The Guilty (40 page)

Striker turned around to face the man.

‘Sir?’ he said.

The Acting Deputy Chief looked tired and stressed, but focused. As always, his thick black hair was pristinely combed back over his head and his white commander’s dress shirt was without
crease. He came to within a foot of Striker.

‘What is the status of this investigation?’ he demanded.

With forensic techs and patrolmen running all around them, Striker gave Laroche a five-minute rundown of everything that had occurred from the torture scene down by the river, up to and
including the death of Inspector Terry Osaka. He left out as much as he could regarding the details of Harry and Koda, and also of the dolls he had found.

It was necessarily prudent to do so.

The Acting Deputy Chief was often like a spinning top, knocking down everything around him with his misguided, erratic decisions. It wasn’t entirely his fault, Striker knew. Laroche always
meant well, in his own twisted way. But over the years the man had become more of a manager and politician than a cop. As a result, it was best to placate him with the bare minimum of facts and
leave him in the dark on the full details.

‘And that’s when we got here,’ Striker finished.

Laroche’s face remained hard. ‘You’ve been in two gunfights in forty-eight hours. If this was any other day, I’d put you on stress leave and send you for crisis
counselling. But we got bombs going off all over the goddam city and cops are being targeted.’ Laroche’s posture sagged, and suddenly, unexpectedly, his expression softened. His face
looked
fragile.

‘Sir?’ Striker asked.

Laroche cleared his throat. ‘Terry was . . . a good friend of mine. I knew the man for twenty goddam years.’

‘He was a friend of mine too, sir.’

Laroche nodded. ‘Just keep me informed – every step of the way.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Do
better.
’

Striker made no reply, and seconds later the Acting Deputy Chief spotted Corporal Summer. Without so much as another word to Striker, Laroche spun away from him and cornered her by the car
wreckage. With the conversation ended, Felicia walked up to Striker and gave him a dubious look.

‘What was that all about?’ she asked.

‘A difficult situation just got a whole lot more complicated,’ Striker said. ‘Laroche is on the case.’

Harry hadn’t slept a wink all night. Bad dreams and an even worse reality. Eventually, he had gotten up and spent the bulk of the night drinking coffee in an all-night
café and listening to the police scanner for more news.

Wish granted.

It had come.

He parked his undercover cruiser on the east side of Kerr Street, directly across from the Fraserview Golf Club. A sense of horrified disbelief swept over him. In the far-off distance, he could
see the red gleaming lights of the fire engine and the greyish smoke that poured from the shell of a vehicle. Half-dazed, in disbelief and stupor, he walked up the road until he was flush with the
yellow police tape.

‘Media point’s on Killarney,’ the young cop guarding the scene told him.

Harry barely glanced at him. Keeping his eyes focused on the chaos ahead, he took out his wallet and showed the badge. The young cop nodded, took down the badge number, and lifted the tape for
him to enter.

But Harry did not budge. He just stood there and watched Striker and Felicia and the RCMP bomb specialist cluster together with Acting Deputy Chief Laroche. His eyes fell to the white sheet that
lay a few feet from the smouldering wreckage. ‘Is it true?’

‘Detective?’

‘Is that really him?’

The young cop nodded hesitantly. ‘Inspector Osaka is what they’re saying. But it’s all hush-hush right now. I really don’t know too much about it.’

Harry did not respond. He just stared at that white, wrinkled, dirty sheet. At the uneven lump in the centre of it. And he felt his world come further apart. A dizziness hit him. Spun his head
like a top. And the road looked like a tarmac on a blistering hot day – distorted, wavy, blurred.

With the heavy bass strum of blood pulsating through his temples, Harry turned away from the scene and walked back to the undercover cruiser. He tried to sort things out in his head, but
couldn’t.

When Keisha Williams had been targeted, he’d
thought
he’d known everything. Even more so when Koda’s ex-wife had been whacked. But now, if these people had gone after
Terry Osaka as well, then he and Koda had gotten it wrong. All wrong from the very start.

