Chapter 6 - The Mud at Redwood Road
The intersection of 9000 South and Redwood Road looked like an aerial bombing range in the Donbas.
The asphalt, eight inches of heavy-duty municipal highway mix laid down by Russell’s paving crews the previous August, had been shattered into jagged, black slabs the size of kitchen tables, tilted upward at forty-five-degree angles like pack ice in an Arctic sea.
A crater sixty feet wide and twenty feet deep occupied the center four lanes.
From its bottom, through the shattered remnants of an eighteen-inch natural gas lateral that had been severed when the sixty-inch water main buckled, a roaring geyser of gray, silt-choked river water was still spewing forty feet into the freezing air, freezing into crystalline needles that coated the traffic lights, the power lines, and the shattered storefronts of the strip mall on the northwest corner in three inches of structural rime.
Two West Jordan police cruisers sat half-submerged in four feet of brown, freezing mud near the entrance of the commercial bank, their light bars still flashing a frantic, synchronized blue and red beneath the gray water.
I arrived in the cab of the Utah Department of Transportation incident-command truck, riding beside Arthur Pendelton and two armed investigators from the Attorney General’s Special Crimes Division.
The air smelled of raw sewage, methane, crushed road base, and the sharp, electrical ozone of three twelve-thousand-volt transformers that had shorted out when the utility poles tilted into the crater.
Near the southern rim of the breach, standing on the dry asphalt of an auto-parts parking lot, a black Ford F-350 sat with its driver-side door open, the engine idling with that rhythmic, clattering diesel knock that belonged to Russell Vance.
Russell stood beside the bed of the truck.
He was wearing his Carhartt work coat, stained with dark grease and frozen yellow mud down the front, his hard hat pushed back on his sweaty, tangled hair. He was holding a six-foot steel valve wrench—an operating key used to turn municipal street gates by hand—waving it in the faces of three city utility workers who were huddled behind their orange service trucks with their hands up.
"Nobody touches that valve box!" Russell was roaring, his voice cracked, hoarse, carrying across the screaming rush of the water like an animal in a slaughter pen. "This is Vance Contracting work! This is under structural warranty! My crew is bringing two track-hoes up from the yard in fifteen minutes! We’ll have the trench sheeted and the bypass pumped before the news trucks get off the freeway!"
"Russell!" I shouted, stepping down from the high cab of the state truck.
The mud along the edge of the asphalt was freezing instantly, catching the rubber soles of my work boots like wet cement.
Russell turned.
His face was terrifying.
The ruddy, athletic confidence from the dinner table was completely gone, replaced by a gray, wild, hollow mania. His pupils were tiny pinpricks in the center of bloodshot, watery whites; his upper lip was pulled back from his teeth in an involuntary, animal snarl that showed the tobacco stains on his gums.
"Naomi," he spat, his hand tightening on the sixty-pound steel wrench until the knuckles were white. "You did this. You triggered the scada gates from your office. You created the pressure wave that blew the joint."
"The joint didn't blow from a pressure wave, Russ," I said, walking toward him across the frozen slush, not stopping until I was ten feet from the heavy iron key in his hands. "The pipe split longitudinally along the seam. The Reno iron had a wall thickness of point-three-eight inches. The spec was point-six-five. It failed at four hundred pounds of internal pressure. You were running seven hundred."
"I was running what the city ordered!" he screamed, his chest heaving inside the canvas coat. "We saved the project twelve million dollars! Dad knew! Dad signed the purchase vouchers!"
"Dad didn't sign the purchase vouchers, Russell," Arthur Pendelton said, stepping forward from behind me, his gold credentials case held open in his left hand, while the two state investigators fanned out across the asphalt behind him, their hands unbuttoning the holsters beneath their heavy parkas.
"We have the handwriting analysis from the state forensic laboratory," Arthur said, his voice flat, formal, and carrying the cold, bureaucratic authority of the state capitol. "You executed your father’s signature using a pantograph machine in the Sandy office on the twelfth of February. And your mother notarized the documents using her expired notary commission from nineteen-ninety-four."
Russell looked at Arthur.
He looked at the two investigators.
Then he looked at the sixty-foot crater behind him, where twenty million gallons of municipal culinary water was currently eroding the foundation of a two-story medical office building, the brick veneer of the ground floor beginning to crack in long, vertical zigzags that sounded like dry rifle shots across the freezing air.
"It’s not my fault," Russell whispered.
The steel valve key in his hands slipped two inches, the heavy iron head hitting the asphalt with a dull, concussive clang.
"It was Mom," he choked out, his voice suddenly dropping into a high, thin, childish register that I hadn't heard since he was twelve years old and had broken our neighbor’s basement window with a stolen baseball bat. "Mom told me the land in Hurricane was going to make fifty million. She told me the resort company was going to buy us out by Thanksgiving. She said we just needed to keep the company liquid for six months until the title cleared... she told me Dad would understand once the money was in the account..."
"Drop the tool, Mr. Vance," the senior investigator said, his hand clearing leather, the Glock seventeen held low and steady at his side.
Russell looked down at his boots.
He looked at the mud.
He looked at me.
"Naomi," he wept, the tears freezing into white tracks on his soot-stained cheeks before they reached his chin. "Tell them... tell them we can fix the pipe. We’ve got four sticks of real ductile iron in the Sandy yard... we can sleeve the joint before the sun comes up..."
"There's nothing left to sleeve, Russell," I said softly.
The two investigators stepped forward, caught Russell by both wrists, and brought his arms behind his back with two sharp, mechanical clicks of nickel-plated steel that were louder to my ears than the roar of the water in the street.
They walked him toward the back of the unmarked sedan.
He didn't fight them. His legs seemed to have lost their bone structure, his boots dragging through the brown, freezing slush, leaving two parallel ruts that filled instantly with the cold river water rising from the broken belly of the city.
I turned my back on the crater.
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Down Redwood Road, the emergency shut-off gates had finally seated into their bronze guides.
The geyser in the center of the road began to drop—forty feet, twenty feet, ten feet—until it was nothing more than an ugly, gurgling boil of gray mud that slowly choked on its own debris and went silent under the zinc sky.
