Troop 18

by Jessica L. Webb

  Andy, Les, and Kate walked the long hall to the change rooms. Les and Kate were going to use the treadmills while Andy and Zeb worked the troop. Kate was going only reluctantly, Les having to coax her with pleas of female bonding. It was the chance to watch Food TV while running that had finally won Kate over. Andy changed quickly, tied up the laces on her shoes, and pulled her long hair back into a low ponytail. As she walked down the hallway, she tried to remember how long it had been since she’d set foot in a university gym. She’d spent most of her undergrad at the UBC athletic complex: four nights a week for basketball practice, games every weekend during regular season, travelling between provinces for championships. As she pushed open the doors for gym two, Andy did a quick count to make sure everyone was accounted for. Listening to Zeb’s commands echo around the gym, punctuated by short, sharp whistle blasts, Andy remembered what being part of a team was like—to follow commands, to be critically aware of where your team was on the court, to be able to anticipate your opponent’s next move and see two plays ahead, adjusting and flexing your muscles to choreograph and execute a perfectly timed play. She remembered what it was like to know every single member of your team was working just as hard to achieve the same goal. As the afternoon wore on, Andy felt a new appreciation for Troop 18. She had almost forgotten to see their dedication and commitment to each other as admirable.

  As they approached the three hour mark, Zeb giving them time to wind down and cool their muscles, the next group began trickling in. Andy guessed by their tall, lean bodies, their heavily muscled legs and the massive, expensive sneakers, that the university’s men’s basketball team had just arrived.

  The troop continued following Zeb’s instructions, but awkwardly now, very aware of the new audience. Andy caught Zeb’s eye, and gave a quick, sharp movement with her hand across her neck, telling him to cut it short and wrap it up. Andy didn’t like the way the newcomers automatically edged in on the court, the aggressiveness of their volume, their display of ownership over the space. Zeb released the cadets, reminding them they had two hours until they were to meet the instructors out front. Andy stood back and watched as they walked past the men’s basketball team. They’d fallen into loose formation, Prewitt-Hayes and Petit at the front, Awad, Foster, Hellman, and Shipman forming an almost evenly spaced barrier between the basketball team and the rest of the troop. But nothing happened, and the two groups gave no acknowledgement of each other.

  “Assholes,” Zeb muttered under his breath beside Andy as they followed the troop back into the hallway. Andy could feel him bristling with defensive anger, his eyes darting back and forth from the door to the team behind them. The three hour workout hadn’t seemed to work its magic yet. Zeb seemed more up than down.

  “We’re done, the troop’s done. Leave it alone, Zeb.” Andy had been careful to not push Zeb these last two weeks. But she needed Zeb to keep it together, and she knew him well enough by now to recognize when he needed an outlet. “Kate and Les are going to supervise the troop at the pool, so why don’t you take the next few hours off? Meet us back at the bus by five.”

  The gym door locked shut with a metallic clang. Zeb glanced through the safety glass window.

  “Okay, sure,” he said, running a hand over the short bristles of his shaved head. “See you in two.”

  Andy found her way back to the women’s change room and decided to take her own advice of a very long, hot shower. The steady stream loosened the muscles in her shoulders and neck, and the steam worked its way into her lungs, seeming to warm her from the inside out. Andy let herself lose track of time, knowing Kate and Les had the troop for now, giving herself a moment of reprieve from the weight of responsibilities that had become her everyday life at Camp Depot. Reluctantly, Andy turned off the shower, towelled herself dry and pulled on her uniform over her still damp body. She pulled tightly at the belt around her waist, feeling uncomfortably light without the holsters she’d left back at camp. Andy bypassed the hair dryers, knowing from experience that they were useless, instead twisting her wet hair up off her neck before grabbing her bag and heading out.

  Andy followed the smell of chlorine to the pool, hearing shouts and shrieks echo off the tall ceilings. She looked through the large observation windows along the corridor and could see most of the troop was playing water polo. A few sat on the side, dangling their legs in the water. Andy craned her neck up to look into the stands and saw Kate and Les with their feet up on the railing, sharing a bag of cheesies from the vending machine. Andy smiled to herself and walked back to the foyer.

