The River Killers (35 page)

We took the elevator to the twelfth floor and walked down the hall to Griffith's office suite. When we entered, his secretary looked at us from the other side of the counter, and I inquired politely as to whether or not Mr. Griffith was in.

“Yes, he's in, but I'm afraid you don't have an appointment. You can't see him without an appointment. Regulations.”

“People are more important than regulations. It's time everyone in this building realized that.” I opened the gate in the counter and started down the hall to Fleming's office. The secretary was making alarmed noises but she stopped when Jerome flashed their badges.

I didn't knock. I entered Griffith's office, where he was sitting at his desk, no papers in front of him, just sitting there looking serious and important.

“Mr. Swanson, I'm afraid I can't talk to you now. I'm waiting for a very important call.”

“Reginald Sanderson won't be reporting in.”

He considered this. “That's unfortunate.”

“Especially for him. Fleming, may I call you Flem? I've taken a real interest in your career lately. Why, just last night I was having a chat with your old colleague, Alistair Crowley. You know of course that he survived his encounters, first with Jerry Mathias, and last night with poor Reggie. Crowley was able to fill me in on many of your little secrets. I also have his computer files and an amusing video that he shot of you at the lab, doing deceptive things with dead rabbits. How do you think the Minister will react to your unorthodox experiments?”

“You amuse me, Mr. Swanson. But there are two things that insulate me from your juvenile threats: important friends and a very good pension.”

“Fleming, you're just going through the motions. Crowley is ready to deal with us. We already know everything about Project Chimera. But there's one little matter that you could help us with. In 1986, a person named Billy Bradley showed up at the lab with one of your mutant sockeye, and then disappeared. Crowley is hinting that you killed him.”

“Crowley is an insubordinate peon! He wasn't there that night.” He stopped suddenly.

“And you know that because you were?”

“I need to talk to Crowley.”

“That would be difficult.” I didn't tell him why.

“If you won't let me talk to Crowley, you need to give him a message. Tell him there's been an administrative change. Operational control has been delegated upwards.”

“That sounds to me like you're copping out.”

He didn't reply and I didn't relent. “We know you faked the results of the toxicity test. You allowed poisonous sockeye to be released into the wild. I wonder how many people have died from eating them.” There was still no response. I tilted my head back and stared at him. He sat motionless with his hands flat on the desk in front of him. He was still staring at them when I left. The two Jeromes followed me out and escorted me back to the car.

I phoned Louise. “You get that?”

“He didn't give much away.”

“Yeah, but he's worried. He wants to talk to Crowley.”

She replied, “Let him worry. The more the better. Tommy's got him covered like a blanket. If he moves, we'll know where, when, and how.”

“So now we wait.”

“Right.”

“Shall we wait at my place or yours?”

“I don't want to come between you and Jerome,” she said. “But I'll meet you for a drink after work. Lounge of the Hotel Georgia.” She hung up.

I turned to Jerome. “We've got some time to kill. What do you want to do?”

“Let's not go for sushi,” one of them said petulantly.

Before I could make a clever reply, Tommy's voice came over the radio. “He's on the move. In a cab, south on Burrard. I'll get the drop-off.”

I hoped that Griffith had
finally cracked. We had scared him out of the office and into the field. Now we'd see how he would handle himself in the real world. Tommy came back on the radio. “He's going to the airport, south terminal.”

I grabbed the mike. “He's heading for Bella Bella. We need to beat him there. You guys got air support?”

Louise came on. “The next flight will only get him to Port Hardy this evening. He'll have to overnight and then catch the next Bella Bella flight at eleven tomorrow morning. Our pilot is on standby and we can take off in an hour.

“Okay. I'll see you there. We can wait until Griffith checks in, just to confirm my instinct is right, and then we'll take off and beat him up there.”

“Danny, why is he going to Bella Bella?”

