Deadly Waters Pt. 07

When Sean returned to his office, he opened the Thacker file and thumbed through it until he found what he was looking for. He studied the photo of the weights that had been attached to Thacker's body for a moment. He'd only gotten a quick look, but from what he saw, the weights on Locoste's truck were the same size, shape and color as those in the photo.

He stood and walked down to the dispatcher's office. "Do you know where I can buy individual free weights?" he asked as he stuck his head into the office.

"Free weights?" Kim asked.

"Yeah, those things that go onto the bar weightlifters use."

She thought a moment. "No, not really. Maybe one of the sporting goods stores in Raleigh or Fayetteville. Hang on, I bet Chips knows." She pressed a button on her console to activate her mic. "Unit 1016, 10-21 the station. The chief wants to talk to you."

"10-21 means call?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"One of these days I'll learn all the codes."

She grinned and slyly pulled a laminated card out from under the computer keyboard. "Want a cheat sheet?"

He chuckled. "No, that's okay. I'm not too proud to ask you to tell me in English until I learn them all."

A moment later the main number began to ring. "Brunswick Police Department," Kim said into the phone, and then handed it up to Sean. "It's Chips."

"Hey, Chips, I have a question. If I wanted to buy individual free weights, where would I go?"

"Free weights? Like weightlifting?"

"Yeah. I'm looking for a specific ten-pound weight, and I'm hoping to purchase it locally."

There was a pause. "Does this have anything to do with Thacker?"

"It does."

"I don't remember what the weights look like, but I'd try Dick's and Omega Sports in Fayetteville."

"Thanks."

"You need any help?"

"Not at the moment. My advice is to stay as far away from this as you can get. I'm afraid it's going to get ugly."

"It's Locoste, isn't it?"

"I'd rather not say, for obvious reasons."

"Gotcha, but if you need some extra hands, I've got two."

"Thanks. I'll keep that in mind."

"Go get 'em, chief."

Sean grinned and hung up the phone. "I've got something to take care of. I'll be out of the area for a while. If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I'll get back in touch with them."

"You got it. When do you expect to be back?"

"Two, maybe three hours."

She smiled. "I've got your back."

"Thanks," he said, and then stepped out of the office. With one or two exceptions, Brunswick had a professional and dedicated police force.

He went back to his office and picked up the photo of the weights along with his keys. It was time to get crafty.

He was on his way back to Brunswick from his final stop. Both Dick's and Omega had individual weights of the proper size, but neither of them looked anything like the one in the photo. When he got back to the office, he'd Google it and see if he could find a match on-line. He exited the interstate, and as he rolled to a stop at the end of the ramp, he could see Brunswick's Wal-Mart across the street. He needed to make a left, but on a hunch, he backed up and pulled into the right turn lane. Wal-Mart had everything, and he wondered if they had weights.

It took a bit of wandering around before he found the small sporting goods section tucked away in the back of the massive super-store. With a little more searching, he found the aisle that contained the weights and weight sets, and smiled in triumph. He checked the photo to be sure, but neatly stacked on the bottom shelf were 2.5-, 5-, 10-, and 25-pound weights of the same style as the weights in the photo. He picked up one of the ten-pound weights and carried it to the front where he used a self-checkout register, pocketing the receipt so he could expense it back to the city. Walking out, he checked the time. It was almost three, but he decided to follow through with his idea.

He drove to LoCoste Adhesives, following the road around to the back of the plant where he knew the truck was parked. He was looking for someone who worked among the tanks and machinery at the back of the plant, someone who would be familiar with the loading of the truck. He rounded the corner and rolled to a stop, watching a man wearing a helmet crouching among the tanks, a bright, flickering light flashing on his body. He was in luck and wouldn't have to track someone down. Leaving some space between himself and the welder, Sean stepped out of his car, weight in hand, and approached the man, being careful to not look directly at the arc.

"Excuse me!" Sean called.

The man turned and pushed his welding helmet up. "Can I help you?" he asked as he got to his feet.

"Yeah. Sean McGhee, Brunswick Police Department."

"I didn't do it, I swear!" the man said with a grin. He removed his heavy gloves and helmet, laying the items aside, and then walked toward Sean. "Frank Reynolds. How can I help you?"

