They buy it and draw their guns. The female officer keys her radio and calls for backup. They stand at the back corners of the Chrysler and the male officer shouts, “Get out of the car now with your hands in sight.”
They are completely focused on the occupants of the car as I fade back onto the sidewalk, out of their line of sight, praying that neither of them turns round.
I turn and stroll towards Carrall Street.
If he doesn’t already know it, the Schwarzenegger clone with the brass knuckles and military knife is about to learn that they are listed as prohibited weapons, and possession of such is an indictable offence under the Criminal Code of Canada.
Hasta la vista, baby.
41
Arnold
I have the information he wants. The least he could do is give me his attention now, but he is talking on his mobile. So typical of his generation. He catches my eye and saunters over. He nods at me as he sits down and mouths, “On hold.” As if I care.
We wait.
Then, “Hey Steve,” he says into the phone. Steve? That’s the name of his old VPD colleague, I think. “When I ran into you on Saturday, you said that you were meeting with someone in Human Resources first thing this morning. Did you get a chance to?”
What could that be about?
After a brief reply from the other party, he says, “So… is there any hope?” He is grinding his teeth. So that’s it. He wants back into the Department. I doubt there is any chance of that. Unless… Hmm. Hold that thought.
“Sure…” His voice has taken on an uncertain tone. After a small delay, he adds, “Sure, I could come over there in an hour… No, I’m meeting with someone right now. I’ll be there around ten, OK?… Yeah. Ten, ten fifteen latest.”
He closes the phone, a puzzled look on his face.
Finally he has the courtesy to address me.
“Hi Arnold. Sorry about that.”
I nod.
“How is Mr. Wallace?” he asks. The question surprises me but I am pleased that he asks it before we get down to business.
“No better. He is in a lot of pain but, except at night, he is refusing the morphine. He says that he needs to keep awake and alert. He is waiting to hear from you that you have found Kevin’s murderer.” I wonder for the thousandth time how I will cope with the death of that wonderful man.
He nods sadly and takes a sip of the coffee I purchased for him. More to cover his feelings, I suppose. “Arnold, thanks for getting the new digs so quickly for me. They’re great and it’s good being a bit removed from the downtown east side. I feel a lot safer there.”
I nod again.
“So were you able to get the information?” he asks. A big part of me wants to tell him no… oh, so very much. Even though Mr. Wallace was adamant, maybe it’s time for me to make my own decision. I think about it.
“Yes, actually I was.” I cannot break the habit of loyalty. I reach down, slide the paper out of my briefcase and hand it to him. “As you know, right after Mr. Kevin’s death, the value of QX4 shares dropped by sixty percent. Well, I analyzed the trading patterns of the shares after that drop. I noticed that every two days or so a fairly substantial purchase was made. None were enormous but in total the purchases over the last two weeks have amounted to twenty million shares; that’s ten percent of the company.”
“Who bought them,” he asks. There is a light in his eyes, the look of the hunter.
“Obviously, I too was interested in that. Most of the trades were made by a small brokerage firm in Toronto.”
“Is there any way to find out who the buyer was, Arnold?”
I am enjoying this. “No. The shares are held in the name of the brokerage. There’s no way to know who the buyer is…” I pause for three seconds and watch the frustration write itself all over his face. He turns away and gazes out of the window, teeth grinding again. “…normally.”
When it hits, his head snaps back.
“It just so happens that an old army chum of mine is a partner there. He owes me. After a bit of persuasion, blackmail if truth be told, I got him to tell me who was buying all those shares. He told me that it was a company based in the Cayman Islands. The trades were all initiated by the company’s Cayman lawyer.”
He knows what that means. His face drops; I find it quite comical. “So you don’t know who the actual buyer was.” He purses his lips and exhales a silent fricative expletive.
I suppress the desire to keep him hanging. “Please, Mr. Rogan, give me more credit than that. Mr. Wallace is very well connected, even in the Caymans. He made a couple of phone calls and within an hour he knew who was the behind the company. Would you care to guess, Mr. Rogan, who made those buys of QX4 stock?”
“George Walsh?” His face has lit up.
“Yes.” I smile. A rare event which I enjoy… occasionally.
“So what Walsh is doing,” he says, “is buying QX4 shares while they are cheap, so that he will make an even bigger profit when they go up again at some point in the future.”
I see the return of the hunter and trump his comment. “Quite so. However, Walsh is not going to make a big profit at ‘some point in the future’. That future is now.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“After the Toronto Stock Exchange closed on Friday, QX4 put out a press release saying that they had received Federal Government approval to move on to human trials of their drug. At six A.M. Pacific time this morning, when the Exchange opened, the market reacted to this news by buying QX4 shares heavily.”
I take out my Blackberry; now he can wait for me. I check e-Trade and it is as I thought.
“The last trade of QX4 shares brought the price to within five cents of the price they were before Mr. Kevin’s death. By the end of trading today, the twenty million shares that Walsh purchased piecemeal over the last three weeks will have almost doubled in value. He’ll make back all of his losses and an additional profit of some three million dollars.”
