Part 13 (2/2)
To the right, there were three machines that Ned called balers. They were short and long, all capped with a large iron door. She and Ned watched as a worker filled one of the balers with an a.s.sortment of materials that were all unrecyclable. This included what looked like ripped couch cus.h.i.+ons, badly damaged plastic, some sort of old molded wood, and sc.r.a.ps of chicken wire among other unnamable things.
The worker shoved all of this material into the baler, using a simple tool that looked almost like a shovel with a flat head to cram it all in. When it was packed in, he closed the iron door and locked it with a large bolt. He then ran a series of three large wires through the balers, using small holes drilled into the side. With these wires in place, he then turned on a hydraulic press that pushed all of the material inside up against the bolted door. Avery could not see the effect of the press but she could hear the rending and tearing of the materials inside.
Thirty seconds later, the press was done and retracted. When it was over, the worker popped the door open and pressed a green b.u.t.ton along the side of the baler. A loud beeping sounded out as a mechanism inside the baler pushed out a nearly perfectly square-shaped bale of material. It was about three feet high and six feet wide-all of the detritus that had just been shoved in pressed down and tied with wires in a neat bundle.
”We then take these bales to the burn center,” Ned said. ”We recycle everything we can but as you might imagine, not everything that comes through here is able to be recycled.”
He led her through a large garage-type door beside them, leading them into another concrete room. Several bales similar to the one she had just seen were sitting to the far right of the room. The back of the room consisted of what looked like a very large baler. But the fact that she could feel the heat of it and smell the burning scent of plastic and other materials clued her in to what she was really seeing.
”This is where it's all burned?” she asked.
”Yes. Every now and then we'll get a piece of metal or something that is too big to go in there. We put those to the side and s.h.i.+p them off to the steel mill. We don't get a lot of it, though. We gather them all up in s.h.i.+pments and send them off. We might get enough to send out a single s.h.i.+pment every year.”
”And do you ever get anything...unusual?”
”Oh yeah. We get dead animals all the time. Cats, dogs, racc.o.o.ns. It's gross.”
”And what do you do with them?”
”It's annoying, actually. We burn them separately, so it can really slow a s.h.i.+ft down.”
”Have you ever found a body in the garbage?” Avery asked.
”No. But last year we did find two toes and a finger. Called the police in and everything, but nothing ever came of it.”
Avery watched as two bales were placed into the burner. There was nothing fancy about it at all. It served very much as a furnace; a large front door was opened, clanging open much like the baler door. The bales were inserted via a miniature forklift and then the door was closed. An operator hit two switches and they could all hear the roaring of the fire as it blasted what had been placed inside.
”What's the temperature get to in there?” she asked.
”Around eight hundred degrees. Sometimes it'll get as high as one thousand, but that comes down to what's inside the bale that we put in.”
”And I a.s.sume there's a certain amount of background checks and training that goes into hiring someone for this job?” Avery asked.
”Absolutely...especially for the baler and the burner. You've got to be a quick thinker when operating these things. If something were to go wrong with the burner, for instance, it has to be shut down and fixed pretty quickly. If that fire keeps going for more than forty-five minutes, it can start doing internal damage.”
”Have you ever had to fire anyone that worked back here?”
”Me personally, no. But there's a pretty widespread story from about seven years ago. I was working in sorting then. Apparently, the guy that was working the baler and the guy working the burner got into a little accident with the lifts. This was right before the burner was cleaned, so all of the cleaning supplies were out, you know? One of the lifts knocked some of them over and one of the guys fell right in it.”
”What were the chemicals?” Avery asked. ”Were they harmful?”
”All I can remember for sure are acetone, amine, and oxide. Stuff that's hard to p.r.o.nounce, much less memorize. He got some chemical burns on his face and hands and a few days later started to act sort of odd. I think there was always speculation that it was because of the chemicals. But no one ever really fussed much about it. Still, after a month or so of him acting irrational and weird, he was fired.”
”Weird how?”
”I don't know myself,” he said. ”From what I hear, he would just lash out at people. He started to get a little too interested in cleaning the burner. He loved the chemicals used for cleaning it...really started to get obsessed with it.”
”Are his records in human resources?” Avery asked.
”Sure thing. I can fetch them for you if you like.”
Ned led her back out of the burner room but before she left back through the large door, she looked back at the burner. She tried to think about a person being trapped in something like that as fire leaped up around them.
Trapped...the heat growing more intense...no escape.
Despite the visions of fire and heat within her head, Avery couldn't help but shudder.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.
Avery pulled up in front of the residence of George Lutz a little over an hour later. Without an official capacity to use A1 resources at her own disposal, she'd had to call Ramirez and have him hunt down more information based on the records HR had given her at the trash plant. All in all, she knew that Lutz had been fired four years ago and since then had managed to work as a fry cook at Wendy's before being let go from there as well. Medical tests and psych evaluations had deemed him fit for society but unable to hold a steady job; he was therefore living on government a.s.sistance in a low-income house that had been paid for by his aunt.
The house was surprisingly well maintained. The small square of a porch looked to have been freshly painted and the windows were so clean they were sparkling. The gra.s.s was mown almost exquisitely-but that was also where Avery saw the first signs of just how far George Lutz had fallen since the days of his accident at the trash-firing plant.
There was a huge a.s.sortment of lawn ornaments surrounding the house. There were pink flamingos, garden gnomes, and ceramic mushrooms. And they were everywhere. In fact, as Avery stepped out of her car, she saw a man sitting on the edge of the lawn, facing one of the gnomes. He was holding a small canister of paint and touching up a red pair of suspenders on the gnome's ceramic body.
”Excuse me,” Avery said. ”Are you George Lutz?”
The man froze for a moment and then finished his current swab of paint before turning to face her. He had a thick unkempt beard and scraggly hair that was mostly tucked under a driver's cap. He looked a little off his rocker but in an almost childlike way.
”Sure am,” he said. ”Who are you?”
”My name is Avery Black,” she said. ”I work for the police.”
”Oh,” he said, dropping his paintbrush and turning to face her.
She saw that she had guessed right. Whatever was wrong with him made him seem very much like a child. It was her a.s.sumption of this that had made her keep her description very basic. I work for the police was going to be a lot more interesting to a child than I'm a detective with the Boston A1 Homicide division.
”Am I in trouble?” Lutz asked.
”No,” she said. ”But I've been looking into some things going on down at the trash plant you used to work at. I was wondering if you could answer some questions about it.”
Lutz nodded, but frowned. ”I don't really like that place. They were mean to me there.”
”How so?”
”They fired me because of the accident. They said I wasn't doing my job right anymore.”
Avery had read all about the incidents that had occurred after the accident. George had complained of headaches and missed quite a few days. And when he had reported for work, he'd goofed off most of the time and had created an unsafe working environment for everyone he came in contact with. He'd also been caught starting fires in the burner that had absolutely nothing to do with his work. That had been the final straw that had lost him his job.
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