But fifteen minutes? He addressed Jo-Lee. “Did you ever see these guns?”
She shook her head, pulling a face. “God, no. Didn’t want to. Once he told me, I never asked again. Plugged my ears.”
“Do you know who he was selling to?”
“No idea. Believe me, his friends and mine don’t mingle.”
JD asked, “Did Rory own a gun of any kind? Small arms or rifles?”
Leith knew Rory Keefer didn’t possess a firearms licence, so any guns he owned would be illegal. “I’m sure he did,” Jo-Lee said. “I’m sure he ran every calibre available on the planet, and had a collection of his own. Was he shot with one of his own guns, is that what you’re saying?”
JD didn’t tell her that it wasn’t a gun that killed Keefer. The evidence wasn’t in yet, she said. But Jo-Lee seemed to reach her own conclusion. “He’s been like a scalded cat these last few months,” she said with a grim nod. “Very jumpy. Says there’s someone named Giorgio after him, a rival gunrunner, he says. The name keeps him up nights. It’s Giorgio this, Giorgio that, Giorgio’s going to get me, Giorgio’s going to slit my throat. He was going to take out this life insurance policy, but in the end he was too cheap. My Alero,” she said, her eyes on Leith now, a startling switch of pace. “You guys ever find it? It’s technically my car, not his. Only got it last fall, brand new off the used car lot.”
Her earlier report of a missing husband had come hand-in-hand with a report of her missing vehicle, and up till now Leith had thought the vehicle was collateral damage. Now he raised his eyebrows.
“Not yet, Jo-Lee,” JD said. “We’re still looking.”
And we’ll be looking very damn hard, now, Leith thought. “Anything about this car that stands out?” he asked. “Custom paint job, body damage, stickers?”
“No, it’s just a boring, clean, well-maintained Alero. Green.”
JD had her notebook out. “Okay, so we’re going to have to take a look around your property,” she said. “And the sooner the better. See if we can find anything to help figure out who did this, all right? Is that okay with you?”
“Yes, of course,” the woman said.
“We’ll have you escorted home, and the rest of us will be there within the hour. I’ve got your address right?”
Jo-Lee checked and confirmed the address in JD’s notes. “There’s an old garage out back I never go near. No clue where the key is, but go ahead and break the lock. That’s where you’ll probably find them, the Uzis or whatever the hell.”
She looked back toward the swing doors as she was led away, and Leith caught a glimpse of what looked like sorrow in her profile. For Rory Keefer’s sake, he was glad.
* * *
They found no Uzis stashed in the garage once they had broken the lock. There were no rifles, shotguns, revolvers, or pistols. No BB guns, ray guns, stun guns or glue guns. Nothing but an old plastic dollar-store spud gun lying on a dusty shelf. Neither did a villain named Giorgio pop out of the woodwork. Not yet, though it was a line being followed up in the dead man’s computer, phone records, and correspondence. The name had been Googled and algorithmed and put to the RCMP’s best informants, with a G, with a J, in various language variants. No Giorgio showed up.
Jo-Lee was their only suspect. She worked for the city. She was not in the databases as any kind of troublemaker, or even a witness to trouble. After a second interview, Leith felt that for a suspect, she was far from exciting.
In the early evening, he and JD and the others who had pitched in to search the Keefer property returned to the office empty-handed. Leith was depressed. The workload was ballooning before his eyes, and many of the best detectives were either on holiday, training programs, or sick leave, all of which amounted to a lot of overtime in the forecast for him. His noble plans of tackling the walls of his new fixer-upper bungalow — first line of attack PolyFilla and spatula — would have to go on hold. Again.
Even the quiet pleasure — well, not exactly quiet, with a three-year-old on board — of sitting at the family table for dinner tonight was not to be.
Leith stepped into Mike Bosko’s office — Bosko was also working late — to update him on Rory Keefer, the non-guns, the non-Giorgio, the non-Alero, and in the other frustrating case, the lack of progress on the Craig Gilmartin shooting.
“Yes, well, keep at it,” Bosko said. “I’ve been talking to the super, and we’re going to bring some guys up from general duties, fill the gaps. Speaking of general duties, I’m still not sure how Dion got from a yacht at Deep Cove to a homicide at Maplewood.”