I can almost see the cogs and wheels turning in that clever head. What a waste. He had so much potential before he started taking that filthy muck.
“You realize what this means?” he says. “George killed Kevin to drive the price of the stock down, so that he could buy more stock at fire sale prices and make a big profit when it went up.”
Not quite.
“That doesn’t fly,” I tell him.
“Why?” There is annoyance in his tone.
“Killing Mr. Kevin could have killed the company. His death could have ruined their chances of ever getting government approval and without approval for the human trials, the shares would never have recovered. I checked if there were any sales of shares before his death. That would be more incriminating: Walsh sells shares at a high price before Mr. Kevin dies and then buys them back at less than half price after his death. Unfortunately, although there were some sales of shares in the two weeks prior to his death, the amounts were insignificant. All Walsh did was take advantage of the fact that the shares had slumped by buying more shares cheaply. Insider trading, perhaps, but not proof of murder.”
He stares across the coffee-shop, eyes focused in the far distance, his front teeth pushing down on his bottom lip. He’s getting there.
Finally he speaks. “OK, here’s a couple of thoughts. First, if it had become public knowledge that Kevin was conducting unapproved and illegal testing on humans which resulted in the deaths of fifty percent of the subjects, then that would have ruined QX4 permanently. The government would have been all over them, they would never have got any more government approvals and there would have been lawsuits by the relatives of the victims. There would have been no recovery from that. All the investors would have lost everything.”
“True.” He is getting it.
“However, if Kevin dies, commits suicide, the shares take a big dive but they can recover. So, if Walsh knew about Kevin’s testing, it would be better for him to kill Kevin than risk it becoming public knowledge.”
>
“Yes.” I nod my approval. “From Walsh’s point of view killing him is the lesser of two evils. You said you had a couple of thoughts, Mr. Rogan. What was the other one?” I wonder if he can make the next step.
“Over the last three weeks Walsh bought twenty million shares of the company and then, guess what, the company announce that they have got approval for the human trials and the shares bounce back to what they were before Kevin’s death. That’s just a little too convenient for my taste. What if Walsh already knew about the government approval before Kevin’s death? He could have killed Kevin, knowing that it would make the shares crash temporarily but also knowing that he could buy a bunch of cheap shares through a company in the Caymans and then announce the good news about the approvals.”
I cannot hide my surprise. I hadn’t thought of that angle and it is an interesting one, to say the very least.
“Let me see what I can find out.” I tell him.
Instead of gratitude, he has a shocked look. His face pales. “Oh my God,” he whispers.
“What?” I ask.
He is shaking his head. “What if they feel compelled to start human tests. They could trigger a whole new round of deaths.”
He’s right. Well, I can do something about that and I tell him how.
He looks much relieved. “Thank you, Arnold. And please thank Mr. Wallace for me. Tell him I will come and see him soon.” He gestures to the paper on the table with the details of the share transactions. “May I keep this, please?”
“Of course,” I say. He folds over the paper and puts it in his jacket pocket.
Now to use my newly acquired knowledge. “You know my own feelings about Mr. Kevin’s death,” I say. He nods, a look of caution on his face. “Well, Mr. Wallace does not accept that he killed himself and is adamant that you continue your investigations. If you are successful, he said he may just be able to apply his influence with the Mayor and the Chief of Police to smooth the way back in.”
His look of amazement quickly transforms into one of gratitude. Before he can speak, I say, “Would you also call me and update me on any developments. I want to keep Mr. Wallace up to date.”
“I will, I promise.”
The inducement of that last little white lie cemented it. He is now firmly moving in the direction we want him to go.
42
Cal
Intuition is a funny thing. It is hard to tell what is an intuitive leap of faith and what is just a lousy guess. On the way here, my instincts were screaming at me not to meet Steve at the Main Street police station. I cannot decide if this is the result of intuition or whether being there is just too painful a memory, reminding me of the career that I loved and lost. Either way, Steve was not happy when I called him to change the venue for our meeting.
I walk into the Bean Around the World on Powell Street. It’s my favourite coffee place in the entire city. So much better than the fancy place where I just left Arnold. Steve is already there, at a table, sitting with his back to the wall, talking on his cell. I get a medium-sized dark coffee from Stu, the owner, and nod to Bob, the manager of the Lion Hotel, eying me warily.
I go join my ex-colleague. He looks very uncomfortable as he closes his phone.
“So Steve, what’s up?”
I can tell from his face he doesn’t know which way to approach what he wants to say. My heart sinks. I know he has talked to VPD’s Human Resources Department about the possibility of my reentering the force, if I can clean up and get straight. Clearly he is not the bearer of good news. As much as I don’t want to hear the verdict, I decide to make it easy for him.
“They said ‘no’, I guess.”
He looks confused for a moment and then realizes what I mean.
“Cal, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s something else.” Alarm bells go off. When we talked on the phone he said it was exactly what he wanted to talk to me about. He takes a deep breath and continues. “I shouldn’t be telling you this sitting here but, hell, we worked together for a lot of good years and I owe you the truth.” He hesitates again. “We’ve been doing some digging and we discovered that your buddy Kevin had reached the end of his rope supporting you. He was planning to stop enabling you and cut you off from using his place to clean up every Saturday morning.”
