“So why did you figure it was better setting a dog on the boy than calling the cops?”
The answer was prompt. “’Cause you call the cops, he just does six months, gets out again, robs someone else. Maybe somebody’d get hurt. This is better.”
“What’s better?”
Pause. Starkey was looking at him across the table, eye to eye, not sure what part of this is better Leith didn’t get. “Well, getting rid of ’im.”
“Getting rid of?”
“Like, put ’im down.” Starkey grinned nervously. “Bad dogs get put down, right?”
Leith persisted. He needed Starkey to state his intentions, not in coy euphemisms, but plain English. For the record. “What d’you mean, Ray, put him down? I don’t understand. Down on the ground?”
Starkey drew a finger across his own throat.
Which looked great on video, the classic execute hand signal, but Leith wanted it in words. “Huh?”
“Better to just have ’im dead.” Starkey lowered his voice, as if slipping his words under the table. Maybe he didn’t realize that the softest sigh was being digitally captured, that every whisper would be amplified to the jury, and in their deliberations, that jury could replay it all to their hearts’ content.
“Better to have who dead?”
Starkey worked to hide his surprise at how dense this policeman sitting across the table was. “The kid, like I said. The kid what tried to rob me. Y’know.”
Leith was satisfied with the admission and moved on. “Okay. So then what?”
Then Starkey had let Pixie back upstairs, fed the animal, and taken her back to Blueridge. Then went across to Vancouver, up Kingsway, to an army surplus store and purchased an old duffel bag. Paid with cash. Returned home and went downstairs. Considered dismembering the body for ease of transportation, and managed to saw through an arm. But it was too tough, so he’d opted for the wrap-it-up and take-it-all-in-one-piece route. Got the corpse into the bag, which was sonovabitch difficult. He had used a rope and pulley set-up to get the duffel bag upstairs, then left it on the back porch for a bit.
Then the cleaning up all the next day, mopping down the cement, the walls. Found one of the kid’s shoes lying in a corner and threw it out with the trash.
Took a day or two to work up the energy to deal with the body. Plan one was truck it to the dump, but then he thought better of it, because if the remains were discovered too quick the employees there might remember him. In the end he had loaded it onto his dolly — really took the wind out of him — and onto the back of his Datsun, and gone out looking for a place to drop it. He knew the perfect spot, too. The very house the kid was hiding out in, which he knew for a fact sat boarded up and empty.
“How did you get in?” Leith asked. “The gate was chained and padlocked.”
“Gate was chained and padlocked, but I had the key.”
“How’d you get the key?”
Starkey explained. Two summers ago he had borrowed bolt cutters from Duggy and gotten rid of the old padlock on the back gate of the Harmon house. Replaced it with his own, so he could get in and out as he wished. “Wasn’t harming nobody. Just hated to see ’em go to waste.”
“See what go to waste?”
“Them crab apples growing in the yard there. For jelly.”
Starkey had dollied the body through the gate, in a sweat about getting caught, but wasn’t caught, and up to the rear of the house, with plans of just leaving the bag tucked there, hidden from view.
The crawl space was another epiphany. He saw the gap in the foundations and thought, Better yet …
But it had been a helluva job again, worse than anything so far, dragging the body through the hole, a real tight squeeze, and along the sand in the dank underbelly of the house, and he wouldn’t do it again, hell no, not if you paid him.
“Not nice places at the best of times, crawl spaces,” Leith commiserated.
“And I got this rheumatism, makes it tough.” Starkey showed off his stiff, curled hands.
“How did you manage?”
“Stuck a stick through that duffle bag handle, the one on the end, grabbed the stick with my arms like this, and inched ass-backwards. Hard on my knees, too. But, no shit, it was a real good hiding spot.”
“Sure.”
Sandwiches arrived, and Starkey helped himself. The food in his belly energized him, and he went on to describe the months of fear that followed his delivery of the corpse to the crawl space.
It had started with the howlings. He heard them all the way down the block. They came from the mouth of the dead boy under the house. “I wasn’t so scared of ’em till after that,” he told Leith. “But I shoulda thought of it, eh? Shoulda been more careful. They turn into animals after they die. They come looking for you, if you do ’em wrong, even if you’re doing right, protecting your own property. They don’t have that same respect for property like you and me have.”
“You think the burglar was coming back for you? In animal form?”
“No, sir. Dead is dead. And me, I’m not superstitious or nothing. But you start to hear howlings in the woods what sound, y’know, half human-like, you get to thinking maybe there’s something in ’em Windigo stories, right? You lock your doors, but they walk right through ’em.”
Leith noticed that Starkey was watching the grey wall to his left. He seemed to see something forming there, and whatever he was seeing worried him enough to bring beads of sweat to his temples.
* * *
Long after midnight, Leith sat at his desk typing up his report. He was at the part about probable cause to enter the premises, which had not been much more than a patchy SOS from Cal Dion. He reflected as his index fingers sought and plunked out the keys that, like all such reports, it was about nine-tenths information for the purposes of prosecution, and one-tenth covering his own ass. Which meant in his job, he was always about one-tenth afraid, not of the enemy out there, but of his own matrix. Which was sad, but probably necessary. It was called law and order.
