Under the Bridge

by Rebecca Godfrey

  Lily, by all official records, was a certified bad girl. A person of bad character, a criminal. Her offenses were solicitation for the purpose of—a crime in which the solicitant is set free but the solicitor is arrested. Lily had been busted twice under the rather arcanely worded law, a formal phrase for prostitution. Lily was sixteen.

  • • •

  Her boyfriend told her to try it; he was the one who pushed the needle into her skin. She was fourteen then, and she was addicted by the time she was fifteen. She did things for the heroin, and then she did heroin to forget about the things she did for the heroin.

  In juvie, they gave her Ativan. When she was in the city cells in Nanaimo, they’d given her something stronger; she wasn’t sure what it was called. Lily looked very much like the girl in Alice in Wonderland; her hair was fair and straight and framed a face that was classic and pretty. The pills got lighter and lighter. When she was first withdrawing, they gave her “a really, really strong sleeping pill.” She slept for ten days in city cells, and then she started to withdraw from the strong sleeping pill. She thought she was losing her body; her body seemed a separate pale white sliver; she shivered and craved. So then they gave her something lighter. And in juvie, they gave her only Ativan now, at night, because she had trouble sleeping when the sky was dark. During the day, she no longer craved or shivered, and after three weeks in juvie, the guards even told her that she seemed transformed. Lily was in juvie when the Reena Virk girls arrived.

  She was with Arianna and Sidra when they decided they should do something.

  It wasn’t much really. She just tripped Kelly, and Arianna poured juice on Kelly. They just bugged her. They told her, “Kelly, you’d look good in red. Red’s a good color for you, Kelly.”

  But then something terrible happened in the bathroom, which was why she now sat here with a cop. He sat before her, waiting, with his tape recorder poised. It was 11:30 at night, and the detective had spent his days in bedrooms, touching and taking the black jeans and black shoes of girls who were no longer in their bedrooms. He read a diary full of words he couldn’t fathom. Hook-up and hoochie and hottie. He talked to girls named Laila and Marissa and Melody. And now he was listening to Lily, who was, in police terms, a junkie and a prostitute.

  “I was in the bathroom last night. When we go to bed, we brush our teeth. I was brushing my teeth, around 9:00, when Kelly came in. I looked at her, and I said, ‘You’re sick.’ And she said, ‘Listen, I feel bad enough already about what happened.’

  “And I said, ‘You should feel bad. A fourteen-year-old girl is dead because of you.’

  “She goes, ‘It wasn’t only me. I’m getting all the blame for this. It was Warren too.’

  “She said, ‘Maybe I was the one who held her head under water, but I didn’t mean to kill her. You don’t think I feel bad?’

  “And then, she goes, ‘You don’t have to treat me like this. I’m not scared of you.’ And she walked out. And after that, it’s just, I don’t know.” Lily looked away from the detective, hugged herself. “I’ve been getting goosebumps up my arms and stuff. Because my assumption was that they beat up a girl and she accidentally died. And then, when I heard out of her mouth that she drowned her … it just scared me … really bad. I thought about it for a long time. She said she felt bad, but she didn’t show any sympathy. It was more like she was trying to prove something to me, trying to, I don’t know, get in good with us, because we don’t like them. She didn’t care. She totally didn’t care about what she did. Her face was just emotionless. And I just keep thinking about it over and over again in my head. The girl she killed, that could have been my little sister. That could have been anyone’s little sister.

  “I thought she died because of her injuries, because they beat her up so bad, and there was eight of them. I thought maybe it was an accident. Maybe they didn’t mean to do it. And then, when she said that in the bathroom, said that she held her head under water for five minutes….”

  Lily looked at the detective, and he seemed confused, so she tried to explain again. “It’s just the way she said it too. Every time she comes into the room, I get goosebumps up my arms and I feel sick to my stomach. She laughs about it. We’ll get mad at her, and she just starts laughing. She’s not the most popular person in juvie. And … she just laughs. Every time we say something to her, she just smirks and walks away.

