It turned out that in Prince’s mind, Lance Liu was a clumsy motherfucking spark plug whose truck, while backing out of the driveway, had knocked over Prince’s custom Harley Wide Glide. Liu and Prince weren’t friends or associates, had never met before that day, were just thrown together by that one twist of bad fucking luck. Liu had been hired for an electric panel upgrade at the Prince home, that’s all. He’d put in his hours and was done for the day, and departed. Prince was popping a Budweiser, heard a crash, ran outside, and after a bit of a fistfight, the two men had settled, off the books. Liu went away with a bunch of death threats thrown at his back, but he got off lucky. Prince used the settlement to repair his bike, but he was never happy with the machine after that. “It’s just not fuckin’ the same,” he said. “When you fuckin’ go over one fuckin’ ten, something fuckin’ rattles.”
“So stay under one ten,” Leith said. “Anything over, you’re breaking the fuckin’ limit.”
“You’re a fuckin’ cunt,” Prince said.
Next Leith put to Prince that Prince had hopped on his bike last week, driven to B.C., and wiped out the whole Liu family, all over one damned rattle. The accusation nearly popped a vein in Prince’s temple, and on that note the interview ended.
* * *
They were put up in two rooms on the fourth floor of the Holiday Inn. Dion unloaded his travel bag. He had a shower, then took time by the big window to admire the view. He saw a flattened version of urban sprawl, lit up as far as the eye could see, and imagined living here, not as an RCMP officer, but a city detective. Because that was definitely an option.
When his watch beeped nine, he closed the blinds. He went downstairs, as agreed, and found Leith in the bar, waiting for him. They had dined separately because Leith had accepted an invitation by a few of the Calgary officers who wanted to hear the coastal perspective on crime, and Dion hadn’t. Now they were here to talk over the Prince interrogation, compare notes, and kill some time before the flight home tomorrow.
The Holiday Inn’s idea of a bar was fairly minimal. Leith was at a tall table, getting a head start on the drinking. The server brought Dion’s order for a glass of beer and promised Leith the nachos were on their way. Leith thanked her, then said to Dion, “So what d’you think?”
Dion had gone into the interrogation knowing what he thought, and nothing of what he had seen or heard of Phillip Prince changed his mind. He shrugged and sucked the froth off his beer.
“I’m thinking he’s not our bunny, and you know why?” Leith said. From what Dion knew, Leith was a beer-drinker, but tonight he was enjoying a Scotch. By the looks of it, he’d enjoyed a few already. “’Cause I’m gonna tell you why.”
“Why?” Dion said.
“I have a two-year-old,” Leith said. One eyelid hung slightly lower than the other, and his focal point seemed to drift in and out. “Well, she’s about to turn two. And when she breaks something, and you go, Izzy, did you break that? she says no, like this. Nooo. I mean, since when do two-year-olds lie? What’s the matter with this world? I thought you don’t learn to lie till you’re, what, five, six? Anyway, this is my point …”
But the nachos came just then, and he forgot his point. Once the waitress was gone, Dion prompted him back on track. “He’s not our bunny why?”
Leith munched on a glob of chips, melted cheese, and hot peppers. “My point is, when you accuse her of doing something that she actually didn’t do — my kid Izzy I’m talking about — she’ll flip out. I mean, she’ll crawl the walls screaming, she’ll be that mad. There’s something about being falsely accused, it’s like a deploy button. And it’s the same with Prince. He’s kind of at your two-year-old level, and he flipped out, too, when I put it to him he’d killed the Lius, right? You saw that, right? Kind of more subtle with him than with Izzy, but I caught it. Yup, I’d bank on it, he’s a bad apple, but he didn’t kill those people.”
Leith was finished with his reasoning, and his mood seemed to dip. “But you haven’t told me what you think.”
