Where the Ice Falls Read online

  “I know a place that sells those. I’ll pick up some for you on the way.”

  When Lacey got to the Tims, Aidan pushed a half-dozen Flake bars at her and waved away the twenty she offered. Calvin grabbed a bar, peeled off its yellow wrapper, and bit halfway down the length. Curls of milk chocolate scattered over the table. He finished the whole thing before she got the rest stowed in her jacket.

  It took some coaxing from Aidan before Calvin started to tell his story, and then it took serious concentration for Lacey to follow his rapid-fire speech.

  “It was back in September,” he said, “second week of Eric’s internship, when he spotted Cylon Six.”

  Lacey made a mental note: two months before Eric went to Black Rock. “What’s a silo six?”

  “Cylon Six. It’s a company name. Eric saw it on some consulting cheque when he was changing a printer cartridge. Of course he got curious. It’s the name of a character on Battlestar Galactica. The sexy blond one, you know?”

  Lacey decided “the sexy blond” was irrelevant. “So a cheque made out to that company name caught his eye and …”

  Calvin yanked the straw from his glass and waved it at her. “Cylon Six Inc. has no internet presence. No website, no business profile, no provincial registration that I could find. Not even picked up by those amalgamating websites. Just a post box.”

  “Why were you and Eric trying to trace this company?”

  Calvin stared. “Cylon Six? It could have been a great source of BSG stuff. We had to find out and —”

  Aidan interrupted. “Never mind about the freakin’ TV show. See, Lacey, Eric found a monthly report during the end-of-September print run that showed several cheques made out to Cylon Six Inc. Nobody should have been buying TV-show crap through a company account, but that was the lesser problem, since the company apparently didn’t exist. He came to ask me what I thought might be going on.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “From an accounting perspective, I figured it was a verifier line in the program. You give it a placeholder name, and the cheques printed are dummies. They don’t get added into the total expenditures, and they sure don’t get cashed.”

  “I’m following you so far. What did you recommend?”

  “I told him to add up the numbers manually, with and without the dummy entries. He came back a few days later and said the amounts were included in the total. So I said invoices must exist, and told him where they used to be filed when I did my work placement at TFB.” He glared at Calvin. “I told him to ask someone in Accounting to show him one.”

  Calvin fiddled with his straw. “We went in on Thanksgiving weekend and hunted down every single invoice for September. And they were there. All of them.” He flattened the straw and folded its tail over. “That should have been the end of it, but the wicked witch got on our trail.”

  Aidan sighed. “The current head of Accounting, he means. She also supervises the IT department. When she found out Eric brought his friend to the office unsupervised, she blew up. They shouldn’t have been there, and they sure as hell shouldn’t have poked around another department’s files. The shit hit the fan.”

  “She wanted to get him fired. Fired!” Calvin repeated the word with an urgency usually applied to hurricanes, earthquakes, and other life-threatening events. “Losing your internship is harsh. Every job interview you have after that, employers figure you screwed up and turf your application. So we had to, like, prove he didn’t deserve it.” The whole straw was now folded like an accordion. “I was protecting him. I didn’t do it for giggles.”

  Calvin — not Eric — had done something illegal? “What did you do?”

  Aidan rubbed his neck again. “They snuck back into the office — after hours again — and Calvin hacked the freakin’ cheque-writing printer.”

  “Ah.” That sounded both foolish and illegal. And what the heck was a cheque-writing printer? “How exactly was that supposed to protect Eric?”

  Calvin pushed his chair back. “If you’re going to be an asshole about it —”

  “I’m not. I’m just trying to understand. So, tell me what you found when you hacked the cheque-writing printer.”

  Calvin’s lower lip pouted. “I found a script.”

  Aidan nudged him with an elbow. “She’s not a geek. You have to explain what a script is.” Calvin’s eyes rolled so far they could have orbited a space station. Aidan shrugged. “A script is a short computer program with a specific purpose,” he said. “Malware sites have hundreds of them, code that script kiddies download to try to hack into other people’s computers. Send an email, lure the recipient into clicking a link. The script loads onto their computer, and every time they access their bank account, it transfers ten bucks to a website in Russia. For example.”

