“Does John know you’re acquainted with her?”
“With Emily, you mean? No.” Did he think I told Riel every detail of my life?
“Emily ever talk to you about her mother?”
“No.” Jeez, what was going on? Then I remembered what Rebecca had told me—that Emily’s mother had died. And now here were two homicide cops showing up at her house. “What happened to her mother, anyway?”
Detective Jones glanced at Detective London. Detective London looked at me in the rearview mirror again. Then Detective Jones turned in his seat again and said, “Her mother was Tracie Howard.”
They drove me back to Riel’s house. On the way Detective Jones asked me what I knew about Tracie Howard and about what had happened to Riel when he was on that case. I said that Riel had told me the whole story.
“Everything?” he said.
How was one person supposed to know if another person had told him everything?
“He told me about the girl he shot,” I said. “He told me why he moved from homicide to traffic services and then why he quit.”
Detective London stared straight ahead, like none of this had anything to do with him. I wondered what he thought of Riel—whether he liked him, the way his partner seemed to, or whether he thought Riel was a wuss, quitting the cops like he did.
Detective Jones shifted in his seat. “We went to see James Corwin to tell him about the connection between the body we found and his ex-wife. You know what that means, Mike?”
I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.
“The media have it,” he said. “It’s going to be in the news.” He peered hard at me. “John says you’re doing okay. He says you had a hard time at first, but that you’ve settled in. In my opinion, he likes having you around.”
Why was he telling me this?
“It’s maybe going to be a little rough on John,” he said. “You know how the media is. They get hold of something like this, especially something like this—unsolved murder, a kid shot, one cop dead, another one wounded. They’re going to have a field day. You see what I’m saying, Mike?”
My stomach felt like it was tying itself into a great big knot. I saw exactly what he was saying. He was worried about Riel. And if he was worried …
He dug into his jacket pocket and handed me a business card. “I’m going to check in on John every now and again. But if anything happens you think I should know about, or if maybe you just want to talk to someone, give me a call, okay, Mike? Anytime. I mean it.”
I looked at him again. He was a couple of years older than Riel. A beefier guy with pale blue eyes and sandy brown hair that was starting to thin a little on top. I wondered if he’d ever been in a situation like Riel’s. I wondered if that’s why he seemed to care so much. Or maybe he was the kind of guy who could imagine what it was like to be in a situation like that. Maybe he had more imagination than Detective London, who hadn’t said a word about it, who hadn’t looked at me the whole time Detective Jones was talking.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
Riel was down on his hands and knees in the kitchen, attacking the tile floor with a scrub brush.
“Gunk,” he said, looking over his shoulder at me. “Gets in the cracks.”
Right. I looked at the fridge, which was on the other side of a stretch of still-wet floor. It was nearly three in the afternoon. I hadn’t eaten since morning.
“Where have you been?” Riel said, still scrubbing.
“Around,” I said. I couldn’t decide whether or not to tell him about Emily. “You okay?”
“Me?” He sounded surprised, like, why would I even ask? “I’m fine. Rebecca called.”
Oh. So maybe she wasn’t still mad at me. I called her, and she invited me over. When I hesitated, she said, “Unless you’ve got plans to do nothing.”
I thought about what Detective Jones had said. I thought about Riel out in the kitchen, attacking the gunk. I thought about when the story would hit the media and how Riel would react and what, if anything—big if—I would be able to do about it.
“I’ll be there,” I said. And then I cleared it with Riel.
He nodded. He didn’t quiz me. He kept right on scrubbing.
We were in Rebecca’s family room. Rebecca was cuddled up on the couch next to me. She’d been nice to me ever since I got there. She hadn’t actually apologized for walking out on me in the cafeteria, but she hadn’t hinted around that I should apologize to her either, the way girls do when they’re mad at you for something. She’d rented a couple of movies—an action movie and a kung fu movie, the kind I liked and she didn’t. She made sandwiches and milk shakes, and later, when we were watching the movies, she made popcorn. So I guess that meant everything was okay.
At eleven o’clock I hit the pause button on the VCR remote and flipped on the TV.
“What?” Rebecca said. “You don’t like the movie?” We were watching the second video, the kung fu one.
“I want to see the news,” I said. “Okay?”
She nodded. If I’d wanted to watch the weather channel, I think she would have let me.
It was the second story. Rebecca stared at the TV. At first she didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Did he say John Riel?” She came up off my shoulder and leaned closer to the TV screen. “Is that Mr. Riel?”
