That was charming. The Poyzen Boyzen now had yuppies working for them. So that's how they afforded those Back Bay condos.

Just as important, Tanya hadn't left any tracks. She'd cleared out of there before the graffitist had.

So I went back into the lab. What had freaked her out so bad? Something she'd seen during the analysis?

I approached the workbench. Slowly. This reminded me of when you hear a rat trap go off in the middle of the night, and when you go down in the morning you know you're going to find something really unpleasant. You just don't know when or where it's going to hit you.

Whatever had set Tanya off wasn't obvious. Not two-headed monsters, no parasites squirming loose on the bench. Hell, that wouldn't have bothered her anyway. She was a biochemist, a scientist, and she had listened to a full recitation of my relationship crimes. Nothing could gross her out. She was about halfway through dissecting one of Gallagher's big stinky lobsters. She'd removed the legs and tail and pried back the shell around the body to expose the liver. The bug was sprawled out on its back under a hot light, and the odor was billowing out of it like smoke from a fire. Had she gotten the liver out? Hard to tell. Something was definitely wrong down in there.

No, she hadn't. There was hardly any liver left. It had necrosed-a fancy word for died. Rotted away, inside the body, leaving just a puddle of black stuff. Surrounded by blobs of yellowy material, vesicles or sacs of something that I'd never seen inside a lobster before. Some kind of toxin that the liver had desperately tried to remove from the lobster's system, killing itself in the process. I found a ballpoint pen and poked one of the sacs; something greasy poured out and a wave of the oily scent rose up into the light.

There used to be a plant in Japan that made oil out of rice. The oil had to pass through a heat exchanger to cool it down. In other words, it flowed over a bunch of pipes that had a colder fluid running through them. The cold fluid was a polychlorinated biphenyl. A PCB.

If you're an engineer, and you're not very bright, it's easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls. They are cheap, stable, easy to make and they take heat very well. That's why they end up in heat exchangers and electrical transformers. It's how they got into that machine in Japan and, when the pipes started to leak, it's how they got into a lot of rice oil. Unfortunately, rice oil is for human consumption, and as soon as human beings enter the equation, PCBs no longer look very good. If we were robots, living in a robot world with robot engineers, we could get away with using them, but the problem with humans is that they have a lot of fat in their bodies and PCBs have this vicious affinity for fat. They dissolve themselves in human fat cells and they never leave. They are studded with loose chlorine atoms that know how to break up chromosomes. So when that heat exchanger started leaking, the city of Kusho, Japan started to look like the site of a Biblical plague. Newborn babies came out undersized and dark brown. People started to waste away. They developed a fairly disgusting skin rash called chloracne-the same one Tom had gotten in Vietnam-and they felt very sick.

Now the plague had come to Boston Harbor.

A PERSON MIGHT WONDER why I, Sangamon Taylor, didn't run out and go home and scrub myself raw like Tanya did. It had nothing to do with male/female issues, or personal bravery or any of that crap. It had to do with how we viewed ourselves. Tanya was pure as the Antarctic snow. She wore a gas mask when she rode her bicycle. She was born vegetarian, the child of hippies. She didn't smoke and she didn't drink; her worst vice was mushrooms-organically grown mushrooms. When she'd looked down into that puddle of PCBs, she'd gotten the first whiff of her own mortality, and she didn't like it.

We all owe a toxic debt to our bodies, and sooner or later it comes due. Cigarettes or a chemical-factory job boost that debt to the sky. And though Tanya had hardly any debt at all, when she figured out she was staring at PCBs, smearing them on her skin, breathing them into her lungs, she probably felt like all her carefulness had been erased. All that tofu was for nought. Suddenly she was up there with the I.V.-drug abusers.

I have no illusions about my own purity. I avoid the really bad stuff, I use common sense. I refuse to work with the nastier solvents and I don't inhale my cigars. But I could look at those PCBs and say, okay, I'm poisoned, maybe if I give up cigars and ride my bike a little more I can pay off this debt.

You don't get PCB poisoning from the air anyway. You get it by eating the stuff.

When I thought of that, I thought of Gallagher and his crew. Those bastards lived on lobsters. I had to get in touch with them right away. Easy enough.

The tough part was this. Where were the PCBs coming from? I was used to finding trace amounts just about everywhere. Basco had put lots of them into the Harbor. But I'd never actually seen the stuff before; just detected it with exquisitely sensitive instruments. To actually stand there and watch it running through a lobster's viscera like melted butter-that was a fucking nightmare. Unheard of. Somebody had to be dumping it into the Harbor by the barrel load.

First things first, so I got myself decently protected and wrapped the lobsters up in many layers of PCB-proof plastic, marked it as hazardous waste, and left it there for the time being. I wasn't normally in the business of disposing of hazardous waste and wasn't sure how to begin. Scrubbed the counter down and locked the place up, then went to a different lab and hosed myself off. Finally got Tanya on the phone; she was jittery as hell, but laughing a little now. I tried to tell her she was okay as long as she hadn't been licking her fingers, but with her background she knew more about it than I did. I asked her to put Debbie on.

"Yeah?"

"We have a big thing coming up. A huge thing. Would you like to work on it?"

"Sure."

"And sometime, if I can find some time, I would like very much, more than I can really say here at this pay phone, to, like, take you to dinner or something of that nature."

"Well, you have my number," she said.

And you've got mine, I refrained from saying. And then what? How could I explain the Poyzen Boyzen thing?

"Gotten any weird messages on your phone lately?"

"Have you been doing that?"

"What?"

"Putting that awful music on our phone machine?"

"No. That's being done by some-some assholes. Heavy-metal fans."

"What do they want?"

Actually, that was a damn good question. What did these guys want? If they wanted to scare me, it was working. But what did they want to scare me into? Thugs can be so nonspecific.

"They're pissed about something. Something to do with Spectacle Island. And the lab."

"Drugs?"

"There you go." Spectacle Island-specifically, that old barge-would be a great place to process drugs. A nice, abandoned, lawless zone, only minutes from downtown.

Bart had said that PCP was very hip among the Poyzen Boyzen drones. PCP was easy to make-even a metalhead could manufacture it by the fifty-five-gallon drum. And I could detect it, by the wastes and smell it generated. No wonder they didn't want me taking samples out there.

"You want to know exactly what happened?" I said. "Those poor idiots overheard me saying I was hunting for PCBs, and they thought I said PCP!"

"Great. So you've got a band of dustheads after you?"

"No. We have a band dustheads after us."

"That's great. I'll never take another shower."

I refrained from offering showering privileges at my place. Without being her official boyfriend, there wasn't much I could do.