by Ted Wood
The most frustrating part of any investigation is the time when answers start to come. It's like doing a crossword puzzle and having a couple of letters in place in a word which spoil your first guess at what the answer should have been. Why, if Ferris was this close to a grab of this magnitude, would he have taken his gun to his head? And if he hadn't done it, who had? And why? And was the chief involved in some plan to lift the gold?
I needed help. There was only one thing to do. I had to contact Toronto and get advice, and even more important, some solid help from guys I could depend on. Then if the bullion van was heisted, the whole problem I'd come here to unravel would be ended.
The chief came back in as I was musing. I had spread the photographs on the table in front of me and he came and leafed through them as casually as any bystander. As he moved his arm I got a whiff of an expensive cologne. If he was mourning Ferris's death it wasn't upsetting his daily routine at all. “Roberts does good work, doesn't he?” he said.
“Very professional.” I nodded. “But they don't show me anything new. How about you?”
He picked up the shot of Ferris's body and looked at it again before shaking his head. “No. They'll make a good show-and-tell for the inquest but there's no surprises in them.” He dropped it and stood looking at me. “What do you propose to do next?” He might as well have been a visitor for all the help or direction he was giving.
I shrugged. “Seems open and shut, chief. I'm going to talk to the doctor, see if he's conducted his examination. Then I guess we can wrap things up and go on, business as usual.”
“Good,” he said. “We'll have to notify his family, see if they want the body shipped somewhere for funeral arrangements. Otherwise, we'll do it here. His insurance with the department will cover the expenses.”
“Right.” I stood up. “I'll go see the doctor and make the arrangements,” I said. “I think it would be best if you were to call his son, chief. It would sound a sour note if I did it, since I've taken over his job.”
He gave a dutiful little tut, holding his head erect. “It shall be done,” he said and walked briskly back to his office.
I took Sam with me to the hospital. It was only ten o'clock, but the doctor was back on duty, wearing a white coat, his stethoscope hanging around his neck. “Just finished my rounds,” he said. “I slept in this morning. We don't have any operations to take care of.”
“Sorry to clutter up your day, doc, but the chief's asking if you've had a chance to examine Ferris's body.”
“Doing it at noon,” he said. “I try to have at least some time for myself. Right now I'm going for my workout.” He paused. “And don't worry. I'll check the muzzle of the weapon first. That's your first priority, right?”
“Thank you,” I said. “If it comes up clean I'll know what kind of case I'm working on.”
He nodded. “Anything else?”
“Not medically, but I wanted to make a long distance call and I'm a little concerned about privacy from the station. Could I do it from your office, please?”
He looked at me quizzically. “Not cheating on that gorgeous wife of yours?”
“Are you kidding?” I laughed with him.
“Come with me,” he said and I followed him back to his tiny office. It had a couple of bookcases stuffed with drab-looking textbooks. The walls were hung with packages of X-ray plates and there was a little plastic figurine on his desk, a demented looking man with the inscription “Lord, give me patience, and hurry.”
He indicated the phone and then lingered at the door. “Look, this is none of my business, but can I ask you a question?”
“I'll try to answer.”
He came in and shut the door behind him. “I've been watching you. You're not the kind of head-beater the chief usually hires. I'm starting to wonder if you have an agenda that's not been made public.”
I stood and looked at him, seeing him clearly for the first time. He was a year or two older than me and fit-looking but tired. His hair was fair and thin and it stuck up at the back. I could feel in my bones that he was an honest man. He deserved an honest answer.
“I do,” I said. “I haven't told anyone else in town, doctor, but I've got a job to do here that doesn't involve my paycheck from the department.”
“Ah.” He picked up his little figurine and tossed it in his hand. “I don't think you need to say anything else. But if I can be of any assistance, please call on me. If you're doing what I think, I'd be very happy to assist.”
“I may need some help, perhaps tomorrow,” I said.
He smiled, a real smile that warmed his eyes. “Tomorrow. Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday.”
“Never jam today,” I completed for him. “Only this is serious. I think something is about to happen. That's why I want to call Toronto.”
“I hope it won't mean you and your wife will leave,” he said. “I've never seen my own better half so happy as she is with this play business.”
“Fred won't let you down,” I said. “The play must go on. She'll make whatever arrangements are necessary.”
“She's a very special woman, sergeant,” he said, and I wondered where he'd met her. Perhaps he had picked up his wife from the rehearsal.
“I know,” I said. “I'm a lucky man, and I don't intend to change that. Like I said, this is business.”
He put down the figurine and nodded. “Good. It's all yours.”
He left and I dialed the number of Leo Kennedy's office at the Provincial Police Commission. He wasn't there. The clerk he'd left responsible for his movements was new. She had been given the usual speeches about security and would tell me only that he was on assignment in a police department somewhere. She wouldn't even say where. I asked who his boss was and she told me that he reported directly to the assistant deputy minister. “That's direct?” I asked and she said it was, surprised that I didn't recognize a big wheel when it ran over me.
