Aftermath, Inc.

by Gil Reavill

  At the age of two, Mozart identified a pig’s squeal as being a G-sharp. So the Chicago Yards and Hitchcock’s Psycho shower scene pig squeal sounded the same note. Illinois has an official state bird (the cardinal), and an official state flower (the dooryard violet). If the city of Chicago ever decided on an official musical note, it would have to be G-sharp.

  At the Back of the Yards retirement home that day, we never secured our police escort. Joe, Kyle, and I left the corpus of Mr. Kamolinski bagged in his kitchenette, to be retrieved whenever Edmund Donoghue and the Cook County authorities got around to getting it. We drove the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway back to what I was rapidly coming to consider, with fondness and loathing, as “Aftermath country,” where the keepers of the long pig were either more accommodating or had less to hide than they did in the city of Chicago, and the hogsqueal of the universe did not sound quite so loud.

  INTERLUDE TWO:

  Nonlethals

  A meth lab burning

  One has a right not to be fallen on.

  —John Berryman

  Look at me, busy as a bee! Where’d I get all this energy? Whoa-oh, meth, meth! I don’t sleep, and I don’t eat. But I’ve got the cleanest house on the street!

  —Song lyrics in the public service ad “Cleaner Girl,” National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign

  You couldn’t ask for a more peaceful, bucolic scene that Thursday afternoon, August 25, 2005, on the back deck of Sarah Searer’s home in Villa Park, suburban Chicago. The white two-story house on a cul-de-sac overlooked the meandering Salt Creek, just north of Salt Creek State Park. Sarah relaxed after lunch, with a Bible and a copy of Today’s Christian Woman magazine beside her.

  It was just after 1:00 P.M. Sarah’s fifteen-year-old son, Dustin, mowed the grass. Her other son, Ben, nineteen, sat inside the house at the computer.

  Sarah looked up to see a stocky DuPage County sheriff’s deputy splashing full-tilt across the creek toward her property. The uniformed deputy brandished a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. For a split second the incongruity of the scene froze her in place. Then she acted.

  Sarah opened the sliding glass doors on the deck, grabbed Dustin, and rushed with him into the house to gather up Ben.

  Rosie, the family’s lab-chow mix, barked furiously toward the top of the stairs. Then another incongruous image struck Sarah with new terror: A slender Hispanic male stood at the top of the stairs with a small silver automatic in his hand.

  Sarah and Dustin retreated quickly out of the house the way they had come in, cutting through the side yard and reaching the safety of the street.

  Ben was caught.

  The intruder had slipped in the open front door and locked it behind him. In his panic, Ben had difficulty with the lock. Rosie barked and snarled.

  With the intruder only a few feet away on the stairs, Ben heard the sharp crack of the pistol. Rosie abruptly fell silent. The home invader had shot the dog.

  Ben figured out the lock and tumbled outside. The Searer family was safe. Minus a dog, but safe.

  Their home, however, became the site of a twenty-seven-hour standoff between the intruder and legions of police. Using percussion grenades and twenty-seven canisters of pepper gas, DuPage County sheriff’s deputies, a SWAT team, and agents of the FBI performed a sustained assault on the lone dog-killing gunman holed up on the second floor of the Searer house.

  When Dave Creager and Ryan O’Shea inherited the scene a week later, a toxic chemical irritant—a residue of the pepper gas—coated every interior surface. The percussion grenades had blown out every window, but that didn’t make it any easier to breathe inside the house.

  “The place looked like a bomb hit it, because a bomb did hit it,” Ryan said. “Lots of bombs.”

  “I think the police went a little crazy,” Dave said.

  The scene at the Searer residence in Villa Park points at a home truth in Aftermath work: Some of the most difficult jobs do not involve human fatality at all. “Nonlethals,” as the techs refer to them, span a full spectrum of circumstance. At the simplest end, nonlethals include accidents where blood may have been spilled, but no one died. A shopper collapsed at a big home supply store, splitting his forehead open on a wooden floor pallet. The small bloodstain had been cordoned off with orange security gates when Ryan and Dave got to it, and required less than a half hour to clean up.

