Deadly Waters Pt. 02

Sean sighed. "It doesn't sound like you've missed anything."

"I found out just this morning that yesterday someone found Thacker's boat and motor stuck in some trees way the hell down the Siouan. The guy who reported it had seen the boat for a day or two, but thought it had just come loose and floated away, and the owner would come looking for it. After a couple of days of it being there, he pulled it out and called the police. I don't know if it's worth driving all the way down to Stillman to look at it or not. They said it had water in it, probably from rain, but otherwise looked perfectly normal. A life jacket with Thacker's name on it, and a paddle, were still in it."

"There's probably nothing left, but it wouldn't hurt to check it for prints. Maybe we'll get lucky," Sean suggested.

Fish nodded. "I asked them to check it, but I haven't gotten the results."

"So, let me make sure I have this right," Sean said. "Every member of the plant can account for their whereabouts except Maggie. Nobody came in during off-hours except for Byrley, and he didn't have the opportunity to do it. Harbaugh, if he did it, left the body in the truck while it was parked in front of the admin building for a half-hour. And nobody came through the gate that was unexpected? Does that about sum it up?"

"Pretty much."

Sean took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Shit."

Fish chuckled. "Now you know why I'm asking for help."

"It's been three days since they found the body and we don't know any more now than we did when we started. This is just what I wanted after only two weeks on the job," Sean groused, but his tone was light and good natured.

"I don't know what to do with it from here."

"To be honest, I don't either. It's Friday, so maybe putting it down over the weekend will give us a fresh perspective when we get back on Monday."

"I hope. I don't know what else to do with it. My gut tells me it isn't Harbaugh, but I have no idea how it could be anyone but him."

Fish paused and Sean could tell something was bothering him. "What's up?"

"I had vacation scheduled for next week. I suppose I can cancel it if you need me to."

"Oh, that's right. No, don't do that. Who's covering for you?"

"Campbell and Limbrose."

Sean grimaced. Keith and Paul were too green and it wouldn't be fair to them. "Leave your file with me. I'll keep picking away at it while you're gone. Maybe I can come up with something while you're out enjoying yourself." He smiled. "I guess I can't expect my officers to do all the work. Where're you going?"

"Thanks. We're headed to Georgia to spend a few days with Laura's parents. They bought us a crib and a few other things, so we're going down there to pick them up."

"Don't worry about it. This is a tough one. No obvious motive and no suspects. That, or too many suspects, depending on how you look at it." Sean shook his head as his lips thinned. "I think you've done the best you can with the information you have available. I can't see where you've missed anything. As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes the bad guys get away with it. If we don't get a break of some kind, this may be one of those."

"That galls me," Fish said, his voice hard. "My first big case and I'm left yanking on my wiener."

Sean chuckled. "Like I said, I've been in your shoes. I assume you heard about the two big cases my task force broke?"

"Yeah."

"What you probably haven't heard is the fifty or so we couldn't solve, or hadn't solved yet. Don't let it get you down. Given enough time, something usually breaks… but not always. A couple of the cases we worked on had been going on for months, and some were technically active but nobody was working them because we'd run out of things to chase down." He shrugged. "It happens."

"It still galls me."

Sean grinned. "I understand how that feels too."

The display on the phone read 911 Dsptch. "Sean," he said, picking up the handset.

"Chief? Steve Locoste is here to see you," Terri said.

"Send him back."

He closed his laptop and waited until Steve appeared in his door. "Have a seat. What can I do for you?" Sean asked, waving at a chair.

"I'm just following up on the Thacker investigation," Steve said as he settled into a chair across from Sean.

Sean shook his head. "Not much to tell. I just reviewed the case with Officer Fisher a couple of hours ago. This is a tough one."

"How so?"

"We have nothing to go on. Nearly everyone can account for their time almost around the clock, unless we're going to assume somebody slipped out without their spouse knowing, killed Thacker, and then left him in the trunk of their car until their shift began the next day, but even then, there's the problem of getting the body from the car to the ditch. We have one suspect who was near where the body was found in the time frame we're looking at, but he doesn't feel right."

