighting kind.”

“Yeah, we're not dumb micks, S.T.”

“Sorry. Ever hear of an activated charcoal filter? The carbon grabs onto organic molecules, anything that's reactive, and holds it long enough for your body to get rid of it.”

Gallagher laughed. “Okay. I'll tell my wife we're getting an aquarium. Just what I need, more frickin' fish.”

By the time I got the Zode back downtown, filled the gas tanks, made it back to the office, loaded myself down with diving equipment, got it all back to the yacht club and hit the water again it was dark and a little bit foggy. Which was fine by me. I was a little dark
and foggy myself; I didn't even know what I was going to look for, or where.

The oily trap—now, that was evidence. No gas chromatograph was needed, just my trusty schnozz. It contradicted the evidence from the gas chromatograph at the university but, by now, contradictions seemed par for the course. I was willing to believe the most recent piece of evidence to drift past me.

I'd gotten Gallagher to show me, on a chart, exactly where he'd pulled that trap. A quarter-mile north of Spectacle Island, in sort of a depression in the sea floor. I could go down into it and look for puddles of oil. For fifty-five-gallon drums or old Basco transformers. We'd already sampled the area, though, and found nothing at all.

What would that prove anyway? It wouldn't help with the real mysteries—why my analysis was all fucked up; why Gallagher was sick.

Maybe it wasn't PCBs at all. Maybe some other form of organic chlorine, that didn't taste oily, didn't show up in our analysis. That was the only plausible way for those guys to get poisoned. I could be dealing with two separate problems here: a busted transformer dumped thirty years ago by Basco, causing oily traps, and some other kind of subtle, nasty waste-dumping, something really new and vicious. New technologies were being invented all the time out on Route 128, and new forms of toxic waste along with them. Maybe someone was using the CSO system to get rid of their corporate shit—flushing it down the toilet during heavy rains, knowing it would immediately overflow into the Harbor and never be noticed down at the sewage treatment plants. It was coming from one of Dorchester Bay CSOs and contaminating lobsters in that area.

That was the thing to look for, then. Take a sample from Dorchester Bay and analyze it. Analyze it every which way, look for every damn thing under the sun: bromine and fluorine and the other compounds that could mimic chlorine. If nothing else, it would help me rule out this new hypothesis. And if I found something, I could trace it to a
particular CSO, and then I had the criminals by the balls. Each CSO drains a specific set of toilets in a specific part of town. By lifting the right manhole covers, paying a lot of attention to my sewer maps, I could trace the trail right back to the perpetrator.