Isolation (6 page)

Gerry gave the lab reports an impatient twitch, as if he longed to swat her away like a fly. “I get your point. Tommy and Wilma see all and they know all.”

“Well, they did, until Liz died and her marina stopped being open for business.”

Gerry finally met her eyes. “Do you think either of them realized—”

Nadia, breathless, interrupted him with a single deadly word.

“Arsenic.”

Faye's head swiveled in Nadia's direction and Gerry's did the same. Notorious poisons have a way of attracting attention.

Gerry tucked the reports he'd been reading under one arm and reached for the new ones in Nadia's hands. “Arsenic? Just arsenic and nothing else?”

“I see volatiles, but they belong at a petroleum site. Other than the usual suspects, I only see arsenic, but why would I be getting hits for arsenic? And there's something else weird. The arsenic contamination isn't in the same pattern as the petroleum. It's spread over a wider area and it's not centered on the kerosene hot spot around the old tank. What the hell?”

Faye wasn't sure how sick she should feel about the discovery of a famous poison on her property.

He asked Faye, “Did anybody ever run cattle out here?”

“Only small-scale, for their own use for meat and milk. Never at a commercial level. And it was a long time ago.”

He looked around the spot where they stood, so close to the shore and on soil so sandy that it was almost a beach. “This doesn't look like a place where anybody ever grew crops.”

“Not to my knowledge,” Faye said. Then her honest mouth betrayed her and she said, “The whole island has been rebuilt by hurricanes several times, though. It's possible that, at some point, this was a spot where somebody might have tried to grow something. But if they did, I don't know about it.”

Nadia and Gerry huddled over the lab sheets. He mumbled something apparently intended for Faye, since Nadia would already know it. “In the old days, arsenic was a key ingredient in agricultural chemicals.”

Oh, dear God. Most of the island had been used for agriculture in “the old days.” These people really
were
going to scrape off the entire surface of Joyeuse Island, then charge her for the cost of incinerating the dirt.

Chapter Nine

Joe sat in Emma's kitchen, which was tastefully decorated in serene shades of blue and yellow. Her lovely face, too, was serene. The window over her sink looked out on the Gulf of Mexico. A breath of wind stirred its waters, spreading ripples of turquoise all the way to the horizon. Emma was one of those people who could make you feel good by being herself, yet here Joe sat, intending to bring up two subjects that would make Emma feel bad. He felt like a clueless oaf.

Speaking of clueless oafs, she opened the conversation with a question about the most clueless oaf of all. “So how's your dad?”

Was she asking because she cared about Joe and his fractious relationship with Sly? Or was she asking because Joe's dad had been obviously and publicly hitting on this very dignified woman? His father liked women and women liked him, but Emma wasn't just any woman. Joe imagined that the goddess of trees would look like Emma, tall and straight-backed, with skin the color of seasoned mahogany. Sly Mantooth looked like a long-haul trucker with a history of forgetting to come home when his wife needed him.

“My dad is the same dose of bad news that he's always been. Why do you even let him talk to you?”

“I like your dad. He's going to take me fishing this afternoon.”

Joe did not know this, despite the fact that Sly could only keep this date with Emma if he had the use of Joe's john boat.

“Young man, if I could handle Douglass Everett all those years, I can certainly handle your father. He's smooth, but he ain't that smooth. If he wants to get me out of this house and show me a good time, I will let him do it and I will smile the whole while. I am bored. I am lonely. And if you're going to start telling me what to do, you're going to feel the rough side of my tongue.”

Joe said the only thing that a man raised by his mother could say to a lady who had said her piece. He said, “Yes, ma'am.”

Emma had started their conversation by bringing up one of his two difficult topics—his father—then demolishing his arguments against Emma spending time with Sly before Joe even got a chance to put them into play. Joe's father might not be all that smooth, but Emma was.

Joe caved. He left the subject of his father and moved on to his second conversational topic.

“Who is Oscar, why was my wife talking about him yesterday, and how come you know about him and I don't?”

***

Faye watched Nadia use a trowel to scoop dirt into a jar with her customary precision. The dirt, enclosed by the hyper-clean jar, was destined for Nadia's floating laboratory.

This time, Nadia was sampling for arsenic and arsenic only. She had already found the limits of the kerosene contamination. The spot of fuel-tainted soil was only a few feet across, and it penetrated only a few inches into the soil. In other words, the tank had not been sitting there leaking for years and years. Faye was the one who had poked a hole in it, so she was solely responsible for any kerosene contamination that she had caused. Fortunately, there didn't seem to be a lot of it, and it didn't seem to have reached the groundwater.

