Undertow

by R. M. Greenaway

  Leith wondered about the stranger, Parker. Bosko had told him to hold fire. What did that mean? Was Parker a member of some covert Internal Affairs unit, to be unleashed when Bosko had enough evidence? Or a private investigator? Which raised all kinds of questions.

  In the afternoon, he and Dion had sat in the incident room with the MVA file folder, as promised, and Leith had found the accident report from Cloverdale, last July the 1st. He had given the road numbers to Dion. Dion wrote them down. He then asked if he could flip through the file briefly, to see what was in there. Leith had said no, his authority didn’t extend that far.

  “What authority is that?” Dion asked.

  “You should probably okay that with Bosko.”

  Dion had thanked him coolly and left.

  Alone, Leith had gone through the file and found the usual traffic analysts’ diagrams, pathology and toxicology reports. He saw the time of the crash was approximately 2:00 a.m. Photos depicted the two vehicles mangled to scrap metal. Gory photographs of Luciano Ferraro, dead. The driver of the red Corvette, a young man with jetty sunglasses smeared into his skull. Who wears sunglasses at 2:00 a.m.?

  There was Dion, too, like a black-and-blue loser hauled away from a boxing ring. He had been shaved for surgery, taped for broken ribs, masked for breathing, and strung with cables for all other bodily functions. He had been heavier then. On his solid right shoulder was a tattoo of black wings. That he had survived was miraculous, considering he hadn’t been wearing a seat belt.

  Then there was the damage to his right hand. Leith had looked at a close-up. The split skin and grazing over the knuckles sure looked to him like scars from a fistfight, not an MVA. He had seen plenty of both kinds in his career.

  The evidence tallied: Dion’s claims of amnesia around the day of the crash, doubtful. His presence in that place at that time, mysterious. Returning to the scene seemed important to him, yet his reason rang false. Add to that evidence of a possible fistfight. And wrapping it all like a bow, there was Bosko’s lose-lose investigation.

  Intuition told Leith that a crime had been committed, serious enough to warrant the steps he had taken tonight. He happened to have in his possession a GPS tracker, and at day’s end he had attached it to the wheel well of Dion’s car.

  Why? Being proactive. If this turned out to be a legitimate murder investigation, then the tracker data could prove critical. If the investigation went nowhere, so would the tracker data. Simple.

  He turned out the lights. He was doing the right thing. He was doing his job, nothing more and nothing less. So why did he feel so sick about it all?

  Sixteen

  Knots

  Dion’s second visit to Cloverdale had focus. The crossroads of 56th and 168th looked like so many other intersections in the farmlands. Night was falling, his workday was over, and he was on the shoulder looking at the road from this end to its vanishing point; 56th was a minor highway, fields all around. Fairly busy now. A cube van sped by, breaking the limit, raising dust. This was where Looch had died, right about where he was standing. That side road marked with railroad signs and low bushes was where the red car had torpedoed out and slammed into him, hurling him and his car somewhere along this ditch.

  But he wasn’t here paying his respects to Looch — who didn’t deserve it — or to curse the dead boy in the Corvette. He was here to reconstruct the night of the crash so he could relocate the gravel pit. They hadn’t come far, after leaving that driveway in the pursuit of their lives, so it was just a matter of casting his mind back, reversing the trip, and looking for landmarks.

  He got back into his car and drove south. He took the first left off the highway, then the first right, then sped up along the paved two-laner for two, three, four kilometres. An overpass told him he was near. He slowed, slowed further, and pulled over. This is it. The pull-off he stared at was wide enough to allow oversized equipment through. The weeds grew wild here. A soft wind brought that same stink of ditch water into the car. The same gate was swung shut but unpadlocked, and the same “no trespassing” sign in faded paint was stuck up on a post.

  But there was also a startling difference. He stared, as he nosed his car against the gate, at the large white-and-blue Re/Max sign erected in the weeds. “God,” he said. He read the smaller print. Eight-plus acres, commercial zoned. A realtor’s smiling face and the number to call. The sign looked new.

  He left the driver’s seat once more, pushed the gate open, drove through, shut the gate, and drove half a kilometre into vaguely familiar territory. Other than the realtor’s sign, little had changed. He parked the car amongst sand-and-gravel canyons, and stepped out onto asphalt chewed up by time. Hands in his jeans pockets, he looked around. Getting dark. Ghosts were out and about, rustling through the small bushes and leafy trees that lined the pit.

  Other than the ghosts, he was alone. Just like then, he might as well be on the moon. He walked to what he believed was the location of the grave, and looked beyond for something he had tossed into the bushes back then, a ragged scrap of plywood, the makeshift shovel. He couldn’t see it, but maybe with a high-powered flashlight …

  He stood unsure, staring at the ground, scanning about. Maybe this wasn’t the spot at all. Maybe it was over there. He walked the perimeter, using his phone flashlight to illuminate the place. The light was too weak to tell him much, but he remembered the ground as lumpier, earthier, more scrub pushing through the crust. It was neat and flat now, rubbly and rough but somehow tamped down.

  Had the backhoes been in, shoving the dirt around? Why? Owners considering what to do with the land, finally deciding to sell? How long would it take for a buyer to move in and start ripping it up for construction? What would they build? Another warehouse, probably. Never enough warehouses in the valley.

  One thing was for sure: once the machines started tossing the ground, life as he knew it would be over.

  He didn’t stay long. The place was as dead and desolate as he could hope for, and maybe it would stay that way for another year or two. Maybe that was all he needed, or wanted. He returned to his car and steered it in a loop, back to the gate. What had he achieved from this trip? Nothing but another knot in the gut.

  Seventeen

  Sinker

  “Hey,” JD Temple said, as Leith got to work this morning. It was always hey with JD. Never sir, like with most of the other younger constables he worked with. Or Dave, which he would have expected, as they worked so closely together. But, hey?

  This particular disrespectful hey wasn’t a slack-assed hello, he noted. She had something to say.

  “Joey Liu said something to his grandma Zan last night,” JD told him. “She left a message on my machine. Want me to swing over there and check it out?”

  Even key names in cases didn’t always instantly snap into Leith’s mind, because the lists could be long and his mind could be overtaxed. But Joey’s he knew on the spot. Cute as a duckling, sad, dark eyes, the lone survivor found hidden in a kitchen cabinet. “I thought she took him back to Calgary.”

  “They’re in town this week to visit her brother, make funeral arrangements. She was going to leave Joey in Calgary, but she says he doesn’t want to part from her, so she brought him along. Which is a good thing. We can see him in person, and they’re not far. Blueridge.”

  After listening to the message with JD, Leith drove out with her to the home in the cookie-cutter suburbs above the Seymour River. Zan admitted them into a living room with Asian decor, scented with incense. The boy was not present, but Leith could see him through the living room’s window, out in the backyard, playing with a large, bouncy black-and-white dog.

  “I should get him one,” Zan said. “He’s four, young enough that a dog will help him mend. But something smaller. A Border Collie’s a bit much. Maybe a Jack Russell, I think. I had a Jack Russell once. Smart as a whip.”

  “Can you tell us how it cam
e about,” Leith said, “that he disclosed?”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t dramatic. I’ve enrolled him in Sunday school, which is new to him. He enjoys it. Takes comfort from the teachings. I believe that’s what gave him the courage to remember. I have not urged him to speak. I believe it should come at his own pace. Well, after the last class he just said it to me, very simply, as we sat down for dinner. But I’ll go bring him in, and you can ask him yourself.”

  The boy was in a better frame of mind now. Out of breath, but in a good way, like a typical four-year-old who’s been running and jumping and wrestling with an energetic dog. He sat in the armchair, wriggling a bit because he wanted to get back to his new friend. Only when JD addressed him did he freeze and stare at her. Maybe her voice and face reminded him of the terrible blackness that was still so close. His eyes widened; his mouth shrank.

  But JD smiled and talked to him about the dog, and other pleasant things, until he began to relax. She said to him in the same soothing voice, “Your grandma says you remember something and want to tell us about it. I’d like to know, too. Can you tell me?”

  He bit his lip. She told him he was absolutely the bravest little boy she’d ever met. He looked guardedly pleased. She said, “Somebody was in the kitchen when you were hiding in the cabinet, hey? Can you tell me who that was?”

  He shrugged and kicked restless heels against the base of the armchair. “An oga.”

  The mystery word Zan had relayed to Leith and JD, the word they needed to hear straight from the source. JD said, “An oga, eh? Was it a male or a female? Could you tell?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What was it doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did the oga look like?”

  Joey didn’t know that either, so he said it again. “Like an oga.”

  One of JD’s brows went down as she looked back at Leith. Leith looked at Zan, who only shrugged at him. Ogre, all the adults were thinking. But nobody wanted to say it and taint the boy’s memory. In case it was not an ogre, but an oga, something altogether different.

  “Maybe show us what it looked like. Pretend you’re the oga,” JD said.

  Joey grimaced and flailed his arms in mimicry of whatever it was he was recalling.

  JD complimented his acting abilities. “So what was it wearing, the oga?”

  “I don’t know,” Joey said again. He hugged his arms around himself and went silent. Then spoke again, viciously. “A hat.”

  JD asked for details of the hat, but Joey couldn’t say, except it was dark. Maybe black. Neither could he recall what else the oga was wearing, or its face or hair, or whether it had on any jewellery. JD asked if he could draw the oga. He took the pad and pencil she gave him, and drew a blob with big round eyes and a big round mouth. An oga indeed.

  “Can you draw what it wore on its head?” she said.

  He drew a large shape on the oga’s head that might have been a ten-gallon hat.

  “Did it see you?” she asked. “Was it looking at you?”

  Joey blinked, squeezed his eyes shut, said he didn’t know.

  “Did it talk to you?”

  Joey thought about it, and said in a strange blurting monotone, “Give us food and give us sins and save us from temptation and save us from the evil one.”

  “It said that?”

  “Yeah,” Joey said.

  “Did it say this loudly or quietly?”

  Joey didn’t know. Leith suspected it was composite false memory. JD said, “Was this oga there before you got in the cabinet, or after?”

  Joey said nothing for a moment, then, “Mama said to hide. I went inside there. I saw him.”

  Ah good, Leith thought. The oga is a he.

  Joey sat up straighter in a listening mode, but probably only because the dog outside was barking, eager to play. Leith was distracted, too; something had caught his eye on the wall beside him, a framed photograph of Cheryl and Lance Liu.

  JD said, “Can you tell me again what he said?”

  “Save us from temptation,” Joey said, heels banging. “Our fodder who art in heaven.”

  Leith divided his attention between the photograph and the boy.

  JD was looking stumped. She said, “Did you shut the cabinet door, Joey?”

  Without warning Joey began to cry. Uncontrollably.

  Later, after Zan Liu had comforted the boy and he was once again outside at play, she said, “I’m sorry. He didn’t say anything about the Lord’s Prayer before. He must be getting confused. I wanted him to know his mama is in heaven, so we talk about that a lot. We pray. My son and daughter-in-law were not churchgoers. So it’s quite new to him.”

  Leith could understand Zan teaching Joey about a sweet afterlife. He had seen children traumatized or dying, in the course of his career, and yes, he would prefer them to believe in heaven. He wished he could believe in it himself, as he once had.

  “Do you think he means ogre?” he asked her.

  “No doubt. Lance used to tell him monster stories all the time. I told him not to give the child nightmares. But Joey liked them. He didn’t have nightmares. Now he does.”

  “How long are you in town for, ma’am?”

  “Lots of family to visit, so probably a couple of weeks.”

  “Okay, good. If he says anything else of interest, please let us know right away.”

  “I will, sir,” Zan said to Leith, and bowed her head at JD.

