Black Oil, Red Blood Page 7

Judge Hooper nodded and fumbled with the phone. Dick showed him how to dial out.

  Anna refilled everyone’s drinks and settled down on the sofa. Poker games sure were fun.

  CHAPTER 10

  Nash and I arrived at Schaeffer’s, along with backup, in ten minutes.

  It wasn’t long before I realized I had talked myself into a situation that still wasn’t going to help me very much. As soon as I showed Nash the file stash, he was just going to have his guys cart everything back to the evidence locker. What to do? What to do?

  Once the house was clear, Nash ushered me inside.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I was thinking. You and your guys are not trained to read the kind of research Schaeffer has been compiling. What are you going to do if you can get your hands on these documents? You won’t know how to handle them.”

  “I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”

  “Even if you do, we’re talking about tens of thousands of sheets of paper. Time is of the essence. You’ll need help sifting through the stacks.”

  “I think we can manage.”

  “What if you can’t? What if there’s a single sheet of paper in there with a smoking gun and you guys miss it? It’s entirely possible. You don’t know the context of the case like I do,” I said. I hoped I wasn’t sounding as desperate as I felt. “The key piece of information that provides motive and points straight to the murderer could be right under your nose, and you wouldn’t know it because you don’t have a good grasp of the bigger picture.”

  “Quit stalling and show me where the files are.” Nash encircled my upper arm with his hand, preparing to forcibly usher me around the house if he had to.

  I shook him off. “I will. But I’m telling you, just like you need my help to find the files, you need my help to go through them. I’m offering my services free of charge. We’ll just take the boxes back to my house and I can—“

  “We’ll do no such thing.” Nash’s grip tightened on my arm. “Even if I decide to accept your help, the boxes are going back to the station.”

  “Okay, okay. Ease up on the grip, already.” He did, but only slightly. I took a few steps toward Schaeffer’s office. “So you’ll consider my offer?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  Deciding to give up for now, I led Nash into Schaeffer’s office, walked to the bookshelf, and pressed firmly in on the Arthur Conan Doyle book. Just like before, there was a soft click and a gap appeared between the bookshelf and the wall. I slid the shelf open wider to reveal the file boxes inside.

  Nash’s cell phone rang. “About time,” he muttered. “That’ll be my warrant.”

  Nash motioned for his guys to load up the boxes and then answered the phone.

  “Nash,” he said. “What? Yes, I can prove it.” A pause. “Based on my own testimony, that’s what.” Another pause. “Trust me, I know.” A look of incredulity spread over Nash’s face. “Well, she’s right here if you want to do it now.”

  Nash shifted positions uncomfortably, then handed the phone to me. “Judge Hooper wants to talk to you.”

  Hmm. Now this was an interesting development. I knew Judge Hooper in passing and had talked to him at various social functions before, but we were hardly on a first name basis.

  I took the phone. “Hello?”

  “Miss Taylor?” Judge Hooper’s high-pitched, aged voice crackled through the poor cell phone connection.

  “Yes, Judge Hooper?”

  “Did you break into that nice Dr. Schaeffer’s house tonight?”

  “Well. . .” I said, not wanting to lie to a judge, even though I wasn’t on the stand and technically wouldn’t be committing perjury.

  “Heh. Of course you didn’t. I didn’t figure a pretty little thing like you would. The very idea.”

  “You’re very kind,” I said.

  “Nonsense.” Judge Hooper lapsed into a coughing fit. “Gol’ darned cigar,” he said. “I’m too old for this. Hold on while I take a swig.”

  “Chloe?” Another voice shot across the airwaves and into my ear—a voice I was hoping not to hear until at least tomorrow.

  “Dick?” I asked.

  “Come tomorrow morning, you got a lot of explaining to do.”

  “According to Judge Hooper, I don’t,” I said.

  “Good thing the Hold ‘em game was tonight,” he said, “or you’d be up a creek. Also a good thing Judge Hooper appreciates your perky little bee-hind, ’cause anybody else’d be in custody right about now.”

