Raising Cubby (37 page)

Everyone’s emotions remained on edge. It was a “big response,” in the words of one cop; they were used to covering crime scenes and they were constantly on the lookout for the “big crime” on any given night. Every time someone new entered the house, there was fresh potential for misunderstanding, which led to shouts and gesticulation among the crew. We cringed whenever that happened, because we suspected anything bad for them was likely to be twisted into something even worse for us.

One of the explosives techs tried repeatedly to bait Cubby, but he didn’t bite. The fellow could not let go of the notion Cubby had a meth lab, even though there was no evidence he did. Nowadays, meth is mostly cooked in big superlabs in Mexico, but lawmen everywhere dream of finding a drug factory in their backyard. It’s the stuff promotions are made of, but it was not to happen this night.

The tech pointed to a vodka bottle and sneered, “Do you swig that stuff while you’re cooking meth?”

“No,” Cubby said, “and you shouldn’t swig it either, because it’s not vodka. It’s refined ninety-nine percent alcohol, and it would kill you to drink it. I use it in a recrystallization reaction.”

If only he’d known what recrystallization was, the tech might have had a wiseass response, but he was smart enough not to look like a bigger fool. The quiet didn’t last, though, as he saw another container a few minutes later. “That’s a lot of Xanax you have
there,” he said, pointing smugly to a container sitting on the shelf below the sink.

The label was clearly visible, and it said Xylene.

“I think you must be confused,” Cubby answered patiently. “Xanax is a prescription pill. Xylene is a cleaning solvent. They sell Xylene at Ace Hardware.” Cubby couldn’t tell if the guy was ignorant or just dumb, but he left him to speculate to himself about the remaining chemicals. Out front, the bosses knew the real score. So far, everything was what Cubby said it was, and where he said it was located. But they were far from done.

They kept working, and we stayed anxious. Our biggest worry was that we had no idea whether the authorities were honest. Would they report what they found truthfully, or would they “discover” a case of dynamite and a pound of meth just in time for the late-night news? Murray, Perwak, and the other leaders seemed like standup guys to us, but we didn’t have the same confidence in the underlings, like the troll who’d baited my son, hoping to discover a meth lab. We knew the cops would get mad as hell if we challenged them, and if they were liars, they wouldn’t admit it anyway, so we decided to watch and judge them by their actions.

By nine o’clock there were sixty people on site, and all three local television stations were outside the police line, hoping to catch a story. None of them really knew what was going on, and we certainly weren’t talking. Gawkers who’d been drawn to the flashing lights stood behind the police line, bandying about rumors of a drug lab; others said there was a spill of hazardous chemicals in the basement. Only a few people knew that they were investigating a teenager’s home chemistry lab.

I’d heard the old adage
any publicity is good publicity
. Well, I turned down plenty of publicity that night, and I’m glad I did. There are times when tried-and-true advice is wrong, and that was one of them.

To this day I feel a debt of gratitude to most of the local news-people
for not broadcasting any of the wild speculation that was rampant at the scene. Only one of the television stations succumbed, saying that “police were investigating a possible meth lab and guns” on their eleven o’clock news. Everyone else stuck to the facts, as given out by the police. They told reporters they were investigating a possible chemical spill (mostly true—chemicals were involved) and that no one had been arrested. Little Bear and I didn’t say a word; in fact, we stayed well clear of cameras and reporters the whole time they were there.

Most of the emergency responders had never been on a raid like this one, and they’d never been near an “explosives lab,” so I understood their excitement. Yet I knew from Cubby that there was only about the equivalent of a stick of dynamite in homemade explosive in his lab. It wasn’t packed into containers to make bombs. It was just loose, in plastic bags and trays. There were no weapons of any kind, anywhere. There was no propaganda and no political ideologue. Most important, there were no victims, and no complaints, at least not until the cops arrived. The truth made a pretty dull story.

The idea that an army was needed to remove that material and protect the neighborhood was just crazy. The same was true of the evacuation; the only hazard to Cubby’s neighbors was the invading army itself. His explosives were never a threat to any of them.

Things were only just beginning, but I could see where they were headed, and it did not look good. I had the two ranking agents telling me Cubby didn’t look like a dangerous criminal, but there was this huge response going on, and someone was surely going to be blamed.

Eleven o’clock came and went. More vans and more people had arrived. They now had a mobile lab parked in the driveway, where they were testing the compounds removed from Cubby’s lab. Most of the time, the tests simply validated what Cubby had told them. There were a few tense moments, when they thought they had
found something unanticipated, but those results turned out to be lab errors and everyone relaxed.

Seeing a lull in the activity, I searched out Peter Murray and asked him what was happening. I guess he was feeling a bit better about things, because he smiled and said, “Every year, somewhere in the United States, ATF runs across a Boy Scout genius with a chemistry set,” he said. “I guess this is your year.” He then proceeded to tell me the story of David Hahn, the seventeen-year-old Boy Scout who tried to make a nuclear reactor in his parents’ shed. “I don’t know about the state, but I can definitely tell you the ATF has no criminal interest in your son. At this point, I just want to see the mess cleaned up.”

Encouraged by that, I sought out Gerry Perwak in his unmarked car. He said about the same thing but added that cops just decide who to arrest. They don’t make the decisions about who to prosecute. That’s up to the district attorney. Perwak’s words didn’t offer much comfort, and I drove home to a troubled sleep. At least I still had a house to return to. Cubby and his mom didn’t. They had to stay by the scene until the cops finally sent them to find a motel room a few miles away in Chicopee.

