It amounted to no more than fifteen hundred a week. Salaries for the secretaries and paralegals alone were four thousand. American Express had filed suit against the firm. There had been no payment for more than four months on twenty-five thousand dollars of credit-card debt. Heller Financial, a leasing company, had threatened to repossess the law firm’s computer terminals by August 1.

He had a vision of himself sitting on a park bench, his hand-tailored suits stuffed into his own green plastic trash bags.

He was much more frightened of having staked too much of himself on this one case. He was afraid that if he lost it—if he’d been that wrong—he would lose something of far greater value than money. That in some mysterious way, all the confidence he had in himself, his ambition and his talent, would drain away.

By the Civil War, Woburn had twenty tanneries, matching Philadelphia in the production of leather. The city acquired the nickname Tan City.

In 1853 Robert Eaton founded a chemical factory in northern Woburn, along the banks of the Aberjona River, and supplied the tanneries with the chemicals—blue vitriol, Glauber’s salt, sulfuric acid—necessary to produce leather. At the turn of the century, Eaton’s factory was one of the largest chemical plants in the country.

When Truman began working with leukemic children in the early 1960s, there was no effective treatment for leukemia. Most children died within weeks of diagnosis. But in the last two years, great advances had been made by the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

In the mid-1960s, east Woburn had a pleasing rural aspect. The Aberjona River, a narrow, placid stream, only a few feet wide and waist-deep, ran through a marshland of reeds, cattails, and grassy tussocks.

One woman, Kay Bolster, who lived a block away on Gregg Street, mentioned to Anne that two families on either side of her each had a young boy with leukemia.

Truman listened in his polite, attentive manner, tall frame slightly stooped, but he would admit later that he did not give Anne’s question any serious consideration. He’d learned over the years that parents of children with leukemia tended to develop a heightened awareness of the illness. Everywhere they turned it seemed they encountered a reference to it, or someone else whose child had it. To Truman, this was not an uncommon psychological phenomenon. Many years later, in a deposition, Truman recalled his reaction to Anne’s queries: “My response was that on the basis of the number of children with leukemia that I was aware of at the time, and considering the population of the city of Woburn, I did not think the incidence of leukemia appeared to be increased. In essence, I dismissed her suggestion.”

The notion that each case shared some common cause began to obsess her. “The water and the air were the two things we all shared,” she said in a deposition some years later. “And the water was bad. I thought there was a virus that might have been transmitted through the water, some kind of a leukemia virus. The water had never tasted right, it never looked right, and it never smelled right.

In the summer of 1967 the Massachusetts Department of Health contemplated shutting down both wells because of “the poor bacterial quality of the water supplied therefrom.” The city protested. The state health authorities relented, permitting the wells to remain open on the condition that the city subject the water to continuous chlorination.

“It was the same story all the time,” recalled Anne. “There wasn’t any problem with the water; the water had been tested and it was fine. I think toward the end, I felt like the answer was never going to be any different. Neighbors would talk, people would call, and everybody would give their own report of what they had heard.”

He had suddenly noticed Volvos everywhere he looked. But that had been an illusion, he said, a trick of the mind. There really weren’t a lot of new Volvos around; he’d simply become more aware of them. He suggested to Anne that she was experiencing the same sort of phenomenon with leukemia.

“I tried not to talk about it all the time,” Anne said in a deposition some years later. “I knew how I was being received by my husband. I stood for emotionalism; I was the hysterical mother. With Dr. Truman, I’d try to pick my moments. He was always very patient. I’d tell him: ‘If I stand on my front porch, I can see all these houses where children with leukemia live.’ His theory was that because more children were surviving, that’s the reason I was seeing more leukemia.”

Both of the wells were “heavily contaminated” with trichloroethylene, commonly known as TCE, an industrial solvent used to dissolve grease and oil. The lab found 267 parts per billion of TCE in Well G and 183 in Well H. The wells also contained lesser amounts of four other contaminants, among them tetrachloroethylene, known as perc, another industrial solvent. The Environmental Protection Agency listed both solvents as “probable” carcinogens.

One type was caused by external irritations—poison oak, parasites, and some chemicals—and the other type by either an inability to tolerate certain foods or nervous reactions, with no apparent external cause.

Truman performed a bone marrow biopsy and confirmed the suspicion. Patrick, who was ten years old at the time, had chronic myelocytic leukemia, a particularly lethal form of leukemia. His prognosis was not good. He would almost certainly die.

In Woburn, deaths from all cancers had increased by 17 percent during a five-year period in the mid-1970s. The incidence of leukemia in particular, and to a lesser extent kidney cancers, was alarming.

The chamber of commerce warned publicly about declining property values and other serious economic effects. “Businesses may decide not to expand, or even to move out of the area,” one speaker told the chamber. “Industrial land may not be sold because of the problem. Property values may be down.” The chamber’s vice-president foresaw “an exodus of business” and said, “We’ve got to try to head that off.”

“For anyone with little or no authority to give the impression that there is a major health crisis within the confines of the city, without factual evidence to back up their statements, is totally irresponsible,” announced the mayor at a city council meeting.

To a New York Times reporter, he said, “I set out to prove [Anne] wrong, that cancer and leukemia don’t run in neighborhoods, but she was right.”

She spoke only briefly, but her words became the headline in The Boston Globe’s story the next day. “We fear for our children, and we fear for their children,” she said. “The neighborhood lives in fear.”

The odds of a cluster like this occurring by chance,” the minister told Mulligan, “are on the order of a hundred to one.

Twelve children with leukemia—eight of them within a half-mile radius, six of them living almost next door to each other—and contaminated drinking water. It was, in legal terms, as Mulligan later said, “almost res ipsa loquitur”—the thing speaks for itself.

One woman whose son had died recently said coldly, “That was never on my mind.” The woman’s tone seemed to accuse Anne of attempting to turn a child’s terrible misfortune into profit.

Another man, the owner of a supermarket in town whose daughter had died two years earlier, vehemently opposed that idea. He feared his customers would disapprove of a lawsuit against the city, especially if it resulted in raising taxes to pay the cost of a judgment.

In November he discovered that the total number of cells in Jimmy’s bone marrow was decreasing rapidly, a condition known as aplastic anemia. The boy did not have leukemia, but without a functioning bone marrow, he would die just as certainly as if he did.

“Don’t you understand?” he shouted at a nurse. “I really need it.”

The report confirmed that an unusual number of leukemia cases did indeed exist in east Woburn. It read, in part: “Analysis of residence at the time of diagnosis reveals a significant concentration of cases in the eastern part of Woburn, where the incidence of disease was at least seven times greater than expected. The incidence of childhood leukemia for the rest of Woburn was not significantly elevated compared to national rates.”

The authors of the report said they could not establish a definite link between the contaminated drinking water and childhood leukemia. But they saw reason for suspicion: “Although the contaminants in wells G and H are not known to cause leukemia, the fact that organic contaminants were found in the water supply must be emphasized.”

Lawyers in America have never been well liked. One of the first lawyers to arrive in the New World was an Englishman named Thomas Morton, who landed at Plymouth Colony in 1625, four years after the Pilgrims. Two years later he was jailed for trading firearms to the Indians and then expelled from the colony. In Massachusetts, fifteen lawyers practiced the profession in 1740, collecting debts and litigating disputes among merchants. By the time of the Revolution, that number had grown to seventy. For some citizens, lawyers had become “cursed hungry Caterpillars” whose fees “eat out the very Bowels of our Commonwealth.” Two hundred years later the basic complaint remains the same. “We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts,” said Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1977.

