No. This place felt deserted. As he’d told JD, something was wrong. He tried the door handle and found it locked. Next to the door was a sliding window accessible from the small landing he stood on. He tried pushing the window and it slid open an inch. He pushed it further and found it didn’t jam up against a safety catch. From down in the dark yard, JD called up quietly. “Hey. What are you doing?”
“Look at this,” Dion said. “The window’s open!”
“So what? You’re not going in there.”
“Kirk’s a cop. He wouldn’t go out and leave his window unlocked.”
JD said she had heard of stranger things.
Dion pushed the window open wide and tested the old wooden sash for strength. It seemed solid. JD had come up the stairs meanwhile. She grabbed the back of his jacket and tugged. “No way we’re going in there. I’ll make a call.”
“That’ll take forever,” he said. He was still thinking about Bosko’s car on the street, Kirk’s car in the driveway, the silent house, unsecured window, and two unanswered phones. He called into the house and got no answer. “I’ll go in, scout around. Only be a second.”
The window was placed high and barely man sized, but if he climbed on the deck’s bannister he could weasel his way in. He clambered up, thrust in one leg, gripped the upper window frame, got the other leg in. He slung his body inside, and found himself bridging awkwardly over a double kitchen sink full of cold and sudsy dishwater. Trying not to break anything, he twisted around to climb down to the linoleum. He paused mid-climb to call out again. “Hello? Police! Arlo Kirk? I’m from the North Shore RCMP. Anybody here?”
No answer. He continued to work his way off the sink counter. Piled dishes slid with a clatter, and a wineglass fell to the floor in pieces.
Dion stared at the broken glass, then at JD, who was hissing at him through the open window, “I’m not going to let you get shot alone. Let me in.”
He opened the door, and now they were both in the kitchen. It was messy, but lemony clean, and it smelled pleasantly of fresh-baked muffins.
“You broke their fucking dishes,” JD said.
“I’ll pay for it.” Dion said. He called out once more, “Sergeant Bosko? It’s Cal Dion. Arlo Kirk, are you there? Anybody?”
Silence.
JD spoke through her teeth. “The neighbours are calling 911 by now. ERT is on its way. We’re going to get tasered.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She scraped the soles of her boots on the doormat. “Right, what’s to worry about? We’re just tracking a killer, unarmed and without a warrant. Best case scenario, we’re facing two dishonourable discharges for B and E-ing a cop’s house.”
Dion was already moving down the carpeted hallway. JD followed, looking more like a lost movie starlet than a cop. The first room they passed was the living room with its street-facing window. A lamp was on low, casting the muted glow Dion had seen from the car. The room was overcrowded with an enormous sofa and two extra-large easy chairs. In the hearth a fire danced —they paused to marvel that it wasn’t real, but a silk flame underlit and teased to life by blown air. “Cool,” JD said. “Everything you could want from a real crackling fire except heat.”
They moved along. There was a bathroom, fairly messy, nobody hiding in the tub enclosure. The master bedroom was empty. It sported a king-sized bed, nobody hiding underneath. Nobody in the closet, either. Judging from the clothes in the closet, JD said, a big man and a big woman lived here. Or a big cross-dresser.
Further along they discovered a messy craft room of sorts, with a clutter of photo albums spread over the floor. Then there was a games room with dartboard and pool table and nowhere to hide, and beyond the games room were more doorways still. In the hallway Dion glanced at JD, exasperated. The little one-storey house was bigger than it looked from the outside, a labyrinth — and still the basement to explore.
The last door on the main floor opened into another bedroom. With the light flicked on, Dion took in a room painted blue, smaller and considerably neater than the master bedroom. A guest room. On the chest of drawers sat somebody’s car keys, and under the bed, when he crouched to check, was a breathing pool of darkness wearing eyeglasses. He saw the gleam of a gun barrel, gave a warning shout to JD. He tried to spring back as the being under the bed gathered itself and swarmed out at him faster than he could hope to escape, and in the moment of chaos there was a flurry of motion, a blast, gunpowder in the air, and he was on the floor, his back thudding against the wall as a second shot rang out. Somebody was shouting. Two voices competing. He’d been hit, too stunned to feel the pain. He squeezed his eyes shut, wondering where the bullet got him, whether he was going to die.
