Clambering after him, trying to keep up. He had turned to laugh at her struggles and watched her lose her footing, like a glitch in a film, the splice between that life and this, and disappear between boulders.
There had been a few numb months, but life went on. At fourteen he had been more agile. He had made it up beyond the treeline, trying to get lost. He lay on lichen-spattered rock and let the wind sweep over him. Even under the spell of his death wish it had been a beautiful world, and he was beautiful, his legs like springs, arms like pistons. As he had climbed into the higher elevations, he had found hope.
But he hadn’t managed to get lost, then or ever. There was always the return, back to the house where the music was always playing. Bleak music, his parents’ way of dealing with sorrow. They made him take piano lessons for a while, though they knew he wasn’t the gifted one. After that, there was high school to get through, then trade school, then work, or recovering from work, or doing chores, or keeping an eye on Anastasia whenever his parents had to go out.
Poor Anastasia. More than once he had tried to wheel her down the road, out to the woods, where he would leave her to the elements. Because if he was uncomfortable in his cage, what must she be going through in hers? A fate beyond cruel.
Even in this he failed. It was too far, too difficult, and each time he had been forced to turn around and wheel her back to their Dempsey Road prison.
He stood in the wet, grabbing undergrowth, his shaggy legs shaking. How he loved and despised this park. He sometimes wondered if he had caught something from it, maybe on that day he lay on the rock and got aroused by the pressure on his crotch. He had tried to fuck the mountain, and now the mountain was fucking him. Something had crawled inside and was turning him into something … alien.
He looked downhill, and his stomach groaned. Should have brought a sandwich.
He thought about the contents of his fridge: bread and ham. With a shout of disgust, he turned and started back down, passing the spot where last month he had spied the intruder. There had been something so blithely content about the man in his bright-red jacket jaunting by that Stefano had wanted to jump out from where he hid and attack.
That was the first time his mind had gone scarlet. He had looped around, following the red jacket through the gloom. He had kept to the sides of the path — not always easy — until Red Jacket quickened its pace, broke into a jog, and finally dropped its gear and ran, no longer blithe, no longer content.
Stefano had run, too, or done his best to run in the boots.
Even with the boots buckling noisily with each stride, he had felt the power of that moment. Stretched to his full potential, free of weak shins and drippy sinuses and pocked skin, he had chased down his prey, and for a little while, he had become a child of the forest, had finally found his purpose.
More recently was the failure — one he wished to forget — with the two women on the path and their yappy dog. When they had turned and stared toward him, he lost courage and fell to a crouch in the bushes. When they ran off, he feared they would bring vigilantes, so he had hidden deep within the forest.
When he felt it was safe, he had stashed the skin and gone home, just as he was going home now, disappointed and unfulfilled.
He crossed the river upstream from the bridge, then made his way to the parking lot, cutting up through the Mesachee and into the suburbs. The road was all woods on this side, all houses on that, but he knew where to emerge undetected. As always, before re-emergence in human form, he packed his face, hide, and rubber boots in their sack and stuffed the sack into the hole formed by rocks that he had discovered some time ago, hidden by bracken. Back in running shoes, he was now on the asphalt and walking casually, a man out for a stroll on this pleasant November day.
A kid jingled by on his bicycle. A fat man on a ladder was doing something to his eaves. Stefano came to Chef’s house and saw that her car was not in the driveway. He felt closer than ever to Chef, now that he had been in her house, but he had also become more realistic about their relationship. She would likely be alarmed by his presence, and may fight back. Possibly she was stronger than she looked. How to subdue a person, and keep them from panicking, so they would listen, and understand? He had left her house that day, knowing he wasn’t ready yet. He needed to prepare.
Around the side of the house, he unzipped his jeans and sprayed the wooden siding.
Then he left out the back and walked along the road back to Dempsey, passing the house where his little friend Troy lived. Finally he was back home, padding in socks down the hall. From his sister’s room came the gasping of her machines, and from his parents’ room only silence.
