The Guilty (53 page)

‘Stanley Park – what a hell file that was.’

Striker nodded. ‘The worst. But Osaka did an excellent job on it. And as a result, four months later, he got promoted – and not just to sergeant, he jumped
two ranks
to
inspector. You know, that was only the second time in the department’s history that anyone has ever jumped two ranks.’ Striker grabbed the pistol one more time and starting doing a
function test to be sure it wouldn’t misfire in a time of need.

Felicia looked at him. ‘You’re not implying that Osaka dropped Archer’s file in order to get promoted, are you?’

Striker shook his head. ‘God, no. Osaka was a man of the highest integrity. I don’t think he had any idea that Archer was shot by one of our own guys. I mean they had a coked-up
biker with an AK-47 shooting at them. Archer got hit. It all seemed pretty straightforward.’

‘But Oliver thought the shooting was intentional.’

Striker nodded. ‘He still does. He thinks the squad murdered his father. He also thinks the department knew about this and covered it up to avoid public embarrassment. And he thinks that
Rothschild was the worst of the lot because he was the man who pulled the trigger.’

Felicia continued writing down the information. After a long moment, she put down the pen, shook out her fingers, and scanned through the six pages of notes. She blinked as if relieved and
horrified all at once.

‘It all fits,’ she said.

‘It does.’

‘You don’t seem overly happy about it.’

Striker reloaded the magazine with bullets and frowned. ‘Why should I be? So many people have died over this file – and I’ve got a really bad feeling about what’s
ahead.’

‘How so?’

‘Oliver Howell is a soldier, Feleesh. He’s been through hell. He’s seen war. And now he’s on a personal vendetta.’ Striker loaded the magazine into the pistol, held
it with two hands, and looked down the sights.

They were good.

Felicia looked at him with concern. ‘You’re worried he won’t go down without a fight.’

Striker nodded slowly.

‘It’s a suicide mission,’ he said sadly. ‘It has been from the start.’

The sun beat down upon the graveyard, turning the green grass a dying yellow-brown colour and bleaching the tombstones white. Despite the brightness, the sweltering heat of the
past week had suddenly evaporated and the air was oddly cool. When the wind hit Harry, he shivered.

In the northeast section, under the tall overhang of a dogwood tree, was the grave of his little boy – Joshua William Eckhart. The Boy Who Had Died.

Harry stood at the foot of the grave.

He had been standing there for a long time now. How long, he had no idea. But long enough that the joints of his knees ached. So far, all he’d done was stand there. Stand there and do
nothing, say nothing, think nothing. He just listened to the cool wind ruffle the white flowers of the dogwood trees, like it was the ghost of his boy trying to tell him something.

The headstone had Joshua’s name on it with the words ‘Beloved Son’ beneath. It was surrounded by four sculptured angels. Each one faced a different direction – north,
south, east and west – and each one brandished a sword.

The stone-and-granite artwork had been demanded by Kelly, Harry’s wife at the time – as if spending vast amounts of money they didn’t have would somehow diminish the grief and
culpability they both felt.

Harry had given her everything she needed back then. And it had been a mistake. The money they spent had done nothing to assuage their loss. All it did was put them another twenty-eight thousand
dollars into debt, and start the ball rolling on what had been their financial doom.

By the time everything was done – the funeral, the procession, the headstone, the flowers and the videos, and all the extra medical bills – Harry had found himself owing almost a
hundred grand. With Kelly not working and barely communicating in her stark depression, there had been no hope of paying off the debt. At the time, Harry really hadn’t cared. All he’d
known was a grief so overwhelming that suicide had been a daily thought.

It had been a dark time. Such a dark time.

Kind of like now.

He blinked, coming out of the sad reverie, and almost immediately the tears slipped from his eyes. He would have traded his life for Josh’s a thousand times over. Put a bullet through his
own head, killed another person – hell, he would have done damn near anything to have him back.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I love you
so much
.’

Harry started to shake because he knew now what he had to do. For his other son. For Ethan. The Boy Who Still Lived. And that meant he would probably never be back here again.

This was the final goodbye.

