Chapter 11
“What did they say?” Carol asked when Maggie reentered the lab.
“They said to get it the hell away from them.”
“That’s toxicologists for you. They can’t think outside the petri dish.” She stood at their tabletop copy machine, making copies of her recent DNA reports before sending them on to the officer, the detective, and the records department. Even though it had been entered in the department-wide computerized reporting system, Carol liked to make sure no one could claim they hadn’t been informed.
“It’s not their fault. Their job is to test for marijuana and Xanax, not mysterious powders enclosed in threatening letters. Apparently that’s the purview of the Ohio Department of Health. Their closest office is in Parma, but they don’t have the facilities to test it there and would send it on to the main one in Columbus.”
“Road trip?”
“I think so, if Denny approves. We’ve got to know what this stuff is. Was someone trying to kill him, terrorize him, or send him a sample of some environmental contaminants?”
“Maybe he sent it to himself to get the day off?”
“I doubt that.”
“What was the guy like?”
“Kind of cute.” Maggie closed the letter with the white powder in a fume hood and pulled off her gloves before catching Carol’s curious expression and remembering that she was supposed to be in love, or at least lust, with Jack. “Um . . . if you like . . . he had that sort of soulful look . . .” Damn, this was hard. “Apparently he and the victim had been butting heads over this public contract, and the note mentions that. Of course she’s a politician, which means she always has a target painted on her back and her murder may have nothing to do with the EPA and drinking water. But we can’t even guess until we know what this stupid powder is. So yeah, I think a four-hour round trip would be worth it if Columbus can give us a clue.”
“Not to mention that if it is anthrax, I’m with the drug guys. Get it the hell out of here.”
“There’s that, too.”
* * *
Jack and Riley stood in the middle of an empty parking lot, with Tower City on one side of them and the Cuyahoga River on the other. A wind that shaded from fall into winter blew in from the lake, brushing an icy touch of moisture on the backs of their necks. The lot was basically used for overflow from the parking garage tucked under huge Tower City, on the other side of Canal Street, and the leftover space received only secondhand maintenance. One end of it petered out into patchy weeds growing around a pile of debris, the shells of two brick walls, and a brand-new construction trailer with a backhoe parked next to it.
Cars zoomed along Canal and Huron and over the interstate bridge. Rush hour had begun to form, and workers from the Sherwin-Williams building next door straggled out to their cars in fits and starts, sparing no more than a glance for the three men standing at the edge of the unused lot. Farther up the river sprawled an electrical substation. When the wind died down, Jack heard faint guitar riffs from the Hard Rock Cafe. A tanker made its slow way past the Cuyahoga’s hairpin bends and around the sparkling white building right off the east bank, the new temporary water crib. It looked like an uninteresting two-story office building with painted concrete block walls and a few windows, connected to land by a narrow catwalk. But the catwalk had two sets of locked gates topped with barbed wire, and more bunched around the base of the structure where the water lapped at its foundation.
“So this is a brownfield,” Riley was saying, allowing a teensy bit of skepticism to creep into the words.
David Carlyle said, “The term refers to a property that’s contaminated enough to be a danger during future development, contaminated enough to ruin the value for future buyers. Developing the land may take longer because of cleanup efforts, and lenders won’t loan to a business that’s located on property that might have a liability issue down the road.”
Jack said, “So you’re trying to help out the real estate market?”
“It doesn’t improve our environmental infrastructure to have abandoned properties around—and more to the point, leaving contaminated land vacant only exposes that to the community at-large. So if we can direct and help and maybe come up with a grant to clean it up, everyone benefits.”
“Okay. So the point is—”
“That this parking lot used to be the Cleveland Asphalt Company. After decades of functioning on this site and then a dismantling, the ground is saturated with petroleum product—hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds like benzene, toluene, xylene. Heavy metals like arsenic. Also polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—”
“We’re going to need the SparkNotes,” Riley told him. “If you don’t mind.”
“Oh, sure. No problem.” The young man ran a hand through his hair, which only made it messier instead of neater. “Is, um, that lady—Maggie—is she coming?”
Jack said, “Back at the lab. Does this trailer have something to do with your problem with Green?”
“Yes. He and his Economic Development office have gotten behind a wunderkind who blew into town to build a facility for entrepreneurs.”
