“Sounds like Lucy,” Marybeth said, and laughed. “A social butterfly.”
“Exactly,” Pam said.
“So . . .” Joe prompted.
“Right,” Pam said, switching back on track. “Butch saved enough to get the foundation dug out, framed, and poured. So a year ago, he went up there on a Friday and started moving dirt. He also had fill dirt brought up and dumped because the lot slopes toward the lake.”
“Two acres, right?” Joe asked.
“Yeah. Not very big, but big enough.”
“So tell me how this involves the EPA,” Joe said. “I’m not connecting the dots.”
Pam looked at him and her expression was fierce. “Even when I tell you what happened, you won’t be able to connect them,” she said.
“Okay,” Pam said. “Three days after Butch started grading the lot, on a Monday—Hannah was up there with him because it was Memorial Day—he was on his tractor when he looked up and saw a car coming down the road. Three middle-aged women get out, and one starts waving at him—summoning him—to come over. He shuts off the tractor and climbs off and walks over to where they parked, which is the road right next to our lot.”
“Were you there?” Joe asked, trying to ascertain if Pam was an eyewitness or had heard the story secondhand, considering her use of the words “middle-aged” and “summoning.”
“I wasn’t there,” she said, “but I heard the same story from both Butch and Hannah. Hannah overheard the entire exchange.
“So these three women get out of their car and stand there, glaring at my husband. There was nothing special about them—they weren’t wearing suits or professional clothes or anything. Butch said he thought they were three lost tourists when he saw them,” she said.
“So he goes over there and one of them says she’s from the EPA office in Cheyenne. She says he has to cease and desist moving dirt that second, that the lot is an official wetlands, and to restore the ground immediately exactly like he found it or he was breaking the law.”
Joe sat back, blinked, and said, “What?”
“That’s what they told him: that our lot was a wetlands and he was violating the Clean Water Act by disturbing it. They told him they were issuing him a verbal compliance order and that unless he restored every inch of the dirt to where it had been before he started up his tractor—and planted native grass and plants on the disturbed soil—we’d be fined every day until it was done.”
“Hold it,” Joe said, shaking his head. “I thought you said you got permits before you did anything.”
“We did!” Pam said, smacking the tabletop with the palm of her hand. “I did it myself. We’re in construction—we know how these things work. I got permits from the county and the state, and I got title to the land cleared through a title company. No one ever said anything about wetlands. And you’ve seen it, right?”
Joe said he had.
“Did you see anything that looks like a wetlands? Did you see any running water, or a swamp, or anything at all besides the natural slope of the land?”
“No,” Joe said, trying to recall the contours of the lot. There was nothing resembling a stream or runoff ditch. And the neighboring houses were close enough, he thought, that he could throw rocks and hit them.
“So when Butch came home that night he was nearly out of his head,” Pam said. “I made him repeat the story about four times, because I couldn’t believe that three broads could just drive up and tell us to stop building our home like that.”
“Back up,” Joe said. “I’m trying to wrap my mind around this. So walk me through it, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You received no calls in advance, or any letters from the EPA?”
“No.”
“Did anyone else in the subdivision or the developers have any trouble before? Did anyone else have to do anything special to develop their home?”
“No. And I know this because of the spec home we built. All our permits sailed right through.”
Joe said, “These three women—were they all from the EPA office in Cheyenne?”
“Two were, they told Butch,” Pam said. “The third one was from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, or so she said.”
“Who were they, exactly? Did they give Butch paperwork or letters from the government?”
Pam shook her head emphatically. “I know the name of one: Shauna Naous. She gave Butch her business card, and I’ve talked to her since. Butch can’t remember if the other two gave their names or not. They didn’t give Butch anything at all except Shauna Naous’s business card. Oh, and they said we would be fined seventy thousand dollars a day.” Pam’s voice was deadpan, as if delivering the punch line.
“Say again,” Joe said, assuming he’d not heard correctly.
“Seventy thousand dollars a day,” Pam repeated. “Starting that Monday, until we complied with the order.”
“Your lot was worth . . .”
“Sixty thousand,” Pam said.
“Wow,” Joe said.
“That’s what they told him, and then they drove away. If Butch didn’t restore the lot to exactly the way it looked three days before—including the weeds and grass—we would be fined seventy thousand dollars per day. This was after three days of dirt work. As you know, there is no way possible to plant grass and weeds and make it look completely natural on a construction site for months in this country. Even if Butch hauled all the dirt out and bladed the slope back to the same grade it was, it isn’t possible to have grass just magically grow again.”
“Pam,” Joe said firmly, “you’re telling me that three bureaucrats drove all the way north from Cheyenne and showed up without a court order, or a warrant, or anything besides a single business card and told you to stop working on the property you owned or you’d have to pay seventy thousand dollars a day in fines?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Joe,” she said. “I swear it.”
“This is just like the Sackett case in Idaho.”
Marybeth asked, “The what?” Pam looked up like she didn’t know the case, either, which Joe found surprising.
