Slow Curve on the Coquihalla

by R. E. Donald

  "That's funny," Hunter mused. "Murphy didn't seem at all inclined to get involved in a situation we both witnessed a couple weeks ago. He's what you might call a friendly galoot."

  "My brother calls his Rottweiler friendly, too. Maybe the guy learned his lesson. Or maybe he's got to have something at stake. According to my scribble here, the report said they were fighting over a woman. Could be he's the jealous type."

  "Were there any other names in that report?"

  "Yep. One Robert Charles Williams and one Audrey Eileen Murphy. Wife, no doubt."

  "When was that, Bill?"

  "October 1991. In a bar at the Stockmen's Hotel."

  "I wonder if that was before or after Murphy and his wife split up," said Hunter. "Like you say, maybe he's the jealous type, or maybe he was just going through a rough time."

  The report on Tiny Kubik was just as Bill had described it. Two guys, fighting drunk, who slept it off and went home friends the next morning.

  "I've got another name for you to run, Bill. Try Frank Scarfo, currently a resident of Edmonton or thereabouts. He's ..."

  Bill interrupted. "Okay, pal, I'll do it Monday. Look, my kid's practically standing in my lap here, trying to get me off the phone. Gotta go."

  After he'd wished Bill and his son a good weekend and hung up the phone, Hunter sat staring out the office window at the street. He was disappointed, and realized that he'd been looking forward to discussing some of the new developments with Bill – Murphy, for example, and the shrink wrap. It always used to help to brainstorm a case with another detective. It could have been especially useful now that Bill was leaning towards the idea of murder. As soon as he considered the evidence to be strong enough, Bill had said, he would take it to Staff Sergeant Walker.

  Hunter wondered how he would feel if the R.C.M.P. decided to take over the investigation, and he was asked to butt out. It could happen. He had every confidence in the force, and didn't doubt the ability of his former colleagues to solve it, but he was developing some strong feelings about this case. As a Mountie, he'd had a few cases that he felt strongly about and was forced to hand over to someone else. The decision was accepted, as it had to be, and he had moved on to other things. This was different. This had become a personal crusade, and he wanted to see it through. Maybe it would be best to keep his distance from Bill until he was ready to hand over the killer, figuratively speaking, of course. In that case, he'd have to solve it on his own, if he could.

  He heaved himself out of the chair and went to the cupboard Suzanne had described. The drivers' log sheets were stashed neatly in a series of cardboard file boxes labelled with each driver's name. He carried four file boxes, those labelled R. Danyluk, G. Rodgers, S. Murphy, and P. Whitehead, over to a bare work table that stood against the back wall of the room underneath the picture window. He gazed outside for a moment, admiring the grace of the weeping willow and watching a big bee bumble around the lilacs that bordered the lawn. Then he pulled his reading glasses from his shirt pocket and perched them on the end of his nose.

  By law, drivers of vehicles over five tons are required to keep a daily log of their activities, and to make that log available to government authorities on request. Copies of the log must be submitted daily to the carrier the driver works for. The main purpose of these logs is to ensure that drivers do not exceed a prescribed number of hours of driving without taking time off to sleep. Some truckers, often with the help of amphetamines, try to work thirty-six or more hours at a stretch. The DOT doesn't want drivers like that on the road. Sleep deprived drivers see things that aren't there. They fall asleep with their eyes open. Thirty-five tons of freight and speeding machinery out of control on a public highway can do a lot of damage. Some truckers, often with encouragement or even coercion from their employers, will still break the rules, keep two sets of log books, drive too long and ingest too many chemicals, and in doing so jeopardize themselves and others. But they're doing it illegally, if that's of any comfort to their victims.

  The information required includes the names of the driver, co-driver (if any), and carrier, as well as the identifying numbers of the tractor and trailer. The driver must record the number of miles driven during each twenty-four hour period, and the origin and destination of the load. The main body of the log consists of a twenty-four hour grid, with each hour divided into quarters. The driver plots his or her activity for the entire twenty-four hour period by indicating for each fifteen minute period which one of the following categories the activity falls into: Off Duty, Sleeper Berth, Driving, or On Duty but not driving. For each change in duty status, he or she is required to write down the vehicle's geographic location at the time of that change. If an activity takes less than fifteen minutes, there's no need to record it in the log.

