“How did he track down the guy’s family?” Dion asked. He had unclipped his seat belt, for two reasons. One, to be able to sit at an angle, back against the door, the better to see her. Two, to be able to defend himself if she should decide to do away with her enemy.
“Oz got the guy’s phone. He looked through the contacts and ended up trying Siri. He said home. And then went where the phone told him to go.”
“And?”
“And you know the rest.”
“Did you go in the house with him?”
“No, I waited in the car.”
“No, you didn’t. I told you, there’s evidence you were inside.”
She hugged herself and puffed on her cigarette, the window open to let out the smoke. She said, “There were toys in the yard. I couldn’t stand it. I went in. I saw.”
“Saw what?”
She managed to put the cigarette to her mouth, but it was a struggle. Tears filled her eyes. She wasn’t faking her distress.
Dion said, “Okay. You have to go to the police. This is going to end here.”
“No. I can’t.”
“If Oscar did it, if you were just there, if they know you were there, the best thing you can do is turn yourself in, right now.”
“Bit late for that.”
“No, it’s not. You were scared. They’ll get that. You’ll explain that you thought about it. Or tell them I counselled you, and you realized it’s the right thing to do.”
She sucked nicotine and billowed smoke. She had managed to calm her shaking hands, but her face was still wet.
Dion said, “If you run — and that won’t be easy without a driver’s licence, will it? — the police will catch up to you. Guaranteed. And then you can kiss leniency goodbye. They’ll figure you’re just as guilty as Oscar, and they’ll put you away, probably for life. Turn yourself in now, at worst you’ll get probation.”
Her next words, softly spoken, were a sign of progress. “What if they don’t believe me?”
“If it’s the truth, they’ll believe you. You’re way better off walking in there today and telling them what happened than letting them catch you trying to get wherever you’re going.”
Nearly a minute passed. She said, “I’ll tell you what happened, what I remember. It’s a blur, but I’ll try.”
“Better if you go in and make a statement. I’ll drive you there. I’ll go in with you.”
“No, I’m not going in there. I’ll tell you, and you can do what you want. Go tell ’em. They can come and arrest me, whatever. I don’t care.”
He didn’t want to be an intermediary, and told her so. But now that she was telling all, she went on to tell all of the all: “First he got the guy in the truck, took him down a hill and smashed the fuck out of him. Then got his phone, went to the house, killed that lady and the little kid. I think the kid was an accident. He didn’t mean to do that, and it really, really bugged him. I had left the house pretty quick when he started strangling the lady. I sat in the truck, scared out of my wits. Then he jumped in and started driving south, said we’d go straight to the border, jump across. Then freaked that they’d be waiting for him, and pulled a U-ey. Then started worrying about the dead guy’s phone, and figured he had to ditch it. He said it had some kind of chip the cops could track, even if it was off. So he pulled down this little dead-end road so he could rip out the battery. It’s something he saw on TV, right? Without a battery it couldn’t be tracked, he said. But he couldn’t figure out how to take it apart, and I said just chuck it. But he had it in his mind he needed to remove the battery.”
“Where?” Dion said. “Where did he ditch it? What’s the name of the dead-end road?
“I don’t know.”
“Did he get the battery out?”
She crushed out her cigarette and lit no more. “No. There was this metal bar lying on the side of the road, and he got out and used it to smash the phone open. That didn’t work, either, so he got back in and spent, like, five minutes on that phone, wiping it down. Then got out again and threw it into the ditch, and the bar in after it, and then rocks and gravel and shit, yelling and crying. I mean, he had a total meltdown. Which is great, isn’t it, when you’re trying to lay low after you’ve just killed someone. Lucky for him nobody drove by. I yelled at him to get in the fucking car, let’s go. So he pulled it together, and we went home. He had a hit of something from his medicine bag and calmed down. ‘We’re just going to play it cool,’ he said. ‘We’ll get through this if we both just keep our mouths shut.’”