  “She doesn’t feel bad. I don’t understand that. She doesn’t show any emotion at all. She doesn’t look like she feels sorry for it. She just wanted to do it. She set out to do it, and she did it. I think that she should get in trouble for what she did. I don’t think she should get away with it. I think she should pay for what she did. Because it’s wrong. It’s wrong. Murder is wrong.

  “I’ve done things in my past. I can change them. I can say sorry to the people that I’ve hurt, and I can say that I’m not going to do it again, and that I’m going to change. But once you take somebody’s life, you can’t say sorry for that. You can’t take it back. There’s nothing you can do. That’s not right. It’s horrible.

  “I talked to my little sister after that on the phone. It’s just so real now. It’s changed my whole outlook on life. If I was sitting at home, watching it on TV, it would be totally different. You know, you go, ‘Oh my God. That happened. I can’t believe it.’ But when you meet the people who’ve really done this, it’s so different. It’s real. It’s too real. It’s just too real.

  “It’s overwhelming that someone could do that. When you see it on the news, it’s like a fictional character, so it seems like it didn’t really happen, not in your world anyway. You think, ‘Oh, it can’t happen to me.’ And then, when you meet the person, face to face, and you know what their hands have done to someone, it’s sick. It’s beyond the imagination.

  “I can’t even sleep across the hall from her. If you met her, if you’ve seen her, everything she’s put on in front of you is a show. But when she comes in here, she’s smirking and smiling and laughing, and she just killed someone on Friday. What’s she happy about? I don’t understand it. Nobody does. If you can, talk to the girls in here. Everybody thinks it’s pretty sick. I’m sure if anybody heard anything else, they will tell you too. I’m pretty sure if they heard anything, they would. Because we were thinking about doing something ourselves, but I’m going tomorrow to assessment, and I want to get into a treatment center. I want to get my life straightened out. I don’t want to be in jail ever again. I’m not going to put myself down to her level and be in for assault or something, like she is. I’m not.

  “Another girl, Arianna, she gets out soon too. And she wants to get her life straight. She’s got her own problems. We thought about doing something, but it’s not worth it. The law will take care of it. If they did it, they’ll pay in some way. God, the law, whatever. I don’t know. You had to be there just to see the look on her face. When I said, ‘You’re sick,’ she just blew up. She got so mad. She said, ‘I didn’t mean for it to turn out the way it did. I only held her head under for five minutes. I didn’t mean for her to die.’ I said, ‘Whatever,’ and I walked out of the bathroom, but it just sent chills all through me, just to think about it.”

  She stopped talking, and the detective noticed she was trembling.

  “Are you on any medication?” he asked the trembling girl, for he’d seen her police file.

  “I get Ativan at night, for sleeping. It’s not too much different than Tylenol.”

  “Okay. You’ve used heroin. You were obviously addicted at some point.”

  “Yeah,” Lily said, wondering why this question now.

  “How long were you addicted to heroin?”

  “For about a year and a half. Off and on.”

  “Do you hope to gain anything from talking to us?”

  Lily thought about this, wondering what she could gain. “I guess I hope that she’ll get what she deserves. A couple of days ago, after she met with her lawyer, she said she was going to get released soon. If
she did do this, she should get punished for it. There’s no way she should get away with it because somebody is not here with us, today, anymore.”

  “And that’s your reason for telling us?”

  “Yes. It makes me feel bad. It’s real. It’s too real. It happened. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say something, and she really did do it.”

  “All right,” the detective said, and he shortly after arranged for a sheriff to drive Lily back to her place of custody.

