Tampered

by Ross Pennie

  “Get back in the car, old man,” said Shorty.

  Art took three breaths and started across the yard. Zol had never seen him walk more than two paces. Each step was a marathon, but he lumbered through the slush, his gaze fixed on Horvat. Everyone watched, mesmerized by the determination in the old man’s face.

  Shorty’s gun eased its pressure on Zol’s back. The pain lifted a little, and his knees strengthened. But a moment later his mouth turned to dust. Where was Max? Art and Phyllis must have left him with the Oliveiras. They’d be filling him with Waste Not’s leftovers — sandwiches and dirty dishes teeming with listeria. No, he told himself. The food at Camelot was fine. It was Horvat, not Gus, who’d brought the listeria into Camelot. Gus and Gloria may not know much about keeping preteen boys amused, but Max was safe. Better bored at Camelot than embroiled here in this mess.

  Hamish tensed but stayed rooted next to Zol, their hands still raised, as Art shuffled forward, occasionally stopping for breath and leaning on his cane.

  “We know what you’re up to, Vik,” Art said. “Empty capsules, counterfeit blood pressure pills, and by the looks of things —” he motioned toward the enforcers “— transactions with the stars of our city’s informal economy.”

  Horvat opened his mouth but nothing came out.

  Art moved forward a few more steps in the stunned silence, then paused to catch his breath. After a moment he continued. “Haven’t figured out exactly how you poisoned us — and yourself — with that listeria bug. I figure you forgot to wash your hands.” He jerked his cane toward the body slumped on the snow. “Now, about that corporal there,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Was he reeking of vodka before or after you and Nick nabbed him from our parking lot?”

  Horvat threw Colleen to the ground, then lunged at Art, taking the old man in a bear hug. He jammed his gun into Art’s temple. “Enough.”

  Zol bounded across the yard, half expecting Shorty’s gun to pick him off. “Your party’s over, Horvat,” Zol said, forcing himself to ignore Horvat’s gun. “Seems you got some sort of beef with old folks and the Canadian Forces. Don’t know exactly how you did it, but I know you polluted their prescriptions.”

  Hamish dashed across the yard and crouched beside Phyllis. He tugged her coat open, pulled up her skirt, and slammed into doctor mode. Ignoring Shorty’s curses, he called for something, anything to stop the blood gushing from Phyllis’s thigh. Zol knelt next to Hamish and held his bare hand on the wound, but simple pressure didn’t do much to stem the tide. Hamish took Zol’s scarf and wound it tightly around Phyllis’s leg near her groin. The bleeding slowed to a trickle. Zol grabbed Phyllis’s wrist. Her radial pulse felt rapid and weak, but at least she had one.

  Colleen heaved herself out of the slush. “Use my coat. As a blanket. It’s inside the —”

  “Well, well, well,” said Shorty, three paces behind Zol and waving his gun. He nodded toward the Lincoln. “What have we here? The ultimate hostage, wouldn’t you say?”

  Zol turned but couldn’t see what Shorty was referring to. They say the eyes see only what the brain has prepared them for. And there was no way Zol was prepared to see his son standing beside Phyllis Wedderspoon’s Lincoln. But there he was, with his ski jacket unzipped, clutching his game gadget.

  “Oh my God, Max,” cried Zol. “How did —”

  “Are you really in a movie, Dad?”

  “No, Max. I’m afraid this isn’t a game.”

  Max returned his I thought so look and gaped at the enforcers.

  Zol caught Shorty’s gaze and narrowed his eyes. “It’s okay, Max. They never shoot boys.” Zol gripped Phyllis’s bony hand and wrist, his finger on her galloping pulse his only connection with reality. He knew if he let go, his world would explode.

  Shorty held up his weapon. “You wanna see my gun, kid? Come over here.”

  Max looked at Zol, his inquisitive face asking for permission to check out the revolver. Had video gaming desensitized Max to the danger? Was he confusing the sanitized gore of shoot-’em-up games with the irreparable devastation of real weapons?

  Zol didn’t know what to say. If Max could stall the gangsters — charm them even — maybe . . . No, he told himself, that was pure denial. Hoping a nine-year-old gamer could outwit heartless criminals was ridiculous. He felt ashamed.

  Max clamped his tongue between his teeth and took a step toward Shorty.

