Behind us, a loud clatter of aluminum echoed from the alley between my duplex and Arlene Gable’s cottage.
Around the corner of the porch, leaning heavily on two metal forearm crutches, came my brother Marcus. His gray sweatpants were smeared with damp earth from the basement floor, his hair matted with sweat, and his knuckles white where he gripped the padded handles of his crutches. Behind him, holding his spare wool coat and an aluminum oxygen bottle, walked seventy-two-year-old Arlene Gable, her garden shears still gripped in her right hand.
Marcus dragged his left boot forward through the dead leaves, his breathing ragged but his chin lifted high. He looked directly at Durning.
“You told your boys to tell the neighbors I was raving,” Marcus called out, his voice shaking with anger that cut cleanly across the frozen yard. “You pulled the emergency monitoring wire out of my bedroom wall while I was asleep, and you put tape across my windows. But Arlene opened the cellar bulkhead ten minutes ago, Frank. And I’ve got the audio from my nightstand voice recorder running on my phone right now. ”
Marcus lifted his cell phone in his trembling left hand. From the small speaker came the unmistakable rasp of Arthur Vance’s voice, recorded at 5:32 AM inside our dark hallway: Get the telephone line cut first. Durning wants the house empty before nine, and make sure the papers in the kitchen are in the burn bag.
Durning took half a step backward, his polished leather shoes catching on the edge of the gravel. His mouth opened, but no words came out. The clipboard slipped from his fingers, hitting the wet stone of the walkway and scattering his administrative quarantine orders across the muddy grass.
“Frank Durning,” Agent Miller said, stepping across the yellow tape and drawing her handcuffs from her belt. “You are under arrest for official corruption, aggravated witness intimidation, illegal discharge of toxic hazardous waste, and falsifying government documents under oath. ”
The state troopers moved forward, pinning Durning’s arms behind his tailored coat and snapping the steel cuffs onto his wrists right in front of my porch steps. The two laborers in parkas were already prone on the lawn, their hands cuffed behind them by the county sheriff's deputies.
The blue strobes flashed against the bay windows of my house, lighting up the neighborhood as doors opened up and down Elm Street. Neighbors stepped out onto their porches in bathrobes and winter coats, watching the Director of Facilities being pushed into the back of a state police cruiser on the very lawn he had tried to quarantine.
I walked past the severed yellow tape, stepped across the gravel, and wrapped my arm around Marcus’s shaking shoulders, holding him steady against the morning chill as the sirens finally fell silent.
CHAPTER 4: The Cost Of Clean Ground
The state police crime scene van did not pull away from Elm Street until the church bells down on Ferry Street struck eleven. By then, the yellow bio-isolation tape had been snipped from my porch pickets and bagged into clear plastic evidence sleeves, and a heavy flatbed tow truck had winched Frank Durning’s county maintenance dump truck off our gravel driveway.
Agent Miller sat with Marcus on our porch glider while an emergency medical technician wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my brother’s arm. Marcus’s skin was still gray from the damp chill of the cellar floor, but his pulse was steadying, and he refused the technician’s offer of a stretcher. He sat upright with his crutches leaned against the cedar siding, answering Miller’s questions in a low, gravelly rasp while Arlene Gable brewed a fresh pot of black tea in our kitchen.
Every piece of physical proof was cataloged on our wooden front steps before the state cruisers cleared the curb. The two maintenance laborers who had carried the bolt cutters were seated separately in the backs of two sheriff cruisers, their signed statements already filling Miller’s clipboard. They had admitted under primary caution that Arthur Vance had handed them forty dollars cash and two county maintenance work orders at five in the morning, instructing them to cut the line, string the tape, and prevent anyone from approaching the front door until the private transport van arrived.
I stood beside the hood of Miller’s car and surrendered the leather satchel.
A uniformed evidence specialist in blue latex gloves received the two hundred pages of calibrated water samples, the laboratory chain-of-custody forms, and the original carbon ledger Durning had attempted to burn. Beside those documents, I laid down the physical lead seal, D-4-SEC-09, its severed wire still bent into the shape Arthur Vance had left when he dropped my stolen keys onto the plastic tray table in row seven.
“This seals the criminal docket, David,” Miller said, closing her leather case and looking down the driveway where neighbors still stood in small, bewildered clusters along the sidewalk. “The state attorney has already filed an emergency injunction freezing every administrative server at the Market Street complex. Durning’s override at Valve Chamber Fourteen poisoned twenty square miles of wetland basin, but he won’t be able to shred a single memo. The grand jury will have the full indictment ready before the five o’clock recess. ”
She paused, her dark eyes dropping to my empty hands.