"No, this is not me pouting. This is me asking if I'm free to go."
"I'll have to check with Neely," she said. "He's the lead on this one."
Neely was about forty and had a brush cut that would have made a drill sergeant stand up straight. He made me go through everything from the start again: why I had been there, why I had broken in, why I thought Will's death was linked to other deaths. He took no notes, just stared at me while I spoke. After he'd heard it all, he said to Hollinger, "You buy any of this crap?"
"We'll check it out," she said.
"You know where to find him?"
"Yes."
"All right," he said. "He can go."
"Thanks," I said.
"After we test him for gunshot residue."
CHAPTER 22
At nine o'clock the next morning, I was back at the Earth Sciences Building on Willcocks. News of Will Sterling's murder had hit the students and administrators hard. I approached a group of people who were crying and consoling one another. One red-eyed young woman walked me over to a man in his early twenties with a mass of dark curly hair pulled back in a ponytail and a soul patch that grew two or three inches past his chin. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve when we were introduced. His name was Jason Eckhardt and he had been Will's lab partner in their analytical chemistry course. We walked slowly down a polished hallway to a brightly lit lab with white walls, white countertops and white fluorescent lights buzzing in the ceiling like trapped, angry flies.
He sat next to some kind of spectrometer and told me to pull up a chair. "Before I say anything," he said, "I want to know everything Will told you."
"That won't take long."
"I'm listening."
"I know that there is something wrong at the Harbour-view construction site. Will all but confirmed yesterday that it has something to do with PCBs."
"Not just any PCB," he said. "One of the most toxic of all, something called Aroclor 1242. Extremely dangerous for people and other animals. A known carcinogen-that means it causes cancer-the liver being the most common target organ. It's also a developmental toxicant, meaning it's very bad for unborn children. And it's suspected of causing a host of other illnesses or symptom clusters in shore birds, reptiles, amphibians and most likely humans as well."
"Where does it come from?"
"Most commonly from coolants in electrical transformers and turbines."
I thought of the decommissioned generating station across Unwin Avenue from the Harbourview site, the transmission towers along Commissioners Street and the other heavy industries north of the site, and wondered whether long-buried toxins could have seeped into the earth.
Jason showed me a printout from a gas chromatograph. It looked like the results of a polygraph done on someone who made wild swings between truth and lies. "Our course requires us to collect and compare soil and water samples from different sites, one clean and one dirty, analyze them and report the results. Will did most of the collecting." Jason looked away and swallowed and sucked at the inside of his cheeks. "We were perfect lab partners," he finally said. "I love the machines. The mass spectrometer, the gas chromatograph. Loading up the tubes and watching them cycle around. Interpreting the results and confirming the hypothesis. Will was the outdoorsman. There's nothing he liked better than collecting samples, getting all muddy and buggy. I used to wonder if he actually rolled in the muck like a dog, he'd come back so dirty. He didn't have as much patience for the tech side, which was cool, because that's my thing.
"This first sample," he said, "came from soil we knew to be contaminated with this stuff, on a site that once housed an oil refinery but hasn't yet been cleaned. As you can see, it clearly identifies a high level of Aroclor 1242. Dirty, dirty soil, not the kind you'd ever want to build on, not without extreme remediation."
He laid a second sheet of paper beside it. "This was supposed to be the clean sample, the one we compare the polluted soil against. But look at these peaks and valleys, the way they scan from left to right. It's Aroclor 1242 again."
"Where did this one come from?"
"Down along the lake, near Tommy Thompson Park."
"At the Harbourview building site?"
"Yes."
"The lakefront parcel, where the park is going to be."
"That's why I thought there must have been a mistake, that maybe I had gotten the samples mixed up. I told Will we should collect new samples and run them again. He didn't want to. He wanted to call the developer of the site and get in his face about it-he's a lot more confrontational than me-but I told him our final marks depended on it. So he collected another sample. It took time to run-there's only one chromatograph here and it's constantly in demand-but in the end the same results came up. That's this third sheet here. Same chemical makeup as the first two. Confirmed presence of Aroclor 1242."
"When did you tell him?"
"Yesterday morning at class."
Will had told me before class yesterday morning that he could guess what Maya and her father had been arguing about… that he'd know more about it later in the day.
"Did Will ever mention Maya Cantor to you?"
"The girl who killed herself? Sure. Her father is the one building those condos."
"Did he tell her about the samples?"
"Definitely. He was hoping she could-I don't know, pressure her dad into doing something about it. That's why he was so bummed when he heard she died. I think he felt like she bailed on him just when they were getting somewhere."
Neither of them knew how close they really were, I thought. And that's why both were dead.
CHAPTER 23
"According to the Record of Site Condition that Martin Glenn filed," Jenn said, "the southern end of the site was squeaky clean."
"But according to the samples Will took, it's anything but."
"Which provides somebody with an excellent motive for killing him."
"And Glenn. And Maya."
"You honestly think her father killed her?"
"Why not? I read somewhere that the vast majority of children who meet a violent end are killed by their own parents."
"How could he live with himself?"
"Let's ask him," I said.
"Where would we find him this time of day?"
"His office or the work site."
"And?"
"The site is out of the question," I said. "Full of guys who could throw us out with one hand and eat their lunch with the other. The office has a receptionist or two to get past, but I think we could handle them."
Jenn thought about that then broke into a smile that would charm anyone who didn't know her like I did. The smile of a fox who'd just discovered an unguarded henhouse.
"Want to mess with his head?" she asked. "I'd rather thump it a few times." "Want to mess with it first?" Half an hour later, she dialled Cantor's office and asked, in a voice dripping both milk and honey, if Rob was in. "No? Well, can you get an urgent message to him? Tell him I need to see him right away. At my apartment. My name? Look at your caller ID," she said, and hung up.
We were calling from Maya's apartment. Jenn had played Maya's outgoing message a few times and practised pitching her voice in a similar range. Not as spot-on as her Scary Mary impression, but it got better with each try.
It took Rob all of three minutes to call back.
Jenn picked up the phone and whispered, "Hello?"
I heard his voice blustering over the other end, asking what the hell this, who the hell that.
"Please come, Daddy," she whispered, and hung up.
"You're creepier than you let on," I said.
"Who isn't?" Jenn grinned. Jenn and I stood on Maya Cantor's balcony, watching a long V-shaped formation of geese fly south toward the lake. The wall around the balcony came up to my waist. I was a few inches taller than Maya. It felt safe to me. Probably had to her too, until someone hoisted her over.