Bones of Contention - Part I - REVISED

2/9/2008: 

OK, folks. I reworked the beginning and cut it down, removing a lot of the technical stuff. I have the story as a whole weaned from 9100 words to just over 8600 words, and I've only really begun the editing with Part I.

2/10/2008: 

 I'm treating this as kind of a live document. I've incorporated Lynn's and Pat's comments into this, as well as the comments on the originally published article, so you're looking at my most updated draft.

 Pat and Lynn - thanks for the input! 

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Please, let me know what you think of the revisions, and as always, THANK YOU for taking time to review and comment!

            "We're at 30 feet, Al," Lumpy Grant called over the din of wind and rig.

            He was talking to me, Alison Quinn, human ice cube. I layered on clothes in a vain attempt to keep warm, but winter in northeast Ohio along the coast, while beautiful, is brutal. On this particular February day, high on an old waste compound, far above any wind break that the trees might have provided, I could see Lake Erie. Its icy blue added a psychological chill and completed the arctic ambiance of our work area.

             "Ok, let's get this over with." I was referring to the core sampling that the EPA demanded before closure of this waste unit started. A gust of freezing wind buffeted us and I cursed the sadistic bureaucrat who decided January was a good time to start this project. With the next blast, I cursed Lawton Environmental Management, the client. The blame for my frozen state laid squarely at their feet.

"We'll see if you get to practice yer countin' this time." Lumpy flashed me a teasing grin as he made three equally spaced marks on the sampling string where it extended above the wrench, rested on the top of the hollow stem auger. Under normal conditions, I would keep track of the hammer blows it took to advance the sampler through each third of the sampling depth. Today had been unusual.

            Lumpy yanked the wrench off to release the sampling string and it began to slowly sink under its own weight. "'Fraid you don't get to count this time either, kid."            I started to make the appropriate notation on the drilling log, when Lumpy grunted. "Well I'll be jiggered, it stopped." He gave the string a push, but it didn't move, "Looks like we found an erratic." He was referring to the large, sometimes boulder-size rocks found in many glacial deposits. "Maybe you'll get to count after all."

            "We're in the middle of the waste." I stomped a frostbitten foot. "Shit! I hope we don't have to move over and start again."

            "My virgin ears." Lumpy grinned good-naturedly as he raised the rig's hammer to begin delivering the carefully modulated blows to the string. "We'll see if we can break through. If we're lucky it's just a little rock that'll push right out of the way."

            As he began to deliver the blows I silently counted, getting more and more agitated as the number mounted. Lumpy's grin was replaced by intense concentration, as he watched for the slightest bit of downward movement. We were up to nine on the blow count when it broke free. A few more blows and we were through the entire two-foot sampling depth.

            "Didn't go too high for ya, did I Al?" Lumpy grinned as he pulled the string with the help of his assistant, Dave 'Smitty' Smith.

            "If you'd gone much higher I woulda had to take off my boots and socks." Smitty snorted at the visual, while Lumpy's shit-eating grin widened.

            Smitty brought the sample to me and stood there as I reluctantly removed my mittens and put on a pair of thin, blue gloves. He leaned forward and poked at a hard anomaly that blocked the end of the sampling tube. "That doesn't look like a rock . . ."

            I picked up the offending chunk, and wiped at the rust-brown muck that clung to it. My ministrations revealed a smooth, though pitted, ashen-colored piece of bone. The sharp edge of the sampler had broken the bone just below the joint. I was dumbstruck, and held it out to Smitty. "Is that what I think it is?"

"Looks like the end of a dog bone." He abandoned me with a shrug and went back to help Lumpy at the rig.

I dug back in my memory to skeletal anatomy class as I stared at the hunk of bone.  I was pretty sure that was the top joint from a femur, and it seemed about the right size to be human. I shook my head, I was never very good at anatomy. It was probably some stupid deer that fell into the old pond when it was still active. Dad used to give me a rundown of the wild life he saw working second shift at the old plant, every morning while I got ready for school.

            I pulled out a sample bag and dropped the bone into it.  I sealed the bag and noted the sampling depth on the outside with my all-weather pen. "I'll have to take a closer look later. Let's drill down two feet and collect another sample." Normally we would have drilled another ten feet before we took a sample, but if we did that, we would bypass whatever was down there for sure. 

            "You are a glutten for punishment, kid." Lumpy shook his head and powered up the rig. "Won't take us long. You better get ready."

Lumpy was right, it didn't take more than a few minutes for them to drill two feet and get the sampling string back in place. Barely enough time for me to collected the routine samples, and dump the remainder of the muck into the drill cutting drum.

            This time, the sampling string hit 32 feet and sat there. Lumpy began pumping the hammer, slowly advancing the sampler through the two foot sampling interval. The hollow ring hinted that all was not right.

            "We've definitely run into something weird." Smitty and Lumpy wore matching scowls. We were all overcome by morbid curiosity.

            Lumpy and Smitty both came over with the sampler. I pulled on clean gloves and poked around in the muck. I found several more bone fragments, but my attention was caught by an angular lump, about the size of a small blueberry. I opened the cooler, pulled out the deionized water bottle, and squirted the muck off of my prize to reveal a diamond that must have been at least five karats, if not more. No deer I ever saw wore a diamond.

            Lumpy let out a low whistle. "In 40 years, I've never come across anything like this."

            I nodded and pulled out my cell phone to see if I had any signal, which I didn't. "Lumpy, power down, but leave the auger in place." I carefully placed each fragment, along with the diamond, into a bag. "Let's wrap this up and call the police from somewhere warm."