"Nice to meet you, Frank. I bumped into Steve at the wastewater treatment plant earlier today and I think he left this," Sean said, extending the weight to Frank.

"Okay. I'll put it back on the truck," Frank replied, taking the weight. "You didn't have to bring it all the way out here. He could have picked it up the next time he was there."

"I didn't mind. I wanted to get another look at the place anyway. Steve gave me a quick tour of the facility the other day, but I didn't see much back here. Business must be booming, huh?"

"Pretty steady. Why?"

Sean shrugged. "Just asking. Steve has been making a lot of trips to the wastewater plant lately. I just assumed business must be up."

Frank looked at him and Sean could see the creeping suspicion in his eyes. "Like I said, production's been pretty steady," Frank said slowly.

"That's good. Better to have a steady run, I suppose, than peaks and valleys."

"Yeah."

"Have you gotten your production problem sorted out?"

"What production problem?"

Sean waved it off. "Nothing. I thought Steve said he was having some problems, and that's why he's dumping so often."

"No," Frank replied, his tone telegraphing that he was becoming uncomfortable with all the questions. "We're not dumping any more often than normal. We're hauling out a load every two or three weeks, just like always."

"How much waste can you hold on site?"

"About fifteen thousand gallons, but we normally try to keep the tank between a quarter and half full. If we empty it, the stuff sets up in the valve and then somebody has to go in there and clean it out."

Sean could tell if he asked many more questions, Frank was going to start balking. It was also clear Frank recognized the weight and knew it went on the truck. He desperately wanted to ask what the weights were for, but he couldn't figure out how to work it into the conversation without tipping his hand that Steve hadn't actually left the weight behind. He decided not to press, not wanting to spook Frank any more than he already had.

"Amazing operation you have here. I like to see companies keeping jobs in the states."

Frank smiled and nodded in agreement. "Yeah. Us too."

"I'll let you get back to work. I didn't mean to interrupt. I just wanted to drop that off."

"No problem, officer."

"Nice talking with you."

"Same here."

Sean walked back to his car before giving Frank a friendly wave as he drove past. Sean kept an eye on him in his rearview, wanting to see if the welder was immediately going to report that he'd been there, but Frank returned to his task. Something was going on. Steve and Frank's accounts were wildly different, and it was the first real proof, circumstantial though it was, that Steve's story was off.

He drove until he was out of sight of the plant, and then stopped on the side of the road, glancing at the clock and flipping on his strobes. It was 3:46, but maybe Maggie was still in the office. He dialed her number, the phone ringing until her voicemail picked up. He hung up, not leaving a message. He'd contact her in the morning and get the dump records. If they showed Steve dumping every six to eight weeks prior to Thacker's death, as Maggie said, he might have enough for a warrant.

He returned to his office and added his observations and Frank's comments to the Thacker file. The case was starting to jell, and the pieces were slowly falling into place. He was convinced now that Steve had been dumping illegally for some time, that Thacker had finally caught him in the act, and Steve had killed him for it. He'd damned near gotten away with it, too.

Sean leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes under his glasses. He was going to have to be sure. Evie said the city council would back him, but when it came right down to it, he was accusing one of their own of murder, and that probably wouldn't sit very well with any of them. He had no solid proof, no smoking gun to point to. All he had was circumstantial evidence and a gut feeling. He sat up. It didn't matter if Steve was a member of the city council, the mayor, or the Governor of North Carolina. If he could find proof Steve was guilty of the murder of Boyd Thacker, he'd bring him down, and let the chips fall where they may.

He checked the clock on his computer. His day was done. He'd had a major breakthrough on the case that had been kicking his ass, and he was in a mood to celebrate and share a beer with a friend. Unfortunately, he didn't know anyone well enough to call and hang out with. It would be him and Marmalade tonight, and they would have their own little celebration. He'd open a can of tuna for Marmalade, the lucky little shit, and he'd have a beer while they kicked back and watched something on Netflix.

He grinned to himself as he rose from behind his desk, wondering how many forty-year-old men were jealous of his wild and carefree lifestyle.

"Sean? What are you doing here?" Maggie asked as he stepped out of his car.

He'd arrived before her, and he'd seen her face twitch in curiosity as she pulled her car to a stop beside his. "I need to talk to you, privately."

