Sour Apples (30 page)

“Yes,” Seth said. “And?”

“Ten years later Joyce asked for a soil analysis, apparently from the Amherst lab, and the report comes back clean. Then for some reason, the same lab issues a
second
report shortly after, showing lead and arsenic. Then
I
ask for a blind report—Christopher didn’t know where the soil came from—and it comes back with a menu matching the old toxins. I think we really need to find out who Christopher’s source was. Can you check if Marvin Dubrowski’s working for the UMass group?”

“Easy.” Seth tapped a few keys, calling up the university directory. “He is.”

“Joyce died, what, almost two weeks ago?” Meg said. “When she leased the land, of course Joyce took the reports in the town’s file at face value—she had no reason to doubt them until her cows got sick. But she was killed before she saw the new soil report, although someone may have known she’d requested it. Someone who didn’t want anyone poking around in the history of that piece of land.”

“Meg, are you thinking…No, I won’t go there. I’ll concede that there’s something odd going on with these mismatched reports, but we don’t really
know
anything.”

“I realize that. And since we don’t know anything, we can’t exactly present this to Detective Marcus. I think we need to talk to this Marvin Dubrowski.”

“About what?” Seth demanded. “We walk in and say,
‘Excuse me, you don’t know me, but I wondered if you’ve lied to any government agencies lately’?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! We start by asking him about the soil tests—all of them. Hold on a minute.” Meg retrieved her cell phone out of her bag and hit Christopher’s speed-dial number. “Come on, come on, pick up,” she muttered. When he finally answered, she said without preamble, “Christopher, by any chance was your contact at the soil testing lab someone named Marvin Dubrowski?”

“Hello to you, too, Meg. As it happens, you’re correct. Why do you ask?”

“I need to speak to him, face-to-face. I can’t explain it all now, but I’d really appreciate it if you could find some pretext to see him, but without mentioning my name.”

“Meg, you’re being awfully mysterious, but let me give him a call and see what I can do. I assume this must be sooner rather than later?”

“Exactly. I promise I’ll explain everything when I can. And thank you.” She clicked off and looked at Seth triumphantly. “You heard?”

“I did. What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

“Trying to talk to Marvin without spooking him—or giving him the opportunity to destroy any evidence or contact anyone else. We can meet at Christopher’s office if he’ll have us—it’s a nice public place with other people around. Just in case Marvin is a killer.”

“Meg, this is insane!”

“Is it? I’m sure he knows
something
, but I’m also sure Detective Marcus isn’t going to run out and interview him based on our suspicions. Just because Marvin signed some documents that don’t match is not going to convince Marcus that he’s part of two murders. And maybe it really is just an innocent coincidence. Maybe he signs every document someone sticks under his nose without reading it.”

“Then I’m coming with you,” Seth said.

“Fine. Safety in numbers and all that.”

Meg’s cell phone rang: Christopher. “That was fast. Are we on?”

“Turns out Marvin had an errand on campus this afternoon. He’ll be at my office at four o’clock. I look forward to full disclosure, my dear.”

She didn’t like keeping secrets from Christopher. “And you’ll have it, I promise. Thank you, Christopher. See you later.”

“Why are we getting involved, Meg?” Seth asked as they drove toward Amherst. “You think the state police aren’t capable of finding out the same things?”

“You and Art handed Detective Marcus everything we had, but has he asked anything more about any of this?” Meg shot back. “And he doesn’t have the conflicting reports that Ethan left for you.”

“That’s true,” Seth admitted. “All he has are copies of the original reports, before and after the clean up, and yours. But he doesn’t know the ‘whys’ involved. Heck, I’m not sure if he knows that Sainsbury’s running for office, or about his company’s connection to the farm in Granford. I know I didn’t mention that.”

“Exactly. And I think we’re getting close to understanding those, only we have no physical evidence.”

“So you think Marvin Dubrowski is going to take one look at your honest face and break down and tell you the whole story?”

Meg turned to look at Seth. “I don’t know if
he
knows the whole story. He may be an innocent bystander, or maybe somebody forged his signature. But his name is on those documents, including the ones that went to the state, and he has to be held accountable for that.”

“And then what? How are you going to know if he’s telling the truth?”

“If he says he never noticed the similarities in the tests, that’s suspect. If he admits he noticed but says he never contacted anyone at Pioneer Valley, we remind him that things like phone records can be checked.”

“But not unless there’s a criminal investigation, Meg. Which makes this a circular argument. You can’t get evidence to prove your point without accusing him, but you can’t accuse him without some of that information. The downside of all of this is that if he
is
involved, and he keeps his head, then he’ll just lie through his teeth and then turn around and tell his co-conspirators as soon as we leave. Which puts us at risk. Joyce was murdered, and it looks like Ethan was, too.”

“Seth, what do you want me to do? Sure, we can tell Detective Marcus all of this, if he’ll listen. But at the same time, I don’t want to drag Marvin Dubrowski into a criminal investigation without a reason. Can we just talk to the guy and see what he says? I promise I won’t accuse him of murder on sight.”

“If I see you doing anything foolish, I reserve the right to shut you up.”

“Fine. Let’s just wait and see.”

Late in the afternoon there was ample parking near Christopher’s office building. Meg and Seth walked through the building, where sunlight slanted through open doors across the scarred linoleum of the near-empty halls. They were silent until they arrived at Christopher’s door, which was shut, although they could hear voices inside. Meg knocked, and Christopher opened the door quickly.

“Meg, my dear, right on time. And Seth—good to see you again. May I introduce Marvin Dubrowski?”