"You're assuming it's someone at the plant? Who's your suspect?"

"I'm assuming nothing, but I have to start somewhere," Sean said, ignoring Steve's second question. "To be honest, I don't see how it could be one of them."

"You said nearly everyone could account for their time. Who couldn't?"

"Maggie Neese."

"That's interesting. Why can't she account for her time?"

"She lives alone. After she leaves, until she comes back to work, she has nobody to confirm her whereabouts."

"Could it be her? Is she your suspect?"

Sean laughed. "No. First off, I can't see Thacker letting her get that close to him with a wrench or whatever was used to whack him on the head, but even if she did manage to sneak up on him, Boyd was six-foot-tall and weighed around two hundred pounds. Maggie is what, maybe five-five and one forty? She'd have a tough time moving him around. Just the strength alone required to lift Thacker high enough to dump him over the wall suggests a man."

"How high is the wall?"

"About waist high. That's to me, and I'm seven or eight inches taller than she is."

Steve nodded. "You know she and Thacker had an ugly confrontation, right?"

"They did? I've heard about him wanting to have her charged with neglect or something."

"Yeah. He was all over the news with that crap and they were lapping it up. He was in front of the plant with his supporters one day as she was leaving. The people were in the road, and as she eased through them, he was banging on the window of her car, yelling at her about what they were hiding, demanding her resignation, all kinds of crap. Made the news."

"Nice," Sean said with a crooked smile.

"Yeah, after that, Bill started running them off, or arresting them if they didn't clear out when he told them too." Steve grinned. "I heard Rudy wanted you to chase them off and you refused."

"If they'd been doing that, I would've shut them down, but all they were doing was waving signs around and being loud. Nothing illegal about that."

"No, I suppose not, but of all the people at the plant, Maggie probably had the biggest grudge against him because she was the focus of his… wrath, I guess is the best term."

"Maybe so, but I can't arrest someone because they didn't like the victim or had a grudge."

"You know the stew festival is a week from tomorrow, right?"

"So?"

"Having people out protesting during the festival looks bad on the city."

"The protesters are at the wastewater plant. That's not where you're holding the festival, is it?"

Steve snickered. "No, but what if they disrupt the festival? Before, when the spill was in the news, they were parading around in front of city hall. That would put them at the edge of what normally gets blocked off for the festival. It would be just like them to try to do that again, just to stir up trouble and hurt the city."

"If they do, we'll deal with them then."

"Good enough. Just a suggestion… take a closer look at Maggie. I understand what you're saying about her being a woman and all, but I know she hated Thacker."

"Enough to kill him in cold blood?"

Steve shrugged. "Maybe he got into her face somewhere and it was self-defense. I don't know. I just know of all the people who had contact with him, she was the one he was after the most, and she couldn't stand the sight of him. Maybe you should talk to Perry, her boss, and see what he has to say."

"Why are you trying to set her up?"

"I'm not!" Steve protested, raising his hands in surrender. "But you landed in the middle of this and probably don't know all the background. You said yourself you were stuck. Personally, I don't think she did it, but it might be something worth looking into."

"Thanks for the info. I'll follow up with it."

Steve grinned as he rose. "Just trying to help. It doesn't seem fair that you're already in the soup after only three weeks on the job."

Sean smiled. "As I overheard one of my officers say the other day, 'If it were raining gravy, my bowl would be upside down.' I'm not entirely sure what that means, but somehow it seems to fit."

Steve chuckled. "I think you're going to fit in just fine down here. We just need to do something about your accent. Try saying, 'fixin,' 'y'all,' and 'over yonder' now and then." Sean gave 'y'all' a try, causing Steve to laugh. "Keep working on it… you'll get it."

"Maggie, its Sean. Can you give me the tour of the plant you promised me? At least to the point where the body was found?"

"Any time."

"Is now good?"

"Sure. Come on down."

"Good. I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

He hung up the phone and rose from his desk, picking up his jacket as he stepped out of his office. "I'm going to the waste treatment plant," he said, sticking his head into the dispatcher's office.

