by R. E. Donald
He started the clothes dryer, fetched a can of Coke from the fridge, and returned to his desk, resolutely picking up the telephone receiver and dialling the number of his ex-wife's home in Burnaby. Christine answered.
"Hi," he said.
"Well, hello! Haven't heard from you for a while. How are you?" His ex-wife sounded genuinely happy to hear from him, and for some reason it pleased him that she was still so quick to recognize his voice.
"Great," he said. "Busy, though. Just got back from a trip to Winnipeg. How about you?"
"Just fine. I've been real busy at work, too. The market's pretty active, so the firm always seems to have more work than it can handle comfortably. They don't want to hire anybody new, though, 'cause they figure it's only a matter of time until things slow down again. That's the way real estate is, I guess. You looking for Jan and Lesley?"
"Well, if they're not too busy ... "
"Hunter, you know they're never too busy to talk to you! Except ...," her voice was sheepish, "they're not home. They went to a movie. Sorry." She paused. "Should I have them call you when they get home?"
"No, that's all right. Uh, maybe tell them I'll try again tomorrow, or maybe Tuesday. It's not important. Just wanted to say hello."
"They'll be sorry they missed you, you know," she said gently.
"Yeah. Sure. Tell them I'm sorry I missed them, too. Good night, Chris."
He let the receiver drop gently into its cradle, then sighed and walked over to the glass doors. He laid his forearm horizontally against the door, the glass smooth and cool through his thin sleeve, and leaned his forehead against it to diminish the reflected glare from the lights in the room behind him. The greens were turning grey and black as the twilight deepened. Stupid, he said to himself. He was planning to visit his old detachment in Burnaby tomorrow morning to see if he could get some background on Chuck Wahl. Maybe if he'd asked the girls to call back, he could have set up lunch, or coffee even. Of course, it was Monday. They'd be working, so they probably wouldn't have time anyway.
Gord had been telling him to try harder. Easy for him to say. Hunter didn't want to make a nuisance of himself. He didn't want his daughters having to make up excuses for not having time to see him. That's just the way life was. Hadn't Suzanne said so? Didn't she say that at that age she didn't have time for her parents? Young women just had better things to do.
El burst through the door from the warehouse and got to her phone just in time to hear a macho curse and a click on the other end. "Jesus!" she muttered. "They know I'm busy on Monday morning. Why can't they let it ring a couple more times?"
She started sorting through the notes on the desktop, making sure that she had all of the pickups covered. There was one she hadn't dispatched yet, a load from North Vancouver to Kamloops, and she held it at arms length, debating how to approach it. None of her regular drivers was going to be free in time to make the pickup, but she was pretty sure that Pete Whitehead was in the area and would most likely be available. Suzanne had asked her not to dispatch Ranverdan trucks directly now that she was back in the office full time, but with Pete being the prima donna that he was, wouldn't Suzanne just have to check with him before she could assign it anyway?
El made a face. No, whether it made sense or not, she had to either talk to Suzanne in order to dispatch Pete, or else find another driver. One way or another, she was going to have to do it soon. She pushed Ranverdan's speed dial number.
"You have reached the office of Ranverdan Transport. There's no one available to take your call at the moment, but if you'll leave your number, we'll get back to you as soon as possible. If it's an emergency, please call El Watson at 526-9393. Please leave your message after the tone." Suzanne had obviously decided on a compromise between forwarding her phone lines to Watson Transportation when she was out of the office, and cutting El out of the picture completely.
"Well, well. This looks like an emergency!" she chortled, and plunked down the receiver. She wondered if Suzanne or Gary had mentioned Gary's brake problem to any of the other drivers. In spite of what Hunter said, it seemed only right that they should know.
El looked up Pete Whitehead's pager number, and made the call.
