Jackie was shocked when she returned to her office and read the email from Bradley Hanson, head of the lab up at UC Davis. He rarely marked his emails urgent.
She’d sent the water and tissue samples from her river trip to him to analyze. He knew the Center couldn’t afford to run all the necessary tests, and Bradley loved a challenge. But she also knew he was doing it partially as a special favor for her. Asking for favors was part of running a struggling nonprofit, but she’d never been comfortable asking for help.
Earlier that afternoon Gage had teased her about taking advantage of Bradley. She liked Bradley and to anyone’s eyes, they were a good match. He ran one of the best pathology labs in the country, he had a far-ranging mind and he was a renowned scientist. And he was handsome, she had to admit. He had one of those faces you’d see in an L.L.Bean catalogue, the guy with the Christmas tree slung over his shoulder and a casual grin lighting his wide-set eyes.
But he didn’t light any fire in her. Thank goodness. Right now she needed a colleague, not a boyfriend. But he’d asked her out a couple times and though she’d always managed to have a good excuse to refuse, his interest made her uneasy.
She took in a breath and punched in his number.
“And how’s my favorite seal doctor today?” Bradley’s voice didn’t have its usual cheery tone.
“I’m well, thank you. But I’ll be better when I know what you’ve found out.”
“In that case, I wish I had better news. You were right—the tests on the water samples from the mouth of the river showed nitrates, the sort of thing you’d see from fertilizer runoff. But it’s a very high concentration. It’d kill a crop if you treated it with that much nitrogen-based fertilizer.”
“But it explains the diatom bloom,” Jackie said. “It’s rare to find domoic acid poisoning in harbor seals, especially in that part of the bay.”
“These levels could easily cause a bloom. And it’s different from the bloom down in Monterey. Same effect though.” He paused. “But we found something else in your samples that is very, very strange. Thompson, my lab manager, discovered it by accident. The guy’s a nut for Geiger counters, antique ones. He was tinkering with an old one, over lunch, and the water samples you sent set it off.”
“No way. Who ever heard of radioactivity showing up in a fertilizer?”
“Way. It’s there. All the samples from where the Susul River meets the bay showed traces of radioactivity, radon to be precise. Nothing showed up in the Monterey Bay samples.”
She jotted the word radon into her notebook and stared at it.
“The fertilizer could’ve been manufactured somewhere near an old mine site that’s still contaminated ” he said, breaking the silence. “Or in an area near some sort of incident, like Chernobyl. It could’ve come in from the Ukraine; fertilizers are a major export in that region. It’d have to be a radiostrontium or a radionuclide, something with a longer half-life that turns into radon.”
He paused. She was still taking in what he said. Her work often uncovered unusual findings, but this was absurd.
“This means the molecule of the fertilizer has a distinct fingerprint,” he went on. “So it’s not far-fetched to think that you could trace its source. At least you could narrow down the area it’s coming from, maybe even track it to a particular vineyard.”
His voice had quickened with the eager sound of the chase.
“What about the samples I sent from upriver?”
“I don’t have those results back yet. But if I were to guess, I’d say it’s coming from a source upstream.”
“You never guess, Bradley.”
“I make exceptions for you.”
“Never a good idea,” she said with a forced laugh. “What about the harbor seal tissue samples I sent?”
“You were right. Pseudo-nitzschia is your culprit for the domoic acid. I’ll need to run more enzyme assays to see which strain, but any of them would cause the symptoms you’re seeing in the seals. I’m sending the water samples over to my buddy at Livermore. He’ll know exactly what radioactivity the Geiger counter picked up; it’s his specialty.”
“I’m grateful you’re doing this, Bradley. Very grateful.”
“I’m coming down to the headlands next week. How about setting aside time for lunch?”
She really couldn’t say no.
But she didn’t smile as she hung up the phone.
Before she headed home, she typed out an email to Michael Albright. He was the chairman of the board for the Center, and he had a right to know what Bradley had told her. It wouldn’t be welcome news. Cheery seal faces were much better PR than radioactive contaminants in the bay.
Discovering radon kicked the whole venture into another realm, a realm she wasn’t sure the Center could handle. It was the worst possible time for scrutiny. The Center needed critical upgrades and they didn’t have enough funds to tackle all of them. This discovery could bring the licensing authorities down on them and trigger inspections, inspections they might not pass. If the Center got shut down, even for a few months, hundreds of seals and sea lions from all along the coast and bay wouldn’t be rescued, wouldn’t get treatment and would die. That was an unacceptable outcome.
But so was letting whoever was dumping chemicals keep on doing it.
She stared at her computer screen, her mind searching the facts. Expensive. The word kept rising, blocking her thoughts. Why would anyone dispose of something as expensive as high-grade fertilizer and in such quantities? What could possibly be worth the risk of getting caught? Normally she loved chasing down a good puzzle, fitting facts together, finding the story below the surface, but a quiet voice whispered inside her, telling her there were forces at work with darker motivations than she could imagine.
She shook off the unsettled feeling and pulled out her notebook. Her list of critical improvements and repairs covered two single-spaced pages. She starred the items that were most likely to get them shut down. The kitchen where the volunteers prepped the seal food had to be rewired; there was no way around that. And plumbing in the new sea lion feeding tank really couldn’t wait. The others she’d think about in the morning. She snapped the notebook shut and finished off the email to Michael, reminding him to keep the findings under wraps until they had better data. She could only hope he would temper his lord-of-the-universe personality and take her warning seriously.