  Hunter was so used to keeping his own log that each grid, looking like a line graph with numerous long plateaus, told him its story in the blink of an eye. The important thing was to match up the dates and locations of the other drivers' logs to Randy's. As he expected, the logs for the last two days of Randy's life were missing. He'd be getting them from Garth in the next couple of days, but in the meantime, he could use Gary's log for the last day instead. Gary's trip to and from Seattle should correspond roughly to Randy's, although Gary had left Seattle before Randy was ready to go. His dry fingers slid on the paper, so Hunter moistened his middle finger on his lower lip and began flipping through the pages to find Stan Murphy's log sheets for May 24th.

  Hunter smelled cigarette smoke and turned around with a start to see Gary leaning against the desk, his ankles crossed, one arm across his chest and the other holding a cigarette in front of his face. He smiled at Hunter – it looked forced – and nodded a greeting.

  "Good morning! You must walk like a cat." Hunter grinned in an attempt to hide his irritation at being surprised.

  "Sorry I missed you at the house earlier. Suzanne sent me over to see if you could use another coffee." Gary pointed at a big thermos bottle on the desk beside him.

  Hunter stood up and removed his glasses.

  Gary's smile broadened. "You look like an accountant in those things."

  "Wait'll you turn forty, chief." Hunter walked over to the desk and picked up the thermos. Beneath it was something he'd overlooked before: a thin sheaf of papers stapled together, with a yellow post-it note stuck to the top. The note read:

  Hunter – Here are the toll booth statements for the last few weeks, and a list of the drivers' card numbers. S.

  Hunter poured some coffee into the thermos lid and took a cautious sip. It was still scalding hot.

  "Still playing sleuth, eh?" Gary motioned towards the file boxes at the back of the room. "What are you nosing around in the log sheets for?"

  "Trying to get a fix on where everybody was the night of Randy's accident."

  "You know where I was."

  Hunter glanced behind him at the table, saw that the ‘G. Rodgers’ on the file box was exposed. "Just for the purpose of comparison. I don't have Randy's sheet, so I'm using yours for that day instead. I'm estimating you weren't more than half an hour ahead of him leaving Seattle. Where'd you stop that night? Here?"

  "No," said Gary. "Near Monte Creek. When I run through here late at night, I don't like to wake Suzanne and the girls. It upsets their routine. Besides, it's faster if I get a few hours of shut eye in the sleeper. The sooner I get the load delivered, the sooner I'm home."

  "What I really want to find out is where all the other drivers were that night. Any chance you remember? You could save me a lot of time." Hunter picked up his glasses and smiled. "And eyestrain."

  Gary raised his shoulders and shook his head.

  "Murphy, for example. Any chance you saw him that day? Maybe in Vancouver before you left for Seattle?"

  "Murphy?" Gary exhaled, slowly and thoughtfully, his eyes following the smoke towards the ceiling. "Randy switched runs with him. I think he sent him to Portland."

  Hunter frowned. "What do you mean, R
andy switched runs with him?"

  "Just what I said. Murphy was scheduled to do the Waicom pickup, and Randy ended up doing it instead."

  "Why?"

  "How should I know? Maybe Randy had to be somewhere for a meeting or something, so he decided at the last minute that he couldn't do the Portland run."

  "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

  "I can't see how it could be important."

  "How did Murphy feel about the switch?"

  "How should I know?" he repeated. "He probably wasn't too happy, because he liked to spend the night with his little squeeze in Cherry Creek when he did the Waicom run. But if you think he did anything to hurt Randy, forget it. Murph's a fuckin' a teddy bear."

  "You're probably right." Hunter forced himself once again not to show his irritation.

  "Like I said before, I don't care how you want to spend your time." Gary waved the ashy butt of his cigarette towards the log sheets on the table behind Hunter. "But I'd appreciate it if you'd get over this obsession of yours as soon as possible, so that Suzanne can put this behind her and get on with her life." He turned around, seeking out an ashtray on Suzanne's desk. "And let me get on with mine. You've got her so spooked she still refuses to schedule me for the north-south runs, and it's starting to affect our income."