The man in question had stood up at the sight of unexpected visitors, and Meg assessed him quickly. Fiftyish, short, and, although she hated the term, nerdy. A perfectly ordinary person, Meg thought. But then, what
did
a criminal conspirator look like?

Marvin spoke quickly. “Hey, Christopher, I can leave if you want to talk to your friends. We’ve more or less covered what you were looking for.”

Christopher looked at Meg and nodded. Apparently it was up to her to now take over the conversation. “Mr. Dubrowski, please sit down,” she began. “I apologize, but I was the one who asked Christopher to invite you to stop by, because I wanted to talk to you. I’m Meg Corey, and this is Seth Chapin. We both live in Granford, and Seth’s a selectman there.” Meg watched Marvin’s face carefully.

Marvin was an open book. He shut his eyes for a moment and dropped back into the chair he had just vacated. “This is about that cursed piece of land, isn’t it?” he asked. When they nodded, he said, “I knew it, I knew it…How much do you know?”

Christopher looked bewildered but retreated silently behind his desk. He gestured toward two other straight-backed chairs, and Meg and Seth sat down.

“Let me start where we came in,” Meg began with the now familiar litany. “The town of Granford leased a plot of land to Joyce Truesdell to graze her dairy herd. When she let them out for the first time this spring, they started getting sick. She had their blood tested and found high levels of lead, so she submitted soil samples to your lab for testing. Then Joyce was killed. Seth went through all the town’s documents about the land, and everything appeared to be in order. But Joyce’s husband Ethan left Seth the results from the soil analysis—in fact, he left two different copies. Independently, I had already asked Christopher to submit
another
soil sample from the same plot, without identifying where it came from. He sent me the results. So now we have a series of reports that say very different things about the same plot of land. And all but one of the reports are signed by you. Can you tell us what the truth is?”

Marvin had turned pale, and there was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. “How did this woman die?”

“At first glance, her death looked like an accident, as though she’d been kicked while milking a cow and hit her head.”

“But it wasn’t an accident?” Marvin asked, looking ill.

“No,” Meg said. “Then this morning the police found Ethan Truesdell, Joyce’s husband, hanging in the barn, an apparent suicide. But the police are investigating his death as well.”

Marvin shut his eyes again and rocked blindly in his chair. “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”

“Marvin,” Meg said gently, “it’s possible we can help you, if we understand what happened. Back in 2001 when you were working for Pioneer Valley, did you change the results of the cleanup report?”

Marvin sat up straighter, took a deep breath, and opened his eyes. “I’m afraid so. Look, I’ll have to go back to the beginning if you want to make sense of this. I’d just gotten my PhD in soil science, and my first job was at Pioneer Valley. It had a good, solid reputation, and I enjoyed working there. Then the owner’s son joined the company, and he had big ideas. I can understand why—his dad’s health was failing, and he hadn’t made any changes in the business for a while. This guy shows up with his shiny new business degree and starts talking about diversification and vertical integration. And suddenly we had a registered cleanup division.”

“Were you in charge of that?”

“No, I ran the lab, and that was fine with me. I never wanted to be an administrator or a salesman. We started
bidding on MDEP projects. The son found out that the Granford site was on their target list and said we should go for it—he knew the property since he’d grown up in the town. I looked at it as a challenge: typical old factory site, loaded with toxic residues. Since it was our first effort, I was careful with the original tests. I didn’t want to minimize the difficulties, and we couldn’t afford to underbid the project and get caught short. You’ve still got those reports?” He looked at Seth, who nodded.

“We won the bid,” Marvin continued, “and we started on the work, but despite my best efforts we were way over budget and the whole thing was taking too long. Blame it on our inexperience, but it was new to all of us in our division, and our bid for that project was over-optimistic. I wasn’t blamed, for which I was grateful, but we’d reached a point where it was draining all the resources of the department, and we couldn’t bid on anything else. We were just stretched too thin.”

“So you altered the reports to make it look as though the work had been done,” Meg prompted.

Marvin again shut his eyes and nodded, once. “Yes. It was wrong. I knew it was wrong. But I needed the job—my wife was having a difficult pregnancy, and the medical bills were eating me up. And everyone was going nuts trying to pull the whole project off. Then the boss told us all that there would be promotions and raises in it for us if we could get the project done on schedule.”

“Is that the way he put it?” Meg asked. “Nothing more specific?”

“No, but I knew what he meant. He said something like, ‘Look, it’s a piece of wasteland in a small town, and MDEP is just doing its job. No one really cares what happens to that particular piece of land.’ And I figured he knew the town so he was probably right, so we wrapped up the remediation and I wrote up the reports as if we had finished. And that was that.”

“How much of the work was actually done?” Seth asked, his face grim.

“Some of it,” Marvin admitted. “I’d have to go back and look at the department records, if they still exist. I’d guess maybe seventy-five percent, but it wasn’t good enough to meet government standards. But it’s not like we just took the money and scattered some dirt over the site. We did make a good-faith effort to do it, but we came up short.”

“Did you get your promotion?” Meg asked softly.

Marvin nodded.

“Why did you leave Pioneer Valley?” Seth asked.

“I got tired of the whole corporate approach to things. Always having to drum up business. I like working for the university. There are no surprises. Samples come in, reports go out. It’s pretty simple.” He swallowed. “Until that sample from Joyce Truesdell arrived. I didn’t personally run that sample—we’ve got several technicians in the lab, but the person who did thought it was unusual enough that he showed it to me. I looked at the profile, and thought,
Uh-oh, this looks familiar.
And then I checked the return address and I knew. A decade later, that acreage had come back to bite me.”

Seth spoke up. “Ethan Truesdell received
two
reports, one that said that the land was clean and a
second
report that showed the contaminants. Why?”