  • • •

  Dusty wrote poems. She gave them to guards. She wrote letters to boys, like Jack and Nick and Brian. She wrote a letter to Warren:

  Hey, hon, whad up? How are you feeling these past few days? I’m o.k. I need a lot of questions answered right now, but I can’t say in this letter but I think you know what I’m talking about. I know we don’t know each other but I think we have a bond that can’t be broken and I don’t think what’s happening to you is fair but just keep on praying and it will be o.k. and if I get out before you I will send you letters all the time but only if you write back. I don’t know you very well but I think about you all the time because I don’t think you deserve this kind of punishment and I hope you don’t hate me after all that happened but anyways this jail food sucks huh! I haven’t seen you or been able to talk to Kelly. Kelly has a no-contact order with all of us. I feel sorry for her but what can I do right. Here is my address. I’ve got to go. Stay strong and have faith in God because he can help us all through.

  P.S. Don’t forget to write back!

  Dusty drew a heart with an arrow. The guards seized the letter and sent it to the police. The love letter would become Exhibit 345 in the Virk case. Warren never received the letter, and from all the boys she wrote to, Dusty received no letters in return.

  Dusty’s sister, on her drives to Yellowknife, would think of her little sister and feel more than regret. (“When I saw the story on the news about a girl killed in Victoria, I just knew somehow that Dusty was involved.”) She wondered if she’d been at fault for sending her little sister away, her little sister who, as she told the police, had known no love, no caring. She needs help, she’d pleaded, someone has to please help her. But who was helping Dusty now? she wondered. Surely not the experts she saw on TV—those who talked about peer pressure and hierarchy.

  • • •

  “Feel my ass,” Laila said to Warren, and he laughed.

  He said, “What the hell for?”

  “It’s rock hard,” she replied, and she told him about her kickboxing finesse. Warren now lived in the Honor Wing. “I liked Warren a lot,” Floyd recalls. “He never caused any trouble at all.” Warren was roommates with a boy who was in juvie for murder also. High on many drugs, he used a jackhammer to, quite literally, bash in the brains of a DJ who’d stolen his Ecstasy.

  His roommate, like Warren, was attractive and well behaved, and had it not been for the grotesque and terrible nature of their acts, the boys might have been mistaken for the sons of the wellborn, spending time at a boarding school. Warren often wondered how they both could have ended up like this, and he could find no answers, and still, very often, he would contemplate the fate of the boy beside him, the other killer who seemed to be possessed of neither malice nor hate.

  In March, a girl named Coral arrived, and she fell in love with Warren, and he was not sure what to do because he still loved Syreeta but he was very lonely. Grace Fox brought him hair gel, which was not allowed. She brought it for him concealed in bottles of shampoo. Once, while hugging him, he felt her slip something in his pocket, and she told him to wait until he was alone. When he was alone, he found it was a letter Syreeta gave to Grace to pass on to him. He read the smuggled letter. She’d sent him a photo of herself with Tara and Marissa. The three girls were laughing, sitting on the back of a blue pickup truck. Once he was watching TV and a shot of the bridge appeared in a news flash, but the guard quickly turned off the TV. Still, he’d seen the bridge, and the moment he saw the image, he felt a shiver go through him. It seemed to him that he’d been here before, or he’d always known he would be here. There would be a bridge. He would see the bridge from his past, the bridge he’d been under. He would be in juvie for his crime, watching the bridge, knowing he’d been in that dark place. “It was kind of like déjà vu.”

  His mother came to visit him but she was raving and reeked of alcohol, and the guards would not let her in to see her last son. His father phoned him from California, and while Warren sat in the phone booth, his father said, “I love you,” and that was the first time his father had ever told him he was loved and he didn’t know why, but he just cried, maybe for an hour, or maybe even more.

  Lily left. She took a bus alone and left the island where she’d done all the things she didn’t want to do anymore, ever, ever again. The bus brought her across the waters on a large ferry, and then she took another bus to the town of her mother. I want to get my life straightened out. Her face was just so emotionless. It’s so real. It’s too real. It’s changed my whole outlook on life. She lived in a valley, full of pear trees and orchards. All the poisons left her system. She wandered in the orchards with her little sister, holding her sisters small hand, too tightly at times. Several months later, the staff at juvie would receive a grateful letter from Lily’s mother. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she wrote. “You’ve done so much for my daughter. She’s so kind and strong now; she’s just completely changed.”