  Scripts, script kiddies, malware, Russia. Lacey’s brain ached.

  “You’re saying someone loaded a script into the cheque-writing printer?”

  Calvin stretched his accordioned straw across the table. “This script is called 33 because it does its thing every thirty-third iteration of the base program — in this case, printing a cheque. It’s ancient in computing terms, ten years old at least. It only works on a limited set of business machines, and hardly anyone uses them anymore. Internet firewalls automatically block it, and even freebie antivirus software would catch it. It didn’t appear on any of the workstations in the company. We scanned them all.”

  “At fucking midnight,” said Aidan, “just begging to be busted.”

  Calvin’s sideways eye roll said whatever. He continued, “The only place the script showed up was in the cheque printer itself.”

  “And that is significant because?” Lacey’s brain caught up with her mouth. “Wait. Okay, if I’ve followed everything so far, this script told the printer to spit out a fake cheque every thirty-third time, one that could be cashed for real money. It was defrauding the company?”

  “She wins the teddy bear.”

  Aidan pushed his mug away. “I can’t believe you guys didn’t tell me all this right away,” he said to Calvin. “I’d have called Mr. Thompson myself. Eric never had to go out in that storm.”

  The anguish in his voice was mirrored in Calvin’s face. The latter muttered, “He didn’t believe Eric anyway.”

  “But you said there were invoices?”

  “He asked the witch and she said it was nothing. I bet she didn’t even look.”

  “Because it came from Eric, who was already seen as a troublemaker?”

  He nodded.

  “Somebody,” said Aidan, “must have created and filed invoices after the fact, after the reports were printed. They had to cover the fake cheques, make them look legitimate if anyone followed up. The scheme was basically audit-proof except during a short window at the end of a print run — however long it took to print off half-a-dozen or so invoices to match the script-generated cheque amounts. They should have told me all of this.”

  “Was it all documented?”

  Calvin nodded. “Eric made a copy of everything for JP, so they could go over it together. It was in his backpack.”

  The missing backpack. Was Eric killed for the contents of his backpack? If he’d told JP Thompson what he was bringing with him that November day, then JP had proven himself a highly competent liar. And possibly worse. At last, there was a motive for silencing Eric Anders.

  “Calvin, how hard was the cheque printer to hack into? Did you need a password?”

  He blinked. “Plugged in my USB cable and downloaded its memory. Easy.”

  “You had to be there to plug into it, though, right? It’s not hooked up to the internet?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Aidan. “As I recall, it wasn’t even hooked up to the company network, except twice a month for cheque runs.”

  “Somebody had to load the malware right onto the machine while standing there in the office?” That narrowed down the field of suspects to anyone who had access to a script website and to the cheque-printing machine.

 
Both men nodded.

  “Any idea how long the script had been on the machine?”

  Calvin shook his head. “We only needed to prove it was happening. Then we thought Mr. Thompson would order a proper investigation.”

  Calvin’s watch pinged. He pulled three prescription bottles out of his jacket pocket, lined them up on the table, and got to his feet. “I need water.”

  Aidan spotted Lacey’s attempt to read the labels. “Anxiety, muscle pain, and one that boosts the effects of the others. These are recent. He’s also got sleeping pills for his chronic insomnia. I don’t know how he can code with all that mucking around in his brain.” He turned the bottles around and Lacey made a mental note of each name to pass along to Bull. The Medical Examiner’s office would know what drug metabolites to test Eric’s liver for. Considering JP Thompson had leaped to the top of the motive list, the RCMP could get a warrant to check his prescriptions, too.

  Calvin came back and set about selecting his pills. She watched him swallow each one, taking precisely two sips of water in between.

  “Why didn’t you go with Eric that day? Wouldn’t having you as backup have been a good thing?”

  Glaring, Calvin grabbed his pill bottles, shoved them into his pocket, and walked off, jostling an old man in the doorway in his hurry to leave.

