Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  “I’m busy, man,” said the Badger without missing a beat. “Don’t expect me to see you today. I’m three hours away.”

  “There’s plenty of time left in the day.”

  “But I’m in Manitoba, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ve got something to show you. It’ll blow your socks off.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Think of your wildest dream, and then think of it sitting in my pocket. Just for you.”

  “Why would you — ?”

  “A little horse trading. Between former schoolmates. Because in my other pocket is something you don’t want your German customers to see.”

  “Sounds like a threat, Dr. Szabo. I don’t take kindly to those. Besides, I’ve got business to finish here. And then the flight home.”

  “I know you keep the Lear at Mount Hope. I’ll make it easy for you. The Tim’s at Duff’s Corners.”

  “I don’t do meetings at Tim Hortons.”

  The loon pipe was staring at Zol from the counter, telling him to stand his ground. Or was that terror in those onyx eyes, the little bird pleading not to be given up to the Badger? Zol picked up the frightened creature and cupped her in his hand, like he used to do with the chicks on the farm. Was he doing the right thing? God, he hoped so. “You will if you want to see what I’m holding in my hand.”

  “Shit, Szabo.” There was a long pause, which Zol had no intention of filling. The Badger coughed, then cleared his throat. “I might be able to make it at five.” He’d blinked. His contract with the German army was a gold mine he couldn’t afford to give up.

  Five o’clock was too close to sunset. This time, he was going to face the Badger in the full light of day. Besides, there’d been too many delays in this case already. “Two o’clock, Dennis.”

  “Two-fifteen. It’ll take me twenty minutes to get from Hamilton airport to Duff’s corners.”

  “It’s twelve minutes, Dennis, even if your driver keeps to the speed limit.” He’d checked out the route on Google Maps after Chief Falcon had told him Dennis was out of the province, but due back later today. “But okay,” Zol told him. “See you at two-fifteen.”

  For a moment, hanging up on the Badger felt great.

  But when it sank in, it felt terribly foolish.

  CHAPTER 39

  Natasha drew to a stop in front of the single-storey brick box that called itself Norfolk Fire and Rescue Services, Simcoe Station. The only open parking spot was beside a red fire-and-rescue minivan. She checked three times, but couldn’t see a sign telling her not to park here. It must be okay. Hamish had arrived already. Who else would have a gleaming, burgundy Saab without a speck of dirt on it?

  He greeted her in the vestibule with a nod, his eyes cold, his mouth tight across his lips. He was angry, anxious, or distracted, she could never tell.

  “They know you’re here?” she asked him.

  “Just arrived. Not a soul around.”

  “Where’s Al?”

  “Had to work. You know, newspapers and their deadlines.”

  “Shall we go in?”

  He shrugged. “Guess so. We said twelve-thirty, and it’s almost that now.” He hesitated, then added, “You get the meeting started, okay? That room’s going to be full of wives and girlfriends, all anxious and tearful — as I told you before, way too much unbridled estrogen for me.”

  She flashed the Tin Man her gentle, concerned-professional smile. It was the secret weapon she used with anxious relatives who were turning hostile in a nursing home closed by a flu epidemic. People said they were calmed by her natural sincerity. She knew that deep down, Hamish appreciated it too.

  “No problem, Hamish. You’ll be fine.”

  It had been Al’s show at the Vanderhoef house. Today it was hers. She liked that.

  Immediately ahead on the right was a reception area, no more than a wall-mounted window opening onto a single-desk office. She imagined that visitors were normally required to sign in — a logbook was hanging on a chain next to the window — but there was no one in the office. Were they out for lunch? Or were they with the others, waiting for the nerd team from the Ministry of Health? It was strange there was no one waiting to greet them. Maybe small towns worked on more casual terms than larger cities. She hoped the 911 line was being handled by a dispatcher located somewhere offsite.

