Acting Lieutenant Curtis Southwind heaved yet another monumental sigh as he turned over yet another page from the file. The pages had been perused so often they were becoming dog-eared. The passenger manifests had yielded nothing, working backward from arrivals at YSB to the hub of the Toronto International Airport, usually, and then backwards from there to the point of origin. He was missing something, but what was it? He’d pinpointed perhaps a half-dozen potential suspects, all engineers, but they all appeared to be on legit business trips to one of the two big nickel companies in the city. They possessed all the requisite skill sets to wreak the kind of damage he’d seen at the transformer station. But why would a Company man sabotage his own property? The only reason he could think of was to discredit the union, but that was a risky gambit—committing a felony to prove a dubious point. If he cracked this case, brought a Company manager up on charges, it would be game over for the Company in the strike. No, such a clandestine strategy was too risky for Inco. Maybe it really was the union. If it walked like a duck …
With another, even more monumental sigh Southwind heaved his not inconsiderable bulk out of his desk chair.
“Gonna leave the building for awhile,” he informed a subordinate at an adjacent cubicle. CIB was crammed in like sardines up here on the second floor of the cop shop.
“Oh yeah? Where ya goin’, sir?”
“Over t’ the union hall. Think mebbe it’s time I had a little talk with them fellas.”