Deadly Waters

by T. Alan Codder

  “Okay. Fair enough. I had to ask. Sorry if I offended you.”

  “I’m not offended, but I don’t want any rumors to get started either. It’s not fair to me or Kevin.”

  “This is part of an official investigation, Maggie. I’m not trying to collect gossip.”

  She sighed as the hardness drained out of her face. “Okay. Sorry I came across so hard ass. It took a while to earn the respect of the crew when I took over the plant, and I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.”

  “How long have you been the plant manager?” Sean asked, changing the subject and trying to smooth things over.

  “I’ve been the manager and ORC for six years.”

  “ORC?”

  “Operator in Responsible Charge,” she explained.

  “How’s that different than being the plant manager?”

  “Normally they’re the same, but they don’t have to be. The ORC is responsible for making sure the plant stays in compliance with its permits and has to sign off on all the paperwork that gets submitted to the state. It’s the ORC’s neck that’s on the line, and the one that will go to jail if the paperwork is falsified. I was the backup ORC for ten years prior to that, when I was the lab manager.”

  “You didn’t have the respect from being the lab manager?”

  She gave him a slight smile. “That’s a whole different world from operations.”

  “Okay. I’ll take your word for it.” He paused as he thought, but then realized he didn’t have anything else. “I guess I’m done here. Sorry I upset you.”

  “It’s okay. I’m not upset. I just don’t want any rumors to get started.”

  “As I said, this is part of an official investigation. What you tell me is kept in the strictest confidence.”

  “Sean, Kevin didn’t do it. I know him well enough to know that.”

  “I’m not saying he did.”

  “But you’re thinking it. I can see it in your eyes. If you’re going to run with this, be careful. I don’t want to see a good man ruined for something he didn’t do.”

  “You’re that sure it wasn’t him.”

  Maggie nodded. “I’m that sure.”

  -oOo-

  Sean was returning from his meeting with Kevin when his phone rang. He was only five minutes from the station, so he didn’t bother to answer. He pulled into the parking lot and switched the cruiser off before pulling his phone from his pocket. He glanced at the missed call and sighed as he pressed the button to return the call.

  “You wanted to speak to me?”

  “Sean, I just got off the phone with Danny Brady. He’s threatening to sue the city,” Rudy said.

  Even through the tiny speaker of his phone, Sean could hear the stress in the mayor’s voice.

  “On what grounds?”

  “According to city policy, any disputes over pay are to be resolved by the Human Resources Director.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “You didn’t give him that chance.”

  Sean sucked on his teeth a moment. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Sean, this is serious business.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Put him on paid administrative leave.”

  “I see. Doing what?”

  “I don’t know! Find something for him to do!”

  “So anytime an officer doesn’t want to work the three to eleven shift, or the eleven to seven shift, all they have to do is take a quick nap, and they’re on days for a couple of weeks with some busy work. Is that what your telling me?”

  “No! I’m not saying that at all!”

  “What are you saying then?”

  “What I’m saying is, put Danny on administrative leave until we can sort this out.”

  “I have another suggestion. Why don’t you have the HR Director rule on his complaint? This is pretty cut and dried in my opinion. If she says I can’t suspend him the way I did, then I’ll find out what I have to do to get him suspended.”

  “It’s not that simple. According to policy, that should have been done before you suspended him. Sean, I don’t see—”

  “What I don’t see, mayor, is why you’re not willing to do what you know is right,” Sean replied firmly, cutting Rudy off. “Let him sue. I have photos of him sleeping in his car. We’ll see how well he likes it when that comes out in court.”

  “He said he wasn’t asleep and he’d just closed his eyes for a minute.”

  “Funny. Didn’t he tell you he was on cold medicine? That’s what he told me. And it was for a hell of a lot longer than a minute.”

  “How can you be sure?” Rudy asked.

  “Because I have two photos of him taken twenty minutes apart. He hadn’t moved.”

  Rudy was quiet for a moment. “How do you know they were taken twenty minutes apart?”

  “Time stamp on the photo.”

  “Can’t that be faked, or changed?”

  “It could be. The thing is, mayor, the shadows moved. It may not have been twenty minutes, but it wasn’t only one or two, either. Why are you letting Officer Brady threaten you like this?”

  “I’m just trying to find a compromise everyone can live with.”

  “No compromise, not on this,” Sean said. “Officer Brady was caught sleeping in his patrol car, and that undermines the trust people have in my department. Without trust, and respect, our jobs become much more difficult. Officer Brady is suspended, without pay, for two weeks.”

  “Sean, be reasonable!”

  “I am being reasonable. I’m not taking it personally that Officer Brady is trying to circumvent my authority.”

  There was another long pause. It was an old cop trick; the mayor was using silence to make Sean uncomfortable, but Sean waited him out.

  “Chief, I want Officer Daniel Brady placed on administrative leave, with full pay, effective immediately,” Rudy said, his voice firm.

  “Very well, mayor. I want that in writing. I want it clearly stated I informed you of the nature of Officer Brady’s misconduct and you are ordering me to remove him from suspension and to place him on paid administrative leave. Once I have the letter, I will attach it to the notice of reprimand in his personnel file and remove Officer Brady from suspension.”

