by Ross Pennie
“Once I give you the go-ahead. And as long as you’re wearing gloves. You brought some, right?”
Tasha held up her duffel bag. “And Tyvek suits.”
“Good,” Bergman said. “We may or may not need them. Depends on what we find.”
Bergman led the way to the front door, buttoning her suit jacket as she went. Immediately behind her, Rodrigues did the same and fluffed his shiny hair with his fingers. Bergman’s dull, nondescript bob looked strictly wash-and-wear. Zol and Tasha followed five steps behind them.
The sergeant rang the doorbell and waited. She was about to ring it a second time when a brown-haired woman appeared at the window beside the doorframe. She shook her head dismissively, dropped the curtain, and turned away. The officers held their badges to the window, and Rodrigues pounded on the door with his fist. The woman returned and this time looked startled. She squinted at the badges, appeared paralyzed with fear, and opened the door only when Rodrigues pounded so hard it threatened to come off its hinges.
“Is this the Khousa residence?” Bergman asked.
“Y . . . yes,” said the woman tentatively. She was slim, medium height, in her thirties, and had gorgeous dark eyes much like Tasha’s. She was wearing a white blouse with black slacks and no hijab.
After identifying herself and her colleague, Sergeant Bergman said, “Are you Mrs. Khousa?”
“Y . . . Yes.”
“Your husband is Hosam?”
The woman grabbed the door frame. “Something has happened to him? I told him —”
“No, ma’am. I just wish to establish your identity. What is your name?”
“I am Hosam’s wife. Leila. Leila Khousa.”
“Is Omar home?”
The woman was taken aback that the officer knew her son’s name. “He . . . he is upstairs.”
“Please ask him to come down. We need to see him.”
Leila’s face turned ashen. “Why? He is just boy. Please, I beg of you. Do not take him away.”
“We need to account for everyone in the house. Other than that, we have no interest in your son. Please, ma’am, there is no reason to be concerned. We just want to have a look inside your house.”
“But why you need to look?”
“Please, ma’am, just call your son.”
The woman turned and shouted something in what sounded like Arabic.
A moment later, a skinny teenaged boy appeared beside her. He had short dark hair, olive skin, and acne on his cheeks. He was about Trav’s height but not as muscular.
“Is there anyone else at home at this time, ma’am?” Bergman asked.
“My husband, he is at work. We have no visitors.”
Bergman explained the search warrant to Leila and told Rodrigues to secure the premises while everyone else waited outside on the steps. Zol watched two angry crows squabbling over a piece of roadkill near the cop car. Were they a mated pair with chicks on the way? Neither was giving ground to the other, so he hoped not.
Moments later, Rodrigues returned — out of breath and his face flushed. “All the rooms are clear, Sarge. But holy Hannah, you won’t believe what’s in that garage.”
Chapter 53
The young officer led Natasha and the others into the kitchen and stopped at a door on the left. On it was a green and white sign displaying the Islamic star-and-crescent and two words written in Arabic script. Below them was their English translation: Prayer Room.
Sergeant Bergman locked the front door behind them as Constable Rodrigues put his hand on the knob of the prayer room door. He flashed his toothy smile at Natasha then said to Zol, “This is what you’ve come to see, Doc. No doubt about it.”
Leila planted her feet and put up her hands. Looking beseechingly at Natasha as if she was a potential ally, she pointed to the sign and said, “Stop. Entry is forbidden. Muslims only. It is our holy place. Non-Muslims must not foul it with their presence.”
Natasha said nothing but watched as Bergman stepped back and threw her colleague a piercing look. “Which is it, Rodrigues? A potential crime scene or a holy place?”
Rodrigues pointed to the sign. “That’s a scam, Sarge. A hoax to keep us out. There’s nothing holy about what’s inside here.”
The sergeant paused, considered what her colleague had said for a moment, then stepped forward. “Okay.” She turned to Leila. “Sorry, ma’am, but this is where we start our search.”
