Heinz Noonan, the “Bearded Holmes” of the Sandersonville, North Carolina, Police Department, was up to his ears – so to speak – in garbage. In this case, it was, in actuality, garbage. He was driving a borrowed pickup truck with a generation of dendrites that had previously been owned, moved, concealed, and denied it was ever owned by either of his twin sons in their rooms before they headed off to college. Their old clothing had been donated to a local nonprofit, their used books to the local library, and their alleged-to-be-artwork to the Sandersonville High School art department for whatever donated art was used for. But that had left a collection of furniture so ragged that even Big Brothers Big Sisters had turned up their collective noses at the donation. The rejected items included ratty rugs, broken and barely serviceable wood chairs, two desks which had been abandoned after the War of 1812 and wall ornaments from cultures Noonan and his wife had never heard, cared not to investigate, put up with because the twins had paid good money to purchase and were more that pleased to see go the way of all rubble that could not be recycled.

Noonan paid his deposit fee – an odd term, Noonan mused, for that which could not and would not be retrieved – and drove to the edge of the dumpsite. As he was evicting 18 years of debris, he was approached by a young woman dressed as a nurse carrying a clipboard. As Noonan had already paid his deposit fee, he was unperturbed.

“Excuse me,” the woman said politely, “but aren’t you the ‘Bearded Holmes’ of the Sandersonville Police Department?”

“I’ve been called worse,” he said with a smile. “Excuse my humor, but what’s a good-looking woman like you doing in a dump like this?”

She chortled. “Oh, that was so good. I’ll have to tell my husband. Actually, I recognize you from the bridge games your wife plays. She’s very good, by the way.”

“Ouch.”

“Oh, don’t worry. This has nothing to do with Bridge. I’m dumping garbage myself,” she pointed toward a pickup where a young man was also evicting debris from his household. “And I am not talking about my husband. We’re cleaning out my mother-in-law’s garage.” She gave a faux evil smile. “While she’s out of town. Everything in her garage is sacred to her, so we’re doing an end-around run. She’ll be a bit upset, but you know, that’s what in-laws are for.”

“Good girl! And husband too.”

“Actually, my colleagues and I were thinking about paying you a call. Our problem, well, it’s not a problem, it’s an unusual occurrence, several, that we’d have a hard time explaining. Or understanding.”

“I get a lot of those,” Noonan said as he smiled. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Here?”

“I’m here. You’re here. You have a problem. We’re both dumping trash, what better place to talk out the unusual?”

“Fine, but I don’t want you to think I’m nuts.”

“Not yet, but go ahead and tell me your tale of woe.”

“I work at Sandersonville Sanitation, you know, where human sewage goes.”

“OK.”

“Someone has been stealing our sewage.”

That took Noonan by surprise. “That’s quite a tale. You should come to my office and tell me more about it. But,” he pointed to the man emptying her truck, “without the refuse – and I do not mean your husband.”

*  *  *

Charlotte Spigner stood about five feet tall without heels. That made her 5’3″ when she came to Noonan’s office. She was dressed in a uniform from a sanitation company. It wasn’t really a uniform; it was more of a matching shirt and pants set with the Sandersonville Sanitation logo on the breast pocket. But the words “Sandersonville Sanitation” were nowhere to be seen. That made sense to Noonan. He could only imagine the reaction someone would get in a butcher shop or eatery if someone appeared with a shirt with those words blazing on it.

Noonan invited her to sit in the chair beside his desk while he dove into the pile of notebooks he had on his desktop, looking for one with a blank page. While he was digging for the notebook, Spigner was looking at the window.

“Do you mind if I pull the shutters?” she said as she pointed at the window. “I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

“Works for me,” Noonan replied. “Some jobs just make you cautious wherever you appear.”

“You have no idea,” she said as she walked across the room toward the window. Then, over her shoulder, she said to Noonan, “And the jokes people will tell, assuming you find sewage humorous.”

“I can live without those jokes,” Noonan said with a laugh, “have a seat.” As she sat, he popped his notebook open and poised a pen over the empty page. “Let’s start with your name.”

“Charlotte Spigner,” she spelled it for him and then handed him a business card. “Here’s how you can reach me.”

“Fine,” Noonan said as he took the card. “How long have you been working at the sanitation company?”

“A decade in October. It’s been a good job. Pay is satisfactory, and I’m building a retirement. It’s an office job, mine is, so I don’t have to go down to the pumping and filtration stations. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my work. I just have to be cautious about whom I tell where I work.”

Noonan chuckled again. “I understand. Now, let’s talk about the theft.”

“Well,” she laughed, “I don’t know that I would call it theft. To me, theft is when someone takes something that has value from someone who owns it. But sewage is not owned by anyone, not in the legal sense of the term. So stealing sewage is probably not a crime. Where you dump it after you steal it could be a crime. Or a misdemeanor, littering, I’d say. A lot of bad publicity, but other than that, no one cares as long as it’s not on their property. Or the smell doesn’t reach them.”