"Okay," she nodded. "I need to check in with the night operators. Give me a few minutes to get settled." He waited in her office for ten minutes while she scurried about, getting her day started. "Okay, what's so important?" she asked as she entered her office and sat down behind her desk.

He pushed the door shut without rising from his chair. "I'm almost sure the man I'm looking for is Steve Locoste."

She stared at him a moment. "How can you be sure?"

"I stopped by his plant yesterday afternoon and snooped around a little. I spoke to one of his maintenance men and he told me LoCoste Adhesives has been trucking out a load of waste every two or three weeks for a long time. I didn't ask how long because I couldn't figure out how to do it without making the guy even more suspicious and causing him to clam up, but I got the impression it's been going on for a while, not just the last few weeks."

"Okay, what's that got to do with me?"

"I want all the dump records for as far back as you have them."

"You'll have to go to city hall to get that. Most of that stuff, the billing records and whatnot, are archived there as part of the public record. You'll only be able to go back five years, though, because that's all the law requires us to keep. The previous logbook might go back a little farther because we can usually get three or four years out of one book."

He grunted. "I don't need the billing records, just the log of what's been dumped. How far back can you go and still get your hands on them reasonably easily?"

"A few years probably. Whatever is in the dump book by the front door."

"The one I saw him filling out yesterday?"

"Yeah."

"Can I look at it?" he asked.

"Sure, but I thought you had a copy already."

He shook his head. "Not of the whole thing." He sprang from his chair and returned a moment later with the ledger in his hands. He flipped it to the first page and checked the initial entry. "Looks like this goes back about three years. Can I make a copy of this before I leave?"

"All of it?"

"Unless I can have the book."

"No, you can copy it. As sure as you take it, someone will show up to dump a load of something."

"Okay, thanks," he said. "Now, if he wasn't bringing the loads here, where could he be taking them?"

"Legally, you mean?"

"Yeah. I want to make sure all my bases are covered."

"I suppose he could take it to Raleigh or Fayetteville. Maybe Goldsboro. We're the closest, but it's not out of the realm of possibility he could take them to another site."

"Can you check on that for me?"

She shrugged. "Sure, I guess." She dug around in her desk a moment before pulling out her contacts book.

"I'm going to go copy this," he said, waving the book.

"Okay. There are two plants in Fayetteville and Raleigh. Do you want me to check both, or just the closer of the two?"

"Both please. Better to be sure."

"Okay, you got it. I'm going to go make some coffee, and then I'll start making phone calls."

He stepped out of the office and spent the next twenty minutes copying pages out of the book. When he finished, he collected the papers, returned the book to its location by the front door, and then stepped back into Maggie's office.

"I'm on hold with E.M. Johnson," she said as he returned to her office. She was rocked back in her chair and swiveled slowly, as if bored, the phone held loosely to her ear with her hand covering the mouthpiece.

"Where's that?"

"Raleigh," she said and then immediately perked up, tipping forward in the chair. "Jenson! Maggie Neese, how are you this morning?" Sean settled into a guest chair and listened. He could only hear Maggie's side of the conversation, but he didn't need to hear it all. "That's good. Listen, I have a question for you. Are you accepting waste from LoCoste Adhesives?" She paused and rolled her eyes. "Nothing to worry about. It's a bookkeeping thing. We're accepting his waste and there's some confusion over here. I'm trying to make sure we're charging him properly." She was quiet as she listened. "You're sure?" There was another pause. "Okay, thanks." She hung up the phone. "Nothing at Neuse River either." She flipped through her book. "I'll try South Harnett next."

"That's in Fayetteville?"

She nodded as she ran her finger down a page, and then dialed. "Lee Ord, please." She paused a moment. "Maggie Neese, Lizard Lick Creek WWTP." Another pause. "Thanks." She turned her attention back to Sean. "I'd be surprised if he's using Fayetteville, since they're the farthest away," she explained as she waited for Lee to pick up. They sat in silence for a long moment. "This early in the morning everyone is running around," she added with a grin to fill the growing silence.

He was beginning to wonder if Lee was going to answer the phone when Maggie suddenly stiffened. "Hey, Lee. Maggie Neese. How are you this morning?" Pause. "Good. Listen, I'm hoping you can answer a question for me. Are you accepting waste from LoCoste Adhesives?" Pause. "You're sure?" Another pause. "Okay, thanks."

