She moved toward us and I rose to embrace her gently. “You look lovely. Words fail me.”
“My, there’s a first time for everything.”
I held her chair as she sat and smiled at Mark. The waitress hovered. Louise ordered a white wine and looked around the room. “Almost as nice as Alexa’s.”
“The clientele is not the same caliber.”
When the waitress came back, we were ready to order: the West Coast combination plate for three. The plate featured some exotic varieties of sushi that Louise hadn’t tried yet. Her anticipation was contagious. We avoided talk of the case and murmured platitudes about the weather and traffic. When the waitress brought our food and a bottle of good BC merlot, all talk ceased.
Plates were passed, wasabi was mixed, wine was poured, and chopsticks were deployed. Sensations of bursting seahorse roe were overlaid with the moist oiliness of raw fish. These culinary notes were mixed with the crispness of chives and peppers to perform a veritable symphony of flavors. Another bottle of wine arrived and we continued with the second movement. Flavors sweet and flavors salty stated a theme over the swelling accompaniment of Japanese horseradish. Minor notes of vegetableness harmonized with the tones of rice and seaweed. The third movement overwhelmed us, whimpering to a premature conclusion.
“Ohmigod.” Louise leaned back in her chair. “I’m so full and there’s still lots of food left. I hate to feel like I’m wasting it.”
“Don’t worry. A waste is a terrible thing to mind. Besides, we can get a doggy bag and Mark can take it back to the boat.” I waved the waitress over. “Would you mind bagging the leftovers? And would you bring a coffee with Baileys on the side? Anyone else?”
Mark and Louise acquiesced to my dessert suggestion and soon we were sipping rich black coffee mixed with creamy Baileys. After a moment of reflective silence, Mark spoke up.
“What’s the plan for tomorrow?”
“We need to talk to Bette at the West Van lab. She’ll be able to give us personnel records from 1996, and maybe give us more info on what was going on back then. Plus, I’m hoping she can translate the files off Crowley’s computer, as well as that non-language journal. I think Louise and I should go, but I’d like half an hour alone with her first. She might want to divulge a few things off the record.”
“Danny, in a murder investigation, nothing is really off the record. Still, I trust your judgement. Why don’t you set it up? Tell her I want to interview her at eleven tomorrow morning. No, wait, it’s better if I do it. I don’t want you looking like my secretary. You can precede me by half an hour or so. But remember, we’re getting information from her, not the other way round.”
I nodded. “Mark, what are you up to tomorrow? Are you going back to your place in White Rock?”
“I’ll stay on the boat tonight. There’s nothing in White Rock worth rushing home to.”
He recovered his credit card from the waitress, collected his doggie bag, and walked out alone. I felt a twinge of sadness, and then guilt at how soon it left, and then happiness as I realized why it left.
I looked across the table at Louise and she was looking at me. This state of affairs continued for a while. “C’mon. I’ll walk you back to your palatial taxpayer-subsidized abode.” She collected her coat, and when we were out on the sidewalk, I put my arm around her waist. She leaned into me and we walked very slowly back to the Hotel Georgia. Just outside the entrance, we clung together for awhile, ignoring the suits going in and out.
“I’d really like to come up to your room. It would be way better if we didn’t have to say good-bye all the time.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good enough foundation for a relationship. I think we have to work on the bits in between the good-byes.”
“But if we eliminate the good-byes, technically there won’t be any in-between bits.”
“There will always be good-byes. And hellos. They’re sort of like the brackets around important bits of our life. Without them, things would be all muddled.”
“How do you get time to philosophize in the middle of solving a murder case?
“Time management. You’ve just run out. Kiss me and go away.”
I did, enjoying the former more than the latter. As I walked away, feelings of regret were offset somewhat by the excitement of what the morrow would bring. Here in this city where nobody was born, but so many were born again, was the answer to an eight-year-old mystery. All we had to do was find it.
Sixteen
When I got Bette on the phone the following morning, she sounded glad to hear from me and told me how proud she was of how well I’d run the herring fishery. “You’re a field guy, Danny. You should stay out of offices.” Maybe, but offices were where all the important decisions were made. That should be number four on the list of “Reasons Our Bureaucracy Keeps Screwing Things Up.” Field people should control things in the field. Office people should control the copy machine. I said I’d drop in around ten-thirty and she said fine.
At nine, I was at Police HQ looking forward to seeing Louise. A constable took me back to the meeting room where she and Tommy were conferring. I sat down and looked at the clutter on the table. “Hey, that’s the same doughnut that was here yesterday.”
“It’ll probably be here tomorrow, too, unless you feel really adventurous.”
“Tommy has just finished reviewing all of Crowley’s e-mail. Every name on the list is a real person, no code names, and as far as we can see not one of them is connected to the case.”
“And I talked to Crowley’s sister. His only relative and they were semi-estranged. But, on a positive note, Telus gave us the number that Crowley called right after he found out about your colleague going missing. It’s the main switchboard number of the West Van lab. However, the call was at twelve-thirty in the morning, so there was no receptionist there to take it.”
