"County lab ran the jugs," she said. "Twelve delivered Thursday. Eight of them had real manufacturer labels and were what they said they were. The four with handwritten labels, the ones that said liquid chlorine, twelve and a half percent. You remember those?"
"Yes."
"Two of them were sodium hypochlorite. Pool chlorine, like they said. The other two were hydrochloric acid. Muriatic acid. Thirty-one percent."
I stood very still in the middle of the aisle. A man with a cart said excuse me, and I moved, and I don't remember moving.
"He poured acid into the chlorine tank," I said.
"He poured what the label told him was chlorine into the chlorine tank," Detective Ibarra said. "The feed tank already had about fifteen gallons of hypochlorite in it. The acid went in on top. Fire captain says it would've started off-gassing in seconds. He'd have been standing right over it."
I thought about Everett on the gravel on his hands and knees. I thought about him in the back of the ambulance, holding Glynis's hand, saying I did it right. I did it like you said.
"He wasn't confused," I said.
"Not about this, he wasn't," she said. "That's the thing. Not about this."
The rest of it came out over the next three weeks, some of it from Detective Ibarra, some of it from a reporter at the Cholla Springs Independent named Tobiah Grenfell who called me eleven times before I agreed to talk to him, and some of it, later, from documents that became public when the county attorney filed charges. I'll tell it the way I understood it at the end, rather than the way it came in, because the way it came in was in pieces, and some of the pieces didn't make sense until the others arrived.
Desert Shine Supply was a real business. Kenton Brandvold had owned it for nine years. It sold mop heads and floor wax and hand soap to restaurants and office parks, and for the last three years, it had also sold pool chemicals to four homeowners associations in the east valley, of which Saguaro Bend was the largest. What the associations didn't know was where the chemicals came from. A legitimate distributor buys from a manufacturer and sells in sealed, labeled containers. Kenton bought, at a deep discount, what the industry calls off-spec and returned product: drums that had been damaged in shipping, partial loads refused by other buyers, bulk material from a pool supply wholesaler in Tempe that had gone out of business. He trucked it to a rented warehouse unit near the airport, where two part-time employees, neither of whom had any hazardous materials training, decanted it into used jugs with a hand pump, and wrote on the labels with a marker.