Dion looked at all the points of interest, tracing them along with his finger. “If they split up here, and she wanted to head home, she would have beelined up Highland, like this. Why come out this way, if not for the party at the Eldon ball field.”
“Doesn’t look like easy walking distance to all points,” Leith said.
“Quite a hike, but doable.”
Leith had found his glasses, and he was able to locate yet another spot on the map to mark with an X on Ridgewood, close to Edgemont Village. “We found her phone about here,” he said. “So we thought she might have boarded a bus. There’s a stop close by. Transit’s been questioned, but nothing from that. Can’t unlock the phone without her code, and her parents don’t know it, so it’ll be up to the techs to crack.” He folded the map, not so neatly. “Now, I’ve got to get on with it, deliver the news to the parents.”
“I’ll go with you,” Dion said.
And he did.
* * *
Judging by how Leith navigated to the Ferris home, Dion could tell he didn’t know his way around the North Shore so well yet. If the GPS said to go this way, he went this way, instead of a sleeker alternate route. But best to keep his mouth shut, he decided. It didn’t matter, anyway. The streets were silent and empty at 3:00 a.m. out here in the suburbs. Even the late-night revellers had gone silent.
The lights were blaring at the Ferris house.
“You never get used to this,” Leith said, as he parked the car and pushed open the driver’s door. Dion waited a moment, wondering why he had volunteered to do this. Because Leith shouldn’t have to do it alone, he supposed. Nobody should.
Fourteen
LOST
Once he had confirmed his daughter’s identity and composed himself enough to leave her side, Roy Ferris followed Leith to one of the small meeting rooms reserved for tough talks like this. Dion went to get coffee from the machine. Caffeine wasn’t a good idea, he realized as he fed the coins and pressed the button. But it would go untouched, anyway. It was a formality, and a familiarity, a pale comfort in an unreal situation.
He returned to the room and closed the door. Ferris sat in a daze. He said thanks for the coffee and clutched the paper cup. He went on to relate how he had dropped his daughter at Edgemont Village earlier this evening, where she was going to meet a school friend, whom she was going trick-or-treating with. The friend’s name was … Grace. “Now it seems so … vague,” he said. “It was her first year out on her own. For Halloween, I mean. She really wanted to go without chaperones. How … how could we have let her? But how could we not?”
“It’s something all parents have to struggle with,” Leith said. “Kids have been fighting for their independence from the dawn of time. You can’t blame yourself.”
The grieving man shook his head. “I’ll always blame myself.” At a little after 9:00, the agreed-upon curfew, he had phoned Breanna. She had answered her cell, said she was still out with Grace and they were having fun, could she have another hour? He had given her till 9:30, then he would pick her up. Yes, she’d call, she had promised.
“At nine thirty I called again,” he said. “She didn’t answer.”
Immediately the worry set in, hard. He had phoned Grace. “I gave you guys her contact info, didn’t I? She said she and Brea split up around eight thirty. So Brea had lied to me. She wasn’t with Grace. Grace said she thought Brea had headed straight home, or was going to call to be picked up.” He looked at Leith, at Dion. “Why was she on that road? Who took her there?”
By 9:45 he was driving around Edgemont, up and down the avenues, peering into the patches of shadow and light for a familiar little figure, but the area was too big and he had no clue where to begin looking. At 9:55 he phoned the police, who immediately started an effort to triangulate the phone Breanna had been carrying. The phone had been located in the grass on Ridgewood, and its discovery only compounded concerns. And while mother and father waited for good news, Leith had shown up on the doorstep with just the opposite.
The interview was done. Ferris was dropped off at his residence, and Dion returned with Leith to the detachment. They sat at Leith’s station in GIS with plans of drafting out their combined observations and recall of all that had transpired that night.
