“You’re right,” Frey said. “She pushed it along. In fact, it was more her idea than Scott’s to go after Amelia, and I’m pretty sure she had murder in her mind all along.”
“So let’s try this again,” Leith said. “Describe the meeting at Porteau Beach for me.”
“Sure. If I can have another 7-Up, please.”
With a fresh pop in hand, Frey seemed almost buoyant. “Dezi and Scott set up the meeting with Amelia, and Dezi drove out to the beach in her Sidekick. She told me to follow. As protection, I think. Or just for someone to show off to, maybe. I did follow, but only thinking I would keep her from doing something she’d regret. I stood back some distance while she walked up to the girl down by the surf. It was dark out, hard to see. And cold. Amelia was expecting to meet Scott, and I could see she was confused. I don’t think she and Dezi had ever actually met before. The two of them talked for a while, and I couldn’t hear the words, but I could see that Amelia was becoming alarmed. She tried to walk back to her car, but Dezi stood in front of her, being the little bully she is.”
Frey chuckled at his memories. “But Dezi’s quite small,” he went on. “And Amelia isn’t, so Amelia pushed past her and marched toward the parking lot. Dezi dogged after her, throwing stones — literally — and laughing. Taunting her about Grandma, saying she’d put rat poison in the old lady’s meds and she was going to die a horrible death.”
Leith sat straighter, but Frey assured him, “There was no rat poison. But by the look on Amelia’s face that night, she believed it, and she couldn’t get to her car fast enough. Dezi’s a scary little girl, you know. She’s got the knack. She’ll hook you in and leave you demolished. Just look at me. Look at Scott. I know toward the end there, she scared the shit out of him, too. He was packing his bags to disappear when I showed up and, well, dealt with him.”
Scott Mills’s fear was news to Leith. Casually crossing his arms, he said, “But he didn’t move fast enough.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“He realized you were Dezi’s loaded gun.”
“Oh, she kept me loaded, all right,” Frey said. “I’d given her a phone so she could call me any time of day or night, talk dirty as long as she wanted.” He reflected a moment. “She never did talk dirty for long. And I know she was just using me. I see that now. You’re thinking it’s time for me to repent? Sorry, but no. And the judge will order that I go through a violent offender program, and I’ll do it, but I’m not going to regret any of it. No, sir, hearing her tickling little voice in my ear was all it took to make me dance.” He gave Leith a ghastly grin. “‘Scott’s going weird on me. He’s got to go.’ That’s what she said. So I got him. Poor Scott. He didn’t go down easy, and I didn’t mean to harm his parents. Really, I didn’t. But you know how it is. After the first, the rest is easy.”
Leith said nothing, thinking of Amelia Foster racing to Lions Bay to stop a poisoning that wasn’t real. He steeled himself for the next area of discussion, the killing of Rory Keefer. But the discussion was shorter than he thought. “I didn’t take part in that,” Frey said. “I draw a line at that kind of violence. I stayed in my vehicle.”
“But you didn’t draw a line at shooting Craig Gilmartin.”
“I had nothing to do with that, either.”
“You didn’t drive along and shoot at him from a van?”
“No, that would be Scott and Dezi. But I did arrange wheels for them. I know a guy who rents out vehicles, always gives me a deal. He also loaned me the flashy car to drive Dezi around, impress her. A Mercedes. Of course she wasn’t impressed. She’s seventeen. I should have pushed for a Camaro.”
“Tell me about those drives. Was Scott always behind the wheel?”
Frey blinked at him. “Just for the first drive, when I wanted to see her up close. Smell her. I gave them a few bucks to get something to eat after that. The next time, though …” Frey actually licked his chops. “The next time I saw her walking along, I worked up the courage to glide up alongside her, as if I’d come upon her by chance, and I invited her to hop in. She was so beautiful in the passenger seat beside me. Allowed me to park in dark places, touch her leg. I’m no fool. I know a carrot on a stick when I see one.” Creepily, Frey cooed in a little girl’s voice, “Don’t, mister. Not yet. Oh, she had me wrapped tight.”
Leith inched his chair back a bit and wondered how long it would take to wash off this interview when he got home in the early morning hours. “So who shot Craig Gilmartin in his home?”
“Scott found a couple of guns in the man’s car. Rory Keefer’s. Scott must have given them to Dezi, before he knew better. Dezi slipped me the .45 later to take care of him with. She said she hoped I was a better shot than Scott, who had only winged the cop, it turned out. I told her I was actually quite a sharpshooter. And I am. Except when it comes to little white poodles, it seems.”
“She asked you to eliminate Scott,” Leith said, “and you did, just went and shot a young guy in the face, did you? I thought you were his father figure. I thought you were friends.”
Frey play-acted shock. “Put yourself in my shoes. If Dezi had asked you for help the way she asked me, her hand on your crotch, you’d have done the same.”
After a pause, Leith decided not to stand up and throw a chair at the man. Instead he asked, “What about Mike Bosko? What was that all about?”