“I totally agree,” Dion said. He sat forward, glad they were now on the same page, and he could share his thoughts, which had been punching at his brain on and off all day. “’Course he didn’t do it. It felt wrong from the start, because of the missing phone, right? Why would Prince take Liu’s phone? Doesn’t fit. So Lance Liu got attacked first, then whoever did it got the info off the phone — and he’d need the passcode to access it, Sig Blatt confirms Lance used a passcode — and then went after his family on a follow-up basis. Doesn’t matter the pathologist says they died around the same time, Lance and Cheryl. Doesn’t say anything about the time of the attack. Fact is, Lance Liu was lying there for a while before he died. If it was Phillip Prince who went over there to kill him in revenge for wrecking his bike — which, give me a break, even Prince isn’t that shallow — it would be the other way around. He’d get to the family first and then carry on with his mission of finding Lance. At worst, and it’s even more unlikely, he’d kill the wife in looking for Liu. I don’t believe it. If you work through the whole thing backward, there’s loads of information there, but it’s like it’s just out of reach. This guy was looking for something. How did he get the phone passcode? Did Liu give it to him? Was it forced out of him? And who’s the woman who shut the kid in the cabinet? It’s bizarre.”
“Huh,” Leith said, setting down his empty glass. He rubbed his gut and winced. “You know what? I should go to bed. G’night.” He tapped his watch face. “Early tomorrow, right?”
“Right. See you,” Dion said.
He watched Leith rise unsteadily to his feet and make his way to the till, pay with a credit card, nearly forget to collect a receipt, then leave. Alone, Dion stayed another ten minutes, finishing his beer. People came and went around him. He said no thanks to a second drink when the server came by. She took away the plate, the barely touched heap of nachos under its layer of congealed cheese not much touched by anyone.
* * *
On the flight home Dion had the window seat. He watched the dusty-green foothills fall away as the plane lifted, and observed aloud that they were going the wrong way. Leith said they were looping around to gain altitude, which was preferable to driving nose-first into the mountains. Leith seemed nicer today, but maybe depressed. He was clean shaven and reeked of aftershave. Over breakfast he had chatted some, get-to-know-you type stuff, but just filling time. Dion had mostly focussed on eating.
Now, buckled into his airplane seat, Leith apologized for last night. “I think you were trying to tell me something, and I couldn’t follow. Had a bit to drink over dinner, and a few more in the lounge. Sorry about that. Want to try again?”
“No. I typed it up in a full report.”
Dion thought about the report glowing on his laptop late last night. He had sat on the bed, referring to the online dictionary for every word he had doubts about. Even ran a few through the thesaurus, for variety. Worked extra hard on the thing, to make it readable, almost poetic, still trying to impress Bosko. He thought of Bosko’s advice to stick it out for a month. He thought of Bosko saying I’d hate to lose you.
He tried to imagine sitting here next to Leith on this one-point-five-hour flight, telling him everything. He shook his head and looked out the window. Now he saw clouds and the planet far below, squares of green and grey, snaking rivers, as their aircraft drifted toward the Pacific.
When he was twenty, he had gone autumn hiking with friends up at Hollyburn. High on the trails he had argued with someone, which led to him getting separated from the group, which left him lost on the mountain, walking half a day and into the evening, shouting and stumbling through wilderness. By nightfall he was cold, wet, tired, and sure he was going to die up there alone. When he found his friends, or when they found him, he sat in the car, somebody’s arm around him, and dropped into the deepest, happiest sleep he’d ever known.
Would telling Leith be somet
hing like that? Would he disclose, and then fall into a dreamless sleep? No, it wouldn’t be like that. Maybe at first there would be relief, but it wouldn’t last. Wouldn’t last beyond the snap of the handcuffs.
* * *
Leith, never a great fan of flying, was glad to be back on terra firma. He and Dion arrived at the detachment midafternoon, walking into a hubbub of exciting news. The excitement seemed to centre around a suntanned, white-haired couple who were trying in a frenetic way to tell Doug Paley something obviously important. Before Leith could get a sense of what it was, Paley began to usher the couple out of the GIS office and away to an interview room.
“Nance spotted it to starboard,” the white-haired man was saying, and Leith saw him gesture at the ratty-looking plastic shopping bag Paley held. “We were drifting. She grabbed the long net, nearly fell in fetching it up.”
