Tampered

by Ross Pennie

  “Um . . . a bunch of Js and a Y, that’s all.”

  Natasha dipped a towel in the basin of cold water she’d brought from the kitchen and handed it to Joe. He rubbed at the blood on his hands, but it was going to take a lot more than a moist towel to remove all that blood.

  An ambulance wailed in the distance, then roared to the front door. A pair of paramedics surveyed the scene, recorded the vitals, wrapped a pressure dressing over Gloria’s wound, and strapped her to a gurney. They were taking her first because she seemed a lot more distressed than her nephew.

  “I don’t need that friggin’ thing,” Joe told the paramedic approaching him with a cervical collar. “And I’m not going to any hospital.”

  “You’re banged up pretty bad, sir,” said the paramedic. “You might have a neck fracture. And with a gash that deep in your scalp, you could have sustained a concussion or a fractured skull. But don’t worry, they’ll take good care of you at Caledonian.”

  Natasha stepped out of earshot and motioned to Zol and Hamish to do the same. “Joe’s a visitor, not a taxpayer,” she whispered. “He won’t have an Ontario health card. Young guy, over from Portugal for his grandmother’s funeral, probably didn’t bother getting travel health insurance. That’s what he’s worried about.”

  “They’ll treat him anyway,” said Zol.

  “Sure,” said Hamish. “Then send him a big bill. CT scan and all.”

  “He really has no choice,” said Zol. “As the paramedic said . . .”

  Hamish stepped forward and rested his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Look, Joe. Don’t worry about the cost. The hospital won’t force you into the poorhouse. They never come after you if you can’t pay.”

  Joe shot Hamish a look of surprise that suggested the fees had nothing to do with his reluctance to go to the hospital. He shrugged off Hamish’s touch and started to stand up, but fell back onto the chair. At that moment, a second ambulance arrived. The backup team wasted no time in strapping on the cervical collar, maneuvering Joe onto a stretcher, and heaving him into their vehicle.

  As they watched the ambulances departing, sirens blaring, Hamish turned to Zol. “You know, for a guy born and raised in Portugal, he speaks awfully good English.” Hamish pulled off his gloves and tossed them into a wastebasket. “And his accent — you noticed it, eh? Pure Canadian.”

  CHAPTER 14

  About eight that Tuesday evening Zol’s front doorbell chimed and Colleen headed for the door. Max was absorbed in the computer room or he’d have been way ahead of her.

  “You heat the plates,” Colleen told Zol. “And I’ll get Natasha settled in the dining room. You work her so hard, she’ll be as hungry as I am.”

  “Hey,” Zol said. “She works herself hard. I just reap the benefits.”

  By the time he arrived in the dining room with three heaping plates — chipotle spiced chicken wrapped in phyllo dough, vine-ripened tomatoes, and lamb’s lettuce in Colleen’s vinaigrette — the two women were engaged in lively conversation. Natasha’s laptop case sat on the floor beside her.

  “I took you at your word, Natasha,” said Zol. “You said you ate chicken.”

  “At this point, I could eat a whole flock.”

  “You’ve been at it nonstop?” Zol said.

  Natasha looked at her watch. “Since eleven this morning. Got started as soon as the paramedics took Joe and Gloria to the hospital.”

  That made it nine hours at the keyboard, entering Camelot’s food survey data into her laptop. Thirty-some questionnaires, more than twenty fields each.

  “But you’re done?” Zol asked.

  Natasha unfolded her serviette and laid it across her lap. “All set for the analysis. Any news on Joe and Gloria?”

  “Treated and released. Cuts and bruises. How’s Hamish?”

  “Well . . . Do you want the honest truth?”

  “Of course. I always do.”

  “He’s completely exhausted,” Natasha said. “And irritable. And can’t go on much longer without any sleep.”

  “I found a medical student to help him. He starts tonight.” Zol knew it wasn’t only lack of sleep that was troubling Hamish. The poor guy was heartsick about Betty. Every day her state was more precarious. Zol’s blood boiled at the thought of the ministry’s Deep Six nonsense. But damn it, there was no getting around it, no matter what strings Peter Trinnock had tried to pull.

