Creep

by R. M. Greenaway

  “I really don’t,” he said.

  “You don’t have an opinion one way or another? You don’t care?”

  He said nothing, and he could almost feel the ground between them splitting — which was great, just what he wanted. Why exactly finding the wolf last night had put an end to his daydreams about this relationship, he wasn’t sure. But it had. She said, “Have you ever heard wolf song? I mean, probably not out in the wilderness, city boy that you are, but have you ever sat down and listened to a good recording? It’s amazing, Cal. It’s a dirge from another world.”

  She stood to go find the CD to play it for him. When she returned, he told her he wasn’t interested right now. She laid it down and told him to keep it; maybe he would be curious some other day. He looked at the CD lying on the table in its case, the beautiful black-furred wolf face on its cover. He asked her if the two hunting rifles he had found in the room upstairs were registered.

  She seemed surprised by the question, and told him of course they were, yes. Registered to her dad, not to her. Weren’t licences grandfathered, or something? Any­­way, nobody had ever talked to her about it.

  He told her even if the registry hadn’t followed up, she should have. It was up to her to ensure the guns were either documented or disposed of safely, and if she wanted to keep them, they had to be secured in a gun locker. “It’s the law,” he said.

  “Okay, sure. Will do.”

  “I’d look into that this morning,” he told her.

  “Yes, all right,” she said, tilting slightly to stare at him.

  To avoid her eyes, he focused on the breakfast she had taken such pains to prepare for him. He had a plan — eat, say thank you, and leave. And this mistake he would not repeat.

  Seventeen

  SACRILEGE

  Leith was in Sergeant Mike Bosko’s office. Bosko was often away, on a non-stop schedule, but when he was here, he made up for it, talking to everyone in his easygoing way and getting his unit back in shape with peculiar efficiency.

  At this moment he appeared to have all the time in the world, though his wall calendar was all scribbled in like mad art. Leith sat across from him. They were doing the chit-chat thing, reminiscing about the Hazelton case, the snow, those mountains, that bunch of tough-spined locals who had made their job so difficult. Bosko asked how Leith’s house hunting was going, then about his caseload, how it was holding up. Too heavy, too light?

  “Pretty good,” Leith said. “My priority is Ben Stirling, now that Monty’s focused on Breanna Ferris. We’re pretty sure we know where the duffel bag used to contain his body was bought from — an army surplus store on Kingsway in Vancouver. But all leads from there have been dead ends. Lot of tips coming in on Stirling, but they’re all pretty wacky. We seem to have a werewolf in the neighbourhood, which is keeping us busy. We’re working to keep it in hand.”

  “I’ve seen the wolf reference come up a few times,” Bosko said. “Could be the real thing?”

  “No. The only Wolf Pack I’m aware of around here is the junior hockey club.”

  Leith’s phone rang. On the line was Doug Paley, saying he had a report in from Lynn Valley. “Kind of vague, but sounds like an assault,” Paley said. “Two women. This being from up the valley, I’d say it’s your problem, not mine.”

  “Got any specifics?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Paley said, and he sounded pleased. “Whatever this thing was, it howled.”

  * * *

  The complainants Leith found himself questioning an hour later were two middle-aged sisters, Sabrina and Evelyn, who had been accosted while walking on the path that ran alongside Lynn Valley Road, close to the Baden-Powell trail. It was just getting dusk, they told him. They were still excited and spoke over one another to tell the story, standing in Sabrina’s living room. Or not exactly accosted, they corrected each other, but definitely they were stalked.

  Sabrina told of how she and Evelyn had been taking cover from the drizzle under the tree canopy, waiting while Ev’s mini pinscher did his thing, and the two women had been startled by a sudden, violent rustling in the bushes just a stone’s throw away. They had stood stock-still, listening. The dog leaped into Ev’s arms and continued to yap at the bushes from the safety of her embrace.

  Sabrina described how she and Ev had decided to walk briskly back toward the street, but to their horror, the thing had followed, skirting the path, keeping to the underbrush. They kept their eyes trained on the disturbed foliage marking the snaking line of the creature’s progress, and just before they broke into a panicked run, Sabrina had caught a glimpse of the thing: a large, dark, semi-upright creature. Definitely a biped.

  “A man?” Leith asked.

  “Not a man,” Sabrina said. “It’s face was long, like this. Like a horse, sort of. But pointier.”

  She patted her chest as she finished her wine. Her husband Tom stood by, also with a glass of wine. He looked intrigued, but not what Leith would call worried.

  “And then we made it to the street,” Evelyn said. “And we heard it behind us. It howled.”

  She shuddered. Tom grinned. Leith watched Tom and wondered if this was an in-house prank. If so, it wasn’t funny. He asked the women about the howl, if it sounded like a human or an animal. Evelyn said it sounded like an abomination. Like a human abomination or an animal abomination, he asked, trying to narrow it down. She didn’t know.

  “And for one godawful minute I thought it was running after us,” Sabrina went on, massaging the ribs over her heart.

  “Man, did we run,” Evelyn added.

  These were two well-rounded women in their mid-fifties who didn’t look like born-again joggers. Something had spurred them on, then. “But it didn’t run after you?” Leith asked.

  “I guess not. Well, we didn’t exactly look back to find out, did we, Sab? But we’re here, and we’re alive. I guess it stayed put.”

  “I think the lamplight scared it off,” Sabrina said.

  Evelyn agreed. “Definitely, it didn’t like the light.”

  * * *

  Leith phoned Bosko, who was at home now, and asked for permission to set up two-point surveillance of the woods. Couple of vans, Leith suggested. He’d place them around the Headwaters, not on the park road itself, but near its entrance. Whoever was causing the disturbances would avoid the main connectors and come and go through ancillary paths — despite the brambles. Whoever it was, they weren’t afraid of the cold and the wet, and they weren’t afraid of getting scratched.

  Audiovisual monitoring, he recommended to Bosko. Amplified listening, infrared photography. “Because no doubt about it, we’ve got someone hanging around in there, and he’s demented, and we’d better find him soon, whether it’s related to Ben Stirling’s death or not. Before someone gets hurt.”

  Bosko didn’t quibble, but gave the nod to the request, with signed authorization to follow.

  * * *

  The spell-checker was slowing down Dion’s several reports, always correcting him. Sometimes he had to look up sound-alikes to get it right. Like stationary. He liked to blame his lousy spelling on brain damage, but in fact reading and writing had never been strengths of his. These days, though, getting it right seemed to matter. When Jackie Randall approached, he ducked his head to his computer and pretended he was too busy to talk. Hopefully she would take her crazy notions elsewhere.

  Randall sat on the edge of his desk and leaned toward him, saying, “Excuse me, partner. Could you lend an ear?”

  He sat back in his chair and lent her his ear.

  “This is going to sound kind of odd,” she said. “But I wanted to ask you about Monty’s party.”

  Just as he’d feared. She hadn’t dropped the idea, then. She was going to run with it. “Got to make it quick,” he said. “I’m signing off.” He shut down the computer to prove it and stood up, pushing his chair back in his cramped
workstation. Tired, sore, all he wanted was a shower in the change room and a swift, uncomplicated departure. Instead he was forced to stand and wait for Randall’s odd question.

  She said, “How about we talk at Denny’s?”

  Denny’s was at the other end of the main drag, a gruelling drive, if traffic was bad.

  “How about we talk at Rainey’s?” Dion said. Rainey’s was nearby, a popular hangout for the younger police officers getting off shift. Not that he felt young. His voice was coming out like gravel and his neck ached.

  “Denny’s is more private,” Randall said.

  “All right. Whatever. I have to change first.”

  “No problem.”

  Forty minutes later they were in a booth at Denny’s, ordering coffee. The place was near empty, just themselves and a few late diners sitting alone. Dion asked for decaf, hoping to avoid another sleepless night. Randall’s civilian clothes looked dowdy, but her face glowed, scrubbed and healthy. Once they had coffee in front of them, she said, “First off, it’s about Tori, so you’ll appreciate why I wanted to meet off-site.”

  Dion stirred half a sugar into his cup.

  “You told me you’d encountered her as you were leaving their house on Halloween, and about how hostile she was, but you kind of skimmed over the details. I wonder if you could go over it again for me, verbatim-like, exactly what happened.”

  “Verbatim-like,” Dion said, heavily. “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you why, but I have a feeling, by the way you’ve been avoiding me lately, that we’re ad idem, and you don’t like it. I don’t blame you. I don’t like it, either, but that’s not going to make it go away, is it? I’ll recap. Stop me if I’m wrong. As I recall it, you’re standing on the back porch. She appears in the floodlight. You give her a scare just by standing there, and she nearly bites your head off for it. What exactly does she say?”

  Randall had a notebook out, but he told her no way was she going to take this down. She pulled a face that said, Hey man, no problem, and put the book away.

  “She asked why I was standing there in the dark, if I was trying to scare her to death. Along those lines.”

  “And you replied?”

  “I said I was just leaving.”

  “And she wanted you to go back into the house with her, is that right?”

  “She did try to get me to stay.”

  “How exactly did she do that? What did she do and say?”

  “She took my hand and tried to lead me in. Teased me. Playing the seductress. I can’t remember what she said. Said she was afraid of Monty because he’d been drinking. I didn’t believe it.”

  “She had ulterior motives,” Randall suggested.

  Dion glowered at her zeal. “Maybe.”

  “Was she drunk? Could you tell?”

  “I didn’t think she was drunk.”

  “Couldn’t smell anything on her? How about her eyes? Did she look stoned?”

  “No.”

  “Still, she was hyped up, acting strange. Shouldn’t have been driving, should she?” Randall said.

  “Probably not.”

  “D’you recall how Monty took a call from her before she arrived? How concerned he looked?”

  “I don’t remember him looking concerned.”

  “I do,” she said. “Carry on. You insisted on leaving, and she yelled something rude down at you. What did she yell?”

  “She called me a queer.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was my sweater.”

  Randall ignored his joke. She was a bloodhound, nose to the ground. “Then what happened?”

