Back at the side of the house, they had another look at the access hole in the foundations. The autopsy had not yet begun, but Jack Dadd had told Leith he believed their John Doe had died of blood loss. Mauled to death. Could have been a knifing, except the wounds were shallow and chaotic, more suggestive of an animal attack. Probably a large dog. Hard to say, as the flesh wounds were old and had lost definition. Post-mortem animal predation also had to be taken into account, of course.
“Even if dogs killed the poor guy, they sure didn’t bag him up and drag him in there, did they?” Monty said.
Leith agreed that a dog probably couldn’t work a decent half hitch. “The knots might tell us something.”
Monty snorted. “They’ll tell us what we already know. The guy didn’t know when enough knots is enough knots.”
“Like he was afraid the thing he’d bagged could get out if he didn’t tie it up real good,” JD suggested.
“Anyway, hopefully our experts will give us more,” Leith said.
Like Corporal Hillary Stafford, for one, the toolmark specialist who also analyzed bite marks. She would look at the remains and try to determine the what, where, when — if not why. She might provide knot analysis advice as well, but it was the weapon Leith was mostly interested in. Hopefully, after her examination, she would give them the size of the dog, maybe even the breed, which could at least point them in the direction of the beast’s owner.
Back in the car, its cab chilly and damp, Leith took the wheel, JD next to him in the passenger seat. Behind them, Monty said, “Guys, I did mention the party, right?”
Another thing to add to Monty’s list of virtues was persistence. The party had been mentioned a few times, and Leith had worked hard at not giving a straight answer, hoping it would go away. “Yes,” he said now. “A costume party, at your place, Sunday. Be there or be square. Sorry, one thing I don’t do is costumes. But thanks for the invite.” He turned the heater on full blast.
In the rear-view mirror he saw Monty’s blue eyes surrounded by fine crinkles. Lines in aging faces could say a lot about character, and Monty’s had nice-guy written all over them. “I tell you what it is, Dave,” he said, relaxing back, his arms outstretched. “You’re socially rusty. You’re the Tin Man without an oil can. But it’s not fatal. Sometimes you just got to push yourself, get out there. Have some fun. At best, you’ll have a blast, make new friends. At worst, you come to my party, you say, Fuck, this is lame, you dodge out first chance you get. I won’t stop you.”
Leith looked at JD beside him. Her eyes said, Don’t ask me; I’m sure the hell not going.
Of course she wasn’t. Except for the occasional drinks night when she joined the crew at Rainey’s, she was a confirmed loner. Even when she deigned to come out, she wouldn’t stay long. She’d take a chair and join in the conversation for a bit, end up criticizing the music or the unhealthy snacks, and usually leave on a sour note. Sometimes Leith wondered if her attendances were some kind of self-imposed chore — like teeth-flossing.
Did he want to end up like JD? Hell no. Monty was right. Socializing is a lot like going for a walk; it’s easier not to, and the longer you put it off, the harder it gets, but once you’re out there, it feels great. “Okay, but no costume,” he said.
“No costume, no candy.”
Leith checked his colleague in the mirror. In this new-age world, candy had all kinds of meanings, some not so innocent. Monty read the glance and cried, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Dave! By candy I mean candy. Gummy Bears and such. You weren’t kidding about the ol’ stick-in-the-mud thing, were you?”
JD laughed aloud.
Leith drove back down Mountain Highway, and behind him Monty said, “Oh, look here.” He was reading something off his phone, an email or text. “Looks like we have a lead. Couple of neighbourhood kids were up the Mesachee trail this summer and might have seen something of interest. Of interest to who, I’m not quite sure.”
“Mesachee, where’s that?”
“Don’t ask me.”
JD knew. “Above the Headwaters.”
Leith told her that meant nothing to him. After six months he was still forever getting lost on the North Shore. Behind him a phone pinged again, and Monty chuckled. “This just in. My fiancée.” He leaned to show JD. She took the phone in hand, looked at the little picture on display, then tilted it at Leith.
