Bone Valley (6 page)

When I looked up, I saw that Angus was crying. Not deep, loud sobbing, but a definite sniffling, with tears streaming down his face.

“Oh, baby,” Lenora said, and stood up. In a quick, but gentle move, she handed Bob to me, and I cuddled the small animal, trying to hold its head like I’d seen Lenora do, and the little guy crawled up my shirt until he could rub his head against the skin on my neck. I looked down at it, just a tiny, little animal trying to live, with big, dark eyes, a little nose and mouth, brownish-gray fur, and a wound on his scalp.

Bob the doomed squirrel chirped a little and then curled under my chin as if to sleep. I looked up and saw Lenora take Angus’s hand and pull him up and into her. “It’s all right,” she whispered.

“Excuse us, please.” Lenora led Angus out of the kitchen and I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I rubbed Bob’s shoulders, and looked down.

A few moments later, Angus came back into the kitchen, alone, red-eyed, and took Bob in his big hands. “Let me take him back to Lenora. Then we better get on to the meeting,” he said, gruffly.

We left soon after that. There were about a hundred questions I wanted to ask. But I had enough sense not to ask any of them. Not just then, anyway.

Nobody bothered to
tell me they were not taking me home.

We rode in a strangled silence toward a main highway, and then Miguel turned the truck toward Bradenton, the county seat of Manatee, and not south, toward my house and Sarasota.

“Whoa, wrong direction. Aren’t you going to take me home?” I said, waking up out of my sadness.

“Can’t. Don’t have time to get you there and us back here. Meeting starts at five-thirty.”

I glanced at my watch. “Where’s the meeting?”

“Got a room at MCC reserved,” Angus said. “You ought to come to the meeting, anyway. If you’re going to represent me and Miguel, you need to know about this.”

“What’s this?”

“Public meeting of all the Manatee County people who oppose the Antheus mine permits. We’re trying to stop them. By turning public opinion against them,” Miguel said.

Uh-huh, and you’ll get another SLAPP suit filed against you for your efforts, and you’re not going to be able to afford to pay me for defending the first one, the stupid orange-defamation case, I thought, but graciously didn’t say.

Then I thought, well, okay, a radical meeting with Miguel and Angus was probably a better topper for a day of saving fake panthers and feeding baby birds than arguing with Philip over where to have our alleged wedding. “Shoot, let’s go, then,” I said.

“Good. Let me get you some literature,” Angus said, and reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a ream of folded papers, forcibly stuffing other papers back into the compartment. “This is the list of the Antheus shareholders, you might recognize some of the names from Boogie Bog.”

No, Boogie Bog and its real name, Bougainvillea Bayou, were about the only names on that topic I was apt to recognize, but I took the list.

“Here’s a list of the names and addresses of people and government agencies you should write to and protest.” He shoved another sheet of paper at me. “And here’s a sample letter. All that information is correct. But put it in your own words. Handwritten letters are supposed to carry more weight,” he said.

Yeah, a primer in public participation—a handwritten note? Like, without, say, a donation of thousands? How naive was this guy?

But I was soon distracted from my cynical appraisal of Angus’s activities. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, looking at the short list of Antheus shareholders, all four of them. And M. David Moody’s name, big as Bob’s baby squirrel eyes, was first on the list. Someone had redlined through his name. “What did M. David have to do with Antheus?”

“M. David pretty much
was
Antheus. He owned sixty percent of the stock. A lot of that land was his initially, acreage he bought in the seventies and eighties when it was relatively cheap. So he put his land into the company, and kept the controlling interest,” Miguel said, and pulled the truck into the Manatee Community College parking lot.

I folded up the various sheets of paper and stuffed them into my purse.

“M. David had valuable contacts with international phosphate companies. I always figured that Antheus, once they got their permits, would either sell out completely to one of those phosphate giants at a huge profit, or he’d at least bring one of those companies in as a partner,” Miguel said.

As I tumbled out of the truck, I thought, so M. David had been the mover and shaker on Antheus. Okay, this had just gotten a whole lot more interesting.

Trudging after Miguel and Angus as they made their way inside a conference room, I wished I’d had a chance to change clothes, wash up, and maybe grab a trail mix bar, but people were already milling about. Serious-looking people started shaking hands with Miguel and Angus.

“There are snacks and drinks over there, if you want any,” Miguel said.

Hungry, I walked over to the table, quickly deduced there was nothing I could eat, but snagged another Zephyr Hills water. By the time I had it opened, Miguel and Angus had already walked up to the front of the room and Angus was calling the meeting to order.

