“We were out for a walk,” Mr. Trask said. “She wandered off. We went looking for her, spotted her in the tree. Ula nearly fainted.”
“That’s me,” Mrs. Trask explained. “I told Leo to get down, but she just started climbing up instead. Leona, that is. We call her Leo.”
Dion asked if Leona was hurt, but nobody could say.
“Four,” he relayed to Wallace, wincing at the implications.
“Four what?”
“Mental development of a four-year-old,” Dion said.
Wallace looked puzzled, and maybe offended, but Dion’s focus was on the tree again. He looked up high and fixed on the blue fabric of the girl’s jeans.
“That ladder extend any further?” Wallace asked the fire crew.
The chief answered. “Sure, but we wouldn’t want to startle her again. Every time we attempt to raise the thing she starts yelling and climbing. I’m afraid she’ll fall. We’ll have to get out the block and tackle, but same problem — the fuss will scare her. But we got no choice, really. We’re fetching the netting, should be here shortly.”
“Oh no, she’s climbing again,” a firefighter said.
With a cry of alarm, Mrs. Trask headed toward the ladder, as if she meant to take matters into her own hands. Mr. Trask held her back.
“I’ll go up far as I can get,” Dion offered. “Maybe I can talk her down.”
The firefighters seemed doubtful, as did Wallace, but when nobody voiced a strong objection or insisted he wait for the netting to arrive, Dion shrugged out of his police parka and asked Mrs. Trask what Leona’s favourite TV show was. Sesame Street, she told him. Favourite character: Grover.
Dion knew of Sesame Street, and in his mind’s eye he could see Grover, a furry green puppet thing with a garbage can lid on its head, if he wasn’t mistaken. He could see himself saving the day and being commended before an admiring audience. Years ago he had been on a scene like this, had watched as the rescuer coaxed a child out of hiding by getting down on her level, talking about cartoon characters that she could relate to. Easy. He gave his jacket to Wallace for safekeeping, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and set his foot on the ladder’s first rung.
* * *
Up in the tree, the conversation wasn’t going well. Leona sat six feet above Dion, looking down. He had propped himself on the sturdiest bough he could find and was looking up. Leaving the ladder behind, he had climbed several branches to get closer, but dared go no farther. The thinnish branch she sat on looked strained, and if she got spooked and went any higher, her support structure might start snapping.
From what Dion could see of her, Leona was small for her age. She had fine brown hair in two ponytails. She didn’t seem traumatized, or even unhappy with where she found herself. All she had told him so far was that she had lost her glasses and hurt her knee. He told her that they should both climb down, very slowly, and put a Band-Aid on that knee.
Leona said she didn’t want to go back down because of the man in the bushes. She liked climbing trees, anyway.
“What man in the bushes?” Dion asked.
“Dirty man,” she said. “Flies.”
The image that flashed into Dion’s mind was a grubby flasher with his pants open. But Leona was batting her hands around her face in what looked like annoyance.
“Flies? You mean buzzing flies?”
She nodded, looking down. “Yucky.”
“That doesn’t sound good. Where is this man?”
She pointed unhelpfully to the forest floor below.
“Where? Will you come down and show me?”
No, she wouldn’t climb down, wouldn’t show him. She wanted to stay where she was.
“I won’t let him hurt you,” he said. “Your parents will be there, too. We’ll hold your hand.”
She shook her head.
“Did he scare you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did he say something to you?”
“He looked at me.”
“Did he come close to you?”
She shook her head again. “He was sitting.”
Dion thought about the buzzing flies. It wasn’t the right season for buzzing flies. West Coast flies didn’t buzz much in December, unless there was a free feast to attend. Not the right season for sitting in the woods, either.
His position in the tree was becoming uncomfortable. He called up to Leona, “I’m going down now, get some hot chocolate. And a sandwich. What kind of sandwich do you like? Peanut butter? Aren’t you cold? Hungry?”
She wasn’t hungry, wasn’t cold, was allergic to peanuts.
He told her that her foster parents were worried. “They’re really afraid you’re going to fall and hurt yourself.”
