Torque (2 page)

“And the cause of the aneurysm would be?” She
had started taking notes.

The coroner put down his own pen and eased
back in the chair. “Although aneurysms can be an inherited trait,
occurrences are often increased by factors such as diet, or
lifestyle.”

Collier paused. Something he’d just said had
effected a change in the lawyer’s demeanour.

“When you say lifestyle, are you suggesting
anything in particular?”

Well-aware that lawsuits could spring from
the least expected sources, Collier mustered back to his
paperwork.

“Apart from obvious signs of obesity such as
high body fat, and poor muscle tone,” he scanned the forms, “blood
tests isolated a variety of chemicals. Some known to be prescribed,
but there were traces of other substances we have yet to
label.”

He looked up, half-expecting an ‘objection’
from the counsel. None came so he pressed on. “Toxicology will
pigeonhole everything, eventually, but it could save time and
hospital funds if we could narrow things down a bit.”

Her hard grey eyes locked onto his but she
shook her head slowly. “Sorry, I can’t help you there.”

Collier made a display of recording her
answer then said, “The deceased does not appear to have been
married. Do you know if he had a steady partner?”

“Not one that he told me about.”

“Well, at least that fits.”

“With what. His lifestyle, again?”

“No. With syphilis.”

Collier had never seen a mannequin’s face
flush. Until now. To her credit she didn’t allow the change in
temperature to crack the stony expression.

“Should you be telling me this, Doctor?”

“Well, Ms. Reis, if you should happen to come
across any of Mr. Aird’s recent sexual partners, while attending to
his affairs, you might discreetly advise they visit their local
practitioner.”

This got the slightest of nods. The blush had
mostly faded though her cheeks retained a tinge of rouge. Collier
decided to press the advantage.

“Might I inquire as to the extent of your
professional relationship with the deceased?”

“Roger—Mr. Aird—had engaged me to survey the
legal aspects of some patents he was hoping to file. He was a
research scientist for a pharmaceutical firm. Perhaps he could have
ingested something there.”

“Are you suggesting that the company he
worked for encouraged self-experimentation?”

Back to her original shade, Reis was once
again expressionless. “I highly doubt it. Besides, a corporation
like Simedyne would have made him sign the usual waivers.” Her eyes
sparkled. “However, there’s a little of Jekyll and Hyde in all of
us. Isn’t that so, Doctor.”

Collier gave a flat smile. It was a trait of
the medical profession he’d seen more of than he cared to admit. He
slid the contents of the manila envelope across the desk.

“Here are Mr. Aird’s personal effects.” He
placed a checklist beside the envelope. “One set of keys, a pair of
glasses, a watch, a ring, a medic alert bracelet, a wallet, and a
pocket calculator. Please sign on the line.”

Reis gave each item a cursory glance, checked
it against the list, and then with a slim silver pen slashed a
bleeding blue signature across the bottom of the page.

“It’s also a common practice, Ms. Reis, to
allow the hospital to launder the deceased’s clothes and give them
to a charity. The family usually provides another outfit for
memorial services.”

Her gesture was dismissive.

“Whatever. Burlington’s Harrowport &
Dynes will collect Mr. Aird—and they’d better be collecting all of
him.”

Collier managed to snare a couple more
scratches on necessary forms before the dead man’s flotsam was
scooped back into the envelope and dropped into the black case. A
snap of catches was followed by a curt “Thank you. Goodbye.”

Her exit set off a rapid staccato of heel
clacks that ricocheted down the hall. Collier picked up her card
and flexed it for a moment between his fingers. Then, forcefully,
as if crushing a scarab he stapled it to the case folder. Signed
organ donor card or not, her particular brand of shit he could do
without.

Speaking of which, he picked up the phone.
His wife’s voice was neutral. Not the non-committal type of
neutral. The mine-laden type of neutral. His diplomatic skills had
come up short in dealing with the lawyer but unless he watched his
step, that would just be a skirmish compared to what he could face
on the homefront.

Hopefully there’d be some champagne left,
otherwise it was going to be a long and chilly night.

== == ==

The sliding glass doors barely had time to
hiss open. Reis strode through, tossed her head back, and inhaled
the cool night air.