  He turned to Colleen and drew in a long, slow breath. He always felt better after a dose of her nurturing aura. “You’ve had quite a day as well, though so far I’ve only heard the bare bones.”

  Between mouthfuls of salad and chicken, Colleen related how she’d followed Gus again, starting at ten o’clock this morning. He made pickups at the Royal Hamilton Hotel, the Mohawk Golf and Curling Club, and Four Corners Fine Foods.

  “They never have day-old baked goods at Four Corners. Don’t want to ruin their fine-food image,” said Zol. “I bet it was artisanal bread and pastries he picked up there.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Where’d he drop everything off?” Zol asked.

  “He didn’t.”

  “Oh my gosh,” said Natasha, “he brought it all back to the Lodge?”

  “He took a call on his cellphone and the wheels fell off,” Colleen said, then paused and waited for a reaction.

  It took a few seconds, but the penny finally dropped. “Of course,” said Zol. “Gloria and Joe.”

  “He’d already delivered two boxes to the HamNorth Mission on Ferguson Street and a couple of sandwich trays to the women’s shelter. Then that call came and he took off. Roared up the Jolly Cut, hell for leather. Then screeched into Emergency at Caledonian.”

  Colleen chased the last of her meal with a long drink of ice water. She turned to Zol. “Tell me, how well do pastries freeze?”

  “Depends. Creamy delicacies don’t do so well, but pies, cakes, and croissants stay fresh enough if you keep them airtight. Why?”

  “That’s reassuring,” Colleen said. A smirk crept onto her face. “After our friend left the medical centre, he drove straight to the Lodge.” She paused and speared a forkful of lettuce. “With three boxes of Four Corners’ finest. Someday, you’ll see them at Sunday brunch. A little dividend after a hard day’s work.”

  Without a word, Natasha finished her salad and lined her knife and fork in parallel across her plate. Something was bothering her, and it wasn’t just the chunks of chicken she’d left on her plate.

  “Let’s have them, Natasha,” Zol said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Your thoughts. What’s bothering you?”

  “It just bugs me, that’s all.” She tugged at the dark, fly-away curls at the nape of her neck. “Gus is stealing. And this can’t be the first load of recycled baked goods that ended up at the Lodge. Dr. Wakefield first noticed the hard doughnuts six months ago.”

  “To be fair,” said Colleen, “you can’t really blame Gus this time.”

  “But we know this isn’t the first time,” said Natasha. “The other day, you caught him helping himself to a box of Delia’s Donuts and a foil packet of something from the Royal Hamilton Hotel. What if he’s bringing meat or dairy back to the Lodge after lugging it over hell’s half acre in his unrefrigerated van? Maybe he’s even been Dumpster diving at the back of restaurants, like Dr. Wakefield suggested. Who knows what bugs have been having a heyday right under our noses?”

  Zol turned to Colleen. “You didn’t see him hauling stuff out of Dumpsters, did you?”

  “No, no,” Colleen said. “His recycling seems perfectly respectable. In fact, it’s part of a registered charity. I confirmed that this afternoon.”

  “What? You’re kidding,” Zol said.

  “A charity?” Natasha said, her dark eyes wide, ready for the hunt.

  “He works for an organization called Waste Not,” Colleen explained. “Half a day, twice a week. As a registered volunteer driver.”

  “Waste Not?” Zol said. “What the heck’s that?�
�

  “Oh my God,” Natasha said. “They’re on my list. I knew something like this was going to happen.”

  “What list?” Zol asked.

  “Our inspection list. We meet with them twice a year.” Natasha grabbed her paper napkin and started picking it to pieces. “Every time it’s the same thing. We bend the rules for them because they’re a charity and because they threaten to make a huge fuss in the media if we give them a hard time. We back down because we’re afraid of appearing heartless and draconian when we tell them they should use refrigerated trucks.”

  This was all news to Zol and none of it was making any sense. “Whoa,” he said. “Back up a minute. How come I don’t know anything about this?”

  Natasha looked shocked. She sputtered then stopped, too steamed, or too embarrassed, to say any more.

