Finnegan's Week (10 page)

“A dozen? Hopeless,” the special agent said. “We're still snowed under around here. The Tailhook business is taking forever. Tailhook's turning into the thing-that-wouldn't-die.
Halloween
, part ten!”

“I don't mind working on this one,” Bobbie said eagerly. “It's pretty dead around here right now.”

“You got it, honey,” the special agent said. “Let us know if you come up with a suspect.”

After Bobbie hung up she had other things to think about besides navy shoes. Tomorrow night was quarterly qualification with her .45 automatic. They'd be using the North Island pistol range for the night shoot instead of the Border Patrol range. Bobbie liked it when she got to shoot the practical weapons course. She enjoyed the challenge of speed-loading, running, dropping to her knee to shoot multiple targets. But night shooting also had its charms. The smell of cordite and the muzzle flash were thrilling. And it was a relief to discover that the navy's trusty 1911 model .45 didn't kick all that much, not like a .357 magnum.

An instructor had said to her: “It's a great old handgun. When you got a big punkin ball going at your target from that huge black hole, you know that if you hit what you're aiming at
nothing's
gonna be coming back at you. Very reassuring, this old gun.”

It was a big pistol for such a small woman, but Bobbie Ann Doggett had surprised everyone including herself by being a very competent shooter.

By the time that the thief, Pepe Palmera, awoke before dawn, his toes were black and swollen, but not quite as painful as before. Still, he was too sore to wear his new shoes, so using a broom as a cane he hobbled barefoot down the pothole-studded street to the stolen van.

When he got to the truck he stumbled into a pool of liquid. He used his flashlight and saw that a drum had been pried open and tipped over, spilling onto the road. The oily liquid had a horrible odor, but wasn't scorching his feet, so he knew it wasn't acid. It smelled something like the D.D.T. they used when he was a boy.

Pepe wiped off some of the stinking stuff in the weeds by the road. He'd felt some discomfort when that slime slithered between his toes and bathed the deep fungal cracks in his skin—that dermal absorbent slime.

After going home and drinking coffee, he found his broken toes felt better, so Pepe eased into the steel-toe shoes, not bothering to wash his feet. If
only
he'd been wearing those shoes when the drum had toppled over! Then Pepe drove the van to a pottery maker named Rubén Ochoa who sold his goods to customers in San Diego and Los Angeles. Rubén was always in need of a truck.

The pottery maker was happy to see the thief that morning. It seemed that he had a consignment of pottery that had to get to San Diego, and the truck he'd planned to use had transmission problems. Pepe had a
pasaporte
, a laminated border-crossing card good for seventy-two-hour visits to the U.S. but not good more than twenty-five miles from the border. Since the delivery was to San Diego, Pepe could do the job for him, and when Pepe returned to Tijuana, Rubén would pay him top price for the delivery,
and
take the stolen truck off his hands for a good price.

Striking a deal was a sure thing, so while the two men haggled over details, one of Rubén Ochoa's workers carried the pottery consignment to the van while another spray-painted the doors to obliterate
GREEN EARTH HAULING AND DISPOSAL.

Still another worker drove to a nearby junkyard to buy an ignition with a key that worked, to replace the damaged one. While en route, he stole a pair of Mexican license plates from a truck parked on the street.

The U.S. Customs officers might check license plates, but they'd seldom do a check on vehicle identification numbers, and if they did, Pepe was prepared to say that he couldn't find his vehicle registration card. And he could even produce bogus documentation claiming that he was the owner/hauler of the pottery.

By the time that Pepe was ready to leave for the Otay Mesa border gate, he wasn't feeling well. The little thief was perspiring, and had a terrible headache. Also, he had to keep swallowing saliva that kept forming in his mouth. He ran to the toilet and vomited, feeling a little better afterward.

Influenza was going around
Colonia Libertad
, and the other
colonias
as well. He'd been stricken by it a week ago and, until now, thought he was getting better. Pepe hoped that the wait at U.S. Customs would not be a long one. He wanted to deliver the pottery, get back to Tijuana, buy some marijuana, and go to bed until the fever passed.

