But I'd done enough of those traces to have a rough idea. If there really was organic chlorine coming out near that pier, the source had to be up north.
We were driving past a pay phone when I remembered Dolmacher for the nth time. “The Holy Grail ... I'm in the book.” I'd looked in the book once before and I knew where he lived: up north. Vague evidence, but visiting the poor fuck was high on my list anyway. We stopped at the booth long enough for me to get his exact address, and then we headed across the river.
To find his place we had to drive down some pretty dark and quiet streets, and the temptation was almost too much. I still had my bandolier, had worn it all the way to the Singletary residence and brought it back to Boston. I started looking around for manholes.
Then I remembered that the simple approach didn't work with this toxin. If it was the same thing we'd seen in Natick, the concentration would be zero up here in his neighborhood, and much higher downstream. Maybe we could check that out later.
Jim dropped me and Boone off in various places, then parked somewhere, and we all converged separately on the house. The lights were off in Dolmacher's place; this wasn't the kind of neighborhood where you needed to leave them on when you went out. Not that it was ritzy, just nice, out of the way and homey. The only criminals around here were us.
As evidenced by the fact that we broke right into his house through a basement window. I was wearing surgical gloves and the others kept their hands in their pockets. We didn't want to turn on all the lights, and it looks suspicious to beam flashlights around the inside of an empty house, so we just stumbled around in the medieval glimmer of my Bic.
The basement was true to form: a big war game was spread out on the ping-pong table. The U.S. was being invaded through Canada and Dolmacher was doing a great job fighting the red bastards off. And he had an active model-building studio down here.
We went upstairs to check out his collection of electronic toys and military-power books. Jim noticed a nightlight on in the bathroom and went to look at that. Boone and I checked out the living room, done up in classic Dolmacher Contemporary, now full of empty pizza boxes and used paper napkins.
“Holy fucking shit, I can't believe this,” Jim said from the bathroom, and we convened. On my way, I tripped over something that fell over and scattered across the floor: a half-empty sack of aquarium charcoal. It goes without saying that Dolmacher didn't own any fish.
We went and gazed at the bathroom in the brown gloom of the nightlight. It stank. The first thing my eye picked out was the half-dozen used syringes scattered across the counter. Then the bottles, many bottles, of pills. I started reading the labels. Antibiotics, each and every one. The place smelled like death and chlorine; there was a half-empty jug of laundry bleach on top of the toilet and an empty in the garbage. I bent over, bless my scientific heart, and sniffed Dolmacher's toilet. He had dumped a bunch of bleach into it. This was inorganic chlorine, the safe kind, not the bad covalent stuff we were looking for. He was using it to disinfect his crapper.
Dolmacher was real sick. He had a problem with some bacteria, a problem in his bowel. He knew it was a problem and he was desperately trying to deal with it.
Maybe I had a problem too. I went through Dolmacher's supply and scarfed some pills.
Boone and Jim were doing some mumbling, bending over the bathtub. “... or maybe buckshot,” Boone was saying.
“No way, 9mm semi,” Jim said.
“What are you guys...” I said, and then, for the first time, noticed the corpse in the bathtub. It was a guy in a suit.
“Your dude's a good housekeeper,” Jim said. “Puts his bodies in the tub to drain.”
“Should've recognized the smell,” I said. “Putrescine.”
“Say what?”
“Putrescine. The chemical given off by decaying bodies.”
Dolmacher had already gone through the guy's wallet and tossed it on his chest. I picked it up, being the only one here with gloves, and checked it out. Basco Security.
“Nice grouping,” Jim observed. The dead guy had six holes in his chest, all within six inches of one another.
Boone and I got beers from the fridge, Jim got water, and we sat around in the living room. I was thinking.
“You guys know anything about quantum mechanics? Of course not.”
They didn't say anything, so I kept thinking out loud.
“Any reaction that can go in one direction can go in the other direction.”
“So?”
"Okay. First of all, here's what we know: Basco, thirty years ago, dumped some whopping transformers on the north side of Spectacle Island. Covered them with dirt and forgot about them.
"In about '68, they started to worry, because they knew there was a lot of toxic stuff in those transformers. But there was nothing they could do about it until recently - the Age of Genetic Engineering. They bought out the best and brightest such company in the Boston area and told them to invent a PCB-eating bug.
"So they did. Put together some chlorine-processing plasmids and implanted them in a particular bug called Escherichiacoli. It's a bacterium that lives in everyone's bowels, helps digest food. A good bug. A very well-understood, well-studied bug, ideal for these purposes. It's what all the genetic engineers use.
"It worked. But it just barely worked in time. An old barge came along and ripped the transformers open. So they had to release the bug quickly, before they'd had a chance to test it in the lab, to clean up that mess before yours truly noticed it. And that all worked just fine. The PCBs went away.
“That's what we know. Now, from here on out, it's just my theory. Like I said, any reaction that goes one way can be reversed. Now, somewhere along the line, when these guys were trying to design a plasmid to change covalent chlorine to ionic, they had to consider the possibility of making it go the other way. Ionic chlorine, like in seawater, to covalent, like in toxic waste.”