Sleeves hadn’t been setting the bombs.

But who then?

The explosion from the car bomb had sent Inspector Terry Osaka flying over twenty feet from the scene of impact, taking off his left arm in the process. A jagged piece of
aluminium, almost eight inches long, had embedded itself through the man’s left eye, leading the on-call coroner to believe that death for the inspector had been mercifully instantaneous.

With the body now removed from the scene, Striker performed a cursory search of the area. In the grass, a half-foot away from where the body had been found, were a series of – what
appeared to be – fingermarks.

Claw marks in the grass.

Striker looked at them for a long moment, and he prayed that the coroner was right about Osaka’s death being instantaneous. To think that the man might have been trying to pull himself
back to his house while dying was too horrific to consider.

Striker killed the thought. He refused to let grief derail his logic. The loss here was overwhelming and personal. So it was critical that he maintained a professional distance. Catching the
bombers was all that mattered now, and the first step in finding them was interviewing Osaka’s wife.

Striker looked at the small rancher on the far side of the road. It was so quaint. So
Mayberry.
White paint, blue trim, on a small ordinary lot with a white picket fence. It was the
North American dream – one that had mutated into a nightmare at sometime before five a.m. Somewhere within those walls, Mrs Osaka was in shock. In grief. And probably being counselled by the
Victim Services Unit.

How the hell had it ever come to this?

With Felicia still preoccupied with the neighbourhood witnesses and the ongoing canvass, Striker headed for the front door of the Osaka house.

It was the last thing he wanted to do.

Five minutes later, Striker sat on a cushy sofa with floral patterns and glanced numbly around the living room. It was small, barely big enough to hold the sofa and loveseat,
and modest. Only a few photographs decorated the room – kids that looked like grandchildren. They made Striker realize that he didn’t really know too much about Osaka’s personal
life.

Across from him sat Mrs Osaka.

Pearl, as she introduced herself.

Her face was so pale that she looked Caucasian. Her eyes were swollen from crying, and her hair still looked matted and out of place – as if she had not yet had time to drag a brush
through it. On the coffee table in front of her sat an untouched glass of saki, and next to it was a Princess Cruise Lines brochure, where retirees were laughing on deck.

Striker glanced at it, and Mrs Osaka noticed.

‘Terry wanted to see the Panama Canal,’ she explained. Her voice was but a whisper. ‘He’d been planning on doing it when he retired. He was just . . . just six months
away.’

Striker tried to meet her stare, but the woman’s eyes remained fixated on the happy couple on the brochure. He spoke anyway. ‘I knew your husband, Pearl, for twenty years. He was a
good man.’

The words seemed to wake the woman, and her eyes took on a pleading look. ‘Terry
was
a good man. He was a really, really good man. So why?
Why?
’ Her voice broke and
she cupped a hand over her mouth.

Striker refused to look away. ‘That’s what I’m going to find out. You got my word on that. I’m going to catch the people responsible for this.’ He gave her a moment
to gather herself, then continued. ‘Can you think of anything that might be related to this, Pearl? Anything odd that might have happened recently or even years ago? Maybe a file that went
bad, or a personal vendetta someone had against him? Some threats that were made but never reported?’

Mrs Osaka straightened her back. Folded her hands in her lap. Looked down. And for a moment, Striker thought he had lost her again.

‘There is nothing,’ she finally said. ‘I can think of nothing . . . All Terry ever did was work hard and be a good cop. If anything, he worked
too
hard and
too
much – like with this case you’re on now. He’d been working on it day and night. He wasn’t able to sleep or relax. It was always with him, always.
Always.
’

Striker wanted to comfort the woman but wasn’t sure what to say. Just as he was searching for a proper response, his cell phone buzzed with a work email. It surprised him because he had
most of the departmental sludge forwarded to his backup folder.

Only external emails found their way to his cell.

‘Is that important?’ Mrs Osaka asked.

‘I’d better just check it,’ he said.