Downstairs was nothing but his own walled-off suite, Paul’s workshop, and the great hulking furnace that roared intermittently. There were also shelves with boxes of Christmas decorations and other artefacts from better days. Stefano expected nobody down here, as always, so was startled when he reached the bottom of the steps to find an intruder at the back of the basement.
The man stood still as a coat rack in the shadows by the storage shelves, tall and skinny, glasses and nose picked out by the scant light of the bulb above. It was Paul. Paul and Stefano looked at each other across the distance.
“Oh, Stefano. I’m looking for my hip waders. Have you seen them? They were in here.” He pointed to a large cardboard box on the spiderwebbed storage shelf.
“No.”
“How odd.”
Stefano slipped into his den, closed the door, and listened. He heard nothing and guessed that Paul was gone, back upstairs to Colette.
The drapes were shut and his room was dark as night. Stefano undressed before the full-length mirror and confirmed what he could feel pushing and pulling inside. The unnatural strands of muscle were filling in his rickety frame, drawing him out longer and leaner. His mouth opened wide, stretching till the skin of his cheeks burned.
He ate in front of the TV with remote control in hand. He settled on a documentary about the aerospace industry and watched blindly while his jaws ripped and chewed. The day was young. Later, maybe, he would change skins and go further up the shaded paths. Stretch into the changes, tear up the miles. If only he had more time. Impossible, though, because he needed to work. He needed the money.
Or did he?
Huddled on the floor, bathed in the flashing TV’s strobe and licking his lips free of ham brine, he grinned as it occurred to him where to go next — and what to be.
Twenty-Two
GUNNER
Dion tried to reach Farah again, and again he was frustrated. He phoned the restaurant and was told she was not in quite yet, as she had some kind of appointment. He left a message for her to call him as soon as she was available, giving his cellphone number, the direct line to his office, and the detachment’s main line for good measure. The girl taking the message said she thought it kind of sweet, all these numbers he was giving her, but it wasn’t.
He was worried. Farah didn’t get it. She lived across the road from a horrific murder scene, but hadn’t seemed in any rush to upgrade her locks, as he had strongly recommended.
Now a man shaped like a wolf was creeping about the surrounding woods. The next time he talked to her, he would give her a bit of a lecture about safety — if it wasn’t too late — and responsibility, and the unwritten law about returning calls.
He was trying to focus on paperwork when she did just that — called. Over an hour had passed since he had given her up for dead, so he counted to three before speaking. On the count of three he said in his calmest, deepest voice, “I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I got your messages, and I meant to get back to you, but didn’t realize it was an emergency till just now.”
“I don’t blame you for avoiding me. I was a jerk.”
“That’s your job, isn’t it? No hard feelings. What’s up?”
She sounded as level as ever. A little rushed, but not angry, or even irritated. There was a great deal of background noise behind her, shouting and banging pots, and something pinged. Dion was pleased about the no hard feelings. “It’s this case I’m working on,” he told her. “I have a couple of questions. You seem to be in a public place. Is the line secure?”
“Secure?”
“Anybody listening in?”
“No, nobody’s listening in. You’re perfectly secure.”
“It’s about Steve,” Dion said, ignoring the light mockery. “The guy you carpool with. He’s come up in our inquiries — nothing to worry about, but I need his last name.”
“Steve? You mean Stefano?”
“If you wouldn’t mind keeping this to yourself,” he added.
“Why do you want to know? He’s not in trouble, is he?”
“No. General inquiries. I can tell you more later, but for now, just give me his name, if you could. And keep it to yourself that I’ve been asking about him.”
“All right,” she said. “It’s Boone. Stefano Boone.”
“B-O-O-N?” he said.
“B-O-O-N-E,” she said.
* * *
After some system-generated delay, Leith and JD sat facing twenty-two-year-old Jagmohan “Joey” Battar, deep within the walls of the Mission penitentiary. Battar sat in the dingiest green interview room, wearing the dingiest orange prisoner’s coveralls, with nothing but the dingiest grey future ahead of him, but he was a pleasant-faced young man. He should have been out and about, enjoying the world with friends, not locked up for the foreseeable future.