“The Sacketts,” Joe said. “A married couple building a home in a subdivision near Priest Lake. Out of the blue, EPA folks showed up and told them to stop and didn’t provide any kind of documentation. Told them to restore the land, or they’d get a huge fine every day. The case is working itself through the legal system right now, and my understanding is it’s likely to wind up in the Supreme Court.”
“You’re telling me this happened before?” Pam asked, as if she wasn’t sure whether it was good or bad news.
“Something similar, anyway,” Joe said. “Pam, be honest with me. I saw the lot, but I didn’t study it. Is there any way it’s actually a wetlands area? Is it conceivable Butch was filling in a swamp or a runoff stream that would go into the lake?”
“No, and that’s not all,” Pam said. “When this horrible Naous person finally took my call, I asked her where they had gotten the information that our property was a wetlands. She told me that it was public information and I could look it up on the Internet at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Wetlands Inventory database. I was pissed because I thought the developers somehow forgot to check that or something, so I got on the computer and checked it myself. And guess what?”
“What?”
“Our property isn’t listed as a wetlands. I called her to tell her that, and you know what she said?”
She didn’t wait for Joe to ask.
“She said the National Wetlands Inventory database isn’t definitive. She said just because our property isn’t on it doesn’t mean it’s not a wetlands.”
Joe pushed back and stood up. He crossed the kitchen to the pantry and asked, “Anybody else want a bourbon and water?”
“I’ll take one,” Pam said.
“I’ll take one, too,” Marybeth said. “And I don’t even like bourbon.”
—
JOE PLACED THE THREE GLASSES on the tab
le, and Pam sipped hers and made a sour face, but she didn’t push it away.
“So what did Butch say to this Shauna Naous and the other two when they told him to stop working?” Joe asked.
“Nothing,” Pam said, and sighed. “He just clammed up and waited for them to leave. I think he was so stunned by what they told him he just couldn’t speak. His dream was just crashing down all around him and he couldn’t believe what was happening and he just froze up. Boy, I wish I’d have been there. I would have thrown it right back in their faces and told them to get off my property—that they had no right to even be there.”
Joe believed her.
“We’ve never been political,” she said. “I don’t even know if Butch voted in the past ten years. We just don’t follow that stuff, even though I’d say we’re both pretty patriotic and conservative. I’m sure he just couldn’t get a handle on the fact that our government could do such a thing.”
“Twice, apparently,” Joe said, and shook his head. “The more you tell us, the more it sounds like the same exact thing that happened to the Sacketts. I wonder if the same people are behind both cases?” Then: “No,” he said, answering his own question. “We’re in Region Eight and Idaho is in Region Ten of the EPA. So it can’t be the same person, can it?”
He looked to Marybeth, and she nodded crisply. She understood what he was implying.
“I’ll start doing some research tomorrow,” she said to Joe. To Pam: “What happened next?”
Pam took another sip. “After Butch came home with Hannah and told me what happened, he just shook his head and sat in his chair in front of the television with the sound off. Hannah said he was quiet all the way home. I tried to discuss it with him, but he couldn’t even talk about it, he was so depressed. He scared me that night. We’ve got plenty of guns in the house, and that was the first time I ever gathered them all up and hid them in the basement. Not that I thought he’d grab one and go after those women—I thought he might do something to himself. I wanted him to scream and yell and cuss out those women and the EPA, but he just sat there and stared. I didn’t want him to let his emotions get bottled up that way, but that’s how he is.”
Joe asked, “Did Butch do anything with the lot? Did he blade the dirt back?”
“No,” Pam said sadly. “He just walked away that afternoon and never went back. And the next day he went to work like nothing had happened.”
Marybeth shook her head.
“I’m not like Butch, though,” Pam said. “And the next day I was on the phone to this Naous, leaving messages every hour. Either she didn’t want to talk with me or she was out of the office. I called all week. Finally, on that Friday, she called me back at four-fifty p.m. and made it a point to tell me she only had ten minutes to talk.”
“What was she like?” Marybeth asked.
“She just sounded annoyed but tried to act like she wasn’t,” Pam said. “Like I was really imposing on her valuable time. I think if I hadn’t hounded her, she might not have ever called me back.”
She took a breath. “At first,” Pam continued, “the way she explained things to me made me think Butch might have misunderstood her. She said we could clear everything up by getting what she called an after-the-fact permit once the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did a study and said our lot wasn’t a wetlands. That sounded stupid to me, because no one else had to get an after-the-fact permit, but I wrote it down and thought we shouldn’t have any trouble getting one, since anyone can see there isn’t any water on our property.
“When I asked her where we go to get the study started, she tells me it can’t happen until we request one and the process could take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars—and it’s still not a guarantee that the EPA will agree with it.”
“You’re kidding,” Joe said, amazed and growing angrier as she went on.