  Finding a semi-quiet corner near the wall of windows, Andy pulled out her phone and her notebook, looking out into the dark and rainy afternoon. She checked her messages first, prioritizing the six calls from work, circling the two she would follow up with on her own, and underlining the ones she would forward to the sergeant covering her cases back in Vancouver.

  Andy paused to watch the sky open up in a torrential downpour, the intense roar only minimally dulled by the layers of glass. Mesmerized, Andy watched the rain and the few unlucky people racing through it until the intensity eventually lessened. She checked the time on her phone. The cadets would be getting out of the pool in about ten minutes. Andy dialled her supervisor’s number and left a message with his secretary. She controlled the urge to drum her fingers on the table while she waited.

  Instead she started a list, kicking herself when she realized they should have combined today’s trip with their weekly drug screen. Someone would have to come into town in the next few days for that. With the rain pinning them down at Camp, the other instructors might like the change of scenery to come into town and drop off the samples, even if it meant being responsible for sixteen mini bottles of urine.

  The phone vibrated on the table, beeping importantly. Andy checked the display, saw the main line for headquarters, and picked up. Their conversation was short, Staff Sgt. Finns checking in quickly between meetings. She updated the limited information she had on the troop, reassured him that everything was fine, then signed off. Andy spun her phone in her hands. Suddenly it vibrated again and Andy saw that it was headquarters again. Curious about what Finns had forgotten to tell her, Andy pressed at the pick-up button.

  “Wylie! It’s me, Jack.”

  As if after all these years she needed the reminder. She only allowed one person to call her Wylie.

  “Hi, Jack.”

  “I heard from Lydia that you just checked in with Finns. How’s it going out there? How’s the troop? How’s Kate?”

  Andy didn’t bother asking how he already knew about a conversation with Finns from three minutes ago. Jack heard everything.

  “Camp is fine, the troop is fine, and Kate is fine. She says she misses you. What’s up Jack?”

  “Okay…well…I hadn’t really done anything with that list you faxed over to me a week ago. You did say it wasn’t a priority,” he added nervously, like he wasn’t sure if Andy was going to give him shit. Not that she ever did. The worst she ever did was glare at him or cut him off when he started to babble or go on a tangent. “Okay, so I decided to do something similar to a Boolean search, using the phraseology of the numbers as opposed to the specific digits. Are you following?”

  “No, not at all. Skip to the part where you found something.”

  “Okay, the majority of the hits I got were from parenting sites and mom blogs, which I disregarded as irrelevant at first. The second highest number of hits came from horticulture sites, looking at mixtures of nitrogen, potash, and potassium and comparing those to types of growth and areas of coverage.”

  Jack stopped to take a loud, fortifying sip of something, probably coffee. Knowing she was in for a long explanation, Andy wished she had her own fortifying substance.

  “So I spent way longer on that thread than I should have before I actually went back and looked at the specific numbers in the charts and realized the quantities didn’t make sense for it to be fertilizer.”

  “And t
he context doesn’t really add up either,” Andy said.

  “Right, that too,” Jack said, somewhat sheepishly. Andy wasn’t annoyed, though. She appreciated that Jack wasn’t afraid to pursue an avenue that didn’t make any sense at first glance. It had given them valuable leads more often than she could count.

  “So you went back to the mom blogs,” Andy said, knowing her partner and the way his mind worked. “What did you find?”

  “Right, so two things popped up on the mom blogs. One was basal body temperature charts, daily tracking of women’s temperatures to correspond to their monthly cycles to show peak periods of optimum fertility. These were sometimes then compared to various levels of hormones detected in a blood test.”

  “Okay…” Andy said, this explanation forcing her brain to angle off sharply in a direction she wasn’t expecting. She shifted rapidly through the information, adding context, motivation, environment and plenty of her own speculation, waiting to see if something clicked. Nothing. “You said two things popped up. What was the other one?”