Leith leaned in the doorway. Another big unsolved mystery cluttering up his thoughts like a dull worry, like overdue taxes, was Cal Dion — something to be dealt with, but better tomorrow than today. “It’s a long story. If you want, I can recap for you, but —”
Bosko shook his head. “You know what, Dave, I don’t need to know right now. But since we’re here and talking about him, I’ll answer some of those questions you had last month, if you have an extra moment.”
This was the grain of sand in Leith’s relationship with Bosko: Dion, and what he may or may not have done. Leith took a chair, resisting the urge to cross his arms, and listened.
Eleven
TROUBLE
THE EXPLANATION STARTED with a question so broadly cast that it took Leith a minute to pin it down. “How’s it been going?” Bosko asked.
To an outsider, the correct answer would have been something like “not bad.” But Leith, an insider who knew exactly what was behind the question, answered frankly. “It’s not.”
The “it” Bosko was asking about was Leith’s investigation into a crime neither of them could even begin to prove, Leith suspected. What he knew about it was virtually nothing. He knew Dion had maybe broken the law, that it had occurred the summer before last, and that Mike Bosko was the lead investigator — if not the only investigator. And Bosko’s sole confidant and deputy was Leith.
Last summer he had taken on the responsibility to be Bosko’s eyes and ears. They were a two-man team on what Leith had thought was a case without foundation. And yet his prying had made some headway. He had latched a tracker onto Dion’s car, and the data had led him to a defunct gravel pit in the Cloverdale area of Surrey. A gravel pit with expanses of crumbly dirt that would make a great spot for disposal of a body, and Leith had thought he was on the verge of discovery.
But it was a short-lived victory. It seemed Dion had an audacious guardian angel, for when Leith had returned, only days later, foolishly equipped with a long-handled shovel, he had found the gravel pit back in business, and dumped over the possible crime scene were, yes, a few kilotons of crushed rock.
The destruction of the possible crime scene had ended his inquiries — a memory he would prefer to forget — and he had spent months pondering whether to share his intel with Bosko or not. For now, at least, it was a resounding not.
His hopes that the investigation would fuck off and die were dashed last month when Bosko had explained why his interest was alive and well and going places: apparently there was a witness to Dion’s crime.
But the conversation had ended there, in no small part because Leith had decided he was done spying on brother officers. Leave that to Bosko and the internal investigations team, if it came to that. But that was then, and this was now, and apparently Leith wasn’t done. Not yet.
“Do you want to hear this?” Bosko asked.
Of course Leith didn’t want to. But he had to. He had to end the suspense. It wasn’t a fun kind of suspense. It was like getting a free ticket to the execution of a friend. He nodded.
“Remember our first debrief in New Hazelton, just about a year ago?” Bosko asked. “It was in the backroom of a restaurant. Introductions were made, and one young constable in attendance was Dion. The name caught my attention, since a constable named Dion had been involved in a serious crash in Surrey some months before. I didn’t know if this was the same Dion, but it didn’t take much checki
ng to confirm it.”
Leith had first met Dion then, too, and had not been impressed. He’d been the opposite of impressed. He had thought Dion was a rookie, and an inept one at that. He had since learned the man wasn’t a rookie and wasn’t inept, but just plain difficult.
Bosko continued. “It wasn’t until I learned his first name that I began to wonder, though. Because phonetically, Cal Dion rang a bell in my mind. It’s a strange story, Dave, so listen carefully. In August last year, the non-emergency number of this detachment received an anonymous message. The caller, a female, reported a crime in Surrey. As you know, our front desk is not manned 24-7, and after hours, incoming non-emergency calls go to an answering service. The message she left was muffled. She used a pay phone, and you know how hard it is to find pay phones these days. That told me she probably didn’t want to be traced.”
An echo of the 911 caller in Horseshoe Bay, Leith thought.
“Probably she was trying to disguise her voice as well,” Bosko said. “The pay phone she used turned out to be in a Coquitlam mall. The mall’s surveillance video didn’t give us a face. So we were left with, basically, a muffled mystery call that went nowhere, filed away and forgotten. I was new to North Vancouver then, and I had a lot to think about, but I didn’t quite forget about it. I had to wonder why a caller from Coquitlam would call a North Van detachment to report a Surrey crime. Right?”