I didn't have to think. It was as if Griffith had suddenly lost his cloak of bureaucratic invisibility and I could see him clearly for the first time. “They've destroyed most of the physical evidence from Project Chimera, and most of the human players are dead. There's one last thing that could link him to a crime, not the murders, but the release of poisonous fish into the environment.”

There was a pause while Louise engaged in the same logical exercise that I had just completed. She didn't break a sweat. “Crowley had been helping Rose Wilson update and digitize the Heiltsuk health records. Why? He wasn't exactly a public service kind of guy.”

“You've got it. Part of Crowley's job, aside from monitoring all the field data, was to see if local consumers were suffering any health effects from the mutant fish. They played this charade in the name of responsibility, even though Griffith and Crowley both knew these fish could kill people.”

I could hear the disbelief in her voice. “And Griffith is worried that Crowley found evidence in the Heiltsuk health center records that people were being affected. He's going to destroy those records.”

“Yes, and now's our chance to get him. He's out of the big corner office and running around with no protective cover.”

“I'm going to phone Rose Wilson and tell her we'll need to meet with her. She'll want to know why we want to poke around in her records.”

“Okay. See you at the airport.”

The
RCMP
transportation budget had obviously been cut. I was expecting a sleek and shiny jet but all they had was a single-engine prop job with
RCMP
markings: sort of a semi-stealth Cessna. However, the pilot wore the approved
Top Gun
shades, which enabled him to get us to Bella Bella without incident.

Louise had arranged to meet Rose Wilson first thing in the morning. There was nothing for us to do except retire to Louise's cozy little house and make love by the light of the fire. In the morning, we sipped coffee and gazed appreciatively at each other. Finally, Louise stood up and moved behind me to nuzzle my neck, which I found extremely pleasant.

“It's time to go and meet Rose.”

“She's going to want an explanation of the eat-no-sockeye edict. Also, why Griffith wants access to her records, and why she can't let him anywhere near them. I think we have to tell her pretty much the whole story.”

Louise nodded. “You're right. And Rose is well versed in confidentiality concerns, so she won't blab anything she doesn't have to.”

We met Rose in her office at the health center. She greeted us warmly, almost like family. I think Rose considered most people to be sort of family. That made her reaction to the story all the more painful to me. She tried to hide her disappointment, but I knew I'd failed her. We all had. Rose had expected me, us,
DFO
, to protect, ‘her people' and we hadn't. Finally, she raised her eyes and spoke quietly. “Eight months ago my nephew, Sammy, died after experiencing convulsions. We thought it was meningitis. I can remember similar cases over the last few years. You're telling me they died because
DFO
was experimenting with genetically altered sockeye?”

“Crowley and Griffith were operating on their own, Rose. Their work wasn't sanctioned.” Somehow that didn't make me feel any better.

“And this Fleming Griffith is coming here? To destroy some of my files?”

Louise answered. “He'll be coming off the eleven-thirty flight. He'll want to meet you.”

“And I want to meet him. I definitely want to meet him.”

“If you could stall him, it would help,” I said. “Tell him the building is closed for cleaning or something. We'll be watching him and he might lead us to other evidence, physical evidence that would tie him to the sockeye experiment.”

Rose considered this. “There's a potlatch this weekend. All my staff are involved in the preparations. I'll tell him he can't have access to the files until Monday.”

Louise stood and placed her hand on Rose's shoulder. After a while she said, “I'm sorry, Rose. I'm sorry we didn't catch on to this earlier. But we're closing in on Griffith now. He's got four days to stew over this. He'll do something stupid and we'll be there to nail him.”

Rose didn't say anything and after a bit we left. I had to stay out of sight so Griffith wouldn't spot me. I went back to Louise's house, while she went to alert her constables and arrange their coordination with Tommy's two surveillance guys who would be on the plane with Griffith.

