Flights and Falls

by R. M. Greenaway

  A pause while Dion considered the question. “We didn’t go hiking every weekend.”

  “And you’ve only been there once before yesterday. Years ago. Your memory’s pretty good, sometimes.”

  An even longer pause. “Sometimes it is,” Dion said.

  After a short wait, in case this was confession time — it wasn’t — Leith let him off the hook and started to pack it in, thinking of the long, difficult day ahead. The exercise he was preparing for might have been a nice break from routine, if not for the many motorists he was sure to piss off. “Let’s see if the crew is ready. I want to get this over with, fast.”

  * * *

  Within the hour Dion was standing on the pullout on the highway, where the marked and unmarked police vehicles had congregated. There was also a civilian car, a white hatchback wearing reindeer antlers. To his right lay the strait waters, ferries and recreational boats that seemed to float in the chill. With some wait ahead of him, he studied the watercraft moodily. Bullshit was going to be his downfall, he realized. That same haze he had invented, that he so desperately needed, was going to envelop him. A year and a half ago he thought he’d been smart, covering everything off to investigators with I don’t remember.

  In fact he did remember, perfectly.

  The mistake was not mapping out his memories. On paper. He hadn’t studied up hard enough in those rehab days, as his memory came back like a defragging hard drive. It had come back fast and clear, with things he would rather forget. He had taken to sitting in the library at the hospital, his face still lumpy, head still patchily shaved from surgery, looking through psych manuals, the DSM and other textbooks, trying to figure out how best to fake it.

  The memories were there, but not the intelligence, clearly. He hadn’t realized how lost he would get without a spreadsheet to guide him. No, instead, in his endless discussions with cops and neuropsychologists in the days that followed, he had blurred up his past with reckless abandon. And now he couldn’t get it back, not without raising flags and launching a re-investigation into the crash itself. So, Cal, the fog is clearing — let’s talk about Cloverdale, about the death of Luciano Ferraro, about what the hell you guys were up to out there at that time of night.

  Probably, the past was clearer to him than it was for most people. Pre-crash, at least. It was the days following that were murky. Swimmy. Vague. He had flipped the truth, and now keeping track of what he was supposed to have forgotten was impossible. How could he remember what he’d “forgotten” with his post-crash memory deteriorating? It was bad, and getting worse, not at all excellent, as he assured anyone who asked. Just another lie he had to keep under his hat at all costs, if he wanted to keep the job.

  The dream of keeping the job was the source of his depression, he decided. Depression is the gap between what you’re wanting and what you’re getting. One day soon all his hopes and dreams would hit the wall in a messy explosion that would see him packed off, wearing the wrong kind of stripes. And then what? No choice but to follow in Constable Souza’s footsteps and find some great height to jump off of. Even if it meant an in-cell hanging using prison PJs for rope.

  He winced through flickering cold sunlight at the team milling about roadside, working out the day’s strategy. Leith was doing most of the talking, his words gusting out in officious white clouds, inaudible from where Dion stood.

  The civilian RC buff, president of the local flying club, was the owner of the reindeer-gag station wagon. He was being briefed separately by Corporal Paley. The antlers told Dion the buff must be some kind of ham. Dion’s task was to take the ham and his plane up to the cliff ledge, and once there, keep him from falling. At the last minute Leith had assigned JD to accompany them, to make doubly sure the ham-president-buff did not fall, Dion supposed. As he watched Leith and speculated on his real motive for assigning JD, Leith turned and beckoned. They were all set to go.

  * * *

  The president’s name was Tom Frey, and he wasn’t hammy at all. Middle-aged and serious, in fact. Fairly quiet, too, until he got on the subject of RC planes and drones — then he couldn’t seem to put a lid on it, talking possible and actual speeds, cost range, manoeuvrability, transmitters, receivers, rules and regulations, the whole nine yards. Dion wasn’t interested, but JD seemed enthralled. It wasn’t RCs she wanted to pilot through the air, though; it was herself. Her dream job was flying cargo planes up north, so she said. Dion had never believed she meant it; he had thought it was just her way of griping about the job. But now, as he listened to her chatting with Frey, he realized her interest was real, and it went beyond the need to escape. She actually wanted to fly.

  Bad idea. Life was dangerous enough without leaving the ground, and he made a mental note to tell her so, talk her out of it, keep her close.

  They were in the SUV making their way up the long, winding Cypress Bowl Road. JD drove, their expert in the passenger seat beside her, Dion in the back. Along with her general inquiries about flight, she made good use of the time, grilling Frey about other members of the flying community, any odd characters he might know. He knew a lot of the hobbyists, he admitted, and yes, there were some young men in the club he considered troubled. If it came down to it, he would name names to aid in the investigation, but only in a pinch. They were all friends, in a way. Family, almost, and he didn’t want to tarnish anyone’s name unnecessarily. JD said that was fair, and fell silent.

  They arrived at the high-altitude parking lot and unloaded themselves and the plane Frey had selected as the most likely weapon, a small wedge-shaped fighter jet, light as a feather, in a custom-made sling bag.

  “Doesn’t look like much, and I’m not the best flyer in the world,” he said. “But super dextrous, and it doesn’t need a runway, if you know how to drop it. Which I do.”

  “And it screams?” JD sked.

  “Does it ever.”

  The man continued talking about the technical aspects of flying to JD as she double-checked her supplies — water bottle, rope, radios — and Dion marvelled at how wholeheartedly people threw themselves into their hobbies. He wondered if he should try throwing himself into a pastime or sport. Yet there wasn’t anything he could see himself becoming passionate about, beyond flying under the radar and staying out of jail.

  He realized he had been staring at JD, and it now occurred to him why. Seeing her in avid conversation with somebody outside of her work realm really was the event of the century. He lifted his iPhone and snapped a photo of her in profile, evergreens in the background. He looked at the photo. It wasn’t a good shot, but he liked it.

  Maybe he should take up photography. If only to please Sam Kerr.

  He stuffed his phone in his pocket and got to work looping sturdy cord around his shoulder. JD got on her radio to advise the ground crew where they were at. Silent now, the three of them struck off down the path, through the hushed and dripping December woods.

  As they neared the shrubby upper lookout, Frey stopped in his tracks. “Look,” he said, demonstrating how his boot heel slithered on the frosty path. “It’s an ice rink. That looks like quite a drop-off we’re heading for, and I don’t see any railings. I thought we were going somewhere civilized.”

  “That’s not actually the one we’re aiming for,” Dion told him. “It’s down a ways.”

  “Has it got a railing? The guy in charge, what’s his name, Leith? He said it was some kind of ledge, but he said it was safe.”

  “It is safe,” JD said. She turned to Dion for confirmation, “It’s safe, right, Cal?”

  Dion could not, in good conscience, swear that the ledge was safe, and maybe Frey read the conflict in his eyes, because he said, “God, you people,” and turned to head back up the trail. JD went after him, taking his arm and holding him in place.

  Coward, thought Dion with a smile.

  “We’ll go slow,” JD was promising their expert. “Holy cow, I’ve never met a pilot who’s afraid of heights before. Where does that come from?”
r />   “I’m not afraid of heights. I just don’t overly care for them.”

  Slowly the three of them made their way down the treacherous path of crumbling rock and scrubby weeds. By the time they reached the ledge, the one that had almost pitched Dion to his death yesterday, Frey was breathing hard. JD asked him if he was okay.

  “I’ll be okay.” Frey set down his bag. “I’m not as fit as I once was.”

  They stood as a group and stared down at the road. Frey made a brisk beckoning motion to Dion to open the bag and give him the plane. Dion did as told, then went about tying one end of the rope to a solid outcrop, the other to the steel rings of Frey’s harness.

  “I hope he knows his knots,” Frey said.

  “Like a Boy Scout,” JD assured him.

  JD was on her radio, communicating with Leith below. Dion watched the toy-sized traffic rolling to a stop, held up by city flaggers on either side of the stretch in question. A lone black car rolled slowly along the cleared section of road like a plane taxiing for takeoff.

  “Now, look,” JD told Frey, and pointed. “The guy driving the black car is a real dink, so don’t hold back. You get a medal if you send him over the cliff. Okay?”

  She smiled at Dion, sharing the joke, because the driver of the target car below was Jimmy Torr. Dion told her it wasn’t funny. Even if Torr was a dink, a mishap wasn’t out of the question, and nobody wanted to see Torr in a casket.

  JD ignored him. “Look at ’em all,” she laughed. The people below were mostly members, both uniform and plainclothes. More hands had made themselves available for this outing than needed. “Some kind of trip to the zoo, or what?”

  JD didn’t laugh often, but when she did, she pulled out the stops, and Dion couldn’t help but join her. He was laughing at her laughter when Leith’s voice came over the radio and sobered him with a sharp reminder to Frey that the objective here wasn’t to hit the car, just take a swoop at it, please and thank you.

  “Killjoy,” JD said.

  Frey was ready, and she radioed Leith to let him know. Dion watched through field glasses as Torr fired his engine and drove north a kilometre or so until he disappeared from view. A moment later the car reappeared, facing this way. He would be going at an average speed of ninety kilometres an hour, cruising westbound past the pullout with its light standards, along the strip of road where Amelia Foster had lost her life. Unlike Foster, Torr would be braced for attack.

  Frey launched the plane like he was throwing a rock. Instead of falling, the jet screamed off into the blue, trimmed about like a hawk on the hunt, and dipped with breathtaking speed to the earth below. Even as it flew out of sight Dion could hear its fading shriek. He tried following with his glasses, but lost the darting speck, and focused instead on the target vehicle.

  The first run failed, and there was a tense moment as Frey nearly lost the small plane, bringing it down in the limited space of the lookout. He apologized, explaining again he wasn’t really top of the class with this particular model. “And I’m pretty good,” he said. “Whoever did this thing, he had to be a master.”

  The crew below took a break. Traffic was allowed through before being cordoned off again. On the second run Frey did better. On the third he brought the plane swooping at Torr’s windshield with speed and what looked like pinpoint accuracy. Dion tracked the black car with his binoculars, watched it swerve to an angled stop. A tiny Torr stepped out of the car swiftly and looked up with anger.

  Even without binoculars JD had seen Torr’s raised fist, and she slapped her thighs in childish delight. Dion didn’t join her this time, because in the moment of the car’s swerve, he had recognized within himself something unexpected and troubling. A spike of glee, almost a narcotic hit, almost a sexual rush. Could this be the thrill a killer experienced as he snuffed out a life? And had he felt the same thing back in Surrey, swinging his fist even when it no longer mattered?

  Was he just plain bad? He looked up with a flinch. The clouds were full of ammunition. A gull coasted, eying the antics below. Frey’s voice sounded both sharp and muffled in his ears. “Well? Was that okay?”

  “He stayed on the road,” was JD’s answer. “Otherwise, perfect.”

  * * *

  Down below, Leith, Sean Urbanski, and Jimmy Torr discussed the test results as the pissed-off drivers that had been held up for the last twenty minutes started streaming past. “Okay, so it’s not impossible,” Torr said. “Could be a random attack, some club of psycho weirdos with a new hobby?”

  Leith nodded. “Tom says it would take a lot of air time to get this good. A drone is more likely and would take less practice, he says, but there’s the noise factor. And the micro jet has more thrust. We’ll have to keep an open mind. Remember, it’s likely just a sport to them, and maybe they’ve done it before. Maybe the only thing that sets it apart this time is somebody died. And there were witnesses.”

  “So we’re saying after the hit they had to eliminate those witnesses, make sure nobody was alive to say it was an RC that did it?” Torr asked. “These guys are total wack jobs, you’re saying?”

  “To put it nicely, yes.”

  Urbanski came up with a variation. “Maybe hunting down the witnesses was the object of the game.”

  Leith looked at him, marvelling both at the idea and Urbanski’s ease in putting it forward. He frowned, trying to imagine this being a game to a person or persons unknown. If so, how long had it been going on? Was Amelia Foster the first, or just the first to stand out as a possible crime? He made a note to have the guys check the road reports, with an eye out for MVAs with any shadow of similarity.

  Twenty-Three

  RIPPLES

  LISTS OF NAMES WERE stuck up on the case room wall: model-airplane club memberships from here to Chilliwack, and mail-order lists from all the local hobby shops. Leith had a battery of constables working on the lists. The shops were approached for canvassing, and all names on all lists were entered into the computer to see who pinged in PRIME-BC, the police information database. JD had sat down with the president of the flying club, Tom Frey, and as promised, he had given her some names of possibly troubled teens to look into. Frey also helped Leith understand the bewilderingly varied world of RC and drone flying.

  By the end of the week Leith was at least passably familiar with the aerospace rules, the types of craft available, the parks and fields favoured by local hobbyists. He had flipped through the magazines. He had watched YouTube clips of planes doing backflips among stratus clouds, and drones speeding through obstacle courses. He’d gotten sidetracked watching trained eagles take down drones that posed a threat around airports. He knew some lingo, and more to the point, he had formed a fairly good impression of the breadth of the North Shore flying clubs’ membership.

  This was not the season for flying planes in the park, he knew. The clubs were more or less hibernating or flying indoors. “It’s really summertime fun,” Frey had explained. The age range of most enthusiasts was either early to midtwenties, or else post-retirement.

  Done with flying objects for a while, identified or otherwise, Leith decided it was time to talk to Craig Gilmartin again, see if he had anything to add to his hide-and-go-seek statement.

  * * *

  Gilmartin was downstairs in the hospital’s rehab centre, trying to straight-arm an insignificant-looking barbell to shoulder height as a therapist offered guidance. The therapist noticed Leith and Dion waiting in the wings and left them alone to talk.

  Gilmartin lowered himself onto a bench and puffed out a breath. Leith sat next to him. “Looking good, Craig. I’m wondering if you’ve thought of anything new since we talked last. I hate to say it, but though your hide-and-seek is an interesting clue, it hasn’t opened any doors so far.”

  “Nothing new to tell you, sorry.”

  “Maybe we can nail down the sequence of events that night a bit better, then. You were a little vague on it before.” Leith brought out Gilmartin’s statement from the night of the crash,
put on reading glasses, and read from it aloud. “You said here, ‘The guy went to call 911 and then I did too. I was waiting for the ambulance and some people came along and went away again.’ See that?”

  “I see that. Should be a couple commas in there.”

  “This is a police statement. We don’t like commas.”

  “I don’t talk like that. I put in commas. Sometimes I throw in a semicolon.”

  Leith carried on with the quote. “You’re asked, ‘How many people stopped after you?’ and you said, ‘Three.’” He looked at Gilmartin again. “If you remember it was three, you must remember a bit about each of them, right?”

  “That girl without a phone would be one. Or maybe I didn’t count her in there. I don’t recall.”

  “Dezi arrived when you and Keefer were down in the ditch, right? And she left when you were up on the highway flagging down vehicles. ”

  “Keefer, is that his name?”

  “Rory Keefer, we’re almost certain.”

  Gilmartin eyed him suspiciously. “What happened to Rory Keefer? I have a feeling it’s not good.”

  “It’s not good,” Leith admitted. “But let’s not worry about that right now.”

  Gilmartin sighed. “I can’t get it straight in my head, who came and went. We were up on the highway. The guy without a phone was gone, and the girl without a phone took off. Then a whale of a guy stopped, and wouldn’t you know it, he had a phone! I told him to call 911, and he did, and I told him to stick around, but he didn’t.” He scowled.

  “Right, we’ve managed to talk to him,” said Leith. “What about after that?”

  “Some foreigners stopped, a couple. They asked if they could do anything. I said no, and they left.”

  Leith asked for more particulars. Age, nationality?

  Gilmartin was massaging his left bicep, the one that had been trying to raise the kilo weight. “They were fifty or so. I think they were Bavarian.”

  Dion had been more or less pacing as he listened, and now he stopped to ask, “The accent, you mean?”