Tears came to the woman's soft, gray eyes. She wiped them away, then wrapped both her hands around Garth's. "I can't imagine," she answered in a trembling voice, biting her lower lip. "It's so. . horrible. Tom was always so safety conscious; he was a certified diving instructor. He was always so careful around the boat, and with the materials he handled. I. . it's awfully hard for me to understand."
"Jessica, do you have any idea why Tom would have been diving in the deep channel at night?"
She shook her head, then closed her eyes as more tears welled up and ran down her cheeks.
"Garth," Mary said with quiet alarm, "maybe you shouldn't pursue this right now."
"It's all right, child," Jessica Blaine said to Mary. "I don't mind. I guess I want somebody to ask me questions; nobody else has. It's like the police just take it for granted that Tom was stupid enough to do something like that. It bothers me."
Mary nodded, then rose and put her arm around the woman's shoulders. I moved my chair closer to the rocker. "Mrs. Blaine, the night Tom towed Garth and me back here to Cairn, he'd just come from someplace where he was investigating some kind of infraction; at least we assume that, because his diver's suit was still wet, and he mentioned that he was getting the goods on somebody. Do you have any idea what he might have been investigating, or who he could have been talking about?"
Again, the woman shook her head. "Tom worked long hours, and he was usually working on a number of cases at one time. We didn't see much of each other, and so we made it a practice never to talk about his work when he got home-it would get him too aggravated. I always tried to get him to think about other things and relax when he was home." Garth asked, "There wasn't one particular company he was more mad at than the others?"
"He was mad at all the companies he caught dumping their dirt in the river. If he was particularly angry with one company, he didn't tell me."
Garth turned to me. "I'm working on getting a list of all the companies with plants on the river in the area Tom patrolled. I should have it by Monday or Tuesday, and I'll fax you a copy at the office. It can't hurt to know the names of the outfits Tom monitored."
"It would also help to know which of them are serviced by tankers or barges."
"Just about all of them use tankers or barges in one way or another," Jessica Blaine said. "That's why they're located on the river. They use water transport for shipping goods or bringing in manufacturing supplies, and often both."
I asked, "Mrs. Blaine, is there anyone else Tom might have talked to, anyone he might have confided in about some particularly urgent case he was investigating?"
"I really don't know. He worked for the Cairn Fishermen's Association, of course, so someone there might know. But Tom was given free rein by the association, and he was pretty close-mouthed about current investigations. He liked to wait until he'd gathered his evidence. Then he'd go directly to the Coast Guard. If the Coast Guard didn't act, or if Tom felt they were dragging their heels, then Tom would take the evidence to the association, and they'd decide whether or not to go to court. Aside from that, there isn't much I can tell you. Most nights he'd come home and work in his office for an hour or two, then come up to be with me.
Garth and I exchanged glances, then looked back at the woman. Garth asked, "Tom had an office, Jessica?"
She nodded. "In the basement. That's where he kept his samples and his logs."
"Would you mind if Mongo and I looked around down there?"
Jessica Blaine slowly shook her head. "Not at all."
Tom Blaine's widow led us into the kitchen, opened a door in the rear of a pantry area, then flipped a light switch on the wall. Garth and I descended a short flight of wobbly, oft-repaired, wooden steps into the basement. There was a dangling, naked light bulb at the foot of the stairs, and Garth pulled a string to turn it on. The stairs bisected the damp, stone basement; to our left was an oil-burning furnace, a washer and dryer, and a floor-to-ceiling Peg-Board filled with rusting tools that had obviously been used only on rare occasions. To the right was Tom Blaine's makeshift office. There was a scarred wooden desk with a green gooseneck lamp flanked by two battered metal filing cabinets. Secured to the concrete wall directly in front of the desk was a corkboard covered with Polaroid photographs of tankers heading up and down the river. Two walls were taken up with crude, handmade wood shelving on which sat an array of labeled coffee cans, jars, and bottles containing gooey materials of different colors, and in varying states of desiccation, and which I wasn't inclined to examine too closely. There were three rows of green plastic jugs similar to the ones we had seen on his boat the evening he had towed us back to Cairn.
All of the labels on the cans, bottles, jars, and jugs were clearly marked with a date at the very top; the rest of the information on the labels was not so clear. Below the dates were a series of numbers and letters, presumably a code identifying the container's contents and where the sample had been taken. All of the containers were arranged on the shelves by date, in the order that they had been taken. Unlike the mudlike materials in most of the other containers, the contents of the green plastic jugs sloshed around when shaken. Unlike the labels on the other containers, which appeared to contain a good deal of information-including what might have been chemical formulas-the labels on the jugs carried only a date and a single letter and number code. The last three jugs on the shelf bore the dates of the preceding weekend, which meant they were probably the ones we had seen on the riverkeeper's boat. All bore an identical code: C-26Q431. The other dozen or so jugs on the shelves all bore codes preceded by the letter C, followed by a different arrangement of numbers and letters. Their dates covered the past six months.
"Hey, Mongo," Garth said quietly, "take a look at these."
I went over to where Garth was standing. He had removed three dust-covered, leather-bound ledgers from the file cabinet on the left and was looking through one of them. I picked up another from the desk, examined its cover. There was a label that gave the dates of March 1987 to June 1989; the label on the third ledger was dated even earlier. Each entry in the ledgers listed a date, a site, a suspected violator, the nature of the infraction, action taken, and final resolution-fines, cease-and-desist orders by some court, or whatever. The ledgers I was examining contained a detailed record of actions taken against polluters in Cairn and the surrounding region over a period of almost six years.
There was nothing complicated about the entries, no codes and no key to codes. It seemed the enigmatic system Tom Blaine had used for labeling the containers had only been used for purposes of security and confidentiality until the samples had been tested in some lab and the matter resolved by the Coast Guard or in court. There was no way of telling what the liquids in the green plastic jugs were or where they came from.
"What's the date on that ledger?" I asked.
Garth closed the book, examined the cover. "It ends nine months ago."
"We need the latest one."
"Indeed."
Garth began searching through the remaining drawers of the two filing cabinets while I checked out the desk drawers. There was nothing in the desk but yellowed copies of old legal transcripts, sundry office supplies, and an ancient pack of Juicy Fruit gum. We checked all the shelves and even looked on the floor under the desk and shelving, but found nothing but cobwebs and three dead spiders. If Tom Blaine had been keeping a detailed record of his activities for the past nine months-and there was no doubt in our minds that he had-the ledger recording that activity was not in his office, and it had not been on the boat, at least not when it was found.