Page 74 of Forgotten Path
“Because you were going to expose this?” Judy asked.
She clasped her shaking hands together and pressed them into her abdomen. “No, not because of this. Because I told him I saw him going into the clinic early Friday morning.”
After she dropped this bombshell, there was a stretch of frozen silence. Finally, the medical examiner from Panama City broke the silence. “What time was this?”
“Around seven-thirty.”
Judy peered at Brianna’s face. “Do you think he’s capable of killing Doc?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Brianna stared at the mural of baby jungle animals that decorated the large wall opposite her. She could remember when Mrs. Wolfe had painted it for the church. Brianna had been in elementary school then. On her way to her classroom every Sunday, she would stretch onto her toes to peek in the window to see what new creature or plant had appeared on the wall.
“Brianna?” Bodhi prompted her, interrupting the memory.
She turned her attention back to the question. “I don’t know. I can believe Chad went there to offer Doc a donation—and it may have been a donation with strings attached. I could see him doing that. Could I see him killing Doc? I want to say no. But given the history …” she threw her hands up and trailed off.
“What history?” Bodhi asked.
“A few years back, the company was getting a lot of grief for dumping wastewater from the paper mill into the bay.”
“What kind of wastewater?” Dr. Owens asked.
“Okay, let me try to explain this. Do any of you know what BOD load is?”
They shook their heads no. She’d figured as much.
“BOD stands for biochemical oxygen demand. It’s a formula environmental scientists use to figure out how much of the oxygen in water is consumed by organic waste that’s introduced into the water. The higher the BOD, the more polluted the water is.” It was an extreme simplification, but it covered the basics.
“And the stuff coming from the paper mill raised the BOD?” Bodhi guessed.
“Right. It was one of the first things I worked on when I joined the company. Chad was livid because he’d cleaned up the bleaching process to lessen the amount of chlorine he was dumping into the water. And thatwasgood. Unfortunately, though, the paper mill got rid of the chlorine by adding nutrients to the purification process. Who wants to guess which nutrients were added?”
Dr. Owens groaned softly. “Please don’t say phosphorus and nitrogen.”
“Bingo. They were treating the sludge with phosphorus and nitrogen. The so-called ‘purified’ waste, removed of chlorine, was released into the water.”
“And that caused eutrophication,” Bodhi said.
“Right.” She turned to Judy. “You might remember this. The state came in and fined the paper mill. Chad felt persecuted because he believed he’d done the right thing by cleaning up the chlorine, so he paid the fine and cleaned up the water, but after that, he just shuttered the mill. Almost out of spite.”
“Oh, I remember,” Judy said sourly. “Dozens of folks lost their jobs, and the water still stank for months.”
“Right. The company did ultimately comply with its legal obligations. But we’d also made a voluntary pledge to change many of the plant procedures to be more sustainable—at my suggestion—and Chad blew it off. It was not a shining example of being a good corporate citizen. Fast forward to the present. Someone—Doc Ashland, actually—complained to the state about the polluted water over at Emerald Estuary Estates and said there was evidence of mass fish die-offs.”
“Wait, do you know for a fact that it was Dr. Ashland?” Bodhi probed.
“Yes, and so does Chad. The DEP complaint form has a provision to make an anonymous complaint, but Dr. Ashland didn’t check that box. Whether that was an oversight on his part or he wanted us to know, I can’t say. But we did know. The state sent investigators out to the construction site, and Glazier Builders was cited for a host of violations.”
“Glazier, not Gulf Paper?”
“Correct. And that was pretty much Chad’s position. This mess was Fred’s Glazier’s problem, not ours.”
“I sense a but,” Dr. Owens told her.
“But it didn’t sit right with me to say we weren’t responsible. Especially because the bloom in the estuary was almost certainly the result of eutrophication caused by fertilizer run-off. Now, Glazier may be the general contractor on the project, but Chad set the budget. And the landscaping was one place where he tried to save costs. I heard him and Sharon—the chief real estate officer—discussing it more than once. The cheapest fertilizer contains lots of nitrates and phosphates.”
“So, he didn’t learn a blessed thing,” Judy said.
“I don’t know if either Fred or Chad knew what was in that fertilizer. But once I found out, I made an appointment to see Doc. I wanted to show him that Chad stopped using the nutrients at the paper mill when the state told him to. I wanted to make him understand that Chad wasn’t a bad guy.” She sighed heavily. “I told him I’d show him the paperwork from the mill violations. He was distracted and said we could meet again next month. So, I left. I spotted Chad going into the clinic a minute later. I thought it was weird, but …”
