Steel Town: Andy Blake Mystery, #5

By Richard Whitten Barnes

Without warning, Detective Andy Blake's personal life seems to be spinning out of control. She already has enough on her plate dealing with the opioid crisis that has crippled her hometown of Sault Ste. Marie. Adding to that are her efforts to balance it all with an admitted infatuation with the charming Dr. Campbell who is on special assignment advising the health responders dealing with a new threat: a pure form of the drug fentanyl that has added to the crisis.

Meanwhile, a young boy with special needs and a young couple become integral to the intriguing outcome of Andy's investigation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781613093917

Book preview

One

Trying hard to control the puck while fending off the two-hundred-pound defender headed her way, Andy Blake skated like hell down the left boards. It was not to be. Her one hundred twenty-five pounds were slammed into the boards—hard. The puck wobbled crazily back onto the ice where it was picked up by a teammate. She followed him up as he slapped it hard at the goal. It was deflected off the goalie’s stick, and she caught it perfectly. Her wrist shot for the upper corner of the net bounced off the post just as the buzzer sounded.

They’d lost 3-2.

I had you cold, McPherson! she taunted the goalie.

If you could shoot worth a damn, you woulda scored, Blake.

Yeah, never saw it coming, you old geezer!

"Don’t ‘geezer’ me! You were a year ahead in school."

They gave each other hugs and laughs, skating toward the open door to the locker rooms of the John Rhodes Arena.

HAIR STILL DAMP FROM her shower, Andy ran fingers back through its dark brown shoulder length, revealing one or two white strands. She fastened it back with a scrunchie before leaving her Jeep. Large, wet late winter snowflakes were starting as she pushed through the O.P.P. front door, nodding to the duty officer. She found her desk in the office she shared with Detective Arnold Terry as she’d left it the night before, a half-completed warrant request form stuck under her laptop.

On the whiteboard near Terry’s empty desk was scrawled, AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE in the recognizable hand of Nolan Roberts, their boss, and chief of the Ontario Provincial Police, Sault Ste. Marie Detachment.

On Terry’s desk she plunked down the thermos of coffee she’d brewed, and they shared in defense and defiance of the poisonous brew available in the break room. Her bag and holstered gun were barely stowed away when Terry’s imposing presence burst into the room. He noticed the message at once.

Not before coffee, Nolan, he boomed.

He shed his camel overcoat, hanging it behind the door along with Andy’s quilted ski jacket. Andy poured out two mugs while Terry wiped melted snow from his hairless dome with the palms of two sizeable paws.

The office was barely large enough for their two desks, a printer/fax machine, and a third desk infrequently used by other officers or visitors. Over their seven-year collaboration, a strong synergy had produced an admirable record of convictions from that small space.

What now? Terry wondered aloud, blowing on his mug, and glancing at the message.

THEY HAD BARELY TAKEN their seats across from Roberts’ cluttered desk when the boss tossed a copy of the Sault Star on top of the mess. Andy retrieved the paper already folded open to the editorial page.

It was another scathing indictment of the Sault Police, the RCMP, and the OPP. For the inexcusable growth of opioid use in the Algoma region, asking how it could be that the "illegal distribution of these chemicals could get a foothold among the area’s citizens under the noses of our law enforcement." The piece went on to document deaths, hospital admissions, and the inability of Social Services to cope with the exploding need for rehabilitation facilities.

I’m getting a ton of shit from all sides on this, Roberts said, not the least from Orillia. He referred to the O.P.P. headquarters in that city north of Toronto.

Andy passed the paper to Terry, who declined, saying, I read it.

Roberts scratched the beard he’d begun to sport in the past two weeks. Gotta admit it. I’m caught flat-footed on this. I don’t know where to start.

There’s always been some opioid use here, Andy said. OxyContin, oxycodone, heroin.

So why the increase? Where’s it coming from?

Terry and Andy traded glances, but neither found answers in the other’s eyes.

More beard scratching from Roberts: Here’s what I want you to do.

THE SAULT AREA HAD enjoyed a brief warm spell as the first days of March arrived. Today, a cold front brought first rain, then a sloppy mix of sleet and snow. Andy’s forty-five-minute drive home to St. Joseph Island would not be pleasant.

After over twenty years with the Toronto and Windsor police, culminating with a knife wound from a Windsor vice lord, she’d returned to her family’s island home to sell it. Circumstances, mostly in the person of one Grant Stacey, changed the visit to a permanent move. She had accepted the detective job with the Sault O.P.P. That was seven years ago. It seemed hard to believe.

This afternoon had been spent getting Terry’s and her cases prioritized, then devising a plan to meet Roberts’ marching orders. He’d told them to each allocate half of their time to the opioid initiative. Following that, he wanted a joint report on the status of the problem in Ontario’s entire Algoma region and a strategy for going forward. This in one week’s time for his submission to Orillia.

