Don't Turn Your Back on the Ocean Page 19

  But it wouldn’t take long for them to forget her. Nowhere did I get the sense that any of these people knew Ariel particularly well, despite the fact that she’d earned her undergraduate degree here. Ariel was just one more face in a classroom. They couldn’t tell me much about the person behind the phrases fine young woman and promising student.

  The professor who taught Advanced Wastewater Treatment was also Ariel’s graduate adviser. He told me, as Maggie had, that Ariel spent several terms working as a student assistant at the regional office of the state water quality board in San Luis Obispo. This was a common practice, he said, giving both undergrads and graduate students the opportunity to get some hands-on training.

  The water board was on South Higuera. When I got there shortly before noon, the receptionist located the engineer Ariel had worked with, a man named Belknap. He was burly and barrel-chested, dressed in a roomy pair of gray slacks and a blue shirt. I took him up on his offer of a cup of coffee.

  “When Ariel didn’t show up a week ago Friday, I called the engineering department,” Belknap said. We had settled into chairs facing one another across his desk in a second-floor cubicle.

  “What did the department tell you?”

  “Not much. One of her professors called the following week and told me she was missing. Then later one of the other interns said she’d turned up dead.” He shook his head. “What a shame. She was really a good student; sharp, you know. I told her she could probably get a position with the water board once she got her master’s.”

  “Just what does the water board do?”

  “Wastewater discharge,” Belknap said succinctly. “We issue permits. The state’s divided into nine regions and we’re Region Three, Central Coast.”

  “And you cover Monterey Bay,” I guessed.

  Belknap nodded and reached toward the bookcase near his desk. He pulled out a handful of publications and showed me a map of the territory covered by this office. When people enjoy their work they like to talk about it. Belknap was no exception. I tried to make sense of his explanation of the difference between wastewater permits and the technical descriptions he used so easily, things like tertiary water treatment, suspended solids, and how to deal with pathogenic organisms and viruses. He described any usage of water as waste. That brought me up short with its logic.

  One of the publications he’d hauled out of the bookcase was called the California Ocean Plan. It detailed what could and couldn’t be discharged into the ocean. I leafed through the pages and stopped at a table about toxic materials limitations and objectives for protecting marine aquatic life and human health. My finger went down the list. Arsenic, lead, cyanide, benzene, carbon tetrachloride, and polychlorinated biphenyl, otherwise known as PCBs.

  “You can discharge this stuff into the ocean?” I frowned, picturing the waves Angie and I had seen during our walk yesterday afternoon at Montaña de Oro.

  “It’s all monitored, of course.” Belknap launched into an explanation of effluent limitations and units of measurement. I didn’t understand most of what he was saying, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Ariel would have. She was a graduate student in environmental engineering. This would have been quite clear to her.

  “What about Monterey?” I asked. Surely, with the sanctuary now a reality, nothing was allowed to be discharged there.

  Belknap disabused me of that notion. “There’s a zone of prohibition that stretches from the mouth of the Salinas River to Point Pinos, at the tip of the peninsula. Monterey’s outfall goes past the zone.” I must have shown my confusion, so he explained that the Monterey Regional Treatment Plant processed about three million gallons of wastewater daily. Then I marveled at my own ignorance. The Monterey area had nearly a quarter of a million people. Did I think everything that went down a drain or a sewer pipe vanished magically?

  “Right now we’re concerned about heavy metals, like lead,” Belknap was saying. “There’s a hot spot right there in Monterey Harbor.”

  “Lead in the harbor? Where did it come from?’

  “Slag. Years ago, when they built the railway from the main line to Cannery Row. They dumped the slag right there near the Coast Guard jetty.”

  I pictured the little cove between the jetty and Fisherman’s Wharf, where the small boats were tied up, where Donna and I had seen the sea otters floating on their backs, drawing the eyes of tourists who walked along the recreation trail or the customers at the wharf restaurants like Ravella’s. I hadn’t known there was lead lurking under the surface of the blue water. The bay I thought was so pristine was more fragile than I’d imagined.