I asked to be put through to him, but he was in a conference in Washington and wouldn't be back for a week. “I can contact Inspector Kennedy and have him ring you,” she said at last.
“When?” I asked.
“He's in transit at the moment. I can reach him tomorrow.” She was genuinely trying to be helpful. It was like watching Nureyev trying to dance in leg irons.
“Please tell him to call me at exactly noon tomorrow at this number,” I told her. “Please. It's vital.”
She promised and I hung up, having to restrain myself from breaking the telephone. It wasn't her fault, I reminded myself. Kennedy had a full slate of jobs on, he couldn't sit in his office for a month at a time waiting for me to rub the lamp like Aladdin.
I sat and thought for a minute longer. Should I call in the OPP? On the face of it, that was the thing to do. But I had nothing more than a suspicion to go on. I couldn't talk to a senior officer. I would have to talk to an inspector at most in the nearest contingent to Elliot, and once I'd alerted them my cover would be blown. Harding would know why I was in town and my investigation would be over.
I went out to look for the doctor, but he had already gone, so I left. Sam was waiting patiently in the front seat. I started the car and sat for a minute, trying to see into the future, rubbing Sam's head as if it were a crystal ball. No, there was nothing else for it. I had to work this one through myself.
The obvious thing to do was to see what else I could find out about the gold shipment. I drove out to the gold mine and the security man stopped me at the gate. “Sgt. Bennett, here to see Mr. Roberts in accounting,” I told him.
“Sergeant?” He bobbed his head in wonder. “Well sure, go up to the main office, I'll call and tell him you're coming.”
I drove up to the office, a single-story brick building beside the refinery. All around me was the coming and going of a mine in full operation. The stack at the smelter was rolling out a plume of white steam, and I wondered how much acid it contained. More than it would have done if it had been located down south where the environmentalists
could see it.
Next to it, connected by an overhead brick bridge, sat the refinery which took the extract from the smelter and purified it a little further, not all the way to the “five nines” gold, 99 .999% pure, at which gold is traded. The final step is always taken at the mint, which is the only place empowered to mark it with the purity sign. It's a pretty good safety precaution. The final ten percent of the refining process is complex and expensive. Confining that stage to one center cuts down on the risk of theft. Cuts it down, but not out. A load of gold concentrate had been hijacked a year before at Kirkland Lake.
A smartly dressed young woman met me at the door of the accounting section and led me in to Roberts's office. It was in a corner of a big bullpen where about forty people were working. Most of the other men were in shirtsleeves, but he was still wearing his full three-piece suit, frowning at a computer printout.
He stood up when I came in, nodded to the woman and stuck out his hand. “Hello again, sergeant. Something wrong with the photographs?”
“No, they're excellent, Mr. Roberts. You do very professional work.” It's always wise to start off by flattering.
“Oh?” He sat down again, waving me to the other chair.
“Yeah. The reason I came is to find out a little more about the other subject we discussed.”
“Why? Do you think we're in some sort of danger?” A good accountant, identifying with his company's money.
“It's too early to tell.” I stopped and looked at him. I knew nothing about him except for his job and the fact that the chief had introduced him. I wondered how well he knew Harding.
He sat back, pursing his lips in impatience. Here in his own office he was more sure of himself. “That's a very ambiguous statement.”
“It's a very difficult situation,” I said. I was debating with myself how much to tell him. For all I knew, he and his wife went bowling with the chief every Thursday.
He looked at me without speaking for a couple of seconds, then he said, “I have heard rumors in town, you know.”
“What kind of rumors?”
He smiled without humor. “I think you know what I'm talking about.”
We were going to play catch. “Perhaps I do, Mr. Roberts, but I'm new in town and even newer in my job. I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.”
That made him chuckle. “Haven't heard that since I was yea high,” he said happily. “No, what I mean is I've heard that Sgt. Ferris was not to be trusted.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But as the new kid on the block, I can't very well go to the chief and tell him that. That's why I'm playing hard to get.” He was ready to believe me. Fred must be right. I have an honest face.
“And you think he might have been planning something for tomorrow?”
“It's a faint possibility,” I said. “I'm almost sure he wasn't, but I want to do a good job without getting the chief mad at me for speaking ill of the dead.”
He nodded and sat silent for a moment, leaning back in his chair, important and happy. “Smart,” he said at last. “You seem to be very professional, Mr. Bennett.”
I shrugged modestly. “It seemed to me that the best thing I could do would be to familiarize myself with what happens tomorrow and be on my toes. Like I said, it's probably nothing, but I had my own suspicions of the sergeant.”
His phone rang. He frowned but ignored it. Somebody else picked it up outside. “What can I do to help?”
“I'd like to know what the shipment will be moved in, and when it's due to leave. There's nothing on the duty roster.”
He reached into his desk and pulled out a file folder. He checked it and said, “Seven a.m.” He sat back in his chair. “I don't know the number of the vehicle, but it's a plain brown van. It sits kind of heavy on the road. All the armor, I guess.” He was enjoying himself now, thinking about his gold. “One man sits in the front, the other in the van itself. They're both armed.”
“And the men themselves are in plain clothes.”