Two

As the St. Marys River flows to the east from Lake Superior into Lake Huron, it divides, forming the St. Joseph Channel and the twenty-by-thirty-kilometer island of the same name. Andy’s yellow Wrangler turned off Hwy.17E and over the Island bridge toward her home on the southern end.

The home was on property that had belonged to her family for more than one hundred fifty years. It was a small farmhouse that Andy had turned into a charming cottage. She entered the rear door that led to a kitchen where a large, grey and black-striped cat sat sphinxlike on the counter in sullen disapproval for having to wait for his meal.

Throckmorton, or Mort (he answered to either), was a rescue from a murder investigation two years before, and the smartest thing on four legs she knew. She was sure he’d have gone to the cupboard and opened a can of Fancy Feast by now if only he’d had opposable thumbs.

Don’t look at me like that! she pried off the top of the can and dumped it in his dish before removing her hat and coat.

She left Mort to his devices, taking a glass of chianti into the living room with the day’s mail—just fliers, and the Island Clippings, a weekly summary of happenings at the Women’s Institute, the Canadian Legion, news of the maple syrup season, etc. The classifieds had nothing of interest this week.

The wine tasted good after the hectic day and miserable drive home. New revelations about the opioid problem hitting the area were not only alarming, they had hit close to home for Andy. Celia, her eldest sister who lived in Alberta, had only recently overcome an addiction to OxyContin resulting from it being prescribed after she had fractured her pelvis. The total recovery had taken four years and much anguish.

Andy and Terry had spent the afternoon shelving cases having a low probability of conviction, and their backlog of unsolved ones they’d been working on. Tomorrow they’d work on learning enough about the local opioid problem to concoct a plan for dividing up the workload between them. Right then, it was about all she could do to watch from the window the winter mix changing to serious snow. Tomorrow’s drive to work would be a bitch.

The phone on her land line rang, and she returned to the kitchen where it hung on the wall next to her marked-up calendar. Mort was there on the counter, washing up after his dinner.

She picked up on the third ring, guessing it would be Grant, who rarely bothered her on her mobile number.

You’re there!

Who else?

He laughed. I’ve got two ribeye steaks and an opened bottle of Malbec. Your place or mine?

Andy knew how the evening would end and opted to spend it there. She threw a few things in an overnight bag, and left Mort in charge of the house.

THE SHOWER WAS RUNNING. Andy could hear Grant singing in his low monotone. For a man who loved music as much as he, it was a fact that he had no ear for it. She rolled over to glance at the bedside clock that indicated 7:50 am. Shit! She’d be late for work. They’d stayed up late talking about the ramifications of his big news: he was selling his business.

Grant Stacey got his start by selling off most of the wooded property and machinery his family’s maple syrup business owned. Over the past twenty years, he’d parlayed that seed money into the largest equipment sales and leasing company in Northern Ontario.

Last night’s news had Andy completely blind-sided. She had sensed nothing in his behavior to indicate such a move.

The offer came out of nowhere, he’d said, but it was just too much to turn down.

She had no sooner digested this news when he dropped another bomb.

You remember that house in Beaufort?

That past November they’d taken his twin engine Beech airplane to Hilton Head, South Carolina for a week of sun, good food, and sightseeing. He’d admired a house on the intercoastal waterway that was for sale. Andy remembered him looking at it while she searched the shoreline for shells, but he hadn’t mentioned it since.

Let’s buy it! he’d said last night.

Buy a house in South Carolina? Why?

Quit your damned job! We’ll spend the winters there and the summers here!

She was completely at a loss for words. The idea that Grant could assume she would drop everything, giving up a career she loved, was more than disappointing. It was infuriating. It had spoiled what had begun as a romantic evening. In the end, she was in no mood for sex, and told him so.

She sat on the edge of the bed. Last night’s acrimony mixed with the wine gave her a feeling worse than mere hangover. She felt cast adrift. For the past seven years. Grant Stacey had been a major part of her life. They’d had moments of doubt over the years, but the past two had been going smoothly...at least for her. But Grant always wanted more. He wanted all of her, and she was unable to part with that.

The shower had stopped. She retrieved her bra and jeans from the chair where she’d thrown them, slipped into her flats, and made her way into Grant’s kitchen with a much-needed mug of coffee on her mind.

Sitting at the breakfast bar, nursing her coffee, her mood did not improve. Grant waltzed in, fresh from his shower, still happily humming. It was more than she could bear. You haven’t a clue, have you?

He began again, telling her of his good intentions, a reiteration of last night’s argument for which she had no stomach this morning.

I’m late, Grant. We’ll talk later.

A BREEZE SWEPT DOWN from the bluffs onto highway 17 as Andy’s yellow Wrangler sped toward town. The weather had unexpectedly cleared, and she had the windows cracked open a bit, letting in the freshness of the sparkling, late March morning. It was something she’d missed during her years in Toronto and Windsor. It helped clear the funk she felt from last night’s unpleasantness with Grant.