“Bombay Sapphire,” the woman said. “But I didn’t know that at the time, did I? With the cap on, of course. Or not a cap. A cork. Like a funny little homemade cork.”
“Great,” Paley said, for the third time. “This way, folks.”
“Floating out in the middle of the Burrard Inlet,” the man put in.
The three turned the corner and disappeared from Leith’s view, but the woman’s shrill voice floated back. “Like a message in a bottle!”
Then there was silence as a door down the hallway clicked shut.
Leith asked anyone within earshot, “What was the message?”
JD Temple said, “A baby bootie, that’s what.”
Ten
Hurricane
A long night of heavy rain had washed the city clean, and the morning air was warm and humid, with mist lifting from the pavement and awnings. At 9:00 a.m., when Bosko arrived, Leith visited him in his office, first to give him the good news, then the bad. “It’s definitely the bootie we’re looking for, sir. No obvious evidence on it, but it’s gone in for analysis. Unfortunately, the only prints on the bottle belong to the Stubbs. The couple who found it.”
“And why did they fish it in?”
“Nancy Stubbs did that,” Leith said. “She says it was pretty, bobbing in the waves. So she scooped it out, and saw there was something inside, and, you know, if it was me, I’d think twice about opening up a mysterious gin bottle, but the Stubbs did just that. They chucked the cork in the water — unfortunately — and used a wire bent into a hook to pull out the bootie. It didn’t click right away, but then Ernie Stubbs recalled the newsflash, and so they brought it in. Not before handling the thing, though. Bet all the DNA we’ll get off it belongs to them and Rosalie Liu.”
“We can always hope,” Bosko said. “Without prints or DNA, does it advance us at all?”
“Far as I can see, it’s just an extra bit of weirdness to add to the file. The Lius weren’t drinkers, so unless they kept a stock for guests, it doesn’t seem it came from their place.”
Bosko thanked him for the update, and since they were talking, asked about the Alberta lead. “Doug tells me it didn’t quite pan out.”
“Not quite written off, but not promising,” Leith agreed, and gave a rundown of his interview with the biker Prince, Prince’s hot denials, and the consensus between himself and Dion that Prince had not killed the Lius.
“Yes, I actually read Cal’s report,” Bosko said, grinning. “Did you see it? It’s amazing. Reads like a runaway haiku. But in the end, when you step back, it’s quite thorough.”
“He’s definitely running circles around me,” Leith admitted.
“Anyway, so Mr. Prince is a dead end. At least you got a bit of a field trip out of it. The prairies revisited. Suffer any pangs of homesickness, seeing that boundless horizon?”
From earlier conversations, Bosko knew of Leith’s prairie upbringing. Leith’s feelings for flatness were ambivalent. Maybe when he reached the end of his life cycle he’d start hankering to go back to his roots, but right now topography didn’t affect him much one way or the other. Except as it affected the price of housing.
“No, sir, I’m not there yet. I’m wondering about something, though. I realize you said it’s at a certain level — your investigation — but has it got anything to do with the crash? I’m just not sure where it’s going. I can’t look out for him, if I don’t know what I’m looking out for.”
Bosko smiled. “There’s not much to know about the crash, since the only witness has total localized amnesia around the event.”
Leith crossed an ankle over a knee. “Wow. That bad, eh?”
“Though I expect he recalls more than he says.”
“You think he’s faking it?”
“Probably not,” Bosko said. “There might be some genuine retrograde amnesia. Maybe simply to avoid dealing with the day of the crash. Which is understandable. He lost a good friend in the course of it, after all. If I have doubts, I mean about it being a genuine psychogenic condition, that is, an emotional response rather than a physical one. It’s the fact he’s been with the force his whole adult life. He’s been at least partially shock-proofed. As for his post-crash cognitive hang-ups, the tests tell us he’s competent, but in my opinion, he’s working hard to cover a slight deficit. But I wouldn’t go so far as to call it even the mildest anterograde amnesia.”
