The Guilty

‘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 ru

But the line was already dead.

One Hundred and Forty-Two

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, sca

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 sca

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 tu