CHAPTER 16
– – – – SIXTEEN
Hunter turned off the Pontiac's engine and waited for a moment, looking with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation towards the building that housed the Burnaby R.C.M.P. detachment, before he pulled out the key and stepped out of the car. Entering the front doors was like walking into a distorted replay of old memories. In the three years or so since he'd left the force, a lot had changed. The face at the front counter was unfamiliar but not unfriendly, there was a new layout and more computers in the office behind the window. A couple of young constables on their way out brushed past him as he turned away from the counter. He thought he recognized one of them, although no name came to mind, but the young man walked by without meeting Hunter's eyes. He wasn't one of them any more, but he still felt a tug of belonging, a tug of wanting to belong. Corporal Al Kowalski, dressed in civies, ushered him inside his office before clapping him on the shoulder and shaking his hand.
"Great to see you again! How's the trucking business going?"
"It's going," replied Hunter. They swapped the usual pleasantries: the obligatory how's the family exchange, what mutual friends were doing, how age was catching up to them all.
Al had always been tall and lean, but he admitted to wrestling with a spare tire and being warned by his doctor to watch his cholesterol. He slapped his belly, then ran a hand back from his forehead, drawing attention to the receding border of his dark hair. "Looks like being a civilian agrees with you," he said. "You're looking pretty fit, a few more gray hairs maybe." He pointed to his own temples. "But you're not here just to show off your youthful figure, are you?"
Hunter smiled. "No. I'm hoping, Al, that you'll do me a favor. I'm trying to dig up some background information on a trucker we suspect of a little hanky panky. Any chance you could run his name through Ceepik for me?" The Canadian Police Information Computer files was the logical place to start any criminal investigation.
Al winced. "Shit, Hunter. You know I can't do that for a civilian."
"Al," said Hunter, "we've been friends long enough for you to know that no one – and I mean, no one – will even know I have the information, let alone where I got it from. I'm looking for leads, and Ceepik is the logical place to start. Whatever you tell me will go in here," he tapped his forehead, "and never come out."
Al pressed his lips together, eyes closed, and then nodded abruptly. "Okay," he said. "What do you need?"
"The guy's name is Chuck Wahl – W A H L – probably Charles, but I don't know for certain. I know he's done time, but I'd like a few details."
Al typed something into the computer, then scratched his ear, frowning, as he waited for the response. "Rings a bell with me, you know." He scrolled through the screen, then tapped a key that set the printer behind his desk into motion. When the printer had finished, he pulled out the sheets and took a closer look.
"I was on this one," he said.
He gave Hunter a run down on the case. Wahl's conviction for theft took place when he was working as a driver for Transcan Express back in 1981. There had been several Transcan employees under suspicion at the time, but Chuck Wahl was the only one the police could catch red handed. The others, primarily two warehouse workers, had been lucky enough to avoid prosecution. The R.C.M.P. were able to determine that the scheme involved employees in both Toronto and Vancouver. It appeared that the Toronto group was responsible for misrouting freight, invariably high value consumer electronics items, to the wrong destination.
"A half dozen T.V.'s, for example, being shipped from a distribution warehouse in Toronto would, uh, inadvertently be loaded on a trailer bound for Vancouver instead of, say, for Winnipeg. The suspects, who were part of the warehouse crew unloading the trailer in Vancouver, wouldn't record the cartons as b
eing received, but would quietly load them onto an empty – quote unquote – trailer, which was destined for the storage yard. Later that night, one of the group would retrieve the T.V.'s and deliver them to the group's retail man, who had probably lined up buyers before the shipment had even arrived.
"Meanwhile, Transcan in Winnipeg would have reported the freight short off the trailer and started a trace with Toronto. If the warehouse manager in Vancouver happened to be alerted in time, he might supervise the unloading of the Toronto load to see if the extra cartons had arrived in Vancouver by mistake. When that happened, the cartons were routinely reported as extra and shipped back to Winnipeg. It was highly suspicious that none of the missing cartons ever turned up when the unloading wasn't directly supervised, but, at the time, nobody could prove anything," said Al.