To him, the legal profession did not seem any more independent or exalted than the plumbing trade. That was the analogy that occurred to him when he thought about becoming a lawyer. People hired you to fix things in their lives—wills, divorces, collecting on bad debts—the same way they’d hire a plumber to fix clogged pipes and leaky faucets in their houses. Working in a big law firm would be even worse. You’d do the dirty work of the rich and powerful.

Working on this case, Schlichtmann experienced a profound revelation. The concept of a system of justice—laws and courts that permitted welfare mothers to challenge governors!—seemed to unfold gloriously before him. He suddenly saw that lawyering wasn’t just wills, divorces, and sordid criminal matters, the leaky faucets and clogged pipes of society. The law, he decided, was perhaps the highest calling a man could aspire to.

By the end of seven months, he had spent fifteen thousand dollars on the case, most of it borrowed. He was deeply in debt. The lawbook company dunned him. His landlord threatened to evict him. Creditors called constantly. His part-time secretary, Kathy Boyer, was working full-time for no pay.

Schlichtmann’s gamble had paid off, but it had been foolhardy, dignified only by his inexperience and the fact that he’d won. It was not necessarily the best sort of lesson for a fledgling lawyer.

As it happened, one of Schlichtmann’s part-time secretaries encountered the ex-husband one evening in a Newburyport bar. The man told her he was looking for a lawyer to represent his son’s interests.

Schlichtmann felt dazzled by Reed. He noticed, though, that Reed never once asked him about himself. By the second hour Schlichtmann began to wonder why Reed had invited him to lunch.

Schlichtmann opened the Woburn file and saw newspaper clippings and Mulligan’s contingency fee agreements, standard forms in which the lawyer had agreed “to do any and all necessary things in the prosecution of any claims which the client may have against”—here Mulligan had filled in the words—“any and all Defendants identified by the attorneys.”

“With few exceptions,” said the report, “investigations of leukemia clusters have failed to demonstrate significant associations or even promising leads as to environmental causes.… None of the chemicals found in Wells G and H are known to be leukemogenic, although trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene have been found to cause tumors in laboratory animals. The source of the present contaminants is unknown.”

He himself had always been vigilant about what he ate and drank. His grandfather, owner of a pharmacy and soda fountain, had once caught Schlichtmann’s father eating a handful of maraschino cherries. “Don’t ever eat those,” the grandfather had warned. “They’re full of chemicals that’ll make you sick.” Warnings of this sort had in turn been impressed on Schlichtmann at an early age.

At a glance, the Woburn case did look, as Mulligan had said, quite promising—polluted drinking water had apparently caused an epidemic of leukemia. But Schlichtmann knew that such a claim would be difficult to prove. He’d have to delve into the question of what causes leukemia, a question that medical science itself had not yet resolved. And it would be expensive.

“We’re not in this for money,” Toomey told Schlichtmann. “We just want information. No one will tell us anything.”

“Working with Jan,” Conway said of that time, “was the difference between being alive and being dead.”

Conway felt as close to Schlichtmann as a brother, although in most respects they appeared to be complete opposites. Schlichtmann was tall and slender, Conway short and stout. Schlichtmann’s shoes were always polished to a high gloss, Conway’s were always scuffed. Schlichtmann’s tailored shirts were perfectly pressed, Conway’s were taut over his substantial belly and billowed out of the back of his pants.

Conway had never met the families, and he could view the case in a cold, unemotional light. He had learned by then that Schlichtmann never did anything in half measures, and the full measure of Woburn—the size, the complexity and the cost—scared Conway. “We don’t want that one,” he would say when he and Schlichtmann went downstairs after work to the Emperor of China restaurant and discussed new cases.

Fame, fortune, and doing good—those were, in combination, goals worth striving for, he thought.

“There are a lot of questions,” said Schlichtmann, “and we don’t have any of the answers yet. I’m afraid the resources to pursue this simply aren’t there.”

Schlichtmann grew suddenly alert. He knew about the firm! he exclaimed to Reverend Young. He was, in fact, one of its founding members! Six months ago, at a convention of trial lawyers in San Francisco, he had contributed a thousand dollars to help get the organization started.

The professor told Roisman and Schlichtmann that the underground plume of TCE coming from the northeast appeared to originate at a manufacturing plant owned by W. R. Grace, the multinational chemical company. The other source of contamination, to the west of Wells G and H, came from the fifteen acres of wooded land that was owned by the John J. Riley Tannery. And the tannery, it turned out, was itself owned by the giant Chicago conglomerate Beatrice Foods, producer of dozens of consumer goods, from Samsonite luggage to Playtex bras, Peter Pan peanut butter and Tropicana orange juice.

Personal injury law is not a charitable enterprise. To a lawyer working on a contingency fee and paying the expenses of a case himself, it is crucial that the defendant either have assets, preferably a lot of them, or a big insurance policy. To Schlichtmann, having Grace and Beatrice as defendants in the case was like learning that a woman his mother kept trying to set him up with had a huge trust fund.

These chemicals included TCE, which the complaint described as “a potent central nervous system depressant that can cause severe neurological symptoms such as dizziness, loss of appetite, and loss of motor coordination. It can produce liver damage and cause cell mutations and cancer.”

He had lost a few trials in his career, and he had also settled many cases before trial, but he’d never seen a case that he thought he could not have won. “Every civil case can be won,” he once told his Harvard class.

The pile, which later would be known as Debris Pile E, contained some rotting timber and several 55-gallon barrels in various stages of decay, one of them oozing a dark, thick material onto the ground. There were some corrugated cardboard containers with plastic linings used for packing chemicals, pieces of rusted sheet metal, several pesticide containers, and a pair of discarded gloves, a leather boot, a long-handled brush, and a collection of beer cans. The earth was darkly stained, and a sickly, nauseating chemical odor pervaded the air.

The tannery had been identified by the state as the second largest polluter of the harbor, and the harbor was the most polluted in the nation. It was for this reason that the state had ordered Riley to build a million-dollar waste-treatment facility, and that, in turn, had led Riley to sell the tannery to Beatrice Foods.

He’d already filed a partial summary judgment in the Acton suit. Jury trials and personal injury cases almost never entered his life. Usually he represented one large company that was suing another, or was being sued by the government, in disputes that were complicated but dry and bloodless and almost invariably settled out of court. In his entire career, Cheeseman himself had tried only four small cases to a jury. He did not like jury trial work, and he recognized that he was not particularly good at it.

“Everyone understands that the deck is stacked,” Cheeseman observed many years later. “Somebody who’s been hurt has the sympathy of the jury. Big companies don’t get that sympathy.”

Among the many dozen rules of Civil Procedure was a little-known and rarely used provision—Rule 11—that had been conceived half a century ago, in 1938. The rule had been intended to curb frivolous and irresponsible lawsuits, but it was so weakly worded and easy to circumvent that few lawyers ever wasted their time invoking it. Cheeseman had heard, however, that the Senate Judicial Conference was revising the rule to make it much stronger. Among other things, the proposed revisions would lay out harsh punishments—large fines, public reprimands, and even suspension—for lawyers who filed “sham and false” claims. The new Rule 11 had not been enacted yet, but that didn’t trouble Cheeseman. It had given him the idea, and as far as he was concerned, even the weak standard of the old Rule 11 applied to this case.

Furthermore, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control had clearly stated in their reports that “the contaminants found in Wells G and H are not known to cause leukemia.” And finally, the EPA had never identified the Grace plant as a source of contamination.

