Occam's Razor Read Online Free PDF

it either gets absorbed, drips out the back unnoticed except by the poor bastard tailgating, or simply evaporates into the wind.”
    “Where do they get it?” I asked, not having had to deal much with this type of crime. Brattleboro was considered a poor dumping spot, eighty percent of Vermont being sparsely populated and covered with forestland.
    “Surprisingly, it’s often from legitimate sources,” he explained, storing his collection of samples into his canvas case. “Places like hospitals and construction sites get contacted by supposedly legit haulers. They might do a cursory check of the hauling license and paperwork, but they don’t know how to tell a fake from the real thing. So they pay whoever it is a huge amount of money—in perfectly good faith.”
    “What kind of money?”
    He paused, stretched, and looked up at the gray clouds overhead. So far this winter, it hadn’t snowed once. “Well, let’s see. One case we worked on not too long ago had a transfer station sending roll-offs to a construction site at fifteen hundred dollars a pop. When the station took back the full roll-offs later, they separated the contents, made money turning lumber into illegal bark mulch, which they dyed dark brown and sold to gardening supply stores, and more money on the scrap metal, which they sold legitimately. The rest they had trucked off, paying six hundred per roll-off, except that since the contents of each container had by now been compacted, they could fit the equivalent of maybe seven roll-offs into a single truck, which brought the total paid to the trucker to around forty-two hundred. That trucker in turn added to his profit by picking up some liquid waste, which he cocktailed into the load he already had, and then he cruised around till he found a recipient—in this case a landowner—hungry enough that he didn’t care he was filling his water table with pure shit. The landowner got two hundred a load. The trucker pocketed the rest. Everybody came out with a lot of spare change, most of it tax-free.”
    “Except the landowner,” I said.
    Mason laughed. “Don’t kid yourself. The one I’m talking about made forty thousand dollars in two months, just for standing by his back gate in the middle of the night with a flashlight in his hand. This doesn’t happen just every once in a while. It’s an ongoing business.”
    I pulled the scrap of paper I’d found in the truck cab from my pocket, now encased in transparent plastic. “This may be just what you’re after, then. Directions to a farm near here. It was wedged between the seat cushions.”
    He took it from me and studied it closely. “You know this place?”
    “I’ve driven by it. I don’t know the owner. You up for a visit?”
    Pat Mason smiled, returning the scrap of paper. “With you along as backup, sure. Some of these guys can get a little testy.”
    I circled around to the car’s passenger side. “My pleasure.”
    We headed north on Route 5, out of Brattleboro and toward the Dummerston town line. Technically, I might have contacted the county sheriff to let him know I was stepping onto his turf, but—also technically—this was now an ANR investigation, and I was going along by invitation, which, since any certified police officer in Vermont has jurisdiction throughout the state, I could do with a clear conscience.
    “Do you think what you just described is what we’re looking at here?” I asked Mason, as we exchanged the congestion of the Putney Road for the gentle curves of its extension into the countryside.
    “Gauging from the age and shape of the truck, I’d say it’s something more low-key—something like what another bunch was doing till we nailed ’em last month. Rented a U-Haul truck, got paid by local gas stations to get rid of their excess used tires—at two bucks per—and either paid someone fifty dollars to absorb it all, or—and this is how we found them through the paperwork they left behind—rented a storage