Covering his ass, he made it clear in his report that upon arrival at Starkey’s house last week, the front door had been unlocked. He had knocked — loudly — and gotten no reply, and quite frankly, he hadn’t waited long before bursting in, flanked by his team, to catch Starkey scuttling out of the bedroom.
Leith’s final questioning of Starkey about that night’s events, the unlawful confinement and attempted murder of Constable Dion, was short and unsatisfying. On this topic, Starkey seemed to grow foggy, like a man of limited vocabulary trying to describe a complex dream.
Starkey did admit he had locked the basement door knowing the police officer was down there. He had gone to Blueridge to pick up Pixie, telling Duggy Vahn he just felt like taking the animal for a walk. He had returned home, unmuzzled Pixie, and locked him in the basement with his prisoner. He had not, at any point after that, unlocked the door, nor made any effort to help the police officer.
Why? was the question he couldn’t answer, except to say this visitor was an “Indian” too, and not a real police officer, and a threat to his well-being.
He would not admit that he had watched the dog attack through the hole in the floor, or that he wanted the cop dead. But again, Leith didn’t need any further admissions to wrap up his report to Crown counsel with confidence. He closed the interview, and the twisted little soul was processed and housed, pending remand. If he didn’t end up in a psych ward, he would spend the rest of his years in jail.
Finished with his report, Leith proofed it and filed it, then sat thinking. Deep in the oil pits of Starkey’s heart, his motivations had been pure sadism. Because what else was there? Sometime between the murder of Stirling and the attempted murder of an RCMP member, Starkey had gone out and purchased a heavy-duty barrel lock set and attached it purposely to the door leading down to his basement.
Not strang
e in and of itself, since a man who has been burgled once might naturally become more security conscious. Except Starkey’s basement had no real access to the outside, so a lock could serve only one purpose.
Besides, weren’t locks futile against werewolves and Windigos, which passed through doors and walls, if Starkey could be believed?
No, what they had arrested was an opportunistic serial killer in the making, Leith believed, and the basement was his trap. It was just a damn good thing someone qualified had stumbled into it before anyone else did. If qualified was the word.
Forty
DEVIL’S CLUB
In the passing days, Dion had no graceful chance to thank David Leith for saving his life. The problem was mostly schedule related, because of shift work. If Leith wasn’t at work or asleep, then Dion was asleep or else stuck in one room or another at the detachment, giving a statement or filing forms.
Week’s end brought one last meeting. This one had the smell of an intervention, and was supposedly off the record, informal, just a chat in an upstairs boardroom. He felt unusually chipper as he entered the meeting. Maybe because he’d had some days to make peace with the end of his career.
He walked in, said hello to everyone, poured himself a cup of coffee, and took his chair.
There were no documents in front of those present, only cups. It was a large room for a party of four, himself facing Inspector Theresa Stein and Sergeant Mike Bosko, with Michelin Montgomery to his right.
He and Montgomery were cool but polite to one another. On his way in today, Dion had decided that if he found himself going down, he would try to bring Montgomery with him. But he realized it wouldn’t work. He had no proof. All he would do was embarrass himself and give everyone else a bunch of free entertainment. He would have to keep the hit-and-run issue, along with the assault in the men’s room, to himself.
Montgomery seemed happy to let it lie, too.
The meeting promised to be brief, and started on a positive note. Dion was commended for his initiative, and the end result of saving April Quail, as well as bringing Ben Stirling’s killer to justice. He remembered to sit up straight and respond with short and civil answers. When he couldn’t come up with an answer fast enough, he played for time by sipping coffee and looking thoughtful.
Where exactly did things go wrong? Later he tried to trace his steps back to the point where he could have kept his mouth shut. Probably it was his answers to the general question about the wisdom of going off on his own while suspended.
He described, with maybe too much specificity, why he needed to see Ray Starkey, how he had tried to alert others to his suspicions, and how some had stonewalled him. Going on to say, “Stonewalled is an understatement,” was the point at which he strayed from his plan, and looking meaningfully at Montgomery didn’t help.
Montgomery’s friendly blue eyes widened in surprise, and Theresa Stein asked what he meant by that.
“What I mean is Corporal Montgomery not only wouldn’t go see Ray Starkey, after I told him how important it was, about five times —”
“And where do you get that?” Montgomery interrupted. “Didn’t I tell you I would? I made a note, and I told you I’d go check it out.”
“You made it clear you’d go later, not right away — if at all.”
“You mean I should have stood up and gone charging out there, bugles blasting?” Montgomery looked both injured and amused.
“Yes, I mean stand up and charge out there —” Dion said, and the next bit in retrospect should have been reworded — “bugles fucking blasting.”
Theresa Stein told him to lower his voice and watch his language, but it was too late. The blood pressure was up, the argument in full swing, Dion and Montgomery facing off. “If you’d been listening,” Montgomery exclaimed, “you would have heard me say I would send a member out shortly.”
“You didn’t say that. You said you believed it was a waste of time, called it werewolf stories, and then threatened me.”
“What?”
