Flights and Falls

by R. M. Greenaway

  In the end the Gilmartins were left to their vigil, and Leith and JD escorted Sophie Dewitt back to the station to get her version of events.

  Five

  TOUCH AND GO

  December 14

  SOPHIE DEWITT WAS NOT quite five feet tall and not quite twenty-two years old. She was also not quite present when Leith sat down across from her in the interview room at 2:15 in the morning. She spoke in dull tones, telling him and JD that it was her fault, what had happened to Craig, because of getting mad at him the way she did after their big fight.

  Aha, Leith thought. Here we go. A slam-dunk crime of passion.

  “When did you have this big fight?” JD asked. She spoke in a kindly way, but she was a bit of a chameleon, Leith knew, and gentleness was only a part of her toolbox.

  Sophie didn’t fall for it. “We didn’t fight today,” she said sharply. “I went over there to apologize, actually. It was last week that I wanted to kill him. And even then, it was just words.”

  “Oh, okay,” JD said. “What was the fight about?”

  “Nothing. We’d gone out for drinks, and he spent a whole hour talking to some girls he didn’t even know, while I sat alone feeling like an idiot. Which I am. He’s just way more social than me. It’s something I have to get used to. And maybe it wasn’t a whole hour, actually, but at least twenty minutes, and we still ended up in this big fight, and I broke it off.”

  “And you believe that has something to do with him being shot?”

  Sophie nodded, then shook her head. “I don’t know. I called him last night around midnight, but he didn’t answer, so I figured he was already out enjoying his newfound freedom.”

  No, he was at the scene of a car crash, Leith thought.

  “I told myself I didn’t care if he was out having fun without me,” she went on. “I was maybe disappointed, but I knew I’d get over it. I’m not a child.”

  Her face began to crinkle and redden. She gave in and cried like a child, taking one tissue after another. Then she calmed herself and said to JD with dignity, “And now he’s dead, so none of it matters. I just wish I’d been able to apologize for being so petty. That’s all.”

  “I can see why you’re upset,” JD said. “That’s tough. How long have you known Craig?”

  “We met this spring. It was serious, too. Until I screwed it all up.”

  Half a year wasn’t long, relationship-wise, Leith knew. But he had been in love at her age, and had experienced the highs and lows, and the misery that followed breakup. With all this emotion flying around, he had to wonder if maybe Gilmartin had shot himself, and this girl Sophie had arrived and disposed of the gun for some reason. Or she was lying, and she had in fact arrived with the gun, after a week of stewing, and shot him.

  He looked at her round face, tilted down now and sniffling, her funny round eyeglasses. Like Gilmartin, she seemed like a bit of a black sheep, but level-headed. Smart. He didn’t think she had shot her ex, and for now he would stick with his original belief that everything was just as she stated: she had arrived to apologize, had found Gilmartin down and bleeding, had called 911.

  “Did you see any vehicles that you didn’t recognize, that stood out to you in any way, parked in front of his place?” JD asked.

  “Parking is bad around there. It’s always jam-packed with cars, so I wouldn’t know.”

  “Do you have any idea at all who might have done this?”

  “No, I have no idea,” Sophie said. “He’s literally the nicest guy on the planet. Why would anyone want to kill him?”

  She seemed to realize what she had lost all over again, and began to sob. Leith would have given her a fresh box of Kleenex and a fifteen-minute break, but JD was signalling to him that they should shut this down for the night.

  When their witness was gone and Leith and JD were back at their desks, he said, “We could have pressed on, JD. Time is ticking.”

  “I think she’s told us all she knows,” JD said. “She’s dead tired. She needs sleep.”

  Leith slumped and pitched paper clips into his empty pen jar, missing the goal on most shots. Hand and eye coordination were starting to go, and so was his mind. He, too, needed sleep. Messages buzzed on his phone, lighting up the screen. He monitored them distractedly.