  “The other one was more simple. It was multiple discussion threads and postings about how much acetaminophen or ibuprophen to give to infants and toddlers, and the question of whether going by age or weight was more appropriate.”

  This twigged for Andy. She disregarded the context of the mom sites, the type of meds, and the age. They were back to drugs. “And when you look at the specific numbers from the chart we found?” Andy said.

  “This is where I’d need Kate,” Jack said apologetically. “It makes sense one column is looking at days of the month and the second column is weight in kilos. The third column could be dosage, but I don’t have a clue what the dosage could be and I couldn’t put enough parameters in to make my searching find anything more relevant.”

  “So I need Kate,” Andy said, scribbling notes so she could fill Kate in on the hypothesis Jack’s search had just outlined.

  “Of course you do, Wylie. I’ve known that since the day we met her.”

  “Very funny,” Andy said, scanning her notes, making sure she had everything. He wasn’t wrong. Jack had always known what Kate meant to her. He’d been able to see what Andy had been so desperately trying to ignore as she and Kate worked their first case together in Seattle. Sometimes having a partner who could see through you was helpful. Sometimes it was a pain in the ass. “Okay, I’ll have Kate look at the chart with that lens. If we get a chance, we’ll text you before we hit the dead zone near Camp. Anything else comes up, send a message to me through Kurtz, okay?”

  “Yep. Got it. Over and out, Wylie.”

  Andy rolled her eyes and hit the disconnect button on her phone. She twirled it in her hands again as she scanned the deserted foyer, thinking about her conversation with Jack, eliminating nothing, adding facts as they fit or presented themselves as relevant. She became distracted by a movement in the window, a play of light against the darkness of the day.

  She realized it was a reflection from down the hall. Though the image was distorted by light and distance, she had a fairly good view of cadets Greg Shipman and Hawke Foster having what seemed like a heated debate. Shipman was shaking his head, looking left and right, anywhere but at Foster. Foster was leaning in, like he was trying to convince Shipman of something with the intensity of his stance. Shipman raised a placating hand but Foster slapped it away.

  Andy half rose out of her chair then stopped herself. She should let them work this out. She could hear them now that she was paying attention. Foster’s voice was sharp and angry, Shipman’s placating. Foster gestured sharply at Shipman, tapping him in the centre of the chest. It was a provoking gesture intended to get a reaction, but it didn’t. Shipman put his hand on Foster’s shoulders, shook him slightly, still shaking his head. Shipman’s whole demeanour screamed an almost casual acceptance of inevitability. Apparently, Foster refused to accept.

  Andy’s phone buzzed in her hand, and she looked down quickly. It was a text from Kate, asking where she was. Andy quickly thumbed out ‘foyer’ and was hitting send even as she looked up to see what was going on with Shipman and Foster. A third person showed up, his face puffy and distorted in the reflection so it took a moment for Andy to recognize the cadet. It was Jacob Frances. Both cadets were turned toward him so Andy couldn’t see their expressions or guess how Frances had changed the dynamic of the argument. Frances spoke, checked his watch, shrugged, and then he punched both cadets on the shoulder and walked back the way he had come. Shipman and Foster stood still, then looked quickly at each other and followed their troop mate down the hallway.

  Andy debated whether or not she should pursue the cadets. She wished one of the other instructors had seen it, so she had someone else’s opinion to consider. Even Zeb’s seemingly biased view of the cadets would be helpful right now. Andy checked her watch, like Frances had just done a moment ago.

  Nineteen minutes until the cadets were due to check in, which meant Foster, Shipman, and Frances had nineteen minutes of freedom left, and Andy couldn’t and shouldn’t follow them. She sighed, checked her notes, scrolled through icons on her phone, and pulled up the picture of the chart she’d taken with her camera phone last week. Andy scanned the numbers, but there was no point. They meant nothing to Andy.

