Leith couldn’t catch the last word, but thought it was horrible.
Dion on the screen fidgeted with a pen he wasn’t using. He said, “I understand you lived with Oscar Roth. When did you move in?”
“Soon as he got a day off to pick up my things. He’s got a fabulous place. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m from the other side of the tracks, right? It’s nice living in a palace, all those faucets and things, but in the end, it’s just another room, another window. And actually, you know what, I like the woods and birds and all, but you seen one tree, you seen ’em all, if you ask me. I miss Vancouver.”
A chatterbox, Leith thought. A poor, uneducated, ravishing chatterbox with a smoker’s rasp.
Dion asked her about Melanie and Jon York. “They’re friends of yours?”
She nodded. “They’re Oz’s friends, really, but we hang out there a lot, in Deep Cove. They babysit Dally sometimes.”
There was a long silence before Dion asked his next question. “Do you get along with Dallas?”
“Well, no, what’s to get along with? She’s just there. She’s mental. She doesn’t talk. Like, ever.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because she’s mental.”
Dion asked about Oscar’s prize Mustang. She said it was a beautiful car and a waste of space, because he never drove it anywhere. She was hoping to learn to drive one day, and then she’d swipe the keys and put it to good use. She smiled as she said it. She had a pretty smile.
Dion went on to ask her in a fleeting way about Oscar’s finances, his business dealings, his general health. She had nothing to offer on any front. He asked if she knew who had killed Oscar, or who might want him dead, or if Oscar knew he was in danger. She didn’t.
Soon afterward he ended the interview.
Leith stopped the video and thought for a moment how to phrase his disappointment. He shifted his chair sideways so he and Dion could have a serious talk. Dion crossed his arms.
“You missed a whole whack of important stuff. What about Oscar’s paranoia? Friends, enemies. Problems in his life that she may know of better than anybody, since she lived with the guy.”
“I covered that off. I can get her back if you want me to ask it three different ways.”
“Well, what was she doing all day? Was she with anyone? What time did she get a taxi to the Yorks’? What about her calls to Oscar, about the last time she was with him? What was he like? What was their relationship like? God, Cal. Are you not interested? I’m going to have to get her in for a rerun, and that’s not exactly ideal. Get it?”
“Yes,” Dion said. “I get it.”
He didn’t look as remorseful as he should. Leith changed tack. “So taking all this incredible lack of information into account, do we tentatively throw Paquette into our suspect pool? Seems to me she’s viable. Any thoughts?”
Dion sat straighter, uncrossed his arms and looked stunned, which was incrementally better than looking sullen. “She can’t drive. If she did it, you’d have to hook in Melanie York. If you think Melanie York’s up to it, I guess you’ve got something. I don’t, but maybe you do.”
“Maybe if we had more information, we could rule her in or out.”
Dion said, “Jamie Paquette didn’t kill Oscar, because Melanie York says she didn’t, because they were together, and I believe Melanie York. Jamie may know who’s responsible, but you saw her when I put it to her. She wasn’t going to give me a thing. Melanie York says Jamie can’t act, but that’s the irony of it. The sign of a good actor is people think they can’t act. I think she can act very well, and I could see where it was going, and I wasn’t going to flip her even if we sat there all night.”
He was done. His logic seemed sketchy, and he looked ill, like someone in the throes of the hot-and-cold flu-sweats. More kindly, Leith said, “Anything else?”
“Yes. The ex-wife, Cleo. That’s someone we should be looking at. There’s the civil case, the money. This was a blitz attack. Robbery doesn’t seem to be the motive, so Oscar’s death was the end game. ‘Die asshole’ was scratched into the car door, spelled wrong. Someone with a grudge or someone pretending to be someone with a grudge, which is Cleo. She didn’t do it, of course, but maybe she hired guns.”
Leith said, “For a smart guy, you make a lot of assumptions.”
“They’re not assumptions.”
“I think that’s exactly what they are. Jamie Paquette could have given us a lot of background on our victim. Background we’re now missing.”
