Free Tampered by Ross Pennie Page A

incommunicado for a week. It turned out that Hamish had been exactly on track and Zol had to eat his words. The guy had amazing instincts.
    Zol stared at the foam on his latte. He remembered the large, unlabelled plastic bags of jumbled vegetables that Natasha had hauled out of Camelot’s deep-freeze. He had to admit, those veggies could have come from a Dumpster. Who was to know? Suddenly, his coffee tasted cold and bitter. “Well,” he said, breaking the silence around the table. “How do we investigate the possibility that the Oliveiras may have embraced the . . . the freegan movement?”
    Colleen put down her serviette and nestled her cup onto its saucer. There was no hint of a smirk on her lips, just professional concern. “Sounds like this comes under my scope of practice. Who procures most of the food for the Lodge? The husband or the wife?”
    â€œThe husband,” Zol said. “Gus does the actual shopping, though I imagine Gloria tells him exactly what to buy.”
    â€œPerfect,” Colleen said. Zol loved the way her South African voice made the word come out like a purr:
purrr-fect.
She returned his smile. “I’ll put a tail on our friend Gus.”
    He felt guilty that Colleen was being sent out on a fool’s errand, but if that’s what it took to keep Hamish in the game, so be it.

CHAPTER 8
    At eight o’clock the next morning, Hamish felt an easing of the knot across his shoulders. No matter what, and especially on a Friday the thirteenth, a car wash was the perfect place to hide and meditate. Impenetrable to pagers and mobile phones, it provided a haven from an intrusive world. This was one of those automated jobs that left a lot of spots and was done in only a couple of minutes. Sadly, his regular, full-service place on Main Street West was on strike. It did a much better job and, more importantly, its twenty-minute cycle gave him plenty of time to practise his breathing exercises. During a stressful week, he’d visit the car wash half a dozen times. He hated the idea of mud spatters on the Saab’s side panels, and going more than a day without his breathing exercises caused his anxiety to build almost to breaking point. He had no truck with all the yoga mumbo-jumbo that went with Pranayama breathing, but the exercises did put a rein on his galloping pulse and helped organize the thoughts that so often raced across his mind.
    At the end of the cycle, he put the Saab into gear and eased through the car wash’s narrow exit. He wasn’t ready to face a long morning in his laboratory, verifying his research assistant’s latest calculations. He parked at the curb, put on the CD of car-wash sound effects he’d downloaded from the Internet, and let the soothing vibrations sweep over him while he finished his breathing.
    He hadn’t missed the smirks last evening at the Nitty Gritty. Zol, Natasha, and Colleen had tried to hide behind their coffee cups, but he knew what they were thinking. They hadn’t believed a word he’d said about the freegans. They were just humouring him. People did that. They humoured Hamish Wakefield, the prickly Sherlock, so he wouldn’t blow a gasket. Well, sooner or later Zol would see that Hamish was right. Hell’s bells, all Zol had to do was read the freegan article on Wikipedia.
    He completed his exercises and killed the CD player. He turned on his cellphone. The display showed one voice-mail message from an unknown caller, left ten minutes ago. Unknown callers were usually anxious patients who blocked their identities. He wasn’t on call for clinical cases this month. Someone else would have to handle it. He’d redirect them to the medical centre’s switchboard.
    The caller was elderly and not used to leaving messages. Hamish could hear that in his voice. “Dr. Wakefield . . . This is Art Greenwood, Zol Szabo’s granddad . . . well, almost his grandfather. By marriage, if