Nish and Fahd came into the motel lobby, their arms filled with copies of the Vancouver Sun and the Province. Nish’s photograph was the entire front page of one paper–“PEEWEE NUDIST FOILS DRUG CARTEL,” blared the huge red headline–and his face beamed out in a smaller photo in the other paper, with a large map beside him showing the various places the RCMP had raided following the arrest of the thugs on Wreck Beach.

“The pictures are inaccurate,” Nish announced as he handed out the newspapers to his teammates. “I shouldn’t have any clothes on–but the stories are pretty good!”

The stories were astonishing. Travis and Sarah leaned over a copy of the Sun spread out on the floor, and raced each other to see who could come up with the most amazing detail.

“‘PEEWEE TOURNAMENT PART OF INTERNATIONAL DRUG SCHEME,’” Travis read from one headline.

“‘AQUARIUM COLLEAGUES STUNNED TO LEARN BIOLOGIST PART OF SMUGGLING RING,’” Sarah read, her voice sad rather than excited.

The story was sad. Exciting, obviously. Dangerous, obviously. But sad, too, for none of the Owls could take any pleasure in learning that Brad Cummings–the marine biologist who had been so kind to them during their visit to the Aquarium, the body they had found floating in the rolling seas off Victoria Harbour, the sweet, gentle man they all thought had been murdered because he tried to rescue a dolphin–had, in fact, been up to his neck in a very dangerous and criminal business.

“This is too much,” Sarah said. And it was, for all of them. She was teary-eyed as she examined the newspapers. And Sam could only read a little bit before crunching up her newspaper and throwing it hard against the wall. She had then stomped out into the light rain, where she could now be seen, walking around the parking lot with her hands wrapped around her bare arms.

Travis read on, switching from one paper to the other, then back, trying to put it all together in a way that made sense.

But it was almost beyond sense. It seemed like they’d all been watching some fantastic, outrageous television show. But there was no remote you could push to turn it off, no happy ending, no feeling it was make-believe.

The mystery had been solved, but Brad and the dolphin were still dead.

Two other things were also certain. The mystery would never have begun to unravel if it hadn’t been for Data’s curiosity about the hockey bags. And the bad guys would never have been caught if Nish hadn’t made that daring, naked dash across Wreck Beach with the broken snow globe in his arms. In fact, the snow globe wasn’t broken, had never been broken. It had been exactly as Data had suspected, an ingenious way to smuggle cocaine.

If Travis had to take all these newspaper stories and reduce them to one simple explanation, the way they sometimes had to do in school, he would have written it down this way:

 

Smugglers had been using dolphins to get illegal drugs into the North American market. Cocaine was shipped up from South America, where it was manufactured. The fishing vessels carrying the drugs really were fishing along the Pacific Coast of the United States, but once they reached British Columbia the “fishermen” quickly became drug smugglers.

Canada is considered much easier to smuggle drugs into than the United States, so the smugglers chose the waters off Vancouver Island as the place to get the cocaine ashore. This is where the dolphins and Brad Cummings, a marine scientist with the Vancouver Aquarium, came in.

The story of Brad Cummings is unfortunate. He was, as friends and admirers believed, absolutely devoted to the welfare of dolphins. He was a leading expert in the training of dolphins and the study of their behaviour, and after many years of research he had developed a complex “language” of whistles that he used to communicate with them. To help finance an international campaign to outlaw the use of gill nets that have killed so many dolphins, Cummings had let himself become involved in helping the smugglers. He helped them land the drugs in return for tens of thousands of dollars, all of which he apparently turned over to various agencies devoted to animal welfare.

One dolphin, raised from infancy by Cummings, had been trained to carry waterproofed packages of drugs from the fishing vessels to a smaller boat closer to the shore, thereby avoiding detection by the Coast Guard and RCMP drug patrols.

According to an informant connected to the drug operations, shortly before his death Cummings came to believe he had been tricked by a smuggler and was owed ten thousand dollars. He instructed the dolphin to head out into open water with the drug payload instead of taking it directly to the drop-off point, and he refused to call it back until he’d received the money. The ransom trick failed. Cummings was murdered by the smugglers, who then used his special series of whistles to track down the dolphin, which was shot and the payload of drugs removed from its body.

This explains why the autopsies had discovered the man was killed some time before the dolphin. It also explains the markings on the dolphin, which had previously been mistaken for gill-net markings.

Once the drugs were taken to Vancouver, an elaborate scheme was devised to get the drugs across the border into the U.S. Shipment was to be arranged through the use of “mules”–innocent drug carriers–which in this case turned out to be peewee hockey players.

Teams from all over the United States and Canada were coming into Vancouver for a special 3-on-3 hockey tournament, and the smugglers arranged to have snow globes and new bags given out to each player participating. The smugglers then arranged to add an “extra” bag to each team, which would contain a snow globe with roughly $300,000 worth of high-grade cocaine in it.

Each team would play a single game just across the Canada–U.S. border at Bellingham, Washington, and the organizers would transport the teams’ equipment in a truck separate from the buses carrying the players. Once at the Bellingham rink, the “extra” bag containing the cocaine would be removed from the rest of the bags. The likelihood of border guards checking through the sweaty equipment bags of several dozen peewee hockey teams was remote indeed.

Had it not been for the work of Larry Ulmar, known to his teammates as “Data,” the trick would never have been discovered. And had Wayne Nishikawa, better known as “Nish,” not used his ingenuity to draw two of the smugglers to Wreck Beach, where they were immediately apprehended by police, the smugglers might have gotten away with their drugs and the murder of Brad Cummings.

 

Travis, on second thought, would change “murder” to “murders.” He could not forget the poor innocent dolphin whose only crime was to obey instructions.