  “Heavy metals are bad news,” Belknap said. “They’re bioaccumulative. They don’t leave the organism’s system. So we have the state mussel watch program. It’s funded by the board and Fish and Game does the monitoring, up at Moss Landing. They set out some mussels, leave them in the water for three months, and then pull them out to check the muscle tissue for toxics.”

  “What would I expect to find in Monterey Bay?” I asked him, feeling more and more alarmed.

  “Ariel asked me the same question. Thought it was odd at the time.”

  That caught my interest. “When? And why do you say it was odd?”

  “First day of classes, three weeks ago. Her first day back here at the board. And it was odd because after working here last year, she knew what turns up in Monterey Bay. There’s agricultural runoff because of all the farming, so there’s always pesticide residue. With all the fishing boats and pleasure craft, there’s bound to be fuel spills. When it rains, there’s storm-drain runoff. Anything that gets spilled or dumped on a city street winds up in the bay. Maybe some bozo has a bunch of old batteries. He takes them out on a boat one night and deep-sixes them in Davy Jones’s locker. It’s not his problem anymore, but all that stuff from the batteries shows up in the food chain.”

  Was there any human activity that didn’t generate pollution? I doubted it. Like slugs, wherever we go we leave slime, whether it’s litter on the trail to Montaña de Oro or the sheen of oil floating on the surface of the ocean.

  Why was Ariel asking these particular questions? Belknap didn’t have any answers. If there was a particular pollutant or incident that worried Ariel, she hadn’t shared that information.

  After leaving the water board I had a sandwich at a nearby deli, then I headed downtown to Chorro Street, looking for the office of Central Coastwatch, one of the environmental groups that sent mail to Ariel Logan.

  It was a narrow storefront a few doors down from the mission, with a window full of pamphlets and posters. Oil was the subject of the display—offshore oil drilling, tanker transport, and the need for conservation. I looked at a poster of a seabird coated with black sludge, then opened the door. The office was divided by partitions, the front half empty. Several chairs were grouped around a coffee table and a sofa. Farther back I saw a desk and a phone next to a large Rolodex.

  “Hello?” I called.

  A voice answered from the back. “Be right there.” Then the phone rang. A tall woman came around the end of the partitions. “Be with you in a minute,” she said briskly, reaching for the receiver. “Central Coastwatch.”

  I watched her as she talked with whoever was on the other end of the line, about something that seemed to amuse them both. She perched on one corner of the desk, a woman in her forties, I guessed, brown hair streaked with gray, tied back in a short ponytail that fell over the collar of her cotton shirt She wore sandals and a baggy pair of blue painter’s pants. Beads dangled from her earlobes, swinging each time she moved.

  When she replaced the receiver in the cradle she smiled at me, laugh lines crinkling the skin around her brown eyes. “Hi. What can I do for you?”

  “My name’s Jeri Howard. I’m a private investigator from Oakland.” While she’d been on the phone I had pulled one of my business cards from the case in my purse. Now I handed it to her. She held it between her thumb and forefinger as though it contained some toxic residu
e. I saw suspicion percolate into her brown eyes. “I’d like to talk about one of your volunteers, Ariel Logan.”

  Suspicion gave way to hostility and the woman glared at me. “I have nothing to say to you. Get out.”

  I’d made the wrong approach, I thought. Why was she so guarded? Had someone sicced an investigator on the organization at one time?

  “Ariel Logan is dead. She was murdered, more than a week ago, up near Carmel. I’m trying to find out why.”

  Now she stared at me with consternation. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I’m afraid so. If you don’t believe me, you can call her roommate, Maggie Lim. She was at the funeral on Monday.”