“Unbelievable! That bastard!” She spat the
words at a dark sky that looked like it might spit back. Aird was
such a jerk-off, how dare he die just when everything was coming
together. And, being the prick that he was, he’d said nothing about
syphilis! A while back, she’d suspected Aird as the cause of a
throat infection but, knock on wood, there had been no lasting
indication of a sexually transmitted disease.

Parked near the door, in a spot reserved for
Doctor somebody or other, the BMW chirped when she pressed the
remote to unlock it. She slid behind the wheel and pulled the door
closed, and then emptied the envelope's contents onto the passenger
seat.

Aird’s brown cowhide wallet was in need of
re-stitching and so full of paper it wouldn't stay folded. From the
billfold section, her long fingers extracted an untidy wad of
paper. Parking vouchers, ticket stubs for Hamilton Bulldogs hockey
games, and several credit purchase receipts. It appeared that the
fat man had favoured his Diner's Club card.

Tossing those into the briefcase she
concentrated on the wrinkled batch of currency. The notes totaled
two hundred and forty-five dollars.

That left one item. A clear plastic sleeve
about three inches wide contained a die-cut piece of vinyl the
thickness of a fridge magnet. The shape, known as a butterfly, was
basically rectangular. On one side, thin black and white stripes
ran diagonally across the ‘wings’. The other side had backing paper
over a layer of adhesive. Reis needed only a second to realize what
it was.

“Son of a bitch!”

She threw the empty wallet against the
windshield then froze when she heard a rattling of keys beside her
door. It was the coroner—Collins? Collard?—getting into the car
beside her. He’d seen the piles of bills on the seat. His look of
disapproval said ‘typical lawyer’, but the voice penetrating the
glass said, “That spot is for hospital staff only. No
exceptions!”

The blow of percussion from the heavy door of
his Lincoln rocked her car, then with more acceleration than was
necessary he left her sitting next to an empty space. Before the
sedan’s taillights had blazed a path to the exit, Reis had the
wallet re-stuffed and into her briefcase.

She snatched up Aird's keys as the lid fell
and flipped through them. The doctor might not approve but Roger
Aird now belonged to her. More specifically, she now owned his
stake in their joint venture. The last few hours had required some
deft maneuvering but she’d always planned to cut Aird loose when
the time was right. And the black and white patch suggested that
the timing of his death, while premature, was not as inconvenient
as she had first thought.

There was still work to do, and some elements
would be harder to accomplish now he was gone, but she’d come too
far to be stalled by a dead fat guy.

“You may have checked out, Aird,” she said,
carefully selecting one key from the others. “But you owe me and
you’d better believe that you’re going to pay me.”

CHAPTER
3

Roger Aird’s address was that of a
one-storey pigsty in Hamilton's industrial North End. Its neighbour
was a mere two metres to the east. There were train tracks to the
west and a bottle factory across the road. Fifteen minutes after
leaving the hospital Reis parked street-side and toggled the BMW's
alarm. It was five paces from the curb to the front door and the
first key she tried unlocked it.

She flicked the hall switch and a bare bulb
revealed that the place had changed little in the past two months.
Habitual neglect was still the theme though now it had the added
air of disposal. The living room had the usual trappings of the
bachelor pad; overstuffed recliner chair and matching leather sofa,
multi-component entertainment centre with monolithic speakers, and
dust on all surfaces save for those that had been recently sat on
or brushed against.

Her eyes were drawn to the pressboard
bookshelf against the back wall. It still held a few paperbacks and
hardbound volumes as well as a smattering of unrelated items: mug,
screwdriver, and an empty shoebox. But something was different.
There was a bare shelf where a computer monitor used to sit. The
processing unit had been in the closed storage area beneath and a
keyboard kept on top of that. All were absent, and that was too
bad. Computers were good sources of information.

Stepping over trash on the floor she crossed
to the kitchen and gave it a perfunctory glance. Dirty linoleum.
Dirty counter. Dirty sink. Dirty window. She never could understand
how the guy, who had been trained to work in a sterile environment,
could choose to live like this. She turned her attention to the
rest of the house.

