Within forty-eight hours, federal warrants were executed.

Martin Vale was named, and so were the corporate executives above him who had known, and approved, and profited, and then spent a decade making sure no one ever found out.

They were pursued not only for the contamination itself, the poisoning of a town’s water, but for the long and deliberate cover-up that had followed it, the years of denial and burial, the silencing of anyone who came too close, and, I had every reason to believe, worse things still.

I did not take part in any of that, and I want to be clear that I did not want to.