For the first time Frey looked uncomfortable, but maybe only because he was recalling his mashed fingers, bruised but not broken, as it had turned out.“Dezi’s got this idea she’s going to be a police officer. You probably think that’s funny, but it’s true. She’s dead serious. She thought the head honcho was trying to ruin her career. I told her she was being paranoid, but she insisted. And I obeyed.”
Leith had to smirk, thinking of Dezi’s desire to be a cop. Good luck with that. But then he thought further, and realized there was a chance she could be acquitted. She could then emigrate, find a place where cops were in short supply, a place where background checks were lax. It could happen.
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” he said, more to comfort himself than to inform Frey. He was tiring, ready to end the interview, resume in the morning.
“If it’s not asking too much, I have a request,” Frey said.
“What’s that?” Leith was on his feet, itching to leave.
“Those photos you found on my computer, they’re clean, aren’t they?”
“They’re not what I’d call clean.”
“But you’ll let me have a couple, won’t you? For my cell?”
Leith walked out and let the door slam behind him.
He got a call from JD as he sat at his desk, catching up on his notes. She sounded half pumped, half furious. “So just as Dezi’s mom was letting us in the front,” she said, “we saw Dezi slipping out the back. We had to chase her all over North Vancouver, but we got her.”
“Great news,” Leith said. “Everyone’s okay?”
“We’re fine. Cal fell in a creek and twisted his ankle, and I’m waiting for the ambulance guys to check him over. But I’d say he’s going to live.”
“Good to know.”
Leith returned to the evidence room to re-watch the video taken off the microchip found in the dash cam of Thomas Frey’s abandoned hatchback. Several hours of useless footage had been downloaded, and one priceless set of frames — silent, low-res images that would have been automatically overwritten if Frey had put in another day of driving. Leith thanked his lucky stars that hadn’t happened.
It was likely that Frey had overlooked the dash cam unobtrusively suction-cupped to the windshield and motion activated, a precautionary measure taken by many forward-thinking drivers in case they ever had to dispute a fender bender.
The device was a department store cheapie, not great at capturing night scenes, but good enough for Leith, thanks to the extra-tall lamp standards set up on the section of highway where the clip in question had been recorded.
Yes, a lot of good s
tuff here. The rear licence plate of the little yellow Sidekick could be read as the vehicle pulled into the broad cone of light, and the young female driver of that car was clearly visible once she had hopped out. And the footage came time-stamped, and the time could be checked against the camera’s current settings for accuracy, and it so happened that the time and date assigned to the clip matched that of Amelia Foster’s crash, and all that was going to look fabulous in court.
Leith slouched forward, and with the mouse, scrubbed back and forth through the dark and grainy footage: out on the Killer Highway, tail lights in the distance veer to the left and vanish. The Sidekick driving ahead swerves to a stop in the pullout, and the driver gets out, looking ahead, then turning back toward the dash-cam vehicle as it too pulls to a stop. Making eye contact with whoever is at its wheel, she laughs and points toward the catastrophe she’s helped orchestrate.
Subtle evidence, for sure, Leith was thinking. But with that beaming face, try and tell a jury you weren’t in it for the thrill. Just fucking try.
He freeze-framed on her grin and pressed Print.
* * *
“I’m sorry, JD,” the detainee said. “It kills me that you hate me.”
JD ignored her. She was in the driver’s seat, with her prisoner in the back, safely behind bars. The cruiser was parked near the spot where the takedown had happened, and JD was watching as Dion was checked over by a couple of female paramedics. He had a blanket around his shoulders, and his hair was still beguilingly wet. He was demonstrating his limp and wincing a lot. The paramedics seemed to be taking their sweet time assessing the injury. Big baby, JD thought.
There was a tightness in her chest, and she knew its source. Sorrow. Did I really like her? she wondered. Yes, I did. I loved that sadistic, manipulative, heartless monster I’ve ended up putting in handcuffs. How is that possible?
Silence from the back seat. Finally, JD looked in the rear-view mirror and saw Dezi was turned away, gazing out at the dark, wet street. Despite her last words, spoken with a whimper, she looked blank now. Like her emotions had gone into hibernation.
“Dezi,” JD said.
The girl’s eyes met her own in the mirror.
“I would have liked teaching you the ropes.”
“Yeah,” Dezi said, something flashing across her face. Innocence. “That would have been so cool.”
Then she was looking out the window again, back in some darker place where JD would never belong.
Forty-Five
INTO THE BREACH
January 4
KEN POOLE HAD SEEN the day break. He sat in the driver’s seat of the sedan he had borrowed, looking down the rainy avenue in Burnaby, waiting. It was a neighbourhood of low-rises; they had pushed out the single-family dwellings that had once lined these streets, nice houses with grassy yards and picket fences. Now these squat apartment buildings from the ’70s and ’80s were themselves under threat. In the distance, high-rise condos were going up above the morning mist, each topped by a crane adding yet another storey.