Leila put a hand to her mouth and looked at her son, her face stricken. The young lad stared at the floor and said nothing.
Rodrigues opened the door and stepped aside so the rest of them could go through. Before leading the way, Bergman said, “Remember, nobody touches anything unless I give the okay. And only with gloves on.”
Rodrigues was the last one in and closed the door behind him. It was clear it was going to be Bergman’s job to supervise the searching and Rodrigues’s to prevent Leila and Omar from tampering with anything or fleeing the scene.
It was a single-car garage without a car or a garden tool in sight. The walls were made of bare cinderblock, and patches of oil stained the concrete floor, but the place was otherwise spotless. As Natasha looked around the room, its function was immediately apparent. It was a dentist’s waiting room with chairs for three, a reception area, and a procedure room — all in one. Two mobile room dividers on casters had been pushed to the side. They were probably wheeled in place around the dentist’s chair to give her and the patient a degree of privacy. Along two of the walls ran white, IKEA-style kitchen counters and cupboards. On each end, they were anchored by a deep double sink. It was impossible to tell for sure, but Natasha hoped that one sink was for the dentist to scrub up, the other for handling contaminated equipment. The taps had wing-shaped handles that could be operated by the flick of an elbow, just like in a hospital OR.
Rodrigues led Leila and Omar to the waiting-room chairs and told them to sit put. Bergman pulled a pair of vinyl gloves from her suit jacket pocket and began opening cupboard doors. She looked inside but touched nothing as if wanting a general overview before the search got into full gear.
Before stepping away from the door, Natasha handed Zol a Tyvek suit and a pair of gloves from her duffel bag.
“Good idea,” he said. “I’ll put on a suit before I touch anything biological.”
Tasha’s face darkened. “No, you’ll put it on now, before you take another step. This place could be crawling with parvovirus. If that mosquito gave you Zika, you’re a target for full polio if the parvo gets you. I’m not even sure you should be in here.”
He hung his suit jacket on the door handle then slid one foot into the Tyvek. He paused and lifted his gaze to her belly. “What about you? You’re sure you’re okay with this?”
She swept the room with her hand. “Look at this place. It’s immaculate. Nothing is going to jump out and bite us. If we’re careful, we’ll be fine with gloves and these suits.”
He’d be careful. Damned careful.
They zipped up their suits, and once Tasha had donned her gloves, she asked Sergeant Bergman, “May I look in a few cupboards?”
The sergeant pulled out her smartphone and said, “We’ll do this together. You open the drawers and cupboards one by one while I watch. Let me take photos of each before you touch anything. You know what you’re looking for. I haven’t a clue. If you find something, great. If not, we’ll get the forensics teams in.”
As Natasha opened the first cupboard, she heard Zol asking Leila about her autoclave and how she tested whether it was working properly. She heard them discussing temperatures, test strips, instruments, needles, and drill heads. She left them to it.
It took a good forty-five minutes for Natasha to go through every drawer and cupboard with Dr. Bergman taking photos. Leila may have been practising dentistry illegally, but her operation seemed exemplary. She was a well-organi
zed person who kept everything in its place. It was difficult to imagine that this could be a hotbed of Parvo-W transmission and the epicentre of the city’s polio outbreak. Each time Natasha glanced at Leila and her son riveted to their chairs — Leila crying silently and Omar scowling — a growing horror fermented inside her. Did she and Zol have it completely wrong? Were they tormenting a highly competent woman who was running a much-needed service for the city’s disadvantaged?
After they’d looked at every vial, package, and box in every drawer and cupboard, Sergeant Bergman held up her iPhone for Natasha to see and pointed to a photo. “You didn’t pull all these out and look behind them.”
“Aren’t they just women’s sanitary supplies?” Natasha said. “I guess some of her patients can’t afford to buy —”
“A favoured hiding place,” she said, shaking her head. “Admittedly, it’s usually drugs, guns, or money. But you never know . . .”