  Leith beckoned JD over to the photograph on the wall and pointed out what had snagged his attention. Not the attractive couple, Lance and Cheryl, but what stood on the table behind them. A squarish, repurposed liquor bottle sporting a sprig of dry flowers, snapping into place Dion’s missing vase — barely noted, quickly buried, and completely forgotten, till now.

  This bottle was blue. Bombay Sapphire.

  * * *

  They drove away from the little house in the suburbs, considering what they had learned. The Bombay Sapphire bottle had been at the Lius’, then. Not a vessel for booze, but a vase. That was something. And then there was Joey’s cryptic tale.

  “Well, you predicted he’d have something to tell us,” Leith said, studying the drawing the boy had provided, a portrait of a killer, but not something he could very well post on the Wanted board. “And you were absolutely right. I’m just not sure what it is.”

  Behind the wheel, JD looked disappointed. “Ogres,” she said. “In cowboy hats. Spouting the Lord’s Prayer. Good start. Weird, though. Who shut the cabinet door?”

  “I’m betting it wasn’t the ogre,” Leith said.

  “And who took the baby bootie, put it in the bottle, and threw it in the ocean?”

  “Again, not the ogre.”

  JD agreed. “There was a second person there. A person with a conscience.”

  “A person under duress, maybe. Who’s under this guy’s thumb. Tossing the bottle was his or her only opportunity to send us a message.”

  “And one way or another, that person under duress was on or near the water at some point. Or else …” JD held up a finger, “… he or she dropped it off the bridge.”

  Leith had sent the Stubbs’ coordinates to the tech department, which had consulted an oceanographer of some sort who could best line up tide and current and provide at least a good guess as to where that little blue gin bottle had been dropped in for it to turn up where it did, in the middle of Burrard Inlet, just off Deep Cove, not far from Indian Arm. With several variables taken into account, the options had been highlighted in a preliminary report, telling Leith the drop had likely occurred from one of the far shores, Port Moody to the south or Burnaby Mountain Park to the west, but most likely somewhere in the middle of the inlet, which could mean from a boat, which had given him some hope of narrowing the equation. But with a bridge thrown in …

&nbs
p; “Or a small plane,” JD added.

  Leith made a mental note to add the possibility to the exponentially expanding list.

  “That’s what I want to be when I grow up,” JD went on, looking moodily at the heavy grey clouds on the horizon rising upward into the silvery skies like a slow-motion explosion. “A bush pilot.”

  “You are grown up, and you’re a detective, and a damned good one,” Leith said.

  His compliment seemed to unsettle her. “You don’t even know me. Trust me, I’m not a good detective. I don’t like puzzles, never have. I don’t like anyone I work with, especially the white-shirts. And sorry, yeah, even the motto gets up my nose.”

  Leith bridled. He loved the motto, Maintiens le Droit, which he believed meant uphold the law. And he admired the commissioned officers, and aspired to be one, someday. Maybe he didn’t care for some of his coworkers, particularly, but he still considered them all family. As for puzzles, like JD, he had never much cared for them, but that wouldn’t stop him trying to bang in the pieces, even if they were the wrong ones. He said, “You knew Luciano Ferraro. Was he a good friend?”

  She made a rude squirting noise. “Looch? No. Loud, opinionated class-A asshole, good riddance to him, may he rot in hell.”

  Leith didn’t pursue it. He watched the skies, cloud heavy. He thought he saw lightning, way over there where the darkness began.

  On return to the detachment, he told JD to go ahead, he had forgotten something in his car, and initiated Stage 2 of his unendorsed, possibly illegal undercover operation. He crossed the lower level of the parkade to his personal vehicle. He opened the glovebox, rummaged, took out an old gas receipt for authenticity, shut the glovebox, locked the car, and headed back to the stairs. Passing Dion’s car, he crouched as if to pick up a dropped pen, and grabbed the tracker from the wheel well while he was at it. Then he was on his way again, blushing and edgy, a bad actor, a terrible spy. His act would be caught on surveillance video, but if all went well, it would never come to light.