Silent Justice: A Ben Kincaid Novel of Suspense bk-9

by William Bernhardt

  But enough ruminating. He had more work to do. He turned and moved rapidly out of the boy’s bedroom.

  Too rapidly, as it happened. His right leg caught on a metal trash can, knocking it over. It clattered down on the hardwood floor. Not a huge noise, but in this absolutely tranquil house, it seemed deafening.

  He heard a rustling sound at the other end of the hallway, in the other bedroom. Someone was awake, which was unfortunate.

  He raced down the hallway, caution to the wind. It didn’t matter whether they heard him now; they knew he was coming. He flung open the bedroom door, his gun raised and poised, ready to go.

  There was a woman sitting in the bed, slightly upright, her head resting against several large pillows. She had dark hair and a hard set to her jaw. Her eyes were open.

  The man knew that she was Harvey’s wife. He also knew that she was an invalid, that she could only move slowly, and barely that. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  He approached the bed, keeping his gun pointed at her brain. He didn’t stop until he stood directly in front of her at the foot of the bed.

  “Where’s Harvey?” he said, gun still at the ready.

  The woman stared back at him with cold eyes. “He’s out of town.”

  He could still see the slight depression on the other side of the bed. A hand to the sheets told him they were still warm. “Tell me where he is.”

  “Cincinnati,” she replied. “He’s staying at a hotel. I can’t think of the name. Saint Something or other.”

  He shot her in the kneecap. After the initial shock subsided and her cries of pain diminished enough that he could be heard, he aimed his gun at her other kneecap and asked her again. “Where’s Harvey?”

  Needless to say, she told him.

  Chapter 3

  THE OTHER PARENTS GATHERED in Ben Kincaid’s office shortly after noon. Their hometown, Blackwood, was in Tulsa County, a thirty-minute drive from downtown Tulsa, and they all agreed to come when Cecily called them.

  “There were eleven?” Ben said, as he studied the faces before him. Cecily had told him there were others, but he never dreamed there could be so many. “Eleven.”

  It was true. Eleven sets of parents, all of whom had recently lost a child between the ages of eight and fifteen to leukemia. For more than two hours, Ben listened to their stories, all told simply and undramatically, and all of them heart-wrenching just the same.

  Cecily told Ben about her son, Billy, how he had been diagnosed with leukemia when he was twelve, how they’d fought it with drugs and radiation and chemotherapy, twice pushing the cancer into remission, only to lose finally at the end of a struggle that took more than two years. She told him about her last frenzied race to the hospital, how Billy had died during the drive, how she had attempted to revive him, crying and pleading, all to no avail.

  “I tried everything I knew to bring him back. Everything. I would have gladly changed places with him, given my life for his. But it didn’t help. My baby boy was gone. And there was nothing I could do about it.”

  Margaret Swanson told Ben about her son Donald, who was a star soccer player at Will Rogers Elementary. When the bruises first began to appear, Margaret assumed they were sports injuries; after all, soccer was a rough-and-tumble sport. When they didn’t go away, she began to suspect other causes. Their ordeal lasted almost three years. Donald endured more than a hundred blood tests, more than two dozen bone marrow aspirations. He spent the entire last year of his life in the hospital. But the end result was the same.

  “Donald begged me to let him go home, to let him play soccer again, but I always said no. I still held out hope, you see. I still pretended to myself that he might recover. So I made him stay in the hospital, where he was miserable. Now I’d give anything to turn the hands of the clock back, to let him go out and kick the ball, even just once. To give him one tiny moment of happiness before he was gone.”

  Ralph Foley had a simpler tale to tell. He and his wife hadn’t been put through the protracted series of treatments and therapies, advances and setbacks that the other parents had endured. The first warning sign they received that Jim was in danger came when he developed a persistent cough. Three months later, Jim was dead.

