Surest Poison, The (2 page)

After finishing breakfast, he realized a
couple of days away from his exercise routine had left him sluggish. He
settled on an abbreviated version of his morning run. He didn’t want to have
to shower again.

Approaching
the
office a little later, he saw
cars and pickups clustered around the mall’s entrances like mice at a cheese
shop, parked by mall walkers, mostly seniors, who swarmed the corridors
before time for the stores to open. Considering his own exercise routine,
Sid wondered if the lawyer might stop off at a place like this before
appearing at his office. No matter, he called Bailey, Riddle and Smith at
7:30 and found the senior partner at his desk.

“Glad you called,” Bailey said. “I’ve
been on spikes and nails all night.”

Sid translated that as needles and pins.
Evidently Bailey liked to be creative with his clichés.

“You mentioned a pollution case,” Sid
said. “Before we go any further, you need to be aware of where I stand. I
spent eighteen years in law enforcement as a National Park Service ranger. I
do not like people who mess with the environment.”

“Excellent. Miss LeMieux assured me you
were the man for the job.”

“You don’t understand. What I meant was,
if your client is responsible—”

“No, no . . . you’ve got it all wrong. My
client is being saddled with a pollution mess another company created before
he bought the property. It involves trichloroethylene that’s polluted water
in Cheatham County.”

“I’ve encountered TCE before.”

“It’s bad stuff.”

“Can be lethal.”

“I’d like to talk to you in person before
we get started, Sid. Okay if I call you Sid?”

“That’s what my mother called me.”

Bailey gave a slight chuckle. “I have a
client due here in a few minutes, and I’ll be in court until noon. Could you
meet me here for lunch? I’ll have my secretary order us some food.”

With that settled, Sid called Jaz and
related the conversation.

“Are you going to take the job?” she
asked.

“Why not?
The subject is one I’m somewhat passionate about.”

“I thought it would be. Oh, I had a call
from Bart Masterson. He wants to know if you’d like to host the poker club
at your office Friday
night?
”

The poker club was a group of six people
with present or past ties to law enforcement who got together occasionally
for a friendly game of cards. Jaz had invited Sid to join them at their last
session. She said it would give him an opportunity to make some good
contacts in the field.

“Sure,” he said. “Is everybody coming?”

“Bart’s checking. He said he’d demand to
be off. They called him out in the wee hours this morning, right after a
messy rainstorm. It was a homicide in Shelby Park.”

“What happened?”

“To quote Bart, it was a case of
overkill. The man was shot five times with a thirty-eight.”

“He
find
any
clues?”

“Nothing.
And what’s weird is the guy worked on a Metro garbage truck. Who would do
that kind of killing in that kind of place with a guy like that?”

2

Sid switched
on
his computer. While waiting for
it to boot, he swiveled his chair, resting his gaze on the windowless beige
wall beside him. It was covered with photographic memorabilia of multiple
careers from Special Forces in Vietnam to policing various National Parks to
providing law and order in the small town of Lewisville. Located a little
over fifty miles to the southwest of Nashville, it was named after explorer
Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame. Lewis died nearby on the Natchez
Trace in 1809. Some said he was murdered there.

When the Internet browser flashed on the
screen, Sid checked his email. Jaz had engineered a website with the help of
the Welcome Traveler Stores’ webmaster. It gave people a place to request
on-line help. At the moment everything worked like a well-greased axle. He
found two missing person search requests prepaid by credit card. That was
easy cash.

Using Internet data bases and a few phone
calls, he spent the next couple of hours tracking down people who had
disappeared from friends’ and families’ radar scopes several years back. It
helped that he’d had experience with missing person cases while the top cop
in Lewisville. He emailed results of his investigations,
then
returned to the computer with a stack of notes to re-create the
files that had been lost earlier in the week. He stayed with it until time
to drive downtown to keep his luncheon appointment.

Sid pulled into the garage beneath the
building that housed the offices of Bailey, Riddle and Smith around noon. As
expected, the first parking floor was already packed like dominoes in a box.
Near the entrance, some character in a green VW Beetle had backed into a
parking space for the disabled, making it impossible to tell if he had a
special license plate. Since Sid was no longer a sworn officer of the law,
it was none of his business. But as he passed, he glared at the driver, who
still sat in the car. An NRA sticker graced the bumper, but no disabled
parking permit dangled from the rearview mirror. Sid shook his head. Some
people . . . .

He finally located a parking spot two
levels down, crossed to the
elevators,
and sped
up to the twentieth floor.

“Mr. Bailey just called from the
courthouse,” his secretary said as she ushered Sid into the walnut-paneled
conference room. A grandmotherly woman with neatly-coiffed white hair and an
Aunt Bea smile, she pointed to an assortment of sandwich meats, cheeses,
bread, lettuce, raw veggies and dips, potato chips, cookies and slices of
cake that filled trays at one end of a long shiny table. “He said you could
go ahead and start eating. What can I get you to drink?”

“A cup of coffee would do fine.”

Sid looked out a broad window at the
dwarf-like lunchtime figures scurrying along the sidewalk below. After
several years as a small town police chief, followed by three years of
isolation at his cabin in the woods, he found it difficult to adjust to
Nashville’s booming growth, both downtown and in the suburban counties. New
skyscrapers had changed the skyline, and the planned 70-story Signature
Tower would usher in a whole new wave of changes. Developments like Nissan
North America’s new international headquarters in Brentwood reshaped the
suburbs. It was hardly the quaint Southern town he remembered from his
youth.