  “I owe you one?” I asked, hardly believing the good ‘ol boys network in this town was working in my favor, for once. If only I could figure out how to exploit it all the time!

  “Darn right, you do,” Dick said.

  “Hey listen,” I said. “I hate to push my luck, but here’s the deal.” I told Dick about the files, carefully omitting the part where I broke in. “They’re about to be impounded as evidence, which means we’re going to have an awfully hard time reviewing them and making them available to a new expert in time for the next summary judgment hearing.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dick said. “Tell Nash to expect a call from the mayor. Where do you want the files?”

  “My house?” I asked. “I don’t think there’s enough room in the office.”

  “Sure. Fine.”

  I could hardly believe my luck. It was all I could do to keep from dancing around the room in glee. “Who’s winning?” I asked, remembering the game.

  “I am, of course.”

  Of course.

  “I want you on those files tonight,” Dick said. “Call Miles. Pull an all-nighter.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And holler at me tomorrow morning.”

  “You got it.”

  Dick hung up. I handed the phone back to Nash sheepishly. “You’re not getting a warrant tonight. I’m sorry to ruin your fun,” I said.

  Nash actually almost scowled. “No you’re not.”

  His phone rang again.

  “That’ll be the mayor,” I said.

  “The mayor? Who are you people?” Nash picked up the phone. “Hello sir,” he said. There was a pause. “But sir. . .” Another pause. “Yes sir.”

  Nash’s half-scowl turned into a full-on glare as he hung up the phone. I didn’t like the look on his face, but at least, for once, I knew what he was thinking.

  CHAPTER 11

  Joe Bob Delmont sat alone in his study, clipping his toe nails, drinking whiskey, and puffing on one last cigar before bed. He could hear Anna clunking around in the living room as she cleaned up the mess and put things away for the night. What a fiasco. All that paraphernalia for one lousy poker game. How embarrassing. He felt like she’d emasculated him with all the girly décor.

  And on top of that, it had sure been hard to get any work done with Anna nosing around. They’d had to be extra careful letting the money exchange hands. The city was low on funds, so Mayor Fillion had levied a minimal pollution fine against PetroPlex. This always meant Fitz would pay the fine, and then during poker games he’d “lose” hands to the Mayor and to Delmont. In exchange, Delmont and the Mayor would look the other way when it came to actually enforcing the regulatory codes.

  And when election time came around, the two of them always had PetroPlex in their campaign funding corner.

  Only tonight, Delmont hadn’t expected Dick’s big win. There was something funny about that guy. Delmont had only invited him to the poker games on the theory that it was best to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. What baffled him was that the bigwigs at PetroPlex didn’t seem to regard him as the enemy at all.

  Fitz was forever cutting settlement deals with Dick. Dick could make PetroPlex bleed money, and it was like Fitz didn’t even care. Delmont figured when you ran a company that made millions of dollars an hour, dropping settlement checks of several hundred thousand here and there wouldn’t really make a dent in the budget. And maybe it was better that way. The
fact that Dick was actually settling cases allowed Delmont to stay under the radar in his dealings with PetroPlex. The more Dick settled, the less Delmont had to worry about handing down obviously biased rulings. It just looked better all around.

  The real problem was Chloe Taylor. She could never seem to come to settlement terms with Fitz. They were all going to have to figure out what to do about that. Delmont never would have thought she had blackmail in her, but sure enough. And now here she was breaking into people’s homes. If she couldn’t be handled, she’d have to be eliminated. She was already way too close to finding out what Schaeffer knew, and if that happened, they were all sunk.

  They’d all been forced to end the poker game after Dick took all of Fitz’s money. If that alone hadn’t killed the night, Judge Hooper’s phone call to Nash and Chloe sure had.