  In keeping with the casual flavour, there were no signs indicating what was where, but when she’d arranged this meeting last evening with the fire chief, he told her the group would be waiting in the lunch room, through the first door on the left.

  That door took them into a short hallway lit with fluorescent tubes. Behind the closed door marked LUNCHROOM was one heck of a hubbub. She couldn’t tell what was coming through loudest — anger, fear, or grief. There was certainly sobbing. Perhaps they were consoling the widows. Overnight, a second woman had lost her husband, a paramedic. He’d died at Toronto General before they could find him a liver. She didn’t like getting morbid about it, but the death count was now standing at six. The team was running out of tricks.

  She knocked. No one answered. They probably couldn’t hear through the commotion. She knocked again, then tried the door handle. It was locked.

  “Who ever heard of locking a lunchroom?” Hamish said. “You sure you got the time right?”

  She ignored the barb. “Maybe the room serves a second purpose. This isn’t a big building.”

  They looked around, but the hallway was empty. Hamish tried the other three doors off the corridor, but they were locked too.

  Applause erupted from behind the door, and a few seconds later it opened. A slim woman slipped out, looked surprised to see them, and stuck out her hand. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a striking page-boy, and she stood almost six feet in her Stuart Weitzman ankle boots.

  Although the woman’s skin was photo-shoot flawless, her eyes were bloodshot. She’d been crying. “Ms. Sharma?” she said, “I’m Joanna Dyment, my husband’s the fire chief. I’m sorry, we weren’t expecting you so soon.”

  Hamish looked at his watch and made a face. “We are only ten minutes early,” he told her.

  Natasha introduced Hamish, hoping Mrs. Dyment wouldn’t be overly put off by his manner. She hadn’t seen anything yet.

  “You may have heard us,” Mrs. Dyment confided without hesitation. “What started as a prayer vigil ended up as a free-for-all.” She closed her eyes and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Forgive me, this past week has been difficult. For all of us. But especially for my husband. The stress is killing him.”

  Natasha handed her a tissue from her purse and waited while the poor woman dabbed at her face then stowed the Kleenex in the sleeve of her Simon Chang jacket.

  She’d noticed Natasha checking out her boots. “Don’t you love the animal-print lining?” Joanna Dyment said, lifting her foot and turning it side to side. She pointed at Natasha’s pumps, also Stuart Weitzmans. “I see we share the same designer.” A spark of conspiracy gave a lift to the sadness in her eyes. “And the same indulgence. You must know Miller’s in Hamilton, on James Street North?”

  Natasha nodded. She could feel herself blushing. “My mother calls me Imelda. Says I have far too many shoes.” She didn’t look at Hamish, didn’t need to see him rolling his eyes at this frivolous interlude in the gravitas.

  “It never bothered me that the Marcos woman had so many pairs,” Joanna said. “Except I heard she didn’t wear most of them.” She paused, and let out a sigh. “Lucky her, she didn’t have to drive for an hour and a half to find a good shoe store. They probably came to her.”

  She straightened her back and tugged at the cuffs of her jacket. “I hope you’re ready for this. They’re not an easy crowd at the best of times.”

  CHAPTER 40

  The lunchroom was crammed. It looked to Natasha like a TV news clip of an airport depar
ture lounge in the middle of a blizzard, where stranded passengers were strewn about like dirty laundry. The windowless room — meant to accommodate eight people at a rectangular table, three more on a sofa, and one in a recliner — was packed with at least thirty bodies. And it looked like half of them had been crying.

  A tall, uniformed man with a red face, broad shoulders, and a broader paunch introduced himself as Grant Dyment, the fire chief. He looked rattled, almost overwhelmed.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. He swept the room with his arm. “As you can see, we’re kind of in a bad way. But . . . but doing our best to pull together.”

  And they had pulled together. Three quarters of the faces in the room belonged to women. She knew that Donna Holt was the sole female first responder in Norfolk County, which meant that these women were the anxious wives, mothers, sisters, partners of the men who worked out of this station. The two widows were easy to spot: they’d been seated on chairs at the table and were surrounded by solicitous “sisters.” It was a relief, and heartbreaking, that this micro-community had responded so quickly to Natasha’s appeal.