“A what now?” Riley asked, pulling the sides of his blazer closer together. “That wind is getting strong.”
“A guy named Connor Scofield is providing the backing. He calls it StartUp Central. It will have more than 50,000 square feet of varying office sizes to provide small start-up companies with space, phones, copy machines, Internet access, everything they need to get a new business off the ground. I think he also plans to have a restaurant or a food court and maybe some retail . . . anyway, that’s not really important.”
“Then why are we here, exactly?” Jack asked as nicely as he could, which probably wasn’t very, because Carlyle sort of gulped and rushed on.
“The EPA doesn’t care what goes inside the building, it’s the process of building itself that’s the problem. It will disturb all this ground that’s been saturated with hydrocarbons and what all, break it up, let it loose, and every time it rains those components will run off right into the river.” He waved his hands around, illustrating this movement of contaminants.
Jack made the connection. “Where it’s going to be picked up by the temporary water intake that Diane Cragin was arranging.”
Carlyle paused, blinking in deep thought because, apparently, this coincidence had not occurred to him. “I suppose so. Either situation is bad by itself. But together, yes, they form a perfect storm.”
“These hydrocarbons—” Jack tried to formulate an intelligent-sounding question—unnecessarily, because Carlyle went on to answer even without a prompt.
“The volatile organic compounds, in high concentrations, damage the central nervous system and give people headaches, nausea, and fatigue. They will depress the immune system and decrease the white blood count. Benzene has been associated with anemia and is a carcinogen, causing leukemia especially. The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons increase the risk of lung, skin, and bladder cancer, liver and kidney tumors, and is terrible for pregnant women, lowering the birth weight and increasing fetal abnormalities.”
“So bad stuff,” Riley summarized. “But isn’t the rain washing through this ground already?”
“Not much, because of the parking lot itself. The layer of concrete binds up a lot of the bad soil, keeps humans and animals from exposure and keeps it from moving into the groundwater. We call this ‘capping in place.’ If Mr. Green moves in with his jackhammers, the cap is removed.”
“So the EPA is opposing the construction.”
“That’s been my recommendation. And my supervisor’s recommendation.” His gaze focused on a spot somewhere behind the cops, and his pale skin turned an even more milky color, emphasizing a slight scar over one eyebrow.
Jack turned. Joe Green exited a car parked next to Jack’s. A young man also emerged, as well as two guys who were both older and much larger. Two other cars pulled alongside, and then a van from Channel 15.
Behind them, two large trucks emblazoned WILEY CONSTRUCTION pulled in.
Green had arrived for his meeting. With reinforcements.
“What are you guys doing here?” he asked the detectives as they approached, raising his voice over the cars in the distance and the rise and fall of the wind. He didn’t sound unfriendly, only curious.
“Learning about the environmental aspects of brownfields,” Jack said.
“I see you brought an entourage,” Riley said. Another car arrived with Lori Russo, then another van from Channel 15’s rival station. The men from Wiley Construction emerged and began to don fluorescent yellow vests and hard hats, boots clattering on the cracked concrete.
“What are you doing here?” Carlyle spoke to Green but couldn’t take his gaze from the men in the vests and hats.
“Moving Cleveland into the future.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Move Cleveland into—”
“Break ground.”
“Not really up to you, is it?”
“Actually, it—”
“And you can explain any objections to the press, here.”
Carlyle’s voice quavered in time with the hum of the interstate. “I’m not authorized to make public statements. That’s not really my job.”
“That works out well for both of us, then.” Green unabashedly waited for the straggling members of the media to catch up. Lori Russo reached their knot and gave Jack a smile.
The man with Green, a trim blond in a sweatshirt and faded jeans, seemed even younger than David Carlyle but completely at ease. Instead of a cigar he had the white paper stick of a lollipop protruding from his lips, and now he pulled it out to wave around and speak in a puff of watermelon-scented breath: “No worries! We’re only here to give everyone an update on StartUp and address your concerns at the same time, before we break ground.”
David Carlyle might be a bit hapless, but he knew the arranged leaves and flimsy sticks of a hidden bear trap when he saw them and opted for a strategic retreat. “Fine. I’ll be over here.”