Skinner felt that there were a lot of worthless cases—“junk,” he once called them—clogging the federal docket and contributing to his own immense caseload. He knew about the proposed revisions to the rule, and he thought them an excellent idea. In his opinion, lawyers should be encouraged to use Rule 11 much more often.

The rule was unusual in that it seemed to require the lawyer who had filed the complaint to take the witness stand and undergo cross-examination by his accuser. Such an occurrence was, like a Rule 11 hearing itself, exceedingly rare. A lawyer’s job is to argue his client’s cause, not to act as a witness whose very testimony could, perhaps, result in his client’s case being stricken.

He was busy with other cases, and he did not read Cheeseman’s memorandum thoroughly. He failed to notice on page nine the single paragraph entitled “Barratry.”

Some types of personal injury cases are riskier than others. Medical malpractice claims, for instance, are usually much more complicated to prepare than most accident claims. They also tend to require large investments of time and money, and the results are far from certain. Among those malpractice claims that go to trial, the plaintiff can expect to lose, on average, two times out of three.

Schlichtmann had taken five cases to trial, each one bigger than the last, and he had not lost once. The Carney case had given him plenty of money. And it had also given him a new measure of confidence. Any other malpractice case would now look pitifully small compared with Carney. He felt he was ready for something bigger. He felt he was ready for Woburn.

Statistical studies rely upon large numbers, and Zelen had only twelve cases of leukemia to work with in Woburn. But Zelen thought he saw a way to get larger numbers. He reasoned that if the well water had, in fact, caused leukemia, it might also have caused a variety of other childhood health problems. If an unusual pattern of birth defects and reproductive disorders emerged among families that had gotten their water from wells G and H, that would tend to support the theory that the cluster of leukemia cases was not simply a coincidence, a statistical fluke.

The Harvard scientists found an increased rate of fetal and newborn deaths among pregnant women whose homes had gotten the largest quantities of the water. Among children in the Pine Street neighborhood, an area of high exposure, they found increased rates of allergies, skin afflictions such as eczema, and respiratory disorders—chronic bronchitis, asthma, and pneumonia. They also found a “significant excess” of congenital defects to the eye and ear, of kidney and urinary tract disorders, and of “environmental” birth defects, a grouping that included cleft palate, spina bifida, Down’s syndrome, and other chromosomal aberrations.

On average, children with leukemia received 21.2 percent of their annual water supply from the wells, compared with 9.5 percent for children without leukemia.

“This report is characterized by … an ignorance of epidemiological issues,” wrote one reviewer at the federal Centers for Disease Control. The American Industrial Health Council, an industry research group, denounced the study as biased, and even one of Zelen’s colleagues at Harvard stated, “It was an incredible mistake to use as interviewers people who have a self-interest in the outcome. To my mind, that just destroys the credibility of it right there.”

It had not addressed the biological causes of leukemia. It did not prove that the contaminated well water had caused the leukemias. It showed only that those children who drank water from Wells G and H were more likely to get leukemia than those who did not.

But that particular strain of laboratory mouse, Jandl pointed out, was known to have a high incidence of “spontaneous” lymphosarcoma, and even the authors of the study had discounted the results. Furthermore, both Harvard doctors told Cheeseman they had little faith in extrapolating the results of animal studies to human beings. The life spans of animals, their chromosomal structures, and their metabolism were just too different.

He believed that constant low-level exposure to TCE had damaged the immune systems of all the members of the Woburn families. “These chemicals always do something,” he told Schlichtmann. “Most of the time they don’t do enough damage for us to notice. You might lose a few cells, but you won’t notice it because we’ve got a lot of extra cells.” A healthy, vigilant immune system will attack and kill aberrant cells. But if the immune system has been damaged, as Levin speculated, a malignant cell stands a far greater chance of surviving and proliferating.

As Colvin began plotting the results on a graph, he knew immediately something was awry. To begin with, he saw far more white cells than he expected, a condition known as lymphocytosis, a sign of an immune system in a heightened state of alert. As he calculated the ratio of helper T cells to killer T cells, it became apparent there was another abnormality. The killer cells peaked sharply in all of the family members, particularly in two of the adolescent children. Colvin rarely saw such distinct peaks. He was not certain precisely what this meant. Perhaps their systems were reacting to a carcinogen, as Levin suspected. Whatever its significance, Colvin found it very unusual.

He’d found an epidemiological study of three hundred and thirty dry-cleaning workers, an occupation in which both TCE and perc, the other chemical in the Woburn wells, were commonly used. The study reported significant increases of several different cancers, among them kidney, bladder, and cervix, and also found five leukemia victims where, statistically, only two had been expected. The author of the study considered the leukemia finding only marginally significant, however. And since the workers had been exposed to several chemicals—TCE, perc, and carbon tetrachloride—the study was unable to draw conclusions about the carcinogenic capacity of any single chemical.

The judge’s ruling was terse and it stung. “Since the complex factual issue of causation is a subject of heated dispute in this case, summary judgment is clearly inappropriate. Defendant’s motion is DENIED.”

Twice Schlichtmann had gone up against Cheeseman, one of Boston’s best practitioners in pretrial maneuvers, and he had come out a winner both times. The case was two and a half years old now, and so far he had done nothing but respond to Cheeseman’s attacks. Many years later Schlichtmann would say that if it had not been for Cheeseman, especially the Rule 11 motion, he might have followed Conway’s advice and let Woburn slip away.

When Warshafsky heard half a million dollars, he flew into an apoplectic rage, his face crimson as he shouted at Schlichtmann. Immediately the boxer’s ears went up. It leaped to its feet and put its paws on the table, a menacing eye on Schlichtmann, who half rose from his chair, prepared to bolt from the room.

A search of the plant’s records revealed that it had used at least four 55-gallon drums of TCE, considerably more than the single drum that Grace had reported to the Environmental Protection Agency. Cheeseman also learned that the plant manager had ordered workers to bury six drums that had contained toxic waste solvents, including TCE, in a trench behind the plant more than a decade ago.

“What the hell is the point of this? You’re claiming Unifirst dumped this crap and poisoned these people. It’s the same thing Schlichtmann’s saying. You can always blame Unifirst, even if they’re not there. In fact, it’s better that way because they can’t respond.”

In the months that followed, Unifirst’s lawyers filed countersuits against both Grace and Beatrice. Cheeseman still wanted to keep Unifirst in the case, but Grace’s in-house corporate counsel finally overruled him. Unifirst was causing too much trouble and it did not look as if the company would ever cooperate in a joint defense. Against his will, Cheeseman was forced to dismiss all claims against the company.

This money was important. Schlichtmann and his partners had made a million dollars from the Carney case, but they’d already spent most of that. Everyone in the office, from Kathy Boyer down to the cleaning lady, had gotten a big bonus. Schlichtmann had renovated his apartment and bought the new Porsche, and Conway and Crowley had each bought large houses in the suburbs. But all of that was petty cash compared with the real expense facing the firm.

That moment was still vivid in his memory, Lauren screaming and carrying on, the cars and big semi-rigs roaring by them on the interstate, Jarrod lifeless in his arms. He thought about it often, but he and Lauren had not talked about it for a long time.

“Some cases a lawyer can’t lose,” Facher often told his Harvard students. “Some, maybe, he can’t win. You play the hand you’re dealt.”

Facher believed that this case was one he probably could not win, not in front of a jury. He could imagine Aufiero on the witness stand with Schlichtmann slowly drawing out the details of Jarrod’s death. The entire courtroom, maybe even the judge, would be in tears by the time Schlichtmann was done. And it wasn’t just Aufiero. There were seven other families, each with its own tragic story to tell.