  Rudy sighed. “Thank you, Sean.”

  “My pleasure, mayor. If anyone asks why Officer Brady is still on duty, I’ll show them a copy of your letter so you can take full credit for it.”

  There was a long pause. Sean knew Rudy was weighing his options. With his reelection coming up, he probably didn’t want it getting out that he prevented Sean from suspending Danny.

  “I don’t understand why you’re stirring up so much trouble!”

  “Sounds like it’s time someone did.”

  There was another long pause. “I’ll talk to Amy,” Rudy said, and then was gone.

  Sean sat in his cruiser a moment. Amy Drote was the HR director, and with the few dealings he’d had with her, she seemed like a reasonable person. He couldn’t believe Rudy’s lack of backbone and that he was backing Danny.

  “Fuck…” he muttered before opening the door and stepping out, wondering to himself if one of Kim’s cookies would improve his mood.

  Seventeen

  Sean sat down at his desk with another cup of coffee. He normally wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, especially in the afternoon, but covering Danny’s shift was killing him.

  Danny was in the middle of his two weeks working the three to eleven shift, and then he was rotating to the eleven to seven shift for the two weeks after that. He wasn’t going to force his officers to cover for someone he suspended, especially the shift everyone hated, the eleven to seven graveyard shift.

  He was working his normal seven to whenever he got done, and then went on patrol until eleven. Next week, he would patrol from eleven until seven, and then work in the office before going home to sleep. He was four days into the suspension, and he only had a little over a week to go. He could hold it togethe
r that long. Maybe.

  Amy had reviewed Officer Brady’s complaint and stated clearly and unequivocally that the policy Danny was referring to was for disputes over bonuses, raises and overtime, not disciplinary actions, and he should be thankful he wasn’t fired.

  The rest of his officers had offered to help pick up the slack until Danny came back on duty. Whether the officers were making a quiet show of support or looking for the overtime, he wasn’t sure, but the support made what he was doing tolerable. He hadn’t taken them up on their offers, but he hadn’t started working the graveyard shift yet, either.

  Rudy had called after Amy made her ruling. He’d offered him a half-hearted apology for trying to meddle, and Sean had accepted.

  The only thing that wasn’t going his way was the damned Thacker case. With nothing else to work with, and his plate full covering for Danny, he’d sat the case aside. At least the news of Thacker’s death was off the front page, and Rudy had relaxed considerably.

  He was sitting at his desk, sipping his coffee to snap himself awake, when his phone rang.

  “Sean.”

  “Sean, it’s Maggie. How are you?”

  “Hanging in there. How can I help you, Maggie?”

  “I remember way back at the beginning of this Thacker thing, you kept talking about how you were looking for patterns, or breaks in existing patterns. You remember that?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Would you be interested in a change in an existing pattern?”

  “You have something?”

  “Steve Locoste is here, dumping.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “He was just here three weeks ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Maggie, I must be dense today. I’m not following.”

  “It’s only been three weeks since he dumped his last load. Before he was in every six to eight weeks, sometimes longer.”

  He smiled as the proverbial lightbulb clicked on. “Okay, now I see. Could this be an anomaly?”

  “Could be. When I saw him come through the gate, I sent Alex out to collect a sample. We’re analyzing it now.”

  “Are you looking for something?”

  “No. It’s been a while since we’ve sampled him, and with all the stir surrounding him coming in the last time, I figured we should pull a sample, just in case.”

  Sean thought about his next step.

  “Have you got the results in from your first set of river tests?”

  “I have. You want to come see them?”

  He grinned. “That was just what I was thinking. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Better make it quick. He’s been here for a few minutes already, and it only takes him twenty or thirty minutes to unload.”

  “I guess I’d better hurry then,” he said as he rose, his sleepiness and coffee forgotten.

  -oOo-

  Sean pulled through the open gate and could see Steve’s truck still in the dump pit. He thought about pulling into the admin parking lot, but decided he needed to take the bull by the horns. He proceeded along the road before pulling into the grass and stopping beside Steve’s truck.

  “Councilman,” Sean said as he stepped out of his cruiser.

  “Chief. What brings you out here?”

  “I’m having Maggie run some tests on the river, watching for spikes in… whatever it is she’s looking for. I can’t remember all this stuff. Anyway, it’s part of the Thacker case. The first of the test results are in and she called me. I came down so she could explain what the results mean. I’m learning way more about wastewater treatment than I ever wanted to know.”

  Steve grinned. “Believe me, I know how you feel. I joined the city council right at the end of the approval phase of the plant upgrade. What a mess. I had no idea what I was doing. Gordon Bollinger, the plant manager at the time, was helping us make decisions on what he had to have and what would be nice to have. Even then, he didn’t get some of the stuff he said they had to have because we just couldn’t afford it.”

  Sean watched the viscous liquid run out of the hose and into the hole at the end of the pit.

  “That’s some nasty looking stuff. What is it?”