He speculated that Chuck Wahl's main role, as the long haul driver, had been to recruit the accomplices in Toronto and to hand deliver their cut to them when an operation had been successful. The local group seemed to share the most hazardous part of the job, which was retrieving the goods from the "empty" trailer in the wee small hours of the morning and transporting them off the property. The night the R.C.M.P. made the collar, Chuck had the misfortune of doing the dirty work. He very nobly wouldn't implicate his accomplices.
"Hmmph! An honorable man," said Hunter. "What happened to the other guys? I'd have thought we'd have set up a sting."
"After we arrested Wahl, the manager at Transcan strongly recommended to each of the other suspects that they find work elsewhere. We'd suggested to him that he leave the suspects in place and we would look at planting an operative, but his main concern was that the company's theft problem disappear as soon as possible. So he told them that they were about to be supervised so closely, they couldn't scratch their asses without him knowing about it. Appears they both hated that idea, so they moved on."
"Where'd they move to? You ever run across them again?"
Al shook his head. "Can't help you there, Hunter. But, for what it's worth, I can give you their names and particulars."
"Shoot."
"The guy with all the experience was Robert Louis Grant, Caucasian male, six foot one and a hundred and ninety pounds, born 1942. That'd make him sixty two. If he's smart, he's retired to Arizona. The other guy is one Chien Li Mah, Oriental male, five foot nine, about a hundred and forty five pounds, born 1965 in Vancouver. He'd be in his prime now."
"He wouldn't go by the name of Steve, would he?"
"You got it." Al didn't sound surprised. "You know where he is?"
"Assuming it's the same guy, he's now working at the Seattle import distribution warehouse for Waicom Electronics, the company we suspect is involved in our little problem."
"You figure he's using the same M.O.?" Al asked.
"Maybe, but not from a U.S. Free Trade Zone into Canada. Crossing the border has got to make it a lot tougher to pull that scam. If one trailer's short six T.V.'s – computers in this case – and the other has six too many, on every run they'd have four chances of the load being examined and the whistle blown by either U.S. or Canada Customs. With heavy customs fines at stake, the company isn't likely to put up with that for long. Since he's already learned the risks in the business, I don't think he'd be playing those odds." Hunter paused for a moment. "But I don't doubt for a minute that he's involved in something, and that he's got more than one accomplice on this side of the border."
"You'd think this company, Waicom, would've called if they were experiencing any significant pilferage. Let me ask around."
"Hang on a sec, Al. Waicom seems to be a little shy about talking to the law. I heard from a civilian source that Waicom has been engaged in a little hanky panky of their own and customs is on to them. Evidently it involves undervaluing their goods on paper to avoid taxes on imports. You might check that out before you approach anyone at Waicom, make sure you're not butting into an existing investigation."
"Right. Thanks. Say, for a civilian, you sound remarkably like a cop. You getting an itch to come back?"
Hunter shook his head. Sure, there were some things he'd like to change about his life, but being a trucker wasn't one of them. "I'm totally satisfied with being a truck driver."
"Yeah, a nosy truck driver. You want to tell me why you're looking for this information? If there's a crime involved, why not just turn it over to us, or whoever's jurisdiction it falls under?"
"Remember that rig that went off the Coq just south of Merritt? It took a couple of days to find it, and when they did, the driver was dead and the trailer had busted wide open and spilled cartons of computer parts out into the wilderness. You hear about that?"
“Aha! So those computer parts belonged to our friends at Waicom Electronics. The driver was from Kamloops, wasn't he?"
"The driver was a friend of mine, Al." Hunter inhaled and exhaled slowly. "The local officers have reviewed all the available evidence, and there's nothing specific pointing to foul play. I'm working on a hunch. If I get something solid, it goes back to you guys."
"I see," said Al, nodding thoughtfully. "Is there anything else I can do for you while you're here?"