Kim gave him a wave of acknowledgement, but was obviously occupied talking to one of the officers.

He'd spent the weekend, off and on, going over Fish's notes, and found nothing. Fish had been very thorough and he could find no fault with what he'd done. Everyone and everything had checked out. The primary suspects had to be Maggie Neese or Kevin Harbaugh. Maggie because she was the only person who couldn't account for her whereabouts, and Kevin because he was the only person who had a realistic opportunity to get the body to the ditch. Kevin and Maggie may be the lead suspects, but neither of them were a good fit for the few facts they had. Now he was going back to square one to try to get a fingerhold on the case. Everyone stated the body couldn't have come into plant through the process, and while he believed them, he wanted to see for himself.

It was a crisp, North Carolina winter morning, with a warm sun and azure skies. As he approached the plant's gate, he noticed the entire area was blanketed in a thick fog. "Sean McGhee to see Maggie Neese," he said after pressing the gate call button. A moment later the gate began to open. He pulled through the gate and parked in front of the admin building. "Keeping the gate closed?" he asked as he stepped inside.

"For now, until we're sure the whackos don't come back," Maggie replied.

"What's with all the fog?"

"It does that when it's cold. It normally burns off by ten or eleven."

"Will we be able to see?"

She shrugged. "Well enough I think. Depends on what you want to see."

"I'm still stumped over how the body got into the plant. I know you said it couldn't come through the process, and everyone agrees with you, but I want to see for myself."

"Where's Tom? I've already shown him all of this."

"He's in Georgia this week but this case, it's bugging me, and I thought I'd take a crack at it and see if I can come up with some fresh ideas."

"Okay. You want to walk?"

"We can drive. I'm only interested in the process to where the body was found."

She grinned. "Well, this won't take long then." They got into his car and he followed the road around the plant. "Stop here," she said as they began to turn the corner to drive down beside the ditch where Thacker was found. He pulled off the road into the grass, and they stepped out of the car.

"Okay, this is the dump pit," she said, leading him across the road toward a concrete pad that sloped into the ground with thick walls holding back the earth. Standing beside the pit was a spigot with a water hose looped around a holder. "Remember when I said industries bring in loads? If someone comes in and dumps a load of waste, this is where it happens. It goes straight into our influent stream from here."

There wasn't a lot to see. The dump pit was big enough for a large truck to back into, with a watermelon size hole at the lowest point. It was obvious from the way the pad sloped from the front and sides it was designed to funnel liquid into the opening. The hole was large enough to pass a lot of liquid very quickly, but was still far too small to pass a body.

"Okay. He obviously didn't go through there."

"No, but even if he did, the screen would have caught him. That's next."

She led him down a masonry path, and then up some stairs to a concrete platform with a large open mesh steel grate section in the floor. Below their feet was the sound of rushing water.

"This is our influent. Sewage from all over ABT comes in here."

"ABT?"

"Sorry. Abbyville, Brunswick, and Tilley. The city contracts water and sewer services to the towns of Abbyville and Tilley. That's why, even though Brunswick's population is only about ten-thousand, the plant is designed to handle eight million gallons a day."

"That doesn't mean anything to me," he admitted.

"The plant was upgraded about ten years ago with the idea of hooking Abbyville and Tilley onto our system. The ABT area is about twenty-three thousand people total, and we built in some extra capacity to allow for growth." She stepped up to a yellow meter under a protective cover and squinted. "We're running about three point five at the moment, but this is a slower part of the day. From about ten in the morning through about four in the afternoon, and between six and ten at night, we may hit six or seven million gallons, and then it may drop to as low as one million in the middle of the night."

"That's million gallons a day, right?"

"Right. If the flow continued like this for twenty-four hours, it would come out to three and a half million gallons."

"That's a lot of shit," he said and then smiled.

She gave him a sideways grin. "I've been doing this for nearly twenty years, and I've heard every shit joke you can make."

"Sorry."