***

            Detective Leo Percival looked at my bone collection, his brows furrowed. "You got these, where?"

            "Between 30 and 34 feet below the surface of that lagoon cap up there." I nodded in the direction of the waste compound. I had both of my red, chapped hands wrapped tightly around a mug of scalding coffee, desperately trying to absorb enough warmth to keep from shivering uncontrollably.

            "So you were drilling to collect environmental samples and when you reached 30 feet, you started pulling up bone fragments."

            Percival's expression was still disbelieving. I really couldn't blame him. I was there and I found it hard to swallow. "Well, maybe more like 31 feet, but yeah."

            "You seem to be taking this in stride, Ms. Quin. You find a lot of bones in your line of work?"

            "Well, there was that time that I pulled up a skeleton in a bailer." I paused for effect. "It was a mouse skeleton, though. I've never encountered bones . . . like that, during a drilling job before, and definitely never a diamond." If I had, I wouldn't still be working as a hapless environmental management consultant.

            "Can you explain to me what's in that . . . lagoon, did you call it? How could these bones have ended up in there?"

            I glanced up at Sally Lewis, the lab tech/environmental liaison/waste manager and all-around girl Friday at Lawton Waste Management. Sally and I had become good friends when I came to work at Lawton, and the friendship had lasted even though my employment had not. I knew Sally was the brains behind the operation, here, but she would never get the title due to the physical limitations of having breasts and a vagina. 

            "The waste in that unit came from an old primary neutralization process located at the north end of the property." I spoke analytically and studiously avoided Sally's gaze, afraid I would dissolve into inappropriate side-splitting laughter. "Waste acid was brought in, dumped into the holding pond . . ."

            "Pond A," Sally interjected.

            "From there it was pumped into a big tank with lime slurry in it, and neutralized. Any metals would drop out as metal hydroxides. The neutralized waste was pumped into the lagoons where we were sampling today. The salt water would run off into the lower holding pond, and the metal hydroxide sludge and un-reacted lime would settle out and remain in the lagoons."

            "How long ago did the process operate?"

            "Old Site 1 was closed and dismantled over 30 years ago, when this 'new' system was constructed." Sally indicated the new system immediately adjacent to the office area where we were sitting. "Lawton used the lagoons for awhile after that, but still, they've been idle for a long, long time."

            "Detective . . ." I shifted nervously, not sure I wanted to know the answer. "Are those . . . human bones?"

            Percival nodded slowly. "I'd almost guarantee it, Ms. Quinn, though we'll have to wait for the ME to take a look to know for certain.  We're looking at an old death. I imagine it could have been accidental . . ."

            "Shit, back then, there was no fence around this facility." Sally latched onto the explanation like a person drowning. "Any idiot could have walked onto the property and fallen into those lagoons accidentally. If they couldn't swim . . ."

            "But wouldn't the gasses from the decaying body have floated it to the surface?" I drew upon knowledge gleaned from obsessive viewing of the various crime scene investigation programs on prime time television. I was a true prime time crime junky.

            "You have a point." Detective Percival rewarded me with a grudging nod, and I glowed with the praise. I always wanted to be a CSI, at least since George Eads demonstrated just how sexy the profession was. Sure beat the hell out of environmental management consulting.

            "What are the other possibilities, if it wasn't an accident?"

            I stole a glance at Sally, inappropriate laughter again barely contained. We often discussed how easy it would be to dispose of a body in this place. The possibilities were numerous, and there was one seagull manager, in particular, that we fantasized about doing in. It was eerie to think that someone actually put one of the macabre methods we joked about into practice.

            I ventured one of my favorite scenarios, first." Well, if the body was in the lime, most of the flesh could have been rotted away fairly quickly, but the skeleton could have stuck around. Once in the slurry, the acid would eat away at the bones. But if they were caked in lime, they could have made it through the treatment cycle mostly intact . . ."

            "Could someone have accidentally fallen into the lime?"

            Sally shook her head. "Even then the lime was stored in a silo. No Joe Shmoe could just accidentally fall into the silo."

            "So we'd be looking at foul play, under that scenario." Percival was scratching notes on his little notepad furiously.

            "But if you wanted to get rid of somebody, why not just push 'em into Pond A?" Sally continued an on-going argument we waged periodically when bored, or pissed with the asshole manager.

            "And have a body floating in the pond?" I just couldn't imagine someone could have missed that. It's not like anyone ever just took a swim in there for fun.

            "Not for too long. That pond had a really low pH back then. Would have eaten the body up quickly."
            "Including the bones." I pounded a hand on the table to emphasize my point. "The only way the bones could have survived is if the body was in the silo."

            "Sounds like you ladies have had this discussion before. I'm not going to find another body out here, am I?"

            "You haven't even found one whole body yet. Don't you think it's a little early to start looking for another?" My energy was sapped from hours of being out in the cold. Now that I was warming up, I wanted nothing more than to go home, kiss my husband and kids, and curl up in front of the fire with a good stiff drink.

            "You have a point." Percival nodded as if he was listening, but his focus was on whatever he wrote in his little notebook.

            I grimaced as I realized that my earlier pleasure at what I thought was praise was really just a trite pet phrase that the Detective threw out when he didn't really have anything to say. So much for my CSI aspirations. "Can I go home, now?"

            "I have all your contact information. If I have any further questions, I know how to reach you." Percival looked at me directly. "Now remember . . ."

            "Don't leave town?" I felt a glimmer of my former excitement at the thought of being involved to that level in the investigation.

            "No." Percival smiled in obvious amusement. "Don't forget to buckle up on your way home and take it slow. The roads really suck."

            "Oh."