Part 29 (1/2)
Placing my palm over the phone, I said, ”Yes. Why?”
”That's crazy. You should stop!”
”I'm-”
”Trust me on this. I was in Chattanooga, where the news guys came in like a herd of elephants and raised so much dust things never got right again. The investigation ground to a halt! I'm telling you. We've got a couple of days to move like lightning. Don't gum up the works.”
I told the folks at the TV station I would call back. Maybe Donovan had a point. He'd been through this before; I hadn't. I had a strong inclination to hold a press conference, but maybe he was right.
Donovan interrupted my thoughts. ”I'm planning to run down some leads here in the valley. I want to look over the accident site from last winter. I also want to interview McCain's friends. And Feldbaum's. Maybe yours, too. Sometimes you can get something verbally that you can't dig up with test tubes and science.”
”I told you before. It's got something to do with Jane's California Propulsion, Inc. It has to.”
”I know. I know. And we think there might be something to that. I've already done a quick read-through of my lists from three years ago, and I can't find their name. I'm going to have Achara work on that this afternoon. She'll check out the various components to rocket fuel and see what the health implications are. She'll also make some calls about Jane's. We have a few contacts in the industry, so we might be able to learn something.”
”Thanks.”
”Don't mention it. We want you well, pal.”
”Thanks.”
He winked. I glanced at Achara to see what her take on this was, but she didn't seem to be paying attention.
”If you're still thinking about calling the media,” Donovan said, ”don't. I'm telling you. They show up, they'll turn this into a circus. You want to give a hundred interviews a day? That's what the chief in Chattanooga was doing. And they didn't get one pertinent piece of information from the public. Not one.”
Stephanie came out of the station in time to hear this. ”You're not not going to call the media?” she asked. going to call the media?” she asked.
”I was. Donovan's got another take on it.”
”I think you should.”
”What do you think, Achara?” I asked.
She turned to me. ”It's your call. I'm not going to vote on a thing like that.” Everybody waited for my decision, Stephanie, Donovan, Carpenter, Ian Hjorth, who'd also come outside and joined our group.
”I'm going to talk,” I said.
Stephanie patted my shoulder. ”Good. Somebody out there might know something.”
Shaking his head with a conviction that almost changed my mind, Donovan said, ”It's your call. But first give us a twenty-four-hour period without interference.”
”I don't think so. Tomorrow's day six.”
”You don't know that for certain.”
”Tell you what, Scott. When you contract this, you take a chance on which day you're on.”
”You're right. Sorry. Forget I even said that. Jesus. I don't know what I was thinking.”
I set up a press conference for ten o'clock the next morning outside the fire station.
Soon after my decision, Achara took her briefcase and notes and walked the two blocks to the North Bend branch of the King County Library; she said she was looking for a place to spread out her notes and work. Donovan climbed into his Suburban and drove off without telling us where he was headed.
Stephanie and I dropped the girls off with Morgan at my house, exchanging tearful kisses with both. Morgan, who'd been all but unreachable for almost two days, was suddenly eager to baby-sit.
The most frustrating task that afternoon was locating firefighters from the Chattanooga Fire Department willing to speak candidly. Already one firefighter was being sued by one of the litigants for speaking out in public, and just about everyone and their mother had been subpoenaed to the trial.
Once again, I found myself in a long, rambling conversation with Charlie Drago, who now filled me in on the LPG disaster that happened two weeks after Southeast Travelers, the explosion he'd forgotten to tell me about during our first conversations. The fact that he'd forgotten to mention it the first time around spoke volumes about his mental acuity.
He also said there'd been a fire in his garage shortly after he began looking into the syndrome, blamed it on powerful unnamed forces, said he'd been followed by men in black for weeks, that his phone had been tapped, that they might be listening to us that very minute. The more we spoke, the more I realized Charlie was a full-blown paranoiac.
”You gotta listen to me,” Drago said. ”Whatever anybody tells you about that LPG incident, it was not not an accident. It was a an accident. It was a trap trap. You know who responded? The same group of guys went to Travelers. It was only luck it didn't kill more than the six of them and the two civilians. You wipe out half a battalion and you suddenly no longer have anyone who cares about Southeast Travelers. Specifically, you wipe out the guys who responded to Southeast, and you got no one left to come down with this syndrome and start suing. That was the plan all along.”
”Carl Steding told me the same thing. That it was a trap. Or at least that's what he hinted.”
”Trouble is, we're practically the only two people in town who think that.”
”Wasn't the LPG incident ruled accidental?”
”Sure it was. That's what they wanted.”
”That's what who who wanted?” wanted?”
”The people who lit up my garage.”
”And who were they?”
”Whoever stands to lose their pants over Southeast Travelers. It could be any one of thirty corporations. Or their investors. Thousands of investors. In fact, investors are usually the worst. I should know. I was an investor once.”
Toward evening a battalion chief from Chattanooga named Frost called in response to messages I'd left. He told me I could cheerfully disregard anything Charlie told me, that Charlie had been spouting nonsense about Southeast Travelers for so long, n.o.body listened to him anymore. When I mentioned Charlie's garage fire and his thoughts on the LPG truck accident, Chief Frost said, ”Charlie started it hisself, left a sack of hot ashes from his woodstove too close to a wall. And that LPG truck driver? He reached over to change the radio station, got a bee in his briefs, whatever. n.o.body but Charlie and some a.s.shole works over at the paper ever thought there was anything odd about it.
”The tank itself must have ruptured with the crash, which would have weakened the double-wall construction. Burned real hot. We went in like we're taught, hard and aggressive, two teams on two hose lines, each spray pattern protecting the team behind it, but the tank blew before we got it cooled. The explosion was unbelievable. Hey. Out of those eight guys, six died, which was a miracle in itself, because they all should have been blown to Kingdom Come. One escaped with minor burns, and one had to retire. h.e.l.luva deal. We also lost the truck driver and a news photographer who happened to be in the way. I didn't get there myself until minutes later, but I saw it from a distance and believe me, I thought twice about turning around and heading on outa there. You ain't lived until you've seen an LPG tank go up. It hadn't been mostly empty, we would have lost a lot more people. d.a.m.n lucky.”
”The same s.h.i.+ft had the LPG fire as went to Southeast Travelers?”
”Yeah.”
”The guy at the paper seemed to think that was significant.”
”I don't know why.”
I spoke to several more fire officers who either had been at the tanker fire in Chattanooga or were intimate with the details. Unfortunately, the details shed little light on our problems in North Bend. Even though Drago told me at one time he had a complete list of the companies involved in the Southeast Travelers fire, he couldn't confirm or deny JCP, Inc., had been involved. So far, neither could anybody else.
We fielded several calls from people in the upper Snoqualmie Valley asking to confirm Scott Donovan was working with us, so we knew he was making the rounds.
At five-thirty people began disappearing to go home and have dinner with their families. By six-thirty there were only three of us left, myself, Stephanie, and Cherie, G.o.d bless her. She'd been with us all day.
Stephanie looked across the conference room table at me and said, ”None of these doctors has called back. I told their people this was a matter of life and death.”