“You try, then. Get her in here. You’re going to get reams of bullshit from her, and nothing else.”
Leith looked at his phone and saw a message from JD Temple, something about — speak of the devil — Cleo Irvine. He rose and said, “Just got word the ex is in Seattle, and she’s been there all week. I have to go make some calls. You look beat, Cal. You can sign out, and we’ll talk again Monday. Some advice, though. Don’t get into fights. If either of you two idiots landed a black eye you’d be up before a conduct hearing, explaining it all to them, not me. You realize that?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.” On a physical level, Dion hadn’t moved from his chair. In every other way, he seemed long gone.
Thirteen
At Sea
In the hour before dawn, Dion left the Royal Arms. He climbed into his Civic, lit a cigarette, and drove out onto the quiet city streets of North Vancouver. This being Sunday, and early, traffic would be sparse. He took the lower levels by the tracks and harbour, past Diamonds, the nightclub dozing in the morning mist, and joined bridge traffic over the Second Narrows. Over the waters he let Highway 1 carry him out of the city, going at a hundred kilometres an hour on cruise control. The limit rose to 110. The broad skies of the Fraser Valley opened before him, a band of clouds tinted pink by the rising sun.
For half an hour he stayed on Highway 1 before exiting onto the smaller Pacific Highway, which would beeline him into the floodplains of Surrey.
He wasn’t familiar with the area. He had grown up in Vancouver, out on Knight Street. He knew his way around Richmond and Delta no problem, but the further-flung districts were uncharted territories in his mind, with the amorphous zone called Cloverdale sitting somewhere in between.
He knew the crash happened in Cloverdale. Hadn’t known it at the time, of course. Hadn’t cared. He didn’t know the names of the roads, because he had never been in the frame of mind to ask, but he was confident as he set off this morning that he would recognize the spot when he saw it, even though that had been nighttime and this was day. He knew more or less the turns he had taken. He recalled an overpass. Not far past the overpass was the turnoff to what must have been a defunct gravel pit.
The crash site wasn’t his target today. The defunct gravel pit was. He tried music but switched it off again. The landscape began to repeat itself: field and fencepost, a bunch of cows, a driveway marked with shrubs and a mailbox, another driveway marked by another shrub and another mailbox, a stretch of field, another bunch of cows. He found an overpass and travelled under it, but it was all wrong. Too many houses. He was on a different road altogether.
He began to see a problem forming. He needed a plan. Pulling to the shoulder, he shut off the engine and studied the map folded in advance to expose Cloverdale. Funny how tiny the area looked on paper, and how boundless it seemed in life. He found where he was on the map and looked out the windshield to correlate lines with reality. The pink clouds had evaporated, leaving nothing but pristine blue. The mountains were hazy grey humps in the distance. The traffic here was almost nonexistent. A truck barrelled past, and a car, and then nothing. He decided to grid search the most likely roads, starting with 68th, working his way down. Sooner or later he would hit it.
With no cars behind him and only a couple ahead, he drove slowly, looking from side to side. He had forgotten that south of the Fraser River the Lower Mai
nland levelled out into one gigantic plateau. He had forgotten how disorienting plateaus could be. He found a crossroad that looked a lot like the one where he’d been slammed into oblivion, but it wasn’t.
After an hour of fruitless explorations, he pulled over once more, shut off the engine, and opened the window. He could smell mud. What seemed like silence at first became a chorus of bugs and birds. He sat and thought about all he’d lost, not because of his own righteous temper, but Looch’s.
The killing night stayed with him in perfect detail — at least, the moments leading up to the crash did. He was back there now, standing on the abandoned flats in the dark, heart wildly beating. His knuckles stung raw and he could taste blood on his tongue. He looked across the expanse of land at a lit building, just a pinprick, too far off to pose a danger. All was dead still. There was the sour stink mingling with the heat that pulsed from the ground, drifting upward to burn in his throat. He was spent from shovelling, sweat-soaked, oddly disconnected, trying to think straight.