  JD was tapping at her keyboard and thinking aloud as she worked. “The drive-by. It would take two, right? One to drive, one to shoot. Unless the driver’s some kind of James Bond, Navy SEAL, DIY sharpshooter type. Not likely. Who could afford that kind of assassin? And what kind of assassin would use a popgun? Must be amateurs.”

  Leith only half followed, a part of his mind stuck on repeat, contemplating his own carelessness, his dismissal of the drive-by as a random shot, a lark. “Sure,” he said.

  JD looked up from her keyboard long enough to give him the eye, which meant she was coming up with some kind of zinger. Leith gave up his paper clip basketball and paid attention.

  “You’re not thinking Sophie hired a hit man to kill Craig, are you?” she asked. He had said no such thing, but he had considered it, and she must have read his mind. “Because you can forget it. Might as well drop her from the list. But if Craig’s a real playboy, he could have trod on somebody’s territory, after breaking up with Sophie.”

  She was typing again. Leith got to work as well, answering his messages, reading through Gilmartin’s personnel file, making notes, responding to calls from the field. From the hospital updates he learned that the patient’s life remained touch and go. Any moment now he would get the bad news. He was a pessimist, and pessimists knew best.

  His land line jangled, making him jump. But it was only Sean Urbanski saying he had spoken to Ken Poole. Ken had nothing interesting to relate about this afternoon, when he’d driven Gilmartin home. Conversation en route had been desultory at best, Urbanski said.

  “Been what?” Leith said.

  “Desultory.” Urbanski was a big guy, with tousled blond hair and a beard, who liked his phone apps, his favourite lately being Word of the Day. “Aimless, just small talk. Didn’t discuss the drive-by in any detail. Ken says he pulled up at Craig’s place, said ciao, and Craig walked into the house alone. Lights were off, nobody hanging around that Ken could see. He watched till the door closed, then drove off.”

  Followed soon thereafter by a deadly blast.

  “Right,” Leith said. “Get the whole conversation down as best as Ken can remember it, however desultory it was.”

  A scapegoat would be nice, he thought, as he disconnected. But he couldn’t blame Ken Poole for not escorting the kid inside, making sure everything was safe in there. Poole should have been briefed, instructed that the house be properly cleared, and who should have instructed him to do so, if not Leith?

  No, for this particular murder-in-the-making, he could shoulder the blame alone.

  Six

  LOVE LOST

  WHEN DION HEARD ABOUT last night’s shooting of an RCMP officer — new on the force, critical condition, no names released — he quit buttering his toast to stare at the clock radio on the counter, and his eyes filled with hot, stinging tears.

  Angry tears, because he hadn’t been called. He should have been there, for a first-hand look at the scene. Should have been given the chance to form his own theories, advance them for consideration, help hammer the facts into an effective line of inquiry.

  Instead, he had been allowed to sleep through it all.

  It was his own fault, of course. The force had reached out to him, said he could come back to GIS, and instead of jumping on board, he had insisted on staying in the general duties pit. Why? Because the GIS was the Serious Crime Unit, and Serious Crime was dangerous waters for him, since he was a serious criminal. A year and a half ago, out in Surrey with his friend and colleague Looch Ferraro, he had killed a man. Illegally. It was the deep dark secret that would never let him get back to normal.

  These days he had a bad feeling that his deep, dark secret was about to come to light. David
Leith’s changing attitude toward him was one warning sign. Usually standoffish, Leith was being nicer to him lately, which could be a sign of pity, and pity could be a sign of disaster approaching.

  At the living room window Dion looked out through the slats, down on the street, like the desperado he had become. He watched pedestrians and counted up his fears. Leith’s pity, Bosko’s interest in him — and worst of all, the witness.

  She had been up above, on the weed-choked gravel hills that had been built up by excavators over the years and then abandoned. She had been looking down as he stood in the pit below, shovelling earth and grit over the body. She had seen him, and he had seen her. Yet all he knew about her, to this day, was that she was on a dirt bike, she had pink hair, and she had fled.