"Nothing?" he asked.

"Nope. Who's next? Goldsboro or Spring Lake? You pick."

"Spring Lake is in Fayetteville? Might as well try them."

She dialed again, and as he listened, she gave the same song and dance, and then repeated the procedure at Goldsboro. "Nothing at Goldsboro," she said as she hung up. "They typically don't accept outside waste, but they're the closest, so I thought I'd check, just to make sure. If he's not dumping illegally, he's driving a lot farther than he needs to, which makes no sense. Actually, going someplace other than here makes no sense, period. We're giving him a better deal than he's going to get anywhere else."

"Thanks. Anything you can think of that I've missed? Any question I should have asked but didn't?"

She paused as she thought it over. "You're sure this sudden increase in dumping isn't just a fluke?"

Sean pulled his lips tight and gave his head a quick shake. "I don't think so. I made sure he knows you're monitoring the river. He's trapped. He can't dump in the river, and he can't store it on sight. I'm kind of surprised he hasn't started going somewhere else to try to cover his tracks. Of course, that wouldn't explain what he was doing before Thacker's death."

"It's not that easy. You can't just roll into a wastewater plant and dump a load. There's a lot of paperwork and testing that has to be completed first. He probably thought nobody would notice, or he could explain it away, and then go back to dumping in the river after a couple of trips. If he's dumping. I still have a hard time believing he'd be that stupid."

"If he is dumping, he's been getting away with it for a long time."

She shook her head. "Yeah, but he had to know that eventually it'd catch up with him... wouldn't he?"

"That's not how people think. The jails are full of people who thought they were going to get away with it. And think about it, if Thacker hadn't been such a bulldog, he'd still be getting away with it."

"I guess. I don't understand it myself. It seems like a lot of risk for not much gain."

"A quarter of a million dollars is a lot of gain."

"Going to prison for illegal dumping, and now, murder, is a lot of loss, too."

"I can't argue against you there." He stood. "I'm going to the station to look through these entries. If I want the rest of the records, I'll have to go to city hall?"

"Yeah."

He made a face. "I'm not exactly popular there at the moment. Hopefully these are enough. Thanks for everything."

"You're welcome. Do you want me to keep testing the river?"

"For a little while longer, if you can. I don't want something to slip past now."

"Okay. I just wanted to check. It's squeezing my lab a little."

He grinned. "I guess I better bring another couple of boxes of doughnuts. Chocolate glazed, right?"

She smiled. "It couldn't hurt."

"Consider it done."

Sean placed the stack of papers on his desk and sat down, dragging his laptop over in front of him. He spent the next hour finding all the entries where Steve had logged a load, entered the date into a spreadsheet, and then marked the line with a yellow highlighter so he could make sure he didn't miss any. When he flipped over the last page, he rechecked the pages, looking for entries he missed, before he quickly wrote a formula to calculate the number of weeks between each entry. The results were clear. Over the past three years and two months, excluding the last eight weeks, Steve was dumping a load on average every 7.62 weeks. For the last two months, that average jumped to a load every 2.23 weeks. He was disposing of almost four times the waste he was previously, and that matched what Frank, Steve's maintenance man, said was normal.

"I've got you," Sean muttered to himself. He printed the spreadsheet off and added it to the file, along with all the copied pages from the logbook. "I'm going to the magistrate's office. Be back later," he said to Claire as he stepped through the lobby, the Thacker file in his hand.

As he drove to Faulkner, the county seat for Siouan County, he went over in his mind everything about the case, trying to make sure he had all his facts straight and wasn't overlooking something obvious. He didn't want to look like an idiot by having the magistrate ask him a question he didn't have an answer to.

"Magistrate, nice to meet you," Sean said as he stepped into the office.

The magistrate's office wasn't large, but it was nicely appointed, looking like a scaled down court room without a jury box. On the oak paneled wall behind the desk was the Siouan County seal, with the American and State of North Carolina flags flanking it. To complete the courtroom like setting, a silver haired man in a black robe sat behind an imposing wooden desk. At the front edge of the desk was a wood and stainless-steel name plate with the magistrate's name, Henry Vison, engraved in bold black letters, with the words Siouan County Magistrate below in slightly smaller letters.