  The Most Important Witness

  THE CROWN knew the case was high profile and important to the community. (“We’re called the Crown in Canada because we represent the Queen. We don’t say the People vs. So and So. We say Her Majesty the Queen vs. Glowatski.”) The investigators accepted that they probably wouldn’t find any forensic evidence to build a case against either Kelly or Warren. Stan Lowe knew “you’re in trouble when there’s no direct witness to a crime.”

  Don Morrison had assigned Stan Lowe the case against Glowatski. Kelly’s skilled lawyer, Adrian Brooks, was fighting her elevation to adult court and had plans, if he lost, to take her case all the way to the Supreme Court. It seemed highly likely that Warren would be tried first, and so Stan Lowe began to assemble his list of witnesses.

  When he’d watched the tape of Syreeta’s first interview, he clapped. A first-class interview, he thought. Constable Brian Cameron just slowly got her to give more and more details, by having her tell the story again and again. He didn’t lead her or suggest. A textbook brilliant interrogation. Brilliant!

  That girl’s going to be the most important witness, he thought to himself.

  He decided, on the last day of November, that John Bond should interview Syreeta. “I just wanted to make sure, absolutely sure, we’d gotten everything right,” Stan Lowe recalls.

  Several hours later, Bond returned his call, informing him that Syreeta was no longer in Victoria. “She’s gone to stay with her father’s family, in Grande Prairie.”

  “Well, I need the answers now,” Stan Lowe said. He authorized Bond and Cameron to take a Lear jet to the prairie town across the Rockies.

  In this way, Bond, an aficionado of airplanes, found himself on the rather lavish aircraft. The jet had been purchased at auction and once belonged to Hank Snow, a country and western singer known for his appearances on the Grande Ole Opry, and for discovering Elvis Presley. “There were leather seats,” Bond recalls, with wonderment. “And this plush red carpet.”

  In the posh jet, the men flew over the rugged mountain range, on a strange chase after a girl who had committed no crime and been in her bedroom on the night of the murder.

  “The trip was just incredibly fast,” Bond would later recall. “I think we got there in a few hours. Going over the Rockies, that was just really beautiful.”

  This Is Not a House That’s Been Broken Into

  FAR AWAY FROM View Royal, on the banks of the Peace River, Syreeta now sat with her grandparents, Gloria and Jim. She returned to the place where her mother
had been born and where she had been born as well. The town was a place of oil and fertile soil, a town without mountains or beaches but with flatlands, full of bales of hay. She was not running from the law. She didn’t know the law was after her. She only wanted to get away. For just a while. The house was warm, with a fireplace in the kitchen, and Syreeta was thinking maybe she would sleep again here, for in View Royal she was afraid to close her eyes.

  Her grandfather had just brought in some firewood on the afternoon when the police arrived. Her grandfather was an ex-RCMP officer, and he decided he’d sit with her during the interview. “He didn’t look so well,” John Bond would later recall. “I think he was having some heart problems. Cameron thought he was about to have a heart attack.”

  • • •

  The conversation started out quite well at first, because she liked John Bond. (“Bond was an all right guy. I didn’t have a problem with him. He had a little compassion.”)

  He asked her about her job at Brady’s. He asked her what her favorite subject was at school. It was slightly awkward, the way it always was when adults tried to make small talk, but still, she thought it was decent of him to not treat her as if she was the criminal. “What type of fun things do you and Warren do together? Do you go to the movies?” he asked.

  “We usually go to the beach and go for walks,” she told him.

  “Which beach?”

  “The one by my house,” she said, and she did not tell Bond that on the beach, Warren asked her to please, I’m serious, marry me.

  But then Bond asked her to explain exactly how she became involved in this case.

  “I’m not involved,” she said. “I was involved because you guys got me involved in it.”

  “You’re not in any trouble here,” Bond reassured her. “You’re one of fifty people we’ve spoken to.”

  “Have you talked to other people three times?” Syreeta wondered.