“Yes.” He was clear about this one. “They wear suits.”
“And when does the van get here?”
“They spend the night at the motel in town. They check in there as representatives of one of the companies we do business with in Toronto, a firm that supplies drill bits.”
“Thank you. You've been very helpful.” I stood up and he did the same.
“You don't want to meet with our security people?”
“Frankly, no. This is all supposition on my part. The fewer the people that know about it, the less foolish I look tomorrow when everything goes off as usual.”
He smiled and shook hands. “I think I'm going to enjoy working with you,” he said.
“If everyone were as helpful as you, there'd be no need for police departments at all,” I said. I nodded and turned toward the door as he sat down again and picked up his printout.
My next stop was the hospital. The nurse on duty steered me to the morgue and I went in and found the doctor, wearing rubber gloves, holding a test tube.
The morgue attendant was there with him. I caught the doctor's eye and he said, “Hi. Would you like a cup of coffee, sergeant?”
“Yes, please.” I can take a hint.
“George, would you mind? There's a fresh cup at the nurse's station.”
George frowned in disgust. He was waiting for the fun to begin—when the doctor started slicing up Ferris's carcass. “How'dya take it?”
“Black, thanks, George.”
He left and the doctor held out the test tube. “It's as you thought,” he said. “I can't find any traces of blood or tissue in the muzzle of the gun.”
I met his gaze. “You know what that means, don't you?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Yes. It means your sergeant didn't commit suicide. He was murdered.”
EIGHTEEN
I handed the test tube back to him. “There's no possibility you could be wrong?”
He shook his head and put a rubber stopper on the test tube. “No.” He shook his head a second time. “No. No blood, and I carried out the test twice.”
“Thank you. Can I ask you, please, to save that sample? If this thing comes to trial we're going to need evidence to back up your findings.”
“Don't worry.” He peeled off his gloves and got a strip of self-adhesive labels out of the drawer under his bench. He wrote one out and stuck it on. It formed a seal over the top of the tube. “There. That's all it takes.”
“Do you have any sealing compound you can put on it?”
He looked at me blankly, then nodded. “Oh, I see. So it can't be tampered with. Yeah. I'll secure it with some Scotch tape. That should do it.”
“Okay. If you could, please.” While he dug around for the tape I initialed the sticker. Then he covered my signature with the tape. “That keeps the evidence intact. Now I'll get back down to the station and tell the chief.”
He frowned. “There's no alternative, is there?”
“No. It makes him a suspect, and Walker. They were the people to report the body.”
“Damn.” The doctor sat back on the edge of the bench and crossed his feet. “I like Walker. I don't think he's responsible, do you?”
“No. I share your feelings. But it looks as if somebody blew Ferris away, probably with a .38, although I won't know until the report comes back from Toronto. I'll take the weapon now, if you don't mind, and ship it and the bullet down there today.”
He got the gun and handed it to me by the muzzle. “How do you account for the fact that his gun was fired?” he said. Like most people he was enjoying being part of a murder investigation.
“That's easy,” I said. “Whoever did it took his gun and fired it off somewhere, out the door most likely. Then they wiped it and dropped it back by the body.”
“Have you seen the guns on the other guys?” The obvious question.
“Walker's gun, yes. It was clean. But that doesn't mean he didn't clean it before notifying the chief what he'd found.”
>
George came back in with the coffee. He had hurried so as not to miss anything, and it was slopped into the saucer. I nodded thanks and finished talking to the doctor. “Can you conduct the autopsy, please? Should be straightforward, I'd think. I'll get back to you after I've had my talk with the chief. In the meantime...” I let the sentence hang.
He nodded. “Gotcha. Not a word.”
I walked around George, who was watching us both carefully, struggling to catch up with whatever he had missed. “Thanks for the coffee. Something came up,” I said, and he scowled.
The chief was in his office, fiddling with the following week's duty roster. He looked up and said “Yes? What did the doctor say?”
“He says Ferris's gun was not the one that killed him.”
“What?” He stood up abruptly, scraping his chair back across the floor with the kind of screech that drives parents crazy. “How can he tell?”
“There's a straightforward test they can do, looking for traces of blood or tissue in the muzzle. He didn't find anything.”
“But what would he expect to find?” Harding was white. Shock maybe. Or guilt?
“When a gun fires there's an implosion that replaces the space left behind in the blast of the bullet. If the weapon was close enough to burn the hair when it fired—as happened here—there would be tissue from the wound in the muzzle of the weapon used. Ferris's gun has nothing in the barrel but powder residue. It did not fire that bullet through his head.”
He sat down again, shaking his head. “If you say so. I've never heard of this technique, test, whatever.” He sat for a few seconds, his hands resting limply on the desk. “Where does that leave us?”
“It means we've got a murder on our hands. The obvious suspect is Walker.”
“Now just a minute.” He lifted both hands in protest.
I lifted my own in return. “I agree, chief. Walker's a good clean guy. He couldn't have done it. But look at the facts. He found the body. He also has a gun similar to the one used to kill the sergeant.”