The arsenic, however, showed a different pattern. The levels were high enough to be worrisome. There was no identifiable source. And the contamination was more widespread. Even non-chemist Faye could tell that these were bad things.

Gerry had made Faye's problem visible by sticking red surveyor's flags into the spots where Nadia had collected contaminated samples that tested positive for arsenic. While waiting for the next batch of lab results, he'd gone back to studying his site map. This meant that he didn't notice that Faye was studying him. And those damnable red flags.

There seemed to be no end to them. Nadia had sampled an area the size of…hmm….how big was it? Faye judged that it was the size of a two-car garage. And the arsenic levels had refused to drop to zero as the sampling locations kept creeping outward. This couldn't be good.

The current set of samples was being collected far, far away from those red flags, so far away that they were almost guaranteed to be clean. Gerry called them “background samples” and they were going to tell him the natural state of Faye's dirt. It was possible for arsenic to be naturally present in soil. In other words, it was possible that Gerry's red flags marked nothing that God hadn't put on Joyeuse Island on the day of creation. To test that theory, Gerry had asked Faye to help Nadia find the best spots to collect background samples.

Some of them had come from the front and back lawns of Joyeuse's great house, where no crops were ever grown and, thus, no nasty old-style agricultural products had ever left any arsenic behind. Now Nadia was collecting a sample under the big oak tree that dominated the landscape on this end of the island. It looked to be more than two hundred years old, so if anybody had ever farmed the spot where it stood, they'd done it long ago. She also planned to collect a bit of the very sandy soil near the high water line. Other than those spots, there was no place on the island where Faye could swear that no one had ever tried to grow a crop or pasture a cow.

Faye didn't like the idea that her entire island might have been covered with a fine dusting of arsenic by Mother Nature herself, but her pocketbook hoped that this was true. The state of Florida would be hard-pressed to make her clean up a bunch of arsenic, if she could prove it was a natural part of her island. This put Faye in the strange position of hoping that Nadia's background samples simply reeked of poison.

Too antsy to wait for the lab results, she decided to walk a circle around the contaminated area, for no better reason than to take yet another look at her problem. An open, shrubby area, dotted by small trees, lay inland from the excavation. Blackberry vines, briars, and shrubby weeds filled the spaces between the trees, so Faye was grateful for her boots and long pants. As she shuffled through the spiny undergrowth, one of those boots struck a piece of wood about the size of her thigh. It looked familiar.

Faye squatted to get a closer look. It wasn't a downed tree branch, nor any other kind of wood that could have gotten there naturally. Though it was weathered and splintery, she could tell that it had been hewn into shape by humans. It took her a second to remember why it looked familiar. When she was a kid, she'd walked this whole island with her grandmother many times, and she remembered a clearing that had once been scattered with several chunks of wood like this one.

She looked around and saw that the trees around her were easily less than thirty years old. She was pretty sure she was standing in the clearing she remembered from childhood.

Faye studied the piece of wood. It had the curved outline of a hollowed-out tree. What had her grandmother said about the broken pieces of wood strewn about the clearing? She'd said that they had once been part of a feed trough. Faye pictured a long, crudely hollowed log holding feed for livestock. The chunk on the ground in front of her looked like a broken piece of a feed trough like that.

Leaving the wood on the ground and circling it in an organized search pattern yielded nothing. The other pieces of the trough had not survived the tropical storms of the years since Faye's grandmother had died. She squatted again to study the weathered wood, pulling out her cell phone to take a picture of it in context with its surroundings. The archaeologist in her wanted to know how old it was.

She reached for the wood, thought again, then donned the rubber gloves in her pocket. If there was arsenic in her soil, there could be poison anywhere. She picked up the wood chunk, and marked the spot with a heavy rock. The wood felt heavy, solid, substantial. Carefully cradling it in both hands, she headed for Nadia and Gerry.

“Nadia, can you test this thing for arsenic?”

“It would take a different extraction technique, but yeah. I could test pretty much anything for arsenic, with enough time and the right equipment.”

Gerry looked at Faye like she had suggested looking for arsenic in a turnip. “Why would we spend the money to do that? I only run lab tests when I've got a good reason. That's what they pay me for—to make an efficient testing plan. Otherwise, a robot could do this job. Taking unnecessary samples is like going fishing, just to see what you can find. And it's a waste of time and money.”

Faye made a mental note that Gerry got a teeny bit defensive when somebody wanted to change his work plan.

“A long time ago, my grandmother showed me a wooden vat over there. I mean, she showed me what was left of it. Just pieces, really.” She pointed at the woods. “She thought maybe it had been a watering trough for horses and cattle, but she didn't remember it ever being used.”