  “Hold it there, kid,” Shorty called. “What’s that in your hand?”

  Max froze. “Um, my, um, game gadget.”

  Shorty looked at the gorilla then at Nick. “What the hell’s that?”

  “For computer games,” Zol explained. “Kids’ stuff, like Super Mario and Pac-Man.”

  “It got a phone or WiFi?” Shorty asked.

  “No,” Zol answered quickly. “It’s just a toy.”

  “Throw it to me, kid,” Shorty said. “I wanna see it.”

  Max stared at Zol, his eyes filled with the terror of a boy caught in a life-altering lie.

  “I said toss it over,” Shorty demanded.

  The sun was fading quickly, the shadows deepening with every passing second. Zol could barely see Max’s face, but there was no mistaking the screen glowing in his son’s hand. That wasn’t a game gadget. That was Max’s cellphone.

  Max planted his feet in the slush and fixed his eyes on the ground. The phone didn’t budge from his grasp.

  Zol swept the yard with his gaze. Everyone was riveted by Max’s fist, aglow in the light of his Aladdin’s lamp. Was it too late to hope for a genie, or was it already out of the bottle?

  Zol’s heartbeat pounded on his eardrums as he stood shivering in the dark, his eyes darting back and forth between his son and the gunman.

  The seconds ticked by. Wishful thinking, fuelled by desperation, toyed with his senses, prickled his ears with an eerie whine.

  The noise rose steadily. When it eclipsed the throbbing in his ears, he realized it was no illusion; it was real.

  It wasn’t the throaty blare of fire-truck horns.

  Nor the high-pitched wail of an ambulance.

  It was the piercing yelp of police-car sirens — two, maybe three of them — their pitch distorted by the speed of their approach.

  Max heard it too. He looked at Zol and very slowly raised his hand. His cellphone lit the whites of his eyes, the lift of his eyebrows, the hint of satisfaction on his lips.

  Only a dad could understand that look.

  CHAPTER 40

  Ten days later, about quarter to four on Wednesday afternoon, Natasha stopped at the Nitty Gritty’s front counter to check on the arrangements she’d made with Marcus, the proprietor.

  “Yes, miss,” Marcus said, “the maple-glazed coffee cake is ready. D’you want me to set it out now?”

  She glanced at the health unit’s table. Marcus had done a nice job with the colourful plates and festive serviettes. “The others will be here soon. Please wait until you’ve served our coffees. Then bring in the cake and we’ll sing ‘Happy Birthday.’”

  “A bit tough having a birthday on April Fool’s Day,” Marcus offered.

  “He got teased about it at school. So, let’s not —”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t mention it. Say — did they find his car?”

  “Yes. In Niagara Falls. The interior’s being deep cleaned. Some sort of special process.”

  “Excellent.”

  Natasha hoped everything about this afternoon would be excellent, although Dr. Wakefield might not feel like celebrating his birthday. He’d told her he’d broken up with his boyfriend, Ken, on the weekend but had confided few details. Still, there was much to celebrate. Professor Crabtree was out of the intensive care unit. Betty McKenzie was back to eating normal food. Phyllis Wedderspoon was walking on her fractured femur, stabilized with screws and a plate. Travis and the army officers were recovering from their listeria meningitis, so far with no major complications. And Viktor Horvat was in jail.

  The past week ha
d been exhausting, but enlightening. Natasha and Dr. Wakefield had spent most of the last seven days sequestered at Camelot Lodge and Steeltown Apothecary with two RCMP officers and a forensics team. A separate team was investigating the medications Viktor Horvat had dispensed to his other clients across the city.

  Wearing crime-scene suits, rubber boots, masks, and gloves, they’d inspected and replaced every pill in the Lodge, combed through every shelf and drawer of Steeltown’s dispensary, and examined every millimetre of Horvat’s infamous garage. The only sign of the cat was its feces piled in a corner. At first, it was difficult to face that dark, windowless place again, but Dr. Wakefield showed her how he calmed his anxieties with his version of yogic breathing — in through the nose, out through the mouth, out first from the abdomen, in first to the chest. She’d let the rhythm overtake her, and it worked — well, the breathing and the academic process of sifting through the evidence.