Harry wiped his eyes. He knelt down. He kissed the headstone. And then he got up and left the graveyard.

He never looked back.

It was exactly twelve-thirty, and Striker and Felicia had just grabbed a couple of green apple & cheddar sandwiches from the Kit’s Coffee House on Broadway. He sat
back in one of the outdoor patio chairs, unwrapped the cellophane and took a bite. The flavours were odd but good, and as he swallowed, his cell rang. He looked down at the screen and saw
Rothschild’s name.

He answered. ‘What’s up, Mike?’

‘They’re gone, they’re fucking gone,
he took my kids
!’

Striker’s throat clenched and the world around him ceased to exist. He dropped the sandwich and jumped to his feet.

‘Where are you?’

‘Your house. My kids, Striker – he’s got my fucking kids!’

‘Just calm down, Mike, calm down. How do you know—’

‘I went out for a smoke. Ten minutes – just ten fucking minutes.’

Striker tried to keep his voice steady. ‘Mike, listen to me. There’s a patrol cop out front. Go out there and talk to—’

‘The car’s down the road . . . they’re dead, the cops are dead, they’re all fucking dead!’

Striker’s blood turned ice cold. ‘Call it in.’

‘
No!
’ Rothschild screamed. ‘Do
not
call it in.’

‘Mike, you have to—’

‘He’ll kill them, he said he’ll kill them.’

‘You talked to him?’

‘He called, he fucking
called
.’

Striker felt the world collapsing all around him, and suddenly he was racing back to the cruiser with Felicia running after him. ‘Don’t move, Mike – we’re coming right
now!’

But the line was already dead.

With Felicia providing cover, Striker raced up the steps of his porch, kicked open the front door, and moved inside.

Too late. The house was empty.

Rothschild and the children were gone.

‘We have to call this in,’ Felicia said. Her voice was unusually high and tremor-filled.

‘Just give me a goddam second,’ Striker said.

He stood in the horrible stillness of the den and fought not to grip his gun too tightly. Behind him, the sound of Felicia’s heavy gasps filled the room, broken by only the deep steady
tocks of the grandfather clock – each one a reminder that precious seconds were being lost.

Striker paced the room, tried to think.

In here. In my house . . .

He took the children from my own house . . .

He stopped pacing, scanned his surroundings, looked for any evidence left behind. When he saw nothing, he walked back outside and looked there. On the welcome mat, trapped in the rough wool-like
tendrils, was another dusting of that same whitish powdery substance he had seen in the mud by the docks and again on the window ledge at Rothschild’s former home.

Striker knelt down, studied it.

Once again, it looked like concrete. But
greyer.
With tiny bits of white in it. He reached down, picked some of it up, rubbed it between his fingers. It looked and felt like nothing
more than dirt and dust.

He took out his cell phone and called Noodles.

‘Did you get an answer yet – from the lab?’

The man was lost. ‘Huh? On what?’

‘That goddam white substance!’

‘The powder, oh yeah, we got the results.’

‘Well, why the hell didn’t you call then?’

‘Because it was
nothing
.’ Noodles made an exasperated sound. ‘Jesus Christ, Shipwreck, it’s just fucking dust.
Dust
. That’s it. What the hell is
up your ass today?’

‘It’s not like any dust I’ve ever seen before. What else did they tell you?’

‘Nothing, that’s it – just dust.’

Striker hung up on Noodles and dialled the lab himself. Being Saturday, they were still open, but the technician who had done the actual testing was not available. Striker managed to get hold of
the head boss. He explained the direness of the situation, and within sixty seconds, received a phone call back from the primary technician. The woman seemed perplexed by the severity of the
situation.

‘It was just ordinary dust,’ she explained.

‘Then why the strange white-grey colour?’

‘Well, that’s because it’s been exposed to quite a high heat, and for a long time, I would say – it’s all in the report we forwarded yesterday.’

‘We don’t have that report yet,’ Striker said. ‘And minutes are critical. Now what kind of heat and what kind of times?’

The woman made an uncomfortable sound. ‘That, I can’t really tell you with any certainty. But it would have to be
quite
hot.’