“But some sewage is missing, correct?”

“Yes, enough to jiggle the account books, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m guessing you mean you are keeping track of the disposal numbers, so to speak, and the volume has a few valleys. How many are we talking about?”

“Over the past year, nine.”

“Month after month?”

“Five, one a month, over five months, and then a break. After that, four months later, four in a row. Once a month.”

“This year?”

“Just the last of the four from last year.”

“When did the withdrawals start and stop?”

“Started in May of last year. Five that ended in September.”

“Just in time for hurricane season.”

“Yup,” she said. “But I don’t see a connection. Then there was a gap. The withdrawals started up again in December and then through March of this year. No hurricanes then.”

“How does the sewage leave the operation? I mean, is it trucked out?”

“That I don’t know. I’m only looking at the books, the ledger, the records. My guess is ‘no,’ because sewage arrives by pipeline and is dispersed through the facility through pipes. No trucks are involved with the collection, so there is no reasonable way for it to be removed by trucks.”

“So,” Noonan said as he wrote in his notebook, “let me assume some things. Sewage arrives by pipeline, and then the contents are separated. The methane gas is removed first. Then the sludge – I suppose that’s the term for the solid waste – undergoes a process where water is removed. What happens to the methane and water, and what’s left of the sewage?”

“It’s odd talking to someone not in the industry,” Spigner said as she chuckled. “The methane is mixed with diesel, and we burn it in the facility. It’s part of our power source. The water is purified and pumped into the ocean. The solid waste is dumped into the ocean as well.”

“Is that legal? I mean, dumping sewage into the ocean doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

“It isn’t a good idea. But it’s not illegal, and the EPA has not ordered us to stop. Or any sewage treatment facility in the United States, I know about. It’s not a good idea, but right now, it’s legal.”

Noonan shook his head sadly. “The things I learn along the way. OK, now, where exactly was the missing material?”

“The loss, so to speak, is after the methane gas is removed and before the water is removed from the sludge.”

“Does the division of water from the sludge take place in one large tank?”

“Several large tanks. It’s not a one-two-three process. All I know, from the records, is that there has been a low volume of sludge at the end of the process in certain months. The water is, well, just water, and it just gets pumped out into the ocean. We don’t keep a record of that volume. The sludge, yes, about 10,000 gallons a month in the early months, half of that after hurricane season.”

“Is there any way to know if the gallons were all taken out at the same time?”

“No, I just know that in the early months, we were about 10,000 gallons low. Then 5,000 in the last months.”

A dull chime clanged in a deep recess of Noonan’s cerebellum.

“How heavy is the 10,000 gallons?”

“Well, we don’t keep track of weight, just volume. If it were water, well, water weighs about eight pounds per gallon. So 10,000 gallons of sludge is about 80,000 pounds. That’s about four dump truck loads.”

“Over a 30-day period?”

“Yes. All I know is the numbers for the month were down 10,000 gallons.”

“And you have no way of knowing if any water is missing?”

“Correct. But there’s no reason to keep track of the water. It’s clean when it’s dumped into the ocean.”

“Now, moving on, when the water is removed from the sludge, is the sludge solid?”

“Not the way you mean it. It’s a slurry. It has enough water in it to make it transportable by pipeline. A moisture content like ketchup.”

“I could have gone all day without that comparison,” Noonan said with a grin. “Now, the sludge, after most of the water has been removed, is in a large tank before it gets pumped out to sea, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Now, I’m assuming that all of the tanks in the process have more than one valve. Again, I’m assuming the methane is bled off, say, from the top of a tank, and the water and sludge oozes into the next tanks where the water is removed.”

“Tanks. More than one tank is involved. But yes, that’s the process.”

“Are there valves on all of the tanks?”

“From tank to tank, yes. Large ones. Smaller ones on the side for safety. About the size of a fire hose, like you’d see attached to a fire hydrant.”

“So,” Noonan twirled his pen, “It is likely your missing sludge was removed through some of those side valves on the tanks.”

“That’s the only way it could be removed from the normal process.”

“So the sludge could have been removed from the tanks and piped to a tank truck, let’s say.”

“Sure. There is a roadway around the facility. But why take sludge in the first place?”

“That,” Noonan said, “is a very interesting question.”

*  *  *

Whenever Noonan had a loo-loo call, and this was certainly one of them, he turned to his two, tried-and-true sources of information: local newspapers and local history. He got zip. There were no articles on Sandersonville Sanitation, not even a letter to the editor. Sanitation was a no-no subject, so there was no local history. The only references to the facility were in passing. It was located out of town, along the Pamlico Sound shoreline, adjacent to a landing strip for airplanes. On the other side of the facility was a dirt road leading to town. There was heavy foliage between the facility and town, which did not surprise Noonan.

