Zodiac

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."

"It's no longer necessary. They made their point."

We sat down in his kitchen and he got me some coffee. "Anna's in town shopping," he said. "Soon as she gets back, we can take off."

"No hurry. I don't have to be back until midnight."

He laughed. "Typical. Most people have appointments at noon. You have them at midnight."

"That's when all the midnight dumping takes place."

"What's up with you these days? What's shaking in Boston?"

"Who the fuck ever knows?" I explained the PCB/PCP story to him, and included my speculations from last night. He seemed to favor the grand conspiracy theory.

"You don't want to fuck around with the Mafia, do you?"

"Not at all. They can do whatever they want. You think it's the Mafia, Jim?"

"Yeah. Something about the whole style of the operation."

"I disagree. Too wimpy."

He meditated on his coffee for a minute. "Well, look. If they get after you-if you get in trouble-get your ass to the Adirondacks."

"I don't ski."

"Doesn't even have to be there. Just any reservation. You go there and ask them for help and I'll make sure you get taken care of."

"Yeah. I guess Sicilians stand out pretty bad on the res."

He let my flip comment sail right out the window. "If they're suspicious, give them my name, have them call me or whatever. But don't hang around and let yourself get greased."

I was surprised by his offer, and honored. It's not as though I'd helped him out all that much. But a reservation would be a great place to disappear.

We talked about the week's operations, which were going to be split between grungy mechanic's work and full-splatter media events. For the time being I was worried about the grungy part, in Buffalo, while Jim was going to be hanging around up at the Falls, looking noble for the cameras. Later, after the cement had hardened, I'd join him up there.

While we were waiting for Anna, we wandered around his property a little. He had a shooting range out back, for both archery and guns, and we farted around there for an hour or so. "This is what you should be packing," he recommended, hauling down a huge rifle with lots of scrollwork on it. "Lever-action. You seem like a lever-action kind of guy. Look at the size of that magazine."

"What magazine?'

"Jesus, S.T., the tube on the bottom is the magazine. Forget it." He put the rifle back. "This is more your speed. We'll set you up with a fucking bow and arrow."

He had a lot of those. He made them in the Nez Perce style, the Lakota style, the Iroquois style, you name it. He figured the only way to keep the knowledge from being lost was by using it. He could go into the woods armed with just a knife and make himself a birchbark canoe from scratch. "Only did it once, though," he had explained, "took me two weeks. Anna had to keep coming out with coolers full of baloney sandwiches. I ended up with viral pneumonia." Which sounded very humble, but he'd finished the canoe, and he still had it in his garage. The bows he made in his workshop, and he had no compunction about shaping them with a belt sander. "The idea," he said, "is to keep the information in my hand, not to live like a caveman."

I couldn't really use his bows, even if I'd wanted too. I could draw them but I couldn't hold them steady long enough to sight in on the target. Also, I was nervous. The bowstrings were made of twisted horsehair. I was convinced that one of them would snap, and its ends whip into my eyeball at supersonic speed. Jim killed a few bales of hay for me, and that was about the time Anna came home.