  It was sheer rotten luck that Chloe had been able to recover the bulk of Schaeffer’s files before he’d been able to get to them first. Schaeffer had required a lot of unofficial persuasion before he had given up the location of that secret room, and even then, it was so full they couldn’t cart all the stuff out before Nash and the crime scene techs had arrived on the scene. Nash was a problem—one they’d really have to consider how to address as they moved forward.

  The only bright spot in the situation was that Dick and Mayor Fillion’s maneuvering meant the files would be a lot easier to deal with at Chloe’s house than they would be in an evidence locker. Now there were many more options, but time was of the essence. The files had to be recovered or destroyed before Chloe and Nash learned anything damaging.

  Even though Delmont had been expecting the phone call, the actual ring startled him so that he jumped, spilling his drink and cutting his toe with the clippers. He just felt on edge. It had been that kind of night.

  He pitched the clippers across the room and jerked the phone to his ear.

  “What?”

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “If you’re thinking about Chloe and Nash reading all those files, yeah, I’m thinking what you’re thinking.”

  “This information leak is getting a little out of control. We’ve got to nip it in the bud. Can you handle Taylor?”

  “I’m sick of handling things for you people,” Delmont said. “Why can’t you put your guys on it?”

  “They’re pursuing other avenues right now.”

  “What other avenues?”

  “We have an ex-employee who could also be a problem. We believe he was working with Schaeffer. He’s got a computer virus he’s threatening to release that would wreak havoc on our system.”

  “What? How come this is the first I’ve heard of this?”

  “Do I really have to give you the speech about a “need to know” basis and all that?”

  Delmont swore. “Look, I told you, I don’t want any more surprises.”

  “Don’t worry about it. If you can’t get on it tonight, I’ll find someone else. But I’m just gonna warn you, I’m gonna tell them to do whatever they need to do to stop the leak on your side and end this thing right now. Whatever they need to do. Do I make myself clear?

  Delmont didn’t like the sound of that, but he didn’t know what else he could do at the moment. He couldn’t leave the house himself under Anna’s watchful eye, and Chief Scott was so drunk he’d had to walk home. “Fine,” Delmont said. “You’re clear.”

  Delmont hung up the phone, wondering if he should be worried. These folks were capable of anything and getting a little too cocky. There were sure to be problems if they weren’t careful.

  CHAPTER 12

  Nash decided he would escort both me and the files back to my house. He also decided he would pull an all-nighter right along with me and Miles as we went through the files.

  “That’s unnecessary,” I said.

  “I insist,” Nash insisted.

  “I don’t want you in my house.”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  I groaned. “Fine.”

  Can’t win ‘em all, and even if I could, I figured it might eventually work in my favor to go ahead and let Nash feel like he’d muscled his way in on something.

  Miles was already waiting for us by the time we got back to my place. I opened the door, and Nash’s guys hauled everything in and left.

  Lucy was happy to see Miles. He scooped her up and she licked his face like it was made of roast chicken. But she shied away from Nash. I think she sensed his tension. She could always tell when someone was in a bad mood.

  Nash whistled softly when he saw my furniture. It was all designer, all oversized, and all very expensive. It clearly didn’t belong in my shabby little rent house.

  The house felt even smaller with three people and thirty boxes of documents crammed into the living room. Miles and Nash shoved the sofa and arm chairs up against the wall to make a little bit of room and scooted the dining room table into the middle of the space. It was long and heavy and barely fit in the house. I’d had to take it apart to get it through the door when I moved in.

  I also hauled a couple of card tables out of the closet and set them up adjacent to the larger table. Then we supplemented them with my coffee table and a couple of glass end tables and settled down to work.

  “I was thinking about the benzene statistics you were telling me about earlier,” Nash said. “What kind of exposures are we dealing with here in the city of Kettle?”

  I choked back a smug smile. I had gotten to him earlier—at least a little. Good. “Take this one PetroPlex refinery.” I nodded out the window to the specter of its glowing lights. “Every single day, this one refinery turns almost twelve-and-a-half million gallons of crude oil into six and-a-half million gallons of gasoline, two million gallons of diesel, and two million gallons of jet fuel. At the end of the day, this process will have also produced over 1500 pounds of toxic chemicals, many of which evaporate into the air or leak into groundwater or otherwise get dumped. And let me remind you, that’s all just in one day.”