She shook her head. “But we both got it wrong. That guy wasn’t following us. I didn’t figure it out till I saw the toys, but Oz was too steamed to step back. It was just a big mistake. Just a big fat stupid mistake.”
A four-door sedan was driving slowly past where they sat parked on this quiet street, distracting Dion from his next question. A ghost of a face looked out from the passenger window. Slow-cruising cars were always a worry. He tried to make out the occupants, but they were too murky. The sedan rolled by without incident, and he returned to his next big question, the bootie in the bottle. Like his first shot in the dark, this would be another, one chance, now or never. Investigators could try it later in the interrogation, but either it would be too late to be meaningful, or it was a meaning they would miss. He said, “Did you take something from the scene?”
“Huh?” she said, still refusing to look at him.
He wished she would look at him. He wanted to see her eyes. “The Liu home, when you were leaving. You took something from there?”
She stared down at the hands in her lap, laying so peacefully one on top of the other, and she nodded. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I did. I took one of the kid’s little booties.”
Motion in the periphery. The lurking car had backtracked. It had done a U-turn at the intersection and was heading this way. One cruise-by was worrisome; two was alarming. The car pulled alongside and idled. Someone stepped out of the driver’s side.
“Jesus,” Jamie said, recoiling. She and Dion were both staring at the dark figure approaching. The street was badly lit, and Dion wasted no time analyzing what little he could see. He shoved open his door as the person leaned down toward Jamie’s open window, and he saw that it was an older man in a short-sleeved plaid shirt, silver hair, glasses. The man straightened as he saw Dion.
“Oh, hello,” the man said. Not a gangster, not Asian, not armed.
“Hello,” Dion said.
“I’m sorry,” the man said. “Saw you sitting here talking. Are you looking for them, too?”
“Looking for … what?”
“The Almonds. The Almond house.” The man looked at a piece of paper in his hand. “At 4241 Cloverley.” He looked harder at Dion. Dion tensed. The man said, “Are you by any chance little Marty Almond?”
“No, sir, you’ve got something wrong.”
“Ah,” the man said. “Sorry. Family reunion, you see. Wife and I just flew in from Ottawa. I haven’t seen Martin since he was this small. Thought you might be him.”
“I’m not, sir.”
The man looked again at the piece of paper. “We’ve been driving around, and there doesn’t seem to be any 4241 Cloverley. Somebody got something wrong.”
Dion could guess who.
The man said, “Don’t want to phone the family and ask for directions. It’s late. Don’t want to wake ’em, this time of night.”
“You’ll be waking them when you arrive, won’t you?”
The white eyebrows went up. “That’s very true.” He smiled at Dion. “I used to give you shoulder rides, back when you were this little.”
He went back to his car, and away they went.
Dion returned to the passenger seat of his Honda Civic, feeling a little knocked off course, thanks to the man from Ottawa. He pulled a map from the glove compartment and ope
ned it to the section showing the North Shore streets. He presented the section to Jamie. “Whereabouts did Oscar ditch the phone? Show me.”
“It matters?”
“It matters a lot. Point it out.”
She studied the map, her eyes travelling around, and he wondered, what was she seeing in her mind’s eye as she searched for the route they had taken after killing a young woman and a baby girl? What memories was this pulling up? How can she be so cool?
“There,” Jamie said. “This little road here, I think that’s it.”
She folded the map and handed it back at him. “You mean it, right?” she asked, not threatening but pleading. “About probation? I did nothing except follow him around. I know I should have stopped him. I should have tried.”
Dion said nothing, too busy burning into his mind the location she had pinpointed on the map, in case she changed her story. He got out of the passenger side and told her they were switching places. “We’ll go there now,” he said, when he was behind the wheel and firing the engine back to life. “Gotta find that phone.”