It was, just for a few seconds. A still shot of him, up in the corner of the screen behind the announcer’s head. Riel, with his hair a little shorter than it was now, and with a moustache, looking a little cockier than he did these days, looking almost like a know-it-all. And then there was Emily’s father with his tan and his straight white teeth and his perfect hair, standing outside his house, talking into what looked like a couple of dozen microphones, saying what a scandal it was that his ex-wife’s murderer was never brought to justice, what a crime it was that his older daughter was shot, how it was wrong, criminally wrong, that the police officer who shot her had never suffered any consequences. Boy, did he have that wrong.
Rebecca looked at me. “Mr. Riel shot a girl?” She sounded like she couldn’t believe it.
“It was an accident,” I said. Rebecca said something else to me, but I didn’t hear it. I stood up. “I have to go home,” I said.
She didn’t argue with me.
Riel was sitting in front of the TV in the living room. He looked at me when I came in, then turned his head back to the TV. I wanted to ask him if he was okay, but it seemed like such a dumb question. How okay would I be if I had done what he had done and now it was all over TV—for the second time? I thought maybe I should sit down with him. Maybe if I did, he would say something. But what could he possibly say? I stood there a moment, watching him as he listened to the sports news—or maybe he wasn’t listening anymore. Then I went upstairs to my room.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I woke up early to the sound of the phone ringing. Three rings, but no voice, no one saying, hello. Then a minute or two of silence. Then three rings again. It was ringing through to voice mail, I realized.
A few minutes later the doorbell rang. Once. Twice. Three times. Four times. Jeez, and no one answered it.
I got out of bed and went downstairs. It was dark in the house. All of the blinds were still closed. Riel was standing in the dining room, holding his cell phone to his ear.
The doorbell rang again. I looked at him.
“You want me to get—”
He shook his head and held a finger to his lips. Shh.
The doorbell rang again.
Riel said something into the phone, and then he slipped the phone into his shirt pocket.
“It’s the media,” he said. “I don’t want to talk to them, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You go near the door or out the door and they’ll be all over you,” he said.
“So I’ll stay inside. I’ve got homework. And my chores.”
Riel looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “Thanks, Mike.”
The doorbe
ll rang and people hammered on the door for most of the morning. Then it got quiet. Riel peeked out one of the windows.
“They’re still out there,” he said. “A few of them anyway.” He sounded discouraged. “I don’t know. Maybe I should get it over with.” But he didn’t open the door, and he didn’t answer the phone, even though it kept ringing.
It was a long day.
Around six o’clock, Riel’s cell phone rang. He answered it but didn’t say much. A few minutes later someone knocked on the door—it sounded like a code: two quick, two slow, two quick. Riel opened the door this time and let someone in. Detective Jones. I heard a voice behind him, asking a question. It was a reporter. Then someone else asked another question. Detective Jones thrust a paper bag at me and then shut the door and locked it.
“How long have they been at it?” Detective Jones said to Riel.
“They started in first thing this morning.”
“You talk to them?”
Riel shook his head.
“I brought dinner,” Detective Jones said. He took the paper bag from me. “Chinese. You guys hungry?”
I sure was.
We went into the kitchen, and Riel got out plates and cutlery and glasses while Detective Jones unpacked the food and set it out all over the table—containers of beef and noodles, fried rice, egg rolls, cashew chicken, spareribs, and vegetables, all steaming hot. He also had cans of pop for everyone—Coke for him and me, ginger ale for Riel. We sat down and ate.
“You saw Corwin on the news last night?” Detective Jones said after a bite of egg roll.
Riel nodded.
“Charlie and I went over to the house yesterday,” he said. I tensed up. I wondered if he was going to mention that I’d been there. If he did, I wondered what Riel would say. But all he said was, “We were going back to the car after we talked to him, and I told Charlie, I give him about two seconds to be on the phone to the papers. Remember what he was like when you were investigating the murder? Making statements every other day about how they must have scraped the bottom of the barrel when they assigned investigators to the case.”
“Because we didn’t arrest Tom Howard right away,” Riel said. “Yeah, I remember. He kept saying it was obvious Howard had done it. What got to me—it wasn’t like we weren’t investigating Howard. My money’s still on him.”
“So how come he was acquitted?” I asked.
Detective Jones looked at Riel. Riel put down his fork.
“The whole case was circumstantial,” he said. “Tom had a hot temper—he even admitted it. He and Tracie fought a lot, usually over money. He had no solid alibi. Said he was up at a cabin; but there was no evidence he’d been there, no one saw him. Said Tracie received threatening phone calls. But the times he gave us for when she got them, the only calls on record were from pay phones.”
“In the neighborhood where he worked,” Detective Jones said.