  Chief Dyment introduced them to the group, and in the process stumbled over her last name and Hamish’s first. It happened so often it felt almost natural. She’d found out by accident that Hamish’s middle name was Ulysses. The schoolyard razzing that must have caused him was too much to contemplate.

  She thanked everyone for coming and told them she appreciated that this was a frightening time for them all. She explained that she and Dr. Wakefield were going to need their help in finding the key pieces of information that would unlock the puzzle and prevent further cases of jaundice and liver failure. She had learned to avoid four words in these situations: victim, stricken, quarantine, and epidemic. They were far too effective at pushing emotions passed the boiling point.

  “So I hope you brought your thinking caps with you,” she said as she turned her secret-weapon smile on the shy smiles that responded from a few of the faces in the middle tier. There were no smiles from the women in the front row, who looked like time bombs set with high-octane anxiety. The four men standing at the back, dressed in dark blue uniforms that matched their chief’s, shifted on their feet and studied their highly polished boots.

  She didn’t recap the narrative of the epidemic. These people were living it, for heaven’s sake. But she wanted them to understand that she and Dr. Wakefield were searching for all the threads that bound the affected first responders together. One of those threads, she hoped, would lead to the solution.

  She looked at Hamish for reassurance, but saw only Tin Man diffidence in his stance and on his face. “There must be several threads,” she continued. “Some we know already, and one or two crucial ones we need to discover together.”

  “As soon as possible,” Hamish added flatly.

  “And we have to keep in mind,” she said, “that the most important threads will include the students at Erie Christian Collegiate.” She didn’t have to remind them that four kids at that school had died and more were getting sick almost every day. It was front-page news.

  She decided to start by itemizing the threads they already knew and writing them on the flip chart someone had set up at the front. “Thread number one,” she said, “is working at this station.” She wrote that down, then turned to the fire chief. “Is that true, all the affected firefighters and paramedics work here? This is their base?”

  “Every one,” he said, puffing his chest like a proud father.

  “Their only base?” Hamish asked. “None of those with liver failure worked part time at another station?”

  The chief scanned the room, looking for dissent. There wasn’t any. “Only here.”

  “Number two,” Natasha said, “they all smoked cigarettes manufactured on Grand Basin Reserve.”

  “Rollies and Hat-Tricks, and varieties of such,” Hamish clarified.

  There were reluctant nods among the women. The men at the back kept their arms crossed and faces fixed.

  “Number three is exposure to chemicals,” Natasha said, and wrote that down. “Chief Dyment, do the paramedics ever use the fire extinguishers, and do they ever help fight fires?”

  He gave that some thought. “No. Never.”

  “Good,” she said, “neither do the kids at Erie Collegiate.” She threw Hamish a knowing look. “At least, that’s what we’ve been told. It looks like we can rule out firefighting chemicals.”

  One of the uniformed men at the back put up his hand. “So you’re ruling out all the toxins we’re exposed to?” He shot daggers with his eyes first at the chief and then at Hamish, then snapped his fingers. “Just like that?”

  “Put it this way,” Hamish said, “it’s not something that links the majority of the affected people together.”

  Clearly unhappy with the answer, the man shook his head and crossed his arms again. He muttered something to the man beside him.

  One of the women seated at the table stopped picking at her lips and put her hand up. Her sloppy, mint-green tee-shirt said FORT MYERS, FLORIDA, CITY OF PALMS. “What about the new appliances?”

  Natasha looked at the chief and raised her eyebrows.

  The chief looked stumped, then threw a questioning look at his wife. Mrs. Dyment pointed toward the kitchen counter on her right, but the room was so full of bodies that Natasha couldn’t see what she was pointing at.

  “Sorry? What appliances?” Natasha asked.