  “Mostly water. The rest is our various glues and acetone. When we start and stop the manufacturing process there’s some waste, and then there is the cleanup of the lines after the run ends. Until the city gets the sewer line run out to us, I have to store it and bring it here to dump.”

  “And the stuff can go down the drain… so to speak?”

  “Yeah. We don’t use animal based proteins anymore, nobody does, but this is still, essentially, an organic compound. Now we synthesize the polymers and tackifiers instead of getting them from animals, oil, or wherever.”

  “Tackifiers is what makes glue sticky?”

  “More or less, yes.”

  “And that’s why horses were sent to the glue factory?”

  Steve nodded. “A long time ago, yeah. Too expensive to do it that way now.”

  Sean grunted. “Learn something new every day. What kind of glues do you make?”

  “Several different kinds. We make a very nice wood glue. When fully cured, it’s stronger than the wood itself. We sell a lot of that. We also have a line of fabric glues we’ve developed that we’re trying to get into the market to replace tacking. We have big hopes for it, but it’s taking longer to ramp up than we expected. I thought the stuff would sell like crazy, but the industry has been slow to accept it.” Steve gave his head a quick shake as his lips thinned in exaggerated frustration. “Furniture making is a business steeped in tradition. Sometimes it’s slow to adopt new ideas.”

  “I know how that is. You should try being the computer guy in a large police department. How often do you have to come dump?”

  Steve shrugged. “It varies. Depends on production. Every few weeks.”

  “That has to be a hassle. Why hasn’t the city run the lines out to the industrial park? You’re neighbor out there, what’s his name?”

  “Bob Willis?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Willis was giving me an earful about it.”

  Steve chuckled. “You should hear him bend my ear. So why haven’t we done it? Why do you think? Money. It’s still on the drawing board. We’re having to replace failing sewer pipe at the moment. The whole system is between fifty and seventy-five years old and it’s falling apart. This project should have been started years ago, and now we’re behind the eight ball, trying to stay ahead of the major failures. I’d love to extend the lines out there, but for now, that money is better spent keeping what we’ve got in the ground working. When we start working on that end of town, that’s when we’ll extend the lines and hook the park into the system, but that’s at least three years away.”

  Sean nodded. “So, until then, you get to play with your truck.”

  “Yeah!” Steve said with a big grin. “It’s the best part of my day, and it gets me out of the office for a couple of hours.”

  Sean chuckled. “You sound like a kid with a new toy.”

  “Hey, you have to take your wins where you can find them,” Steve said with a smile.

  Sean nodded. “I know how that feels, too.”

  Steve glanced at the trickle of liquid flowing from the large gray hose.

  “I think I’m empty. Anything else you want to know before I start cleaning up?”

  “No. I actually came to see Maggie, but I saw your truck out here so I thought I’d stop by and say hi.”

  “If you want to hang around, you can help me wash the truck off,” Steve said as he used wire cutters to snip a pair of long zip ties.

  There were two ties, one for each of the two handles. Each of the ties wrapped around a handle and then around the chrome plated mechanism on the end of the pipe that secured it to the valve on the truck.

  “No, I need to get back to work. Thanks anyway.” Before he turned away he nodded at the back of the truck. “What are those for?”

  “The zips? DOT regulation. Even thoug
h those handles lock the pipe to the truck, the Department of Transportation, in its infinite wisdom, says you have to secure the locking handles in place. It’s stupid, but it’s the rules. I guess it prevents you from accidently knocking the handles open or something, but that’s all they’ll do. If the pipe is going to blow off, those little zips aren’t going to prevent it, but rules are rules. I don’t want to get fined because I was too lazy, or cheap, to put a quarter-cent zip tie on there.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Don’t try. It doesn’t have to make any sense; you just have to do it. I’m sure someone makes a fancy lock to do the job, but I use zip ties. Other people use duct tape. It’s stupid, but so long as you have something,” he made tick marks in the air with his fingers, “securing the locking handles in place, you meet the requirement of the law.”

  “Our tax dollars at work.”

  “That’s it,” Steve said with a short chuckle. “Good luck with your investigation.”

  “Thanks,” Sean said, and then turned and walked back to his cruiser.

  As he sat down in his car, Steve was pulling the large diameter hose back from the hole. Sean sat and watched for a moment as Steve began to spray the pipe and back of the truck down with water from a garden hose attached to the nearby spigot. With a slight shake of his head, he started his car and drove around the plant and back to the admin building.

  “I saw you out there talking to Steve. Everything okay?” Maggie asked as Sean entered the offices.

  “Yeah. Nothing seemed unusual. I hinted around about him being back so early, but didn’t learn anything. If he’s up to something, I didn’t want to spook him by coming on too strong and then have him try to hide it. How unusual is it that he’s here so early?”

  “He normally dumps every six to eight weeks. Could he be back in only three? Sure, I guess. I know he has a storage tank and if he is drawing that down for some reason, or if his production is up, sure, he could be here again. I called because it’s something that had changed, and that’s what you were going on about at the beginning.”

  He gave her a sideways grin. “Thanks for letting me know. It may turn out to be nothing, but at least it’s something. Right now I’m at a standstill.”