The company had admitted to the EPA that its employees had dug a pit behind the plant and placed several drums into it. The company had described this material as “generally innocuous,” and had stated that no actual drums had been buried. But Schlichtmann knew that this admission had been incomplete at best, and perhaps even a deliberate lie. The EPA, after all, had subsequently unearthed from the plant’s backyard six corroded drums, lying end to end, which had once contained TCE and other toxic solvents.

He replied to Schlichtmann’s questions in a slow and deliberate manner, often giving vague answers or claiming not to remember. He said he had been appointed “pollution control officer” at the Woburn plant, but when Schlichtmann asked when this appointment had occurred, Shalline replied, “I don’t remember.”

Cheeseman had produced Shalline as the person most knowledgable about waste disposal, but now Shalline denied knowing anything.

He admitted that when he first started working at Grace in 1961, he had dumped used cleaning solvents into a drainage ditch behind the plant. “At the end of the work day, take the solvent out and dump it on the ground,” said Barbas. “We did like what we were supposed to do.”

Schlichtmann reflected on how very odd it was that Barbas should have gotten his first and only promotion just now, just before his deposition, after twenty-two years in the paint shop.

“No one knows what causes leukemia,” explained Cheeseman. “And no one knows what caused this cluster. I personally think it’s just a matter of chance. If you took a hundred pennies and threw them in the air, half would land heads and the other half would land tails. If you looked around carefully, you’d probably be able to find some heads grouped together in a cluster. But it’s purely a matter of chance. No one can explain it.”

Love did not want to become an informer. He had already named Barbas and Meola at his deposition, but he’d been under oath then. He and Tommy Barbas had known each other almost their entire lives. When Barbas had started work at the plant, fresh out of high school, Love had taken it upon himself to look after the younger man. At the company Christmas parties, Love and his wife, Evelyn, always sat at the same table with Tommy and his wife. They’d had the Barbases over to dinner at their house. Love wasn’t about to cause any more trouble for Barbas. If Tommy had anything to tell the lawyers, he himself should be the one to do it. “I can’t do that,” Love told Cheeseman, shaking his head.

Listening to Cheeseman speak, it suddenly dawned on Love that perhaps the lawyer really did not know what had happened at the plant. Certainly Vin Forte, the plant manager, knew everything. If Cheeseman was in the dark, then Forte must have lied to the lawyers to protect himself. And Tommy Barbas must have lied, too.

“I threw stuff back there myself,” he told Schlichtmann. “Yep, threw it there myself. Eddie Orazine, the assembly foreman, he told me to throw stuff out in the gully there. Nothing will grow there. I didn’t know at the time the stuff was toxic. My hands used to get white from it. I used to wash down the belts with the stuff, I don’t know what it’s called, I’m no chemist.”

Schlichtmann had not managed to get Barbas over to Love’s house, but he got the next best thing. One week after Love’s visit to the assistant U.S. attorney, Barbas called Cheeseman to say that he had suddenly remembered something. He remembered now that he had been involved in dumping the drums into the pit.

Grace corporate executives initially told the EPA that the plant had purchased just one drum of TCE. “Total amount used up by 1975,” Grace had reported. “Use discontinued after a single initial order.” This, of course, was false.

It said: “Up ’til September; Used trichloro, 150 gallons.” To Schlichtmann, this could only mean that the Grace plant had used 150 gallons—slightly less than three 55-gallon drums—in the first nine months of 1973. If that inference was true, it meant the plant had consumed four drums of TCE a year up until 1973, not merely four drums throughout its entire history. And that translated into fifty or more drums of TCE.

Kelly had said, “There’s twenty-one barrels buried back there, under the warehouse. They better not dig there.” But Schlichtmann would never find out what Kelly knew. Kelly had died of a heart attack not long after speaking to Pasqueriella. And Vincent Forte, who was reputed to have known everything that went on at the plant, had also died of a heart attack, on the eve of his second deposition.

Discovering the whole truth of what had happened at the Grace plant, Schlichtmann realized, was impossible. In the beginning, the truth had been obscured by a web of lies, evasions, and self-serving accounts from both workers and Grace executives. In the end, it still remained hidden by death and the vagaries of memory. But for Schlichtmann’s purposes, it really made little difference whether there had been two pits or three or four. He had uncovered more than enough to make his case.

An air of gloom and secrecy hung over the plant. In the front office, lawyers searched through the files. Barbas and Shalline were often gone from work, called to Boston for more interviews. Word spread that they were now represented by criminal lawyers. Their fellow workers speculated in whispers about whether anybody would go to jail for dumping or for perjury.

Cheeseman knew that if Grace fired Love now, Schlichtmann would turn him into a martyr. Cheeseman could imagine the headlines in the Woburn Daily Times and The Boston Globe.

For a moment, he considered rolling up the windows and closing the sun roof, but he decided against it. The rain came down in sheets, a tropical cloudburst. Later, when Schlichtmann walked out to his car, Cheeseman watched him open the door. Water trickled out of the Porsche and Schlichtmann swore. Cheeseman laughed heartily, loud enough for Schlichtmann to hear.

He had said that he could see the headlights of flatbed trucks full of barrels driving up the access dirt road onto the fifteen acres. “They’re dumping stuff in the middle of the night,” Ruth recalled his saying.

This information changed the complexion of the case. Even so, in the eyes of the law, Beatrice Foods still bore responsibility for what had happened on its land, for keeping an “open and notorious” toxic waste dump. Legally, it did not matter who had contaminated the land, but Schlichtmann knew very well that it would matter to a jury. He still had a case, but it was a far weaker one if he could not prove that Riley had done the dumping himself.

If this material was indeed tannery waste, then how had it become contaminated with TCE, which Riley claimed he had never used? It was, of course, possible that someone else—Whitney, perhaps—had dumped TCE on top of it. That was possible, but to Schlichtmann the most logical explanation was that it had all come from the same place. And if that was true, it meant that Riley had lied about TCE.

One after another, the case histories of the plaintiffs looked astonishingly alike. Conibear told Schlichtmann that the pattern of chronic solvent poisoning was unmistakable. She had conducted a computer search of scientific journals and found more than a hundred articles on the toxic effects of TCE. Most of those articles dealt with workers who’d been exposed to the solvent, and they cited the same constellation of symptoms—dizziness, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, skin rashes. Among the Woburn families, any one person might have the misfortune to suffer repeated rashes, chronic abdominal pains and nausea, and sinus and upper-respiratory-tract infections. But for a group of families, related to each other only by geography and the water they used, to suffer so many common ailments and to have a leukemic child in the family—to Schlichtmann, that could not be coincidence.

This test measures the functioning of the trigeminal nerve, the nerve that TCE seems to affect most directly. Feldman found that the blink reflex of every family member, of both children and adults, was either slower than normal or fell barely within the normal range. Feldman was impressed not so much by the degree of individual impairment but by the uniformity of the group. He told Schlichtmann that the results were “highly significant,” that the odds of a group of twenty or more people all testing out at the slow end of normal were “a million to one.”

The doctor who had actually administered the blink reflex tests, an expert in electromyography, had known nothing about the history of the Woburn families. This doctor had been concerned about the number of slow blink reflexes she was seeing among this group. She had wondered about the accuracy of her TECA-4 machine. To test the machine, she’d rounded up seven technicians from the hospital corridors. Their blink reflexes had all been textbook-normal.

This seemed to explain why Richard Toomey and several other Woburn people had complained of a burning sensation in their eyes while bathing. Schlichtmann had always assumed that the primary route of exposure had come from drinking the water. That would have meant that the families had consumed only the TCE contained in a quart or so of water each day. But every ten-minute shower they had taken would release to the air most of the TCE contained in sixty gallons of water, which would have found its way inside their bodies through inhalation.