Apparently, antiphosphate meetings were run by the same set of rules by which my brother Delvon’s church was run, that is, anybody can say anything at anytime, and the louder the better. In other words, a good deal of free-form crowd rant ensued about the destruction and environmental disaster that a phosphate mine by the east fork of the Manatee River would create. I got the point in thirty seconds—the mines would suck up millions of gallons of precious water and leave behind slime ponds of toxic waste—and ducked out to find a bathroom.

When I came back in, a serious-looking man behind the microphone was droning in way too much detail about how phosphate runoff was killing our streams, bays, and Gulf, destroying marine life, and otherwise becoming the chemical agent of Armageddon. Then he cursed our luck for living on the outer edge of the so-called bone valley region, named after the ancient bones of bygone creatures that time and nature had turned into one of the world’s richest deposits of phosphate ore.

Truth is, I’m just not much for scientific discourse unless it pertains to one of my own cases. Besides, I already had the big picture—phosphate mining, processing, and use were all bad; green trees and clean streams were all good.

Edgy now, I bit back a yawn and scanned the crowd, looking for entertainment or information. Naturally I started with the most beautiful person there, that being Miguel, but he was not playing eye contact with me anymore, so I branched out my visual reconnaissance.

Not halfway through my study of the various people crowded into the meeting room, damned if I didn’t see Mrs. M. David Moody, aka Sherilyn the beauty queen, standing in the back corner. An older man with a strong build was standing nearby, but his head was turned away from me. I couldn’t make out whether he was with Mrs. Moody or not. After a quick glance at his bulked-up body and his thin, gray hair, I dismissed him as a grandpa-weight-lifter-on-steroids, and turned back to Mrs. Moody.

Something was wrong with her face. Even from across the room, I could see that her complexion looked wounded, like a bad sunburn that had peeled into different layers of skin and colors, but not healed. What in the world had happened to her? Mrs. Moody was known for her beauty and her splendid parties—parties I was never invited to attend but which I read all about in Marjorie North’s column in the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
. Okay, I wasn’t necessarily a Sherilyn fan, but, still, to see her looking so unattractive seemed so—so what? Sad wasn’t the right word, not after meeting Bob the doomed baby squirrel and Lenora the saint with a serious disease. Still, I felt myself feeling a little sorry for the woman.

But before I could think further on Mrs. Moody’s ruined complexion, Detective Josey Something Farmer came into the room, right through the door I was guarding, and she spotted me and stopped to shake hands.

“Interesting, meeting you here,” she said.

“I’m here as a citizen with a vital, but routine, interest in learning more about phosphate mining. Why are you here?”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Anything new on M. David?”

“Yeah. It’ll all be in tomorrow’s newspaper. Sunday paper recap and follow-up story. Lots of pressure on the department on this one, high-profile victim and all, so the sheriff gave an in-depth interview.”

“Tomorrow, huh? I’m not real good at waiting,” I said, and flashed what I hoped was an endearing girl-bonding grin.

Josey grinned back. “Yeah, I hate to wait too.”

“So tell me.” She hesitated, and I said, “Hey, you said it would be in the paper. Not like you’re selling government secrets.”

“Yeah, right. Autopsy’s not complete yet, but the obvious physical evidence indicates he had been held down in the phosphogypsum pond until he drowned. Bruises on the back of his neck.”

“Phosphogypsum pond? I thought he drowned in a gyp stack.”

“Same thing. They take all the processing waste and store it in gyp stacks, or ponds, behind earthen dams. The dams are around seventy feet high, and you can drive or walk around on top of them. If you are on the top of the dam, it looks like a big pond. So some folks call them gyp ponds because it looks like a pond from the top. Other folks call them gyp stacks because the stuff is stacked behind those dirt dams.”

Okay, so there’s a whole vocabulary to this phosphate stuff. But at the moment I was more interested in the mechanics of M. David’s death. “So somebody forced M. David to the top of the dam, and drowned him in the…gyp stuff?”

“About that.”

As much as I disliked M. David—and that was a lot and for good reason—I couldn’t help but shudder at the image. Bad karma is ugly.

“Any leads?” I asked.

“The high sheriff’s official position is that we have a number of leads, all of which we are vigorously pursuing.”

Okay, that was the public-relations speech. What was the truth, I wondered.

“Prints, tire tracks, motives, what do you have?” I asked.

“It’s all in the paper. Sheriff ’s not so good with ‘no comment’ when the media sticks their collective thumb in his eyes,” Josey said. “Somebody drove a Jeep to the top of the dam and left some tracks. Looks like it might be the DEP Jeep left on-site.”

“DEP Jeep?”

“The Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Their engineers watch the gyp stacks regularly, so they leave a Jeep at the plant so they can drive up on the stacks and check on things. Saves wear and tear and muck on their own cars.”