He turned his back on the group and walked to the trailer, where he took a seat on the two steps suspended under its door.
Green’s brow never creased. He turned to the media group and introduced the blond as Connor Scofield. The other two men from his vehicle stayed in the back and were not introduced. They had the look of bodyguards, but Jack wondered at the political sense of walking around with personal goons. Perhaps Green had enemies other than Diane Cragin, more potent ones.
Connor Scofield gave the current assembly and all the world at-large a brilliant smile and started off through the weeds at a brisk pace, speaking with the enthusiasm of a kindergarten teacher at the history museum. “Great! Well, all this gunk you see will be cleaned up and leveled out, and this will become a parking garage. It will have walkways to the building, for when that wind whips off the lake.”
“Like today,” Riley grumbled, hands shoved into the pockets of his worn blazer, even though the temperature hadn’t dipped below sixty degrees. But he had stopped holding it around himself as soon as Lori Russo had appeared on the scene.
“Like today. Which’ll be super nice in February when its well below freezing.”
“You’re from Cleveland originally?” Lori Russo asked, pen and notebook out, scribbling as she walked, easily handling the rocky terrain in her rubber-soled shoes.
“Raleigh. But I love it here. I’ve totally adopted this as my hometown. I want to marry and raise my kids in this city.” He waved his arms to sketch a large rectangle in the air. “This will be five floors of office space and other areas. Two of the floors are exclusively for start-ups, and the top two floors will be set aside for corporate innovation offices for larger companies and service providers.”
“When does construction begin?” one of the reporters asked.
“Right now. We can all be a witness to history,” Green said without a hint of insincerity.
Jack said, “Aren’t you waiting on an all clear from the EPA?”
“Why would we be? We haven’t received any such ban.”
“And the election is in two days,” Riley murmured.
“But the mayor’s committee hasn’t approved the draw yet,” Lori Russo pointed out.
“The grant is approved,” Green stated. “Approving the construction draw is a minor formality that will be taken care of at Tuesday’s meeting, and these guys know it’s all good. They’re ready to get started.”
“They’ll never get the building closed in before winter hits,” another reporter said.
Scofield said, “The timing is not ideal, but we’ll have to push through. If we wait for spring it will put us a year behind all the newest tech releases. Now, the ground floor will stay as flexible space depending on what’s going on, cubbies for the smaller start-ups, coffee shop, maybe a restaurant, meeting rooms, an open central area big enough for a modest trade show. Legal and accounting professionals will also have a presence in the building so that the newbies don’t just have a coffee machine and a copier but immersion in the support areas that they need.”
They had reached the construction trailer, and he paused. “I can show you the blueprints, if you’d like to see them.”
The reporters politely agreed. David Carlyle, apparently unsurprised that the crowd had wound up in front of him again, stood up from the steps and moved to the side. He seemed to disconnect one call and dial another, apparently trying to get a supervisor on the line with the authority to stop the men in hard hats. But no one felt like picking up on a Sunday afternoon.
Scofield went inside, then promptly reappeared in the trailer’s doorway and unrolled a copious set of oversized blueprints. He couldn’t hold them to be readable without one corner or the other rolling up again, but a score of digital cameras made digital shutter sounds.
Jack, meanwhile, stared at the two metal steps hanging off the side of the trailer below the door. They had black metal grate insets, roughly the size and shape of what he had found on Diane Cragin’s stoop. None, however, were missing. They also had rounded edges, whereas the grate they’d found did not.
Scofield stowed his blueprints where they had been inside the construction trailer. From a glance through the open doorway, Jack didn’t see much else except some crates of hand tools and extension cords.
Lori Russo asked, “What is the estimated benefit to the city? In dollars and cents.”
“That’s impossible to calculate,” Green said. “Obviously some start-ups will fail.”
“Probably most of them. That’s the nature of the beast,” Scofield admitted cheerfully.
“And others will lope along, and yet others will become the next Google or Starbucks. The Economic Development office looks at not only the jobs generated, concrete employment figures for the initial construction, of course, but also the long-term operation.”
“Let’s take a look at the site,” Scofield said, jumping from his perch on the metal steps, and leading them on a hike across the weeds. Carlyle trailed them, dialing yet another number.
“How much?” Jack heard a reporter ask.