At least JD wasn’t dead. He now recognized that it was her doing most of the shouting, and she sounded damn healthy. He still felt no pain. He opened his eyes and saw her kneeling in front of him. Close, within arm’s reach, busy wrangling with the man from under the bed, the man slammed face first on the floor, JD on all fours on top of him. Or not quite on all fours, but pressing him down with one knee. She had hold of his uppermost ear in one fist and his short salt-and-pepper hair in the other, and was mashing her free boot heel to one side as though stomping on ants. Not ants, Dion realized, but the man’s gun hand, which was by degrees splaying its fingers and releasing its grip.
The man was shouting insults and protests, thrashing but stuck, trapped by both cop and bed frame. Both of Dion’s arms worked, he found, and a quick self pat-down found no gaping holes, no spilled guts. JD kicked the gun out of the man’s reach with a warrior cry of triumph. Dion did a home-run slide to grab the weapon, and once he had it in his fist he scrambled back against the wall, levelling its muzzle at Thomas Frey’s noisy face with a shout: “Shut up, lie still, don’t move!”
Frey rolled a one-eyed glare his way, but lay still and stopped screaming blue murder. He was done.
Still sitting with his back against the wall, gun in hand, Dion drew in a deep breath and pieced together the mad series of events. Frey had come crawling out gun first, JD had bounded past Dion and up onto the bed, and from there dropped onto the shooter with her full weight. The gun went off, but the bullet missed its target, Dion, probably by inches. A second shot flew wide.
“I could use some help here,” JD snapped. She told him to grab a nearby extension cord. He did, and helped her use it to bind Frey’s wrists behind his back.
With her prisoner frisked and disabled, a folding knife seized from his jeans pocket, JD stood at Dion’s side, wobbling a bit, to catch her breath.
But only for a moment, before digging into her fluffy coat pocket for her phone and making the call. She asked for police — and ambulance, too. “Just one,” she said. Ambulance, Dion supposed. No, she explained, the injured man was breathing fine. She might have broken the fine bones in his fucking gun-wielding wrist, that’s all.
She finished the call, and she and Dion stood looking down at their prisoner. “If you’re okay here,” Dion said, “I’ll go check the basement.”
“She didn’t do anything,” Frey rasped, his face down on the nubby carpet. “I did it all. She had nothing to do with it. You broke my hand. It hurts. I can’t breathe.”
“Don’t talk till you’ve consulted a lawyer,” JD told him. She made a brutal kicking motion at the back of his head, a kick he didn’t see or feel, since it didn’t connect. There was jubilance in her dark eyes when she turned to look at Dion. He saw relief, too. “I thought you were hit,” she said.
He started to say, “So did I,” but stopped. Something in Frey’s last words startled him.
I did it all.
All what? It had been in response to Dion saying he was going to check the basement. “You did all what?” he said sharply.
But Frey didn’t seem to hear, too busy moaning about his crushed hand.
Dion left the room at a jog. JD shouted after him to stay put, backup was here. Sirens wailed to a stop outside. He found the basem
ent stairs and flicked on what turned out to be a low-watt bulb, and made his way down. At the bottom he tried to locate the main switch for better lighting, but couldn’t. He swore, as he had no flashlight, and his smartphone beam didn’t cut through the tungsten gloom much. He used it anyway. The unfinished basement was sprawling, a maze of shadows complicated by support beams. Junk everywhere. A hoarder’s paradise.
Movement caught his eye — a slow, drifting glitter between obstructions, down on the floor at the far corner of the basement. Blood escaped a pile of clutter and made its way toward a floor drain. He stumbled toward the clutter, and saw behind a heap of boxes a body — the bottom half, heavy legs in blood-soaked trousers. He brought his arm to his face in defence against the stench of death that he expected, that he knew so well. Upstairs, he could hear the heavy footfall of men, and voices ringing out loudly: male voices and the shrill tones of a woman, not JD.
