Finnegan's Week by Joseph Wambaugh

had come home very late. She suspected that the boys had bought tamales from a street vendor. She’d always warned Luis about street vendors. They used cat and dog meat in their tamales, she’d always told her son.

C HAPTER 8
    N o sex appeal is what they always said about cases involving hazardous waste. By that they meant no jury appeal.
    â€œHow do you take a bubbling vat of hazardous waste before a jury?” a deputy district attorney had once rhetorically asked D.A.’s Investigator Nell Salter when she’d wanted a criminal complaint against a waste hauler.
    â€œWell, what if we drape a little silk and lace on the acid drum and hang a dildo on the flange?” Nell had suggested, before calling it a day and giving up on a case that had cost her at least one hundred investigative hours.
    That was everybody’s attitude when it came to environmental crime. Nobody cared about it because nobody knew much about it, least of all the cops. The field was too new, too esoteric, too unsexy, and there was almost no case law. Clint Eastwood would never ask the owner of a dioxin-producing paper company to “make his day.”
    When Nell had been assigned to the unit back in 1985, she and another investigator, Hugh Carter, had simply shaken hands and said, “Now what?”
    The District Attorney’s Fraud Unit had been given the job of investigating environmental crimes. There were about fifty of them in the unit: attorneys, accountants, investigators and assistants, all sharing a floor in a downtown bank building because the county building was not large enough. The Fraud Unit could be housed in a privately owned high rise because their clientele wouldn’t frighten the other tenants of the building as ordinary street criminals might do.
    Their quarters were cramped, and Nell’s view was of the downtown homeless. She had a cubicle containing a small desk, two chairs, a computer, a bookshelf and a file cabinet. Investigators were not entitled to a full wall so she had to settle for a three-quarter divider, but she also had an unobstructed view of the common bathroom in a nearby residential hotel. Nell learned that both men and women had some weird bathroom rituals.
    There’d been no training and very little information available on the subject of environmental crime back when Nell was assigned. In the early years most cases dealing with the illegal disposal of toxic waste merely involved lawsuits by the county. Then dumping became a misdemeanor, and sometimes a “wobbler” felony that could be prosecuted as a misdemeanor, depending upon the circumstances.
    But at last the laws had been given teeth, fangs in fact. For a hazardous waste hauler who “should have known” of intentional dumping there were new felony provisions for a determinate sentence of sixteen months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months in prison, and a fine of up to $100,000 per day per offense, with a mandatory minimum of $5,000 per day. If someone suffered great bodily injury as a result of the dumping, the perpetrator could get thirty-six months added to his sentence, along with a fine of $250,000 for every day that the material was actively exposed. The county’s share from that kind of money made the bureaucrats and politicians pay attention to environmental crime.
    When Nell Salter and Hugh Carter started out they referred to all hazardous waste as “methyl-ethyl bad-shit,” until gradually they began to learn a thing or two. Once, an EPA Super Fund team of chemists and waste handlers had made an error cleaning up a dump site that involved a large quantity of nitric acid. A lot of workers ended up with a snootful of acid and cyanide fumes, the very thing used to execute people within the walls of San Quentin Prison. That made Nell and Hugh more anxious to read all they could about any methyl-ethyl bad-shit they might encounter, so as not to get up-close-and-personal to suspicious