  “Okay,” Nash said. “But people live right here. You live right here. Why would the government allow that to happen if they themselves have said it’s not safe?”

  “I can answer that,” Miles said. “Congress didn’t pass The Clean Air Act until 1970. In order to get it to pass at all, they had to grandfather in exceptions for all the refineries that were already in existence—most of which already had residential neighborhoods built in their backyards.”

  “And so,” I said, “once these tougher restrictions were passed, oil companies stopped building refineries. Guess how many new refineries have been built in America since 1976?” I asked.

  Nash looked at me through wary eyes. “How many?”

  “None.” I folded my arms across my chest. “Big oil just hunkered down and focused on getting all they could out of their older, dirtier facilities, adding on to them as needed.”

  “So what you’re telling me,” Nash said, “Is that we have a whole lot of pollution regulations on the books that don’t even apply?”

  “Some of them apply, but large portions don’t,” I said. “Plus, the Federal Clean Air act leaves a lot of discretion for states to pass their own clean air laws, and Texas doesn’t accept the federal act as the final authority. Don’t get me wrong. There are newer laws and other provisions that apply, but they haven’t been enforced very well. Or if they are enforced, Big Oil could care less. For example, Texas oil and gas drilling penalties for leaks of toxins into the ground water tend to be less than $3500.”

  “And let me tell you how Big Oil could care less about that,” Miles said. “PetroPlex alone is so rich it makes one and a half million dollars of pure profit every single hour. You think they care about a bunch of piddly little $3500 fines? I don’t think so! It would cost them more to prevent the leaks than it would to just pay the fines!”

  Nash was starting to get agitated, by which I mean “agitated for Nash.” His expression remained the same, but he got up and strolled over
to the window, gazing into the night at PetroPlex’s seemingly innocuous twinkling lights. “That is outrageous,” he said evenly.

  “The government knows oil and oil refineries are toxic to human life. In fact, the EPA recently reported that if you live within a thirty-mile radius of an oil refinery, you are being exposed to benzene concentrations in excess of The Clean Air Act’s acceptable risk threshold.“

  “So why don’t we just move the neighborhoods away from the oil refineries?” Nash asked. “It can’t be that hard.”

  “Wrong,” I said. “A full one-third of the United States population lives within a thirty-mile radius of at least one oil refinery.”

  Nash turned around. “What? A third? Are you sure?”

  “Yep,” I said. “And of course we can’t just move the oil refineries themselves, because they are private businesses. And they’ll never choose to move themselves since any new refinery facilities would be subject to more rigorous health and safety laws. That would cost a lot of money. They are way too invested in the status quo. Since they’re sheltered by The Clean Air Act’s grandfather clause, they’re getting away with it.”

  “Big oil could clean up their act by improving their technology,” Miles said, “but again, they just don’t have a lot of incentive to actually do it. Sure, they get sued and fined all the time, but they are so rich that the settlements and fines don’t really make a dent. They barely feel the pain at all. Instead, it’s easier and cheaper for them to spend money trying to convince the public that oil is perfectly natural and safe.”

  “Take the BP Gulf Oil Disaster,” I said. “The worst environmental disaster in this country’s history. The media coverage revealed some of the methods PetroPlex and Big Oil use try to pull a fast one on the American people. When BP hired thousands of fishermen to help clean up the spill, they issued plastic clothing to prevent the oil from getting on workers’ skin. But on CNN, Dr. Sanjay Gupta speculated they didn’t issue respiratory equipment because they didn’t want to create the impression that the spill was somehow unsafe. Remember, it only takes a few gallons of crude to offgass enough benzene to poison an entire football stadium. Imagine what the health risks of floating around in millions of gallons of the stuff without respiratory equipment would be.”