  “People kept telling me I was lucky—lucky that the inevitable end had come so mercifully fast. I don’t feel lucky. Even now, I can’t believe Jimmy is gone. It was all too quick, too unreal. One day, you have a healthy ten-year-old boy, and the next, he’s buried in a hole in Meadowland Cemetery. Things don’t really happen like that, do they?” There was a tremble in his voice, the advance guard for the tears that began streaming down his face. “It can’t be over so fast, can it? They can’t take the most precious thing in your life and just … and just …”

  He never managed to finish his sentence.

  Ben listened to those stories and all the others. Each time he thought he had heard the worst, he found out he was wrong. Rarely in his life had he sat in a room in which the sense of tragedy was so palpable. These were grieving parents, mothers and fathers who had poured their hearts and souls into raising their children, only to lose them due to something entirely outside their control. There could be nothing worse than that, Ben thought. Nothing at all.

  When the stories were done, Ben asked a few simple questions. “How did you all come together?”

  Cecily answered first. Ben gathered she was their unofficial leader. “I got some names from Billy’s pediatrician, after his first relapse. He wanted us to form a support group, but I never called the others. I was too busy trying to save my boy’s life. After Billy was gone, I met a priest from the local Episcopal church. Father Richard Daniels. I wasn’t Episcopalian, or even particularly religious. In fact, at that point in time I probably felt less religious than at any time in my life. But he was a comfort. He knew what I needed to hear—in part because he had been through this before. He told me about some of the other parents in town who had lost their children. Before long, we started getting together regularly to talk about what had happened—and what we were going to do about it.”

  “Cecily’s been the ramrod behind this since day one,” Ralph Foley explained. “She’s the one who refused to just take it. She kept saying all these leukemia deaths in the same area couldn’t be a coincidence. Something had to be causing it.”

  “What do your doctors say caused it?” Ben asked.

  “They all say the same thing,” Jim answered. “That no one knows what causes leukemia.”

  “But I wasn’t prepared to accept that,” Cecily said. “It was just too coincidental. Look at this.”

  She unfolded a map of the small city of Blackwood. On the map, she had penciled an X where each of the deceased children had lived. They were all congregated at the north end of the city, all within about five square miles of one another.

  “Leukemia is a very rare disease,” Cecily continued. “And yet here were eleven cases, all clustered together at the north end of a small town. And you want to tell me that’s just a coincidence? A statistical anomaly? No way.”

  “Then what caused it?”

  “That’s what I didn’t know. At first, I thought maybe there was some kind of virus going around. I had read that there was a type of leukemia cats got that was transmitted by a virus. But that wasn’t the kind of leukemia Billy had. So then I tried to think of something all the boys and girls who died shared. Most of them went to the same school—but not all. Most of them played sports—but not all. Then I tried to think of things that were universal that everyone shared. Like the air.” She paused significantly. “Or water.”

  “Did you share your theories with the rest of the group?”

  Margaret Swanson answered that one. “She certainly did. We all thought she was crackers.” She glanced quickly at Cecily. “Nothing personal. But we did. We knew she was struggling to accept her son’s death. We all were. But this seemed a strange way to go about it. She was talking about hiring scientists, suing the city. We didn’t want any
part of it.”

  Christina leaned forward. “What changed your mind?”

  “This.” Cecily reached into her oversized purse and retrieved a folded newspaper. “This is the front page of the Blackwood Gazette from about four months ago. See for yourself.”

  Ben took the paper from her. The headline story, in bold black letters, proclaimed: POISON POOL FOUND IN BLACKWOOD AQUIFER.

  Ben quickly scanned the article. A reporter named David Daugherty had discovered a half-buried pool, half an acre in size and about four feet deep, of contaminated water. The pool was connected to a ravine, which in turn fed the Blackwood water aquifer. In the water, the reporter found traces of arsenic, chromium, lead, and other heavy metals. The pool was uncovered by a construction crew in the process of laying the foundation for a new apartment complex. Ben also saw a line toward the end of the article that Cecily had underlined in red. Arsenic is believed to be a carcinogen, it said, even in small doses.