  He had dropped his makeshift spade and jumped into his car, Looch beside him. They had torn out with no grand plan in mind except to cut the witness off on the highway, and instead had got T-boned on the passenger side by a punk in a speeding sports car.

  The punk and Looch were both dead now, and Dion would spend the rest of his days trusting nobody with pink hair.

  Which was stupid, because the dye would have grown out by now. She could have switched to blue. Or purple. Or gone natural, for all he knew.

  But time had gone by, and no witness had stepped forward, and no body in a shallow grave had come stinking to the surface either. The latter was the most baffling of all. The burial was botched by the interruption, and Dion hadn’t gone back to make it properly disappear, as per the plan. He couldn’t, because he had been in a coma.

  The passage of time told him Pink could be crossed off his list of fears, for now. If she was going to come forward, she would have done so long ago. But as one worry faded, another one had risen, hinged on a memory he had retrieved only recently. Hardly a vignette, maybe nothing but a misinterpretation, but had he turned around as he worked at being a gravedigger, and had he seen Looch standing near the car, his face underlit?

  Underlit. In retrospect he was sure he was right, and an underlit face meant Looch was either checking his mail or making a call.

  And there was no way he’d be checking his mail.

  Looch was a burly man and a big talker, but he could be a real chickenshit in a crisis, and who would he be calling to cry about his predicament to? His common-law partner, Brooke, that’s who. Looch thought the world of Brooke. She had the answer to everything. She would tell him what to do.

  Dion was still looking out the window, still searching the streets for danger. Had Looch made contact? Had he told Brooke what he’d done, what Dion had done? But if he had, and if Brooke was in the know, she seemed to be keeping that knowledge to herself. So far.

  He worried anyway, because one thing was for sure: crime had a way of unravelling, and on the day of reckoning his only excuse for killing that man would be laughed out of court, after which he’d be sent to the slammer at whiplash speed.

  So keep lying low, then, and pray. Except he wasn’t good at lying low. In fact, all this lying low and watching his back was giving him ulcers — not literally, yet, but he was sure to wind up with a doctor’s visit and a bunch of Zantac pills, if he wasn’t careful.

  Eating breakfast instead of staring at it would be a good idea. He chomped on the toast and swallowed, chomped and swallowed.

  His shrink had talked about the power of gratitude, and he tried it now, counting off on his fingers what he had going for him instead of against.

  Counselling itself was a big positive, in fact. He hadn’t gone willingly, but was starting to appreciate the sessions, because Samantha Kerr’s psychological soul-digging was inadvertently teaching him how to read between the lines of how others saw him. He was sussing out how to avoid detection. He was perfecting the fine art of being normal.

  Gratitude point number two was his improving health. Getting ill would be the last straw, so he had thrown out his cigarettes, cut down on Scotch and beer, and ate meals rich in vitamins, minerals, and fibre. He had bulked out, almost back to normal, bought a road bike and a rack for his car, and went for spins in his time off. On his last checkup his doctor said he was doing great.

  So even though his spirit was dragging its knuckles, his cardiovascular system was hopping.

  There was probably some third thing to be grateful for, but he had run out of time. He stood at the sink counter, half dressed, his short black hair still damp from the shower, the slice of whole grain, partly buttered toast in his hand blurred through tears. He took another bite and chewed viciously. He wouldn’t rush to work, and wouldn’t ask questions when he got there. Any details worth picking up he would gather through osmosis as he carried on with his day. If the downed officer died, he would attend the funeral — but nothing further.

  He scraped the remains of the toast into the garbage and placed the plate in the sink, irritated by curiosity. Who had been shot? A rookie. First Tony Souza, and now this. Could the two be related? Was last night’s victim someone he knew? Probably not.

  The tightness in his chest was from the caffeine, no doubt. He poured the rest of the cup down the drain. He put on his street clothes, buffed his boots, would change into his uniform at work. He seemed A-okay, judging by his reflection in the full-length foyer mirror. Nobody could tell from looking at him that he was churned dirt inside. He palmed the shadows from under his eyes, then grabbed his coat off its hook and left the apartment, out to discover who the fuck had gotten shot.