  “It’s a food recycling service, Zol,” Colleen said. “With an executive director and a proper website.” She explained how Waste Not’s team of volunteer drivers ferried leftover food — too good to throw out — from hotels, restaurants, convention centres, and food-processing facilities to organizations around the city catering to the needy.

  Her napkin in tatters on her lap, Natasha found her voice. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Zol. I thought you knew all about them. It’s always bothered me that Waste Not transports perishable food in private, unrefrigerated vehicles. They should know that the world is more complicated than it used to be.”

  The practice was a minefield of potential complications. And it seemed that Camelot was a living example. It was a good bet its residents were getting gastro from the past-their-prime leftovers Gus carted around the city before slipping them through the Lodge’s back door.

  But how to blow the whistle on a man like Gus Oliveira? Volunteers held a sacred place in society. Without irrefutable evidence of wrongdoing, any accusations could be interpreted as an attack on a saint who did nothing worse than help himself to a few discarded doughnuts.

  “Well,” Zol said, “I guess, Colleen, you’ll need to keep tailing Gus, catch him with his hand repeatedly in the cookie jar without an iron-clad explanation. And the rest of us will have to prove that his Waste Not dividends are causing Camelot’s gastro.”

  He stood up and cleared the plates from the table. “Okay, Natasha. Why don’t you fire up your laptop. Maybe those food questionnaires have something to tell us.”

  Two hours later, Zol rubbed his back and heaved himself out of his chair. He paced the sunroom, working the cramps out of his knees. “Oh no, look at the time,” he said. “Max should’ve gone to bed ages ago.”

  “Not to worry,” Colleen said. “He’s all tucked in with the light off.”

  “By himself? He’s never done that before.”

  Colleen patted Zol’s arm and gave it a squeeze. “Goodness — you really were absorbed by the data. I coaxed him into his pyjamas, supervised his teeth, then read him a chapter of Lemony Snicket.”

  Natasha had run her database program fifty different ways. It came up empty every time. Not a single correlation between the gastro episodes at Camelot Lodge and the dietary preferences of its residents. And whether or not residents ate Nick’s lukewarm soup, made of potentially recycled ingredients, had no influence whatsoever on their risk of gastroenteritis.

  “I feel like a fool for stating the obvious,” said Colleen, “but we’re missing something that’s staring us in the face like a herd of zebras on the open savanna.”

  Zol shuffled Natasha’s questionnaires. The residents’ mealtime idiosyncrasies had sparked a chuckle here and there, especially the elaborations scribbled in the margins. One man had eaten vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce for dessert every night for the past four years. Another said he wouldn’t touch soup if it were the last thing on earth. One woman only ate beef if you promised her it came from a cow named Angus. Myrtle and Maude, the puzzle sisters, appealed for brown eggs, brown bread, and brown rice.

  “Are we looking for zebras when we should be just looking for horses?” said Natasha.

  “Well,” Colleen said, “are we correct in assuming the culprit has to be the food?”

  “Fecal-oral transmission is classic for gastro,” Zol said. “It’s the cause of most outbreaks, from salad bars on cruise ships to contaminated raspberries in trendy restaurants.”

  “We checked the dishwasher,” said Natasha. “The water’s hot. The machine cycles properly. I watched the boys loading it — no worries there. The cutlery and dishes must be okay.”

  “And the residents are religious about the cult of the hand sanitizer,” said Zol. “They can’t enter the dining room without bumping into the dispenser.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the food storage at the Lodge,” Natasha added. “The fridges and freezer are working perfectly.”

  “Is it worth looking at the dining-room seating arrangements?” Colleen asked.

  Natasha riffled through the stack of questionnaires and pulled out four sheets. “Well, we could look at these four women. Retired math teachers. They always share a table and eat the same things. They choose the same items at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and play euchre together almost every day. If you ask me, they’re pathologically inseparable.”

  “And?” said Zol.

  “Only two of them have had gastro.” Zol could see an idea flashing into Natasha’s eyes. “And they’ve had it repeatedly. Two or three bouts each.” She clicked at her keyboard, paused for a moment, then clicked again. “This is interesting,” she said, tapping the screen. “Look how many residents have had recurrent gastro. Of those with gastro, ninety percent have had it twice or more, and seventy-three percent have had it three times. One poor person has had it four times.”