  “Okay,” Ben said, “that’s frightening. But how does it link up to your stories?”

  “Here’s another paper,” Cecily said, “from a week later.” This time she didn’t wait for Ben to read it. “The first article kicked up quite a stink in little Blackwood. The city council ordered the city engineer, one John Schultz, to test the city’s water supply. As the article explains, the city of Blackwood is serviced by four water wells. Three of them tested fine. But one of them was contaminated due to underground seepage from the poison pool. That was Well B. And guess where the water from Well B goes.” She paused, her jaw set. “North Blackwood. Our neighborhood.”

  Ben scanned the article now in his hands. Everything Cecily had said seemed to be correct. The city engineer determined that the well’s water was tainted by several undesirable chemicals, including trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, an industrial solvent used principally to dissolve oil and grease. He had ordered the well shut down immediately.

  “Wow,” Ben said quietly. He knew it sounded stupid, but it was all he could think to say. “That’s amazing. And … horrifying.”

  “I always thought the water tasted funny,” Barry said. “But what can you do about it? Water’s water.”

  “I thought it was gross,” Margaret said. “We bought bottled water for drinking. But you can’t use bottled water for everything. We couldn’t afford it.”

  “All our children were exposed to this water,” Cecily said. “They drank it, they bathed and showered in it. It was unavoidable.”

  “You may have grounds for a suit against the city,” Ben said. “The city engineer may have been negligent in the performance of his duties. But what would it get you? I can guarantee you the city coffers aren’t large enough to pay off any big judgment. A town that size probably doesn’t even have insurance.”

  “We don’t want the city,” Cecily answered. “We want the bastards who poisoned the water in the first place.” Once more her hand dipped into her oversized purse, this time retrieving a report bound in a clear binder. “I started researching this as soon as I read the first article in the paper. I studied to be a biologist, back at OU, so I wasn’t totally in the dark on this. I started reading about TCE and how it’s been linked to tumors in laboratory animals. I also found out I wasn’t the only person concerned about the Blackwood aquifer.”

  What Cecily handed Ben was a report by the Environmental Protection Agency. After the preliminary discovery of the poison pool, they had placed the Blackwood aquifer on the National Priorities List—which put it in line for cleanup via Superfund dollars. The EPA ranked all the sites on its list, based upon the chemicals involved, their concentrations, and the proximity to residential areas. The EPA ranked the Blackwood aquifer seventh out of over five hundred sites. Like the city engineer, they found TCE in Well B—280 parts per billion, an extremely significant contamination. They also found lesser amounts of other foreign substances, including tetrachloroethylene, better known as perc, another industrial solvent. The EPA considered both TCE and perc to be “possible carcinogens.”

  Ben flipped the pages, passing quickly over dense paragraphs of jargon, which he frankly didn’t understand, long academic sentences, and charts and graphs dealing with groundwater contours and well logs and such. But there was a short paragraph at the end of the report that he definitely understood.

  It was in a section labeled Contaminant Origination. It explained that Well B had been polluted by the underwater pool recently discovered in Blackwood. And it explained that the most likely cause of the contamination was dumping by the H. P. Blaylock Industrial Machinery Corporation, which owned the land and operated a manufacturing plant and headquarters not far from the poisoned pool.

  Ben closed the report. “You want to go after Blaylock Industrial?”

  “Of course,” Cecily responded. “They’re the ones responsible for this. Isn’t it obvious?”

  Ben and Christina exchanged a sharp look.

  “So,” Cecily said eagerly. “What do you think?”

  Ben bit down on his lower lip. “I think we should take a break.”

  Ben called for a fifteen-minute recess before the meeting proceeded. He needed to think about what he was going to say, and how he was going to say it. He wanted to be honest with these people, and that meant telling them many things they would not want to hear.

  Christina followed him to the kitchen while he poured himself a restorative Coke. “What are you going to do?”

