by Dave Daren
“Sure,” Brody agreed with another heaving sigh.
Evelyn gave a gesture that I think probably counted as a shrug. In the short time I’d known her, I’d had to dedicate at least an hour to figuring out what each of her stiff, proper movements meant.
I drummed my fingers on the top of my desk and furrowed my brow in thought. Despite the churning in my stomach, I was tempted to eat another muffin, just to give my hands something to do.
“We should get a new plan together,” I said and broke our silence. “Right now, we can’t focus on the residents themselves. They practically take the back seat to everything else we need to gather for this case, so let’s focus on that.”
I straightened up and twisted around in the chair to crack the ache in my spine away. After this case, I needed to go see a damn chiropractor. When I turned to look at my team again, Evelyn waved her hand for me to continue, and Brody watched me with mild interest.
“Right, so, we’ve already talked to Torres at the EPA,” I reminded them both as if they could have forgotten in so short a time. “We need to get back in contact soon to make sure there haven’t been any little hiccups in that source, either. We need to make sure he hasn’t been scared out of helping us.”
I didn’t know Evelyn’s contacts, and I didn’t know if they were trustworthy. I’d liked Torres, but if I was learning anything from this case, it’s that no one person could stand up to Goliath on their own anymore.
“Archer,” Brody interrupted and raised his hand to stop me from continuing on. “There was something else about my phone calls. A few of the people I called, well, they didn’t leave the suit because of fear.”
His words lingered in the air, and I didn’t like the angle that they pointed.
“Shit,” was all I managed to say.
Brody exhaled and gave a slow, exhausted nod.
“At least six of the residences were offered under the table settlements from Knox and his people to drop the suit,” he said and let yet another bomb drop.
I could practically feel the color leech from my face as I listened.
“How much?” I asked without wanting to know the answer.
He scratched the back of his neck and glanced at his chicken scratch once again.
“Twenty-thousand, which, it didn’t matter that I told them if this suit goes through they could be looking at millions. That type of money...” He exhaled through his nose and gave a shake of his head.
“That’s life-changing to some people,” Evelyn finished. The look on her face mirrored my own, and I wanted to melt into the ground.
“Which means Knox very well could have paid off Torres, too, shit,” I murmured and followed with a tired groan.
I dropped my head against the back of the chair and dragged my palms down my face. It was just for a moment before I straightened back up. I couldn’t let myself fall to pieces over a roadblock, no matter how infuriating.
“He could have,” Evelyn admitted as she pursed her lips. “We’ll need to try and make contact again soon. From what I know, he’s a good, honest man, but, he’s got a family and he’s in government work. They don’t exactly pay with bricks of gold.”
She turned in her chair to begin writing a neat list to the side of our timeline to keep track of everything we needed to tackle. She didn’t have to tell me twice about the government and the lack of pay for civil servants. College had practically primed me for working at the public defender’s office and living off ramen. Not, admittedly, that I was much better off now. But at least my coffee maker was better than it had been in Maricopa County.
“We should look for some doctors,” Brody chimed in. “Find someone that’s seen some of the residents to get some real backing on their illnesses. I don’t think any one of them is lying about having kidney disease and whatever all else they’ve got, but a judge might not want to take the word of every Tom, Dick, and Harry we trot by him.”
The marker in Evelyn’s hand squeaked as she swiped it across the whiteboard.
“We’ll need to talk to everyone that’s still on our side and find the names of their doctors,” I said. “Odds are, there is probably some decent overlap in patients between them, and I bet plenty of the kids with serious issues are seen out at Cook. It might be easier to focus on one of the local doctors and not a pediatrician working in a level one trauma center.”
It wouldn’t be my first case trying to track down a doctor, though, the last time I’d done it, I’d been trying to get a hold of a cardiothoracic surgeon for a lack of child support payments. I used to think that old joke ‘what’s the difference between God and a cardiologist? God doesn’t think he’s a cardiologist,’ was a little too on the nose, but as I had been forced to learn, it isn’t.
I could even reach out to Clara again, given her job at Cook, and I was positive she had connections we could work with. I scribbled down my own note on the nearest legal pad to remind myself to send her a message later.
“That should be doable,” Evelyn mused as she jotted it down onto the board. “We could also see about finding any other sort of buried lawsuits that Knox is hiding. It’s a little hard to believe that a petrochemical plant that’s been around for decades is only now beginning to cause problems. It might not go anywhere, but it’s worth checking.”
Evelyn looked back at me for approval with her marker hovering over the board. I nodded to urge her to write it down.
“We can check local water records, maybe see if any other neighborhoods around the plant are having similar problems,” I suggested. “What’s been eating at me, though, is the fact that this happened so recently. Two years isn’t a long time to develop life-threatening illnesses.”
I scratched at my cheek as I tried to parse through any reasonable thoughts as to why all of the problems had begun so suddenly.
“Could be an increase in dumping,” Brody brought up with a tilt of his head. “Maybe they’ve been producing more, which means more waste, and if they’re opposed to paying more for safe hazardous waste removal for the excess…”
“They’ve been finding their own dumping ground,” I finished with a heavy sigh. “Evelyn, write that down, too. We’ll see if we can access the records about their production. Something has to be on public record.”
