Flights and Falls

by R. M. Greenaway

  It wasn’t the first time Dion had heard the ring-my-bell joke. Not the first time Leith had, either, judging from the shortness of his smile. “So you’ve never seen him before? He didn’t walk by that window, step into the store?”

  “Nope.”

  “How slow a night was it? One car an hour? Two?”

  “Something like that. One or two. Wait,” she said, and held up a finger. Leith and Dion waited. “No, maybe that was another night,” she finished.

  “What was another night?”

  “When you said two, it did ring a bell. Two pairs of headlights, no customers,” she said. “Both vehicles went to the side there.”

  Dion put pen to paper, making note of her words.

  “Along here?” Leith asked. “By the phone?”

  “Kind of in that area. You always worry, is this the night I’m going to get robbed? But no customers came in, so for all I know they did their drug deal or whatever and left. Happens. I forgot about that till now.”

  “Two vehicles together, one following the other? Or some space between them?”

  “Kind of together, but not like bumper to bumper.”

  “How long did they stay there?”

  “Well, as I said, I forgot about them, didn’t notice them leaving.”

  “Or whether they left together or separately?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “And you don’t know what night that was?”

  “Let me think about it.” She thought about it, gazing at Dion. “That was the night that whole family got shot dead down in Oregon,” she told him. “Murder-suicide, you remember that, the contractor who went bankrupt and decided his own life wasn’t worth living, so neither were his wife and kids’? I’m sure they were grateful for his sense of togetherness.”

  Dion wasn’t aware of the tragedy.

  “It was in the headlines,” she said. “I was reading about it on my iPad soon after I wasn’t held up and robbed. So that’s why I know it was that night. It’s all a stream of consciousness, you know? Connecting the dots.”

  “So Oregon was breaking news when these cars pulled in?” Leith said.

  “Yes, for sure.”

  Leith did a headline search on his phone. He showed the result to Dion, then looked at the clerk. “Got it. If that’s the same night somebody made a call from that pay phone, we’re getting there. Let’s try to narrow it down to a time.”

  Her best guess was anywhere between 12:00 a.m., about an hour or so after her shift began, and 2:15, when her co-worker arrived. Leith asked her if she had any idea what either of the two vehicles were — cars, pickups, vans, any clue?

  “No clue,” she said. “They were just headlights.”

  “High, low, close-set, wide?”

  “Wow, don’t ask for much, do you? I think the first was low, like a normal car. Second was maybe higher, like maybe a pickup truck.”

  “The high headlights — how far apart? Wide like a full-sized pickup, or more like a small Jeep-type vehicle?”

  “This is where my recall hits a brick wall. Sorry.”

  “Anything else of interest happen that night?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, thanks,” Leith said.

  “Thanks,” added Dion, tucking away his notebook.

  “Have a nice day,” she told them.

  * * *

  Leith had bought a takeout coffee before leaving, and with it safely lodged in the console, he drove north approximately fifteen minutes, to the accident scene that he had flagged on his GPS, the spot where Amelia Foster had left the road in her red Mazda 323. With no good place to park, he drove past the spot, pulled a U-turn at the earliest opportunity and parked on the ocean side, southbound, with hazards flashing. Probably right about where Gilmartin had parked that night, behind the steel or teal vehicle of the mystery man who might or might not be Rory Keefer.

  “Not a great road in winter,” Dion remarked from the passenger seat. The engine was shut off and they were both staring across the road at a shallow ravine, the stand of conifers backed by a natural rock wall.

  From this distance there was no way of knowing which was the killing tree, but Leith could guess. “Yeah,” he said. “I know what they used to call it.”

  “There’ve been worse roads in Canada,” Dion said. “But not by far. Till the upgrades. That’s reduced the fatalities along here quite a bit.”

  “Some things change for the better,” Leith said, and stepped from the warm serenity of the car into a battering cold wind. He stood by the bumper of the Crown Vic and took in his surroundings. The traffic here was not heavy, but steady. Skiers heading to Whistler, no doubt, and Whistlerites heading into town for some Christmas shopping. Cars zipped by doing probably ninety clicks. Limited by geography, this section of road narrowed from four lanes to one lane in each direction: two narrow opposing lanes, twisting in tight curves along the belly of the cliffs, no centre divider.

  “Used to be like this all the way to Whistler,” Dion said by the passenger door.

  Leith stared up. The rock wall rose steeply, then slanted into the dull glare of the sky. To his back was an aluminum guardrail, the only barrier against a deadly plummet into the Pacific.

  They waited for a break in the traffic and crossed the highway on foot, and from there climbed down the grassy dip and through some low scrub to where the Mazda had come to rest. The wreck had been removed, but the evidence of destruction remained: the wounded fir tree, the heaved and gouged ground, the crushed bracken.

  Leith looked at the ground where the MVA victim would have lain. “It raises some questions,” he said. “If the unknown driver arrived before Craig, maybe he was responsible for the accident. Might even have run her off the road deliberately. Or, if he didn’t cause the accident, maybe he saw who did.”

  “If he ran her off the road on purpose,” Dion said, after a moment’s consideration, “he definitely wouldn’t have told Craig. If he’d run her off by mistake, he might have said so. If he’d seen someone else run her off the road, he definitely would have told him. He didn’t say anything, so either he ran her off the road, or he didn’t see who did, or nobody ran her off the road and it was just an accident. She lost control, like he told Gilmartin.”

  “Sure. I get what you’re saying.” Leith tried to imagine the night, from what he knew. He took in the scene, added blackness, seriously reduced the volume of traffic, then threw in some variables. “Maybe Teal had a passenger. Gilmartin might not have noticed a third party.”

  He knew from the on-scene investigator’s report that other passersby had stopped after Gilmartin, but the investigator had not considered them important, as those passersby hadn’t seen anything and would have nothing to add. So away those witnesses had gone, unfortunately, without handing over their contact information.

  Maybe they would respond to the ads that had gone out asking the public for information, but Leith doubted it. Their testimony, for what it was worth, was gone like the morning mist.

  “If the driver of the teal car is Rory Keefer,” he said, “and if Keefer witnessed something he shouldn’t, that could mean someone tracked him to the pay phone in Horseshoe Bay. Maybe that’s the second vehicle the clerk saw pull in. The supposed pickup.”

  “Kidnapped him after the call,” Dion agreed. “If so, there must be more than one person involved. Someone would have to drive Keefer’s car away, dump it out of sight behind the Superstore.”

  Leith nodded, thinking again about Keefer’s possible involvement. Keefer owned a cellphone, of course he did, but he hadn’t used it that night. Because he didn’t want the trouble of being a witness, or some shadier reason? Had he driven Foster off the road deliberately? Was he killed for what he’d done? And was Gilmartin targeted because he had talked to Keefer?

  Red paint from the Mazda was smeared, blood-like, across the killing tree’s pale bark. Otherwise the ravine was giving nothing away. The two men climbed the bank and studied the asphalt
underfoot, the black burnt-rubber streaks of Amelia Foster’s wheels heading at them like the twin ghosts of her horror. Again, it told them nothing but the obvious. For rate of speed and all the other fine details, the accident reconstructionist would have to translate for them — another report in progress.

  Dion looked to the north. “There’s a pullout there, illuminated. Foster would have driven through it just before she crashed.”

  Leith followed his line of vision. Down the road, ocean side, a scenic viewpoint bellied out over the sea, with the usual info signs and oversized garbage bins. Three taller-than-average lamp standards would have lit that section of highway even in the darkest hours. “I doubt the light would reach this far.”

  Traffic had increased since they had pulled over to the shoulder. Cars torpedoed past, shredding the air. They waited for their chance to cross and made the dash. Dion went around the front of their car to look over the brink. Leith joined him, and what lay below looked to his watering eyes like a vast brawl: whitecaps rushing in at the rocks, sucking back, rushing in harder, crashing down and breaking into froth.

  No wonder Amelia Foster had steered left.

  Fourteen

  STONE WALLS

  December 16

  THE BLOCKY OLD HOSPITAL sat across the street from the detachment. At the reception desk, as he showed his identification, Leith was advised of the strict ICU house rules. He was warned again by another nurse outside Gilmartin’s door, then left alone.

  Inside the room were three empty beds and one shrouded by curtains. Behind the curtain he found a chrome-railed bed flanked by active machinery. Craig Gilmartin lay on his back, an inert, long-limbed cocoon sheathed in blankets and tubes. His eyelids were faintly blue-veined, like a baby’s, and the lashes were gummy. His intubated mouth and nose were enclosed in a plastic snout strapped to his head, and the mask, Leith realized, was doing Gilmartin’s breathing for him.

  The young constable had caught the bullet close to his heart, rupturing the subclavian artery, shattering his scapula and throwing him into hypovolemic shock, if Leith had the lingo right. The bottom line was that he might not pull through. Yesterday, Raj Sattar had managed to weasel past the nurses to visit Gilmartin, to say a prayer over him. Visibly shaken, he had then reported back to the detachment, saying Craig was deader than anyone was willing to admit.

  With the doctors’ long and grim reports in mind, along with Sattar’s pithy one, Leith had come expecting the worst. Instead, to his surprise, what he saw in Gilmartin’s form lying before him was not a fading, but a life force slowly surfacing. Strange. Leith was far from imaginative, yet it was happening before his eyes, the frenetic process of demolition and repair, a cellular knitting and relayering. Gilmartin was going to survive.

  Only when the machinery broke its pattern of blipping did he wake with a start.

  Pessimism firmly back in place, he ran to fetch a nurse. The nurse studied the screen briefly and adjusted something. She thanked him for bringing it to her attention as though she really would have preferred that he hadn’t, and whisked off again.

  Probably best not to hang around, Leith realized. “Keep up the good work,” he told Gilmartin, and left him to his stealthy repairs.

  * * *

  The meeting Leith called was held in Bosko’s office. Rather than taking seats, Leith, JD and Jimmy Torr stood around Bosko where he sat at his desk to share what they had. Torr opened the meeting by holding up a manila envelope and promising that the pictures weren’t pretty. “Ready for a little light entertainment?”

  Bosko didn’t say whether he was ready or not, but accepted the photos as they were handed to him, removed his glasses, and studied each in detail. Leith stood behind him and looked over his shoulder, refreshing his own memory. The first shot was an 8 x 10 glossy of a dead man sitting against a tree, what was left of his face swollen and discoloured, blood tracking down his cheeks from the crown.

  “This loose scarf around the throat —”

  “Not a garrotte,” Leith said. “It was used to gag him. Knotted at the back. Blood on it, and some vomit. Probably slipped off when his jaw broke. His wife identified the scarf as his.” He took the photos from Torr, pulled the autopsy set, and showed the first to Bosko. “Note the bruises.”

  “Ankles, wrists, knees, elbows, all over,” JD said. “Like he was banged around in some hard place. Or struggling. Duct-tape gunk all over him. Mouth, too. Riot of fibres caught in the gunk. Chafing. Probably tied at the wrists and ankles and held in close confinement for some hours.”

  “Like a car trunk,” Leith suggested. “Except the fibres aren’t off any kind of car-grade carpet. Maybe he was placed on a tarp.”

  Bosko was looking at the first photograph again, of Rory Keefer tied to the tree. He glanced up at Leith.

  “He was stabbed in the abdomen first,” Leith said, and the unimaginable suffering of Rory Keefer struck him again. “Stabbed twice. Then left sitting for some time before being finished off with a rock to the face and top of the head. He was stabbed again post-mortem, fourteen times: deep, fast thrusts into the thighs, lower belly, and a couple more to the stomach. There was also a more deliberate stab between the ribs around the heart. Missed the heart, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Strange, since he was already dead.”

  “Looks like amateur hour to me,” Torr said.

  Leith nodded. “The rock-to-face blow dislocated his jaw, as you can see. Must have been a heavy swing going right to left. Then a swing downward with the same rock fractured the skull, left a depression about seven centimetres round, and is the likely cause of death. There’s blood and hair on the rock and the surrounding area, but not much blood spray. Still, the killer, or killers, would have walked out of there quite a mess.”

  “You say he was left sitting for some time before being finished off,” Bosko said. “How long?”

  “We can’t say, except it wasn’t quick,” replied Torr. “At least ten minutes, we’re thinking.”

  “Maybe they were trying to get information out of him,” Leith said.

  “Or it was just for the thrill,” added Torr.

  “Revenge,” Bosko suggested.

  JD had another idea. “The killer never did anything like this before. He was unsure of himself. He stabbed the guy, twice, thinking it would be like in the movies, instant death. When that didn’t happen, he started freaking out, trying to decide what to do. Maybe seeing the man in pain got to him, and he used a rock to finish him off fast. Show him some mercy.”

  “Why do you assume it’s a he?” said Torr, nose in the air. “Seems kind of sexist.”

  “I’d hardly call a rock to the head merciful,” Leith put in, pre-empting JD’s probably regrettable response. “A cut throat would be kinder. It probably wasn’t extracting information, either. You’d see more superficial cuts. I’m with Jim — it’s a first-timer’s thrill kill, plain and simple.”

  “Whatever the case,” Torr said, “even ten minutes is a hell of a long time to hang around the scene.”

  “’It’s cold, wet, and miserable,” JD agreed. “Not to mention creepy as hell.”

  “No, I’m saying it’s risky,” Torr said. “Even in December, even at night, you get your weirdo nature buffs exploring the park. The guy’s got to be wired.”

  “Why do you assume it’s a he?” JD said smoothly.

  Leith agreed with Torr that the killer or killers — he was quite sure more than one were involved — were on something.

  “If only adrenaline,” Bosko murmured. He had looked through the horrific photographs with equilibrium, as if they were landscape shots and not stark depictions of torture. He stacked them, handed them back to Leith, and changed the subject. “Bit of promising news for you guys. We have a response to the public request for witnesses to the Sea to Sky crash, a driver who came on the scene and stepped out to help.”

  “Right on,” Torr said.

  “I didn’t talk to the tipster myself, but she’ll be coming in later tod
ay to give a statement. Also Amelia Foster’s partner, Tiffany Tan — maybe it’s time to have another talk with her.”

  “Yikes, the dykes,” Torr said. “Well, what?” he retorted at Leith’s glare. “That’s what she is. She and Foster were a couple, okay? Let’s not be coy here.”

  “Since we’re not being coy here,” JD told Torr, “You’re an asshole.”

  Leith’s views on many things were old-fashioned and would no doubt fail the PC test, but unlike Torr, he was smart enough to keep his prejudices to himself — and to see them as something he needed to change. He turned his glare on JD, who shouldn’t be swearing at the top of her lungs in the presence of Bosko, but she was too busy thrusting her chin at Torr to catch the reprimand. Which didn’t matter, as Bosko had ignored the entire exchange. He swivelled his chair around to face Torr and said, “I know you and Doug talked to Tan once already, and I think you mentioned it was like pulling teeth. She was in shock, though, and hopefully she’s recovered a bit. It’d be good to get any exchanges she had with Foster that day. It could be nothing, or it could be important, but whatever it is, gently does it. Right?”

  “I tell you what it’ll be,” said Torr, “more of the same: dunno, dunno, dunno.”

  “Right, so let’s switch things up a bit,” Bosko replied. “Take Dave this time, and let him do the talking. Okay?”

  It was a mild but icy slap, and even thick-skulled Torr seemed to feel it.

  Done, Bosko wished them all a good day, leaving Leith and Torr, two straight white guys, to pay a visit to one gay Asian woman. Leith could only hope she was more open-minded than they were.

  * * *

  Tiffany Tan was thirty-three, with a bleach-blonde asymmetrical haircut and a row of studs in one ear. Her mouth was clamped in a thin line, her eyes red rimmed and bruised looking. She stood reeking of dope in the doorway of the low-income housing unit where she lived with Amelia Foster, and it appeared Torr was right — she was going to stonewall them once again.

  No, they couldn’t come in, was her first response. They could talk to her from the corridor.