“How long’s it been here?” he asked, reaching into his back seat and pulling out a bulging canvas briefcase.
“Several days. We don’t know for sure.”
We slid out of the car’s warm embrace and approached the truck.
“You know why it was abandoned?”
“It broke down.”
We both stopped by the puddle under the Mack’s rear gate, where Mason, apparently unimpressed by the sharp odor, crouched down, placed his case on the ground beside him, and opened it up. Inside were a variety of vials and small bottles, stoppered test tubes, and packs of swabs. He rummaged among them, selecting what he needed, and collected a sample from the dark ooze before him.
After several minutes of this, he rose and glanced up at the dump body’s rim. “Anyone been inside that?”
“We looked over the headboard from the cab, just to see what was there. That’s as close as any of us wanted to get.”
Mason smiled grimly and returned to his car. “Smart.”
He quickly outfitted himself in a billowy white jumpsuit, booties, gloves, and a respirator, speaking as he did so. “Pretty toxic stuff, so far. Probably a cocktail mix of solvents, oils, and God knows what. The lab boys’ll have to sort it out. My guess is it was either in drums or more likely, crushed bales, which would explain how it got mixed together. Course, some of it’s just old-fashioned engine oil. It’s that time of year.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“When they carry these loads in winter, a lot of it sticks to the bed if they don’t coat it with oil. Even these idiots know enough not to want to wade in there kicking it loose.”
He finished suiting up and waddled like an albino penguin back to the truck. With surprising dexterity, he scaled its side, paused on the rim, and vanished from view. I heard him land with a hollow, resonating thud on the inside.
“You okay?” I shouted, worried about the oil he’d mentioned.
His voice sounded distant and muffled through the respirator. “Okay.”
Half an hour later, from the relative warmth of Pat Mason’s car, I saw him reappear, his white suit smeared and dripping, holding several more samples in his fist. He disrobed standing on a small cloth square and then stuffed both the square and his suit into a clearly labeled, red plastic bag, which he carefully stowed in his trunk.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked him as he went through this much-rehearsed ritual.
“Well, whoever they are, they’re guilty as sin. They even had remnants of medical waste back there-worth its weight in gold when it comes to disposing of it. And I was right about the load being baled. That’s why there was so much leakage. They bundle up all sorts of junk-construction debris, motors full of PCP, medical waste, you name it, and then they pour additional liquid waste all over it. During the trip, it either gets absorbed, drips out the back unnoticed except by the poor bastard tailgating, or simply evaporates into the wind.”
“Where do they get it?” I asked, not having had to deal much with this type of crime. Brattleboro was considered a poor dumping spot, eighty percent of Vermont being sparsely populated and covered with forestland.
“Surprisingly, it’s often from legitimate sources,” he explained, storing his collection of samples into his canvas case. “Places like hospitals and construction sites get contacted by supposedly legit haulers. They might do a cursory check of the hauling license and paperwork, but they don’t know how to tell a fake from the real thing. So they pay whoever it is a huge amount of money-in perfectly good faith.”
“What kind of money?”
He paused, stretched, and looked up at the gray clouds overhead. So far this winter, it hadn’t snowed once. “Well, let’s see. One case we worked on not too long ago had a transfer station sending roll-offs to a construction site at fifteen hundred dollars a pop. When the station took back the full roll-offs later, they separated the contents, made money turning lumber into illegal bark mulch, which they dyed dark brown and sold to gardening supply stores, and more money on the scrap metal, which they sold legitimately. The rest they had trucked off, paying six hundred per roll-off, except that since the contents of each container had by now been compacted, they could fit the equivalent of maybe seven roll-offs into a single truck, which brought the total paid to the trucker to around forty-two hundred. That trucker in turn added to his profit by picking up some liquid waste, which he cocktailed into the load he already had, and then he cruised around till he found a recipient-in this case a landowner-hungry enough that he didn’t care he was filling his water table with pure shit. The landowner got two hundred a load. The trucker pocketed the rest. Everybody came out with a lot of spare change, most of it tax-free.”
“Except the landowner,” I said.
Mason laughed. “Don’t kid yourself. The one I’m talking about made forty thousand dollars in two months, just for standing by his back gate in the middle of the night with a flashlight in his hand. This doesn’t happen just every once in a while. It’s an ongoing business.”
I pulled the scrap of paper I’d found in the truck cab from my pocket, now encased in transparent plastic. “This may be just what you’re after, then. Directions to a farm near here. It was wedged between the seat cushions.”
He took it from me and studied it closely. “You know this place?”
“I’ve driven by it. I don’t know the owner. You up for a visit?”
Pat Mason smiled, returning the scrap of paper. “With you along as backup, sure. Some of these guys can get a little testy.”
I circled around to the car’s passenger side. “My pleasure.”
We headed north on Route 5, out of Brattleboro and toward the Dummerston town line. Technically, I might have contacted the county sheriff to let him know I was stepping onto his turf, but-also technically-this was now an ANR investigation, and I was going along by invitation, which, since any certified police officer in Vermont has jurisdiction throughout the state, I could do with a clear conscience.
“Do you think what you just described is what we’re looking at here?” I asked Mason, as we exchanged the congestion of the Putney Road for the gentle curves of its extension into the countryside.
“Gauging from the age and shape of the truck, I’d say it’s something more low-key-something like what another bunch was doing till we nailed ’em last month. Rented a U-Haul truck, got paid by local gas stations to get rid of their excess used tires-at two bucks per-and either paid someone fifty dollars to absorb it all, or-and this is how we found them through the paperwork they left behind-rented a storage unit, filled it with the tires, and walked away with over a thousand bucks in profits.
“Given the load I just sampled, though, I’d say we’re dealing with someone working between those two extremes, where the money’s in the midrange. Which still ain’t too bad, by the way-medical waste is more expensive than low-level nuclear stuff nowadays. I know one legitimate operator who gets about five hundred dollars to dispose of a single fifty-gallon drum of it. Even cocktailed, there might’ve been several of those drums in that truck.”
We ended up on a dirt lane, winding up a steep hill with woods on one side and fields on the other. Vermont is one amazing, lumpy, crazy quilt of highways, roads, paths, and trails, all heading off somewhere, often with authority, sometimes just to peter out for no apparent reason.
In this case, we came to a gate held shut by a piece of wood stapled to a loop of barbed wire. I got out, let Mason drive through, and closed the gate behind us. Over the top of a cleared hill and to the right eventually appeared a broken-back barn with one wall caved in, standing drunkenly next to a sagging wooden house that seemed to be sinking into the earth beneath it.