I sat in Louise's kitchen and stared out over the water. The water taxi came around the corner from Shearwater. A herring skiff ran across to the other side of the bay and stopped.
Checking a crab trap
, I thought. Two seine boats made a stately transect from south to north and exited out into Seaforth Channel.
Heading home to Rupert,
I thought.
How very normal. There's no way those waters could be harboring mutant sockeye produced by mad scientists working in secret. Poisonous mutant sockeye that kill people.

When I'd almost convinced myself that it was all a bad dream, I turned my thoughts toward Fleming Griffith. In spite of the confident façade I was displaying for Tommy and Louise, doubts were creeping in about our ability to nail him. Best-case scenario: we'd find evidence in the records that people had died from unexplained causes. Could we link the deaths to eating the sockeye? Probably not. When Griffith got access to the files, he would probably try to destroy them. So what? Shredding files wasn't in the Criminal Code of Canada. We could probably damage his career. He'd be forced to retire and live on his pension. That would show him!

My growing depression was alleviated somewhat when Louise walked in bearing dinner in a box marked “pizza.” The labeling was commendably accurate. As we engaged in slice allocation, Louise brought me up to speed. Griffith had pressed Rose for access to the files but had been refused. He was now wandering around town looking angry and out of place.

“What now?” I asked.

“He'll probably go over to Shearwater to stay in the hotel. It occurred to us he might try to take a boat to one of their locations we haven't discovered yet. We left a couple of bait skiffs at the wharf. They've got hidden transmitters so he'll be easy to follow.”

“How's Rose?”

“She's hard to read. She spent a long time talking to Griffith, pretending she didn't know why he wanted access to the files. He made up a story about looking for cases of red tide poisoning.”

“I hope you're right about her being discreet,” I said. “If she told anyone what Griffith had done, he'd probably be dead by morning. We wouldn't want that. Would we?”

“Of course not. I don't want to have to arrest anyone for doing my job.”

“Doing your job?”

“Justice, Danny. Bringing Griffith to justice. And that's my job and no one else's.” She went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of Riesling. For the next half hour, we interspersed sips of wine with bouts of serious nuzzling. Then the phone rang. Louise answered it and listened for a second before swearing quietly. She slumped back into her chair.

“That was Rose. Griffith is at her place and he's taken ill. They're moving him to the clinic.”

I was shocked. This wasn't part of our game plan. I thought for a moment. “You go to the clinic and check on Griffith. I'm going to talk to Rose. Where's her house?”

Her answer was muffled by her hands covering her face. “Two houses down from the school. Opposite side of the street.”

I left in a hurry. When I got to Rose's house, she was sitting placidly on her porch. I took a second chair and sat down beside her. “What happened, Rose?”

“Mr. Griffith is a guest in our village. I did the necessary thing and invited him to supper. I meant to take a spring salmon out of the freezer, but I must have made a mistake and unthawed a sockeye.”

I sat for a while, trying to think of the proper words. “Rose . . .” Nothing came to me, so I left. I tried really hard to ignore the dead cat next to the stairs.

I got to the clinic quickly and was shown to Griffith's room. A nurse and a doctor were paying more attention to him than he deserved. Louise observed from a corner by the window. The doctor issued some orders to the nurse, along the lines of “I don't know what the hell he's got but watch him closely,” and he left.

Griffith looked awful, which cheered me immensely. His usual pallor had taken on a grayish tinge. He was sweating and panting and on the verge of panic. I waited until the nurse had left. “Flem, buddy, I think I know what's ailing you. I think you know too.”

No response.

“Flem, buddy, does the phrase chickens come home to roost have any meaning to you?” No response except for quicker breathing and dilated pupils.

“Flem, buddy-oh, several people, we don't know how many, have died from this and it's entirely and completely and absolutely your fault. Any thoughts on that?”

No response but moans and momentary spasms.

I leaned in over him. “Crowley's got the antidote.”

His eyes focused on me. I offered him the deal, which was as honorable as his entire career had been. “Tell me what happened to Billy Bradley, and I'll try to hook you up with Crowley.” I didn't care if God wouldn't forgive me. I hoped my Mom would, but she didn't know.