With his arm still up he walked toward the bloody legs, knowing with a sick heart what he would find attached.
Forty-One
FLYING
SIRENS, POLICE, AMBUlANCE, the homeowners, and Mike Bosko — they all seemed to arrive within moments of each other. JD had opened the front door as the first VPD officers had arrived, knowing what she must look like in her slinky red dress, her short hair tousled, her kohl-lined eyes — first and last time in her life she’d use that muck — smudged and streaked. Dion had just disappeared downstairs and wasn’t there to back up her story, so she shouted at the cops that she was North Shore RCMP responding to a report of a break-in.
Not exactly, but it sounded more credible than the truth, and hopefully they’d think twice before tackling her to the ground.
They didn’t tackle her, in the end. She was leading them to the guest bedroom to introduce them to Thomas Frey when two civilians who must be the Kirks showed up, demanding to know what was going on.
There was a lot of talk, and JD shouted over the noise, asking the Kirks if Mike Bosko was with them, where was he? Getting no satisfactory answer, she headed along the hall toward the front of the house, and there he stood, alive and well, showing his ID to the constable at the door.
“JD,” he said, staring at her in surprise.
“Lookit,” she said, too exhausted for deference. “Cal’s downstairs looking for your remains. You better go tell him you’re alive.”
“What? I’m afraid —”
“I think he probably saved your life, by the way,” she said, but before she could elaborate, she was called away by one of the uniforms on the scene to finish explaining what the hell was going on here.
* * *
Dion pulled away the boxes. He was shaking inside. Why did he care so much? He had seen death before, up close and hands-on. He had lost friends and brother officers and had accepted their loss without falling apart like this. And Bosko wasn’t a friend. Not even close. In the final analysis, he was an enemy. So what was the matter? Why did his death seem like the end of the world?
Bad got worse — it was not just murder, but mutilation. As the boxes fell aside he saw that the upper half of the body was missing. Gone completely. It had been cut at the midriff. Quite neatly, too. Dion stepped back in horror, tripped on clutter and landed hard on the concrete, rump and elbows splashing in the warm river of blood, the blood wetting his hands and clothing as he struggled back to his feet shouting out in fear and disgust.
A bright light shone and a bulky figure was coming his way, calling out. Dion tried to run backwards, or sideways, not sure what he was running from, but his legs got tangled and he began to fall again, corkscrew fashion. The bulky figure dashed forward and grabbed his arm, steadied him, saying, “Hey, hey, take it easy.”
He stared at the man who steadied him. The flashlight had been set down and was no longer blinding him, but illuminating the truth.
He stared at Bosko, then down at his own wet palms. Water.
He stared down at the bloody corpse and saw only two fat, badly stuffed Santa legs, life-size, black-booted, and clad in red velveteen. He looked at Bosko, and his anger welled up, fuelled by humiliation, until it blew out of him in a gust of anger. “We’ve been trying to contact you!” he bellowed, for the first time in his life shouting full throttle at a superior. “You didn’t answer your phone! Why the fuck didn’t you answer your phone?”
“I’m so sorry,” Bosko said. His hands were up, don’t shoot. “You can blame Arlo for that. But listen.”
Dion listened. Already his anger had cooled, giving way to regret. Not only had he shouted at Bosko, but used the F-word at him, and in his dazed state of mind the transgression inflated into a crime.
But it was a crime Bosko chose to overlook. “I haven’t had time to sort out what’s happening here,” he said. “But I’m starting to jump to conclusions. And JD says you saved my life. What’s that all about?”
“Thomas Frey is what it’s all about. He was hiding under the bed in the guest room. He had a handgun, and he fired at me. JD …” Dion paused, catching sight of the grotesque Santa legs, and his anger flared again. “What is that?”
“Let’s go,” Bosko said. “It’s Arlo’s idea of fun,” he explained, as he led the way upstairs. “You didn’t think that was me, did you?”
Dion glared at the slow leak escaping from the hot water tank — apparently it needed service — and stomped up the stairs after his superior.