“Which cupboard was it?”
They backtracked several cupboards until they found the one in question. “Pull everything out,” Bergman told her.
Once Natasha had placed all the packages on the counter and checked that nothing was hidden behind them, Bergman said, “We’ll do this together.”
“Do what?” Natasha said.
“We examine each package, feel its weight, and check for signs of tampering.”
As Natasha glanced at Leila, the escalating fear in the woman’s eyes suggested that either Zol had found a flaw in her sterilizing procedures or Officer Bergman was onto something.
When Natasha lifted the third box of two-dozen tampons with a Costco label, she could tell it was heavier than the others. “There’s something funny about this one,” she told Bergman. “It’s too heavy.”
“For God’s sake don’t shake it. Just put it down. Slowly.”
Natasha eased the box to the counter and stepped back. The look on Bergman’s face told her she should be scared to death.
“Get out your wand, Rodrigues,” Bergman said. “I need you to check out this pack of so-called tampons.” She turned to Natasha then looked at Zol. “It may be boobytrapped.”
Rodrigues put on a fresh pair of gloves and lifted a slender box from his jacket pocket. Working on the white IKEA countertop on the other side of the room, he opened the box and removed a device that looked like a TV remote. He took a small cellophane packet from the box, ripped it open, removed whatever was inside, and attached it to the end of the device.
With the loaded wand in his hand, and every eye in the room fixed on his movements, Rodrigues approached the jumbo-pack of Costco tampons. With a light and practised touch, he dragged the device back and forth across the top and sides of the suspicious box.
When he’d finished, he pressed a couple of buttons on the device and looked at it closely. “Negative for residues. It’s not going to blow up.”
Telling everyone else to gather on the other side of the door while she opened the box, Bergman stepped toward the counter.
Seconds later, she called, “All clear, you can come back in now.”
When Natasha looked into the wide-open box, she saw it had been opened and resealed with Scotch Tape. The top two rows of tampons had been disturbed, and they were doing a poor job of concealing a row of what appeared to be medicine vials beneath them.
“Told you,” the sergeant said, making no attempt to hide her triumph. She pointed to the shiny blue containers. “What are those?”
Natasha adjusted her gloves, pulled the white sleeves of her Tyvek suit down over her wrists, and lifted out one of six identical 30-ml plastic bottles.
“Zol,” Natasha said. “Take a look at this.”
She glanced at his hands to be sure he still had his gloves on and handed him what was less a vial and more a small plastic bottle with a pull-off top.
He read the label aloud. “Ketamine nasal spray. Extra strength.” He turned to Leila. “Dr. L . . . that’s what they call you, isn’t it? Tell me, what’s this for?”
Positioned on her chair again, stone-faced and red-eyed like one of her patients with a toothache, Leila said nothing.
“Please, Dr. L,” Zol continued, “you’ve been running an incredibly clean operation. And I’m impressed, I truly am. But you hid these away for some reason. We need to know why.”
“My husband, he is not approving.”
Zol held up the bottle. “Why? Is there something wrong with this preparation?”
“It is perfectly good.”
“Then why doesn’t he approve of it?” Natasha said.
Leila waved a dismissive hand. “Hosam is out of date. He is thinking ketamine is powerful anesthetic belonging only in operating theatres. That was true in former times.”
“But not now?” Natasha pressed.
“I am using much smaller doses than the anesthetists. Very safe.”
“Hosam doesn’t know you are using this?” Zol said.
Leila’s face was long and sheepish.
The thing looked like a bottle of over-the-counter, pump-action nasal spray. Natasha used a steroid from a similar bottle every September when her hay fever peaked. “Tell me how you administer it,” Zol said.
Leila tightened her lips and stared at the floor.
Sergeant Bergman held up her car keys and rattled them. “You can tell us here or tell us at the police station,” she said, her tone offering no flexibility. “Your choice.”