What a waste, Leith thought. He introduced himself and JD, then sketched in the background of why he was here, looking into a serious crime out in Lynn Valley on the North Shore. Battar said, “I figured you’re here about a serious crime ’cause you’re from GIS, which is like the homicide squad, right?”
“Something like that. Where have you been living the last few years, Joey? You seem to be off the radar as far as fixed addresses.”
“I travel. Stanley Park sometimes, in the summers. Burnaby Lake. West Point Grey once, believe it or not.” He couldn’t remember where he had lived this past summer, so. Leith asked if he had ever spent time in Lynn Valley.
Nope, he’d never heard of the place.
Leith told him that was strange, as his fingerprints had been found all over a derelict house in the very heart of Lynn Valley. Battar said it must have been someone with identical fingerprints to his own. Leith told him fingerprints are unique, no two people’s are identical.
Battar wanted proof of that theory. “Unless you check everyone, you can’t say that for sure. It’s like snowflakes. Who’s going to go around checking every snowflake to see if they’re the same or different? Right?”
A lot of time was wasted arguing the point, but Battar finally conceded that he had spent a few days with a friend in a place on the North Shore. He refused to give the friend’s name, as friends don’t rat out friends. It’s the code.
Now they were arguing about codes of honour and how far they could be pushed, another argument Battar was doomed to lose. “You win,” he said. “You a smoker?”
Leith said he was a smoker who was seriously trying to quit. Battar said he would help him quit by bumming a cigarette off him, for later. Leith gave him the whole pack.
“I’ll just stick one in my mouth, like,” Battar said. He sucked on the scent of his unlit smoke for a while, then finally went about breaking the code and ratting on his friend. “This buddy of mine was kind of a crook, to tell the truth. He’d go out in the daytime — best time for it, he says — and burgle places. It’s all hearsay, though, because I never do that stuff myself.”
“That’s why you’re in here, I thought. Partaking in B and Es with friends.”
“Which is a misunderstanding. I fell in with the wrong crowd. I was set up to take the fall. The judge didn’t believe it, is why I’m here.”
Leith brought the discussion back to the matter at hand. “I need the name of your friend in Lynn Valley, Joe. I wouldn’t worry about getting him in trouble. He’s beyond that.”
He showed Battar the old school photo of Ben Stirling — a handsome, but glum-eyed young man — supplied by Ben’s older brother. Battar said, “That doesn’t look like him, but that’s him. That’s Gunner.”
“Gunner — that’s his nickname? What happened to him?”
Battar relaxed, now that he accepted he wasn’t the target of this investigation, and turned out to be quite a talker. “I don’t know what happened to Gunner. We parted ways at some point, back in that heat spell. Haven’t seen him since.”
He described meeting Gunner in Vancouver across from the old CP building. That was back in the spring. “He’d just got off the bus, was selling something, I can’t remember what, small but hi-tech, and we got talking, and later bunked down together — not in that way, just friends. And later he invited me out to his place in whatever that was you said —”
“Lynn Valley.”
“Big old house he found in a walkabout. We lived there all of August, but you can’t make a living over there. Just doesn’t pay to be homeless in North Van. You stick out too much, so you have to lie low. Better off in Vancouver, where you got more options. And if you’re thinking Gunner’s a criminal, he’s not. He wasn’t going to do B and Es forever. He had plans, was going to start a business. With global warming, there’s this specialized kind of landscaping he read up on that uses very little water. He says it’s going to become really big, and he’s going to be the first in the city to offer it. He just had to build up some capital to get started. He was going to hire me, too, and we’d work together, was the plan.”
Battar stared sadly at his unlit cigarette. “Gunner’s a smart guy, but heavy into the dope. Sometimes smart people can’t handle how smart they are and need the uppers and downers to kind of take the edge off.”
