That was all I was going to learn out here. I went to a pay phone and called the car rental company. I used my flack voice.
"Yes, this is Mr. Taylor. We've rented a vehicle from your office," and I gave her the description and license plate number, "we've misplaced the rental agreement, and there seems to be some confusion as to which account it's being charged to. I'm working in the accounting department and I need to know. Would you mind reading to me the impression from the charge slip?"
She did. Turns out Kleinhoffer and Dietrich were working for a company named Biotronics.
Now that I knew, it made sense. I should have guessed it. First Poyzen Boyzen, then the Mafia, leaving me threats. And the Mafia thing didn't start until right after I began worrying about it.
Some assholes in fancy shoes had been trying to scare me. And for the most part they had done a damn fine job. But this bit with Scrounger was too fucking much.
The tip was the computer. A Mafia goon would kick in the screen and say, that's it, that sucker's busted. Actually, monitor screens are cheap. The expensive part is the box underneath. Whoever trashed our place had known that much. He'd known about it, and cared. The thing with the freon, too. That was a pretty suburban way to trash a kitchen- letting the freon out of your fridge.
Now that I'd seen the faces of the people who were trying to scare me, I was a lot less scared, and a lot more interested. Maybe they were really making PCP, or maybe they had some other nasty secret. When I got back from Buffalo I'd have to find out, and do these people some damage. In the meantime, I'd have to content myself with charging up tens of thousands of dollars' worth of lingerie on their credit card number.
18
STILL, THE DISAPPEARING PCBS were keeping me awake at night. I'd gone over the whole thing a dozen times in my head, trying to find my error. I wasn't even sure which time I'd screwed up-on that first lone sample or on the whole batch we collected later.
That's the difference between being a toxic detective and some other kind. You're a regular detective and you find a dead person on the floor, you know murder's been committed; your eyes tell you. But if you're a toxic detective, your eyes are a gas chromatograph, not always as reliable. If that mechanical eye tells you there are PCBs in this sample, you have to ask: how was the sample taken? Is the machine okay? Who else has been dicking around with it?
For a second, I had an inspiration. Maybe someone had gotten to our samples overnight, while I was in getting massaged and drunk. They'd been sitting out in the back of the Omni, and high-tech goons could be just clever enough to get in there, dump out the samples, and replace them with fakes.
But there were too many problems with that. First of all, it was just too implausible. Second, I remembered seeing a flash of red in one of my samples-a fragment of a Coke can-which I also saw again later, the next day. And most conclusive, when we plotted the results on the map, the samples showed an even, steady pattern of decreasing PCB levels as we headed toward Spectacle Island. That couldn't be duplicated with fakes.
My next inspiration: maybe the PCB spill was extremely localized. And maybe, just by dumb luck, I had come down into a hot spot on my first trip and gotten a really dirty sample by chance. This was just barely conceivable. Maybe there was some really big, old shark that had been hanging out in the Harbor for decades, eating bottom fish, building up incredibly high levels of bioconcentrated PCBs. Then it had croaked, settled to the bottom and decayed away to nothing, leaving a puddle of PCBs behind.
Stranger things had happened. When you're being rational and scientific, you have to take into account that bizarre events can throw off your results. That's why good scientists take a lot of samples and check their numbers before they go public. I could at least feel good about that.
I snagged a few Z's on the Blowfish and then went out and rented a U-Haul box truck. Debbie went out on the boat to plan the Niagara gig, while Alan and I, along with Frank, the largest member of the Blowfish crew, took the U-Haul outside of town to a big home-and-garden store. We filled the truck to its limit with hundred-pound sacks of dry cement and gravel and we also got ourselves some really vicious epoxy resin glue. Canvas gunny sacks we already had.
We parked the truck near the marina for the time being and then I drove out to a nearby Indian reservation and met a guy named Jim Grandfather, whom I'd worked with before. He was shaped like me, in his forties, lived with his wife and dogs in a doublewide back in the trees, and drove a big old Dodge pickup with an Indianhead hood ornament that he'd lifted out of a junkyard somewhere. He had a couple of years of college and was the tribe's historian, archivist, and preserver of weird knowledge. Whenever environmental issues came up, he was the point man for the tribe. I don't know
if he had an official position in the tribal government, or if he was appointed by consensus, or by himself, but that was definitely his role. When I showed up, he was out on the front yard throwing sticks and frisbees for his dogs. There were two dogs and only one frisbee and consequently I had to sit there and wait while a tug of war was waged across the middle of the road. Finally Jim shouted something in a language I'd never know, and they both dropped it simultaneously. He stalked up to the car with a big grin.
"How's the Granola James Bond?"
"A little more toxic than last time, but good enough. How are you, dude?"
"Check this out." He opened his wallet and took out a folded piece of paper. It was a computer printout. A blood test.
"What, they testing you for drugs or something?"
"No, no, this is for cholesterol." He pointed to one line with one of his stubby fingers. "Low normal." He stepped back and held his hands off to his sides. "So? Does this look like a body with low cholesterol F
"Congratulations, Jim."
"Well, I thank you for it." The last time I'd seen Jim was about a year ago, and I'd hassled him about the amount of greasy food he ate. He belonged to some kind of a pig raising and butchering co-op, so he hit the bacon and sausage very hard. His wife, Anna, started getting on his case too. He had gone in for a checkup and found out that his cholesterol level was pretty high. So this was quite a turnaround.
"You been eating a lot of fish?"
"You see any oceans around here?"
"Tofu"
He snorted. He already knew my opinion of that. "Venison, baby. Lean and tough. Like me. Take some sausage to work every day."
"Why'd you do it?"
"Shut my wife up." Which might give you the wrong impression, because they loved each other.
I parked my car half in the ditch and let his dogs smell me. At least I thought they were dogs.
"How can you tell these things from wolves?" I said.
"These have collars," he explained. "Don't worry, they're checking you for dioxin."
They didn't find any, so we wandered up toward his house.
"Who's this asshole in South Dakota?" he said.
I almost asked how the hell he'd heard about that, but then caught myself. If we had a computer bulletin board, why couldn't they? I'd seen this before, though. Go out to Alaska, California, talk to tribe officials, and it's like they've been poring over my dossier. They kept in touch.
"I don't know him myself. You can probably expect the national office will fall all over itself trying to apologize."