"It's okay. Most of this is just water, obviously. Every time you flush, shower, brush your teeth, or wash a load of clothes or dishes, it comes here. Solid wastes are only a very small fraction of what we take in." She jerked her thumb at a near vertical conveyer belt made from interlocking pieces of metal that reminded Sean of chainmail. Extending from the belt in offset rows were wicked looking thin pieces of metal, about an inch long, with hooks on the end that formed teeth. "Remember the screen I told you about? That's it. The water passes through it, and anything that won't pass through the mesh is trapped. It's not moving now, but every five minutes or so it will move, putting a new section of screen into the flow. All the crap that it traps, that stuff you see hanging on it, is scraped off as it goes over the top and is dumped into the dumpster sitting under that cover."

"What's this trough?" Sean asked, stepping to the side and looking through the grating over another channel.

"That's our bypass. If we need to bypass the screen for some reason, we can send the water that way." She gave him a quick smile. "Before you ask, no, we didn't do a bypass, but even if we did, there's another screen in there, a bar screen. It won't catch stuff as fine as the regular screen, but it'll catch anything the size of your hand or bigger. The only time we bypass is if we're working on the mechanical screen or we're taking in more water than we can push through it."

Sean nodded in understanding. "Well, he obviously didn't go this way either."

"Right. As you can see, there's no way for the body to get past this. Even if he'd managed to come through the mains somehow, one of the big lift stations would have ground him up like hamburger long before he got here. That or he would've plugged the pump, which would have triggered a high wet well alert, and we'd have found him there."

Sean looked around, but it was pretty clear, even to him, this would have trapped the body. "Since I'm here, I guess you might as well show me the rest."

She led him down a series of steps to a large box, perhaps thirty feet square, with a large opening that looked like a giant storm drain on one side. "This is our grit system!" she said, raising her voice to be heard over the roar of falling water. "The water comes from the screen, which removes the large chunks, and into this box! You can't see it, but there is a huge cone, kind of like an ice cream cone, just under the water! The water pours into the center then runs out the sides! The small stuff, too small for the screen to catch, is forced to the bottom where an auger takes it away! Once every couple of days, we come out here with our skid-steer, scoop it up, and put it in the dumpster!"

"So even if the body managed to get past the screen, it would have been trapped here?"

"Yep! And before you ask, no, there is no bypass on this! Officer Fisher and I have done this once already, and that was always the question he asked!"

"Okay, I'm convinced! The body had to have been dumped into the ditch!"

"Yeah! There's one more stop! From here, after the water runs through that opening, the water is divided into two paths, one for each ditch!"

She led him down a set of stairs, leaving the roaring water behind and stopped by three basins, each about twenty feet square.

"These are technically part of the oxidation ditch. This is where we adjust the chemistries of the influent stream to start the breakdown of the incoming waste by pumping in bugs and nutrients left over from the process after we pull off the clean water. Under the water there's a pipe that connects each basin to the next one in line. These three basins feed ditch two, those three over there, ditch one. The pipe is forty inches in diameter and is down about twenty feet, so he'd have to be neutral buoyant and floating at just the right depth, otherwise he would either get caught on the bottom, or float over the pipe. In addition, you can flow a lot of water through the pipe, but I can't see a body flowing through one. Not enough current and he would probably hang up, just like he did at the scum skimmer. From here it goes into the ditch where he was found."

He scrubbed at his mouth. They were right back where they started. How had the body gotten into the plant? "Thank you. This has been informative."

She grinned, her eyes crinkling with mirth. "Now that you've seen it for yourself, do you believe me when I said the body had to have been dumped in the ditch?"

"I believed you before, but yeah, I think I've seen enough."

They walked back to his car. After starting the engine to get the heater going for Maggie, they sat a moment, Sean leaning on the steering wheel as he stared out of the windshield, puzzling over the problem of Thacker's body getting into the plant. He looked at her. "Do you have any thoughts on how the body might have gotten into the facility?"

She joined him in staring out of the windshield as she blinked slowly, clearly thinking it over, then met his gaze. "I've been thinking about it, but no. I can't come up with anything. I would stake my life on the fact none of my guys did it. Did you ever find out how long the body had been in the ditch?"

"Four to seven days according to what the ME said."