even though it was 6:ffl P.M., rush hour showed no sign of abating. There was a bumper-to-bumper stream of traffic flowing in both directions, and Cambie, just to my right, was gridlock.
I turned west on 12th Avenue and headed for the next major artery — Oak Street. I knew I could jog up Oak to 33rd, then loop back around and jog downhill for the last bit of my run. Given the traffic, the damage to my lungs from pollution would far outweigh any benefits derived from the exercise, but that damage wouldn’t show up for years, and I tend to be a short-term girl.
The first couple blocks were tough, but then my body and brain began to loosen up and move into that altered state caused by lactic acid overload. By the time I reached Oak and had started the uphill climb, I was absorbed in the details of the case, moving through them in a process akin to free association. I started with Edwards. What did I know about him, other than he was a bit of a jerk with a tendency to interrupt? For one thing he was an American. That had interesting possibilities. Americans studying salmon in Canada would be, to some degree, persona non grata, given the volatility of the issue on the international stage. Maybe somebody wanted him to go back to where he came from.
Or maybe he was part of an American plot to discredit the Network. Someone in Washington was upset by the direction things were taking and Edwards was promised tenure and a big fat grant south of the border to cause a little trouble. We’d do it if our interests were at stake, so why not them? But whose interests were at stake? I’d have to find out.
Or maybe Edwards was just jealous. It wouldn’t be the first time that a junior researcher had accused an established scientist of fraud: a sort of sour grapes approach to career advancement.
But how did any of these possibilities tie in with the file disappearing? I couldn’t see the connection, which raised again the possibility that the disappearance was a random event, unrelated to the investigation itself. The problem was, every time I settled into that conclusion something didn’t feel right, as if I was overlooking an important fact that was sitting right before my eyes.
I had a brief stint with the RCMP, which is to say that I completed my training and was honourably discharged to spare certain people certain embarrassment if they tried to jerk me around. It didn’t matter. I’d realized long before the end of training that it wasn’t the life for me. While I had balked at the militaristic training, I did manage to come away with some critical skills that have saved my butt on more than one occasion. The most important, beaten into me by a brilliant and marginally sadistic crime-scene investigator, was to trust my intuition, so when this niggling uneasiness about the missing file kept reoccurring I paid close attention.
I had begun mentally prodding the little doubt, seeing if I could crack it open, when I was momentarily distracted by the aroma of quality cappuccino escaping from a little café. I filed the location away under caffeine then returned to my uneasiness, trying another tack. Why, for example, was I focused on Edwards? Nationalistic prejudice? I consider myself above that, especially since I know from experience that fraud, dishonesty, and deceit are pan-national characteristics. The unifying force is greed, and that is neither cultural nor hereditary.
So what had led me, perhaps unconsciously, to Edwards?
Maybe it was Riesler’s credentials. It was hard to believe that a gold-medallist from the University of Toronto, a Rhodes scholar in biochemistry, and a tenured professor two years after his dissertation would embezzle money. It’s not like he lacked research grants, and he had a good salary, so unless he was supporting an expensive mistress or had an ugly addiction it wasn’t about money.
By this time I was winded from the uphill climb, and starting to feel a stitch in my side. When I get to thinking and running at the same time, as the thinking speeds up so do the legs, but they don’t have the stamina of my neural tissue. I hit 25th and made a bad decision, because, God knows, I needed the exercise after all those hours on the plane. But, instead of continuing to 33rd, I turned left, cutting my run short a few blocks. I could always blame it on the pollution.
As I jogged along, rhythmically panting in time with my legs, my brain fell into a meditative chant of “Why Edwards, why Edwards, why Edwards,” timed with the intake and exhalation of my breath. After several blocks I wanted to change the channel, but as usual my brain resisted. Finally, in desperation, my unconscious cut in. Because of the reference search, you idiot.
Huh? What reference search? And then I remembered. Attached to the initial letter of complaint was, as I had noted at the time, a very inadequate reference search. It was inadequate because whoever had done the search had only focused on Edwards, calling up his publications for the last two years, and that was very fifth-floor. A poorly done search focusing on the researcher who had the least political sway.
When I hit the corner of 25th and Cambie I remembered something else. The search results had been clipped to Edwards’s first letter of complaint, but the date of the search hadn’t been entered in the action log attached to the file. So when exactly had the search been done? I picked up speed and headed downhill.
Back in the hotel room I didn’t bother with stretching, another bad decision, but went directly to my briefcase. I pulled out the evidence kit and grabbed the magnifying glass, one of the small, high-powered jobs used by geologists. Then I opened the salmon file and flipped to the back. I looked up at the ceiling, said a brief prayer to the goddess of forensic evidence, then looked down at the reference search. It had been printed on a laser printer rather than on the large-format dot-matrix that the National Science Library used. That meant that someone had logged into the library from a remote location and had searched the database from there. And whoever it was had decided that Edwards was the guy to investigate rather than the infinitely more prestigious Dr. Riesler.
On the top of the page was a header, but the type was so tiny it was unreadable. I pulled the magnifying glass from its case, held my breath, and positioned it over the header: Aquatic Sciences Citation Index search time 7 min 32 sec 1342 h Saturday 13 Oct 2001. Thank you for using Canada’s National Science Library.
I let out a long breath. That’s what I had hoped for. Proof that the file was still active well after Patsy claimed she had returned it to Lydia. Active enough, in fact, for somebody to come in on a Saturday afternoon and conduct the search. To do that, the user had to have a special account with the library — they were charged by the minute for search time — as well as a reasonable knowledge of how the database worked. In my job, it is a comfort to know that nothing in the modern world is free of paperwork.
I smiled. Where there’s paperwork, there’s a paper trail, and no one is better than Sylvia at tracing a paper trail.
chapter five
The Thai Kitchen was up Cambie within walking distance of the hotel. I showered, put on a clean pair of jeans, and pulled on my all-purpose leather jacket. I left the laptop hidden under my shirts but took the file and my briefcase with me. The traffic was still imposing, but it had eased up enough for the cars and trucks to move along at a steady, if slow, pace. I took my time walking up Cambie, checking out the wood-oven pizzerias, upscale Chinese take-outs, and clothing boutiques.
The interior of the restaurant was dark, lit mainly by flickering candle lamps, so it took me a moment to locate Sylvia. She was sitting by the window sipping an amber liquid from a tiny glass. She looked like an exotic gypsy who at any moment might pull out a deck of tarot cards and lay them across the table. I’d expected her to be wan and pale, but from where I stood she looked vibrant, almost excited. I crossed the room and wrapped my arms around her, kissing her Montreal style, once on each cheek, then I slipped into the chair on the other side of the table.
“I thought you weren’t allowed,” I said, nodding to the glass.
