Sugar clicked off, and then tried Deputy Rachel Pike. Got her, first ring.
“So what’s my new assignment?”
“I realize this is a lot to ask,” Sugar said.
“Ask it.”
“Pull some phone records.”
“You got a warrant or subpoena by any chance? Know a federal judge?”
Sugarman was silent. He knew the law and knew what could be done to get around it.
“No, I didn’t think so. Good God, Sugar, this isn’t Homeland Security; we can’t go data-mining when the mood strikes.”
After a moment more, Rachel sighed and said, “Just out of curiosity, where’re these phone records from?”
“Sarasota. Law office of Carter Mosley, Esquire. Got a particular day. July eighteenth, anytime between nine and noon. Either incoming or outgoing. Or if he’s got a cell, it could be that.”
“I have a full-time job, honey. I can’t put that at risk. There’s some strings I just can’t pull. Even for you.”
“I understand.”
The line went quiet long enough for Sugar to ask if she was still there. When she came back, the last of the teasing tone was gone.
“You give any thought to that job offer? We’re interviewing some applicants, nobody in your league, but I can’t hold it open forever.”
Sugar looked out at the grassy berm. Not really debating it, just trying to find some polite words.
“I take it that’s a no?”
“Sorry, Rachel. I’ve gotten used to the footloose thing.”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“Maybe it’s not my place, Sugar.”
“Go ahead.”
She sighed another time. He knew what was coming and suspected it had been brewing for a while. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had given him the advice.
“I care about you, Sugar. As a friend. It’s just that I think you’d be a lot further along in your career, and maybe in your personal life, too, if you stopped letting Thorn drag you into these shit-storms he’s so fond of.”
“Thorn’s my friend. He’d do the same for me.”
“Think about it, Sugar. Think what that friendship costs you.”
Sugar was silent, collecting himself, his face growing warm.
“You’re right, Rachel,” he said. ”Maybe it isn’t your place.”
They listened to each other breathe for a few seconds, then Rachel clicked off without a good-bye and Sugar slipped his cell into his pocket. Another bridge burned. Shit, shit, shit.
He fumbled with the remote for a while before he had the DVD synched with the TV and got the video running.
It didn’t take him long to get the idea. Over the years he’d attended more public meetings than he cared to recall. Most involved the latest brainstorm of some real-estate scammer. The meetings were usually hopeless displays of earnest citizens failing miserably to stand firm against the hustlers and their bulldozers.
After watching a few minutes of the general public of DeSoto County, Sugar felt the same sense of doom.
Fast-forwarding over several rambling rants, he was about to shut the whole thing down when C.C. Olsen climbed onstage. Olsen was a rangy man with long swept-back hair, a hawk nose, and a Pancho Villa mustache, like some renegade biker from the 1960s.
His voice was subdued, almost shy as he introduced himself to any who might not know him. The hubbub died away and the room stayed silent until he finished his talk. In the dozen rows the camera captured, nearly every person was leaning forward to catch Olsen’s words.
First, he roll-called the names of eighteen locals who’d died of various diseases within the last few years, mostly cancer, a few respiratory ailments Sugar had never heard of. After Olsen pronounced each person’s name, their age at death, he gave the number of years they’d spent in the classrooms and hallways of Pine Tree School.
Only two of the eighteen were cigarette smokers.
In his calm, deep voice C.C. Olsen said, ”If these eigh-teen folks, all of them friends and neighbors of people in this room, if these eighteen human beings don’t count as a cancer cluster, then I don’t know what would.”
Then he read off the EPA’s official report on radon in that region. How government investigators found that concentrations of uranium and radium in gypsum samples taken locally were ten times the average background levels in soil for uranium and sixty times the background levels in soil for naturally occurring radium-238.
Radium-238 decayed into radon gas, which was colorless and odorless. In about four days radon decayed into polonium-218, which gave off alpha particles. These high-energy specks could penetrate to the nucleus of a cell and permanently change DNA. So if radon gas was inhaled into the sensitive tissues of the airways and lungs, over time the cells could be permanently damaged and the chances of contracting lung cancer or other respiratory ailments were greatly increased.
Sugarman saw how challenging it was to make the science clear to such ordinary folks. But C.C. was patient and slow and kept things mostly to one and two syllables. A teacher teaching.
Radium showed up in high strengths in the waste of phosphate mining. And when that radioactive clay and sludge was stacked two hundred feet high, it didn’t take a genius to see how easy it was for particles to be kicked up by prevailing winds. Those particles settled onto nearby ponds and trees and agricultural areas, and got trapped inside buildings, where they built up the way grease will film the walls of a restaurant from years of deep-fat frying.
On the upper crust of the gypsum stacks the radioactive clay collected rainwater that grew into scummy ponds. That standing water evaporated and the fumes spilled down the sides of the harmless-looking mountain same as fog descended hillsides and gathered in valleys. But you couldn’t see radon like you could see fog. The only means to measure the stuff was with detection meters that monitored exposure over extended periods.
And in the first video, that’s all C.C. was asking for. Funding from Bates International to pay for a few dozen radon detectors. Sounded like a no-brainer to Sugarman.