She struggled to push those thoughts from her mind and concentrate on the day ahead. She and Arnold Terry were supposed to spend half their time on an issue she felt might have been better solved by other entities: The RCMP, because it was a national problem involving imported, illegal drugs, and the Sault Ste. Marie PD, because that’s where the action was—on the street. Apparently, the Ontario Provincial Police in Orillia felt differently.

Those thoughts occupied her until she arrived to see Terry, also a bit late, just exiting his car.

"What’s your excuse?" she asked him as they hit the entrance together.

Maker’s Mark bourbon. What’s yours?

She laughed. Red wine and Grant Stacey!

Terry didn’t push for clarification, which was a trait in the man she appreciated this morning.

I’ve been thinking about this opioid thing, Terry said as they settled in with coffee from Andy’s Thermos.

Me too. What’ve you got?

The boss says we should come up with a plan to divide up the work. I’m thinking he meant one of us does the research and the other the legwork.

Go on.

That’s bullshit.

As opposed to...

Arnold Terry was not comfortable giving compliments. Erm...we—hell, Blake! We do our best—you know—

Working as a team? she said.

More like in tandem—shooting ideas back and forth as we go. I don’t like the idea of one of us holed up while the other is bouncing around somewhere else.

Andy set her mug down, rose from her chair, and crossed the two steps to Terry. She laid a warm kiss on his large, bald head. That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said to me in seven years.

Terry reddened. Beat it, Blake! Go drink your coffee!

The morning was spent throwing ideas up on the whiteboard. Andy wielded the felt tip while Terry, reading glasses perched on his forehead, leaned back in his chair making his contributions.

By noon they had distilled a strategy from all the talk into a few lines:

-  Given: the use of unprescribed drugs is a human condition that may never be eliminated, social services, not police, will be the likely ultimate answer to the problem.

-  In the meantime, steps can be taken by law enforcement to stem the availability of these drugs in two ways:

Determine, and if possible, stop the main source.

Disrupt the local distribution of same.

Experience with illegal contraband teaches that the elimination of local distribution only creates voids for new distribution avenues of the same material. Significant reduction of traffic can only be accomplished by finding and neutralizing the main source(s) of the product.

Identifying the distribution network and tracing the flow of goods back to their source is a proven procedure in achieving this end.

Andy spent the afternoon transforming this simple outline into a report for Nolan Roberts, together with a rationale for the two of them to work together, rather than dividing up their tasks. She suggested an interim report be made in two weeks.

By 4:45pm they were called back into Roberts’ office after he’d read the report.

Okay, he said. this’ll keep them off my back for a while. He looked up from the report at one, then the other detective. So, get out of here, and get on it!

SHE WAS BORN MARILYN Quinn and raised in the city of Sudbury, Ontario, the oldest of six children who lost their father to a mine accident when Marly, as she liked to be called, had been ten. Merle Quinn, the girl’s mother, eked out an existence on what the nickel mine and the government allotted but was not equal to the task of coping with her headstrong, oldest daughter as she grew into and out of puberty.

One September morning, seven years ago, and one week into her high school senior year, Marly, a slender girl, brown hair streaked with pink, a stud defiantly pierced through her lower lip, failed to board the school bus, and walked instead to the Wellington Street bus terminal. The ticket to Toronto took most of the seventy-three dollars she’d squirreled away over the spring and summer by holding back on what she’d earned at the Dairy Queen.

She stepped out of the bus terminal onto Toronto’s Bay Street with no idea of what to do or where to go. Lugging her single suitcase down the busy mid-day street, she found a small lunch room. Two men drinking coffee at the counter appraised her. It wouldn’t be long for the seventeen-year-old girl to come under the influence of the worst Toronto had to offer.

IT TOOK SIX ROUGH MONTHS for her to be settled living in a flat with three other girls making their way in life by doing phone and video sex and turning occasional tricks for a handler they saw only occasionally to turn over their receipts.

By attrition, after two years she assumed the role of house mom to newer girls, and responsible for collecting and paying the rent. It was a role she did not savor, as the pressure to satisfy their handler was enormous. The penalty for being short of expectations was harsh. She did that for four years, until one Christmas Eve, just shy of her twenty-third birthday, she found herself on a Greyhound bus, northbound back to Sudbury.

It was the confusion of the holiday that enabled her to collect her few belongings and leave the flat unnoticed. That was hard enough. What she hadn’t foreseen was how daunting the idea of showing up at her mother’s door would be.

There, in the Sudbury bus terminal she stood, unable to continue and face life in this city, much less her mother’s disappointment and recriminations. Her options were that, or to keep going. She chose the latter. There was no returning to Toronto, if she valued her well-being.

The hardest part of her decision was not coming to terms with her mom or seeing her siblings, especially Tim, the only boy among them. He’d been four when she left, going on thirteen by now. Somehow, she’d always had a special feeling for