Leila’s eyes widened at the sight of the keys. She swept a wayward strand of hair off her cheek and took a long, deep breath as if suppressing a sob. Her eyes filled with tears. “When . . . when patient arrive in a great discomfort, I spray once or twice. Each nostril.”
“What does that do?” Zol asked.
“It remove their pain. Help them relax.”
Natasha thought of what Bhavjeet Singh had told her. He’d mentioned receiving some sort of spray. Perhaps he was vague about the details of the visit not because of his pain but because of the ketamine Leila had administered. As an anesthetic agent, it would dampen the brain as well as a toothache. “So,” she said, “say I arrived in terrible pain from a tooth abscess. Before you froze my mouth and pulled my tooth, you’d spray a couple of shots of this into my nose?”
Leila nodded. “To make your experience less unpleasant.”
“And less memorable?”
“That is possible.”
Omar, who’d been growing increasingly agitated on his chair, had a pained look on his face. He said something to his mother in Arabic.
Leila turned to Sergeant Bergman. “My son, he would like to use the toilet.”
Bergman frowned. “Can’t he hold it?”
Leila shot a questioning glance at her son, and when he shook his head she said, “I do not think so.”
“Okay,” said Bergman. “But he can’t leave the house. And he has to back as soon as he’s done.”
Omar shot out of his chair and was out the door before his mother had finished repeating the sergeant’s instructions in Arabic.
Zol took a closer look at the little spray bottle, then said, “These are designed for multi-use, right? One vial can make several patients comfortable.”
Leila examined her fingernails and pulled at her cuticles.
“What do you do with the nozzle between patients?” Zol asked her. “Plastic doesn’t stand up well to autoclaving.”
Leila gave a heavy sigh. “I wash. According to directions. Hot soapy water.”
Zol was looking paler by the minute. “Where do you get this stuff from? I doubt that it’s licensed for sale in Canada in this form.”
“Alibaba,” Leila said.
“What?” Zol’s mouth was wide open. He never shopped online. Natasha knew he must be imagining the original Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
She touched his arm. “It’s
an Asian online shopping site.”
Officer Bergman pointed to the bottle. “What Dr. Szabo has in his hand is a prescription drug that comes to you directly from overseas?”
Leila nodded.
“And Canada Customs never intercepts it?”
Leila didn’t answer.
Natasha knew how it worked. “They come marked as a gift, don’t they, Leila? Canada Post. One or two bottles at a time?”
Leila’s silence spoke volumes.
“Importing prescription drugs without a license is a serious offence,” Bergman told her. “Ma’am, you could be in major trouble. I suggest you do your best to cooperate with us.”
“Oh, my God,” said Zol, holding up the bottle again and squinting at the tiny letters on the label. His hands shook as he returned it to Natasha. “Look where it’s made.”
She turned the thing around a couple of times before she found what he was talking about. Her heart raced at the sight of it. Her skin burned and tingled beneath the Tyvek suit. In all probability, this not-so-innocuous little bottle was the key to two deadly revivals of epidemic poliomyelitis on opposite sides of the globe: Dr. Khan’s in Lahore and their own here in Hamilton. Dr. L’s ketamine nasal spray, sent to her through the mail by Alibaba, was made by Tru-Meds Pharma in Lahore, Pakistan.
“What?” said Officer Bergman. “Where’s it made and why does it matter?”
Without waiting for an answer, Bergman tensed, turned, and grabbed her holstered handgun with her right hand. With her left, she pointed across the room at the doorway. “Rodrigues, for shit’s sake, what’s that kid got in his hand?”
Chapter 54
Omar did have something in his fist. A syringe. And attached to it was a long, uncapped needle.
The boy stared at Zol, his face filled with revulsion. “I know you. From TV. You father to KB.”
Zol couldn’t take his eyes off Omar’s weapon. A needle that size would blind you if it pierced your eyeball. And what was the boy talking about? “KB? I don’t know what . . . oh . . . you mean from Fortnite?”