Hunter frowned. Although he had nothing to do with Waicom, Rick Bilodeau was a man with a motive. Hunter decided to take advantage of Al's cooperation and get him to run Bilodeau's name through CPIC, too. He wasn't surprised to find out that Bilodeau had a criminal record. During the past twenty years, he'd been convicted of assault, breaking and entering, and impaired driving on more than one occasion. He'd served eighteen months in Oakalla from 1983 to 1984, which would have put him there at the same time Chuck Wahl was serving out his sentence. Bilodeau's latest assault charge had been laid in Edmonton, Alberta in 1990.
"You know Sam Manji in the Surrey detachment?" asked Al.
"Yes, of course I know Sam. Well. We worked together a couple of times. Why?"
"Might not hurt to get some first hand information on this turkey," said Al, lifting his telephone handset and punching in a number. When Sam came on the line, Al said, "There's an old friend of yours here looking for some information on one Richard Claude Bilodeau. You know the gent?" Al nodded silently at the response. "Well, I'll let you talk directly to the guy who wants the information. Hang on a sec." He winked at Hunter and passed over the handset. "I've got a meeting to go to, but make yourself at home here." Al gestured at his desk. "I'll trust you to show yourself out." Hunter thanked him for his help, and they shook hands before Al went out the door.
Sam sounded delighted to discover who he was talking to, and Hunter went through the same reunion routine as he had with Al before Sam got down to brass tacks. He had had a couple of first hand encounters with Bilodeau in the past six months. At his last arrest, Bilodeau had been ordered to attend substance abuse counselling, had subsequently been enrolled in a residential addictions treatment program but was kicked out in the first week for being disruptive. He currently collected welfare, but spent much more time in the bar than a welfare income would permit. The R.C.M.P. hadn't any hard evidence on whatever he had going on the side, but suspected he was selling drugs, among other things, to supplement his meagre welfare checks. Whatever he was doing, it was bound to be illegal. Hunter asked his friend about Bilodeau's driver's license, whether or not he was licensed to drive a truck with air brakes. If he had been, he'd lost it, said Sam. His most recent conviction was for driving while impaired.
Hunter thanked Sam for his help, and hung up the phone. He sat back in the chair and closed his eyes, mulling over the information he'd just obtained. It might be useful to know if Bilodeau and Wahl had met during the six months they were both at Oakalla. It might also be useful to know how Bilodeau made the extra money that he was pouring down his throat every night at The Goal Post, a bar also frequented by Wahl. It seemed like too much of a coincidence, but it was always possible the two of them were in cahoots. The lack of a driver's license didn't eliminate Bilodeau's possible involvement in Randy's murder. The roads were ri
ddled with unlicensed drivers taking a chance on not getting caught. If a man were prepared to break the law by stealing or repeatedly beating up his girlfriend, he certainly wouldn't shrink from driving without a license. It would be interesting to see what Sorry came up with.
Hunter drummed his fingers on the desk, staring at the phone. Here he was in Burnaby, just a few minutes drive away from where his daughters lived and worked. Hadn't he told his ex-wife that he'd call the girls today? He looked at his watch. They probably weren't home, but he could always leave a message. What would he say? That he was leaving town again tomorrow and wouldn't be home until Saturday? He could just say it was about time he took them out for dinner. They could name the date. He paused with his hand on the phone, then snatched up the receiver and punched in the number. What the hell.
It was Chris's voice on the answering machine, her office voice, managing to sound friendly and professional at the same time. "After the tone, please leave your name, number and a brief message. Jan, Lesley, or I will return your call as soon as possible." The tone sounded. Hunter opened his mouth, then caught his breath. How would he say it? Should he start with "Hi, Chris" or "Hi, Jan and Lesley" or "Hello everybody"? These three women had been the most important human beings in his adult life. He'd lived with them all for more than thirteen years, he'd seen each of them naked and in tears, he'd changed diapers and kissed hurt knees and shared some of the worst and the best moments of his life and theirs, and now he didn't know how to talk to them. The tone sounded again.