  Seven

  STEEL

  LEITH LISTENED AS Jim Torr opened the debrief with his background report on the victim. “Craig is twenty-two. Grew up in Dundee, which is in Scotland, came to Canada at eighteen, and after some film school classes, he dropped out and applied to join the force. Went through the hoops, got accepted. First day on duty was October 12. No major disciplinary snags, though he’s been told to pipe down and pay attention during briefings. That’s not on his record, but from collateral sources. His family’s got money. Dad’s some kind of top-dog executive …”

  A privileged background, then, Leith thought. Fairly unusual for the police force. Torr went on with his review, and nothing stood out as a flag except for wealth. The dad was a big shot with a multinational based in Scotland that Torr was describing at length, and money always attracted an element of danger to any family. A kidnap attempt gone wrong was something to consider.

  Sean Urbanski reported on the chronology of the single-vehicle crash Gilmartin had chanced upon — maybe irrelevant, maybe not — as assembled from Gilmartin’s statements to the first responders. The only written statements were one badly jotted police report, followed by the more in-depth interview by Torr. “Craig was travelling west on the Sea to Sky, heading home from a house party in Whistler, when he was flagged down to the scene of a crash. See map on wall. This was about one a.m., he says, give or take an hour.”

  “Give or take an hour?” Leith said. “That’s as close as Craig could get it?” What kind of cop rounds his time to the hour?

  “He hasn’t been on with us long enough to know how all-important minutes are, I guess,” Urbanski said.

  “Fractions of minutes, better yet,” JD put in.

  Urbanski nodded and tucked scraggly hair behind an ear. For months he had not only been improving his vocabulary, but working on the look that would get him into biker bars without raising eyebrows. His dream was to move to Surrey and go undercover with Special O. “Other evidence suggests the crash happened in the area of midnight, going by the 911 calls. Speaking of which, we got three of them. Two came from cellphones, drivers who pulled over at the scene, and one anonymous call from a phone booth in Horseshoe Bay — that’s maybe fifteen minutes’ drive west from the accident scene, if you’re doing the limit — at twelve sixteen a.m.”

  Torr cupped an ear. “The call came in from a — what did you say? Phone booth? What the fuck is that?”

  “In the old days,” Urbanski said, “long before you and I were born, Jim, cellphones used to be
tied to wires, and if you ripped them off the wall, they no longer worked.”

  JD interrupted impatiently. “You’re saying neither Craig nor the guy who flagged him down had a working cellphone to call 911? How likely is that?”

  “Unlikely,” Urbanski said. “Maybe even chimerical.”

  Leith had been tapping his list of questions with his pen, puzzled by something, but the something was eluding him. He thumped the pen louder, for attention. “Any clue as to who this individual was who flagged Craig down?”

  “No clue,” Urbanski said. “No names were exchanged. Craig pulled over and Mystery Man told him he’d seen the red car lose control and swerve into the trees. That’s all we’ve got, second-hand hearsay. Craig gave just a rudimentary physical description of the guy in his statement to the on-scene officers. Dark hair, medium build. Didn’t even know what make of car he drove. Just that it was a mid-sized four-door, steel, the officer’s got written down for colour. Which I guess means grey. Craig wasn’t pressed for details, but of course, who knew it would end up being important?”

  “Okay. Carry on.”

  “So Mystery Man and Craig climb down into a ravine where they find an older red Mazda pretzelled around a fir tree. Get the door open but see the victim’s in too bad a shape to move. Mystery Man goes to flag down a car to call for help while Gilmartin stays at the scene. Gilmartin explained to Jim here that Mystery Man hadn’t flagged down anyone in the end, but had taken off, so Gilmartin went and did it himself. He says there were some other people who showed up and left again, either three individuals or three parties — no descriptions or details, age, gender, nothing. In retrospect it would have been nice if somebody had asked him for those basics, hey, Jim?”