  Aidan watched him go. “I should have warned you. He feels really guilty for not going along. They’d had a huge fight the night before. It was the last time they spoke.”

  “What did they fight about?”

  “Eric got accepted to university in Vancouver. Cal said my brother was abandoning him.”

  “Where was he that weekend? Did he help with the search for Eric?”

  Aidan looked blank. “I’m not sure. I don’t remember hearing from him until maybe Tuesday.”

  Calvin had sleeping pills. Calvin had been angry. Calvin had known where Eric was going. What if he had gone along, or had met Eric there, lost his temper, and drugged his friend? Or simply driven away in Eric’s car, leaving Eric locked in the shed to teach him a lesson about being abandoned? Calvin was clearly prone to mood swings, and he might not have been thinking about consequences.

  Lacey didn’t want Aidan to guess the trend of her thoughts, so she asked a different question. “Why was Eric switching majors and universities halfway through the year?”

  “He didn’t really discuss it with me, but I know he was getting more interested in oil spills and pipeline breaks.” Aidan pulled his jacket on. “Oil spill remediation is a growth industry. More so than IT, where he was just another young geek on the lowest rung of an overcrowded ladder. Look, I don’t know if any of this stuff about the script will be of any use, but the sooner you and the police figure out why Eric left his car and ignored all his winter safety training, the sooner my family can start to get their shit together. I hope.”

  Lacey thanked him and passed on her thanks to Calvin. Before Aidan had left the parking lot, she was calling Bulldog Drummond. The call went to voice mail.

  “Bull,” she said, “When you find that backpack, check for a bunch of computer printouts in it. There might be a motive there.” If the printout was gone, that could mean Eric had already given it to JP. For an insane moment, she contemplated driving straight to Black Rock Bowl and walking the ski trail to hunt for the backpack herself. “Also, Eric’s friend, Calvin Chan, has a pile of prescriptions, including some kind of sleeping pills, and he was apparently furious at Eric right before he vanished. No account of Calvin’s whereabouts that weekend, either.”

  As soon as she hung up, her phone buzzed. A voice mail from Zoe, inviting her to go cross-country skiing and to bring along, if she could, grief counselling information for Eric’s brother and sister. Given that they had more shocks coming when the RCMP officially declared a homicide investigation, Lacey figured that last was a request she must honour, whether she went along skiing or not. She called her Victim Services supervisor to request the resources. Hopefully the woman wasn’t on holiday straight through Boxing Day. With that message done, she swallowed the last of her cold, slightly stale coffee.

  Now where to turn?

  Tom. He might not know anything about accounting fraud in connection with TFB Energy, but he’d know who to ask. She punched in Tom’s number. He answered over a cacophonous level of background noise.

  “Hey, guy, did you get my text this morning?”

  “Lacey? I can hardly hear you. No, put that back, I said.”

  “What?”

  “I’m Christmas shopping with the kids. Can’t talk now. Darren, I said no!”

  His voice faded out amid indecipherable shuffling noises. When he came back on, he said, “Can you meet me at home in a couple of hours? Marie would be glad to see you.”

  Before she could answer, they were disconnected. Rather than call him back, she called his home number. “Hi, Marie. I was wondering what your boys would like for Christmas. I already know to pick something reasonably priced, multi-use, not too stereotypically male, with no batteries, no noise, and definitely no guns …”

  An hour later, Lacey pulled up in front of Marie and Tom’s house and checked for Tom’s truck. Not back yet. She grabbed the toy-store bag.

  Soon she was settled in the warm kitchen, wrapping not only the gifts she’d brought but also part of the stack of gifts for Tom and Marie’s extended families. As the two of them struggled to disguise the shape of a baseball bat and glove, she told Marie about coping with Dee’s mother.

  “She’s terminal, with maybe three months left, and Dee was trying to get her to stay here to the end. But apparently she might not get approved for assisted dying in Alberta.” The paper tore under her fingernail. “And I don’t really understand how sick she is, or if she might be thinking of killing herself sooner if the pain gets to be too much. I wonder each night if she’ll be dead the next time we open her bedroom door.”