Evelyn finished writing up the list and capped the Expo marker with a faint little click. It wasn’t a long list, and it wasn’t an easy list, either. Knox was making damn sure our path forward wouldn’t be simple, but all that meant to me was that we were on the right track.
I took a deep breath and realized that the air in the cluttered office seemed stale. It had been well over a week since I’d been able to tidy things up, and the strewn boxes of case files and notes, along with the two other bodies filling the tiny space, had started to make me feel a bit claustrophobic.
“If you two want to pop out to grab lunch, I’ll go ahead and start calling the Morrisons’ line again,” I offered with a quirked eyebrow.
“Works for me. I can’t survive on blueberry muffins alone,” Brody joked as he grunted and pushed himself to his feet. “That diner around the corner any good?”
His comment was directed at me, but Evelyn answered as she moved out from behind her desk while she adjusted the strap of her purse over her shoulder.
“They’ve got a great country fried steak,” she assured Brody with a dainty pat on his shoulder that he did not seem to appreciate.
While the pair began to make their way from the office, I reached across my desk to swivel the landline toward me. I punched in the Morrisons’ number that we had marked on file and waited to hear the dial tone that never came.
A cold, mechanical voice came crackling through the speaker of the phone. “I’m sorry, but the number you have dialed has been disconnected. Please contact the provider for further information.”
I dropped the phone back into the cradle with a clatter and brought my hand to my mouth as I took a deep, exhausted breath. Brody and Evelyn paused in
the doorway and turned their focus from the conversation about the best diner food and back to me. I couldn’t make myself look at them.
“They disconnected the line,” I said with careful effort to keep my voice calm. “We’re down to nineteen houses.”
Chapter 8
Evelyn, Brody, and I had sent out our feelers for a few more hours before it became apparent that we were all calling the same numbers in some sort of round robin of desperation. I’d sent them home despite their protests and had spent the last few hours of the evening into the night trying to reorganize the office. We couldn’t get much work done if we were all grabbing the same files, only to put them back somewhere different for the cycle to start right up again.
I hardly remembered getting home and going to bed, but it had obviously happened given I’d woken up in my own navy sheets and not in a puddle of drool on my desk. I’d made it to the office early the next morning with coffee still in my mug, and I counted that as a small blessing.
I wouldn’t say I felt rejuvenated from my meager hours away from the job so much as I felt redetermined. We had our list and more than enough hands to divide the tasks between us. Evelyn had taken the doctors, Brody the public records, and given my prior rapport with Torres, I’d taken the EPA.
As I leaned back in my desk chair, I called Torres’ personal number for the third time that morning. Either he was dodging my calls, or there wasn’t any sort of service in the lab. But, I had a sinking feeling it was the first. I didn’t let that deter me as I dialed again and waited to hear the grating voicemail message I could effectively quote, word for word. Hello, you’ve reached the personal number of Gabriel Torres. If this call is in regards to EPA-related work, please call my work number. Leave a message after the beep.
The infuriating fact of the matter was that I had called his work line first, and then his personal, and then his work, so on and so forth. I’d spent the entire hour I’d been awake listening to slightly different dial tones, and learning to understand how people were driven crazy.
The phone continued to ring before there was a faint click. I shot upright in my chair and pushed my hand through my hair.
“Dr. Torres,” I exclaimed and waited for some sort of response, but all I heard was faint, labored breathing. Had he just been running? “Doctor, I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. I--”
“I don’t have anything to say to you, Mr. Landon,” he hissed.
His words reminded me of what Nora had mumbled through the crack in her door the day before. I frowned and leaned forward to put my elbows on my desk.
“I don’t think you were avoiding my calls,” I lied, anything to keep him on the damn line. “But I was beginning to get worried something had gone wrong with our sample.”
That, however, wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t a complete truth, either. I wasn’t worried about the sample itself, but I was worried about the man who’d promised to gather it.
“There wasn’t anything in the sample,” Torres said with his hushed tone. “I’m sorry. I misled you before. It was just dirt in the water that led to the discoloration. I can’t do anything for you. Piney Crest is safe.”
It sounded like he was reading off some sort of script, and his strangely mechanical delivery made the hairs on the back of my neck rise up. I didn’t trust this.
“Dr. Torres, is everything okay?” I repeated again with emphasis on each word.
Was he being threatened right now? Had he run off to avoid someone following him? I couldn’t figure out what was happening behind the phone, but I knew it wasn’t good.
“I’m fine, Mr. Landon,” Torres said. “But there is nothing in your sample. I cannot help you, because there is no problem. Thank you for calling, but I have to go.”
Before I could offer any further protest, the line went dead. I couldn’t bring myself to lower the phone from my ear for a good, long moment.
“Shit,” I whispered to the empty room. “This is not good.”
I dropped the phone back into place before bringing my hands up to massage my temples. I wasn’t an idiot, and Torres hadn’t seemed like a liar when I met him before. Something was clearly wrong, and I couldn’t figure out what, but I had a few options to work between.
