"I heard you tell a dispatcher, out loud, that you had evidence of what was in that building. And I heard another person, three seconds later, decide that the evidence had to disappear before the fire department saw it. While a man was choking." She stood up and tucked her chair in. "Whatever else is going on, that's the part I keep thinking about. She didn't wait. Most people would at least wait."
When she left, it was almost eleven. Nico had gone to bed. I sat on the back patio with the misters off, in the warm dark, and I watched the pump house over the wall. The hazmat team had set up lights, and the building glowed white-blue in the middle of the black gravel like an operating room. I could see figures in yellow suits carrying the blue jugs out one by one and setting them in a row on a plastic tarp, and someone with a clipboard going down the row, kneeling at each one, holding up something small that caught the light.
I should have slept. I'd been up since four-thirty in the afternoon, which on my schedule is the same as being up since dawn, and I had a ringing in my ears and a scratch in the back of my throat that I knew was the chlorine. Instead I took out my phone and texted the charge nurse in the ICU, a man named Benedikt who I'd worked with since before Nico was born.
Hollister? Chlorine exposure from Saguaro Bend. Came in around 6. You have him?
He wrote back in two minutes. We have him. On BiPAP. Bad night probably. Chemical pneumonitis. Why, you know him?
He's my neighbor, I wrote. I'm the one who called.
There was a pause, and then: The wife's out in the waiting room. Won't go home. Keeps asking for a phone charger and then not plugging in her phone.
I sat with that for a while. Then I typed, She's not allowed to know I'm asking, and he wrote back, Copy, and I put the phone face down on the patio table and sat in the dark until the hazmat lights went out, a little after one.
Detective Ibarra called me two days later, on Saturday morning, while I was standing in the cereal aisle of the Fry's on Ocotillo trying to remember whether Nico liked the cinnamon squares or hated them.
"I want to tell you something before it's in the paper," she said. "Because you're going to get asked about it, and I'd rather you heard it from me."
I put the cereal down. "Okay."