With Tate Whitehead’s body still out by the reservoir waiting for a forensic examiner to come God knew when, and Randy Finley cuffed to a door by the entrance to the water treatment plant, Garvey Ottman gave me a quick tour of the place at the same time as he offered up a course in Water Filtration 101. I’d been interrupted with a call from David Harwood, but once that was out of the way, Ottman was able to continue.
“Water treatment is really only about eighty years old,” Ottman said, “and it wasn’t until Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974 that it became the law of the land that the water coming out of the tap had to be one hundred percent drinkable.”
He was leading me through parts of the plant I’d never seen before. Huge water-filled basins divided into different compartments the size of a school gymnasium.
“There are six basic stages water goes through before it comes out of your tap,” he said. “There’re pretreatment and screening, which is basically what happens in the reservoir. As the water moves from there into the plant, there’re coagulation and flocculation, then-”
“Flock what?”
“Flocculation. Coagulation and flocculation remove suspended particles in the water that survive the screening process. These particles get stuck together into clumps called floc. In the sedimentation stage, the floc settles to the bottom, where it can be collected and separated from the water and-”
“So all the crud, all the bad stuff in the water, it sinks? Like cigarette butts and stuff like that?”
“More than that. Larger things like butts, they should get caught in the screening process, but there are plenty of things in the water that count as solids that are too small to see. It’s that stuff that we get rid of here. Then, at filtration, which is the next stage, the remaining impurities are removed.”
Ottman threw some other words around. Aeration. Chlorination. Fluoridation.
“Fluoridation?”
“Fluoride,” he said. “For teeth. It gets added in one of the last stages. Then the water gets pumped up into the tower, ready to go. So the pumps don’t have to be going all the time. They run a lot overnight, refilling the tower from town water usage during the day. So, when everyone gets up in the morning, when the demand for water is at a peak, what with everyone having showers and cooking and all that kind of thing, there’s plenty in the tower, and the delivery system is as simple as flowing downhill.”
Now we were moving from chemistry to engineering. Neither had been among my top subjects in school. But I was trying my best to get my head around everything Ottman was telling me.
Even though we were well into the plant, surrounded by tanks and massive pipes, I turned to face the reservoir and said, “So let’s say, even if something really bad got into the reservoir, then there’s a whole slew of steps along the way, before that water comes out of the tap, where the contamination would be caught and neutralized.”
“Like to think so,” Ottman said. “Tate’s not able to defend himself, so I have to say, even if he fucked up somewhere, this system is so well automated, it practically runs itself. Even if he failed to make a few checks in the night, chances are the water would still be fine.”
But it was already looking obvious to me that Tate’s only fuckup was getting himself killed. He didn’t do anything to the water. He was killed so someone else could.
“So, given all these steps, and all the safeguards, if you were going to add something to the water that would make people sick-that would kill them-you’d have a better chance doing it at the tail end of the process.”
Ottman nodded. “Yup. That makes sense.”
“What about putting something into the tower?”
“Seriously?”
I nodded. “Yeah. What?”
“Have you seen that thing? I can’t imagine lugging something up there. And even if you could climb all that way, there’s no way to dump something in that I can think of. No, you’d want to do it down here, let it get pumped up there.”
“So where, then?”
Ottman shrugged. “Is that where you’re going with this? Someone deliberately put something in the water?”
Far from us, an angry, echoing shout: “Let me go!”
Ottman glanced that way. “Randy sounds pretty pissed about-”
“Don’t worry about him,” I said. “So if you wanted to add something into the system, where would you do it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe into the chlorine or fluoride tanks.”
“Take me there.”
We continued on farther through the plant to more tanks and pipes and other things I didn’t understand.
“This here’s the fluoridation area,” Ottman said.
Something I’d noticed the moment I’d walked into this place the first time was how spotless it was. All the floors, every pipe, every pane of glass, were sparkling clean.
But where we were standing now, I noticed something on the floor. I felt it underfoot first, the tiniest bit of grit. I stopped, turned my foot around so I could see the sole.
It looked like salt. I licked my index finger, then touched it to some of the grains on my shoe to get a better look.
“I wouldn’t taste that if I was you,” Ottman said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. I brought my finger up to my eye. “You have any idea what this is?”
“Nope,” he said. He looked down at the floor. “But there’re a few granules of it around in this area. Like someone was carrying around a huge bag of table salt with a pinhole rip in the bottom.”
“My finger feels kind of itchy,” I said.
“Shit,” Ottman said. “You need to wash it off. No telling what it might be.”
He steered me immediately toward a door with a male symbol on it. A men’s room.
“It feels kind of like when you handle fiberglass insulation,” I said. “All irritated.”
Ottman led me quickly to a sink, turned on the tap full blast. “Get it under there. Put on lots of soap. Keep washing it.”
“What the hell is it?” I asked.
“Just keep running water on it,” he said, tension in his voice.
“Do you know what it is?” I was running water on the finger, soaping it up, then sticking it back under the tap. The itchiness was subsiding.
“Not for sure. I mean, I might be completely wrong,” Ottman said.
“What’s your best guess?”
“What were the symptoms?” he asked.
“A burning finger.”
“No, I mean, what were the main symptoms of all those people going to the hospital?”
There were so many, it was hard to remember them all. I said, “Throwing up, dizzy, low blood pressure. Vision problems. I think someone said hypertension. No, not hypertension. Hypotension. A big drop in blood pressure.”
Ottman was shaking his head, almost in wonder. “You’d need so much of it.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to me.
“So much of what?”
“And it would probably take a long time. You put it in too fast, it might explode on you,” he said.
“For Christ’s sake, what the hell are you talking about?” I asked, still holding my finger under the tap. Then it hit me. “And if the water’s bad, what the hell am I doing holding my finger under the tap?”
He looked at me and turned off the tap. I thought I saw fear in his eyes.
“We need to get out of the building,” he said. “We need to get out now.”
“Ottman, tell me what’s going on.”
“You got some way to get Randy out of those cuffs?”
“A sharp knife, heavy-duty scissors,” I said. “They’re just plastic. There’s no key.”
“Let’s go.”
We left the men’s room, Ottman grabbing my arm to keep me from going anywhere near those salty-looking granules.
“It could be in the air,” he said. “There might be more of it around than what we saw on the floor.”
I decided to stop asking him what he was talking about. We’d get out of the building first. He’d already reached into his jacket for a pocketknife. He had the blade out as he walked briskly toward Finley.