  But high-end nonlethals can be some of the most complex and time-consuming Aftermath jobs of all. The Villa Park cleanup took Ryan and Dave five days and ninety man hours to accomplish. It proved an agonizing job. The police had dumped a full riot’s worth of tear gas into a single two-story residence.

  “The stuff activates in water,” Ryan said. “So we’d work all day, go home and take a shower…yow! You’d start hurting all over again.”

  At the start of the week-long job, they could remain in the house for only a half hour at a time. By the end of that thirty-minute period, even using respirators, they’d be wheezing, their eyes streaming with tears. Every cloth-based object in the Searer house, most of the furniture, carpeting, and clothing, had been thoroughly contaminated and had to be thrown out. Ryan and Dave arduously cleaned every square inch of ceiling, wall, and exposed floor. They removed the bloodstain on the stairs, where Rosie had fallen.

  The gas grenades employed by the DuPage Sheriff’s Department were so-called triple threat canisters, which used OC pepper combined with CS tear gas aerosols. OC stands for oleoresin capsicum, with the same active capsaicin ingredient that renders chilis hot. While the pepper-based substance was an inflammatory, the CS (ortho-chlorobenzylidene-malononitrile) was an irritant, providing a one-two punch designed to thoroughly incapacitate a target—swelling shut the eyes, locking in the CS. (The third element in the triple threat was the nitrogen-propelled grenade itself.)

  Although tear gas has been outlawed for use in war, police departments around the world use it for crowd suppression and riot control. CN (chloroacetophenone, with the commercial brand name of Mace) has given way to a much wider use of CS, named after the initial letters of the names of its inventors, Ben Carson and Roger Staughton. Interestingly, before a police department in the UK can be licensed to use CS as a personal incapacitant spray, or PIS, its constables must themselves be sprayed with the stuff, in order for them to know how a PIS feels.

  Ryan and Dave got the story of what happened that August afternoon at the Searer house from several sources, first and foremost the family, then the news media and police. At 12:30 that day, a thirty-year-old ex-Marine named Juan Silvas entered Harris Bank in La Grange, a Chicago suburb six miles to the southeast of Villa Park. He carried a silver handgun and an assault rifle, but botched the robbery, escaping with only a thousand dollars in cash and the police closing quickly in behind him as he fled west.

  Since the bank was in their jurisdiction, DuPage County Sheriff’s Department deputies picked up the chase. Firing on his pursuers with his assault rifle, Silvas put a few holes in squad cars and shot out the windshield of one, wounding a deputy with flying glass. Racing north on I-294 in his 1996 Cadillac Deville, he blew through the toll plaza at Oak Brook, finally leaving the highway at Exit 13, in Elmhurst.

  With police converging on him from all directions, Silvas abandoned his car and fled on foot into the woods lining Salt Creek. Finding the Searers’ door open, he slipped inside. Immediately as the Searer family fled, the police arrived. A force of more than seventy-five sheriff’s deputies, FBI agents (because of the bank robbery connection), and other law enforcement personnel cordoned off the dead-end street and surrounded the house.

  Dogs don’t have the tear ducts to react to the lachrymatory effects of tear gas, and thus if Rosie had lived, she would not have suffered in the gas grenade barrage that hit the house in repeated waves, from Thursday evening through Friday morning. Police entered the house Friday afternoon to find Silvas dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

  The next day the Searer family, still not able to enter
the house for periods longer than a few minutes, buried Rosie in the backyard.

  Juan Silvas had no wife or children, no debts, and no criminal record. He had worked as a cook at Camp Lejeune during his stint in the Marine Corps. He had five sisters and brothers, and they were baffled as to why he walked into Harris Bank that day. Nothing in his past presaged such a development.

  After the Aftermath techs thoroughly remediated the site, the Searers moved back in with no ill effects. When she threw a homecoming barbecue, Sarah Searer invited Ryan O’Shea and Dave Creager to attend.

  Around the Aftermath office the most dangerous, reviled, and unwelcome nonlethals were meth lab jobs, which resembled Superfund cleanups in miniature, with the added risk of fire and explosion thrown in.