When C.C. Olsen was done, Carter Mosley stepped to the podium amid scattered catcalls. With a half-smile, he waited till the noise died away. Though Sugarman had met him the night before, he hadn’t paid much attention. He took him to be a quiet, unassuming man.
The Mosley he saw on the TV screen was something else. In denim shirt, khakis, and scruffy moccasins, he’d dressed the part of some disheveled poet just back from a ramble through a fairy-tale forest. But his expression was anything but blithe.
Sugarman froze the video, then advanced frame by frame till he got a focused image of Mosley’s face.
Black reading glasses were perched on the tip of his nose and Mosley’s sharp blue eyes squinted above them at the audience. White Scandinavian skin, expertly barbered silver hair, eyes a deep blue. On first glance his smile had a bemused air, but the longer Sugar looked, the more it resembled a sneer.
Sugarman punched the play button and watched Mosley continue to smile as the hoots and grumbling subsided. When the room was completely hushed, Mosley seemed to count off a whole minute before he began, as if letting the air clear of the fumes of their childishness.
When he spoke, he echoed Olsen’s slow delivery and folksy manner and seemed perfectly at ease before the crowd. After only a sentence or two, though, Sugarman’s bullshit-detector was jiggling fulltilt.
“I want to compliment Mr. Olsen on his skillful presentation. I can certainly see where he came by his fine reputation as a teacher. I’m sorry to admit I’m not in the same league as C.C. when it comes to eloquence. So bear with me, please.
“He paints a gloomy picture, and to be honest it gives me the shivers. I’d be terrified for us all if what Olsen claims turns out to be true. That’s why Bates International has decided to commit substantial resources to examine these accusations of Mr. Olsen.
“Starting this week we’re bringing to Summerland the best scientific minds available, men and women from all over the United States, and they’ll be setting up their monitors around the perimeter of the gypsum stack, examining the data and statistics these devices capture. Bates International, and in particular Abigail Bates, is fully committed to tracking the source of any airborne migration of radon gas. Absolutely committed to being good citizens in this community where we live.”
Sugarman fast-forwarded. Listening to Mosley’s patronizing twaddle was giving him a headache. It was a typical gimmick, letting some corporate-sponsored lackeys handle the scientific investigation. Fox and the henhouse. Amazing that citizens still fell for it.
He rolled past a couple of minutes, then froze another frame. Worked it forward till he had another focused image. And there it was again, that smile that was not a smile, but a smug grimace, faintly predatory.
It was an expression Sugar associated with grown men who’d once been victimized by school yard bullies and never got over it. Such men rarely openly confronted their adult antagonists. They were wilier than that, using their smarts and fake charm to gain advantage. But the anger and hurt and vengefulness born of long-ago humiliations were still burning hot, just below the surface. He knew that was a lot to pin on a half-second facial expression, but somehow Sugarman knew this guy. He was sure of it. A mean-spirited little shit.
He zipped to Mosley’s exit line.
As to the radon monitors C.C. was asking Bates to purchase, well, that sounded like a reasonable request, so Carter Mosley promised, right then and there, to take the appeal directly to Abigail herself and report back to the assembly promptly.
Most of the folks in the audience knew a dodge when they heard it. The rustling grew to a growl and somebody started stomping on the gymnasium floor, and soon the stomping spread to the bleachers and grew in volume until Mosley had no choice but to step away from the microphone. As the noise increased, he waved a stiff good-bye and ambled away.
The next two videos were more of Olsen’s unhurried, commonsense science, including a list of readings from the radon monitors newly installed in the classrooms, and a progress report on the ventilation system the county had grudgingly agreed to install. Then more of Mosley’s pie charts and mealy-mouthed arguments, the preliminary results of the various scientific studies that Bates International was funding.
Abigail Bates made an appearance at the end of the third meeting. She was booed for a full minute before she began to speak. During the razzing, she stood impassively, scanning the audience row by row as though taking names.
When the heckles finally died away, she cleared her throat and gripped the edges of the podium and spoke in a voice that brooked no contradiction.
“I’m older than dirt. Older than anybody in this room. Eighty-five, about to be eighty-six. And nearly every one of those years I lived within two spits of phosphate mines and gypsum stacks. So if you folks want to see what radon does to someone, take a good long gander at me.
“I’ve already spent more money on your complaints than I consider reasonable. That’s money I worked hard for. Money I earned from my own sweat, and the backbreaking labor of my daddy and his daddy. I’m nearing the end of what I’m willing to pay. So right here and now, you’ve got fair warning. If these attacks on Bates International continue, I’ll just have to start looking elsewhere for employees.
“I’ll fight this nonsense till my last breath. And that’s a long way off.”
She proceeded to suck down a huge lungful of air, then puckered her lips and let it go like a dope smoker treasuring the last of her joint. She meant it as a taunt, of course, but watching this old dame who would soon die of drowning, Sugarman couldn’t shake a creepy sense of foreboding. With that public display of scorn, it was very possible Abigail Bates, Thorn’s feisty grandmother, had just sealed her death sentence.