Then he billed the HOAs for brand-name product, at full price.
"At cost" had meant his cost plus a markup of somewhere between two and four hundred percent, depending on the month. The thirty-one thousand dollars the board had promised to save by firing the pool company had been closer to nine thousand, and most of that had come out of not paying anybody to do the work. The rest had gone into Kenton's pocket in amounts small enough that nobody noticed, because nobody on the board but Fern had ever asked a question, and she'd been told to sit down.
That was the fraud. It was ugly and it was greedy, but it was not, by itself, what put a man in the ICU. What did that was the jugs.
One of the part-time employees, a nineteen-year-old named Dmitri Spence, told investigators that he'd mentioned more than once to Kenton that they were refilling chlorine jugs and acid jugs at the same station, with the same pump, and that it would be easy to mix them up. He said Kenton had told him to "just be careful." He said that the summer before, in early June, he'd gotten a phone call from Kenton yelling at him because "some old guy at the Mariposa pool" had complained that the chlorine smelled wrong.
That was the June that Nico stopped breathing on the pool deck. It was the June Alma Sotelo's eyes swelled shut.
I found out the last part of it from Glynis herself.
She came to my door on a Wednesday, almost a month after the gas. It was nine in the morning and I'd just gotten home from a shift and was still in my scrubs. When the doorbell rang I almost didn't answer it, and when I looked through the peephole and saw who it was, I almost didn't again. She was standing on my front step with no hat and no sunglasses, in a plain gray T-shirt and jeans, holding nothing. The house-shaped pendant was gone. She looked ten years older than she had in the board meeting, and smaller, the way people do when they've been sleeping in a vinyl chair in an ICU waiting room for most of a month.
I opened the door, but I didn't step back from it.
"My attorney," she said, "told me not to come here. He told me in writing. He said if I spoke to you it could be seen as witness tampering, and he'd be right, I suppose, and you can call the police if you want, I won't argue." She took a breath. "I'm not going to ask you for anything. I promise you that. I just need to tell somebody the truth before I tell it to a judge, and you're the only person who's earned it."
I thought about it. I thought about Detective Ibarra's voice: she didn't wait. Most people would at least wait.