Leith glanced away from the road and squinted at the screen, which showed a pixie-like girl pulling a rude face at the camera. She looked about twelve. “She’s pretty,” he said, and it wasn’t a lie.
“Pretty as a picture,” Monty agreed, retrieving his phone. “She’s not jailbait, if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s twenty-eight.”
Leith was more interested in where the Headwaters were than Monty’s amazingly young-looking fiancée, and JD went on to fill him in. Around the bend from Greer, the neighbourhood they had just left, she told him, was the Lynn Headwaters Regional Park, bisected by Lynn Creek — which was more raging river than babbling brook — into formal and informal halves. On the far side of the river from the parking lot were the mapped trails, with walks that ranged from beginner to murderous, all clearly delineated on governmental signboards. No mountain bikes allowed. But on this side of the river lay the Mesachee, an unendorsed, uncharted swatch of forest created by mountain bikers, for mountain bikers. The Mesachee, as JD went on to describe, was a crazy network of trails and death-defying obstacles, ramps, mud swamps, and switchbacks.
“Sounds like you’ve challenged these death-defying obstacles yourself,” Leith said.
“No, but I’ve personally signed my niece’s leg cast.”
Monty had been busy reading emails. He tucked his phone away and set the agenda. “We’ll have lunch, then go talk to these kids. Apparently they’re out and about, mountain biking at this Mesachee place. But they’re being rounded up for us as we speak.”
“Good,” Leith said. He had a feeling when Monty said, “We’ll have lunch,” he meant together. And Leith was right.
“So whereabouts for lunch?” Monty asked. “Ideas, anybody?”
JD said, “At my desk, out of my brown bag, if you want to join me. Otherwise, you can just go ahead and drop me off.”
As she had told Leith once, she had given up on the whole team spirit, rank-climbing bullshit long ago. Maybe it was her disfigurement. Her mouth was scarred by a birth defect, which might have led to her being bullied, which might have led to loneliness, which had maybe left her with a defensiveness that was just a little over the top, as he’d told her. She had told him in reply to go fuck himself, so she was definitely warming up to his charms.
But rank-climber was Leith’s middle name. He looked at Monty and said, “I’ve always wanted to try the Tomahawk, if you’re up for something new.”
Six
HOWL
Though it was just past noon, the forest seemed to be sinking into dusk. Dion and Jackie Randall were in the midst of the Mesachee Woods, looking for two young witnesses who were said to be mountain bike fanatics and were possibly hereabouts.
The trails on this side of the river were narrower and not so hiker-friendly as those woodsy corridors on the far side, the headwater trails where just this week, Aldobrandino Rosetti had lost his life. Muddier here, too, as the knobby treads of bikes were always chewing through the ground cover. Dion was sweating more than he had on the Rosetti hike; his thighs ached, and his boots were starting to look like shit, literally. “Five more minutes and we’re going back,” he called to Randall ahead of him. “Didn’t I tell you we’re better off ambushing them at the trail head? And it’d be a lot easier.”
“Five more minutes,” Randall agreed, over her shoulder. “The problem is, these kids have had their phone privileges revoked. And they’re on bicycles, and we’re not, and they could be anywhere from here to Mount Fromme.”
Dion corrected
her. “You can’t get to Mount Fromme from here. You have to go around. Mountain Highway takes you up there, but you’d need a vehicle.”
“You know your way around pretty good. You a biker?”
He had been, when younger. He had flashed down these very trails, in fact, coated in mud. He had thumped the tracks, done a couple of end-over-ends, earned his kudos. “I’ve done some biking in my time.”
Randall grinned. “I’m a pretty hot biker myself. Got an old one-speed with a basket and a bell in my mom’s basement. But, oh, right, I don’t do hills.”
They continued walking. Dion explained that this area was an old set of trails that had been refurbished by young freeriders some years back, because bikes weren’t allowed on the main park trails, and the kids wanted somewhere more accessible than the Mount Fromme wheelie wonderland.