“No, I can fly,” she told him, looking dreamily up at the clouds.
“No!” Dion thrust out a hand to stop the thought in its tracks. Only when she made no show of flapping her arms or launching did he breathe again. “No,” he told her again firmly. “You can’t fly. But you sure can climb. Climb on down here, okay? We’ll sit together for a while.”
She shifted about as if to climb higher, and in desperation Dion resorted to the last trick up his sleeve. A cheap trick, maybe, but all he had left. He shouted up cheerily, “Hey, Leona, you know who’s down there? He heard you’re in trouble and came right over. Grover. He’s sitting there in his garbage can, and he’s really worried you might fall.”
Leona stared down at him, and beyond him to the earth below. From Dion’s perspective, she appeared to tip forward, and he shouted at her again to be still. “You can’t see him from where you’re sitting,” he bellowed. “Just climb down here, slowly. I — I can see him. He’s waving.”
“No, he’s not,” she said.
“Yes, he is.”
“In a garbage can? Why is he in a garbage can?”
And suddenly she was climbing nimbly down. She bypassed him like a monkey and kept going, all the way to the ground. He followed more carefully, and found the girl angry and confused that there was no Grover to greet her. But everyone else was pleased, and there was a spattering of applause as he retrieved his patrol jacket from Wallace.
Leona was pacified, given a carton of apple juice, and her scraped knee was attended to. She then accepted Dion’s apology for his lie, and educated him on the difference between Grover and Oscar the Grouch. Finally she took her foster mom’s hand and led Dion and Wallace into the woods. She stopped and pointed, and Dion stepped in front of her and squinted. Now he caught a glimpse of what had scared her up into the tree. It scared him, too. He turned the family away, telling them to go back to the parking lot and wait there. Wallace radioed the fire chief and gave the same advice: take the men back to the vehicles with the family and stick around till further notice.
Now the three of them were alone, two living and one dead. “Some hobo gave up the ghost,” Wallace guessed. But the woods clearly unsettled him, and he looked more alert than usual. Dion was eying the shadows. Listening, hearing nothing but the rustling of dry leaves and grasses, the shushing of the tides to the west. Then there was the buzzing.
He moved in closer to look at the body.
The dead man sat rump-down in the bushes, staring forward, his lower face damaged and slack, the flies zigzagging about his nostrils, clothes littered with twigs and leaves. Just sitting with his back against a tree, far off the beaten trail, like a man on a picnic gone drastically wrong.
On closer view Dion could see the dead man wasn’t a hobo, he hadn’t given up the ghost in any natural way, and it hadn’t happened too long ago. His hands were zap-strapped at the wrists, his ankles bound with twine. A rope around his neck kept him fixed to the tree and seated upright. Dried blood drizzled off the top of his head like a black, lacy cap.
Dion retraced his steps, away from the smell of death. He summarized for Wallace what he had seen, then jotted notes: time and coordinates, and all those present, and what brought them to the scene, and the weather (cold and overcast, five
above zero, max), and finally a brief description of the dead man. Caucasian, brown-haired, middle-aged, average height and weight. Looked like his skull and jaw had been impacted hard. He wore dark slacks and an expensive-looking brown-leather bomber jacket over a black T-shirt. There seemed to be jagged tears in the T-shirt.
“Could be the Blueridge man,” he said, pocketing pen and notebook. A forty-five-year-old named Rory Keefer had recently been reported missing, and the description was a good fit.
Wallace didn’t reply. He stood rigid, hands in coat pockets, looking solemnly across at the dead man as if trying to communicate with him telepathically. Unlikely, though. Probably he was thinking about Scotch.
There came a faint noise, like a body shifting or something large inhaling deeply — but it was only the wind tugging at the treetops. Dion looked up. A mess of branches blotted out the sky. Nothing around him but tree trunks and shadows. An odd stretch of silence. Then a crow cawed, and somewhere far away, children yelled and whooped.