  Kate and Les arrived less than a minute later, wandering down the hall, chatting quietly, laughing easily. As they approached the table where Andy was sitting, Kate looked up and smiled, and then she seemed to be scanning Andy’s face, her body language, the way she held her notebook in one hand, her phone in the other. Kate’s ability to read her and know when she was keeping something back had been unnerving for Andy in the beginning. It had rapidly become a lifeline for Andy, though. A necessity more than a convenience. Which was why their two months apart had been hard, of course. Jack was right. Andy needed Kate.

  “What is it?” Kate said, sitting across from Andy.

  “Jack has a hypothesis regarding that chart we found,” Andy said quietly, aware her voice could easily carry. She quickly outlined the three hits Jack’s search had isolated, allowing both Kate and Les to make their own judgements about the relevance of each. Kate asked to see the chart again and scanned it on the small screen, and then she asked for Andy’s pen and notebook. Andy and Les watched as Kate sketched her own chart, putting the numbers one to thirty-one in the first column and filling in numbers beside that in the second. Reading the chart upside down, Andy figured out she was translating what they suspected was the weights column from kilos into pounds.

  “If Jack is right, this column tracks daily weight fluctuations in an individual who weighs at most two hundred and three pounds and at their least, one hundred eighty-seven,” Kate concluded, turning the chart around so Les and Andy could take a look.

  “That’s a pretty big fluctuation,” Les said. “Especially since the chart only shows twelve days’ worth of data.

  “True. Given the fluctuations as well as the numbers we’re looking at, I’d guess male. Females don’t lose weight that rapidly.”

  “Bastards,” Les muttered reflexively. “Who fits that in the troop?”

  Kate tilted her head to the side. “Off the top of my head, Foster, Frances, Mancini, Awad…and I’d put Shipman in there, too, but at the heavier end. I’d say he’s minimum of high one-nineties. I can double-check the cadet files when we get back to camp.”

  “Could any of the women fit the profile?” Andy said. She would guess no, but wanted to hear the reassurance of another opinion.

  “Hellman at her most muscular would just reach into the one-eighty range. So I’d discount that possibility for now unless you get something else to suggest the profile is female rather than male.”

  Kate talked like a cop, building on evidence and fact, holding every nuance and suggestion as relevant until it could be definitively disregarded. Her brain naturally worked that way, sorting and isolating and scaffolding information into a cohesive whole.

  “Andy…” Les said quietly.

>   Andy looked up. Cadets Prewitt-Hayes and Shandly had just come around the corner, talking quietly, their hair still wet from the swim and shower. Andy cursed in her head and checked her watch. Only four minutes until the cadets had to report back. Kate folded the piece of paper before slipping it into her coat pocket.

  “Later,” Les muttered under her breath. “Let’s get the team together after cadet lights out.”

  Kate mumbled an agreement, but Andy was busy observing the cadets. They’d been joined now by Hellman and McCrae, Petit, and Awad. The cadets moved down the hall in twos and threes, and Andy watched them with a sinking feeling in her stomach. She saw forced casualness in the way they spoke to each other and circulated around the foyer in choreographed neutrality. The troop was attempting to pull their camouflaged blind around them, attempting to go unnoticed.

  “Shit,” Andy said, drawing Kate and Les’s attention. “They’re hiding something.”

  Just then Zeb walked in through the front door. He shook his head and body out like a dog, water spraying out from his jacket as he approached the table where Andy, Kate, and Les were sitting.

  “Hey,” Zeb said. He seemed calm and in control. Good. Who knew what the hell Troop 18 was going to try to pull right now?

  Andy stood, and Kate and Les followed. “Did you see Frances or Shipman or Foster while you were out there, Constable Zeb?”

  “No. But the rain’s so heavy I couldn’t see shit. Should I go back out? Are they missing?”

  “No, they have another two minutes.” She watched as more and more of the troop arrived. She lowered her voice until the instructors and Kate had to lean in to hear what she was saying. “I saw Shipman and Foster having a verbal fight about fifteen minutes ago,” Andy said. “Then Frances arrived, said something, and left. Shipman and Foster followed.”