  "Just give it a little more time."

  Gary started to say something, then shook his head and walked away.

  Hunter watched him go before extracting the papers from under the thermos. He looked at the top sheet. Beside each driver's name was a three digit card number. The subsequent sheets were the toll statements, showing the date, time, direction and card number for each toll transaction. Here at last was some of the key information he'd been looking for.

  According to the statements, Gary had been through the northbound toll booth at ten forty three p.m. on May 24th. Randy had been through the northbound toll booth approximately an hour and twenty minutes later, at nine minutes past midnight on May 25th. That was consistent with Chuck Wahl's claim that Randy had left Hope sometime after eleven p.m.

  Hunter winced. He had involuntarily visualized Randy at the toll booth. The attendant had probably said, "Have a nice day!" like they always do, and Randy might've said, "I sure will! I hope you do, too!" Within the hour he was broken and dying in a deep ravine. Life sometimes seemed such a fragile thing.

  There was no northbound toll transaction recorded for Stan Murphy's card on May 25th at all.

  Taking the toll statements with him, he turned back to the file boxes and found Stan Murphy's log sheet for Tuesday, May 24th. According to the log sheet, Murphy had left Vancouver at one a.m. After a half hour breakfast stop, he was in Portland, Oregon making his delivery by seven thirty. He then logged himself off duty until three thirty p.m., which gave him the full eight hours required by DOT regulations, at which time he picked up a load destined for Calgary, Alberta. Hunter surmised it was a case of dropping off a trailer at the customer's dock in the morning for the customer to unload and reload prior to the driver picking it up again in the afternoon. Either that or Murphy had been somewhat lax about logging his On Duty hours in Portland. The log showed him crossing the border back into Canada at nine thirty p.m. He could have legally driven another two and a half hours before stopping, but he showed off duty in Hope at eleven o'clock for a full eight hour layover before getting back on the road. He had logged his arrival time in Calgary at seven a.m. on Thursday, May 26th.

  Hunter sighed. If Murphy's log were accurate, he arrived in Hope at roughly the same time as Randy left it, and was still there at the time Randy went off the road some sixty miles away. Hunter double checked the toll statement, but there was definitely no transaction on it to back up the times on Murphy's log.

  A log is only as reliable as the driver who records it. A driver might fudge the times in his log for any number of reasons. He might have to drive extra hours to make a tight delivery deadline, or maybe to where he could spend the night nestled against warm, perfumed skin. He might not want to take a chance on his wife seeing he'd passed some time in his old girlfriend's home town, or he might not want his employer or the authorities to know he'd been driving well over the speed limit. Under the circumstances, Hunter figured he couldn't count on a murderer to scrupulously log his presence at the scene of the crime.

  What could be the explanation for there being no record of Murphy on the toll statement? Hunter frowned and drummed the eraser of his pencil on the page. One obvious possibility was that Murphy had misplaced his card and had to pay cash. The second most likely possibility was that he'd taken the old highway, the long route through the Fraser Canyon. But why? Perhaps he'd stopped in Cherry Creek, which was just off the old highway, to visit his girlfriend on the way through. Or perhaps he wanted to avoid having a record of his presence on the Coquihalla toll highway that night.

  Hunter went back to the cupboard and pulled out the log sheets for the other Ranverdan drivers. Tom Buckingham had been travelling westward across Saskatchewan that night. Tiny Kubik had spent the night in Calgary waiting for a load. Pete Whitehead had returned to Kamloops at four thirty that afternoon with a load from Prince George, then logged himself off duty. That put him within easy driving distance of Randy's accident, so he couldn't be ruled out. Of the part-timers, only Jason Whitehead, Pete's son, had been on the road that night. The tractor number matched that of Pete Whitehead's, which meant that Jason had picked up the truck after Pete had returned from Prince George. His log showed that he left Kamloops at five o'clock and arrived in Vancouver at about ten. In spite of logging off duty for a meal, he was turned around and headed back out of Vancouver by two a.m. with a return load for Kamloops. That put him on the fatal stretch of the Coquihalla several hours before and again several hours after Randy's rig would have left the road. Hunter checked the toll statement, which bore out the times in Jason's log.