* * *
Leith and JD were across the waters in Kitsilano talking to Craig Gilmartin’s parents once more. This time they were trying to elicit from them the name, or names, of anyone who could have wanted to harm their son. Rivalry within Gilmartin Senior’s business world, perhaps? Some kind of vendetta?
It was slow going. The parents were exhausted, had just come from the hospital and would soon be going back. Loreen Gilmartin kept losing track of the question and needed frequent time outs. And just as she promised she would be all right now to carry on, a phone call came in from Craig’s brother in Edinburgh, causing further delay.
Leith was waiting for Loreen to finish her long-distance call when JD turned to answer her own phone. She spoke briefly, and once done, motioned Leith aside to fill him in. A dead man in the woods. “Chris Wallace was first on scene,” she said, “and Sean and Doug are on their way out there.”
Wallace from general duties being first on any scene was puzzling. “Some kind of accident?” Leith asked. A foolish hope, as Sean and Doug would not attend an accident, no matter how serious, unless their own loved ones were involved.
“Tied to a tree and shot in the head,” JD said. “I’d say no, not an accident.”
Ten
GUNRUNNER
JD CALLED THE AREA Maplewood Flats. She said Malcolm Lowry had squatted here in the sixties and at that time wrote Under the Volcano — and not much else, she added. Leith didn’t know the man or the book, and in fact had been unaware that this patch of preserved woods and shoreline existed. He looked around with interest as JD drove in. “Nice place,” she said. “Kind of a secret, just minutes from the head-fucking city. And now this.”
They left the car in a small parking area jammed with emergency vehicles and two unmarked sedans, and walked down a trail toward the waterline. JD went on griping. “Just don’t tell all your friends about it. It’s low traffic, and I want to keep it that way.”
“I can count my friends on one hand,” Leith told her. He held up a hand, thumb and two fingers extended. “And you’re one of them.”
She put on a burst of speed, and Leith supposed it was to avoid having to deal with the compliment. He jogged to catch up.
At the end of the path was a small, wild beach strewn with flotsam. The grey-green waves coursed in a climbing tide. Across the strait waters were the impenetrable woods that lined the shores, with Burnaby rising beyond. “This park attracts birders,” JD added, turning toward a picturesque footbridge. “I like birders. They’re quiet, they mind their own business, and they tend to disappear.”
“Are you a birder?”
“Me? Gimme a break.”
She may not be a birder, but he knew that JD had her eyes on the sky in a big way; she wanted to quit the job, move up north, become a bush pilot. Shift cargo and tourists for a living — preferably cargo. Her desire to withdraw from humanity disturbed him. Sometimes, when he was feeling magnanimous, he wanted to reach out to her, keep her grounded, but she never made it easy. The closer they became, the harder she backpedalled.
A short hike brought them to the murder scene, where an unidentified male had been found. No wallet, no ID, no visible tattoos. So far he was just an unfortunate John Doe, executed and left to rot. Leith and JD looked at the body where it sat being photographed. An update had come in to them en route: the man had not been shot, as first thought, but impaled and beaten. Leith understood the error: the body looked bullet-riddled.
He spoke to those on-site and got the full gruesome details. The man’s torso had suffered multiple penetrating wounds, and his head and face had been impacted at least twice, hard enough to break the jaw and knock out a few teeth. As far as the impact trauma, the likely weapon had been found in the bushes: a jagged rock, small enough to heft with two hands, but large enough to do serious damage. The rock was polluted with blood and hair.
Leith also learned that it was Dion, not Wallace, who had found the body. Of course it was. Who else would stumble upon a corpse hidden in this little woodland glen? Nobody but Cal Dion.
He took brief statements from both men, and by the time he was done the body had been removed and only the forest remained to be combed. Wallace left the area, allowed to return to the beach, where he probably rested on a park bench now, rubbing his knobby knees. Dion remained nearby. He was close enough to be called over, if needed, but had turned away from the gory tree. He was eating a sandwich, which Leith found odd.
JD approached Leith, saying she had Jo-Lee Keefer on the line, and what should they do, meet her at the morgue or what? Leith checked his watch, gauging travel time, and suggested forty minutes.