He remembered a ghostly line crossing the night sky, a jetliner leaving its trail of exhaust as it made its way from wherever to Richmond. He watched it form, realizing that those three hundred or so souls up there and himself down here were permanently parting ways. It hit him how one split-second decision had brought him here, and he looked across at Looch.
He found his voice and called out to him, some kind of reassurance. Not a problem, man. We might as well be on the moon out here. For once in his life Looch had stood speechless, staring at him through the gloom. Or not at him, but past him, toward the mounds of gravel and the rutted laneway where Dion’s car sat, just minutes before that car was to become a death trap.
Dion turned and saw it, too, what Looch was staring at. Beyond the car and the mounds of gravel, a flicker of movement that shouldn’t be there.
That was night and this was day. Almost a year had passed, and now he couldn’t backtrack to the pit. He needed to find that pit. He would have to get the coordinates, but how to do it without raising eyebrows, was the question.
The online news. Why hadn’t he thought to check that? A few keywords, and he would pull up an article that would start by naming the roads. Perfect.
With a fresh cigarette between his teeth, he sat working his phone and Googled in various combinations of words: Ferraro, RCMP, Cloverdale, death. Found the obituary, and some articles, but none naming roads, except one that said, “… on 176th in Cloverdale.”
He stared out the windshield. He had just driven that road, and that wasn’t it, not even close. Somebody had got it wrong. Or somebody had tampered with the records. Could they do that, sabotage the news? His heart was banging just as it had that night, maybe harder, because now he was looking backward at his mistake, instead of forward at the unknown, and seeing just how hellish his life had become.
He stared into the rear-view mirror, expecting to catch a flash of light or a moving shadow, signs that somebody or something had followed him. He saw nothing but postcard serenity: green fields, grey asphalt, blue sky. It was an unreal stillness, a dead peace, and he was completely lost. He pulled a U-ey on the empty little road and headed back to the North Shore.
Fourteen
Dead Ahead
Monday morning, after only one day off, Leith was steering the unmarked down Dollarton with a quiet Dion in the passenger seat, off to the York residence in Deep Cove for some follow-up interviews. The interviewees were Jonathan York and Jamie Paquette, with maybe a few questions for Melanie York thrown in as well. None of these characters sat hugely suspect in Leith’s mind, except maybe Jamie — but he couldn’t write her off just yet, thanks to Dion’s underwhelming interview on Friday. He could have pulled them all into the office to talk, but he wanted to see them in their element. Check out how they played off against each other, too.
Deep Cove was another area Leith wasn’t too familiar with. Dion could have probably directed him, but he was in a mopey mood, so Leith relied on his talking GPS. It had a young female voice. She sounded American, cool, efficient, patient. A better conversationalist than Dion, anyway. It occurred to Leith that these days he was having more conversations with his GPS than his wife. He resolved to call Alison tonight, pop a beer, stretch out on the bed in his furnished rental apartment, and spend some quality, long-distance time with her.
The York home was situated up a well-populated, woodsy hill. A narrow, winding road took them to a dead end and a nice-looking modern residence. Nowhere to park, really, so Leith pulled his car as far as he could to the side of the road. In the driveway sat a white Lexus SUV and a sporty Nissan, the silver bullet young constable Johansson had coveted.
Melanie York opened the door to them, wearing a simple black dress. She seemed more centred now, after having a few days to adjust to the new reality. Leith re-introduced himself and Dion. “Of course,” she said. “Please come in.”
The corridor inside was wide and clear of junk, naturally lit by skylights, adorned with driftwood and rocks. They stepped down into a good-sized living room. Jamie Paquette sat on the sofa, her legs tucked up. A child lay on the floor. Jon York stood by the window. It might have had a great view of Deep Cove’s community, park, and harbour below, but the swooping branches of evergreens blotted out much of the light.
“Nice place,” Leith said to Melanie. She smiled politely.