“I wish I was,” Pam said. “She said that even if a study said it wasn’t a wetlands, we’d then have to apply to the EPA for something called a wetlands development permit and have it approved or rejected. See, if it was approved, we could start building, and if it was rejected we could have our day in court to try and prove them wrong. I asked how long that takes, and she said years. Plus, we’d have to pay application fees and lawyers’ fees and that could amount to a quarter of a million dollars, she guessed. And if the wetlands development permit was rejected, all we could do then was sue the EPA in federal court, and that would take hundreds of thousands more and even more years.”
“They’ve got you coming and going,” Joe said.
“Right,” Pam said, sitting back and draining her drink. “It’s me and Butch going up against a federal agency with dozens of government lawyers paid by my tax money. They’ve got all the time and money in the world, and none of them are risking their personal bank account or livelihood like we are. And in the meanwhile, even if we started going through the process and applying for after-the-fact permits, we’d still be racking up fines of seventy thousand dollars a day. So as I was talking to this woman, I was getting more and more upset until I was crying. I might have said some things to her I shouldn’t. In fact, I know I did.”
Joe was confused. He said, “I still don’t get it. A person gives you a business card and the fines start automatically that day? With nothing in writing at all?”
Pam said, “I begged her to send me something. I sent certified letters to her office begging for some kind of documentation of what they were doing to us and why. But she ignored me, and no one in that office would talk to me on the phone. After a couple of months, I just stopped calling.”
Joe asked, “Did you try to get in touch with any of her higher-ups?”
“I sent letters and emails but never got a reply.”
“Does the name Juan Julio Batista mean anything to you?”
“Sure,” Pam said. “He’s the big boss. I found his name in a directory, but I couldn’t get past his secretary when I called, and he never replied to my emails.”
“What about Heinz Underwood?”
“Never heard of him.”
Joe said, “How was Butch taking this?”
“Badly,” Pam said. “He just withdrew into his shell. He went to work, he came home and ate dinner, but it was like he wasn’t really there. We were both waiting for the other shoe to drop—for something to happen so we could maybe find a lawyer or call the governor or some politician who might be able to help. We did talk to a lawyer, but he said he couldn’t really do anything without seeing something in writing from the EPA. In fact, he kind of looked at us like we were paranoid or exaggerating. So we waited for the EPA to slap us with some kind of charge, but nothing happened.”
Marybeth said, “Is that why you never said anything about it to me or anyone? Because you thought we might not believe you?”
Pam took a moment to answer while considering the question. “It’s complicated. I think even though we were convinced we didn’t do anything wrong we still felt . . . guilty somehow. It’s just like the questions you’re asking me—like you think there has to be another side to this story, because why else would they come after us like that?
“But there is no other side,” she said, “unless it’s something we don’t know or never thought about. I think both Butch and I always believed someone would just say, ‘Hey, this is crazy. This can’t happen in America,’ and it would just go away.”
Joe said, “You mean since that first encounter you never got a letter, or anything, from the EPA? Not even a call?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I started to think it was all some kind of bad dream. Or, like I said, that it might somehow just go away. I thought maybe Shauna Naous and the EPA had lost their paperwork, or it fell through the cracks or something. I hoped maybe she got fired or something and the whole thing left with her. Then I realized federal employees never get fired. Still, I was starting to have some hope again. But I couldn’t ever stop thinking of that seventy thousand dollars a day.
“A couple
of months ago,” Pam said, “Butch moved out. He said he just needed to be by himself.”
Marybeth gasped and covered her mouth. She said, “Pam, why didn’t you tell me?”
Pam shook her head. “I was ashamed. I didn’t want anyone to know. Every day I thought he’d move back in and our life would be normal again. We still worked together at the office, but at the end of the day I’d come home and he’d go to his place. I made Hannah promise me not to tell you, but I think she told Lucy.”
“Lucy never said a word,” Marybeth whispered.
“She’s a good friend for Hannah,” Pam said. “I so appreciate her being able to spend so much time here with a normal family.”
“Oh, we’ve got issues,” Marybeth said, and laughed, “but we think of her as one of our own. She’s a sweet girl.”
“She likes you, too,” Pam said.
“Where has Butch been staying?” Joe asked Pam.
“Downtown. In some grungy little apartment over the Stockman’s Bar.”
“I know of it,” Joe said, recalling once breaking into the apartment during a case two years before.
Pam said, “The good news is Butch moved back home just last week. He said since we hadn’t heard anything from the EPA in nearly a year, that maybe it was all some kind of bureaucratic snafu. He said they could at least apologize for what they put us through, but he didn’t really expect anything.
“It was like having the old Butch back,” Pam said with a sad smile. “It was like a black cloud had lifted from him. That’s not to say I didn’t resent the hell out of him for leaving us. We still have issues to work through on that one, and I don’t plan to let him off the hook as easily as he expects me to let him off. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy yesterday when he said he was going to go up to our lot and get back to work on it. He wasn’t gone three hours before I got a call from Shauna Naous.”
Joe held his breath.
“She said they were delivering the documentation I’d asked for, that it had taken a while to get it all put together.”
“A year after you asked for it?” Marybeth said, obviously outraged.