Jo-Lee Keefer was the woman who had reported her husband missing yesterday. Leith recalled Jimmy Torr taking the call and laughing it off as just another husband who didn’t want to be found. Seemed Torr was wrong. There was a good chance this was their missing man, Rory Keefer, and whatever had happened to him, it was most definitely against his will.
Leith walked over to Dion, saying, “Where’d you get that? I don’t see any food trucks around.”
“Ula Trask had extras,” Dion said, mouth full.
Leith didn’t know who or what Ula Trask was. Neither could he imagine having an appetite at a crime scene like this. The reek of death had snaked into his nostrils, and it would take several hot showers and a lot of scented soap to get rid of it. “Looks like we have an ID on this guy,” he said. “He was reported missing yesterday. Going to talk with his wife now, see if we can firm it up.”
“Okay.”
“You and Wallace can leave any time now. We’ve got this place covered.”
“Right, thanks.”
Clearly, Dion was no longer a ladder climber. Well, literally speaking he was, in this case, but in no other sense. Leith collected JD, and together they went to meet the missing man’s wife.
The woman stood waiting in the hospital’s foyer, looking miniaturized in front of an oversized Christmas tree, the soothing notes of seasonal melodies tinkling around her. Jo-Lee Keefer was in her midforties and of Asian descent, with nothing notable about her except a kind of flare when it came to jewellery and cosmetics. She jangled and glistened as she turned to Leith and JD and said, “This better be some kind of horrible mistake.”
They sat in a lounge-like room down the hall from the morgue. JD described the victim and his clothing, and Jo-Lee said that sounded like her Rory. JD asked if Jo-Lee wouldn’t mind looking at the jacket itself, and perhaps a scarf.
Jo-Lee inspected the dead man’s leather bomber jacket, which had been removed from the body and bagged as an exhibit, the bloodied portions of it concealed by strategic folding. She looked at the scarf. She said yes, that was Rory’s jacket, that was his scarf. Now she knew what was coming, the bad news that lurked in that other room, the sort of room she must have seen in movies often enough. She reached to touch the jacket in its plastic shroud. “Chrissake, what are you hiding? Is there blood on it? What’s happened? Let me see
the body.”
“That’s not at all necessary,” JD assured her. “If you want, I could show you a photograph —”
“I want to see him. I want to know.”
Inside the crypt Jo-Lee identified the body without hesitation. The damaged portion of his face, like the bloody jacket, was concealed. “Oh god, that’s him!” she cried. “What’d they do to him? Why? What’d he ever do to them?”
The specificity of her wails pinged Leith’s attention. “You think you know who did this, Mrs. Keefer?” he asked.
“Sure do. He was getting guns in through Stewart, eh?” She looked at Leith, at JD. “Drive up north, pick up a load, bring ’em down here, sell ’em at a huge markup.”
“Guns?”
She fluttered her hands, as if all this talk exasperated her. “I think so, yeah. Don’t ask me. I had nothing to do with it. I hate guns.” She looked at the closed eyes of her dead husband and said, “Oh, you dumb bastard, what have you gotten yourself into?”
She was escorted back to the sitting room, where she told Leith and JD about her husband and his precarious lifestyle. “He used to drive up to Stewart about once a month. He was really tight-lipped about it, but when I kept asking and asking, he finally said it’s guns. I never thought to doubt him. It’s the kind of thing he’d do, eh? Sell guns to schoolchildren, if it made him a quick buck.”
Her face was wet, but already she was recovering from the shock. Leith thought about her fast turnaround from grief. Maybe it would seep back in when she returned home and saw the gap her man had left behind. Or maybe not. Some relationships were fairly cool, take it or leave it. He knew Alison wouldn’t bounce back quickly if she had to identify his body laid out on a stainless steel table. He was quite sure she would mourn for at least a year. He hoped it wouldn’t be much shorter than that, but not a lot longer, either. He made a mental note to remind her that he would want her to get on with her life, if that were to happen, not wait too long to be happy again.
Flights and Falls Page 5