That was when they remembered Catto, their cat. When the raid started, the cops had locked her in the bathroom. Now they let Little Bear in briefly to retrieve her. When she went into the bathroom, she saw the medicine cabinet door opened a crack, so she looked inside. Every one of her pill bottles had been moved, and some of the lids were half open. She felt violated and wondered what else they had rummaged through.

When she went back outside, she ran into the hazmat chief and asked him how much longer they would be there. “I don’t know,” he said. “We still don’t know how we’re going to get all the chemicals out of this place. We may have to blow the house up and cover it with dirt.” She looked at him as if he were crazy, but he made it plain that he was serious. There were no words to say in response.

She took the cat and snuck her into the motel with Cubby. They cried themselves to sleep as Catto bounced from bed to bed, energized and wild after an evening locked in the bathroom amid all the clamor.

I got home in time to discover that my son was the lead story on the eleven o’clock news, on all three local stations. With horrified fascination, I switched from one newscast to the next, wondering what they would say. To my surprise and pleasure, the reporting was remarkably balanced. “Police are investigating a teenager’s chemistry lab in a South Hadley home,” ran one headline. None of the news stories identified my son by name, presumably because he was still a minor. Walking around earlier that evening, I’d overheard all sorts of wild speculation from reporters at the fringes of the scene, each one hoping to get a scoop. I was relieved that their fantasies of meth labs, guns, dynamite, and more hadn’t made it into the news. I wondered how long that would last.

The news crews were still there the next morning. The raid was on the front page of that day’s newspaper, complete with photos of the house and police cars. The headline read: “Possible Chemical Spill in South Hadley Home!” Disturbing as that was, it was a hell of a lot better than “Drug Lab Busted,” or any of the other rumors that bystanders had been feeding the reporters. I was glad to see the newspaper editors had followed the precedent set by the previous night’s television reporters; they stuck to what the police had told them, my son wasn’t mentioned by name, and there was no sensational speculation.

The newspaper’s online forums, however, were filled with all sorts of far-out innuendo. I’d heard some crazy stuff from spectators the night before, but the comments in the paper’s discussion area put all that to shame. Cases of explosives, toxic waste, nuclear accidents—“people in the know” revealed it all.
The National Enquirer
could have taken lessons from the people who posted there. I wondered what we should do.

Meanwhile, my son had more pressing concerns. He’d given the cops an exact list of what he had, and so far, every test had proven
him right. With all their talk of meth, there was not a single narcotic drug on the list. The only illegal chemicals were the small amounts of explosive he’d told them about in the initial interview. But the technicians kept making mistakes, or imagining things that weren’t there, and whenever that happened, they jumped on him. We were now in our second day of that, and he was sick of their sloppiness and the repeated accusations of trickery. Walking down the street for privacy, Cubby called the number I’d given him the night before. David Hoose was cross-country skiing that afternoon, and he’d stopped to rest at the top of Northfield Mountain when his phone rang.

As soon as he answered, my son introduced himself, then asked, “Are you my new lawyer?” Cubby sounded a little hesitant, but Hoose was hesitant too. He had not met any of us and knew next to nothing about my son or what he might have done. Criminal lawyers are asked to represent all kinds of people, and every attorney draws a line somewhere. For all Hoose knew, Cubby could have been the next Unabomber. He decided to ask.

“If I take your case, I’m not going to find out that you are affiliated with the Nazis, skinheads, or any other hate group, am I?” It was a reasonable question, given that Cubby’s lab was now dominating all the local news channels.

Cubby was taken aback. “I’m a scientist, not a terrorist! I’m not involved with wackos like that! I don’t always agree with the politically correct people in Amherst, but that’s about as far as it goes.” With that established, Cubby had himself a lawyer. Hoose gave Cubby the same advice he’d given me the day before. “Say as little as possible to the police. Don’t volunteer anything, but be cooperative when they ask questions. If anything blows up, call me!”

From that moment on, Agent Murray became Cubby’s guardian at the scene. He’d been fair all along, but now he really looked out for Cubby’s rights. For that he has my commendation and gratitude. He knew Cubby was represented by counsel, and that my son had chosen to help them voluntarily. Whatever the bomb techs thought, Murray
was clear: They needed Cubby’s knowledge. He made sure the meth lab taunts came to an end, and that people treated my son with respect.

By Saturday afternoon, the police had inventoried everything in the house and there was agreement about what Cubby had. To my great relief, Murray and Perwak still felt Cubby had been completely truthful with them. There had been some surprises but no evasions or deception.

Cubby’s mom spent a second night in the motel around the corner, and Cubby went back to Amherst with me. I felt a little comfort, having him back home. The shock of the raid had left him pretty subdued, and he realized parents might be good for something after all. Meanwhile, having been evicted from her home, his mom was alone and scared. I knew she felt bad, but there was really nothing more any of us could do. So we went to bed.

Sunday morning arrived, and with it day three of the cleanup of Cubby’s lab. I stayed home to catch up on work, and Cubby went to meet his mom. The scene was much quieter, as most of the people who’d been there the first two days slipped away. The State Police Command Center was gone, and the tent in the street had vanished with it. The bomb techs had finished blowing up Cubby’s chemicals in the South Hadley landfill. The rest was up to the hazmat people.

Exactly what the hazmat crew was doing remained a mystery. They were still keeping everyone out of the house. Seeing there was nothing more they could do, Little Bear and Cubby drove to Northampton, where the three of us had a date to meet our new attorney.

Cubby was holding up pretty well on the surface. In the year or so before the raid, I’d been happy to see my son outgrow some of his more obvious compulsions, like the hair brushing and hand washing. I hadn’t watched him get dressed for the lawyers, but now I couldn’t help but notice his hands were scrubbed raw. I felt so sad for my little boy. I wished I could wash all this away for him, but I couldn’t. I hoped the lawyer could help.