  Ben shrugged. “Tell them the truth.”

  Christina nodded. “So you’re not going to take the case?”

  “It would be suicide, Christina. You know that.”

  She did not disagree. “These people have been through an awful lot, Ben. More than you or I can imagine.”

  “I understand that. But encouraging them to file a kamikaze lawsuit wouldn’t be doing them any favors.”

  Ben returned to his office early. He found all the parents waiting for him. They had never left. They were too anxious to hear what he had to say.

  “First of all,” Ben began, “I want you to understand that you have my utmost sympathy. I really mean that. What you’ve been through was a living nightmare, something no one—no parent—should have to endure. But you also have to understand one simple reality. The courts cannot right all wrongs. In fact, I would say they can’t right most wrongs. They can handle locking up crooks, and they’re pretty good at resolving disputes that are simply squabbles over money. But this case is about more than money. A lot more. And frankly, I don’t think the courts can help you.”

  He saw Cecily stiffen. “Couldn’t we file a lawsuit for negligence? Or for wrongful death?”

  “Yeah,” Ben answered, “you could file it. The question is, could you win it?”

  “But the EPA report says that—”

  “The EPA report won’t get you anywhere,” Ben said flatly. “It probably isn’t admissible, but even if it is, it won’t help. It’s full of the usual cautious academic language. Possibly this. Most likely that. When you’re in court, you have to be able to prove your case. To prove it. By a preponderance of the evidence.”

  “But surely when the jury sees the map—when they see all the leukemia victims clustered together in one neighborhood—”

  “I admit, the map is very compelling. Common sense tells us this cancer cluster can’t be just a coincidence. But common sense isn’t evidence. In court, we have to be able to prove that Blaylock poisoned the water, and moreover, that the water caused the cancer. If we can’t do that, we won’t even get to the jury. The judge will shut us down before it ever goes to trial.”

  Ben scanned the circle of sober, unhappy faces surrounding him. He was not telling them what they wanted to hear; he knew that. But it was what needed to be said.

  “To even attempt to prove a case like this, we would need expert testimony—by the barrelful. And that is very expensive. We’ll need geologists, toxicologists, engineers, hydrologists, not to mention doctors. They’ll all be billing hundreds
of dollars an hour for their time—plus expenses. We’ll have to conduct studies of our own, with our own researchers, so we can get them in as evidence. And we’ll need to somehow prove that Blaylock contaminated the site, something I can guarantee they won’t admit.”

  Ralph Foley cleared his throat. “Isn’t it possible Blaylock might agree to settle? You know, to avoid the expense and bad publicity of a trial.”

  “Is that what you were hoping for? Well, you can put that pipe dream to rest. Blaylock will never settle. Because if they did, every citizen of north Blackwood would turn around and sue them. They can’t afford to let that happen. They’ll fight this tooth and nail.”

  “That’s fine,” Cecily said defiantly. “We’ll fight back. Hard.”

  “With what?” Ben asked. “Let me tell you something. I know for a fact that the Blaylock Corporation is represented by Raven, Tucker & Tubb, the largest firm in Tulsa. I know this because I used to work there. I also know the Raven litigators are some of the best in the business. They know all the tricks. They’ll try to delay, to protract this and make it as miserable and expensive for us as possible. They’ll file frivolous motions, ask for hearings, demand pointless discovery, all to run down the clock—and run up the tab. This litigation will cost thousands of dollars—probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. Who’s got that kind of money? I certainly don’t. Do you?”

  Again Ben peered out at the sea of faces. No one was nodding. He didn’t need to be a financial whiz to know there were no billionaires in the room. None was rich to begin with—and all had just suffered debilitating medical expenses.

  “So basically, what you’re asking me to do is file a high-profile lawsuit that we can’t afford and can’t win. To run up expenses with no hope of recovering them. That’s why you haven’t been able to get anyone to represent you.” He paused, drawing in his breath. “And that’s why I can’t represent you, either.”