I perked up when I heard that. “That reinforces my opinion that the lab is tied into all this. I’m sure there are answers to be found there. We need to know if someone took that call or if it was recorded on voicemail.”
“I can do that when I meet Bette Connelly at eleven,” Louise said. “I’m going to be the bad cop after Danny plays the good cop. Danny, how do you want to handle it? Are you going to tell her you’re assisting us with our inquiries, or shall we pretend we don’t know each other?”
I thought that over. “I’m not very good at playing games. I’ll tell her we’ve been working together since we met at Crowley’s float house. The truth is always easier to remember. Should I stick around when you talk to her?”
It was Louise’s turn to think. She looked at Tommy for support. “I think you should. She could bullshit me about DFO internal matters but she can’t bullshit you. And you probably have a better handle on the key information gaps.”
I felt a twinge of unease at this glimpse of the cop Louise. Her default position obviously was that all civilians were not to be trusted. Tommy had the same view.
“Bette is potentially a very valuable resource,” I pointed out. “You need to convince yourselves that we can trust her. What do we know that would provide a litmus test for her?”
“One of the few concrete facts we have is the call that Crowley placed to the lab. I’ll ask her about incoming calls on the morning of April 9. If she doesn’t respond straight up on that, we’ll know we can’t trust her. If she does respond straight up, we can maybe trust her.”
My unease deepened. They were talking about a person I knew and liked and had faith in, a person who had done nothing that would make her suspect. Yet suspect she was, until she proved herself reliable. A cop’s world was a strange and scary place. I took a deep breath. “All right, I’m going to head over there. My first question, or request, is going to be the personnel records from 1996. I want to know who was working there then who might have been involved in Project Chimera. Second question, what else can you tell us about the lab’s projects during that period? If you guys feel comfortable about
her after that, and after Louise talks to her, we’ll get into decoding the journal and the computer files. And there’s no reason why you should feel uncomfortable about her. She’s a good person.” I took the very stale doughnut and nibbled a crumb. “I hate to take the last one. Any chance of fresh ones this month?”
“Next Monday is budget day. We’ll know then if we can afford doughnuts and coffee for the troops. In the meantime, we like to keep our guests happy. Fill your boots.”
“I would but I don’t want to lacerate my feet. I did my penance in Ottawa.” I threw the doughnut in the tin waste bucket and it rang like a solid Little League hit. “Will you guys lend me a cop car or do I have to call a taxi?”
Thirty seconds later, I was in the reception area waiting for a cab that Louise had been kind enough to call for me. Twenty minutes later, I was being chauffeured through the incongruous rain-forest-in-a-city that is Stanley Park. And then I was passing over the incongruous ribbon-above-the-ocean that is the Lions Gate Bridge. The passage over a quarter-mile-long bridge suspended by a couple of cables is impressive: Strait of Georgia to the west, the skyscrapers of Vancouver to the east, and churning ocean directly beneath. The bridge is one of man’s supreme accomplishments, and yet it barely merits mention with one of God’s trivialities: the narrow strait that it spans.
When the cab dropped me at the West Vancouver lab, I stood for a moment and looked around. This place, this building, and its surroundings, were the scene, I was convinced, of a murder that had led to two other murders. And the first of those killings had taken away a friend of mine, sucked him into oblivion, and left only pain as a marker of his life.
I circled the building, noting the dock at the rear and two outbuildings that were not sufficient to contain decades’ worth of project gear—floats, tanks, ropes, anchors, and assorted aluminum assemblages. When I returned to the front of the building, I looked up at the imposing edifice, symbol of knowledgeable authority and commitment to responsible management. I felt sad we’d never lived up to that, angry at the idiots who had prevented it, and a bit scared that some of those idiots might be feeling threatened. A cornered idiot was at least as dangerous as a cornered weasel. And what if they weren’t idiots?
When I walked into Bette’s office on the second floor, she rose from her desk to hug me. “Wow, you’re all tanned and healthy-looking. Office people always look so pale and sick compared to field people. I’m jealous.”
I held her at arm’s length and gave her an exaggerated up-and-down. “You look okay to me, kiddo.”
“Why thank you, Danny. Flattery is a girl’s best friend. Or a guy’s. I forget.”
Bette didn’t do coquettishness very well and I couldn’t flirt sober, so I went for the direct approach.
“The last time we talked, I asked you some pretty general questions about possibly illegal research that was going on here in the 1980s. Since then, I’ve come across information that indicates a friend of mine was killed because of that dodgy research. Two more people, one of whom was Alistair Crowley, were killed to cover up that initial murder. This is beyond supposition. It’s now a police investigation. We, that is the police and I, need to know as much as possible about what was going on here back then. The fact that you are now operations manager should facilitate that. We hope.”
Bette would feel some pressure to protect the department, but I hoped her considerable bureaucratic intelligence would align with her basic morality and tell her to cooperate with us unreservedly.
“Jesus, Danny. Thanks for complicating my new job. Murder? Here? We do science here. We don’t kill people. But you know that. Our whole rationale is about discovering the truth, and I won’t be part of any cover-up.”