  “Let me see,” Joanna said. “We wives got together and purchased a new electric kettle, a toaster oven, and a microwave. I think that’s it.”

  Natasha turned to the woman with the Fort Myers palm tree sprawled across her boobs and asked her, “Is something about them bothering you?”

  “I guess not. It’s just that they’re new.”

  “Do people usually bring their own lunches, or do you have a caterer come in?” Hamish asked.

  The men at the back scoffed and chuckled. One of them, a bit shorter than the others, said, “A caterer? In here? Yeah, sure. Every day.”

  One of the women turned and threw the man a behave yourself look. “But they do have takeout,” she insisted. “Several times a week. Pizza, Chinese, Thai. You name it.”

  “But no waiters or fancy dishes, and we clean up the mess ourselves,” said the man at the back.

  Natasha tore a blank sheet from her notebook and handed it to one of the women in the front row. “People,” she said, scanning the crowd and catching as many eyes as she could, “would you please list the names of the takeout places you’ve ordered from in the past couple of months. And the phone numbers, if you have them.”

  The woman stared at the paper in her hand as if it were a piece of nuclear waste. The chief took it from her, asked his wife for a pen from her handbag, and instructed one of the men to get busy with the list.

  Natasha glanced at her notebook. Had she turned up any other common threads when she’d spoken to the families of the affected first responders last week in Simcoe Emerg? No, none. She looked at the flip chart. It was awfully bare.

  “I’m wondering,” she said, “are there any events that brought the affected first responders in contact with kids from Erie Collegiate?”

  The room filled with muttering and perplexed faces, but nothing that looked like an answer.

  Hamish was beginning to look impatient, as if exasperated at having to do the thinking for a room full of ninnies with no ideas of their own. Natasha was beginning to feel the same but hoped her body language didn’t betray her.

  “For instance,” Hamish prodded, “do all the affected firefighters go to the same church?”

  One of the men at the back said, “Can’t think of a single one who does go to church.”

  “Yeah,” said the man beside him. “Working shifts means we’re either at work or sleeping in on Sunday mornings.”

&nbs
p; “How about sports?” Hamish said. “Do you guys play on the same teams as a lot of people from Erie Collegiate?”

  “Not with the kids,” came a comment from the back.

  “Any of the jaundiced guys coach kids from that school?” Hamish said.

  “Our shifts kinda put the kibosh on that,” said the talkative guy at the back. He looked pointedly at the chief. “Much as we’d like to.”

  The woman in the Fort Myers tee-shirt stood up. “What about Fire Prevention Week?”

  “When was that?” Natasha asked.

  “A couple of weeks ago,” someone else said.

  “Actually,” said a woman wearing a chunky Juicy Couture necklace. Natasha had noticed the pavé heart glinting in the overhead fluorescents. Now, as the woman raised her hand, Natasha saw Band-Aids on two of her fingers. “It was a few days before all this started,” the woman said.

  The room went quiet.

  Natasha’s tongue went dry. Her heartbeat quickened in her chest. “Did your station visit Erie Collegiate?” she asked the chief.

  He straightened his shirt collar and stepped forward. “We certainly did. Spent a full morning there.”

  Natasha’s pulse was now racing at her right temple. Maybe they were getting somewhere. “The exact date would be very helpful,” she said. “Anyone remember?”

  The chief’s face showed he was drawing a blank.

  Joanna Dyment pulled her phone from her Coach handbag and started tapping on the screen. “Here it is,” she said. “The day after Thanksgiving.” She looked at her husband and touched his arm. “You dropped me off at the dentist on your way to that school. I remember, because you said the principal was a bit odd and you wondered how such a scruffy guy got on in a school full of demanding parents from the Christian Right.”

  Natasha wrote thread number four on the flip chart: Firefighters visit Erie Collegiate six days before first students come down with jaundice.

  “What exactly did you do there?” Hamish asked the chief.