suspect in a diesel crime investigation Thursday, February 17 2011
It was a beautiful day, with highs in the 50s and substantial melting of the increasingly-dingy snow pack. The gradual revelation of dog turds is perhaps the major unpleasant side effect of this otherwise welcome turn in the weather. Other happier finds turned up in the snow as well, including an MP3 player that had been missing for nearly a month, causing me to buy Gretchen another one. Despite exposure to cold and melting snow, the battery still had a charge and the player itself worked fine.
I took the dogs with me into town and we went to P&T Surplus, where I wanted to get an old printer cables to cut up and make into the sensor/actuator cable for the new Arduino solar controller. There were also some nice big AC motors I thought might make for a better disco ball rotator (though, as it turned out, they were far too beefy and might actually have an application in raising and lowering the greenhouse lid — when I get around to building it). P&T Surplus was colder inside than it was outside. But when I took the dogs for a walk in the adjacent park, the deep snow and uneven paths made by others made for difficult walking. Still, we followed those paths further than I ever have in the past, out onto an overgrown, rubble-strewn jetty into Rondout Creek (41.913008N, 73.992115W).
Back in my laboratory, I was sitting at my computer doing nothing in particular when Gretchen called up the stairs, "There's a state trooper here and he says he wants to talk to you!" Holy shit, what could this be about? I thought about all the bodies I'd buried, but none of those should have been possible to find since I'd only buried them in my dreams. As for the actual crimes I've committed in my lifetime, all of them should have fallen off the edge of the statute of limitations. Then again, maybe I was finally getting busted for operating a pirate radio station. That seemed the most likely actual offense; other than that, I've been a surprisingly law-abiding citizen, which is what one expects from a married 43 year old without a psychiatric condition or much in the way of financial stress.
The trooper asked if he could talk to me in private; evidently he thought I'd be more honest without my wife listening. So we went outside. He asked me if I used diesel fuel. Suddenly all my fears of having been caught for an actual crime evaporated. I have never in my life committed any crime involving diesel fuel. This moment was akin to the time the FBI came to my place in Los Angeles and announced that they wanted to talk to me about my Trench Coat Mafia website (as opposed to the hits of ecstasy being shipped in anonymous envelopes from a nearby postal drop box).
Suddenly relaxed, I took "diesel" to mean fuel oil (which it can be used for in a pinch), so I said that yeah, we heat our house with it. The trooper then said he wanted to look at our tank. At first I thought sure, but then I had a second thought, which was that I didn't want a state trooper going on a fishing expedition in my house. Like many people, if you root around long enough in my house you will eventually find something that is illegal. For example, somewhere in the laboratory is a plastic bag containing a couple stale buds of non-medical marijuana. I may also be in possession of one or two feathers shed by a bird of prey. So I asked, "What exactly is this about?" The trooper responded that he was conducting an investigation and that he was hoping for my cooperation. He said that last part with just enough menace to make it seem like things would not go well for me if I didn't show him what he wanted to see. He also asked me who delivers our fuel oil, though I didn't have an answer. I said we'd have to talk to my wife, so we went inside.
Gretchen, who'd been on the other side of the door the whole time listening as well as she could, quickly made like she'd been busy doing something else. She scared up our last fuel oil bill and then we went out to the garage to look at our fuel tank, a conventional 250 gallon monster I have yet to customize with electronic sensors. Aside from the random clutter and weird paintings, there didn't seem to be anything amiss. The trooper said he was going out to his car, and I thought maybe he was going to get some sort of device. But when he returned he was carrying what looked like one of those little envelopes of the sort eBay merchants in Hong Kong use for packaging the small electronic devices I buy from them. The trooper didn't say anything about it, though I wondered now if perhaps I'd bought something from Hong Kong that might be used to make a boiler do something illegal. By this point I was thinking perhaps I was suspected of dumping diesel into the environment. It seems that when police are investigating a crime, the suspects aren't told what it is they're suspected of, perhaps in the hope that they'll volunteer the crime themselves. The problem for someone who hasn't committed a crime is that they have to dip deep into their reservoir of misbehavior to produce something to which they might be guilty. This is especially true when the police are using torture to extract a confession.
By this point, though, the trooper was abandoning his hope that I was the guilty party. I took him downstairs and showed him the boiler, and aside from the crazy network of devices needed to support the solar hydronics, there was nothing incriminating, at least not for the crime being investigated. Eventually the trooper gave up on me as a suspect and told me the crime he'd come here to investigate. Down in Old Hurley, directly across Wynkoop from the Hurley Mountain Inn, is an ugly building originally constructed as a State Police barracks (it was put there back when the Hurley Mountain Inn was still a notorious biker bar). Since the State Police moved out to a new facility on US 209, there have been a series of businesses that have come and gone in that old barracks. There was a medical supply store (where Gretchen and I dumpster dived some old wheelchairs). Then there was a Curves fitness center. Most recently the basement has been home to Wildlife Encounter Taxidermy and the upstairs has been occupied by a truck driver training school. The back parking lot is now full of large semi tractor-trailers used by the school. According to the trooper, someone has been siphoning diesel fuel from these trucks. It's happened three times now, and something like a thousand gallons has been stolen so far (worth about $4000). So why was I a suspect? An envelope with my name on it had been found near the crime scene. The envelope in question was the one used to ship me my latest Arduino Ethernet Shield from Hong Kong. I'd opened that envelope while preparing to walk the dogs in the nearby corn field and evidently it had fallen onto the ground, where it had become evidence, and even labled as such with the following note:
That's pretty flimsy evidence, but it was all they had. I asked the trooper why didn't the truck driver training school install cameras or at least lock their fuel caps. The trooper agreed with me that cameras would be a good idea, but he said they didn't use lockable caps because these tend to freeze up in the cold weather.
"I'd really hoped you were the one," the trooper said as he was preparing to go. But now that I wasn't the investigation was going to have to continue.
Gretchen had noticed that the trooper had been reluctant to talk to her at all, even answering her questions with answers directed to me. She couldn't tell if this was sexism, hyper-focus on a suspect, or a combination of the two. The only satisfaction the trooper gave Gretchen was to compliment the smells coming from the kitchen not once but twice. Gretchen was baking us one of her classic noodle bakes, a food so delicious it always inspires me to sing the following song:
