“What colour would you say it is?” Dion said, indicating the car.
Sattar looked at him. “What?”
“I’m making notes. Everybody’s calling it green. Isn’t it more like blue?”
“It’s green,” Sattar said. He kept looking at Dion. “You found the dead guy out in the woods, yeah? Guy who owns this car? How’d you know where to find him?”
It took a moment for Dion to recall Leo gazing out to sea from on high. “I didn’t,” he said. “There was a girl stuck in a tree we had to go check out. She said there was a man in the bushes, and she ended up leading us to the body. I wouldn’t call this green.”
“A girl in a tree? Like, doing what?”
“Long story.”
“Was she pretty?”
“What?”
“So what d’you think all this is?” Sattar said. “Drug deal gone wrong? One of those things you go, yeah okay, he’s dead, so what?”
Sattar was somewhere around twenty-five. He had a pushy way of talking, and quickly lost interest in his own train of thought, which made him hard to follow. His voice filled the cold echo chamber as the Ident team worked. They had broken the seals and were inside with lights and vacs, magnifiers and tweezers, employing their magic in the gathering of trace evidence. Sattar bounced his knees awhile, gloomily looking anywhere but at the car. “They say he’s hanging in there — Craig. But he’s gonna die for sure. I know, ’cause I seen him. Ever met him? An okay guy, I guess. Hilarious accent. Shitty artist, like I say. But totally badass air hockey champ, man. Killed me five in a row. Was hoping to turn that around, reclaim some dignity, but so much for that, eh.”
It didn’t seem as though the team was finding anything interesting in or around the car. Hard to tell with Ident people, though. They never smiled. Never shouted Hallelujah! Dion’s report was bland, so far, and his new, improved longhand looked like squashed spiders. Next to the time of commencement, he wrote in plate number and VIN, transferring the data from his notebook, probably unnecessarily. The data was already spelled out elsewhere.
Next in his notes came a basic description. He had written down 2004 GM Alero, green. Now he crossed out green and wrote blue. Then he thought about Kate, who taught at the art school over on Granville Island, who knew the name of every colour under the sun. He had seen her name in the paper last night, an announcement that she was taking part in a group show with two other artists in a Vancouver gallery. Seeing her name in print was both shocking and maddening. He had been doing so well, putting her into cold storage.
When they had been together — again, it felt like forever ago — Kate had been working on giant photographic montages that Dion never got. She was now with another guy, a guy who ran an organic food outlet, a guy who got it — in both senses. Dion thought about the guy, and for whatever reason, the thought led to Tony Souza jumping off a bridge.
“Did you know Souza?” he asked Sattar, realizing too late he was interrupting some new complaint midstream.
Sattar looked hurt. “Know who? The guy who killed himself? No, not really.”
With that there was nothing left to say. Sattar was staring at Dion in silence.
Dion stared back. “What?”
“He looked a lot like you, didn’t he?”
“Did he?”
It wasn’t the first time Dion had been told he looked like Souza. In the general duty pit some weeks ago, Corporal Doug Paley had called him over, tapping a photograph in a newspaper — a headshot of the young man who had recently jumped off a bridge. “Looks like you in your rookie days, if you squint,” he said.
“No, he doesn’t,” Dion had answered, looking at the photo of Souza, a handsome Mediterranean-looking individual smiling for the camera. Dion was not Mediterranean.
“That’s ’cause you’re not squinting,” Paley had snapped as he walked away.
Now Sattar was making the same comparison, so maybe Paley was right. Dion stretched his back. He looked at the car. He thought of a note he had seen on the whiteboard in the Craig Gilmartin case room just an hour ago. It was a brainstorming list somebody had scrawled in dry-erase marker, points taken from Gilmartin’s statement following the crash on the Sea to Sky Highway, as the team looked for anything Gilmartin might have done or said in the days before he was shot, hoping something might link up and produce a lead. Apparently nothing had.
What was the particular note he was trying to remember, and why did it matter?
He looked at the Alero. Two distinct cases, Craig Gilmartin and Rory Keefer, nothing to link them but gender, rough timeline, and the fact that there were vehicles involved. A crash on the highway on one hand, a green car that might be part of a murder scene on the other. It was enough of a link that he had gone through what he knew of the files again and again, searching for commonality. Nothing. He looked at his boots, trying to pull the word he had seen on the whiteboard so recently. What was it?
He stared harder at the Alero. Something about the colour …
“What’s up?” Sattar asked.
“Steel,” Dion said, slapping his knee. That was the word. “Maybe he meant blue. Would you call this steel blue, maybe?”
“Definitely fucking not,” Sattar said, also looking at the Alero. “Why?”
“They wrote steel/grey on Gilmartin’s board, but what does that mean, steel grey? Dark grey, or silver, or what? I read his statement, Gilmartin’s, the one he gave to first responders on scene, and he said the guy who took off, his car was ‘steel.’ He didn’t say grey, or at least it didn’t get written down, so that’s just what the team guessed he meant. But if all he said was ‘steel,’ maybe he meant blue. Steel blue. That’s a colour, right?”
Sattar’s stare at the Alero became analytical, but not for long. “You’re thinking that car is this car, and that by the way, Craig Gilmartin is colour-blind? Well, yeah, I guess he must be, from what he calls art. But this is not steel anything, man. Especially not blue. This is the shittiest factory green on the planet. It’s a bad colour for a car. The worst.”
Dion doodled a sunburst around the word blue on his clipboard. Then he shrugged, crossed out blue, and wrote green in its place.
Thirteen
HIGH
December 15
FINALLY, AFTER SOME discussion with the team that went nowhere, and then a private discussion with Dion that seemed a little ridiculous, Leith decided he had better go see Rory Keefer’s car for himself. Last night Ident had searched the Alero inside and out, and no signs of violence had been discovered. No scuffs or bloodshed, no slashed upholstery. Seats were not oddly positioned and the rear-view mirror seemed normally aligned. The popped trunk didn’t disclose a load of guns or any other contraband. The only quasi-illegal substance was a damp, dirty roach in the ashtray.
Now, with the forensics report in hand, Leith stood with Dion in the vehicle bay and looked at the ordinary four-door sedan. The car was well-lit by sunlight, with an extra blast from the electric lamps. The colour of the car was a dark, unpleasant green, in Leith’s eyes. Not a bright green. Not grass, emerald, sage, or forest, and definitely not blue either, as Dion had suggested at Leith’s desk this morning in that baffling conversation, drawing lines between this car and Craig Gilmartin’s statement.
“No, well, it’s definitely green,” Leith confirmed. He tapped the file folder he held to prove it. “The registration papers say green. Keefer’s wife called it green. This isn’t a blue car, Cal.”
There was a lull as he and Dion both studied the car. “It’s like a blue-green, maybe,” Dion said. “Gilmartin described the other guy’s car as ‘steel.’ Maybe at night, on the highway, he saw it as steel blue. Because what kind of colour is that, steel?”
“Silver,” Leith guessed. “Or grey. Probably what he meant was lead grey, like every other car on the road is these days.”
“Except he paints. Aren’t painters totally specific about their colours?”
“You really want there to be a connection
, don’t you?”
Dion answered tightly. “It’s not what I want. It’s what I believe. Two violent events within days of each other, two cars to be on the lookout for — how often does that happen?”
“I could pull up half a dozen more files of cars to be on the lookout for right now, if you want,” Leith said. “Maybe you want to link them all in?”
“No.”
“No, of course not. Anyway, there’s nothing to indicate Amelia Foster’s accident was a criminal act. It was a single-vehicle crash. Tragic, of course, and yes, we’d like to find the man at the scene that night who called 911 and was apparently driving a steel-coloured car, because he may be able to shed some light on the shooting of Craig Gilmartin. But I doubt very much he has anything to do with the Maplewood stabbing or this very green car I’m looking at.” To bolster his case, Leith turned to beckon over a civilian mechanic who serviced the bays. “Hey, Pat. Settle this question for us, would you?”
The mechanic joined them and followed their stares to the car. “What’s up?”
“Is it blue or is it green?” Leith asked him.
There was no hesitation from the mechanic. “It’s kind of blue-green,” he said. “Believe they call it teal.”
Leith hurried back upstairs, followed closely by Dion, and together they studied the statement Gilmartin had given roadside on the night of Amelia Foster’s crash, skipping down to the part where he described the vehicle of the man who had flagged him down and then driven off to anonymously call for help.
What was this guy driving? was the officer’s question.
Gilmartin’s answer, as taken down that night, was, Standard four-door, didn’t catch the make. Not too old. Colour I’d say was steel.
Or maybe the officer misheard and — as Dion hardly needed suggest now — Gilmartin had actually said, was teal.
Still, even if the word was teal, not steel, it was not much more than a tease, an unsubstantiated link. Yet Leith eyed Dion with a deep-seated suspicion — or maybe superstition — that because that faint connection was Dion’s lead, the connection would prove valid. Hell no, not just valid — pivotal. “You might be onto something here,” he admitted.
“I know,” Dion said with a grimace. “Just not what I thought I was onto.”
Leith’s impulse to clap him on the shoulder and say something jolly, like good work, died on the vine. “I’m going to take a look at where they found the Alero,” he said instead. “You’d better come along.”
* * *
The Superstore wasn’t far from the detachment. Along the western flank of the mega-building with its football field–sized parking lot ran Keith Road, leading to the freight bays around back, then petering out to an unpaved turnaround. It was along Keith that Rory Keefer’s Alero had been pulled over and left, locked and unblemished.
Leith and Dion got out of Leith’s car to inspect the spot marked on the file diagram. It was a quiet, secluded area, almost a lover’s lane, with a tangle of blackberry bushes and a patchy view of Vancouver across the water. The bushes and grasses had been combed for evidence, any potentially interesting debris picked up and bagged, but so far nothing popped out as relevant.
Leith walked to the end of the turnaround and thought about stats. There weren’t many violent deaths on the North Shore, and few of those deaths were mysterious. He phoned JD and told her to bring in Jo-Lee Keefer, get her to listen to the 911 call from the Horseshoe Bay Mini-Mart, see if by any chance it sounded like her dead husband making the anonymous MVA report.
“You think there’s a connection?” JD asked. “Between Craig and Rory Keefer?”
Leith hesitated. “I have reason to wonder if Keefer wasn’t the man who flagged down Craig at the Amelia Foster crash. Anyway, it would be helpful to find out Keefer’s whereabouts at the time of the crash. “
“Yeah, okay,” JD said tiredly. “I’m still trying to find some dirt on Keefer. Seems to be fairly clean, but everybody I talk to has a different angle on the guy. I’ve been up to my neck in Jo-Lee’s bullshit allegations all day.”
Leith holstered his phone and walked back to where Dion seemed to be on sky duty, observing the cloud formations amassing like an army overhead. “Couple more things I want to check out. The Sea to Sky accident site, and the phone booth where the 911 call was made from.”
Dion got into the passenger seat again. He didn’t look happy. “Why take me along? Orders from Bosko?”
“No orders from anybody. Why would Bosko order me to bring you along?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
Leith could understand Dion’s arm’s-length attitude. He seemed to think he was under suspicion for something. Which he was. And, naturally enough, he didn’t trust those around him, including Leith. Which he shouldn’t.
“You pointed out the colour of the car,” Leith explained. “And somehow or other that sprang a new lead, and maybe even joined these two files. That tells me you’re engaged, and all I want to do —”
“So what? You’d link the two anyway, with or without the car. It’s nothing. By the time you end up investigating whether it’s the same car, it’ll all be solved.”
