Sugarman got Dr. Dillard’s home address from the Summerland phone book. His house was a boxy two-story, several blocks from the downtown historic district. The charm factor dropped off drastically in those few blocks. Second-tier Summerland was treeless and stark, and the air smelled of fried food and motor oil. Battered pickups in driveways, spavined couches and recliners parked on porches, the grass patchy and brown. A pack of skinny mutts were foraging along the garbage cans left out by the street.
When no one answered Sugar’s knock, an old lady who was smoking on the front steps next door called out that Dillard was probably out back.
“With his brand-new choo-choo,” she said when Sugar thanked her. The old lady pointed her cigarette to the side of her head and made a crazy twirl.
The door to Dillard’s workshop was ajar, so he stepped inside without knocking. Banks of fluorescent lights glared from overhead, sun poured in from two large windows, and a couple of halogens were aimed toward the center of the room. The good doctor was wearing bib overalls, a blue work shirt, a red-and-white-striped engineer’s cap, and some kind of magnifying spectacles. He was stooped over a plywood table, using a pair of tweezers and a long needle to make adjustments to the tiniest model railroad set Sugarman had ever seen.
“All aboard,” Sugar said.
Dillard straightened and frowned when he saw who it was. He pulled off the jeweler’s eyeglasses and set them and his tools carefully on the plywood sheet, just beyond the border of his imaginary world.
The track looped and twisted through green hills with cows standing beneath one-inch trees, past ponds and cascading waterfalls, then the locomotive and its cars and red caboose descended into a valley and clickety-clacked through a charming American village somewhere in New England. Church steeples and storybook main street, kids on bikes, teenagers in convertibles, a firehouse with its dalmatian. Sugarman bent close to make out some of the finer detail.
“That’s awful tiny,” he said. “But I guess even fleas need to travel.”
“You dropped by to make jokes?”
The two of them watched the train pass through the little town. A crossing guard lowered, the tiny whistle whooped, but all the people and dogs and cows and a herd of horses galloping through a meadow stayed frozen.
“In case you’re interested,” Dillard said. “That strand of hair is not the victim’s. But that doesn’t mean it’s the killer’s. It could be anybody’s. It’s like you found a random fingerprint or drop of blood. It’s meaningless without having another hair to associate it with. Do you happen to have one of those?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Oh, are you?”
“Actually, I didn’t stop by about the hair.”
“I’m sorry, is this a game? I’m supposed to guess what you want?”
“Something you said earlier. At the time it seemed weird, but now that I’ve seen the videos and I’m up to speed on this, it seems even weirder.”
“Well, well. What in the world did I say?”
“You said misdirected. That was the word you used. Misdirected.”
Dillard turned back to the hills and valleys and rivers and waterfalls.
“We were talking about the public meetings,” Sugarman said. ” ‘A lot of anger seething around these parts.’ Those were your exact words. Then you said, ’Misdirected, I must say.’ Referring to the anger, like you knew something all those other people didn’t.”
“You have a remarkable memory.”
“It was just a few hours ago. I’m not dotty yet.”
“All right, so what do you want to know?”
“Just that. What did you mean when you said their anger is misdirected? They’re mad at Bates, they’re mad at the gypsum stack, at the high readings of radon. How’s that misdirected?”
Dillard shot a longing gaze at his train. Still on its tracks, still circling, the dalmatian still asleep in the shade of the fire truck.
“Well, it’s complicated. It involves scientific matters.”
“Try me. If I don’t understand something, I’ll raise my hand.”
He sighed and reached out to the transformer box and switched off the power. The train halted on its downward swing through Happy Valley.
“Are the radon detectors accurate? The measurements really that high?”
“Those electronic gadgets Olsen bought are nothing but cheap toys.” Dillard stepped past Sugarman to the door. He hooked his hat on a nail and went outside.
Sugar followed the doctor into the shade of the neighbor’s house—a box as characterless as his own.
“Toys, meaning they’re inaccurate?”
“Oh, they’re probably accurate within a few points, I suppose. But to be taken seriously by the scientific community, a true study of ambient radon levels would have to be done by exposing a charcoal canister for several days and performing gamma spectroscopy for absorbed decay products.”
Dillard fingered some of the fine gold threads of his remaining hair into place. His pale scalp glowed beneath.
“Let’s put the science aside for a second,” Sugar said. “How’s the community’s anger misdirected? What do you know that they don’t know?”
Dillard shook his head and firmed his lips so not even a peep could escape. Sugar stepped closer to the man, inside his comfort zone. DiUard took a step backward, bumped into the trunk of a scrawny tree. Sugarman took another step, closing into body-odor range. Dillard’s was as moldy and rank as mushrooms left too long in the fridge.
Sugarman whispered the words: “Who should the citizens be mad at?”