  Zol rubbed at the ache in his lower back. The health unit looked at numbers of gastro cases when monitoring outbreaks at institutions; individual names were recorded but did not always figure in the analysis. Looking at each Camelot case as an affected individual might be important. Perhaps there was a subgroup of residents susceptible to the gastro and coming down with it repeatedly.

  Zol returned to his chair and studied the chart Natasha had created on the monitor. “How many residents have come down with gastro in the past two months?”

  Natasha’s fingers danced across the keyboard, and a new table flashed on the screen. “Twenty-one, six of whom have died.”

  “In other words,” said Colleen, peering over Zol’s shoulder, “seventeen of Camelot’s thirty-eight residents have never come down with the gastro.” She gazed at the ceiling, and her fingers punched at an imaginary calculator. “Roughly half the residents seem to be immune to it, while the other half keep getting sick. Do I have that right?”

  Natasha bit her lip. Zol had never seen her caught out before. She dealt more with numbers and risk factors than with patients. But now that the questionnaires had put names to the gastro cases, a pattern was emerging.

  A trumpet blared from Natasha’s handbag. She grabbed the purse from the floor and fumbled with the zipper. The blaring got louder and louder as she pawed madly through the contents.

  Finally, she scooped the phone from the bottom of the bag and flipped it open. The racket ceased. “I told you not to call me tonight, Mummyji. I’m working.” She scrunched her eyes and nodded. “I’m always okay, you should know that by now. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She closed the phone. “I’m sorry, Dr. Zol. She calls every evening at ten-thirty. On the button. If I don’t answer, she sends my dad over to my place. One time, she called the police.” She turned off the phone and held up the blank screen. “My little cousin must have fiddled with this again. He knows I hate those trumpets.”

  Zol smiled and did his best to stifle a yawn. “Sounds like we’ve come up with something to trumpet about, something creating two distinct populations within Camelot Lodge. Now that we know it must be there, we just have to find it.” He covered his yawn with his palm, then added, “But we’ve done enough for one night. If I don’t get to my bed I’m going to drop.�
�� He turned to Colleen and winked. He wasn’t too tired to pay her some special attention.

  CHAPTER 15

  After breakfast on Thursday, and before morning coffee, Art Greenwood drove his scooter out of the elevator and headed for the Mountain Wing’s nursing station. He and Earl had been up all night keying in their new data, and it looked like their efforts had paid off. It was time to tell Dr. Wakefield about it.

  His spirits sagged as he passed that horrible sign on Betty’s door. Stop: Restricted Access, Contact Precautions. It was as though they’d consigned her to a nuclear dumping site, a load of toxic waste. When he’d seen her yesterday, she’d looked sallow and wispy, as though she could dissolve into the bedclothes at any minute.

  She wasn’t the only Belvedere resident who’d been shipped over here to the dark side. One of the four euchre-mad math teachers had been wheeled here yesterday. Phyllis had scored a look at her in the elevator. Dry as a prune, she reported.

  “How’s my Betty?” Art called to Hamish Wakefield across the counter at the nursing station. The young doctor no longer looked like he’d just ridden three days across North Africa on a camel. Maybe he’d had a better night. Perhaps Betty, too.

  Dr. Wakefield shook his head and lowered his eyes. “Just the same, I’m afraid. The antibiotic hasn’t kicked in yet.”

  “But it’s now six days. You said . . .”

  The doctor’s eyes darted evasively, their hallmark confidence nowhere in sight. “I know, I know. But Betty’s colon hasn’t been reading the textbook.”

  “Do you think today she’ll . . .” Art picked at the spatters of dried acrylic dotting his handlebars. Sometimes hope was all you had left, even when you knew in your heart there was no cure. During the final weeks of Jeannie’s breast cancer, they’d hoped for better control of her pain. When cure was impossible, you hoped for peace.

  Art swept his tears with the back of his hand. “At least you’re looking better today, Doctor.”