  The petri dishes she’d spotted in Horvat’s refrigerator turned out to be loaded with listeria bacteria. Ellen from Caledonian’s microbiology lab confirmed they bore the same genetic fingerprint as those recovered from Viktor Horvat’s spinal fluid when he had meningitis at New Year’s. They were also identical to the listeria in Camelot’s gastro stools, young Travis’s blood, and both soldiers’ spinal fluids. Of course, all the microbiologic tests were being repeated in government forensic labs elsewhere, but Natasha was confident Ellen’s results would hold water.

  It was Hamish — he’d asked her to call him that, though his intellect was sometimes so commanding that Dr. Wakefield felt more natural — who figured out how Viktor Horvat had infected so many people. He knew right away the purpose of the propane torch, the forceps, and that wire loop thing.

  Horvat was facing a string of charges, including the first-degree murder of Jayson Dasilva, the second-degree murder of at least half a dozen Camelot residents, the attempted murder of Travis Andersen and the two army officers, and the willful sale of counterfeit medications. Nick the cook had been charged as an accessory to kidnapping. The two gang enforcers — she never did learn their names — were awaiting bail on alleged weapons offences. The police were building the case for charging them with conspiracy in a counterfeit drug ring. The cops had developed the theory that one of the local gangland families had made Horvat one of those offers you can’t refuse: be the pharmacist front man for our new venture into counterfeit prescriptions. The mobsters could see that fake drugs were easier than cocaine to get past Canada Customs and their sniffer dogs, and could be almost as lucrative. The RCMP had impounded the Cadillac SUV parked in the alley behind Steeltown and were pulling the vehicle apart, piece by piece. So much for the short guy’s Moroccan leather seats.

  One thing was for sure: Max would never get into trouble over his cellphone again. The dispatcher had used the GPS to pinpoint Max’s location the moment he’d called nine-one-one from the back seat of Phyllis’s Lincoln.

  Dr. Wakefield set his fork on his empty plate and fixed Natasha with his wide blue eyes. When he beamed that boyish smile of his, it was easier to think of him as Hamish. “That was the best birthday cake I’ve ever had,” he told her. “Thank you, all of you. Very much.”

  “For a while there, I thought we weren’t going to see it,” Dr. Zol said.

  “The cake?” said Hamish.

  “No, your birthday.”

  Colleen dipped her eyes and pressed a few final crumbs onto her fork. She was still recovering from the shock of watching Viktor Horvat pump those bullets into Jayson, right at her feet. She wasn’t the kind of seen-it-all private eye they showed on TV. She’d come all this way from South Africa to escape violence, and the shootings had left her contemplative for a few days, despite her clear-headed courage under stress.

  Colleen had been right about the terrible smell in Steeltown’s refrigerator. It wasn’t rotting flesh, but Travnicki cheese sent from Bosnia and Herzegovina six months ago. The postmark on the paper wrapping left no doubt about its origin and mailing date. Ellen Ballyk’s cultures showed it was teeming with listeria bearing a genetic fingerprint matching all the others. Whether Horvat had ordered the contaminated cheese from Bosnia with criminal intent, or if he’d seized the serendipitous opportunity of a present from the old country, they would probably never know.

  “Yes . . . well . . . Here we are.” Hamish lifted his plate. “Care to cut me another piece, Natasha?”

  “Was it only Xanucox capsules that Horvat laced with listeria, Hamish?” asked Dr. Zol. “Did you find any other contaminated medications?”

  “Just the Xanucox,” Hamish said. “He plucked listeria colonies from his petri dishes with the tiny wire loop we found on his work table.” Hamish demonstrated by skimming a smidgeon of maple glaze from his coffee cake with the tine of his fork. “Then he placed the colonies inside real Xanucox capsules. But not every capsule. That way, the infections appeared at random and were distributed over time.”

  “Extraordinary,” said Colleen. “He made it seem like a problem with the kitchen. Unrelenting food poisoning. A clever way of discrediting Gus and Gloria to force them out of their livelihood.”

  It had worked. Gus and Gloria Oliveira were out of Camelot Lodge like a shot, replaced by a team from a temporary employment agency. Camelot’s owner didn’t like the idea of his managers having harboured an alleged murder fugitive. Besides, Jayson’s death meant the Oliveiras were in no shape to look after the Lodge. They’d be mourning Gloria’s son for a long time.