Arnie Bailey arrived a few minutes later.
The polar opposite of Sid, who had a solid frame, broad shoulders, and a
modest waist, Bailey launched his short, chubby body through the door like a
well-dressed groundhog storming out of hibernation. He pulled off his navy
blazer and draped it around the back of a chair.

“Been waiting long?” he asked.

Sid held out his cup.
“Long enough to get started on your version of Starbucks.”

The lawyer headed for the food display.
“Grab a plate and fill it with some of this grub. I have to be back in court
by one-fifteen. We need to get busy.”

Sid chose turkey and Swiss on wheat and
assorted veggies. He grimaced at the pile of food that filled Bailey’s
plate.
Though ten years older than his host, Sid flexed
muscles where Bailey collected fat.
Most guys had passed their prime
by the time they reached their fifties, but most guys didn’t take care of
their bodies like Sid did. He followed a daily running routine.
Workouts in the gym.
He would never forget the
gunshot wounds that halted his Park Service career, injuries received in a
multi-agency drug case fourteen years earlier. He didn’t intend to get
caught short in a situation where physical conditioning could make the
difference between life
or
death.

“How about giving me the particulars?”
Sid said when they were seated at the table. “It took place in Cheatham
County?”

“Right.
My client is Wade Harrington. He’s around forty, a veteran of the Gulf War.
He runs a small company just outside Ashland City that makes specialty
shipping boxes. They’re designed for specific products.”

“Like cartons for computers and such?”

“Exactly.
He started the company—it’s called HarrCo Shipping—about ten years ago, with
money he’d been saving. He found an abandoned plant nobody seemed to want
and bought it at a good price. An uncle loaned him the rest of the cash he
needed to get it going. He’s paid that back.”

Bailey said HarrCo only occupied part of
the plant at first, but as the business caught on, the operation expanded
until most of the building was now in use. Everything looked great until
people who lived in the area began to complain of headaches, nausea, and
dizziness. Others reported bouts of clumsiness that made them appear drunk.
Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation inspectors found
trichloroethylene, or TCE, in the well water. It had also seeped into
streams that fed into the local water supply.

They tracked the TCE back to an area at
the rear of the HarrCo Shipping plant. When the ground was tested there,
they discovered it was soaked with the hazardous chemical. With no way to
determine just when the spill occurred, the state came after Wade Harrington
to pay the hefty clean-up bill, which could run into the hundreds of
thousands. It would bankrupt a thriving small business with lots of promise
for the future.

“Trouble is, Wade’s plant never used TCE
or anything like it,” Bailey said.

“You’re sure about that?”

“Dead sure.
There’s no need for that stuff in the shipping business. Besides . .
. ”
He rummaged through a folder in his
briefcase, emerged with a paper scrawled with barely decipherable letters
and numbers. “Here’s a list of every chemical they use.
Right down to the carpet cleaners.”

“So it was the previous occupant?”

“Had to have been.
They went out of business a couple of years before Wade bought the plant. He
heard it had something to do with the automobile business. They must’ve used
TCE some way in the process. How that much wound up on the ground is
anybody’s guess.”

“The people Harrington bought the place
from should be able to tell him what he needs to know.”

“The guy who handled the sale said he
didn’t know anything about the company that previously used the plant.
Somebody else was involved with that deal. It wasn’t local.”

Sid reached for the coffee pot and
refilled his cup. No doubt Harrington faced a real problem. Somebody created
a bad situation behind his plant, one that did serious damage to the
environment. It was a bit different from the concerns he had encountered in
the Park Service. A few national parks suffered from water pollution, but
the greatest problems they faced stemmed from air pollution, primarily acid
rain.

“Harrington hasn’t learned anything about
the previous owner?” Sid asked.

“Wade is completely in the dark. He
hasn’t turned up anything about the company other than a vague hint. He
can’t find who owned it or managed it, or what happened to them. It seems
nobody around there knows what went on. He’s really between a boulder and a
brick wall.”

More cliché
adaptation.
“What was the
company’s name?”

“Don’t have that either. Sounds like a
phantom operation.”

Sid’s look flashed a caution sign. “You
realize phantoms can be hard to chase down. That can get kind of expensive.”

“Do whatever you have to. Just find the
culprit. It’ll be a lot cheaper than whatever he’d have to pay the state.”
Bailey reached into his file, pulled out a large photograph. “Here’s
something they gave Wade. It’s just a sample of what some irresponsible
asshole caused.”

Sid stared at the face of a small girl
with curly blonde hair. Her mouth twisted up on one side. Her right ear
appeared only as a gnarled stub. Large hazel eyes gazed out as part of a
grotesque smile.

Sid looked at the lawyer, then back at
the disturbing image. The little girl could smile
now,
unaware of what was to come. A cousin of his had been born with similar
malformations years ago, after her mother took thalidomide during pregnancy.
Attempts to correct the defects proved unsuccessful. Unable to take the
stares and ridicule, the girl had committed suicide as a teenager.

“If that little girl was mine,” he said,
“I’d be looking for somebody’s scalp.” He handed the photo back to Bailey.

“That’s how I feel, too.”

“Have you told Harrington about me?” Sid
asked.

“I talked to him this morning right after
you called. I told him I was meeting with you here for lunch. You’ll want to
get with him, of course, but he was headed out of town. He’ll be back
tomorrow.”