Stein said, “Calvin —”
“This man doesn’t just want me gone from here,” Dion told her. “He wants me dead.”
“Which brings me spot on to something I want to talk to you about,” she said, “namely Samantha Kerr. She’s a new counsellor over at the medical building. I hear she’s very good.”
“Which is exactly what he wants,” Dion told her, slapping the table top. “He wants you to think I’m unfit, because I’d been talking to Jackie Randall. Why does that matter? Because she was digging into his handling of the hit-and-run case, which he didn’t like. That’s why he wants me blacklisted.”
“And dead,” Stein reminded him. “You know, it seems to me Corporal Montgomery has shown more concern for your welfare lately than anyone else around here. He’s championed your cause, in fact has done a much better job of it than you have. But he’s also worried about your state of mind — and I’m beginning to see his point. You’d better think hard before you go throwing allegations around, especially in a forum like this.”
“I did think hard! I defended him. I told Jackie she was wrong, even when I thought she was right, and in the end, she agreed. She was going to either hand it to Internal or drop it. Probably drop it. I was only too happy to do the same. But ask me again what I think.”
“Sit down, Cal,” Bosko said.
Dion hadn’t realized he had risen, but he wasn’t done yet. “Not only that, I want full access to Jackie Randall’s file. Before he goes and tampers with that, too.”
“Sit down,” Bosko said again, louder.
Dion sat back down in his chair as belligerently as he knew how. “And by the way, does a man concerned about your welfare march you up to the john, shove you against the wall, and tell you he’s collected evidence that’s going to ruin you? Is that what an innocent man does, or is that someone with something to hide?”
“Holy Toledo, where did that come from?” Montgomery remarked.
“Are you saying that never happened?” Dion asked him. To everyone else he said, “You want me to tell you the bottom line? Because I’m ready if you are.”
“Is this about Tori’s supposed involvement in the hit and run?” Montgomery asked.
He said it openly, without hesitation or concern. Dion stared at him. He saw sympathy radiating back at him, and not much else. Now he understood the game plan. Montgomery had pre-empted the attack. Not just let the cat out of the bag, but fed it. Stein and Bosko seemed to know the punchline. They had known all along. That’s what this meeting was all about, silencing the dead whistleblower and finding out where the live one stood on the issue.
He picked up his coffee cup. He thought about that buff-coloured school tablet again, full of possibly coded notes that only he could cast light on. What about Linnae Avenue? In the end, Jackie had written it off as a dead end, but she hadn’t convinced him. Then there was his own idea about checking cell records, pinpointing Tori’s phone call to Montgomery on Halloween night. None of it was going to be looked into now.
He re-centred himself and pitched it one last time at Stein and Bosko. “I should work on Jackie Randall’s murder file. I have a perspective that you’re going to need.”
Stein stood, straightening her suit skirt. “This is where I hand it over to Mike and Corporal Montgomery. Outline your ideas to them. All right? And don’t forget Samantha Kerr, Calvin. It’s no longer optional, by the way. See you all later.”
Stein left the room. Bosko’s cellphone had buzzed, meanwhile. He was on his feet, making a hand signal at Montgomery, Carry on without me, and now he was gone, too, and like a cruel joke, Dion and Montgomery were left to sort things out on their own.
* * *
The Boones’s wheelchair-equipped, teal-blue Sienna van had been found. Leith and JD drove up to Lynn Valley to take a look at the evidence in situ. It sat off a rarely used lower-park
service road, driven into a sludgy spur and abandoned. The wheelchair was still inside.
The mystery of Anastasia Boone’s disappearance was solved two days later. She lay stretched out supine within a gulley, fairly high in the park and off the beaten track. Two officers in search of Rosetti’s devil’s club patch — as seen in his final photographs — found not only the patch, but the young girl. Like the van, she was shrouded in foliage, canopied by the big spiky leaves that were withering to gold in the frigid November air.
She wore a nightgown, soaking wet and plastered to her skin. Her eyes were somewhat open, her dark hair rayed out neatly, and a small bouquet of dollar store flowers lay on her chest. The coroner suggested cause of death was suffocation. If not for the late-season insects visibly mining her body for nutrients, Leith thought, she could have been the flawlessly beautiful subject of a romantic painting.
“Imagine carrying her all this way,” JD said. “Must have been nighttime, or someone would have seen him.”
Leith nodded with a sigh, and looked around. He wouldn’t express it to JD, but once again he could feel the spirit of the place, in a most visceral way. The breeze up here was biting, the red cedars massive. And there was the hush. Even with everyone standing around and the pockets of conversation, the silence was overwhelming.
If his own limited imagination was affected like this, sensing some higher power resident in these trees, imagine the sway it would have over a mind on the edge of madness.
Forty-One
LINNAE
Leith sat in Mike Bosko’s office, called in to talk about nothing more controversial than workload and rotas — or so it seemed. At the end, however, Bosko placed a folder on his desk, removed a document, and passed it across. “On an unrelated matter, take a look at this, Dave.”
A set of photocopies. Scribbles, handwritten letters, numbers. Mostly numbers. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?” Leith asked.
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