Schlichtmann learned around this time that the problem of TCE in drinking water was not limited to Woburn and Gray, Maine. In a document published by the U.S. Public Health Service, he read that “between 9 and 34 percent of the water supply sources in the United States may be contaminated with trichloroethylene.” Even more astounding, the same document estimated that if a population of ten million people were to breathe air containing one part per million of TCE over a lifetime, as many as 93,000 would be “at risk of developing cancer.” Schlichtmann vowed never again to take a drink of regular tap water.

The steadily mounting bills alarmed Conway, but they didn’t surprise him. He had known that Schlichtmann would spend every cent the firm had on Woburn, and then borrow more. Three years ago, Conway had predicted that the case would become a “black hole.” Now, eight months into discovery, that prediction seemed on the verge of coming true.

Alone, he could never bring himself to ask the banker for money. Quite the reverse, he always felt an unaccountable urge to give money to Uncle Pete. More than once, in need of a loan, he had offered to pledge the deed to his Beacon Hill condominium, the title to his car, or any other worldly asset he possessed. Pete had always smiled and turned him down. “I don’t need it now,” Pete had always said.

In the calculus of personal injury lawsuits, a dead plaintiff is rarely worth as much as a living but severely maimed plaintiff. Severe injuries, like those suffered by Carney, usually mean a lifetime as a cripple, often with great pain, big medical bills, and loss of income, items a jury can consider in rendering its award. By this same cold calculus, a dead child is always worth less than a dead adult, especially if that adult had been the family breadwinner or mother to several children.

“It’s like one of those kiddy cars,” he said to Conway. “They give you a steering wheel but it’s not connected to anything. You think you’re in charge, but you’re not.”

He could not hold all the things he had to do in his mind, and he was afraid of forgetting something crucial. In every other case, he’d always felt confident of his mastery of the facts, but Woburn was much more complex than any other case. After a long day he’d fall into an exhausted slumber and dream of numbers—of T cell counts, blink reflex milliseconds, parts per billion of TCE. He’d awake with a start at five or six in the morning, feeling as if he had worked through the entire night.

This agreement was, in retrospect, a mistake caused by haste and a burdened mind. Facher and Cheeseman were no more likely to stay within the terms of the agreement than Schlichtmann would have been in their place. Schlichtmann was uneasy and skittish, and this first mistake led him to a series of further mistakes, mistakes of intemperance.

Coaching a witness in the middle of a deposition is a serious violation, but Schlichtmann didn’t care. These depositions, he contended time and again, were not “regular” depositions.

“You think you’re going to put those families on the witness stand and break everybody’s heart. You think the jury’s going to pull out their handkerchiefs and dab their eyes.” Facher shook his head resolutely. “It will never happen. Those families will never see the light of day.”

It seemed to him that Skinner treated Facher with more respect and deference than he accorded him. Something the judge had said about Facher at the Rule 11 hearing, three years ago now, had stuck like a burr in Schlichtmann’s memory. He recalled the judge saying, “I can’t let Mr. Facher’s judgment be substituted for mine, although I ordinarily would give it great respect.”

The judge and Facher were of the same generation. They had gone to the same law school at virtually the same time. They had the same breeding in the law, and they had both risen to high positions in it. They even seemed to think alike.

Mr. Smith sues the Blue Bus Company for damages. During the trial, he proves the aforementioned facts but admits that he cannot identify the color of the bus that forced him off the road.

By that standard, it would seem that Mr. Smith should win his case.

But a verdict based simply on the odds, Nesson argued, even very good odds, has no moral or legal force, and sooner or later the public would find such verdicts and the judicial system that permitted them unacceptable.

To achieve this end, the public has to believe that jury verdicts are statements about the truth of actual events, not mere probabilities. If that belief is ever lost, a society based on the rule of law would ultimately collapse into anarchy. To find for the plaintiff against the Blue Bus Company would be, in this sense, to find for anarchy.

The question is whether evidence which would not be the proper basis for a verdict becomes proper because an expert blesses it and says, ‘I, as an expert, would be willing to take this bet.’

High test scores and low grades indicated laziness, the dean said, and Harvard Law did not want lazy students. Nesson framed the rejection letter in a black border, as if it were a obituary, and hung it above his desk. He began studying mathematics in earnest. His grades improved. He applied again to the law school, and this time he was admitted.

At Harvard Law, grades are carried out to three decimal points, and legend has it that Nesson left the law school with the highest grade point average since Felix Frankfurter graduated in 1907.

His job carried great prestige and he made a good income, but it was only a fraction of what many of his former law school classmates, and even some of his former students, now made in private practice. Nor had he achieved either the scholarly recognition or the popular fame of colleagues such as Laurence Tribe, Arthur Miller, and Alan Dershowitz.

The Woburn case seemed like a wonderful riddle, and it had everything he could want in a lawsuit—interesting proof and evidence problems, an important social and environmental issue, plenty of media attention and, not least of all, the potential for making a great deal of money. It seemed, in short, like something worth reaching for.

“The only language that corporations understand is money,” said Nesson. “Sales, income, earnings, profits, the bottom line. That’s their blood.”

W. R. Grace had reported sales of slightly over five billion dollars last year, Gordon replied, with profits of $198 million. For Beatrice, net earnings had come to $436 million.

“Frankly,” admitted Nesson, “I’m in this for the punitive damages.”

“I take umbrage at the entire tone of your presentation,” the judge told Nesson, his voice rising in anger. “You were trumpeting away about sending messages to the boardrooms of America. Lawsuits are between parties, Professor. One side seeks compensation and the other side defends against it. If the boardrooms of America happen to notice what’s going on, that’s an incidental consequence of the process. It’s not the purpose of it.”

Cheeseman billed W. R. Grace for 115 hours of his time in a single week, an average of sixteen and a half hours a day for seven straight days.

Facher looked exhausted, small and old and gray. His voice drifted off into a mumble. It sounded almost as if he were muttering in his sleep. The judge gently reminded Facher to speak up. And then Facher just shrugged and wearily sat down.

As a rule, Schlichtmann liked inexperienced witnesses. “Virgins,” he called them. They were generally impressionable enough to follow his advice and listen to his warnings.

“The honest, scared witness is best,” he once explained. “They exude honesty when they’re nervous. Judges and juries love them.”

In a voice heavy with sarcasm, Cheeseman said, “That’s sort of like reading entrails, isn’t it? Tarot cards. You throw the cards down and look at them and you see the future from that?”

“There is no such thing as complete safety,” replied the toxicologist. “Everything poses a risk. Walking down the street is not safe. Sitting here in this room, being bombarded by cosmic rays, is not safe. What I’m saying is, the risk is acceptable to the human population because it is so infinitesimally small.”

“I don’t think anyone in the world knows what causes acute lymphocytic leukemia in children,” said the hematologist. “It’s evolving. The molecular biologists are going to tell us the answers, but no one knows the answers yet.”

“Most of their experts concede that TCE can cause cardiac, neurological, and immunological problems,” said Schlichtmann late one evening, after taking five depositions in one day. “The only difference between their experts and my experts is that theirs don’t think there was enough TCE in the water to cause problems.”

“There was, in fact, less deaths from cancer than one would have expected,” this doctor explained at his deposition. “There were fewer deaths from heart disease. I would begin to entertain a serious hypothesis that trichloroethylene in these quantities, rather than being harmful, is quite beneficial with respect to heart disease.”