Leith was left-handed, Dion saw. The pen hooked over the words as they formed, the writing oddly sloped — but neat. Leith gave a broken running commentary as he worked, more a thinking aloud than a sharing. Kids and independence, the worrisome age when babies think they’re grown-ups. He would be talking to Grace first thing tomorrow, see if he could get some clue as to why Breanna had lied, then made her way up Sunset Boulevard instead of heading home. Possible there was something even more sinister at work here than an accident, he said, then corrected himself with a growl. “As if leaving the scene of an accident isn’t sinister enough.”
Dion looked at his watch. He didn’t think anything would surface beyond a child struck by a speeder who didn’t have the guts to stop. Their inquiries would show the young teen was breaking the rules, heading out to party. A meet up with others at the ball field, maybe a boy. Could be she’d already been and was heading home, or had changed her mind en route. Or realized she couldn’t find her phone and was retracing her steps. Maybe she was lost. He didn’t believe she had been picked up and murdered.
Leith had shifted in his chair to stare gloomily at the black windows. “I lied when I told him he can’t blame himself, though,” he said. “He should bloody blame himself. Thirteen is way too young to be out on her own. So what that she’s got a cellphone. It’s the new security blanket. False faith. Makes parents lazy.”
He was on a rant because he had a small daughter of his own, Dion guessed. Once up north he had seen them together, father and child. She was small, just a baby riding on her dad’s shoulders. She was still a few years away from trick-or-treating age, but it was going to happen, and Leith would be facing his own tough decisions, how and when to let her head out on her own.
The moment was melting into a dream. Dion blinked to wake himself and struggled to his feet. “If there’s nothing else —”
Leith was still writing out his awkward notes. He dismissed Dion with a wave of a hand. “Sure. Get lost. I mean, don’t. Not literally.”
Only while driving the short distance back to his apartment minutes later did the insult sink in. Don’t get lost. Dion snorted, thinking if anyone was going to get lost — literally — it would be Leith, relying on his GPS to find the easiest of addresses. Watching the road ahead, he thought of Leith’s anger at the Ferris parents, and about young girls walking alone in the dark. He wasn’t as shocked as Leith was at how parents could make bad decisions. Faith. As he saw it, unless a man has been through some kind of personal hell, faith is the default approach to life.
Mr. Ferris would lose faith now. He had been hit by reality too late, and his newfound wisdom would go to waste. Dion had been hit by reality early in life, which gave him a head start on wisdom. Until the crash set him back to zero.
Why was he so disturbed? Why was he gripping the wheel like he wanted to kill it?
With a whump of fear he understood what had been nagging at him. It was Breanna’s pink hair. It had set his mind on a near-forgotten loop, thinking about that girl on the ridge of an old gravel pit, her looking down, him looking up. He didn’t know her name, age, anything. She was a giant X. About all he knew of her was the unusual sheen of her hair as she turned to flee, that she rode a dirt bike, and that in his pursuit, he had gotten his good friend Luciano Ferraro killed.
He had gotten barely a glimpse of her standing up there, but she had been watching him. Watching as he stood sweating over a shallow grave, his heart hammering. How long she had been watching and what she had seen, he didn’t know. Had she actually seen his face from that distance, in that dim light? Would she be able to identify him? And the kicker: why had she never gone
to the police?
He forced his hands to loosen their grip on the wheel. He thought of more immediate problems, of Breanna Ferris walking alone, up or down the road to or from Eldon Park, in the dark.
Even with her pink hair she would have been nothing but a shifting sliver of night moving along that creekside road. Easy enough to miss, if a driver was even slightly distracted, reaching to adjust the stereo, lighting a cigarette. He went back subconsciously to superimposing Breanna’s face over the mystery girl’s, trying to fill in the blanks, when he realized that in his abstraction he had just passed 13th Street, meaning he had missed the turnoff toward his apartment block.
Turning back around wasn’t as easy as it should have been. One street was closed for repair and another reorganized into a one-way, trapping him in a temporary cul-de-sac. Lost. He thumped the steering wheel. It wasn’t just the few minutes wasted trying to get turned around, when he desperately needed sleep. It was the way he kept blundering about since the crash. Time was ticking and his chances of becoming anything were slipping away, and no matter how he tried to convince himself he didn’t care, he did.
