“Is that the chief?” Randall Finley, who was several steps away from me, was trying to listen in on the conversation. “Because I have a complaint!”
Finderman said, “Who’s that?”
“Never mind. Did you get what I said?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I just got a call from the state environmental unit. They think they may have a handle on what’s in the water.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Sodium azide.”
“Jesus, yes. How did you know?”
“It’s spilled all over the floor in the plant, around where the fluoride tanks are.” I lowered my voice. “I’ve been downplaying terrorism with all the shit that’s been going on, but if this isn’t a terrorist act, I don’t know what is. But what the hell is sodium azide?”
“It’s bad, bad stuff,” Finderman said. “At least, when it’s added to water, it is. They use it in automobile air bags, among other things. When it’s triggered by an electrical charge, it turns into nitrogen gas and blows up.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not how it’s being used here.”
“It’s got no odor or taste, and if it’s added to water, it causes all the symptoms we’ve been seeing at the hospital. Convulsions, respiratory failure, dropping heart rate.”
“What can they do for it?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Say again?”
“Nothing, Barry. There’s no magic pill, no antidote. You either live or you don’t. Severity of symptoms depends on exposure, or how much is ingested. If what you swallowed didn’t quite kill you, you could end up with permanent lung or brain damage.”
“Whoever put this into the water killed one of the workers here,” I said.
“Who?”
I told her.
“What’s killing one guy when you’re ultimately planning to kill hundreds, or thousands?” Finderman asked.
She had a point.
“What’s the death toll?” I asked her.
“It’s gone up. It was a hundred and twenty-three, but I just heard we’re revising that up to one hundred and thirty-one.” A pause. “I lost my niece. Esme. She was seventeen. My brother and his wife, they’re beyond devastated.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I want who did this,” Rhonda said. “Whoever he is, or whoever they are, I want them.”
“There’s more,” I said.
“More what?”
I told her about Lorraine Plummer, the murdered student at Thackeray College. “I had to leave the scene,” I said regretfully. “I couldn’t get Wanda or anyone else to get there. We need a crime scene unit there.”
“We’ve had to bring in coroners from other jurisdictions,” the chief said. “It’s like we’ve had a flood, a hurricane, and locusts all at once. A few years’ worth of bodies in a single morning.”
“The Thackeray thing, even in light of what else has happened today, is big, Chief.”
“Go on.”
“Our guy is back.”
“What guy? What-no, come on.”
“Wanda will have to do a full autopsy, but I had a good look at the body. The wounds are the same as on Olivia Fisher and Rosemary Gaynor.”
“Goddamn it, Barry. When are you going to let this go?”
“I’d be more than happy to take you to look at the body and let you judge for yourself.”
There was quiet at the other end. The Fisher and Gaynor murders were evidently still a source of friction between us, but I’d already admitted to myself there was plenty of blame to go around.
“Duncomb’s dead, and Gaynor’s in jail,” the chief said. “Your two lead suspects.”
“Yeah.”
“Shit,” Finderman said. “If you think it’s the same killer… I trust your judgment.”
“There’s nothing I can do here right now,” I told her. “I can’t even have anyone get near Tate Whitehead’s body. The whole area has to be closed off until it’s been given an all clear. I’m going to spend the next few hours working the college homicide.”
“Just keep in touch,” Rhonda Finderman said.
Finley, who’d been watching me this whole time, said, “I want to talk to her! I want to talk to her right now!”
I put away my phone.
Finley waved a finger at me. “You’re going to be sorry when I’m mayor.”
“We don’t agree on much, but I think you’re right about that.”
“I don’t forget.”
I closed the distance between us, put my face in his. “I don’t forget, either, Randy. I never forget. The other day, when you called me to check out all those dead squirrels, and you hinted around, wondering whether I had anything on anybody, I thought, no, I don’t play that game. I don’t have anything on anybody. Except maybe that’s not true. Maybe I have something on you.”
He took a step back. “Me? What the hell have you got on me?”
“I was on the phone a few minutes ago and learned something kind of interesting. Something interesting about you, Randy.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I heard you did your good deed before coming back up here. You set up by the falls and handed out hundreds of cases of bottled water.”
“Yeah,” he said, puffing himself up. “I did. You should have come by. I’d’ve given you one even if you are a horse’s ass.”
“It’s kind of amazing how you were ready to go so fast.”
Randy shrugged. “You do what you have to do when people are in trouble.”
“How’d you know?”
“How’d I know what?”
“How’d you know you were going to need so much bottled water?”
He was shaking his head. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“You cranked up production this week. Before any of this happened.”
“Where the hell did you hear that?”
I’d heard it from David Harwood. A comment just in passing. But it had been bothering me for a while now.
“Did I hear wrong?” I asked.
Finley’s mouth opened like he was going to say something, but he hadn’t figured out yet what it was going to be.
“Yeah, that’s wrong,” he said.
“So it’d be okay if I started asking around, checked that out. Because if it’s true, it raises a question. Why would Randall Finley, just as he’s on the comeback trail, start bottling more of his famous springwater on the eve of a catastrophic poisoning of the town’s water supply?”
“You fat fuck,” he said.
“You want to make life difficult for me?” I asked him. “Go ahead. Meanwhile, I’m going to go whisper in the ear of one of those CNN or New York Times reporters swarming all over town. Then I wouldn’t even have to start nosing around. I’d just let them do it for me. See how long it takes before someone puts a camera in your face and asks if you’d actually be willing to let hundreds of people die to advance your half-assed political career.”
“You son of a bitch,” he said.
“I didn’t mind ‘fat fuck.’ I gotta admit, that’s pretty accurate. But now you’re casting aspersions on my mother.”
“You saying I did this?” he asked, pointing a thumb back at the plant.
“Did you?”
I should have been ready. I should have seen it coming. But I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m the first to admit I could be in better shape. So when Randy charged at me, I didn’t move as quickly as I could. I didn’t take a defensive stance, like shifting my weight forward so he’d have a harder time taking me down.
But take me down he did.
He rammed his body into me, put his arms around me, and tackled me to the ground.
“You fucker!” he said.
We turned slightly as we fell, which was just as well, because it meant I hit the pavement on my side, my left shoulder taking a lot of the impact. If I’d fallen straight back, I’d have probably cracked my head open. And I’d already hit it on a curb a few days earlier when that Thackeray College professor had gotten the better of me.