Conway had deposed this witness while Schlichtmann was busy at another deposition. The study, the doctor admitted under questioning from Conway, had been financed by the very same company that had exposed its workers to the solvent.

Although it was widely believed that W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods were responsible for contaminating the aquifer, this belief was based largely on circumstantial evidence and unproven theory. The EPA felt it necessary to test that theory in the field before filing its own lawsuit demanding that Grace and Beatrice pay the cleanup costs.

His specialist in groundwater, a Princeton hydrogeologist of great renown in his field, studied the data and reported that the pump test had confirmed Schlichtmann’s fondest suspicion—Wells G and H were contaminated by groundwater coming from the Beatrice and Grace properties.

By the time he finished on Monday morning, he had a precise total of the cost to date: $1,803,195.84. Interest alone on the debt to the Bank of Boston and other creditors amounted to several hundred dollars a day. They were now half a million dollars over the budget he and Schlichtmann had given Uncle Pete three months ago.

The only thing they could not afford, Gordon figured, was a postponement of the trial. He could not imagine any way of financing Schlichtmann through a long delay.

Eighty-two percent—409 of the 500 people interviewed—felt that large corporations should, as a general rule, be held responsible for damages in toxic waste cases. Among those people who knew of the Woburn case from newspaper articles or the television news, 77 percent had already decided that both Grace and Beatrice were responsible for the leukemia deaths.

There were 159 bound volumes totaling 23,337 pages. There were forty-three expert witnesses in the case. Facher didn’t even know some of their names, never mind the substance of their opinions.

“A rough estimate of the magnitude of medical, technical and legal materials amassed thus far, stacked vertically, would exceed sixty feet, or the equivalent of a three-story building.”

“I’m proud of the way I prepare cases,” he told the judge. “I am not able to prepare this one. Is it right to force a party to trial if a lawyer says to you, ‘I just can’t do it. Don’t make me do it’? As bad as it sounds on the record, that’s what I’m saying. Believe me, it hurts to say that because I’m a proud lawyer.”

So in the end, they compromised. They decided to ask for a hundred and seventy-five million. That would allow room for negotiation down to a hundred million, if that should become necessary. But they wouldn’t be so crude as to ask for such a sum outright. They would present a package of demands and a payment schedule.

The deed to his house in Wellesley was now at the Bank of Boston, in Uncle Pete’s files. Gordon had gone to Uncle Pete for more money, and this time Pete had said he would need collateral. Gordon had pledged Schlichtmann’s condominium and the houses of both Conway and Crowley.

What about what they had told Pete four months ago? Conway wanted to know. They’d said the case was worth twenty-four million dollars then. Now they were at a hundred and seventy-five million. “It’s crazy, Jan,” said Conway.

As Schlichtmann spoke, he saw Facher reach for a bowl of mints on the table and slowly unwrap the foil from one. Facher popped the mint into his mouth and sucked on it, watching Schlichtmann watch him.

These figures, he thought, were preposterous. They meant that Schlichtmann did not want to settle the case, or else he was crazy. Maybe Schlichtmann simply wanted to go to trial. This opulent setting, and Schlichtmann sitting at the table flanked by his disciples like a Last Supper scene, annoyed Facher. Where was Schlichtmann getting the money for all this?

Facher took a croissant from the plate in front of him, wrapped it in a napkin, and put it into his pocket. That and the mint he had consumed were the only items the defense lawyers had taken from the sumptuous banquet that Gordon had ordered.

That morning, on the bus coming in to work, the judge read a Boston Globe article in which Anne Anderson was quoted as saying that money wasn’t important to her. “To me, it would be blood money in the strictest sense,” the Globe quoted Anne as saying. “I would just like them to say, ‘Yes, we made a mistake.’ ”

“No,” said Facher. “But I think a woman who carried a child for nine months is a special class.”

By the fifth day Facher and Cheeseman had used all of their peremptory challenges, all but one on women with children. Schlichtmann, too, had used all of his, all on men—on accountants, engineers, and bankers.

The judge seated the woman despite this comment. Schlichtmann had a peremptory challenge remaining at that time, but he decided not to use it. He liked the fact that this forklift operator had six grandchildren. And Facher and Cheeseman didn’t challenge her, either. They liked what she’d said about “the lady looking for extra money.”

He brought these proceedings to a close by telling the lawyers, “You’re not entitled to a jury of your liking. You’re only entitled to an impartial jury.”

“It never works that way. My bottom line will always be too high, and your top will always be too low.”

Furthermore, getting rid of Beatrice also meant getting rid of Facher, who had proven to be his strongest adversary. Without Facher to complicate matters, the trial against Grace would no doubt be simpler, and probably clearer and more compelling for a jury of ordinary citizens.

He had found a Woburn campaign sticker from 1963, a prescription bottle dated 1967, and Budweiser beer cans with tab tops of the sort that Budweiser said they had stopped making in 1970. He had chopped down a stunted tree growing out of one pile and sent cross-sections to a botanist, who determined that the tree, eighteen years old now, had started growing in 1967.

“A plaintiff’s case depends on momentum,” Facher once told his Harvard class. “The fewer objections you get, the better your case will move along. Objections break up the rhythm of an examination.”

For this reason, Facher asked the judge to exclude Drobinski’s opinion and thus end the case against Beatrice then and there.

Drobinski’s opinion could not rightly be called “scientific”—“He eyeballs the soil the way anybody who has ever dug a hole eyeballs the soil,” said the judge. Nonetheless, on the basis of Nesson’s argument, the judge decided he would permit Drobinski to state his opinion to the jury.

“People are greedy,” Facher once told his Harvard class. “The biggest problem with witnesses is that most of them exaggerate.” In Drobinski’s deposition testimony, Facher had found an exaggeration, and now he drew it forth for the jury to see.

He had, in fact, counted on eliciting them to set up his confrontation with Riley. He produced what he liked to call his “killer document”—the 1956 report by state health agent A. C. Bolde, in which Bolde had ordered Riley to remove six hundred feet of tannery sludge from the edge of the Aberjona marsh. That report told, in black and white, how Riley had refused, claiming that he owned the land and could do what he wanted on it.

“In my eleven years of trial experience, you’ve got more shit to use on this guy than I’ve ever seen before. You can fucking destroy him. What does it take to get you mad?”

“A case depends on momentum and Schlichtmann doesn’t have any,” Facher told the young associates who gathered around him, coffee cups in hand. “He doesn’t know how to ask a proper question. Just from a craftsman’s point of view, I feel bad for him.” Facher’s young associates all smiled.

In the enclosed, ritualistic world of the courtroom, where judges wore black robes, witnesses were sworn to tell the truth, and panels of silent strangers held one’s fate in their hands, reality was often a mere shadowland.

He glanced at Kaplan, debating whether he should offer her a cup of water, and then decided he could not risk it. Facher, a dozen paces distant, poured water from his own pitcher and started toward Kaplan. Then one of Cheeseman’s partners briskly crossed Facher’s path and reached Linda Kaplan first with his own cup of water. Facher, intercepted in mid-stride, stood in contemplation for a moment and then raised the cup to his lips and took a sip.

Mary Zoza nearly fainted the afternoon, seven weeks into the trial, when she got a Chinese lunch bill for $124. She began cooking lunches at home—roast chickens, big bowls of salad, spaghetti and meatballs—and bringing them in to work.

Gordon put a stop to the twice-a-week fresh flower arrangements from Fleural Lis. He saved another two hundred dollars a month by canceling the contract with the Greening Touch Company, which pruned, watered, and fed the office’s potted ferns and ficus trees. (“It’s fucking ridiculous,” Gordon said of that contract.) He stopped paying Schlichtmann’s student loan from Cornell Law School. He stopped paying the bank loan on Schlichtmann’s Porsche, and he let the insurance lapse.