‘How hot? Like as hot as a foundry or something like that?’

‘I wouldn’t think so. Some of those foundries can reach sixteen hundred degrees Celsius. That would be
exceedingly
hot. Plus, you would then find contaminants within the
dust – bronze or magnesium, copper or tin, steel or—’

‘I get it,’ Striker said. ‘Then where?’

The tech made a frustrated sound. ‘Well,
any
factory setting where industrial machines are hard at work, especially ones that have boilers or an ongoing distillation process
– oil refineries; garbage incinerators; recycling plants; heck, even some food processing plants. The list is really endless.’

Striker felt his hopes deflating, felt the seconds ticking away. ‘I’ll call you back – stay by the phone.’ He hung up and turned to Felicia. ‘Location-wise, if you
had to make a guess, where would you think this guy would be hiding out?’

‘Geographically speaking?’ She turned silent for a moment. ‘It would have to be somewhere relatively close by. He’s hurt. He’s got two little kids with him. And his
sole focus lies here in Vancouver.’

Striker nodded. ‘I agree completely.’

Felicia flipped back through her notebook pages. ‘That Alpha unit had a white van take off on them just ten minutes after the Osaka bombing, remember? It was racing west on Southwest
Marine Drive. From Collingwood Street.’

Striker mapped out the area in his head. ‘There’s nothing west of there but the Shaughnessy Golf Club, the Musqueam Reserve, and the university grounds. After that, it’s all
ocean.’

‘And I don’t recall there being any factories on the reserve,’ Felicia said. ‘Same thing goes for the golf club.’

Striker nodded. ‘But there are some on the university grounds.’

Felicia continued flipping back through her notes. ‘And wasn’t that the way the bomber fled from Rothschild’s house? On Thursday morning? He ran into Pacific Spirit –
that park is how big?’

‘Seven hundred acres,’ Striker said. ‘And he did so without a getaway vehicle.’

‘So either he hid in the woods and waited us out – which seems highly unlikely given that we had police dogs tracking him – or . . .’

‘He’s hiding out somewhere on the university grounds.’

Striker grabbed the laptop and used Google to bring up a map of the University of British Columbia. He scanned the grounds for any possible locations where Oliver might be hiding. By the time he
was done, he had narrowed it down to three possible areas – the Food Systems buildings, the Applied Sciences grounds, or the UBC Hospital. Each one of them had numerous boilers and areas of
constant high heat temperatures.

He called back the technician. She answered on the first ring and Striker didn’t even say hello. ‘The university hospital, the Food Systems, or the Applied Sciences buildings –
do any of those match?’

Her response was defeating. ‘There would be contaminants,’ she explained. ‘Especially in the dust from the Applied Sciences buildings and the hospital. As for the Food Systems,
that would depend on where the dust came from – it’s quite a big facility.’ She turned silent for a moment as she thought it over. ‘Then again, because of the type of
machinery involved and the health regulations required, I can’t see the dust coming from there either.’

Striker ground his teeth. There was also the issue of the heat being
constant
. He closed his eyes. Struggled to calm his thoughts. He felt like an overheated boiler, ready to explode
from the growing pressure.

A boiler . . .

And then he realized where.

He snapped his eyes back to the map of the university grounds, but did not see what he was looking for. No icons, no writing.

But it was there. He knew it. That one place out west, on the university grounds, where heat was a constant factor. Where no one would ever find Oliver. And where the dust he tracked would have
no telltale impurities within it.

A place where it was
always
hot and humid. A place where the pipes could reach a hundred and eight degrees Celsius.

He stood up and met Felicia’s stare.

‘He’s in the steam tunnels.’

Harry drove towards the southwest section of Vancouver. The more he thought about his situation, the more he realized there was but one way out. In order for his family to have
any hope of a peaceful future, it was going to require a violent present.

When he reached the Marpole district, the GPS icon on his tracking display was a steady red colour. It told him that Striker and Felicia were in the 4400 block of Camosun Street. Just across
from St Patrick’s High School. They were stationary.