Poole’s happiest days had been spent in a nice house with a picket fence, not far from here. Days of popsicles and innocence. Look at where the world was going, the groping race to the top, the squeeze for elbow room, the crush for jobs, young people in sleeping bags under bridges, everybody angry about something, his own anger adding to the buzz inside his head.
Screw the buzz. He slouched and went back to his paperback. It was a western, and the good guy was galloping like mad across the plains to save the day. The cowboy would go through hell, but by the end he would have won back the girl, and probably the ranch, too. It was just a matter of turning the pages.
He flipped another page. He had no idea when the woman he was waiting for would emerge, so to be safe he had returned before daybreak. By a process of extrapolation, having a good idea of Bosko’s schedule, he knew the meeting would have to be set for this morning.
He was right. The glass door he was surveilling swung open, and out she came, fussing with her handbag. She had cleaned herself up since yesterday. Her hair had always been her pride, he recalled — long and glossy and chestnut brown. Going a bit grey now, but neatly combed. Makeup applied, she was dressed for success, looking fit and pretty and determined.
He stepped out of his car as she reached the sidewalk. He called out to her. She looked his way in surprise and headed toward him, couldn’t seem to recall his name. He introduced himself, and explained that he had been tasked with escorting her to the meeting. She seemed flustered, but went around and sat in the passenger seat. Only when they were on the road, driving along Hastings toward the Second Narrows Bridge, did she voice her doubts. “But Sergeant Bosko doesn’t know where I live. He doesn’t even know my name.”
“He’s a cop,” Poole told her, with a wink. “He’s got ways. Don’t worry about it.” He glanced at the clock on the dashboard of the car he had borrowed for this purpose, the old but respectable gold-brown Taurus his mom kept in her underground parkade but never used these days. The plates were borrowed from another car in another parkade that could never be connected to him. He’d thought of everything. “You want breakfast?” he asked. “Mike says he might be a bit late, so I’m to take you for a bite, if you’d like. Up to you.”
“Coffee would be nice.”
“Sure thing. I know just the place.”
Instead of turning right toward the bridge, he hooked a left toward Highway 1. Brooke was startled. “Where are you going? The bridge is that way.”
“Can’t meet in North Van,” Poole told her, watching the road. “You can see why, right? This is an IHIT case. They’ve set up a safe house in Surrey.”
He could feel her eyes on him. He could feel her fear.
He told her not to worry, and they both fell silent as the road peeled away under them.
On the freeway he picked up speed, heading out to the Fraser Valley, where the land spread out flat, much of it farmland, but great swaths of it wild and undeveloped. A place of beauty — and endless possibilities.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I think it’s commonly accepted that crime fiction writing is a strange pursuit, and the writers who do it are often full of self-doubt, facing the near-daily question, Why? So when you find a writing buddy who gets it, and can give you near-daily reassurance that there’s some point to it all, although she’s not sure what that point is, either, that person is a valuable find. So I’d really like to thank Judy, a.k.a. JG Toews, for being my go-to writing buddy, sounding board, and ballast. And the great thing is, I know she feels the same about me, which makes it all more or less debt free.
JG also was my first reader of the first draft. I’d like to say it needed no repair, but I can’t, and it did. She made sure to let me know where I’d gone astray.
My substantive editor Allister Thompson took over from there. He’s been with me from the start, helping me shape the arc of the series, which is as difficult as painting clouds. He’s also rapped my knuckles on occasion, for which I’m thankful — once the sting wears off.
Copy editor Catharine Chen truly cared about this book — I can tell — and zoned in on specific problems that led to much fine-tuning. Finally, Jenny McWha, my editor at Dundurn, has amiably shepherded all of this along, which I much appreciate.
So a lot of minds went into giving Flights and Falls wings, and I’m grateful for every pointer, criticism, and encouragement.
Yet sometimes nothing seems to make sense, and when that happens there’s one guy whose solid voice of reason always buoys me. He won’t read this, as he doesn’t read crime fiction much — even mine — but I’ll thank him here anyway — love you dearly, son.
NOTE: I have taken liberties with some of the geography and businesses of the Lower Mainland, though hopefully its essence remains intact.
BOOK CREDITS
Project Editor: Jenny McWha
Developmental Editor: Allister Thompson
Copy Editor: Catharine Chen
&n
bsp; Proofreader: Megan Beadle
Designer: Laura Boyle
Publicists: Michelle Melski and Tabassum Sidiqui
DUNDURN
Publisher: J. Kirk Howard
Vice-President: Carl A. Brand
Editorial Director: Kathryn Lane
Artistic Director: Laura Boyle
Production Manager: Rudi Garcia
Publicity Manager: Michelle Melski
Manager, Accounting and Technical
Services: Livio Copetti
Editorial: Allison Hirst, Dominic Farrell, Jenny McWha, Rachel Spence, Elena Radic, Melissa Kawaguchi
Marketing and Publicity: Kendra Martin, Elham Ali, Tabassum Sidiqui, Heather McLeod
Design and Production: Sophie Paas-Lang
Flights and Falls Page 29