  If the Oliveiras had stayed on any longer, Dr. Zol would have been forced to publicly expose Gus’s misappropriated Waste Not dividends. The man hadn’t been exactly Dumpster diving, and according to Ellen Ballyk his Dijon mustard and chouriço sausage were in the clear, but stealing from a registered charity was the final blemish on the Oliveiras’ record. They would never work in long-term care again. At least not in any place near Hamilton.

  “Art says the food is better already,” Zol said. “The veggies are fresher and the soup is piping hot. I phoned Waste Not, by the way. Suggested they might like to remove Gus Oliveira from their list of volunteers.”

  Natasha was learning that with a phone call you could pass along sensitive information without making a federal case of the details, and leave no paper trail to answer later. She’d made a note to see about making Waste Not’s operation more secure, perhaps with bonded drivers and rules about faster door-to-door delivery times. Maybe the well-meaning charity could learn from the cutthroat pizza delivery business. No one liked lukewarm pizza.

  “And the propane torch?” Colleen asked. “What was that for?”

  “Sterilizing the wire loop after he used it to inoculate the capsules,” Hamish explained. “But he must have forgotten to use the torch once or twice, and got a big dose of listeria on his fingers. He probably licked them when he snuffed that votive candle beside his wife’s photo, and infected himself.”

  “Was anyone a specific target of his contaminated capsules?” Dr. Zol asked.

  “My guess is Raimunda, Gloria’s mother,” Hamish said. “All the others were just taking the wrong meds at the wrong time, so to speak.” He shook his head and looked rueful for a moment. “Betty got her contaminated Xanucox from Raimunda. An informal trial to see if the drug would help her arthritis.” He raised his finger and wagged it assertively. “If she’d listened to her doctor . . .”

  Dr. Zol fidgeted with his fork, and an embarrassed look came over his face. “What about those goons who gave me a hard time? You know, at the funeral?”

  “I asked our RCMP buddies about them,” Hamish said, enjoying the moment. “Laughed their heads off. Said you should have twigged to the Gretzky–Crosby routine.”

  Dr. Zol’s ears flushed red. “What do you mean?”

  “You were fed fake IDs. Those guys were probably enforcers with the construction company Jayson was working for.”

  “Pilfering from job sites is a big problem,” Natasha added.

  “I don’t get
it,” Dr. Zol said.

  “It’s kind of complicated,” Natasha explained. “But Jayson Dasilva — that’s Joe’s real name — wasn’t living in Portugal after all. He was working in Toronto, pretending to be an illegal Portuguese construction worker named Joe Medeiros.”

  “He wasn’t in Canada illegally?” asked Dr. Zol.

  “Not as an illegal immigrant,” Hamish said. “But as an illegal army deserter. AWOL from the Argylls while awaiting trial on a drunk-driving homicide charge.”

  Natasha shuddered and was careful not to catch Colleen’s eye as she relived those three deliberate shots Horvat fired into Jayson’s crumpled body. One bullet each for Horvat’s wife and two daughters.

  Colleen asked, “Any news about Horvat’s blood-pressure tablets? Has the drug company finished running its tests on them?”

  “Oh, I meant to say,” Natasha said. “Wayne Jarvie from Lakeview Pharma called today and left a message on my phone. Not a trace of active ingredient in any of Steeltown’s Zytoprils. Just brick dust.”

  “Brick dust?” Zol said. “How does . . . Never mind.”

  A warm presence approached Natasha from her left, then crouched beside her and whispered in her ear. “Are we permitted to join you now?” Al Mesic asked. She nodded, then watched wistfully as he aimed his sexy smile at Hamish, a wrapped present in his hand.

  “Happy birthday, Dr. Wakefield,” Mr. Greenwood called out. He wheeled eagerly to the table and explained, “Betty’s at the hairdresser. Having an afternoon at the spa with Maude and Myrtle. They’ll be coming by taxi when they’re done.”

  Hamish was radiant with a mix of pleasure and shyness. He touched Al Mesic on the arm and jumped to fetch him a chair. Dr. Zol shuffled the seats to make room for the guests and placed Colleen beside him. He flashed her an intimate smile when he thought no one was looking.

  Mr. Greenwood looked around. “Say — where’s young Max?”