“It’s kind of an outlaw route,” he said. “Not even on the maps. We should go back. Hear me, Jackie? Enter at your own risk.”
She turned to laugh at him. “You’re such a wuss.”
“Watch out!” he warned her.
They both stepped back as a cyclist charged by, telling them, “Get off the path, motherfuckers!”
Two more groups of bikers passed, and Randall yelled at them, “Hey, any of you James or Ronald? I’m looking for James Wong and Ronald Graham. Can you help me out?”
Her pushiness paid off, and they were directed to a patch of woods somewhat off the beaten trail. Gently sloped and fairly open, it had been built into a playground for bike gymnastics. Happy young voices echoed through the trees, and there were their witnesses, two mud-spattered teens taking turns tackling one archaic-looking wooden ramp.
Dion watched one of them land, skew, nearly lose it. He called out for them both to take five and come over and talk.
The boys laid down their bikes and approached. Introductions were made. The skinny white kid said he was Ronnie Graham. The heavier Asian kid said, “Wong … James Wong.”
“You guys must be the only human beings on the planet without cellphones,” Randall told them.
“Even if we had phones,” Graham said, “there’s no signal up here.”
“And no phone is the new cool,” Wong said.
“First I’ve heard of it.” Randall’s breath puffed out white in the chill. “You’re not in trouble, but mind coming with us? Grapevine says you might have seen something up here that might be of interest to the police.”
“We did,” Graham said, and he would have said more, but Wong stopped him with an arm shot out sideways.
“There’s a reward, right? If you catch it?”
“It?”
“It,” Wong said.
“It,” Randall said to Dion, and her eyes sparkled. “This is going to be interesting.”
* * *
Dion decided he was not needed and stayed in the car when the GIS members arrived. The black sedan pulled in alongside. Leith and JD Temple, along with the corporal whose name Dion had forgotten, left the car and joined Randall and the boys in the gloom. Randall would promptly hand the kids over now, then join him, and they would return to their duties keeping North Vancouver safe from graffiti artists, jaywalkers, and shoplifters —at least that was how he saw it unfolding.
When things didn’t unfold as he expected, he stepped out of the car and leaned against it. Introductions were made — Wong … James Wong — and then some bonding talk about the sport, the park, the weather. Everybody was being chatty, including Randall. Dion signalled at her that they had to get back to work, but she ignored him. He stopped listening to the group and watched the sky, which was gathering itself into another great blue-black bank of rain clouds.
Yeti, he heard Ronnie Graham say.
“Wasn’t a yeti,” Wong said. “Don’t listen to him. Yetis are a creamy white or a pale grey. This was black. It was a werewolf. Up on the bike path near the Rock. Near enough that we could see it.”
A bogeyman was the hot tip, then. Dion waited for someone in the group to smarten up the tipsters with a warning and call the whole thing off, but nobody did. David Leith was doing the talking now, and Dion moved in closer to hear, as the air was heavy and voices were muted, even over short distances.
“Let’s forget what it’s called,” Leith said. “What did this thing look like?”
“It was big and black and running along on all fours,” Wong said.
“We looked for tracks,” Graham added.
“Later, when we were sure it was gone.”
“Didn’t find any.”
“Could it have been a dog?” Leith asked. He sounded tired.
“Way too big,” Wong said. “It was like a really big man.”
“Bigger,” Graham said.
Leith asked for the circumstances: When was the sighting? What were the kids up to at the time? Wong said, “Two months ago, August. Last week of summer holidays. We were up on the trails. It was at night, like, ten o’clock or something. Dark, but we had headlights. Then we heard something, like this blood-curdling howl.”
Graham failed to chime in to back up his friend’s story of the howl, as he had backed up everything else, and Dion expected Leith would pick up on the boy’s silence, challenge him on it. But Leith didn’t catch it, and neither did the corporal who had introduced himself as Montgomery. They were focusing all their attention on Wong, the loudmouth, the squeaky wheel.