After eight weeks of trial, the days in the courtroom had begun to blur into one another, like the countryside seen from a train window. A shaft of spring sunlight would find its way into the court and strike the brass lamp on the judge’s bench, a flash of brilliant yellow in the cavernous, gray, dismal room. The fluorescent lights overhead made everyone appear pale and sickly. Thick volumes of legal papers had grown on the counsel tables and more thick volumes lay underfoot in cardboard boxes on the floor. The lawyers’ overcoats, damp from a morning rain and smelling of wool, hung over the gallery railing. The radiators hissed gently. Distant, muted sounds of city traffic, a siren, an unmufflered truck, would float up into the courtroom from the streets fifteen stories below. The atmosphere felt heavy and dense. One of the alternate jurors regularly fell asleep. On particularly dull days, such as the one when Schlichtmann read Grace’s answers to interrogatories into evidence, Judge Skinner himself seemed to doze at the bench, the flesh of his cheeks slack and his mouth slightly parted, his head rolling back onto his chair.

“Are you telling this jury that you came in here yesterday, as a Ph.D. and the chairman of a department, and made a little mistake in an opinion you’ve been preparing for the last year and a half?” Facher had said. “You’re telling us, as a professor of geology, that you forgot to take into account porosity? Didn’t you lecture in front of this jury for an hour about making these calculations? Today is true and yesterday was not? That is what you want this jury to believe?”

Pinder’s attempt to be precise and accurate led to dense thickets of confusion and imprecision. Pinder was wary of Facher. He looked for a trap in every question Facher asked. To avoid being trapped, he refused to answer even the simplest questions in a simple way.

“I’m beginning to get the impression that this fellow has either got a very loose grasp of the language, or he will say anything that comes into his head.”

As it later turned out, Pinder was generally right. In its final report, released two years after the trial, the EPA concluded that the Beatrice property “contains the most extensive area of contaminated soil” and “represents the area of highest groundwater contamination at the Wells G & H site.” The report may have vindicated Pinder, but it came out too late to do Schlichtmann any good.

The great legal scholar John Wigmore wrote in his treatise On Evidence that “cross-examination is beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth. A lawyer can do anything with a cross-examination.… He may, it is true, do more than he ought to do; he may make the truth appear like falsehood.”

“That frightens me,” said Schlichtmann. “If the judge has become a father figure, what happens if they see me as the outcast, the wayward son?”

Schlichtmann’s firm received 40 percent of the settlement. In the past, a payday of this sort would have been cause for celebration, dinner out for the entire staff at an expensive restaurant, bonuses all around, and a night of drinking and revelry. But there was no party that night. The entire fee would have to go directly to Gordon, who would use it to pay Woburn bills. The money would disappear as soon as it arrived.

He mixed up dates, asserting that Well G had not been installed until 1974, when by now the jury and everyone else who’d paid any attention at all knew perfectly well that it had been installed ten years earlier.

“The jury might well have considered Mr. Mernin a total idiot. He was not an impressive witness.”

Under direct examination by Facher, Braids told the court that he had been able to determine by scientific tests the earliest possible moment at which TCE could have been dumped on the Beatrice land. He had done this by examining the microorganisms in the soil—“It might be easier just to call them soil bugs,” Braids said.

Standing in the well of the courtroom, before a gallery of only half a dozen spectators, he asked if Braids had looked at old aerial photographs, old maps, or collected any tannery records—any documentation at all—to determine the history of the Beatrice site. No, admitted Braids. Had Braids ever done this sort of work before, with microbiology and the degradation of chemicals? No, he had not, but he had read “a few articles in professional journals” about the subject.

Gordon imagined the Woburn debt as an immense pyramid. Each block of the pyramid represented a creditor, and there were hundreds of them. Keeping all the blocks in place, the pyramid intact, had become exhausting work. “The one day I don’t come in—if I get sick or I don’t have the energy—that’s the point it could all come down,” moaned Gordon.

Gordon didn’t have enough money in the various accounts at the Bank of Boston to cover the check, but he’d given his word. He figured it would take four or five days for the check to work its way through the mail and banking system. Anything could happen during that time, thought Gordon.

That fucking check went through the system like diarrhea,” Gordon said in wonderment.

It was a simple mathematical formula, devised by a nineteenth-century Frenchman, to compute the flow of water through porous media. The law stated that the quantity of water (Q) flowing through a given area is equal to the hydraulic conductivity (K) of the material through which it flows, multiplied by the size of the opening (A), multiplied again by the gradient, or angle of incline (I). Thus: Q = K × A × I. Once one knew what values to put into the formula, it was quite easy to work out. Unlike Guswa’s splendid three-dimensional computer model, it required only a pencil and paper.

Nesson began working out the equation, using the values Guswa had supplied on the morning of his five-gallon-a-minute calculation. Nesson discovered immediately that the equation did not balance. He assumed for the moment that Guswa was right about twelve inches of annual rainfall entering the groundwater system through Grace. He assumed further that Guswa was right about the angle of incline toward the wells and also the low conductivity of ground moraine. How big, then, Nesson asked himself, would the opening—the pipe, as it were—have to be to accommodate the volume of water that flowed through the system? Using X to represent the size of the opening, Nesson performed some simple algebra and reworked the equation so that it looked like this:

This had been Nesson’s discovery. Assuming that Guswa’s figures, which formed the basis for his opinion, were correct, then Darcy’s Law dictated that the Grace plant would be submerged under a lake of water ten feet deep.

Guswa labored at the chalkboard that morning. True to Schlichtmann’s prediction, Guswa had groundwater flowing deep into the bedrock, a hundred feet down, three hundred feet, a thousand feet, in all directions along cracks and fissures that existed only in hypothesis. He culled dozens of numbers, changing gradients and permeability, multiplying and dividing numbers in an effort to salvage his theory. He stood at the board in front of the jury box and muttered numbers to himself, punching them into his calculator. “Now, how am I going to do this here?” he said under his breath at one point.

Schlichtmann had heard from the families that the Grace plant had been recently landscaped, with new picnic tables and newly planted vegetable gardens, in preparation for the jury’s visit. He asked the judge to let him inform the jury of this, but the judge denied his request.

The EPA had warned the judge that no one should stray off the dirt road because of dangerously high levels of contaminants. The shoulders of the road, cluttered with barrels and building debris not so long ago, had been recently cleared. Nesson spied some newly sown grass seed and pointed it out to Schlichtmann. Someone had obviously been out to spruce up the area for the jury’s view.

Schlichtmann watched as one of the jurors, Robert Fox, stood near the edge of the marsh and gazed over at the remains of the city wells, a few hundred feet away. “My God,” he heard Fox say, “I didn’t realize it was so close.”

“It’s like someone slipping a cyanide capsule into a bottle of Tylenol and putting it on a drugstore shelf late one night. Nothing wrong with that! It only becomes a crime when the drugstore opens the next morning.”

“What you say is very interesting,” mused the judge. “It’s also very disturbing. On the one hand, you say that TCE is the cause of all these people’s symptoms because TCE is in the water. Then, in the next breath, you turn around and say that because all these people got these symptoms, we therefore conclude that TCE was in the water. This suggests to me that you’re bootstrapping. If that’s true, I’m wondering whether there’s any point in proceeding. You might as well call this case to a halt right now because you can’t possibly win it.”

Why can’t I look at him? Why does his argument embarrass me instead of engage me?