“About twenty million. But who’s counting?” Scofield tossed this last off with a laugh that Green echoed.
Lori Russo said aloud, “Taxpayers. They’ll be counting.”
A television guy asked, “Where is the money going to come from?”
Scofield swatted at a fly that buzzed his face, holding on to the last vestige of summer air. “Me. I’m the angel investor here. Me and other venture capitalists. That’s what StartUp will focus on, unlike similar forums—not merely giving new people a place to work but luring venture capitalists from other cities and even countries. Put those two entities together, and it will take us into a new game.”
“Where is your money coming from?” Lori asked. “No offense, but you seem a bit young—”
“Twenty-two,” the guy said. “On my next birthday. I know it seems weird when my peers are still on the couch playing video games, but I’ve been working forty hours a week since I was fourteen. Six years ago I started a website design firm called Grand Slam. Two years ago we were the fastest growing firm in the country, and one year ago I sold it. I’m a hard worker, yeah, but I’m also really lucky that timing has usually been on my side.”
“If he wants to be taken for a grown-up, maybe he should take the sucker out of his mouth,” Riley said to Jack sotto voce.
Scofield pointed to a partial wall of concrete block, about twelve feet high at the tallest point. “This used to be the main part of the asphalt plant. Watch your step. This would be a hard hat area if there were actually a roof left.”
Lori said, “I looked online. I couldn’t find a lot of information about Grand Slam, other than it had existed.”
“We were the power behind the thrones, not the thrones themselves.”
“Or an entry on any list of fastest growing companies.”
“We didn’t get an award for it. That’s simply what the numbers said.” Jack found it impossible to assess the kid’s truthfulness. For one thing, he never stood still, either due to hyperactivity or youthful exuberance or because he knew it was more difficult to assess veracity when the body wasn’t still. Police officers had a reason for sitting suspects and witnesses down in a small room with nowhere to go and nothing to distract or explain the motions of their limbs. Humans had gotten very good at schooling their faces to keep up an act, but from the neck down it got harder to do. Feet described most honestly what a person thought or felt. And this kid’s seemed to be made of rubber.
They spread out through the empty shell, Riley kicking at loose stones tucked between tufts of weeds, Lori poking at an abandoned bird nest in a recess that must have anchored a large piece of equipment. Graffiti depicted body parts and faces but mostly words in bold and colorful fonts. A metal stairway lay on its back along the floor.
“I love these old places,” Scofield said. “You can stand here and breathe in the history.”
From what Jack breathed in, this particular old place had become a makeshift men’s room, but he said nothing. Instead he wondered how he and Riley were going to explain to the homicide unit chief why they had taken a tour of the Flats instead of figuring out who had brazenly murdered a sitting U.S. senator on her own doorstep. They had followed a breadcrumb trail of evidence, but it had left them lost in a vacant lot.
Now that the group had shuffled during the move, Scofield took the opportunity to shake some more hands, coming round to the young EPA agent as if he had only now noticed his presence. “Don’t know if we’ve been properly introduced, but I’m Connor Scofield. David . . . EPA, right? You were at that one committee hearing, can’t remember exactly when that was—”
“Last Thursday.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“This young man is from the EPA.” Green announced to the crowd, giving Carlyle’s employment status the grave tone usually reserved for informing a patient of serious health issues. “He wants to tie up the project indefinitely in order to do tests, tests, and more tests, when the Economic Development office has shown that the increased tax base can be used to fix any environmental problems that may develop down the line.”
Spots of red appeared on Carlyle’s high cheekbones, and he muttered, “I doubt that very much.”
Lori Russo said, “I thought you said that was impossible to calculate?”
“The total benefit. The tax base will increase by ten to fourteen percent.”
“Did you know,” Riley murmured to Jack, “that sixty-eight percent of statistics are made up on the spot?”
A roaring sound started up, and they moved out from behind the wall to find the cause. The construction crew had strung caution tape along the road and at the edge of the Sherwin-Williams plant parking lot, and three of them now warmed up their jackhammers. They obviously planned to start at the far edge, safely away from the reporters’ parked cars. A bit close to Jack and Riley’s, however.
Green’s smile stretched his face. “Beautiful day for progress, am I right?”
“Stop!” David Carlyle screamed.