Since the theft of the sludge ended at the beginning of hurricane season for the Atlantic, Noonan began reading newspapers backwards from September. The previous year had been one of torrential rainfall in some areas of the country and massive fires in others. North Carolina had been particularly hard hit by both. The heavy rain had been in the Appalachian foothills of Western North Carolina, and fires had occurred in Eastern North Carolina. The fishing has been good along the coast – no surprise there – and the tourists had scattered the previous year a bit early because of Hurricane Erin.

There wasn’t much to go on.

That, Noonan suddenly realized, was the key to the solution. The sludge had not gone out to sea. It had not been hauled out by a dump truck, or, in this case, multiple loads of dump trucks. That was not reasonable. On top of that, 10,000 gallons was a lot of sludge. It couldn’t just vanish.

Or could it?

Did it just leap into the sky and disappear?

And then a mighty gong reverberated in his cerebral cavity!

*  *  *

A week later, Harriet, the Office Manager and Tsar of Common Sense, came into Noonan’s office with a large envelope in one hand and a three-foot zipper in the other. As she walked toward Noonan’s desk, she looked from hand to hand with a puzzled look. Noonan didn’t say a word and waited for her to sit in the leather chair next to his desk.

“Let me guess,” he said humorously, “I’d say the zipper was from Sandersonville Sanitation.”

“Well,” Harriet said with a snide look, “you are certainly psychic today.”

“And,” Noonan said, looking over Harriet’s head toward the window overlooking Pamlico Sound, “the letter said something like ‘our lips are sealed.’”

“You are half right.”  Harriet shook the dangling zipper, “It said ‘our lips are zipped.’”

“Ah,” Noonan said with a faux sense of horror, “Zipped. Women not speaking in this day and age?! What will happen next?!”

“Very funny, oh ‘Bearded Holmes.’  This was from a loo-loo call I did not take. Tell momma all about it.”

“Interesting story with a lot of crap.”

“Figured that from the return address. Now, cut the crap, and tell me the story.”

“Strange case.”  He pointed to the zipper. “One of the silent ones told me Sandersonville Sanitation was missing sewage. About 10,000 gallons a month for six months and then, a few months later, half that per month for four months.”

“Someone was stealing sewage?”

“No, not stealing. The actual gerund is incorrect. If you steal something, it has to have a value to someone. If you take something that has no value, it is ‘finding’ or ‘discovering’ or ‘finders keepers.’”

“R-i-g-h-t! Cut the manure, now keep the conversation going.”

“F-u-n-n-y, in a punny way. The sanitation staff knew the sewage was going, but didn’t know why. All they knew for sure was the amount and the months. Oh, and they also knew the sewage was not going out by truck.”

“That doesn’t leave a lot of options.”

“Correct! The one option left was by air.”

“It was flying away?”

“No, it was being flown away.”

“Why would anyone fly sewage anywhere?”

“I’m not sure. But I had a good guess. It was based on the months the sewage was missing.”

“Really? What months were those?”

“Roughly May to September.”

“Just before hurricane season.”

“Yes, but there is also another season which comes before hurricane season.”

“Really? Tell me all.”

“Fire season. It was – and is – my guess that someone in the government is looking ahead. That person knows that you cannot keep dumping sewage into the ocean. So, what can you do with the sewage that is environmentally positive and not costly?”

“Dumping the sewage on fires?”

“That’s what I guessed was being done with sewage in the five months before hurricane season. Can sewage be used as a fire retardant? Good question. The answer: someone knows now. If it works, there will be a positive use for sewage.”

“But we don’t know if it works.”

“I don’t. I’m sure someone does.”

“But you said there was sewage stol, er, disappearing, after hurricane season. The fires were out by then.”

“Correct. I’m betting the experiment continued. Not only was sewage being tested as a fire retardant, but it was also being tested as a fertilizer for the burnt areas. Was it possible to accelerate ground cover growth in fire-scorched areas using sewage to reduce the time of recovery?”

“Very clever. And a way to stop pumping sewage into the ocean. But did it work?”

“I don’t know.”  Noonan pointed at the zipper. “Neither do the unknown workers at Sandersonville Sanitation. But if it does, the sanitation industry will be able to sell the sludge rather than dumping it.”

Harriet smirked. “A whole new industry. So, I’m guessing, you told the sanitation workers what you thought.”

“I did.”

“And,” Harriet squinted one eye as she looked at Noonan. “They asked you not to tell anyone because the sewer theft just might prove to be profitable.”

“I told them lips are sealed.”

“Don’t you mean ‘zipped,’” Harriet said as she raised the zipper.

“Absolutely. And now I am a sewer expert. You know what a professional sewer expert is called?”

“Oh, no! A joke.”

“A connoi-sewer.”