  Marie taped down the tear. “The simplest way to ease your fears is to ask. Loreena wants to talk about dying. This is the biggest thing in her life right now.”

  Lacey shifted her hands to let Marie tape up the paper seam. “I don’t want to give her the idea of suicide.”

  “Trust me, if she’s talking assisted dying, she’s already had it.” Marie tied the bat’s handle with ribbon. “As a dedicated health-care worker, I should be biased against medical assistance in dying. Especially since I’m also a Catholic. But there’s Catholic and then there’s Catholic, and I’m the kind who values birth control and medically necessary abortions. I wouldn’t want to personally help a patient die, but in ten years of nursing, I’ve seen enough suffering to know that sometimes choosing it for themselves is their best possible option.”

  “Loreena says she might not get approved in Alberta because everyone’s too religious here.” Lacey pulled a talcum-powder box toward her, the kind that drugstores stack on their rack-ends for Christmas and Mother’s Day. Wrapping for Tom’s family was the closest she ever got to Christmas spirit, and here she was obsessing about dying people. She slid a piece of leftover holly paper under the talc box. “Do you know if there would be a problem applying here?”

  “She would have to get her medical records transferred to a doctor here, apply through Alberta’s process, and then go through the interviews again. If she’s already got a supportive doctor in Ontario and she’s well enough to travel home with her nurse, that’s what I would suggest.” Marie rolled up a hockey toque and scarf in striped silver paper. “Not necessarily because we’re all too religious out here, but because asking a doctor to help you die is a very personal conversation. It’s a huge responsibility for the doctor, too. Nobody wants to spend the rest of their life worrying that a person they helped die might have changed their mind at the last minute. The better the doctor knows the patient, the more comfortable they’ll feel about asking the questions and accepting the answers.”

  “Dee’s talking to her mom about it this afternoon. I’m really out of my depth with emotion
al situations.” Lacey carefully folded a corner. “Give me a mugging or robbery and I’ll deal with it, show me a victim of a crime and I’ll assist them. But this is like learning a foreign language.”

  “Well, the first thing about learning this language is that you have to give people time and space. Intensely emotional decisions shouldn’t be rushed.” Marie reached for the ribbon again. “Do you want to stay for supper, give them more time to thrash things out?”

  “No, I’d better head back. Dee isn’t quite stable enough on her feet to help her mom at bedtime.”

  “Well, call me if you need help while that nurse is away.”

  They’d barely moved the gifts to the tree when Tom returned, accompanied by a blast of cold air and two overexcited youngsters. Darren and Sam hugged Lacey and swarmed their mother, who ordered them back to the porch to remove their snow boots.

  Tom swapped his car coat for an old parka split down one side and stained with indeterminate substances. “McCrae, come out to the garage and see my Christmas present to myself.”

  “Some present.” Marie’s mouth twisted in a resigned half smile. “See you, Lacey. Call if you need me.”

  Lacey ruffled each boy’s hair as she followed Tom out the door. He flipped on the garage lights and flung back a cover. “Voila!”

  “You bought yourself a snowmobile?” Lacey looked over the shining Arctic Cat with a skeptical eye. “How much?”

  “Enough.” He crossed his arms. “It’ll be sweet. Remember when you and Dan and Marie and I went sledding out at Revelstoke that weekend?”

  “Yeah, I remember.” She and Dan had rented separate machines, while Marie rode behind Tom. After a long fast run out to a steep, snow-filled mountain valley, Marie and Lacey tended the fire while Tom and Dan went high-marking, roaring up the slope and risking an avalanche to compete for bragging rights. Dan’s rented machine had tumbled backward on him, triggering a mini snowslide that buried him up to his chest. She shook off the memory of his anger afterward before it could veer into the part where her wrenched arm had hurt for a week. He’d apologized. Heat of the moment and all that, he’d said. She realized she was rubbing the long-faded bruise and dropped her hand. “Tell me you bought Marie something equally nice.”