I do not deny it. I have seen too many guilty men get in deeper by protesting too much, so I try another tack. “I thought you guys were treating Kevin’s death as a suicide. Why would you be asking about my relationship with Kevin?”
“I told you that Stammo sent your jacket off for DNA testing—”
“Yeah and I told you that it was Roy’s blood.”
“There was blood from two different sources. One from an unknown male, which I assume was Roy’s,” he pauses, undecided about something, then the moment passes and he continues. “Anyway, the other exemplar, which was newer and on top of the first, was a hand sized smear of Kevin’s blood.”
I can feel the blood drain from my face. What is Steve saying? It is just not possible. How could Kevin’s blood be on my jacket? There has got to be a mistake. I look at Steve and know for a certainty that there is no mistake and I can see in his eyes that he may be judging my reaction as one of guilt.
“Cal, I’m telling you this as a courtesy because I know you and I can’t imagine that you killed your best friend. But Stammo is all over this like maggots on a week old corpse. I want you to do the right thing here. Let’s drink our coffee, walk over to 312 Main and have a chat about it. Let’s sort it out together.”
I rein in the thousand thoughts that are chasing through my head. They all come down to one choice. I can go with Steve, call some Legal Aid lawyer and fight this charge through the system, while detoxing in a cell, or I can make a run for it and somehow prove that George is the murderer, not me.
As I procrastinate, I look out the window and see a black Ford, a Crown Victoria. Stammo is getting out of the passenger side and the shit-eating grin on his face makes my decision for me.
As I stand up, I say, “I really am sorry Steve,” and push the table into his lap, spilling coffee all over him. I spin around, dash between the counter and the back wall of the shop and run down the thirty foot hallway that leads to the back alley. Yet another alley beckoning me. I am praying that Steve expected me to come quietly and has not stationed a couple of uniforms out back.
That prayer goes unanswered.
As I barrel into the crash bar and open the back door, it bangs hard against someone and I hear a yelp of pain. On my left I see a surprised Sarge, no more than four feet away, and on my right lies the crumpled body of the kid, not unconscious but still disoriented from his encounter with the door. Serves him right for standing too close. Sarge makes a grab for me but I dash to my right, too fast for him.
I burst out of the alley and turn north on to Gore Street. I shouldn’t be running like this. I know I’m innocent and I still have faith that our legal system would exonerate me. But I also know it is the Beast inside that keeps me running. I can’t face the agony of going cold turkey in a jail cell so I’m running again, from the gang, from the police and from myself.
I have one chance and even that is a risky one. A block and a half away, at the end of the road, is a fence that surrounds the railway yards and the docks. If I can just make it over that fence. I have a chance. Then I remember one of my first days on the job: the mutilated body, the dismembered legs lying on the railway tracks, the horrified train driver and the blood, so much blood.
Halfway down the block, I check over my shoulder. Sarge is chasing me and talking into his radio. He is too out of shape to have any hope of catching me. As I dart across Alexander Street, another back check reveals that Stammo is rounding the corner from Powell, a full block behind me. I’ve got a fighting chance here.
“Stop, Rogan. Stop right now.” Stammo shouts. I thank heavens this is not the United States. In Canada, cops are very unwilling to draw weapons unless there is immine
nt danger to someone, especially when there are civilians on the streets. But will Stammo make an exception in my case? My back muscles tense awaiting the thwack of a 40mm round.
As I approach the fence, I risk another quick look back. Stammo has passed Sarge but has not even reached Alexander. In contravention of department rules, the stupid bastard has drawn his gun and is running with it. He’s too far away for an accurate shot, even for him, and I am grateful that he is a smoker.
But Steve is not far behind him and Steve can run. If he catches me, am I prepared to fight it out with him? And I know the answer: it’s not up to me. The Beast will do anything to avoid being caged, screaming in pain in a cell. I dread having to find out how far I might go if Steve catches me. As I jump and scramble up the fence, I hear the sound of an approaching train. I vault over the top and land in an off balance crouch. My right ankle twists under me and a jolt of pain sears up my leg as I stumble and fall on the track closest to the fence, the most used one. Panicked, I roll away from the fence and off the track. Maybe the train I can hear will shield me from my pursuers. No such luck.
On the next track is a stationery train. Cursing, I crawl under a freight car loaded with containers, imagining what would happen if the train starts. The wheels will slice my limbs like a sharp knife through a ripe tomato.
I leap to my feet yelling out at the pain in my right ankle. There are five empty tracks and on the sixth track is a freight train moving west, towards the downtown shunting yard. It has slowed to about fifteen miles per hour. It’s my ticket out of here.
I step forward and hear the shriek of a train whistle.
Just in time I see the freight train lumbering eastward and it’s right on top of me. Heart hammering, I shrink back as two hundred tons of engine pass only inches in front of my face. My ankle collapses and I trip and fall backwards into the freight car I just crawled under.
Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 1, 2 & 3 (Box Set) Page 23