Right, Leith thought. A month after Cal Dion, a North Van constable, had crashed his car in Surrey.
Bosko said, “The situation would have been a lot different if the caller had spoken clearly. She says, ‘I know’ — something indiscernible — ‘killed on killed a man in Surrey.’ And it went on from there. Even after enhancing the audio, we thought it was just a stutter, and the name was lost in the indiscernible bit. Follow?”
Barely. Leith nodded.
“So back in the Hazeltons, when I was confirming Dion’s identity just out of curiosity, I saw ‘Calvin Dion’ in his paperwork. It still didn’t click. But when I mentioned him to Inspector Stein a few days later, and she called him Cal, I began to wonder. When I got back home, I listened to the message again, and I was about thirty percent convinced that ‘killed on’ was actually ‘Cal Dion.’”
The puzzle piece snapped into place. “What was the rest of the message?”
Bosko had it memorized, it seemed. “‘I know’ — indiscernible — ‘killed on killed a man in Surrey. When you arrest’ — indiscernible — ‘testify against him. Make the arrest, and I’ll call again.’ That’s all I had at that point. I didn’t have a body in Surrey that fit with the crash in any way whatsoever. Just one muffled call-in. Anonymous, with no follow-up. You can see why I didn’t open up a file.”
“But you pulled strings to get him back here, so you could keep an eye on him. Keeping an eye on him from your position wouldn’t be easy, so you got me to do it. Right?”
“Partly that. Partly it was curiosity. Is he brilliant, or just lucky, the way he gets things done? Case in point, the dead man at Maplewood. Either way, as I told you, he would be one incredible asset to the team, if he’d only take the offer.”
“An asset, or a suspect in a Surrey murder without a body,” Leith said, and realized his arms had crossed themselves. His undisclosed knowledge about a possible gravesite lying under mountains of rock haunted him. When this all came out, he would have to decide whether to confess to his iffy tracking fiasco, or just shut up about it.
Probably the latter.
He uncrossed his arms and linked his hands in his lap, watched Bosko, tried to look nonchalant. The kicker, he felt, was coming.
“A month ago, around Halloween,” Bosko said, “I got the second call I’d been waiting for. It came through the main line again, and this time was patched through to me. Same voice, less muffled.”
God, Leith thought.
“In fact, clear as a bell,” Bosko continued. “With no intro, she said, ‘Why haven’t you arrested Dion? Haven’t you found the body?’ So there it was. I was right, and I was stunned. Even with my concerns brewing away, it was a shock to hear his name.”
“You recorded the call?”
“The call to the main desk is recorded. Once patched through, it’s not. I asked her why Dion should have been arrested. She said because he killed a man. Now, that could mean killed a man in the line of duty, but there’s no record of Dion ever having done so.”
“Maybe she was referring to the MVA. Dion was the driver, and his passenger, Luciano Ferraro, was killed. Maybe it was somebody who knew Ferraro, who wanted Dion to pay. Maybe the caller was Ferraro’s wife.”
“Well, except she asked if we found the body.”
“Right, of course. No mystery about where Ferraro’s body is.”
“So that doesn’t fit. This caller was talking about an actual murder with intent. We didn’t get into the nitty-gritty, as I wanted to nail down her identity and the specifics quick as possible. I asked who the victim was. She didn’t answer. I feared she was getting discouraged and might disconnect, so I tried to keep her chatting. I told her that her previous call was too muffled to discern and suggested it would be best to meet in person. She said if I didn’t have a body, there wasn’t much point in talking further, then implied that I was incompetent. I told her we could maybe find the body if she came forward and helped fill in the blanks. I gave her my personal number, told her to call any time. She said she would think about it. Then she hung up. So what have I got? Confirmation that she is accusing Dion. An informant who is weighing whether to come forward with more details. That’s where I stand.”
“Chances are you don’t hear from her again. Then what?”
“Back burner once more. There’s not enough to push it forward. For all I know, it’s somebody with a grudge just trying to make trouble for him. I have a feeling, though, I’ll be hearing from her again before long. Clearly this knowledge bothers her. She wants resolution.”