Gerry started walking in that direction, but Faye held up a hand. “It's not there anymore. I think this is all that's left.”

“A wooden trough from—what? The late 1800s? Early 1900s, maybe? A trough that never held anything but water and horse spit? Why should we test that?”

“I told you that my grandmother didn't remember seeing it used. What if it wasn't for water? You said that cattle farmers used arsenic as a pesticide. Could they maybe have used the trough to dip small animals in flea and tick repellent? Piglets? Maybe even calves or foals?”

Gerry stopped being defensive and nodded his head. He silently pointed at the wood. Nadia took it from Faye's hands, asking him, “You want me to take sample of this, do an extraction, and test it for arsenic?”

“While you're at it, you might as well send it to Tallahassee and tell them to look for pesticides, too. Hell, I don't know. Maybe they kept other stuff in there. Have them do a full screen for inorganics and organics, including herbicides.”

A hot, hard knot formed in the pit of Faye's stomach. What had she been thinking? She'd been so intent on puzzling out the reason for the arsenic, she hadn't thought through the consequences of more testing. What if Nadia found something else noxious?

She had gotten no further with her worrying when Gerry's phone rang. He'd hardly said hello when he started running for the shoreline like a man who couldn't care less about Faye's arsenic and kerosene problem. As he ran, he used the hand that wasn't holding the cell phone to fumble with the binoculars around his neck. Being nosy at heart, Faye grabbed her own binoculars and followed him.

Gerry was still yelling into his cell phone when she caught up with him. “—got him? He's still on the water? You got witnesses? Yeah. I can get between him and the marina, if I go right now. Before I do that, tell me you've got the evidence and that you're sending me plenty of backup. We have to get this right.” He pointed the binoculars at a black dot on the horizon. “You're sure?”

Gerry must have gotten the answer he wanted, because he wheeled around and ran up the path that led to his boat. He must have sensed that Faye was coming after him, because he turned, pointed a single finger at her, and said, “No.” Then he poked the finger toward the ground at her feet and said, “You stay here. This is official business.”

Faye would have considered his orders fair enough, if he hadn't delivered them to her like she was a well-trained dog. Maybe Gerry was heading off on official business that had nothing to do with Faye, her property, and her livelihood, but maybe he wasn't. She trained her own binoculars in the direction of that spot on the horizon, twiddled with the focus, and stood there an extra few seconds to be sure she understood what she was seeing.

She knew that boat.

It belonged to Tommy Barnett, the boat mechanic. If Gerry's job was to track down chemicals that had been illegally dumped in the Gulf and on its islands, he would have to be interested in Tommy's boat business. Tommy probably never did a job that didn't generate used oil or solvents or paint, and all that waste had to go somewhere.

Faye paused a moment to judge her level of personal interest in what happened to Tommy. The man wasn't old enough to have buried the kerosene tank on her island. Probably nobody alive was that old. The arsenic? Maybe, but she couldn't think of any boat maintenance chemicals that could have caused her arsenic problem. Maybe paint? She was going to guess no.

Even if Tommy had dumped a trainload of pollutants—and, given Gerry's level of interest, perhaps he had—Faye didn't think he was the cause of her problem, because the tank was just too old.

But this didn't mean she had no personal interest in his fate. If Gerry was after Tommy for environmental crimes, it seemed likely that he'd used the marina as a base for committing them. Could this be why environmental specialist Gerry was working Liz's murder case? Could Tommy's crimes be the reason Liz was killed?

Liz had been Faye's friend. Therefore, Faye had a personal interest in anything that might be related to her murder. Gerry and the person on the other end of his phone call were, even now, trying to catch Tommy while he was still on the water. Maybe Gerry was within his authority to tell Faye to stay away from a rendezvous that might turn dangerous. But was he within his rights to tell her to sit and stay like a naughty cocker spaniel?

Oh, hell no.

Faye knew of no reason that she, as an ordinary citizen with civil rights, couldn't get in her skiff, which was sitting a stone's throw away in waters that belonged to the State of Florida and not to Detective Gerry Steinberg. She saw no reason that she couldn't take it to the marina, getting a very decent head start on Gerry, whose boat was docked a ten-minute walk from where they stood. She could get even further ahead of him before he reached shore, since he would presumably be stopping to arrest Tommy on the way.

Liz would not be at the marina to sell her a piece of pie to eat while she waited, but there was a perfectly nice wooden bench under a shade tree. And there was nothing to keep her from sitting on it until she saw Gerry and his fellow officers bring Tommy to shore.