“W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods do not have the right to point outside this courtroom,” he said with fervor, his own finger jabbing the air, “not until they point across these two tables at each other.”

Standing in the well of the courtroom before the jurors, Schlichtmann could hear himself talking, but he felt dislocated, as if he were a spectator watching someone else perform.

“I’m sorry, excuse me. See how difficult it is?” he said to the jurors with a desperate laugh. And then, speaking to himself, he said in a low voice, “All right now, I can’t make a mistake.” But the stenographer heard him and duly recorded his statement, and so had the jurors and everyone in the gallery.

On Tuesday afternoon, Fox suggested they declare a deadlock and report to the judge that they could not arrive at a unanimous decision. Coulsey and Kaplan vehemently opposed this. “I don’t care how long we have to go,” Coulsey said. “I don’t care if it takes us all summer.”

On a piece of notepaper, Vogel wrote: “After six and a half days of deliberation and examination of the evidence made available to the jury, we cannot reach a unanimous decision on Question 1 for either Grace or Beatrice.”

“I’m not going to declare a mistrial at this point,” the judge said, “because if I do, another jury will have to hear the same evidence again. And there’s no reason to suppose that some other jury will be in the position to do any better than you’ve done. It’s your duty as jurors to consult with one another and to deliberate with a view to reaching an agreement. Do not hesitate to reexamine your own views or change your opinion. The jury room is no place for pride of opinion.”

That evening, Schlichtmann stood at the counter in the office kitchen, trying to open a bottle of apple juice. His palms were sweaty, his hands trembled, and he could not get the top off. He put the unopened bottle down and planted both hands on the counter, as if he were steadying himself on a storm-tossed sea. “Could I be wrong?” he wondered aloud. “Could there be only one holdout for me? I can’t believe that nightmare.”

The sheriff came to repossess Schlichtmann’s Porsche that weekend. It was an event of such little consequence to him that he failed to mention it to his partners until much later.

Their only sane option, as Schlichtmann had realized after his sleepless night in New York, was to try to settle with W. R. Grace now, before the judge began dismissing leukemia claims. But to negotiate a settlement, they had to be prepared to go ahead with the trial. Grace had to believe they were willing to go ahead, and for Grace to believe that, they had to make themselves believe it, too. “You can’t settle without a commitment to going on,” said Phillips.

“It’s not bullshit,” Schlichtmann said calmly. “Our bottom line cannot be less than our honest valuation of the case.”

“No, Jan,” said Conway. “I haven’t lost a second’s sleep on Beatrice. But things have changed. Now we’re just trying to stay alive. Ten million dollars is an awful lot of money. My first consideration is keeping the firm together, even before my family, because my family depends on that.”

Because I’m more successful if I’m perceived as someone who can turn a company’s worst nightmare into a positive event, instead of one who wages war.

The jury had returned a verdict against Grace, and paying money now would make it look as if Grace accepted that verdict. Furthermore, Eustis was concerned about the “shark effect.” A big settlement would induce other personal injury lawyers to seek clients in Woburn and file dozens of lawsuits, hoping to settle for a lot of money.

A new trial would make it look as if Grace wasn’t really guilty. They could even have the families say to the press that Beatrice and chemical companies in north Woburn were responsible for the contamination of the wells.

“It’s very clear. Eustis is afraid that if the number is too high, it’s going to create a shark effect. All these other things are just red herrings. Either they care about them or they don’t. And I don’t think they care.”

Conway left his home in Wellesley for work on Thursday morning, August 28, a rainy, gray morning with the barest hint of autumn in the air. He had one dollar and seventy-five cents in his pocket, exactly enough money to pay for the commuter train ticket to Boston.

To Schlichtmann, the idea of accepting Eustis’s offer was humiliating. He’d rather go ahead and risk losing everything. It was easy for Schlichtmann to take that risk, Conway thought. He didn’t have a family depending on him. And what about the Woburn families? They were the ones who should really be making this decision, not Schlichtmann.

On that same morning, Gordon searched the drawers of his desk and filing cabinet for any Krugerrands or stray hundred-dollar bills that he might have overlooked in earlier forays. In the back of one drawer he found a tattered blue savings account book from Brookline Savings. The last entry, a deposit, had been made in May 1962, when Gordon was eight years old. The account balance read $39.42.

Conway thought that Keating’s brief might well persuade Judge Skinner to order a new trial. Schlichtmann thought this was unlikely. If Skinner did so, he would in effect be admitting that his own questions had been hopelessly confusing and that they had just wasted five months of trial.

Phillips read aloud an account in The Wall Street Journal about a lawsuit concerning a woman who had died of toxic shock syndrome. The jury had returned a verdict of ten million dollars, which the trial judge reduced to $1.3 million. On appeal, the verdict was overturned. The woman’s survivors had gotten nothing.

He had decreed that, based on the evidence, groundwater from the fifteen acres had never reached the Woburn wells. Because of the compound nature of the questions the judge had posed to the jury, this specific question had never been answered. Skinner took it upon himself to answer it, and in doing so he made any appeal on the Beatrice verdict much more difficult.

Reading the report with rising excitement, Schlichtmann discovered that the Yankee engineers had drilled six monitoring wells on the tannery property, wells that had remained secret throughout the entire EPA pump test and the trial. The report stated that groundwater from under the tannery flowed to the east, toward the city wells, through very porous soil, exactly as Schlichtmann’s expert, Pinder, had predicted.

In the legal profession, destroying or suppressing evidence ranks just below stealing money from a client. The very purpose of discovery, wrote Justice William O. Douglas in 1958, “is to make trial less a game of blindman’s buff and more a fair contest, with the basic issues and facts disclosed to the fullest practicable extent.”

“All this paper,” said Schlichtmann, more to himself than to Crowley. “It represents nine years of my life. Why did I do it?” He paused for a moment and then answered his own question. “Pride, greed, ambition. Getting rich by doing good.”

“I’m thirty-nine years old,” continued Schlichtmann, “and I’ve dug one fucking big hole. A man couldn’t dig a bigger hole.”

In the Chapter 7 papers filed in bankruptcy court in Boston, he listed his assets as fourteen dollars in a checking account, a fifty-dollar cassette radio, one hundred dollars in cash, and five hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. (The expensive suits, after all, were no longer new.) He owed his creditors $1,231,542, of which state and federal taxes accounted for almost two thirds.

He told himself that he was purging his mind, but in truth he kept wondering how one would know if one had wasted one’s life. He was afraid of finding the answer.

“I used to believe in the idea that justice would prevail if you worked hard enough at it,” he said recently. “I thought if judges saw cheating right in front of them, they’d do something about it. The Woburn case gave me a depressing dose of reality.”

As far as I can tell, these kinds of problems with toxic waste are all around us. Why would we want to move? At least we know what we’re facing here.

Two groundwater treatment systems have pumped seventy-four million gallons of contaminated water out of the Aberjona aquifer. The treatment systems, which consist of ultraviolet radiation and chemical oxidation, have extracted approximately seventy-one gallons of contaminants, mostly TCE and perc, from the groundwater. In addition, sixteen hundred tons of contaminated soil have been removed from the Beatrice property and incinerated.

Given the nature of the contaminants, however, all parties agree that it will prove impossible to rid the site of TCE and perc completely, especially in the deepest reaches of the aquifer. Only nature can accomplish that, and it will take nature many thousands of years to do so.

I relied on the official record—primarily 196 volumes of sworn deposition testimony, seventy-eight days of trial testimony, and fifty-seven volumes of pre- and post-trial hearings—as well as my own interviews to reconstruct events that I myself did not witness.