“The important point for your purposes?” Ernie says in my wireless earpiece, as I get out of the SUV. “Whoever repainted the boat to be in compliance didn’t give a shit that there’s a reason for the ban.”

I get scene cases out of the back.

“Apparently, the person just slapped coats of primer and red paint on top of original black paint, which doesn’t stop the TBT from continuing to leach out and into the water,” Ernie adds, and I think about what Lucy just told me.

Channing Lott’s shipping company offers a hundred-thousand-dollar award for solutions that help preserve the environment. I can’t imagine any of his tankers painted with a dangerous biocide or that any boat he might have would be, certainly not his yacht that he sometimes moors in the Boston Harbor.

“It could be anything,” Benton says, after I tell him, and we’re climbing the weathered wooden front steps of Howard Roth’s three-room frame house, which doesn’t look as uncared for as it simply looks poor. “Any type of vessel or marine object originally painted with the antifouling stuff, from a buoy to a piling to a submarine. Then repainted.”

“I doubt a submarine would be repainted red.” I notice a coiled garden hose connected to an outside faucet and wonder what Howard Roth used it for.

There’s no grass, nothing to water, and he didn’t own a car.

“More likely we’re talking about a boat bottom and maybe its prop that were repainted with primer, and then a red antifouling paint that’s environmentally safe and legal.” We put on gloves and shoe covers, and I open a rusting screen door.

Sil Machado is waiting on a porch crowded with open black garbage bags overflowing with cans and bottles. Shopping carts are filled with bags, and more of them are stacked in the seats of a metal slat porch glider. I wonder how Howard Roth got his recyclables to a redemption center, and I ask Machado if he knows.

“Nearest one’s on Webster Ave.” He unlocks the front door with a single key attached to an evidence tag. “I think his buddy from Fayth House used to give him rides. Jerry, the maintenance guy who found him.”

He lets us in and stays outside because I intend to spray for blood if I don’t find any that’s visible, and there’s very little room inside. Machado explains through the open door that Roth’s friend, maybe his only friend, got a DUI and his license was suspended.

“He told me on Sunday afternoon when I responded to the call that as soon as he got his license back he was going to help Howie haul all this in,” Machado says.