Luis Zúniga, though younger, had always been stronger than his friend Jaime Cisneros. Jaime had asthma and had been sickly all his life, but even Luis got nauseated after they'd tipped over the drum full of oily liquid. The liquid was slimy and smelled terrible. Both children knew it was not motor oil, new or reclaimed. Luis got splashed with the stuff, but Jaime got absolutely drenched. It splashed onto their faces, hands and clothing, and they ran to Luis's house to rinse it off as best they could in a tub of water outside.

Luis got very sick to his stomach when he went to bed that night, and he developed the worst headache of his life. His mother gave him aspirin but it didn't help. Jaime got what his mother thought was his worst asthma attack
ever
. In the middle of the night she gave him some medicine but he couldn't hold it down. He tried his inhaler but it didn't seem to have any effect.

The mother of Jaime Cisneros became extremely frightened when her son began to salivate. He started drooling like a hungry dog. He also got very short of breath, but the most frightening thing of all was that his pupils seemed to bounce!

Jaime's mother got a flashlight and looked into her son's eyes. One pupil looked small, one looked large. Then they seemed to trade sizes! Within fifteen minutes he was convulsing. By the time the uncle of Jaime Cisneros drove the boy to the Hospital Civil, Jaime was not conscious.

Later that morning Luis Zúniga was admitted to the same hospital with symptoms similar to Jaime's. He had lost control of bowels and bladder during the night. He had tried to get up to get a drink of water, but his vision was so blurred that he tripped over a kitchen chair and fell. His father found him on the floor and drove him to the hospital.

After examining Luis Zúniga a doctor asked the boy's mother what her son had had to eat the night before. His symptoms were similar to a person who had been poisoned, the doctor said. He asked if the rest of the family was all right.

She told the doctor that her family was well, but then she remembered that Luis had been playing with his friend Jaime Cisneros all evening, and they had come home very late. She suspected that the boys had bought tamales from a street vendor. She'd always warned Luis about street vendors. They used cat and dog meat in their tamales, she'd always told her son.

C
HAPTER
8

N
o sex appeal is what they always said about cases involving hazardous waste. By that they meant no
jury
appeal.

“How do you take a bubbling vat of hazardous waste before a jury?” a deputy district attorney had once rhetorically asked D.A.'s Investigator Nell Salter when she'd wanted a criminal complaint against a waste hauler.

“Well, what if we drape a little silk and lace on the acid drum and hang a dildo on the flange?” Nell had suggested, before calling it a day and giving up on a case that had cost her at least one hundred investigative hours.

That was everybody's attitude when it came to environmental crime. Nobody cared about it because nobody knew much about it, least of all the cops. The field was too new, too esoteric, too unsexy, and there was almost no case law. Clint Eastwood would never ask the owner of a dioxin-producing paper company to “make his day.”

When Nell had been assigned to the unit back in 1985, she and another investigator, Hugh Carter, had simply shaken hands and said, “Now what?”

The District Attorney's Fraud Unit had been given the job of investigating environmental crimes. There were about fifty of them in the unit: attorneys, accountants, investigators and assistants, all sharing a floor in a downtown bank building because the county building was not large enough. The Fraud Unit could be housed in a privately owned high rise because their clientele wouldn't frighten the other tenants of the building as ordinary street criminals might do.

Their quarters were cramped, and Nell's view was of the downtown homeless. She had a cubicle containing a small desk, two chairs, a computer, a bookshelf and a file cabinet. Investigators were not entitled to a full wall so she had to settle for a three-quarter divider, but she also had an unobstructed view of the common bathroom in a nearby residential hotel. Nell learned that both men and women had some
weird
bathroom rituals.

There'd been no training and very little information available on the subject of environmental crime back when Nell was assigned. In the early years most cases dealing with the illegal disposal of toxic waste merely involved lawsuits by the county. Then dumping became a misdemeanor, and sometimes a “wobbler” felony that could be prosecuted as a misdemeanor, depending upon the circumstances.