Leith pushed his vehicle into the traffic funnelling off the Second Narrows Bridge. “Anyway, you can’t fool me,” he said. He idled with the lineup, stop and go. “You want on the case. You want to put your two cents in. Might as well quit playing dead right now.”
They were moving again before Dion spoke up. “You’re in the wrong lane.”
“I know it,” Leith lied, and signalled to butt into traffic.
* * *
Dion regretted his uncalled-for interference, drawing to Leith’s attention the steel-blue question, which turned out to be — maybe — a transcribing error. By different paths, he had arrived at the same destination, merging two vehicles of interest into one, effectively merging two major crime files into one. Smart, observant, dedicated — but a sheer fluke.
He didn’t care that his engagedness impressed Leith. Impressing Leith had not been his objective. Pinning down the doubt was all that mattered. It had nothing to do with work ethic or the goodness of his heart. And as he had told Leith, the team would have arrived at this destination pretty fast on its own.
He noticed that Leith was a good driver, but tense when in new territory, which he was heading into now as they approached the ferry settlement of Horseshoe Bay that jutted into the narrows. He didn’t seem to know this route so well, out here beyond his jurisdiction on the so-called Sea to Sky, a road Dion knew colloquially as the Highway of Death, or sometimes the Killer Highway.
“Don’t like terminals,” Leith admitted. “Too many signs. Go this way, don’t go that way, departures here, arrivals there.”
“Just stay left.”
Leith stayed left, and once in the village he relied fully on Dion for directions to the pay phone. Dion knew Horseshoe Bay well. Over the course of his life, he had taken the ferry across to the Island countless times. He had missed sailings and spent plenty of downtime in this place, had picked up cigarettes from the convenience store while biding his time, and had once used the pay phone affixed to its brick wall off to one side. “That way,” he said.
Leith turned the unmarked Crown Victoria as directed and reversed into a parking stall facing the wall. The phone was mounted on the wall with nothing but a Plexiglas windbreak for those who used it. And who besides a desperado would use it these days? Dion wondered. The phone looked derelict and sad, as if it knew it would soon be jimmied off and chucked into the junk pile with all its mates — another pay phone hits the dust.
The store’s surveillance footage had been gone through, of course. But the outdoor camera was aimed at the entrance, not the side of the building or the shadier parts of the parking area.
Still seated in the car, Dion considered the phone as it related to the front of the store. Through the curve of windshield the sky was grey, end to end. A bit of rain lashed the glass, litter clung to chain-link, an
d far away he could hear the first rumblings of thunder.
“Middle of the night,” Leith said, “The store’s open twenty-four seven, but at twelve sixteen a.m. the place would have been pretty empty. Caller probably parked next to the phone, and employees might not have seen him. We’ll step in, see if anybody’s remembered anything new.”
Two employees were in charge of the brightly lit store. Even at midday there were few shoppers in the aisles. Faint music played, and the workers moved slowly through their tasks, maintaining the delicate balance between doing nothing and looking busy. The young woman who came out from behind the till to talk to Leith told him that, yes, she was on shift that night, just herself because her workmate was a no-show, and it took a while to get a replacement. She was the store manager. She had been manning the till around the time the call was made, and as she told the other cop earlier, she hadn’t seen anybody driving by, pulling up, using the phone — nothing.
“Sometimes memories fill in over time,” Leith explained, handing over his card.
“I’ll put it with the other card with the number I’m supposed to call if I remember anything,” she said, and laid it on the counter.
“Was there much traffic that night?”
“The usual, probably. Not much.”
He showed her a photograph of Rory Keefer. “This guy ring any bells?”
“Doesn’t ring my bell, that’s for sure,” she said, and glanced at Dion and grinned.
Flights and Falls Page 7