  She strode past me to the coffee table, her hands sorting through a stack of newspapers bearing the masthead San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune. “I saw a headline, a couple of days ago, that said a Cal Poly student had been murdered. But with everything that’s been going on, I didn’t read the story.”

  She found the newspaper she sought and sat down on the sofa. As she read the story she shook her head in disbelief. Then she handed me the newspaper, Sunday’s edition, with a small headline below the fold, near the bottom, and a few inches of type giving a bare minimum of facts.

  “I wondered why I hadn’t seen her. Particularly with the news about the oil company.”

  I sat down beside her, still holding the newspaper. “What news is that?”

  She pointed at the banner headline that topped the newspaper. DA TO SEEK INDICTMENTS, it read. I quickly scanned the article. The oil company whose tanker I’d seen plying the waves between Cayucos and Morro Bay had been the subject of a lengthy investigation involving the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office, Fish and Game, and the water quality board, as well as a number of federal, state, and local environmental agencies. The results made disturbing reading.

  A huge amount of petroleum had leaked into groundwater and the ocean near the company’s storage facility south of SLO. Evidently the leakage had been occurring for several years and nothing had been done to stop it. In fact, the company and several of its employees were accused of knowing about the leak and covering it up rather than notifying authorities. The DA’s office had already filed misdemeanor charges and now things were about to move into the felony column.

  “They deny it, of course,” the woman said. I knew she meant the oil company. As she spoke her eyes sparked with the righteous anger of the truly committed.

  “They always deny it. Or they point out that they’ve got a permit, issued by the water board. So they just keep spewing crap into the ocean. Arsenic, cyanide, mercury, lead, toxaphene, and PCBs, all of it legal, for Christ’s sake. If people knew what gets dumped into the ocean just off those picturesque sandy beaches, they wouldn’t stick a toe into the water.”

  Maybe she was right but I doubted it. We human beings have an enormous ability to ignore that which we do not wish to see or hear. I’m as guilty of it as the next person.

  The woman continued to rail at the oil company. “And if they don’t have a permit, they dump the stuff anyway. When they get caught, they get a slap on the wrist and a fine.” She sneered. “Fines are peanuts to a large corporation. Maybe this time some of those executives and middle managers will get their corporate asses thrown in jail. That might get their attention.” She stopped and shook her head in frustration. “I’m sorry, I get so angry. It’s been going on for years. When I think about the seals, I get mad all over again.”

  “What about the seals? Ms.—?” I set the newspaper on top of the stack.

  “Just call me Maya. You want to talk with a friend of mine, up in Paso Robles, about the seals.” She leaned back against the sofa and waved away any more questions about marine mammals. “But please, tell me about Ariel. What happened? What’s your connection with all of this? Did her family hire you?”

  I shook my head. “They think my cousin had something to do with Ariel’s death.”

  “She was involved with a fisherman, a guy named Bobby. Is that your cousin? Why is he supposed to have killed her?”

  “They had an argument the day she died. Bobby won’t tell me what it was about. The official theory is that Ariel wanted to break it off between them, and Bobby didn’t, so he killed her. But that’s not Bobby.”

  Maya crossed one leg over the other and cupped her hands together on her knee. “She did have her doubts about the relationship. They argued about a lot of things.”

  “How do you know this?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not saying Ariel and I were best friends and confidantes. But she’d come in looking blue, so I’d ask her what was the matter, and she’d tell me. Earlier in the year, in the spring, she told me it was all over, because of his drinking. Then, during the summer, it was back on. She said he was going to AA.”

  “That much I know. What else did they argue about?”

  “She had doubts about what he did for a living. Hell, she had doubts about her own career choice.”

  “She didn’t like the fact that he was a fisherman?”

  “It wasn’t a class thing,” Maya said. “Ariel wasn’t like that. But she felt his way of life is disappearing and he’d better find something else to do. A lot of us think fishermen are like loggers. Overfishing is stripping the sea of life, just like the timber companies are stripping the forests.”