* * *
Much of the rest of the night was a blur for Dion. Leith arrived, still nicely dressed. Torr and Paley were here, too, and a woman in a sparkly cocktail dress who might have been a VPD VIP, amidst uniformed officers. It was like a house party colliding with a roadside disaster colliding with an official debrief, with nobody in charge and everybody asking questions. Within Dion’s periphery, people came and people went, and the clips of conversation he took in made no sense. JD was trying to describe the events of the last hour, but it was a patchy story.
JD: “… kept trying to call you, and then Cal …”
Sylvia Kirk: “Well, it’s because he’s always on his phone, so …”
Arlo Kirk: “… the one night his phone malfunctions …”
Mike Bosko: “It didn’t …”
David Leith: “But how did you know …”
JD: “Kind of cool, actually.”
Sylvia: “No, Dave, full disclosure, Arlo switched it off when Mike was …”
Bosko: “I was wondering why it was so …”
Leith: “… okay, but why didn’t you just …”
Arlo: “If you just did like me and turned the damn thing off once in a while …”
Somebody: “Ma’am …”
Somebody else: “Look, can somebody here give us his lowdown? He needs medical …”
Leith: “Jim, you’d better accompany …”
JD: “… Frey, I told you. Thomas Frey. It’s a broken finger, at worst. Jesus.”
Somebody: “Excuse me, when will you be …”
Somebody else: “…the crime scene …”
JD: “… soon, okay? I think we’re …”
One of the somebodies: “Looks like you’re all going to have to clear out.”
And finally, somebody new, an older man with a bullhorn voice: “Now!”
* * *
There was a major exodus from the Kirk home to the Burnaby RCMP detachment, where they could debrief in the calmer setting of a spare case room. Here Dion did most of the explaining, since JD said she was losing her voice. She had scrubbed off her makeup and was looking more herself. Dion had scrubbed his face, too, and with adrenalin levels back to normal, he felt good. He and JD had saved the day, after all.
As had Arlo, by sabotaging Bosko’s cellphone. If Bosko had answered his phone, the alarm wouldn’t have been raised, and he would have ended up walking into the trap. Likely he would be dead. Possibly Arlo and Sylvia would have joined him at the morgue.
Tomorrow Leith would be dealing with Thomas Frey, but for tonight, everyone was going home
to get some rest. As Sylvia said, there would be a lot of prayers of gratitude uttered tonight.
When all the other cars had left the detachment’s parking lot, Dion and JD returned to JD’s ratty Subaru. She drove back toward the bridge, and in the passenger seat Dion thought back over the night’s events, and the way it had ended. Via text, he had lined up a coffee date with Kate, and he had at least a day pass to Bosko’s respect.
Bosko had thanked him for a job well done, in front of everybody. He hadn’t mentioned the farcical Santa-legs confusion, nor Dion’s bellows of fear. He had even clapped Dion on the back at one point, which felt like friendship. It felt like more than that, like inclusion into a safer world. It wasn’t — it couldn’t be — but it felt that way.
His eyes closed as JD carried them over the bridge. She was singing to herself, another first, but he couldn’t catch the words. Maybe he was dreaming, but he seemed to be gaining altitude, looking down on his troubles, watching them dwindle to specks. He was airborne, that’s what it was, and he held on to the feeling as best he could, just for a while.
Forty-Two
FALLING
January 2
WERE FREY AND GREY MAN one and the same? Had this two-faced creature driven a blade into Rory Keefer and put a hole through Craig Gilmartin? Or had he worked in concert with Scott Mills, who was no longer around to give his side of the story? Or was he in cahoots with Dezi? JD had told Leith of her doubts about the girl — completely unsubstantiated, but bothersome. Dion agreed with her. There was something off about Dezi, and it couldn’t be ignored.
But for now they focused on Frey. Leith spent an hour with JD, preparing for the upcoming interrogation. They were wondering what had gone wrong in the man’s life, because from all indications, he was an upstanding individual who’d had no past brushes with the law. Not the kind to tear through a house shooting everything that moved, nor to lie in ambush with a loaded gun.
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