Battar the psychoanalyst. “I see what you’re saying,” Leith said.
“So we only stayed in that house there, him and me and his girl, for hardly even that month. Too hot.”
Girl. Leith thought about the fake-gold bracelet, a dime a dozen, found on a windowsill in the Greer house.
Battar said, “It was just a few days after Aphid left that we kind of broke up the scene. Gunner had kept telling her to go back to her parents because she was really young, and this wasn’t a good life for her. She didn’t want to go. It was like telling a dog, go home, go home, and it keeps following you around. But when she finally took off — that was around welfare day in August — he was really watery about losing her, and it wasn’t the same after that. He left a few days after she did. I hope he went home, too. He has a brother somewhere.”
Another pause.
“After Gunner didn’t come back, I packed up and left myself. That place is creepy enough even when you’re not alone.”
“Gunner’s girl?” JD asked. “You said Aphid?”
“Aphid,” Battar told her. “Like the bug.”
“How do you spell that?”
“A-F-F-I-D, I guess. Like the bug.”
“Last name?”
“Hell if I know.”
“Tell us what you know about Aphid,” Leith said.
“She was his girl, about this high.” Battar indicated about five feet off the ground. “She didn’t talk much. She’d run away from home, is all I know about her.”
Leith could get no more details about Aphid except hair colour — kind of like milky tea.
Battar asked Leith what it was Gunner had done to cause all these GIS questions. Leith told Battar that Gunner was dead.
Battar put down his damp cigarette and was silent. He asked how Gunner had died, and Leith told him that was exactly what he was trying to find out.
Leith asked Battar
for a complete list of Gunner’s friends. Battar said there were none, except himself and Aphid. Oh, except for the lady.
“Lady?”
“Yeah, man.” Battar became more animated as he reminisced. “She walked right in and scared me and Gunner half to death. But turned out she was cool. Invited us over and fed us. Great food, nice place. And awesome soap. Fruity, eh?”
Twenty-Three
FEVER
Joey Battar was turning out to be a treasure trove of new leads, and Leith thought it wise to just nod encouragement, prompting only when necessary, while JD quietly jotted notes. Right now a prompt was needed, as Battar seemed to have fallen into a deep reverie.
“Tell us about the lady, Joe.”
“She showed up pretty soon after Aphid disappeared, and good timing, too, because Gunner was in a mood. Depressed. He needed a break. And a bath. He cared about Aphid in a big way.”
“And so this lady came over. And what’s her name?”
Battar shook his head. “I was laced that night, man, complete Nirvana. So it’s all a bit of a dream state, to tell the truth.”
Fabulous, Leith thought.
“What’s kind of funny,” Battar went on, “is a couple nights before she walked in, Gunner went over and ripped her place while she was out — I only found this out later — bagged a bunch of jewellery and stereo equipment. So then holy shit, when she just walked into our place and came up the stairs, we’re like, yikes, what’s up here, man? And she found us in the closet and she goes, ‘Give me my stuff back, like, now.’”
Leith was glad his digital recorder was taking this all down, as JD seemed to have stopped taking notes. Like himself, she was too busy not believing her ears.
Battar said, “So I guess this is a first for Gunner, being told to give stuff back. Pretty quick he goes into his hidey-hole under the floorboards there” — the hidey-hole the team had discovered under the claw marks, Leith supposed, nothing inside but dead beetles — “and he gets the stuff out and gives it back to her, and me and him are both, like, wondering what she’s going to do about it, if she’s already called the cops and they’ve got the place surrounded, or what. But nope, apparently not. This lady just takes her jewellery and goes through it, checking for something in particular, which she finds. A ring, or something. She says none of it would score us any cash, anyway. Sentimental value, she says. And all the while I’m thinking, lady, there’s two of us and one of you here. You should be a little more, if nothing else, respectful. Better yet, scared shitless. I sure would be. But anyways, far as I remember, then she says we can keep the amp and mini CD player, but she’ll take the jewellery. And she wants her speakers.”
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