Wong said, “It was like this,” and pitched his face upward so it caught the blue-black wash of coming storm, squeezed his eyes shut, and let loose a howl. He didn’t do a bad job of it. Graham didn’t contribute to the howling, and Wong went on with the story. “So we heard this howl, and couldn’t tell where it was coming from really, up or down, so we kept going up, and then we saw it, this big dark shape, kind of crouched on the path, right? I think we scared it, ’cause soon as we showed up it took off.”
“Running on all fours?” Corporal Montgomery asked.
“Yes. Not like a dog so much, but not like a man, like something in between.”
“Like a yeti,” Graham said.
“It was summer, you genius of the undead!” Wong bawled at his friend. “No snow, no Himalayas, no yeti. Altogether the wrong country. Okay?”
“Then a sasquatch. Same thing.”
“Sasquatches are huge,” Wong said. He looked up pleadingly at JD, Leith, and Corporal Montgomery. “If this was a sasquatch, it was a midget sasquatch. No, this isn’t a joke. We saw a werewolf, and I’ll swear my life on it.” His palm went over his heart.
“Whatever it was,” Leith asked, “was it running level, uphill, or downhill?”
“Up,” Wong said.
Up. If it was a steep enough up, Dion thought, a man doubled over for balance could be seen as running on all fours.
JD must have been thinking along the same lines. “How steep uphill?” she demanded, dark brows angled dangerously.
The boys watched her blankly and didn’t answer.
“You guys are making this up, hey?” she said. She began to describe what kind of serious trouble they could get into, telling stories to the police, but Wong interrupted, his teeth a flare of white in the dusk. “It’s not stories. And what about that dead guy who came out of the woods and fell down with his hair white as snow? That’s not stories.”
Dion sighed.
“What dead guy?” Leith said.
“Heart attack fatality last week,” Randall told him. “Name of Rosetti. He was found up on the Lynn Peak trail. Cal and I attended to assist. His hair was not white as snow.”
For the first time, Corporal Montgomery spoke up, to scold the boys, “See here, this is how rumours get started. An acorn falls on your head, and next thing you know the sky is falling. How far up the path are we talking here, where you saw whatever you saw?”
“Maybe ten, fifteen minutes,” Wong said. “By
bike.”
“If Dave and I brought our bikes around tomorrow, would you show us where you saw this werewolf?”
“Well, hang on,” Leith said.
“What kind of compensation are we talking about?” Wong asked.
“Compensation?”
“I don’t have a bike,” Leith said. “And even if I had one, I only do paved roads. Count me out.”
“And if you were thinking of counting me in, don’t,” JD added.
Dion looked at Jackie Randall, waiting for her to jump in and volunteer.
She did, but not how he expected. “Cal here knows the trails like the back of his hand, and he’s an ace mountain biker.”
Dion spoke up loud and clear, telling Montgomery, “I’m not on duty tomorrow, I don’t have a bike, and I haven’t been on these trails in years.”
Montgomery smiled at him. “We’ll work something out. We’ve got us a team, and that’s a good starting point. Okay guys,” he told the young witnesses. “We’ll be in touch first thing tomorrow, and you can take us to the spot and show us around. Sound good?”
The boys confirmed their contact information, promised to stay reachable tomorrow, strapped on their helmets, and cycled off. Once they were safely out of earshot, Leith exclaimed, “Werewolves? Yetis? Some mad survivalist in a fur coat is what they saw. You’re not seriously thinking of biking up there to look for this guy?”
Dion put in his own objection. “I can tell you what you’ll find. More trees, more skunk cabbage, more mud.”
“What we’ll find,” Montgomery corrected him. “Guys, where’s your sense of adventure? I believe these boys really saw something. If somebody’s hanging around in the woods playing monster and scaring kids, even if it’s got nothing to do with John Doe, we’ve got to check it out. Right? And it happens I’m a pretty badass off-roader myself.” He was grinning at Dion. “Looks like it’s you and me, Cal.”
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