“All over the Harbor. Mostly Dorchester Bay.”
That didn't help me at all. Dorchester Bay was a pocket of water below South Boston, ringed with sewer overflows - CSOs - but not much industry. It was three or four miles east - southeast of the area I'd been concentrating on.
“Have you pulled up any traps that were oily?”
“Yeah. We put one down near Spectacle, just as a test, you know. See, S.T, we're starting to become invironmintles. Pulled it up this morning. Check this out, S.T.”
I knew it had to be bad because they had just chucked the whole thing into a Hefty bag and left it out on the fantail. I pulled it open and looked. There was no lobster in there, but the trap was still glistening with oil. It had all dripped off the trap and run down into one corner of the bag where I could grab it and squish it around and feel it through the plastic. Oily, but transparent. This trap had been dipped in PCBs.
This was orders of magnitude worse than the lobster Tanya had found - the lobster had just had a few drops of the stuff, built up slowly over time.
There was more to this business, but I had no idea what. Each new piece of evidence directly contradicted the last.
Billy ate oily lobsters and got poisoned. When he stopped eating them he got better. Fine. But the rest of the crew never did. They got poisoned anyway. They stopped eating them but it didn't help. Where were they getting PCBs?
“The only thing I can think is that you're absorbing them from traps like this one,” I said. “You didn't try burning anything, did you? Any old traps or ropes?”
“Why would we do that?”
“Beats me. But let me just warn you that PCBs don't burn. They just turn into dioxin and escape into the air.” Maybe someone was running a clandestine toxic waste incinerator in Southie. I just don't know.
“Activated charcoal,” I said. “Go home and buy some aquarium charcoal. Grind it up fine, heat it up, and eat it. Give yourself an enema.”
It took me a while to make them believe that. “Or you could grind up some briquets very fine. Don't use the self-lighting kind.”
“Yeah, we're not dumb micks, S.T.”
“Sorry. Ever hear of an activated charcoal filter? The carbon grabs onto organic molecules, anything that's reactive, and holds it long enough for your body to get rid of it.”
Gallagher laughed. “Okay. I'll tell my wife we're getting an aquarium. Just what I need, more frickin' fish.”
By the time I got the Zode back downtown, filled the gas tanks, made it back to the office, loaded myself down with diving equipment, got it all back to the yacht club and hit the water again it was dark and a little bit foggy. Which was fine by me. I was a little dark and foggy myself; I didn't even know what I was going to look for, or where.
The oily trap - now, that was evidence. No gas chromatograph was needed, just my trusty schnozz. It contradicted the evidence from the gas chromatograph at the university but, by now, contradictions seemed par for the course. I was willing to believe the most recent piece of evidence to drift past me.
I'd gotten Gallagher to show me, on a chart, exactly where he'd pulled that trap. A quarter-mile north of Spectacle Island, in sort of a depression in the sea floor. I could go down into it and look for puddles of oil. For fifty-five-gallon drums or old Basco transformers. We'd already sampled the area, though, and found nothing at all.
What would that prove anyway? It wouldn't help with the real mysteries - why my analysis was all fucked up; why Gallagher was sick.
Maybe it wasn't PCBs at all. Maybe some other form of organic chlorine, that didn't taste oily, didn't show up in our analysis. That was the only plausible way for those guys to get poisoned. I could be dealing with two separate problems here: a busted transformer dumped thirty years ago by Basco, causing oily traps, and some other kind of subtle, nasty waste-dumping, something really new and vicious. New technologies were being invented all the time out on Route 128, and new forms of toxic waste along with them. Maybe someone was using the CSO system to get rid of their corporate shit - flushing it down the toilet during heavy rains, knowing it would immediately overflow into the Harbor and never be noticed down at the sewage treatment plants. It was coming from one of Dorchester Bay CSOs and contaminating lobsters in that area.
That was the thing to look for, then. Take a sample from Dorchester Bay and analyze it. Analyze it every which way, look for every damn thing under the sun: bromine and fluorine and the other compounds that could mimic chlorine. If nothing else, it would help me rule out this new hypothesis. And if I found something, I could trace it to a particular CSO, and then I had the criminals by the balls. Each CSO drains a specific set of toilets in a specific part of town. By lifting the right manhole covers, paying a lot of attention to my sewer maps, I could trace the trail right back to the perpetrator.
This strategy had another advantage as well: I wouldn't have to dive as deep. Diving just isn't my thing. Under normal conditions it's scary enough, but diving at night, in murky water, with no backup - that was fucking stupid. I was only doing it because I knew I wouldn't be able to relax until I did something. So I anchored my Zodiac a hundred feet off the shore and worked from there.