The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 21: The Other Side of the Coin

The war that seemed to have erupted on Calgary's formerly quiet and peaceful streets had quickly prompted action by local politicians. Within hours of the first incident in what would become a veritable list of battle sights, the mayor had formed a special taskforce comprised of Calgary's police department's best and brightest. Their specialties ranged from Homicide, like Dee, all the way to Vice as the mayor attempted to pool the city's finest crime solvers in an attempt to discover who was behind the wave of destruction shaking the city.

That done, the mayor had then appointed Anna Simpkins, the city councilor responsible for police activities, to head the taskforce. Dee chuckled as she thought of that, stepping around another fire engine to approach the thick line of yellow police tape forming the scene's perimeter.

Simpkins, of course, had turned out to be a complete political hack, worried about nothing other than how good she looked on TV and her political career and ambition. The taskforce had quickly gone from a functional organism to a platform for her to primp and preen on, constantly calling news conferences over the least little thing just to get her face on camera. Such maneuverings had served only to steal momentum from any investigation the taskforce attempted to launch, miring it in political manipulation and pandering. Within the first week half the taskforce deserted, returning to their regular assignments in frustration.

Dee, however, wasn't so easily put off. She had dealt with plenty of frustration in her earlier incarnations as a RCMP officer and a CSIS operative. Besides, there was something to this thing, something ... sinister. Disturbing enough to pull her to it, iron to a lodestone. She was going to find out what was going on, if it was the last thing she ever did!

First there was that office explosion downtown, the one that Forensics and the fire department both claimed must have been set off by a gas leak of some kind, judging by the amount of destruction and the plotted trajectory of the blast fragments. Of course, that explosion matched a rash of similar explosions that apparently happened within a half hour of each other all over the city. Unfortunately the subsequent investigation couldn't uncover the exact cause since the destruction of the floors in question was so heavy that no telltale clues had been left behind to point the finger in any one direction.

That prompted the formation of the taskforce, which quickly uncovered a scene of devastation at the Alec Arms hotel, within easy striking distance of the downtown office building, its destruction apparently coming a few minutes before the string of explosions that subsequently rocked the city. Further digging had yielded ghost files on a number of other incidents that had taken place before the hotel and the office, their contents, including crime scene photographs, oddly missing.

While the taskforce contemplated the strangeness of the ghost files, cross-referenced with fire department reports and Forensic Crime Scene Investigation reports, the next big incident occurred, resulting in heavy destruction in a house in the southeast quadrant of the city. The house that was completely leveled by what looked like yet another gas explosion.

No bodies this time, unlike the office building which had nearly fifty. The thing that had stuck in Dee's mind, however, wasn't the lack of bodies. It was the fact that the building's shell had somehow remained relatively intact, as if the walls themselves had managed to contain the explosion that had completely devastated the interior.

After the house, there had been a relative lull in big time destruction, as if the arsonist, terrorist or whomever was responsible for the explosions decided to take a bit of a break. And Dee was thoroughly convinced that no gas explosion was responsible for any of the destruction that she had seen.

Of course, this was also the point in the taskforce's existence that it began to fall apart, as its members became more and more frustrated with Simpkins' posturing and political maneuvering. As smaller incidents, more reflective of gang-like violence, continued to show up on police and fire department investigative blotters, the taskforce lost direction and drive.