What were his chances of getting back on top when something as silly as a girl’s pink hair sent him into a tailspin of panic?
Then panic would beget anger. Anything, anytime, could set him off. New office furniture, rearranged roads, strangers in the halls. An updated operating system on his phone. He no longer had a heart beating in his chest; it was a pounding fist.
He pulled into the parking lot below his apartment block, only to find a boat-sized Buick had taken his reserved spot. He reversed out with a triple-chirp of tires, swearing, forced to find parallel parking on the street. The only option was a narrow slot, and it took some tries before he could winkle his way in. He stepped out of his car, breathing hard, and slammed the door shut. Above him, the night skies were giving way to the first light of dawn, and within he seemed to be giving way to darkness.
Fifteen
SEIZE THE DAY
At the November 1 afternoon general-duties briefing, Dion learned what progress had been made on the Breanna Ferris case, not from the slow-speaking sergeant conducting the meeting, but from Jackie Randall sitting next to him in her trousers and blazer. The hit and run was being handled upstairs in Serious Crimes, but Randall had been helping out with background checks on the case, and she gave Dion the gist. “We’re getting there, slowly but surely,” she said, flapping her plainclothes lapels at him proudly.
He smirked at her use of we. “You’re head of the unit already, are you?”
“I might as well be.” In a low voice and in bits and pieces while the briefing went on, she told him what the accident reconstructionist had reported so far, and what Leith and JD Temple had extracted from Breanna’s friend Grace. Under pressure, Grace had added to her story, filling in at least part of the puzzle.
Brea had a top-secret boyfriend, was the bombshell confession.
“That’s what I figured,” Dion said.
So secret that Brea had only told Grace the boy’s avatar name, something that sounded like Bonfire. Last night, when Grace and Brea had parted ways, an hour earlier than Brea had told her parents, Brea had gone to the north end of Edgemont Village to meet Bonfire.
The boy had a car, but Grace didn’t know its make or model, or whether the two had planned to go anywhere.
Lastly, Grace revealed that Brea and Bonfire had probably broken up that night. At least going by the last text she received from Brea. BF is a creep. Going home. Grace had written back, asking for details, but there was no answer.
“BF is a creep,” Randall repeated. “One little line that says it all. Bonfire kicked her out of his car, or she got out on her own. Maybe he ran her down. Maybe on purpose.”
“What’s her phone doing on Ridgeway?”
“I was thinking about that. She was in contact with Grace just after nine, had been with her boyfriend up till then. Only thing I can think of is she left the phone in his car, or he took it from her. Then he chucked it out the window as he headed wherever he was heading. It would be the kind of thing a creep like Bonfire would do.”
Finding Bonfire was going to be a hell of a job, she added. The meeting was finished, other members were leaving, and Randall was no longer talking like a spy sharing secrets in a church pew. “But we’ll get him.”
“I don’t think the boyfriend mowed her down,” Dion said. He grabbed a piece of paper to diagram out his reasoning. “The driver was coming around this corner too fast, saw Breanna too late, slammed on his brakes, and contacted her about here. She flew like this, landed here.” He drew a stick figure. “If the boyfriend hit her on purpose, it would look different. Unless he drove off, then came back gunning for her, but changed his mind at the last second. I don’t think so. This driver skidded and, by the looks of it, almost avoided a hit. I’ve seen a lot of MVA victims, and on that scale, Breanna looked to be in pretty good shape. It was an accident, Jackie.”
Far more interesting than the boyfriend angle would be the trace evidence, he thought. Debris on the road, paint in the girl’s wounds, bits of glass in her hair. Or it would have been interesting, if he was on the case. He crumpled the diagram.
“Where were you last night while we were all out working double time?” he asked Randall. “I had my eye out for you. I thought you’d be right in there, leading the troops.”
She pulled a face. “I slept through the call, would you believe?”