Across the living room, on the opposite wall,
an empty doorframe left no doubt as to where the bathroom was. The
missing door, now a makeshift table on top of two kitchen chairs,
held a grease-stained pizza box and a scattering of dog-eared
magazines with the theme of either science or sex.

The small bedroom had grimy walls, an
unhinged closet door, and a soot-covered window overlooking the
tracks. Above the unmade bed a large brown watermark stained the
ceiling. Naked, her clothes scissored to shreds, she’d once spent
several hours watching that ugly stain swirl and morph into shapes
both grand and grotesque while Aird’s narcotic cocktail had made
her pliable to whatever his perverse imagination had come up with.
That had been part of the bargain. Bargain was not the right
word—agreement. He hadn’t been cruel, but the memory of that
session made her shudder and she turned to leave.

Her spiked heel caught the corner of a sheet
lying on the floor. She looked down and spied the monitor of the
missing computer half-buried by a pile of dirty clothes beside the
bed. An odd place for it to be, yet it sat on the processing unit
and the whole setup whirred to life when she hit the power
switch.

The set was so ancient it had a slot for the
original 8” floppy discs. Alphanumeric code scrolled pedantically
down the green screen as the CPU processed a memory check and boot
operation. Reis slipped off her jacket, grabbed a pillow from the
bed and sat cross-legged on the floor to wait. The floppy drive
whirred and lines of a simple Autoexec.bat file appeared. Soon, the
flashing cursor came to rest at a C:> prompt. There were no
user-friendly icons. Not even a mouse to navigate the screen. All
input would have to be via the keyboard, which Reis put on her
lap.

It had been eons since she’d last typed DOS
commands, but remembering the fundamentals she keyed DIR /P and,
after a moment, a short list of simple programs for creating
documents, spreadsheets, and simple databases appeared. It was
unlikely that Aird would have used this relic for lab work, but
some file dates were within the past month and could shed light on
what her ex-partner had been up to.

There were income and expense details,
including bank transactions from the previous week. The numbers
would make more sense if she had a bank statement printout and Reis
remembered there were documents in the living room. She made to get
up but instead of pushing off the hardwood floor her hand settled
onto a moist crusty mass. With a cry of disgust, she ripped the
blanket from the bed and quickly rubbed the sickening mess off her
palm.

“I'll have you buried in a cesspit, for that,
you bugger!” She cast her anger at the ceiling watermark then threw
the blanket across the room. She rose carefully and tiptoed her way
to the open-concept loo. Apart from a sliver of soap and cold rusty
water, the bathroom had little to offer. The medicine cabinet held
only a bottle of diabetic medication, a tube of hemorrhoid cream,
and a toothbrush. No toothpaste.

She picked her way to the kitchen and helped
herself to a beer from the dead man's fridge. Standing in the
doorway, hand on hip, Reis took a long swig and surveyed the living
room once more.

The bookcase had a drawer crammed with
utility bills and miscellaneous chits of everyday life. Among them,
two bankbooks, several pay stubs, and a series of cancelled
cheques. She dumped them into the shoebox and went back to the
computer in the bedroom. The cheques were all for rent payments and
nothing in either the bank statements or pay stubs would have
raised so much as an eyebrow with an auditor, yet Reis knew more
than two hundred thousand dollars had been funneled Aird’s way.

And he hadn’t spent it on redecorating. So
what had he done with it?

She adjusted the pillow and over the next two
hours delved deeper into the computer’s list of files. One
directory held a timetable with dollar amounts that coincided with
the payments Aird had been given to develop the patches. Another
had a text file that described bonding values of chemical
combinations. The most intriguing reference, however, was to the
catalogue number of a compact disc, and its storage location at
Simedyne Corporation. Simedyne was the Hamilton-based research
facility where Aird was employed.

Obviously, the old computer had only been
used as an electronic scratchpad. Any serious work—company-approved
or otherwise—Aird would have stored on the compact disc. The vinyl
patch proved the product was production-ready but the formula was
the cornerstone of the project. With both, she could market the
concept to any crime syndicate that controlled the street drug
trade. From what Aird had told her, some of the West Coast groups
had state of the art labs.