Torres might have been threatened by Knox, which did seem likely given how he’d threatened the residents of Piney Crest. Or, he could have been paid off, which I had a harder time believing given the panic in his voice when he’d ended the call. Or, perhaps the worst option I’d come up with, Torres’ job had been threatened, which meant that Knox had a foothold at the EPA. I felt sick to my stomach.
I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles and tried to clear sleep from the corners as I attempted to figure out my next step. Evelyn and Brody wouldn’t be in to bounce ideas off of for a few more hours at the very least. The both of them had their own jobs this morning with their own lists to check off, which left me alone to debate my next step.
As with the residents of Piney Crest, it seemed like the only real option was to drive back out to Houston to try and catch Torres before he left the office for the day. I could admit that it wasn’t the best plan I’d ever come up with, but right now, unless I wanted to try to blow his phone up and end up getting blocked, it was all I had.
I scribbled a note on one of the legal pads with big enough letters to catch either Evelyn or Brody’s eyes when they walked in. GOING TO THE EPA TO TRY TO TALK TO TORRES! It made more sense to just send off a text, but the charger for my cell phone had broken last night, just to add insult to injury, and the damn thing was as good as a brick.
I could try and use the shitty little charger I had plugged into the old cigarette lighter port in my car, but I wasn’t too hopeful it would do much of anything other than piss me off.
As I grabbed my jacket from the back of my chair, I skimmed my eyes over the note one more time, just to make sure I hadn’t made any sort of egregious mistakes. I quickly left the office and locked up the front door before jogging the short distance over to my car in some pointless attempt to get my legs limbered before I shoved them into a car for the next four hours.
It hit me as I closed the driver’s side door that if I didn’t get my phone to at the very least turn on, I was going to be driving blindly without navigation all the way to Houston. Or, more accurately, I’d be driving blindly without navigation to wherever it was I ended up because it sure as hell wouldn’t be Houston.
I huffed under my breath and wasted a good five minutes fussing about with the car charger before the battery symbol on the phone’s screen lit up. I gave a sigh of relief and watched as ever so slowly, the phone clicked to life. I rolled my neck to relieve some of the built-up tension along my spine before I swiped to unlock my phone. I pulled up the address for the EPA lab in Houston from the Recently Visited tab on my maps app and, once the mechanical voice began to bark out its first order, I slid my car away from the curb.
I remembered the drive in snippets of recognition, but it passed by like I was driving through molasses. I tried not to look at the clock, as if that would keep it from dragging so slowly. It didn’t, but it did feel like a noble effort. I switched between the music on the radio, the meager CDs in my collection that I was fairly certain had come with the car when I bought it second-hand years ago, and I even attempted to listen to a podcast hosted by a team of giddy women talking about true crime.
In the end, I drove for hours in silence. I had to stop for gas once at a Pilot Travel Station in Buffalo, a town whose sign boasted less than two-thousand residents. But save for the single stop, the drive went without major interruption. The clock on the dash informed me that it was nearly one p.m. when I pulled into the EPA lab’s parking lot.
There were significantly more cars filling the lot than I’d seen the last time I’d been here. It took me a moment of lapping through the rows before I found an open space to nose my car into. I clicked the engine off with a turn of the key and took a moment to simply sit as I tried to come up
with a plea that would convince Torres to actually speak with me.
I’d spent the majority of the drive thinking about what I would say and how precisely I would say it. I knew I was charming, and I knew that I’d never had much issue convincing people to trust me, to listen to me, to help me so I could help them in return. It made me good at my job, and right now, I had a lot of peoples’ health and livelihoods riding on my ability to be good at my job.
I eased my way out of the car and carefully made sure my door didn’t ding the light post I’d parked next to. I was in perfect view of the front doors, wedged between the aforementioned light post and a startlingly teal hatchback. I leaned back in the car for just a moment to unplug my mostly charged phone from the dinky little car charger and to grab my suit jacket from the passenger seat.
I slammed the door, just to make sure it would shut properly, before I slipped my jacket on and adjusted my tie. It would help, I thought, if I looked like a lawyer this time around, like I was someone who required respect. Or, at the very least, I hoped that’s how I came across. I smoothed my hair back and took a deep breath before I started my walk across the parking lot to the large front doors.
Unlike the first time I’d been to the EPA, there was security standing just past the glass. I wasn’t sure what it was about the sight of them that set my nerves on end, but something felt very wrong. I should have brought a briefcase, that would have made me look like I had more of a purpose than a suit alone. I gave the security a pleasant smile and a tilt of my head in greeting as I pushed open one of the glass doors and stepped into the threshold of the laboratory.
That’s when everything began to go really, really wrong.
One of the security guards stepped in my path. I’ve never been a short man, and at at six-two with a swimmer’s build, I’ve never felt like a shrimp. But the guard had what seemed like a good six inches on me. His head was shaved close to his scalp and a deep, unpleasant scowl seemed to be permanently etched in the corners of his thin lips. His polo shirt stretched tight across his chest and featured the small “security” label stitched above his right pectoral.