So she wasn’t perfect. He was glad, and told her so. He described Inspector Hope showing up and yelling at everyone. Randall said now she really regretted sleeping through the call. The last mystery of the night was solved when he told Randall about the odd witch’s hat blowing onto the road. It didn’t fit with the girl’s costume. Randall had a suggestion for that, too. It wasn’t a witch’s hat, but a warlock’s. And if Bonfire had been a warlock that night, he had just given himself away. Hats made great repositories for DNA.
Before the meeting finally broke, the team watched various recorded news clips. On the Ferris hit and run, a reporter standing close to the deadly corner on Sunset Boulevard told of grief in the community. She closed by asking that if anybody had seen anything at all, they contact the nearest RCMP detachment, or call their toll-free anonymous tips line. The recording ended, and the room began to clear.
“There will be only one eyewitness to this accident,” Randall told Dion. “Maybe he or she will come forward. Otherwise, all we can hope for is a tipster.”
“There’ll be evidence of some kind,” Dion said. “There always is.”
Randall wasn’t so sure. “Monty says it’s not looking good. No witnesses, and so far, no calling card, either. They’re still looking, and maybe something will be pulled from the body, he says. But none of the usual car bits and pieces on the road.”
Dion was nodding too, but absently. Mention of Montgomery reminded him of last night’s party and Azrael’s awful farewell. He had passed Montgomery in the hall in the morning, and the corporal had smiled at him in his usual friendly way, which meant at least Tori’s wrath hadn’t bled, much. Still, he was uneasy.
Fishing for clues, he said, “How was the party after I left?”
“Kind of humdrum, actually,” Randall said. “You left just before Tori arrived, and after that it went kind of sideways. She was snippy with everyone. Monty, I hate to say it, drank way too much, and he was all over her, and she didn’t like it. Who would? Fascinating as it all was, I didn’t stay long. May I ask why you’re smiling?”
Dion was smiling because now he knew he wasn’t the only one Tori had been snippy with. “I thought it was me,” he said. He went on to tell Randall of meeting Tori on his way out, her wanting him to stay, his insisting on leaving, and her firing insults at him as he left the deck. “Everything looks worse at night,” he said, and busied himself making a few last briefing notes.
> Randall had slouched back in her chair. “I wouldn’t take it personally,” she said. “Tori’s always coiling up tight till something gives; then she springs, and it can be messy. You learn a lot about people in hockey. Hockey’s like a mini war, and she’s not a good warrior. She’s a really nice person, unless she gets bored, or loses at something, or sees someone prettier than her. Myself being no threat in the prettiness department, she likes me a lot. But we’ll never be friends. She digs karaoke bars and bikers. Me, I’m happy flopping out on my sofa and studying. A good police periodical, mellow music, cup of cocoa. That’s my heaven. But in Tori’s mind, if you’re not having the absolute most fun physically possible, you might as well be dead. Carpe diem, eh.”
She might have gone on talking, but she noticed the wall clock and leaped to her feet. “Sam Stirling’s touching down. I’m going to be there when he arrives. It’s one way of jamming your foot in the door, you know. Be there, even if they don’t want you there. Always be there.”
Dion couldn’t recall who Sam Stirling was, but wasn’t about to say so.
“Ben’s brother,” Randall reminded him.
He clapped his notebook shut with a sigh and stuck it in his pocket. He and Randall left the room together. “I wonder why Tori would be so vicious to you, though,” Randall said. “I mean, what could you have done to —” she stopped both talking and walking.
Dion turned to look at her. “What?”
But she wouldn’t share whatever it was. “Going this way,” she said, pointing. “See you later.”
Dion made his way to the general-duties pit, wondering what had given her pause. Had the same ridiculous thought crossed her mind as his? It had to do with the flash of anxiety on Montgomery’s face as he answered his cell, and Tori’s jumpy anger, which seemed to peak as Dion had looked toward the alley, and a young girl struck by a speeding car and left to die.
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