Bosko’s phone was doing its usual blitz of buzzing and flashing for attention, and as always he seemed to know instinctively what to ignore and what to pay attention to. He picked it up now, and the light from the screen lit his face as he read a message. Then, “Anyway, the long and the short of it is” — Christ, here it comes, Leith thought — “let’s just keep it open for now. If this woman gets in touch, I’ll let you know.”
“What if I want to distance myself from it all?”
Bosko tilted his head and considered Leith. “I wouldn’t blame you. But you won’t be doing him any favours. Don’t you think?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but gave a rueful smile that doubled as a see you later, and turned to other matters.
Twelve
BLUE
MONITORING THE PROCESSING of evidence was about as easy as things could get, Dion decided. It was a step down from his tasks in general duties, where at least he was out and about, doing things. He preferred the out and about. He watched the car being processed and worked at adjusting to the slower pace.
Only minutes earlier the vehicle had been unchained from the carrier and dropped into its examination bay. High-watt spotlights glared down, giving the scene an underworld showroom quality. The lock-up was chilly and stank of gasoline. In the after-hours lull every clink and clank echoed. Two members from the Forensics Identification Unit were at work, crawling in and around the car. Dion had taken up an observation post at the sidelines, seated on a plastic stacking chair against the wall next to Raj Sattar, his partner of the hour. Both men were in uniform, with jackets on and collars up.
Sattar was an optional partner, really. Free to leave, should he be called away on other errands that might arise. With no errands to run now, he was studying his smartphone screen, or playing a game on it, and complaining. Dion held a clipboard loosely on his lap, doing as told, observing the car and ready to take notes, though there were none to take at the moment. He was not listening to Sattar much. A mad energy surged through his body, but he felt too heavy to move. He looked at h
is clipboard and saw that the notes he had made were blocky and childish. The writing style had become habitual, a way of taming his spastic loops. To kill time, he decided to try writing in a more mature hand. He clicked his pen and focused on the facts.
The facts were basic. The car was a shiny newish Alero, trunk and doors sealed off with exhibit stickers. It was confirmed to be Rory Keefer’s vehicle, and had been located on Keith Road an hour ago, about 5:30 p.m., at the rear of the Superstore, only a couple minutes’ drive from the Maplewood Flats, where the man had died. Like its owner, parked and cold. No keys in the ignition. Dion filled out the form again, trying this time for fluency. Make, model, colour …
Sattar continued to complain. He seemed disgusted. He was meant for bigger things than watching a car being worked over. “But no,” he said. “We need eyes on this. Four eyes, I guess. What about the murder of Craig Gilmartin? I should be on that one. It should be mine. I was first on scene, me and Kenny Poole, but Kenny’s useless. Stands there going what the fuck like he never seen a shooting victim before, while I jump in like Superman and administer first aid.”
Dion nodded. Nodding like a bobble-head to whatever Sattar was talking about seemed to satisfy him. Listening seemed optional.
“Saved Craig’s life, didn’t I?” Sattar was saying. “And so far nobody says thank you. Propped him up, wound higher than heart level to slow the bleeding. Applied pressure, ’cause if he lost another ounce, man, forget what Kenny says, telling me not to touch him — if I hadn’t so-called touched him, you think he’d still be alive?”
“Yeah, no,” Dion said.
“Seems he’s some kind of artist,” Sattar said suddenly. “Kenny and me cleared the place, and in one room — you know how you notice things even if it’s in the back of your mind, when you’re totally focused on something else? Well, there’s this big picture up on an easel thing, and there’s paintbrushes and shit around, and in the back of my mind I’m thinking, whoa, is that some kind of mishap with a paint can? If that’s what he done on purpose, man, he’s a bad, bad artist. Really bad. I mean, I could do better drunk with my eyes closed. I mean, nice enough, okay, with little bits of gold and all that. But honestly? Anyway, I shoulda known. He’s such a fruitcake, man. Can’t stand the guy …” Sattar fell silent, looking depressed. Fruitcake or not, Gilmartin was his friend, and his friend was dying.
Flights and Falls Page 6