He looked again at Jamie Paquette, a woman he had so far only seen on a desaturated video monitor. She looked younger now, maybe because her face was not made up and her hair was tied back.
The child who lay on the brilliantly coloured rug before her would be the mentally challenged daughter of the dead man, he supposed. Dallas Roth.
Jon York, in casual cords and a loose silk shirt, had been on his phone. He pocketed it now and crossed the room to greet them. He shook Leith’s hand emphatically, then Dion’s. “I’m really sorry about the other day,” he said. “I wasn’t myself. I can’t recall a single word I said, in fact. I hope I’ll be more helpful today.” He had a broad, attractive smile, now that he wasn’t in shock, and Leith could see how he won his way through life, selling encyclopedia sets or nightclub shares, whatever came to hand. “We’ll use the den, if that’s okay?”
“Fine, thank you,” Leith said.
They went along to a lower-level room almost as big as the living room above, with less natural light, only one floor-to-ceiling window panel, and a set of leather chairs. They took the armchairs near the window. Dion occupied himself making notes, and York left them to go fetch coffee.
“Great place,” Leith said, sounding like a broken record. “Nice to have a view of the water.”
The view from here was actually better than from upstairs. Leith could see yachts and what looked like houses stacked on houses. Deep Cove was a little holiday town, pretty and buzzing with life.
“For sure,” Dion said, not looking at the pretty town or the dramatic cloud formations or the dazzling play of sunlight dancing on waves. He had run out of notes to jot down and was reviewing an email. He told Leith he was bringing himself up to speed on the latest tips that had been filtering in on the other big case, the Mahon Avenue homicides, Cheryl and Rosalie Liu, which was credible enough. Still, Leith thought it was more an avoidance manoeuvre.
York finally came back with a tray of coffee, cream, honey. York and Leith each had a cup, but Dion didn’t. York talked about Arabicas and grinds. Leith was more of the drip-blend-whatever type, but made noises of appreciation.
With coffee in hand, they got to business. Leith wanted to know whatever York could tell him of his and Oscar Roth’s relationship. York turned out to be a good speaker. Economical, with a bit of pitchman flare.
It wasn’t the most interesting story, though, and a lot of it Leith already knew from Melanie York. How Jon and Oz had met, their education, first jobs, careers running parallel, then splitting off. Oz went into the nightclub biz, York
stuck with finance, but they’d remained close friends. He talked about Diamonds, its ups and downs, the big opening on January 1st, the bureaucratic tape that got so long and tangled it could choke a man.
“How’s it doing now, the club?” Leith asked, the same question he had put to Melanie.
“Too soon to start making graphs,” York said. “But it’s looking positive.”
“How will Oscar’s death affect Diamonds?”
“Nothing extreme. I’m reefing the sails. Proceeding with caution. My big concern right now is dealing with the stakeholders. They’ve got questions, need comforting. Fair enough. Everybody knows Oz is the ideas man. I’m just the bookkeeper.”
But a competent one, Leith thought. “Tough,” he said sympathetically.
“Worst of all, I went straight from the shock of his death into damage-control mode. No time to think, let alone grieve. I’ll wait for Sunday, then lock myself in my office and have a tantrum, I’m sure.”
“You ever had any fights, you and Oscar?” Leith asked. “Arguments. Breakups?”
“No, nothing big. We were seriously good friends. Probably never had two days gone by where we didn’t get together, business or pleasure, didn’t matter. Never ran out of words. Argued, sure. But we were tight. Friends are ten a penny, but Oz and I were like this.” He linked index fingers and pulled, and apparently couldn’t break the grip. “Friendship like that, it’s irreplaceable. I keep forgetting he’s dead. Unreal.”
He pressed thumb and fingers against his eyes. He inhaled and apologized with another smile, even more attractive with tears. “Sorry. What else d’you want to know?”
“Enemies,” Leith said. It was a question he had asked at their last meeting, but York had been too distraught to answer.
Now the man nodded and pulled a folded paper from his breast pocket. “I made a list.”
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