  “I’d rather do a six-week decomp than a meth lab any day,” Greg Banach told me. “Too many fucking things can go wrong.”

  In a sense, home methamphetamine production pays tribute to the great American tradition of free enterprise, “except it’s for morons,” as Banach said. Meth is the only psychoactive drug that can be easily and cheaply manufactured by someone without a degree in chemistry. With the facilities of an ordinary home kitchen, a single meth cook can produce enough of the substance to supply twenty users. Meth democratizes drug production. Recipes are widely available on the Web. Raw materials can be purchased at Wal-Mart. Anyone can do it.

  A lot of people did. Meth use is actually on the decline nationally, but that fact provides little relief to areas hard hit by the blight. Because the smell of meth production is terrific, resembling the odor of an enormous well-fouled litter box,* rural areas with a lot of wide-open spaces are especially susceptible to the scourge. Aftermath worked meth lab cleanups primarily in the downstate counties of Illinois, in communities along the Mississippi River, or on remote farms in Iowa and Indiana.

  Aftermath techs traded stories of the bizarre behavior of meth addicts. Meth stimulates neurochemicals such as dopamine that signal alertness, pleasure, or euphoria, and causes many users to lose grip on their minds. Transported by the drug’s pseudosexual rush, groups of meth users indulge in orgies in front of their children, who are often left to scavenge food for themselves as multiday meth binges consume the lives of their parents and caregivers. The refrigerator in a meth house is always either empty or full of chemicals. Meth addicts (“tweakers”) tend to fall off the face of the civilized earth, neglecting normal human conventions such as cleanliness, sanity, and gainful employment in favor of a monomaniacal devotion to the drug.

  Probably behind only heroin, meth has acted prominently upon the world stage. It should come as no surprise, given the infamous frothing-at-the-mouth performances at Nuremberg rallies, that Hitler’s private physician, Theodor Morell, regularly injected the leader with methamphetamine. Likewise, John F. Kennedy mixed steroids (a treatment for his Addison’s disease) with injections of amphetamine. More recently, North Korea replenished its paltry cash reserves by manufacturing and supplying meth to black markets in Asia and Australia.

  The drug’s midwestern arena is smaller. A pair of meth users dialed a 911 operator during an Iowa blizzard, giving their location as nearby an apartment building in the area. From the source of the call, the 911 dispatcher realized this could not be possible, and tried to elicit the correct information out of the meth-addled callers. Describe your surroundings, she suggested. The male caller said he was looking at a frozen pond. With groups of people crossing it. Chinese people. Carrying auto parts, which, the caller said, the Chinese people were placing in the branches of trees.

  The hallucinatory callers, a couple named Michael Wamsley and Janelle Hornickel, both twenty, were found after the blizzard had run its course, frozen to death. Authorities discovered them in a wooded area along the Mississippi River, far from the apartment building that they had repeatedly given as their location.

  Aftermath techs were generally called in not to clean up the body fluids of dead meth addicts, but to remediate their labs. These were not the “superlabs” capable of producing hundred-pound batches of crystal meth, but smaller house- or apartment-based operations. Drug enforcement agents nickname them “Beavis and Butthead” labs, after the demotic cartoon characters.

  In fact, the word lab only charitably applies to the chaotic jumbles of cook pots, plastic tubing, bottles, and tubs used in homemade methamphetamine production, and often lost amid the general clutter and filth of the tweaker lifestyle. Of the thirty-two chemicals involved in meth production, a dozen are toxic, and many are corrosive, explosive, or flammable.

  During the 1980s, when meth production remained largely in the hands of motorcycle gangs, phenylacetone was the reagent of choice, but in the areas of the Midwest serviced by Aftermath, tweakers tended to steal quantities of explosive ammonia fertilizer from farmers and treat it with metallic salts, a highly unstable process. White gas for camp stoves can be another combustible ingredient, along with lye, iodine crystals, hidriotic acid, and phosphorus—the red material at the end of matches.

  Meth cooks who use a common recipe send their acolytes out on “smurfing” runs, mad invasions of convenience stores or groceries with the purpose of grabbing all the cold medicine available. The cooks then refine the pseudoephedrine and ephedrine in the cold pills to make meth. Left behind for Aftermath are flammable solvents, chlorinated solvents, and acid bases used in the process. Cleanup standards permit no more than .5 micrograms (one-half millionth of a gram) of detectable meth residue per square foot.