  “Some would say that’s an extreme point of view.” I thought about the Ravellas, three generations of fishermen, and knew what their reaction to this would be. On the other hand, the sardines disappeared from Monterey Bay back in the fifties. There were no more sardine canneries down on Cannery Row.

  “Is it? The drought just about killed the salmon fishery. Too many demands on the existing supply of water. With the competition between agriculture and the cities, fish come out a distant third.” Maya shook her head. “You should see what drift nets are doing. They’re miles long, trapping everything in their path. A while back some Japanese vessels came through Morro Bay. They were hauling abalone out of the ocean by the dozens. Now the abalone fishermen are bitching because their catches are down. They blame the otters. What bullshit! Otters never take more than they need to survive. I can’t say that about humans.”

  Environmentalists sometimes sound as though they’re preaching. But they had much to preach about, particularly when I recalled the poster in the window and the newspaper headlines in front of me.

  I steered her back to something she’d mentioned earlier. “You say Ariel had doubts about her career choice. I would have thought environmental engineering was a good field for her.”

  “Have you seen their ocean plan?” Maya’s mouth twisted into a sardonic frown as she referred to the booklet Belknap had shown me. “Have you seen what they’re allowed to dump? Heavy metals, carcinogens, toxins of all sorts. All perfectly legal. Oh, yes, it’s monitored—by the wastewater discharger.”

  She flicked a disparaging finger at the headline about the oil-company indictments. “A bit like asking the fox to monitor the henhouse, if you ask me. That’s what environmental engineers do, mitigate pollution. Damage control. And in my opinion they don’t do a very good job of it. Ever since she started working at the water board, Ariel had doubts about whether she wanted to be a part of wastewater treatment and solid waste disposal.”

  “The people aren’t going away,” I said.

  Maya shook her head. “No. The marine life will vanish first. Then there won’t be any more fish for your cousin Bobby to catch.”

  I recalled something Bobby said, last week before Ariel’s body was found, about how the squid weren’t plentiful in the bay this year. The Nicky II had to go farther out to sea to make its catch. Were the squid going the way of the sardines?

  “When was the last time you saw Ariel?”

  She thought for a moment. “Three weeks ago, Wednesday, the week before classes started. We had a meeting here, then she and I went around the corner for coffee.”

  “A week ago
Friday she cut classes. Her roommate says she left around eight that morning, to go up to Carmel. It’s about three hours, if she took 101. But Ariel didn’t show up at her parents’ house in Carmel until that afternoon. She must have gone somewhere first. I have a hunch it may have something to do with what Ariel did during the summer. Did she say anything about how she’d spent her time?”

  “Well, first she told me that her relationship with Bobby was back on,” Maya said, “because he’d stopped drinking. Things were good between them. They were engaged but they were going to wait until she’d finished her master’s. She hadn’t told her folks yet and was wondering when to spring it on them.”

  Maya was quiet for a moment. “She was concerned about her grandmother. She had cancer. Ariel spent a year in France living with her grandmother, between high school and college. I guess she and the old woman are close. Ariel’s parents went to Paris and Ariel would have gone with them if she hadn’t been due back at school.”

  “Did she hint at anything else that was on her mind besides Bobby and her grandmother?”

  “We talked about the oil-company investigation. It’s been going on for a couple years and it looked like the DA was finally going to indict. Ariel would have been so pleased about the charges. Felonies as well as misdemeanors.” Maya sighed, then she brightened, as though something had just occurred to her. “She asked questions about the seals. I sent her to my friend in Paso Robles.”

  “What happened to the seals?” I asked. This was the second time Maya had mentioned it. Could this have some connection with the report Ariel had filed with the Monterey SPCA?

  “It was awful. Susan can give you the details.” Maya leaped up from the sofa and crossed the office to the desk, flipping through the Rolodex. She quickly wrote a name and address on a telephone message pad and tore off the sheet. “I’ll call and tell her to expect you.”