  “Then I left. She shouted at me that I didn’t know where I was going, that I was heading in the wrong direction. Something like that. She called me a blind sonovabitch.”

  “So now you’re a queer blind sonovabitch. Were you going the wrong direction?”

  “I just stopped to look at the sky, the fireworks.”

  “And that bothered her?”

  “I guess so. I had activated the floodlights as I headed down the stairs.”

  Randall seemed pleased. “That sounds like a non sequitur, but it isn’t. You know exactly where this is going. What did you see straight ahead of you?”

  “Path. Lawn. Fence. Back alley.” He sighed. “Car.”

  “Right. Her car. It was parked there, wasn’t it?”

  “Can’t say it was hers, but there was a car there,” he said. He could say so with confidence because in the early morning hours that followed the discovery of Breanna Ferris’s body, he had lain awake and worked on reconstructing the memory until he could almost see it. The car was pale and could have been an Acura. It had been parked in the backyard, away in the shadows, just an object, a paler glob against the darkness. Almost subliminal in nature, almost not there.

  “What kind of car did you see?” Randall asked.

  “I don’t know. A compact. I couldn’t tell the colour. Maybe white.”

  He was hardly touching his decaf, so far, and it was losing steam. He pushed the cup aside.

  Randall said, “So she parked her car in the back alley, that’s almost for sure. Seems a little strange. It would be a long walk in those heels of hers.”

  “The street was quite packed in front. Their garage is full of boxes. Van was in the carport. She didn’t have a choice.”

  “There was lots of space further down. It would have been easier to walk that distance than negotiate that pathway out back. And there’s something else. Tori would want to burst through the front door, not slink in through the kitchen. More bang for her buck.”

  Dion was still trying to reason a way out of this unpalatable theory. “How about this,” he said. “Halloween, lots of cars and chaos. She’s got a nice car, and she wants to keep it that way.”

  “It’s an older basic-model Acura,” Randall said. “I checked. Not exactly a showpiece.”

  He winced at her. “No, but it’s fairly nice. So she parks out back so it won’t get dinged by bad drivers or scratched by kids. And even though she was coming up the back path, she might have been intending to walk around the side and come in through the front door, until she saw me.”

  Randall considered his argument. Out the window, a couple walked by holding hands. Dion watched them go and thought about Farah, all the things he and she had talked about, how she made him feel. Already he was having second thoughts about his second thoughts. His departure had been curt but not final. In fact her last words were, “Give me a call when you’re over yourself.”

  A little cryptic, but promising.

  “It’s time we made a plan,” Randall was saying. “Start documenting this. If it goes somewhere, we want to have a paper trail. I want to start by taking your statement. While it’s all fresh in your mind.”

  “No,” he said, pulling change from his pocket and laying it on the table. “It’s campfire stories, and you’re a camper. I’m going home.” He stood up and pulled on his coat.

  She followed his rising with her eyes, and he saw her glint of derision. For his cowardice, he supposed. She said, “I’m just thinking it’s funny how Corporal Montgomery jumped on that hit-and-run file. And then not only that, but made sure he’d be the lead investigator.”

  Dion paused in his coat fastening and glanced at her. This was news to him. She didn’t look like she was kidding.

  “At least that’s what I understood,” she qualified. “And did you notice how tense he’s been lately? Isn’t that kind of funny, too?”

  It wasn’t funny at all. It was an insinuation against a man who didn’t deserve it. He said good night to Randall and left her to her sacrilegious thoughts.

  Eighteen

  A LITTLE PSYCHO

  In the early evening, Leith was at his desk when Dion showed up at the threshold of the GIS office.
He came over and took the visitor’s chair. He was in full active uniform, except for the cap, and with his pink cheeks, sweat-spiked hair, and put-upon expression, he looked like a police officer who had spent the last hour chasing down trouble.

  Leith waited for him to broach whatever he was here to broach. When it didn’t happen, he said, “Busy day?”

  Dion sucked a barked knuckle and nodded.

  “There’s something you wanted?” Leith said.

  “I was told to see you.”

  Now Leith recalled the semi-official instructions, Bosko’s casual order: “Oh, Dave, let’s try to bring Cal back into the fold.”

  Not a plan Leith agreed with much, or even trusted. Was this a genuine show of faith on Bosko’s part, or was he still in the process of trap-setting? Leith sensed that whatever evidence Bosko had against Dion had fizzled, and his unofficial investigation was shutting down. But he didn’t know, and not knowing left him on edge. One of these days he would corner Bosko and demand a definitive answer: is Cal still a suspect, or have we cleared him? So he could shut it down in his own mind.

  “Right,” he told Dion. “It seems we need extra hands, and I’m trying to get people going on some leads that are piling up. They’re not what I’d call credible, but there’s a lot of them. We’ve opened a separate file, not linked to Ben Stirling. I’m not even sure it’s a GIS matter. The guys are calling it Code Werewolf. You can go ahead and laugh if you want. I’ll send down the details.”

  “Sure thing,” Dion said. He was up and heading off, but turned to ask how the hit and run was progressing, and who was in charge.

  “Michelin Montgomery’s got it well in hand,” Leith told him.