Maybe Leith wouldn’t, either, if he knew what that was. He chewed his lip and nodded.
He opened his mouth to apologize for being snoopy — but then his phone buzzed, and apparently Bosko’s did, too. They both murmured “excuse me.” Bosko put on his reading glasses to check his inbox, while Leith held the BlackBerry to his ear and said, “Leith.”
The message was murder, and the meeting was over.
* * *
The call took them into the hills above Indian Arm, an area Leith didn’t know. Looking at the aerial map on his phone, he saw the forests were thick and the residences few and far between. JD turned off the busy parkway and ascended their vehicle up a twisty and roughly paved road for another ten minutes before arriving at a lane opening that the GPS assured them was their destination.
The laneway curved uphill through trees, until a gateway announced they were at the threshold of the residence. Here a police vehicle was parked, and a constable stood guard. He nodded them through.
Within the gates, what looked like a compact country estate spread out. The broad asphalt parking area could easily accommodate a couple dozen vehicles. A border encircled a landscaped fountain, and a person could play minigolf on the rolling green lawn beyond. Or croquet. From the parking area, a driver could exit back to the laneway or pull into his choice of three jumbo-sized garages. One garage door, Leith saw, was rolled up.
He looked at the house, a modern version of an old-style manor, white siding with steely black trim. JD parked, and she and Leith stepped onto the tarmac and took in the scene. There were two civilian vehicles, high-end models — one a sports car, the other a black SUV, and three police vehicles. Two of the cruisers were occupied, each with what had to be a civilian in the back seat. Witnesses, hopefully.
JD was talking to one of the constables as she flagged Leith over and confirmed it.
“Those are the witnesses who called it in,” she said, indicating the two occupied cruisers. “Constable Johansson here got their basics and decided he’d better keep them apart for now.”
Leith could make out the shapes of individuals in the two vehicles. Hard to say for sure, but both appeared co-operative, even subdued.
Young officer Johansson gestured at one cruiser. “Melanie York. She and the other lady found the body in the garage. Garage door was down when they arrived, and the car inside. Its engine was running. They said they didn’t touch anything, just switched the engine off. Melanie York’s the one that made the call. Oscar Roth is her brother.” He looked across the parking area and added, “That’s his Hummer.”
“Oscar Roth is the dead guy,” JD told Leith. �
��This is his house.”
Dead guy’s Hummer, dead guy’s house, Leith thought. Got it. “Place is secured?”
“Yes, sir,” Johansson said. “The other two garages are empty, except for a ride-on mower and a couple Ski-Doos and dirt bikes. And a fairly big boat trailer, no boat.”
And no other dead bodies, Leith assumed. “And the women, have they been inside?”
“Yes, sir. They only found him after they went into the house. Heard the vehicle running through the interior access, went in, and found him lying there. You wouldn’t believe what’s in there, sir. A Boss 9.”
Leith puffed out his breath. “Yes?”
“Only the rarest Mustang ever. Probably a ’69, jet black, mint. Priceless.” Johansson let the words settle. Then, “The victim’s sister saw her brother, shut off the vehicle and opened the garage door, went back outside with the other lady, and called 911. Then Mackie, Bahari, Henson, and I arrived. We separated the ladies into two cars, then Mackie and I did a walk-around. Found forced entry at the back. French doors, window smashed. Niiice place. But a real mess inside.”
JD shrugged at Leith. “Roth has no record, and this place isn’t flagged in any way. No motive pops to mind.”
Not flagged as a drug house, a guns house, an all-round trouble house, she meant. Leith nodded.
Johansson said, “The other lady there, I think she’s the victim’s girlfriend. Name’s Jamie Paquette.”
Leith said, “They all live here?”
“The girlfriend, yes, the sister, no. Sister lives in Deep Cove. That’s her Nissan 350Z. Sharp car, excellent reviews.”
Yes, it was indeed sharp, and probably ran well, too. Leith asked the constable, “So they found the body, the sister, and the girlfriend. Were they together at the time?”
Undertow Page 8