Dillard swallowed.
Another whisper: “Unburden yourself, Doctor. Let it out.”
“I want immunity.”
Sugarman had just been poking for rotten places, weak spots in the story line. He hadn’t held out much hope for Dillard and the whole “misdirected” thing, but after the sticky trail of sweat appeared on the doctor’s cheek and he blurted out the magic word immunity, Sugarman felt the decayed place give way, as if he were about to plunge his hand down into the moist underbelly of this whole rotten mess.
Sugar made a gun of his right hand, then brought his pointing finger slowly into Dillard’s sight and touched the muzzle to the underside of the doctor’s jaw, the soft bristly flesh yielding.
“This is just between you and me, Doc. No immunity. No need.”
Dillard swallowed again and drew a breath.
“What do I get out of it?”
“Out of telling the truth?” Sugar said. “You get to go back in your workshop and play with your train. I walk away. You never see me again.”
“You promise me that?”
“Cross my heart.”
He took a long breath as if it might be his last.
“It’s in the building materials,” he said. “The cement, the wallboard, the plaster.”
“What is?” Sugarman dug his finger in a little deeper.
“Phosphogypsum.”
“The radioactive stuff that’s dumped inside the gyp stack?”
“Exactly. The building contractor was cutting corners.”
“Using phosphate mining waste for cement and drywall?”
“The practice wasn’t illegal when the school was built.”
Sugarman withdrew his finger and stepped back. Dillard was panting.
“And you learned this how?”
Dillard shot a look back at his workshop, his perfect world.
“I did some scrapings at the school, bored a few holes and analyzed them. I was curious. A big ruckus is going on in town. Scientists from all over the country are coming into my backyard to present position papers. No one thought to ask me to be involved. So I took it on myself. I did some sampling at the school, and, yes, that’s what happened. The contractor used mining waste to build the structure.”
“So it’s not the gyp stack causing all the cancer?”
“Oh, no. That’s a ridiculous claim. C.C. Olsen was grasping for straws. Of course that’s the obvious target to attack. That giant mountain of waste so close by, but it’s not the stack. The science doesn’t support that.”
“Did you tell anybody about this?”
The doctor hesitated.
“Who’d you tell, Dillard?”
Dillard’s eyes flitted to Sugarman’s and dodged away. “I told the parties responsible.”
“Who, the contractor?”
Dillard stared out at nothing.
“Why’d you do that?” But as soon as he spoke the words Sugarman knew the answer.
“That’s all I’m saying.” Dillard tried to move forward, but Sugar put a hand on his bony chest and held him in place.
“Bates International, or some subsidiary thereof. That’s who built the school. In the long long ago. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Dillard thought about it for a moment, then nodded faintly.
“So you went and told John Milligan, Abigail Bates, Carter Mosley. Look what I found. Look at the bad thing you did. If this goes public it’s going to cost you millions. Liability suits, health costs, penalties, not to mention tearing down the school, building a new one. This is going to be huge. This could destroy you. At least put a big dent in your bottom line.”
“I thought they should know,” Dillard said with a burst of huffiness.
But even he could see how pathetic it sounded, for he closed his eyes and bent his head down as if offering a plea of forgiveness to whatever god held sway in his puny universe.
“I bet they were thrilled to find out,” Sugar said. “I bet they were so happy you passed this on, they wrote you a check. Maybe a couple of checks. And you went out and bought yourself a brand-new miniature New England village. A little world where you could toot-toot your horn every day. God smiling down on his creations.”
“You’re twisting things.”
“So all those meetings, focusing on that mountain out back of the school, that’s diversionary.”
He nodded.
“They must have loved C.C. Olsen. He kept the spotlight on the gyp stack. Nothing they did was illegal. But once the cancer deaths started cropping up, they started lying. Down that slippery slope, like the tobacco companies did, the asbestos people, and that cost them hundreds of millions in fines.”
“Yes, that worried them.”
“Why isn’t the state involved? Why don’t they send their own researchers in?”
“Out of respect for Bates International.”
“Respect? No, you mean political pressure. Stay out of my business, or else.”
“Well, those are the realities in Florida. Phosphate is king.”
“Sooner or later,” Sugar said, “somebody’s bound to do what you did, right? It’s so obvious. Take some samples, figure out the real cause. Look up the building records.”
“Every day it goes undiscovered is a good day for Bates.”
“But not for the kids going to school inside that building. You ever think about them when you’re counting your blood money?”
“Look, you don’t know what it’s like,” Dillard said. “Living in a place like this. After all my years of training and education, being treated like some hack, some illiterate file clerk. The lack of respect. You don’t know.”
Sugarman had to chuckle.
“Oh, I think by now I’ve got a pretty good idea.”