I pointed him west, toward Brookline, and ran my test in the back. Positive for organic chlorine poisoning. The crooks were west of us. My prejudices were well-founded.
To be fully scientific I should have stopped at every manhole between Roxbury and Natick, following the trail, but sometimes you have to take your science with a grain of salt. First there was Brookline. Not the scummy northern part of Brookline with its two-hundred-thousand-dollar condos. The nice part, with its fifty-room slate-roofed mansions. Then there was Newton, where Roscommon lived, where every front door was flanked by Greek columns. The folks in Brookline and Newton weren't dumping organic chlorine compounds into the sewers; they were making their money from doing it.
We drove straight to southern Newton for another check. Getting samples was tricky out here because there were even more cops, and just owning a black van was reason enough for a life sentence. I'd had success before, though, just on pure balls. “Yes, officer, I'm Sangamon Taylor with GEE International, we're working on a sanctioned investigation here [whatever that meant] tracking down illegal dumping in the [insert name of town] sewer system. You live in this town, officer? You have children? Noticed any behavioral changes lately, any strange rashes on the abdomen? Good. I'm glad to hear it. Well, it looks like my assistant is just about finished, thanks for your help.”
We had to check three manholes before we made a bingo. Newton had its very own sewer system with its own manholes, which made things confusing. I was forced to deploy the above-mentioned speech while Bart was checking number two. Usually it was hard to convince them that you worked for a real environmental group, but the Zodiac on top of the van, with GEE in orange letters, made it all look plausible. I'd have to remember that trick. Word got out on the radio, and at manhole number three, a cop actually stood there and directed traffic around us while we worked.
Which doesn't necessarily mean we fooled them, but they could see we weren't out to cause trouble, and things went a lot more smoothly when they stood there with their flashing lights. And that's mainly what a cop wants: things to go smoothly.
More organic chlorine. We headed west. Once we got out into Wellesley we were sampling more often. That got us into the city limits of Natick, and this was where things got really tricky. Until now, we'd been following a single line, but here the possibilities were branching out in every direction and it was necessary to check manholes at every branch.
My maps didn't run this far out, so things got primitive: drive around slow, look for manholes in the street, scratch your head. We got lost immediately, just past Lake Waban, did a lot of U-turns and sketching of diagrams on the old McDonald's napkins in the back. We sort of thought that there was a major branch here - a lot of Natick sewer lines feeding into the big tunnel.
“This is going to take fucking forever,” Bart pointed out. By now it was three in the morning and we had about eight manholes to check.
“Hang on for a sec,” I said. There was a 7-Eleven half a block away and I trotted over and scoped out their phone book.
All they had was a white pages, so it was kind of a random search. I was trying to think of all the prefixes that high-tech companies give themselves. “Electro,” “Tec,” “Dyna,” “Mega,” “Micro.” In ten minutes or so, I had found half a dozen of those, and the last one had an interesting address: “100 TechDale.”
TechDale had to be some kind of high-tech industrial park. I looked it up by name: TECHDALE DEVELOPMENTS, followed by an office address in downtown Wellesley and one for their development in Natick.
And then, gods of Science forgive me, I couldn't help it. It was biased thinking, but I couldn't help it. I looked up Biotronics Incorporated. They had a facility in Natick, alright: 204 TechDale.
Inside the 7-Eleven they sold maps of the area. TechDale was so new it hadn't shown up on the maps yet, but the clerk showed me where it was: a couple of miles away on Cochituate Avenue, out in the direction of the lake by the same name. I spread the map out on the counter and simply traced Cochituate Avenue backwards toward us. It crossed our path a quarter of a mile away. We'd already driven up and down it a couple of times, and found a manhole in it.
I got back into the van. “We want the manhole on Cochituate Avenue,” I said. “Over there.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Prejudice. Sheer blind prejudice.”
“You think black people did it? Is that why we were in Roxbury?”
We checked the manhole. It was the right one. The chlorine was still there.
Or so I told myself, because I was tired and we were running out of time. What I had was a substance in a test tube that would turn red in the presence of organic chlorine compounds. When I used it on the Dorchester Bay sample, or the Roxbury sample, it came out looking like burgundy wine. This last sample looked a little more like rose. The concentration was getting weaker as we approached the source. And that didn't make a damn bit of sense. Obviously it should've been the other way around. I could think of a few bizarre hypotheses to explain it, but they sounded like the work of a pathological liar.
This, friends and neighbors, was depressing as hell. As we moved west on Cochituate Avenue, the concentration kept decreasing. The toxin was still there, definitely at illegal levels, but it was doing the wrong thing.
We tested it on one side of a residential subdivision and it was high enough to be illegal. We tested it on the other side and it wasn't there at all. We'd lost the trail.
“So they don't want to dump right from the company property. They put it into tank trucks. They drive a couple of miles to the subdivision with the curvy streets. The trucks drive down the streets dumping the shit into the gutters.”