“Think somebody from the DEP did it?”

“No.” Josey gave me a look like I’d just accused Mother Teresa of being a serial killer.

“But if the killer drove a DEP Jeep—”

“Anybody who could hot-wire that Jeep could drive it.”

“But anybody with a DEP key could drive it too.”

Josey gave me that look again. All right, all right, I thought. Nobody from the DEP is a suspect, but that left a whole lot of other people to fill out the list.

Eager to hear more, I leaned into Josey’s personal space, but she was eyeing the crowd and ignoring me. “Hey, that’s Mrs. Moody. Wonder what the missus is doing here?” she said, and marched over to her.

I watched them from my spot by the door. Their body language didn’t suggest dinner and drinks were in the offing. A moment later Josey sauntered back toward me.

“So, what’d she have to say?” I asked, like Josey and I were first-class buds, or partners. I liked it that she was unusually chatty for a cop.

“Blah, blah, blah, loosely translated, she’s with that guy with the big arms.”

“She’s on a date? With Mr. Big? What, two days after her husband is murdered?” Plus, I thought, who goes on a date to an antiphosphate rally?

“Yeah, well, the rich are different, you know.”

I eyed the good widow for a long moment, assessing both her facial damage and the clinging Capri pants she was wearing very successfully. “Is Mrs. Moody a suspect? I take it she’ll inherit M. David’s vast holdings.”

Josey ignored my question, and instead pointed toward the muscle guy. “The man with her, that’s Galleon Theibuet.”

“He’s one of the Antheus shareholders, isn’t he?”

“How’d you know that?”

I patted my pocket where I’d stuffed the papers Angus had given me outside the meeting. But what I said was, “Oh, we lawyers have our tricks.”

“Yeah, well, Theibuet’s part of the Antheus phosphate group. Reckon he’s here casing the opposition.”

I glanced back at grandpa-on-steroids. He still had his back to me as he bent toward Mrs. Moody, apparently listening to her.

“Yeah,” Josey said. “I’d say he spent some time lifting and punching the bag. Check those biceps.”

Before Josey and I could complete our girl bonding by discussing Galleon’s well-maintained body further, Angus John took the podium, and we stopped talking to listen to him.

Angus jumped over the requisite intro joke and right into denouncing the proposed Antheus Mines. Before long, Angus had the crowd stamping their feet and shouting, “No more phosphate! No more phosphate!”

Go, Angus, go, I thought, latent cheerleader instincts surfacing in me. Then I looked over at Mrs. Moody, who stood tall and held her formerly fine face straight ahead. I don’t know, but if I were her, bodyguard or not, I’d slip out the door and go home.

And just in case the crowd was not already riled up, Angus rallied it by his retelling of the Boogie Bog debacle. As a result of the company’s bankruptcy, huge phosphogypsum stacks—such as the one in which M. David was forcibly and against his will drowned—were left at the Boogie Bog site for the state to clean up. These gyp ponds contained millions of gallons of toxic sludge retained behind those earthen dams, which were at high risk of breaking or overflowing.

I leaned over to Josey. “Is that all true?”

“You
don’t
read the newspaper much, do you?”

“Okay, I’m real busy. I’m a lawyer. I have to read tons for my clients. Sometimes I miss stuff in the papers.”

“Yes,” Josey said. “It’s true. It’ll cost the state of Florida millions to clean up the site, that is, if the DEP can even figure out how to do it. Early estimate is around a hundred and sixty million. Right now, they’re talking about transporting the sludge by way of barges and dumping it out in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“That’s totally insane,” I said.

“Yeah. Isn’t it, though? The DEP will treat the sludge as best they can before they dump it, but it’ll still be a risk to the entire Gulf of Mexico and the marine life and the coral reefs. The fishermen are up in arms about the plan. But if the state leaves the gyp stacks like they are, they pose a worse threat. If the stacks overflow during our summer rains, the path of least resistance will be to take that poisonous sludge,
untreated,
straight into Bishop Harbor and then into Tampa Bay. Where we know for certain it will kill off the sea grasses and marine life, destroying the bay. God help us if a hurricane hits one of those gyp stacks.”

Appalled by the catch-22, I nodded.

“It’s like nuclear waste,” Josey said. “There’s nothing you can do with that gyp waste that won’t hurt something.”

Okay, Josey knew her stuff. I needed to introduce her to Olivia, let them preach to each other’s choir. Maybe I ought to listen more closely too. After all, Florida was my adopted home state. Okay, Lilly Belle, memo to internal file: Learn more about Boogie Bog, Antheus, and, actually, you know, start listening to Olivia. Oh, and actually read the whole newspaper once in a while.