“I knew you’d say that. Complication. Some higher level people might be involved, people like Fleming Griffith. At this point it’s better if they don’t know about the investigation. That puts pressure on you, but you’re protected if you can say you were dealing with a simple police investigation. So forget the background I gave you.”
She stared straight ahead as she computed the ramifications of this. “I can play dumb for awhile, but I didn’t get this job by being dumb and people know that. At some point, I’m going to have to take responsibility for the fallout, even if it’s fallout from ancient history. Good management practitioners are supposed to contain bad news. Or at least put the right spin on it.”
Good management practitioners? Contain? Spin? Bette was speaking a language I hadn’t heard her use before. It was a language, to be fair, that was commensurate with her new position. But did it signal a fundamental change in her thinking? I tried to reassure her.
“I’ll do everything I can to spin it as ‘valiant DFO staff do everything they can to help solve old mystery.’” I told her. “Beleaguered heroes don’t get fired.”
“I didn’t sign up to be a beleaguered hero,” she said, “but you play the cards you’re dealt, I guess.”
I got specific. “Okay, the first thing I need is the personnel files for 1996. Somebody was here working with Crowley and that somebody is a murderer. Oh yeah, and that person is probably still working here, so we need your current staff list as well.”
Bette picked up her phone and dialed a four-digit number I took to be an internal extension. “Hi Bernice, it’s Bette. We’ve got a pain-in-the-ass query from Revenue Canada. Something about pension deductions from staff. Can you dig up our payroll files from 1996 to now?”
“Wow, that’s good cover,” I said after she’d hung up. “I’m raising both eyebrows in admiration. When did you learn to obfuscate so effectively?”
“An abundance of career models.”
“So, here’s the big question. What research was being conducted here in the eighties, and up to ’96? You told me a little bit about Project Chimera, and how you were asked to delete a bunch of those files. Can you add anything to that? You must have looked at some of those files. Did you see anything that in today’s world would be a career wrecker?”
“God, let me think. There was lots of growth data on various salmon species under differing treatment regimes. I saw a couple of project proposals for transgenic work on salmonids, but nothing to indicate those projects were approved and carried out.”
“Who wrote those proposals?”
“Alistair Crowley, definitely. He was the senior scientist. I can’t remember anyone else.”
“Fleming Griffith?”
“Not that I remember.”
“But you would remember if you had seen Fleming’s name? He’s not exactly an unknown.”
“You’re right. If I’d seen his name, it would have stood out.”
“Any names of other people working on Project Chimera?”
“No.”
“Project description? Budget? Reports?”
“I remember a memo from Crowley asking for more money. They’d gone way over budget on supplies from some company, like triple. I’ll try to remember the company’s name.”
At five minutes before eleven Bette’s phone rang and she answered.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll come down and get her.”
I knew Louise had arrived.
Bette stood up to leave and then paused a minute. “Whose side are you on here, Danny?”
“The side of trying to find a murderer. You’re on the same side.” She left me alone to stare out the window at the gently rolling waters of Burrard Inlet. I could see a few shrimpers heading out to the Strait of Georgia, their single poles cocked forward like jouster’s lances. I wondered if one of them was Cousin Ollie on the Ryu II.
Bette led Louise into the room and I stood and imagined embracing her. We all sat and the two unpolice deferred to la policerina.
“Thanks for taking the time to see me,” Louise began. “I know you’ve just taken over this position and I understand how busy you must be.” She paused, but Bette only nodded in acquiescence. “I assume Mr. Swanson has given you the background, and you must appreciate th
e seriousness of the situation. We’re going to solve this crime and nothing can be allowed to interfere with the investigation. Having said that, we will make an effort to avoid, for lack of a better word, collateral damage.” She crossed her legs and waited.
Bette didn’t rush her reply. She leaned forward, elbows on her desk, and rested her chin on her interlaced fingers. “I would obviously prefer that this investigation wasn’t happening, at least not now. But I’m not going to snivel in the face of reality. You will have our full cooperation, and let the chips fall, hopefully, not into the delicate machinery of my worn and damaged department.”
I felt like a spectator as two skilled heavyweights jabbed and circled.
Louise smiled. “That’s very encouraging. Mr. Swanson assured me you’d be helpful, but I needed to hear it from you.” Hook to the ribs.
“At DFO, we like to think our work is important. But we realize other agencies have other priorities.” Right uppercut.
“Justifiable priorities . . .” I had to interrupt before bureaucratic blood was spilled.
“There’s a key question we need help with.” I waited for Louise to jump in. She didn’t so much as flex her knees. “Early on the morning of April 9, Alistair Crowley placed a call to the main switchboard here. We need to know if someone took that call, or if it was routed to voicemail or an extension number.”
“I’ll find out and let you know ASAP.”
“It would be preferable,” Louise said, “from the evidential point of view, if you told us who to talk to and we made the enquiries.”
“Of course. Our main desk receptionist’s name is, uh, Tina, no . . . Tanya Something-ova. Tanya Serenkova. I’ll tell her you want to talk to her. Please don’t tell her more than you need to. But of course you won’t.” She stood a fraction before Louise did and extended her hand.
The River Killers Page 17