The pottery maker was happy to see the thief that morning. It seemed that he had a consignment of pottery that had to get to San Diego, and the truck he’d planned to use had transmission problems. Pepe had a pasaporte, a laminated border-crossing card good for seventy-two-hour visits to the U.S. but not good more than twenty-five miles from the border. Since the delivery was to San Diego, Pepe could do the job for him, and when Pepe returned to Tijuana, Rubén would pay him top price for the delivery, and take the stolen truck off his hands for a good price.
Striking a deal was a sure thing, so while the two men haggled over details, one of Rubén Ochoa’s workers carried the pottery consignment to the van while another spray-painted the doors to obliterate GREEN EARTH HAULING AND DISPOSAL.
Still another worker drove to a nearby junkyard to buy an ignition with a key that worked, to replace the damaged one. While en route, he stole a pair of Mexican license plates from a truck parked on the street.
The U.S. Customs officers might check license plates, but they’d seldom do a check on vehicle identification numbers, and if they did, Pepe was prepared to say that he couldn’t find his vehicle registration card. And he could even produce bogus documentation claiming that he was the owner/hauler of the pottery.
By the time that Pepe was ready to leave for the Otay Mesa border gate, he wasn’t feeling well. The little thief was perspiring, and had a terrible headache. Also, he had to keep swallowing saliva that kept forming in his mouth. He ran to the toilet and vomited, feeling a little better afterward.
Influenza was going around Colonia Libertad, and the other colonias as well. He’d been stricken by it a week ago and, until now, thought he was getting better. Pepe hoped that the wait at U.S. Customs would not be a long one. He wanted to deliver the pottery, get back to Tijuana, buy some marijuana, and go to bed until the fever passed.
Luis Zúniga, though younger, had always been stronger than his friend Jaime Cisneros. Jaime had asthma and had been sickly all his life, but even Luis got nauseated after they’d tipped over the drum full of oily liquid. The liquid was slimy and smelled terrible. Both children knew it was not motor oil, new or reclaimed. Luis got splashed with the stuff, but Jaime got absolutely drenched. It splashed onto their faces, hands and clothing, and they ran to Luis’s house to rinse it off as best they could in a tub of water outside.
Luis got very sick to his stomach when he went to bed that night, and he developed the worst headache of his life. His mother gave him aspirin but it didn’t help. Jaime got what his mother thought was his worst asthma attack ever. In the middle of the night she gave him some medicine but he couldn’t hold it down. He tried his inhaler but it didn’t seem to have any effect.
The mother of Jaime Cisneros became extremely frightened when her son began to salivate. He started drooling like a hungry dog. He also got very short of breath, but the most frightening thing of all was that his pupils seemed to bounce!
Jaime’s mother got a flashlight and looked into her son’s eyes. One pupil looked small, one looked large. Then they seemed to trade sizes! Within fifteen minutes he was convulsing. By the time the uncle of Jaime Cisneros drove the boy to the Hospital Civil, Jaime was not conscious.
Later that morning Luis Zúniga was admitted to the same hospital with symptoms similar to Jaime’s. He had lost control of bowels and bladder during the night. He had tried to get up to get a drink of water, but his vision was so blurred that he tripped over a kitchen chair and fell. His father found him on the floor and drove him to the hospital.
After examining Luis Zúniga a doctor asked the boy’s mother what her son had had to eat the night before. His symptoms were similar to a person who had been poisoned, the doctor said. He asked if the rest of the family was all right.
She told the doctor that her family was well, but then she remembered that Luis had been playing with his friend Jaime Cisneros all evening, and they had come home very late. She suspected that the boys had bought tamales from a street vendor. She’d always warned Luis about street vendors. They used cat and dog meat in their tamales, she’d always told her son.
CHAPTER 8
No sex appeal is what they always said about cases involving hazardous waste. By that they meant no jury appeal.
“How do you take a bubbling vat of hazardous waste before a jury?” a deputy district attorney had once rhetorically asked D.A.’s Investigator Nell Salter when she’d wanted a criminal complaint against a waste hauler.
“Well, what if we drape a little silk and lace on the acid drum and hang a dildo on the flange?” Nell had suggested, before calling it a day and giving up on a case that had cost her at least one hundred investigative hours.
That was everybody’s attitude when it came to environmental crime. Nobody cared about it because nobody knew much about it, least of all the cops. The field was too new, too esoteric, too unsexy, and there was almost no case law. Clint Eastwood would never ask the owner of a dioxin-producing paper company to “make his day.”
When Nell had been assigned to the unit back in 1985, she and another investigator, Hugh Carter, had simply shaken hands and said, “Now what?”
The District Attorney’s Fraud Unit had been given the job of investigating environmental crimes. There were about fifty of them in the unit: attorneys, accountants, investigators and assistants, all sharing a floor in a downtown bank building because the county building was not large enough. The Fraud Unit could be housed in a privately owned high rise because their clientele wouldn’t frighten the other tenants of the building as ordinary street criminals might do.
Their quarters were cramped, and Nell’s view was of the downtown homeless. She had a cubicle containing a small desk, two chairs, a computer, a bookshelf and a file cabinet. Investigators were not entitled to a full wall so she had to settle for a three-quarter divider, but she also had an unobstructed view of the common bathroom in a nearby residential hotel. Nell learned that both men and women had some weird bathroom rituals.
There’d been no training and very little information available on the subject of environmental crime back when Nell was assigned. In the early years most cases dealing with the illegal disposal of toxic waste merely involved lawsuits by the county. Then dumping became a misdemeanor, and sometimes a “wobbler” felony that could be prosecuted as a misdemeanor, depending upon the circumstances.
But at last the laws had been given teeth, fangs in fact. For a hazardous waste hauler who “should have known” of intentional dumping there were new felony provisions for a determinate sentence of sixteen months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months in prison, and a fine of up to $100,000 per day per offense, with a mandatory minimum of $5,000 per day. If someone suffered great bodily injury as a result of the dumping, the perpetrator could get thirty-six months added to his sentence, along with a fine of $250,000 for every day that the material was actively exposed. The county’s share from that kind of money made the bureaucrats and politicians pay attention to environmental crime.
When Nell Salter and Hugh Carter started out they referred to all hazardous waste as “methyl-ethyl bad-shit,” until gradually they began to learn a thing or two. Once, an EPA Super Fund team of chemists and waste handlers had made an error cleaning up a dump site that involved a large quantity of nitric acid. A lot of workers ended up with a snootful of acid and cyanide fumes, the very thing used to execute people within the walls of San Quentin Prison. That made Nell and Hugh more anxious to read all they could about any methyl-ethyl bad-shit they might encounter, so as not to get up-close-and-personal to suspicious containers with strange contents.