Thirty-Two
Shades of Blue
Leith was heading upstairs to the main office when his work phone rang. He stopped to look at the caller ID. It was a personal number, not dispatch, and nobody from his list of contacts. He put the phone to his ear and answered brusquely. “Leith.”
The voice was male, young, not immediately recognizable, and rough-edged. “Could you meet me? It’s important.”
“Dion?”
“I’m down on Orwell Street, off Bond. I’ll wait for you here.”
“I’m on my way to briefing,” Leith said, and continued walking to prove it. “I’ll be at least an hour.”
“Cut it. Get a recap later. I’ll bet this is more important.”
“Business or personal?”
“What?” Blast of impatience. “Business. See you soon.” Dion disconnected.
The morning had started out brisk, but the forecast said to dress light. Leith ditched his jacket in the back seat of his unmarked and keyed the coordinates Dion had given into his GPS. He arrived on a quiet dead-end road, houses on one side, brambles on the other. The brambles looked formidable, and the houses were mostly blocked off by high shrubs, tall fences, or drawn curtains. It felt like the kind of place a drug deal could go down in peace and quiet. He pulled in behind the sporty blue Honda Civic with tinted windows. Dion stepped out of the car and walked to meet him, no smile, no formalities. “I’ve got some info for you on the Liu murders.”
Leith stopped at a neutral distance and gave a neutral nod. “Yes?”
“I got this from Jamie Paquette. You’ll have to get the details from her. She says Oscar Roth murdered the Lius, and she was with him.”
Leith crossed his arms, the better to contain his surprise.
“These bushes here,” Dion said. “You’re going to have to get Forensics —”
“Hold it a moment,” Leith said. “This is spinning my head, considering you’ve just not only solved one of our biggest files, but linked it with the other. Oscar Roth killed Lance, Cheryl, and Rosalie Liu?”
“Seems so. And what I’m trying to tell you —”
“Hey, this is breaking news,” Leith interrupted, hands out both to embrace the information and slow it to a manageable level. “You get that, right? You can see I’m not taking notes or recording this. So we can either carry on, you go ahead and tell me what you know, then we go over it again at the station, or we can stop now and drive there and do it right. I appreciate what you’re telling me, but I’d rather get this firsthand on the record, Cal.”
“I just want to finish this.”
Dion was sounding adamant, and Leith knew better than to push his luck. “I’m listening.”
“Because you’ll need to get going on this part. When they were driving back from the Liu home, Oscar pulled over, found a metal bar on the road, and tried smashing Liu’s phone open to remove the battery, because he figured — I don’t know what he figured, if the phone was located it would be traced back to him. He wiped the phone clean of prints and tossed it in the bushes, and the bar, too. Somewhere along here.” Dion pointed at the brambles, and Leith turned to take in the length of them. They seemed to go down the block and into infinity. “I tried to get her to pin down the spot for me, but she couldn’t say, except it was on this road. She mentioned the dead end, so I guess it would be here somewhere. She says he threw it far.”
Again Leith studied the bushes. Even narrowed down to this stretch, there were a lot of them. He said, “Does Paquette know you’re telling me all this?”
“She knows.”
“You should have brought her in.”
“She refused. I wasn’t going to manhandle her. That’s your job. She’s at the Yorks’. ”
Dion waited while Leith called in instructions to Doug Paley to have Jamie Paquette detained for questioning. Leith pocketed his phone and said, “Why did she tell you? Or why did you ask? Far as I understand it, you’re off the force. You’ve become a PI, have you?”
“We got to be friends,” Dion said, with arms crossed.
“Uh-huh,” Leith said. “You, Paquette, and the Yorks. You’re in bed with the whole lot of them, are you?”
A flush of wind tore by, ruffling their hair and blowing dust in their eyes. “How about you just find Liu’s phone,” Dion said. “Or at least the piece of metal he used to smash it with. Maybe that’ll help.”
“Piece of metal …” Leith said. Then realized: it was a matter of fingerprints. He called out to his informant, who was walking back to his car, “So what about that statement?”