He hit the email button. There on the screen was a message that left him cold:

The message was unsigned, but the sight of it made Striker’s pulse quicken.

‘Is everything all right, Detective?’

‘Just forensics,’ Striker said.

He put the cell away and stared at the woman before him. Her expression was one of despondency. Of pure loss. And it pained him. He wished there were something he could say to ease her grief.
All he could come up with was:

‘Your husband was a dedicated man, Pearl.’

She let out a sad laugh. ‘
Too
dedicated . . . This job was hard on him. He was slowly breaking down from it, and he didn’t even see it.’ As the woman spoke, a sense of
anger began to creep into her tone. ‘The department can’t expect a man to work morning to night every single day, Detective. Leaving at six, not getting home till two. Those are crazy
hours – crazy. They make a person ill. Make them unclear. And they make mistakes.’

Striker said nothing back.

Morning to night?

Leaving at six?

The words rang untrue. Sure, they’d all been putting in tough hours this last week. And yes, Osaka had been held over on many of the calls. But on all those days, Striker hadn’t seen
the inspector signed on until his shift had started. And that was at noon. He met the woman’s stare again. ‘What hours did you say your husband was working on this file?’

‘
All
hours. He left the house every morning before six and he sometimes didn’t get home till after one or two in the morning. It was ridiculous.’

Striker wrote this down in his notebook. ‘Did he say what part of the investigation he was working on so early? Or where he was going?’

‘Well, no, not really. Terry didn’t like to talk about his work. He thought it would worry me, and he was right about that – it did. But he did mention White Rock once or
twice.’

‘White Rock?’ Striker asked. That was far out of Vancouver’s jurisdiction, almost a half-hour drive into the valley. ‘When was that?’

‘Well . . . just yesterday.’

‘Do you know what he was doing out there?’

Mrs Osaka shook her head. ‘I just remember him mentioning that because it was such a far way to go, and he was so tired.’

Striker took note of the woman’s words, and he wrote it down in his notebook, then spent another half-hour conversing with the woman, going over all other possible leads. But nothing
seemed to hold any value. And when he was done, there was only one thought in his mind.

White Rock . . .

What the hell was Osaka doing way out there?

When Striker left the Osaka house, Felicia was standing by the front kerb waiting for him. The muscles under her skin were tight, and it made her face look hard and serious.
Upon seeing him, she beelined up the walk.

‘I got a message,’ she said.

‘From the bomber?’

She nodded, half surprised. ‘You get one too?’

‘We need to trace the email ASAP.’

Felicia frowned. ‘Already done.’

‘Through Ich?’

She gave him an irritated look. ‘Of course, Ich.’

‘And?’

She shook her head. ‘The message was sent through an offshore proxy. It’s completely untraceable. You can’t even reply. It won’t connect.’ She opened her email app
and showed Striker the message she had received.

It was the exact same.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘Why send this at all? What, is he taunting us?’

Striker thought it over. It didn’t seem that way. If anything, it was almost like the man was genuinely warning them off. The idea that they would ever stop the investigation was ludicrous
– a break from reality. It told much of the bomber’s mental state.

‘Nothing makes sense any more.’

Striker looked at the scene behind them, where Corporal Summer was now taking complete control of the latest bomb scene. Patrol was busy canvassing, forensic techs were filtering through the
debris, and the Media Liaison unit was busy dealing with the constantly amassing press.

They could do no more here.

‘Come on,’ Striker said. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here. We got a wildcat to see.’

They headed out east to the 2800 block of Pender Street with Striker at the wheel. That was where E-Comm was located. While en route, Felicia went through the CAD call remarks
of the Osaka bombing, looking for anything unusual.

‘Interesting,’ she said after a while. ‘Listen to this: not five minutes after Osaka was killed in the blast, a witness reported seeing a white van racing south on Kerr
Street.’

‘They get a plate number?’

‘No . . . Then, ten minutes after that, one of the Alpha units tried to pull over a white van in the Marpole area. But it bolted on them.’