  Hunter pulled out a handful of Randy's log sheets and flipped through them randomly. A notation caught his eye. He remembered that one of the abbreviations from Randy's scrawled notes on the computer printout had looked like "PC Rs". Just after Randy had left Kamloops on a run, he'd recorded a fifteen minute On Duty stop in his log and labelled it "PC". Right beside it were the words "Fuel Stop". Of course, the "PC" stood for Petro Canada, where he must have stopped for fuel and maybe something to eat. The "Rs" could have been a sloppy "Ks", the city code for Kamloops. Had something connected with Waicom happened at the Petro Canada station in Kamloops?

  Hunter racked his brain for the other abbreviations Randy had used. "Rybds" was one. If it was a sloppy K again, what could "Kybds" stand for? He sounded it out. Keyboards. The shrinkwrapped skid. The other abbreviation was "TB", wasn't it? He flipped through the pages again and saw nothing that came close to it, but he thought of a prime possibility. Toll Booth. There was a rest area just north of the toll booth on the Coquihalla. Both the rest area and Petro Canada were places where a truck might be expected to stop for an extended period of time, much like Gary stopped to use the washroom at the brake check just past the Coquihalla Summit. If there was enough time for someone to tamper with a trailer's brakes, perhaps there was enough time for someone to tamper with its load. Had Randy seen it happen? Had he seen who it was?

  Hunter took off the reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. He still didn't have all the answers, but this latest discovery made him feel more than ever that he was on the right track. Now, where else could he look for hard evidence that hauling the Waicom shipment to Edmonton that night had somehow led to Randy's death? He'd have to talk to Murphy. And he'd have to wait for Sorry to gain the confidence of Steve Mah. Between the two of them, the answers were there, Hunter was sure of it.

  He slid the file boxes back onto their shelf, picked up the keys to the Suburban, and set out for Shuswap Lake.

  The Youngs' cabin was almost twenty miles off the main highway. Most of the road was paved, and much of it ran along the shoreline of the lake, snaking in gentle dips an
d curves beside the water. A few sections were heavily populated, with houses on both sides of the road, and sported rows of power boats bobbing off-shore beside an assortment of home-made and store-bought buoys. Hunter saw a glossy turquoise and white Bowrider lurch away from a weathered wooden dock leaving a long, inverted V of foam on the surface of the lake. A few of the boats he saw skimming across the lake were followed by tubers or skiers, trailing their own shallow wakes or boisterous rooster tails.

  Two barefoot and nearly naked brown boys, one almost a head smaller than the other, ran gingerly across the pavement ahead of the Suburban and disappeared down a steep bank towards the beach. What a place for a kid to spend the summer! Outdoor adventure and an escape from city attitude. Maybe a dude ranch wouldn't be such a bad place for a couple of little girls to grow up. In his rearview mirror, Hunter saw a small pickup following too close. He pulled over to the far right and let it pass. Three teenaged girls in the box waved at him cheekily as the little truck pulled ahead. Dumb kids, he thought. They think they'll live forever. Every year, the R.C.M.P. attended too many accidents that proved them wrong.

  The population grew sparser as the road continued. He saw a little store called the Eagle Bay General Store and turned into its semi-circular driveway. He purchased a dozen cold cans of beer, choosing Kokanees and Kootenays, and two bottles of California wine with corks. No matter what Gord said about not having to bring anything, he wouldn't feel right showing up empty handed. Gord had told him that by the time he reached the store, he'd be only about five miles away from the cabin. The pavement soon ended, and the last few miles were on a hard packed surface of reddish brown dirt pocked with potholes and strewn with loose gravel. On a few of the hills, the road's surface rippled into a washboard and Hunter had to slow the Suburban right down to keep the beer from bouncing dangerously. The road dipped down towards the water past a row of lakeside cabins. Near the end of the row, Hunter saw the sign nailed to an eight foot tall cedar stump. "Uncle John's Cabin", it said.