“You’ll be busy a while,” Dion shouted back. “Just call me when you’re ready.”
He got into his Honda. The engine fired up, music thudded from the open windows, and Leith watched the car pull out and accelerate off Orwell, back toward wherever he was hanging out these days.
* * *
Jamie Paquette was brought in and interviewed. Her confession was astonishing. JD had been assigned solo conduct of the first round of questioning, in hopes a female investigator would get more out of the woman. It seemed to work.
JD related the story to Leith late Thursday afternoon, following her interview and before it got transcribed. “Paquette saw toys in the yard. She believed they’d made a mistake, this wasn’t any kind of gang house, or even if it was, if there were kids involved, she had to try to stop Oscar, so she went in. She didn’t mention a little boy, or trying to protect anybody. She says it was so traumatic, she can’t remember any details. She remembers picking up one of the baby’s booties, with some vague idea of holding on to proof of what had happened. She recalls something about a bottle, but not what she did with it. Oz had gone rogue, and she was afraid of him. She didn’t seem to have much of a plan, though.”
“She doesn’t remember Joey? Kind of a big deal, isn’t it?”
“Her memory is scrap metal. And when you think about it, everything she remembers she could have picked up from the press. So she could be feeding us what we want to hear.”
“A false confession,” Leith said. Why would Paquette confess to something she hadn’t done? It went into the mystery box of why would anyone confess to something they hadn’t done. Happened all the time.
“But then there’s this,” JD said. “There are these Asian guys who were after Oscar, and I asked her, what, south Asian, east, north? She said they were Chinese. I think that’s her umbrella term for anyone from that side of the world. She can’t say how many, or describe them, except they were not kids and not old guys. She couldn’t give any names or pick anyone out from the mug gallery. But you know what?”
By now Leith knew that when JD said you know what, she had something interesting — and probably complex — to tell him.
“What?” he said.
“In goi
ng through the shots, Paquette picked out a couple, and said one of the bad guys stalking Oz looked kind of like this guy here. The guy she pointed to looked south Asian. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. It was obvious, at least to me.”
“Okay.”
“So I’m saying he wasn’t Chinese. She keeps calling them Chinese. If she’s wrong —”
“Not everyone can see the differences, JD. Sometimes the differences are pretty hard to make out, unless you’re some kind of anthropologist who specializes —”
JD made a noise, losing patience with him. “That’s not the point. If you’d let me finish. The point is Joey Liu said the ogre — who we now know was Oscar Roth — was yelling at Cheryl Liu about noon. Right? Get it? Noooon.”
“Okay,” Leith said again. “And?”
“How about win?” she said, with a smug smile.
Or win was what it sounded like to Leith. “Huh?” he said.
“The Vietnamese name. N-g-u-y-e-n. Someone who didn’t know how to pronounce it might say noon. Or nooyin.”
Maybe Leith was looking more stupid than usual, for JD reached up and gave his forehead a disrespectful little rap with her knuckles.
“Oh,” he said. “I see.” Possibly they now had a name for whoever Oscar Roth was looking for. Nguyen. Sometimes Leith wondered why he was in this job, when he could be combing a beach somewhere, looking for lost change.
* * *
All male Nguyen mugshots from the Lower Mainland were separated out and shown not only to Jamie Paquette, but to Jon and Melanie York, and even to Zan Liu. No Nguyen was pointed out as meaningful to any of them.
Two days after Dion had met Leith on Orwell with his breaking news, a battered iPhone 5 was found in the brambles. It had been located with the help of city crews and their giant side-mower, metal detectors bought and borrowed, high-powered lights, and a crew of auxiliary officers in bushwhacking gear. The piece of metal was found, too, an old L-shaped tire iron, its chromed surface going patchily to rust. The phone itself had been wiped of prints, sure enough, but the tire iron had a nice fat thumbprint belonging to one deceased ogre: Oscar Roth.
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