  Ryan and Dave answered a meth call in southern Illinois, in a set of low-slung apartments, formerly a motel, outside of Champaign. When they arrived, they found a smoking char that clearly would yield nothing to clean up. A woman had moved into the complex, set up a lab, and promptly burned herself and a dozen other residents out. That’s how a fifth of meth labs are found—when they explode or catch fire during the volatile process of making the drug.

  In the middle of the burned-out six-unit apartment building stood the local fire chief, looking lost. Ryan and Dave briefly picked through the rubble with him. The apartments had been burned flat. The chemically fed flames burned so hot the aluminum window frames melted into pools of liquid metal.

  “What do you think, guys?” the fire chief asked them, turning over a melted lozenge of burned plastic. “Do you think that this could be part of the lab?”

  Ryan and Dave exchanged looks. “I couldn’t believe it,” Ryan said later. “Here’s the arson investigator asking us, like we’re the experts. He seemed, like, stunned.”

  “I don’t think we can help you,” Dave told him.

  “He didn’t know where to begin,” Ryan recalled.

  The clothes of the female meth cook had been set on fire by a small explosion atop a Bunsen burner. There were other tweakers present who, instead of calling 911, simply watched her burn until it was too late, and she had set the building on fire. Then the solvents used in the cooking process took over, and the whole place went up.

  “She’s up in the burn unit at Cook County Medical.” The fire chief looked around at the burned-flat apartment building.

  “This stuff,” he said to Ryan and Dave, meaning home-cooked meth, “is just kicking the hell out of us down here.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  In the Black Museum

  William Petersen as Gil Grissom

  The microscopic debris that covers our clothing and bodies are the mute witnesses, sure and faithful, of all our movements and all our encounters.

  —Edmond Locard

  Blood is jolly.

  —Alfred Hitchcock

  The death struggle was confined to the kitchen. Eric Grimes, an elderly African-American male afflicted with high blood pressure and diabetes, lived next door to his younger brother, George, in Calumet City, near the Indiana state line. George dropped by Eric’s small, orange-brick Foursquare, identical to his own and to six others on the block, at midnight on a winter Tuesday. Calling out his brother’s name, he entered the ki
tchen and saw blood, great splattered gouts of it, on the floor and ceiling and across two of the walls. Eric’s dead body lay on the floor next to a heating vent.

  Upset and fearful that the attacker might still be in the house, George left the scene immediately and went back next door to call the police. By noon on Wednesday, homicide detectives had released the scene, and early the following morning, I pulled up in front of Eric Grimes’s house with Dave Creager and Ryan O’Shea. The bitter cold made changing in the back of the truck a hurried process. Cloud-colored frost coated the curb and the boulevard strip.

  George Grimes, a heavyset fifty-five-year-old former athlete whose movements were slowed by obesity and arthritis, emerged from his own house with the key to his brother’s.

  “I ain’t been inside, not since I found him,” he said to us. “My constitution isn’t strong.”

  But he unlocked the main door, on the south side of the house, sheltered by a small portico. He hung back as Dave and Ryan did their initial walk-through. Hesitating, he moved down the brown-carpeted hallway toward the dining room. Through a doorway to his left was the kitchen. I watched as George inched forward and finally allowed himself a peek. Shock, dismay, anger, and sadness passed across his face in successive waves. He shook his head.

  “Lord, he must’ve struggled,” he said, staring at the curtain-like sweeps of blood reaching high above the refrigerator on the opposite wall.

  The body had already been removed, but the fluid imprint of it remained.

  Ryan steered him away from the kitchen, back down the hallway toward the living room. “What we’re going to do, Mr. Grimes,” he said, “is deal with all the blood and biomatter that’s in the kitchen, remove whatever is contaminated. Then we biowash the walls, which is a three-step process.”

  Ryan looked down at his clipboard. “We’re going to have to take up part of the carpet in the living room, too, but we’ll save as much of that as we can.”