himself had taught her. The police clerk muttered something about being only too willing to help if she needed anything and subsided into his chair. Caitlin made sure he was at least pretending to work before turning her attention to the information before her. What did she expect to find? She didn’t know exactly, but if it helped her get ahead of Jinnah it was worth it. Her wake-up call that morning had come courtesy of her producer, Ian, screaming about Hakeem’s exclusive plastered on the front page of the Tribune. Caitlin hated getting beat. She especially hated getting beat by Jinnah.
Her fingers flipped through files; two weeks, three weeks; four weeks … here. She kept her face carefully neutral as she scanned the document. Affidavit supporting an application for a search warrant. Sponsoring officer: Sergeant C. Graham. Certain activities known to me, occurring at public property adjacent to the intersection of Main and Terminal Streets, city of Vancouver….
“Holy shit!” Caitlin’s eyes bulged out as she read the bottom of the document. She glanced nervously back at the police clerk, but he was, thankfully, on the phone and hadn’t heard her astonished oath. She composed herself and pulled the file out of the cabinet, laying it in front of the police clerk.
“Do you think you could copy this for me, please?” she asked in a voice as saccharin as Jinnah’s coffee.
The clerk put his hand over the phone, solicitous. “Find what y’needed?” he said, taking the file from her.
Caitlin Bishop smiled her best 18 percent milk fat smile.
* * *
It was a short walk from the records room to the main lobby. The brief wait for the elevator to the third floor seemed to take an eternity, so did the momentary hesitation shown by the clerk behind the Major Crime counter. But it was actually a very, very short time before Caitlin Bishop found herself sitting across from Graham, studying the policeman’s face as he opened the file she had handed him, waiting for his reaction when he flipped to the final page. He didn’t disappoint her. It wasn’t much, just a slight raising of the eyebrows, but that was worth a thousand screams of anguish and denial from other interview subjects. Graham’s face, however, was a cipher as he turned his eyes on Caitlin.
“So what do you want from me?” he asked, voice neutral.
“You could start by explaining how Thad Golway’s name got onto the affidavits supporting the warrant.”
“Judges kinda like to know who’s swearing out the affidavit. They’re picky that way.”
“The names are supposed to be deleted from the document once they’re put in the public files. To protect the informants.”
That hit a bit close to home. Graham simply nodded as he tried to calculate the damage to the case, the department, to himself.
Caitlin fired another shot into the silence. “If Thad was working for you, what was he doing on the street? And who else might have been looking through these papers and found the same information?”
“You can check with records — they keep a list.”
“And they could guarantee that no one even slightly pissed off they’d been ratted on didn’t go in there or send someone a little more respectable looking to have a glance at the public record?”
Graham couldn’t, but he certainly wasn’t going to admit it. It had been a bastard of a morning, what with Jinnah’s bloody Yakshas story and Superintendent Butcher reaming him out for being so stupid as to try to manipulate the media. Now this. How hard could it be, to sever a name from a document?
“Extremely unlikely,” he lied. “It’s just a clerical error, that’s all. It’s been known to happen.”
“Why was Thad back on the street? Was that a clerical error too?”
Caitlin was vaguely disappointed when she saw the look of desperation fleet across Graham’s face. He was usually made of sterner stuff. There could be no mistaking the plea contained in his reply.
“Ms. Bishop, all I can tell you is this line of questioning is not helpful to the investigation.”
Despite her surprise at having won quite so easily, Caitlin Bishop managed to keep her smile in place as she retrieved the copied affidavit from Graham.
“I’ll be doing a stand-up on The Corner at noon,” she said, pausing by the door. “It’s up to you if you want to go on live with me or not.”
* * *
“Insurance, Craig. Or home renovation. That’s the ticket. Do you think Transport Canada really inspects these things or does the operator just print up a label on his computer, hmm?”
Normally, Graham would have appreciated Jinnah’s attempt at humour, but not today. His stomach was in knots and the rocking motion of the Aquabus wasn’t helping. The tiny passenger ferry that crossed False Creek was their special meeting place, used only when they had urgent matters to discuss. For Graham, things weren’t just urgent: they were desperate.
“When I asked for advice, Hakeem, I didn’t mean career counselling,” he said peevishly. “I gotta find some way to muzzle Caitlin Bishop.”
Jinnah took a drag of his cigarette and considered his friend’s face. Was it possible for a man to age so much in twenty-four hours? His hair looked greyer around the temples, there were lines that hadn’t been there just a day ago. But then, white guys were like that, he reflected. Like bananas: perfectly ripe one minute, gone off the next.
“You could always send Animal Enforcement down to her station — remind them that pit bulls in the city of Vancouver are supposed to be muzzled.”
“You’re a great help.”
Graham slumped against the fiberglass hull of the ferry. They were sitting in the stern, well out of earshot of the ferryman, the only other person on the vessel as it threaded is way through the yachts, sailboats, and power craft that poured through the narrow waterway as ceaselessly as the tide. Jinnah felt sorry for the policeman, truly, but what did Craig expect him to do about it? He tried summing up the situation.
“Caitlin Bishop has your balls in a vice, your super wants your head on a platter, and your career dangles by a thread. A very sorry state of affairs, my friend. I don’t see what I can do about it.”
“You could talk to her, Hakeem.”
Oh ho! Things must be worse than he’d thought. Jinnah’s inherent instincts, the ones that ensured his professional survival, quivered ominously.
“And just what do you expect me to tell her, Craig? ‘Listen, Caitlin, I want you to forget everything I’ve ever taught you about news? Just be nice to the policeman, darling, and the policeman will be nice to you?’ Sonofabitch —”
“You could tell her that there are some things more important than a scoop.”
“Aside from vast personal wealth, what would those be?”
“Like the greater good. Like catching Thad Golway’s killer.”
“My inherent instincts tell me that somehow she has already heard this speech.”
“She might listen to it, coming from you. She respects you,