But at last the laws had been given teeth, fangs in fact. For a hazardous waste hauler who “should have known” of intentional dumping there were new felony provisions for a determinate sentence of sixteen months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months in prison, and a fine of up to $100,000 per
day
per offense, with a mandatory minimum of $5,000 per day. If someone suffered great bodily injury as a result of the dumping, the perpetrator could get thirty-six months added to his sentence, along with a fine of $250,000 for every day that the material was actively exposed. The county's share from
that
kind of money made the bureaucrats and politicians pay attention to environmental crime.

When Nell Salter and Hugh Carter started out they referred to all hazardous waste as “methyl-ethyl bad-shit,” until gradually they began to learn a thing or two. Once, an EPA Super Fund team of chemists and waste handlers had made an error cleaning up a dump site that involved a large quantity of nitric acid. A lot of workers ended up with a snootful of acid and cyanide fumes, the very thing used to
execute
people within the walls of San Quentin Prison. That made Nell and Hugh more anxious to read all they could about any methyl-ethyl bad-shit they might encounter, so as not to get up-close-and-personal to suspicious containers with strange contents.

“Beware of BFRC!” is how they put it: Big Fucking Red Cloud.

Many of their investigations consisted of tracking down knowing disposers. Plating companies were among the worst offenders, and their acids were dumped everywhere, much of it in southeast San Diego. Nell knew of one particularly egregious case where fifty 55-gallon drums were transported to Mexico by a waste disposal company that had bribes in to a Mexican customs official. The de-headed drums were dumped into the Tijuana River and the empty ones were sold to squatters who used them to haul drinking water. And there were other horror stories involving Mexico as a dump site; one involved the casting of re-bars used in cheap Mexican concrete housing with metal that had been made
radioactive
in the United States.

Presidential candidate Bill Clinton had recently
sort of
approved of the North American Free Trade Agreement, his approval being subject to more environmental safeguards from the Mexican side, but Mexicans said that their citizens had suffered from U.S. toxic waste in ways that no one would ever know about. In that poor Mexicans had a high mortality rate from diseases long since eradicated in the U.S., who could say if hazardous waste contributed to it?

That was the way of things in a Third World country, or so the Mexicans said. And nobody south of the border thought that the Americans would sign the NAFTA agreement unless it greatly favored the U.S. It had always been thus, ever since the gringos stole their land in the Mexican War, or so the Mexicans said.

Of course Nell's job stopped at the international border, but she often thought about the people down there. She frequently took holidays on the Baja peninsula, and had been to Mexico City twice, as well as to Acapulco. She was interested in the Mexican culture, liked the people, and hoped to be able to afford a decent specimen of pre-Columbian sculpture someday, like those she'd admired in the shops of Mexico City.

If Finbar Finnegan thought it was tough staring down the muzzle at the forty-five-year benchmark, Nell Salter could have told him that it wasn't a lark turning forty-three, which she had accomplished in July. Unlike Fin, she hadn't managed to chalk up three divorces during her twenty years in law enforcement; one was enough, when she was twenty-two, then working as a civilian crime-scene photographer for the San Diego P.D.

The job of crime-scene photographer hadn't been exactly what she'd envisioned. During young Nell's second day on the job she'd found herself literally cheek by jowl with a dead drug dealer who'd had his throat cut, and was discovered inside the trunk of his own Mercedes two weeks after his murder. Nell's civilian husband had made her strip naked before she was allowed into the house after that one. Her clothes smelled, her hair smelled, her
fingernails
smelled. For months she could whiff that dead drug dealer. It might happen when she'd walk into an unfamiliar room, or when she'd open the trunk of her own car. Once it happened when she was cooking dinner. Keeping a small can of aerosol in her purse helped her to get her imagination under control.

“This isn't what I expected from corpse photography,” she'd explained to her boss.

He said, “Did you expect they'd resemble mannequins that you could dress up like dolls?”

Nell's fourteen-month marriage to her high school sweetheart deteriorated quickly after that. His boozing, aggravated by a job layoff, made things worse. One night after a drunken row, he'd punched her in the face, breaking her nose and blackening both eyes.