“And he was the beneficiary of a sizeable amount of insurance money.”
“When it finally paid out, it was quite a windfall,” Detective Jones said. “Although I heard there was almost nothing left by the time he’d paid his legal bills.”
“But if he had a motive and no alibi …” I said.
Riel shook his head. “We never found the weapon that was used. We never found any evidence of blood on any clothes Tom owned. We never found anything that tied him directly to the shooting.”
Detective Jones took a swallow of Coke. “When John and Marty accused Tom Howard of making those calls himself, to set it up like Tracie was being threatened, Howard came up with another story. Right, John?”
Riel nodded. “He said maybe the phone calls—”
“And the cat,” Detective Jones said. “Wasn’t there supposed to have been a dead cat?”
“A dead cat we never found,” Riel said. “So Howard changed his story. He said maybe the phone calls weren’t related to the murder. He said some of her things were missing.”
“What kind of things?” I said.
“Some jewelry,” Detective Jones said.
“All of her jewelry,” Riel said. “He said maybe someone broke into the house to rob it and was surprised to find Tracie there and killed her.”
“Which the defense used,” Detective Jones said. “Expensive jewelry was missing—”
“Which Tom probably took himself.”
“And which we were never able to locate.”
“The long and short of it, Mike, is that the prosecutor couldn’t make its case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Riel said. “So Howard was acquitted.”
“Is that why James Corwin is so angry with the cops?” I said.
Detective Jones looked at Riel.
Riel said, “That and what happened to his daughter.”
I was sorry I had asked.
“Now what happens?” I said.
Detective Jones looked across the table at me. “Now we concentrate on finding out who was buried out there in Caledon. Once we know that, we can maybe see how that links with Tracie Howard. In the meantime”—he dropped an egg roll onto his plate—“life goes on.”
Riel looked down at his food for a moment. Then he said, “I need you to do me a favor, Dave.”
Dave. Not Jonesy this time.
“Take Mike over to Susan’s for me, would you?”
“What?” I said.
“I already talked to her,” Riel said. He was looking at Detective Jones, not at me. “I should have done it as soon as you told me there was a link with Tracie Howard’s murder. I knew the press would be all over it. And I don’t think that Mike should have to—”
“I don’t want to go to Susan’s,” I said.
“Go pack a bag, Mike,” Riel said.
“No.”
Finally he turned to face me. “You have school tomorrow. I have school tomorrow. And they’re going to be out there with their cameras and their microphones. I don’t want you involved.”
“I’m not going.”
“Pack a bag, or I’ll pack it for you.”
Like he was my father.
“Pack what you want, I’m not going,” I said.
Riel looked at Detective Jones. Detective Jones shrugged. It looked like he didn’t want to get involved. Riel turned back to me.
“They’ll harass you, Mike. As soon as they find out who you are, they’ll probably put that in the paper too, stuff about your mother and about Billy. You want that? You want your private life right there in the paper for everyone to read?”
“Your life’s going to be in the paper.”
“That’s different. I was doing a job. You don’t have to subject yourself to this.”
“You’re always telling me this is my home now. You’re always saying I have responsibilities here, but I also have privileges, right? Isn’t one of the privileges that I get to be here if I want to?”
“Come on, Mike.”
“I want to stay.”
Riel looked at Detective Jones again.
“He wants to stay,” Detective Jones said. “But I have to go.” He stood up and started putting the empty food containers into the paper bag he had brought the food in. “I’ll stay in touch, John, let you know what’s going on, okay?”
After he left, Riel said, “I better call Susan and tell her not to expect you.”
That’s all he said.
Riel had seemed pretty relaxed for a while when Detective Jones was at the house. He didn’t seem nearly so relaxed the next morning. He was downstairs before me, as usual. As usual, he was packing his briefcase. What was different: he looked like he hadn’t slept all night.
I peeked outside while I was drinking my milk. There was a TV van across the street and, a little ahead of it, a car with a man and a woman in it. The man was looking at the house. Other than that, it seemed quiet.
“Whatever they ask you, even if all they ask you is your name, you don’t say anything, okay, Mike?” Riel said as he handed me my parka.
“Can I say,
No comment?”
“It’s better if you pretend you don’t hear them and just say nothing at all.”
He didn’t say better for who, but if that’s what he wanted me to do, that’s what I was going to do.
I put on my backpack, he grabbed his briefcase, and we went out the back door to the garage behind the house where his car was parked. By the time we got in it and Riel had turned the car around and was going down the laneway between his house and the one next door, two guys had got out of the TV van, one with a video camera, the other with a microphone, and they were coming up the drive. The man and woman had got out of the other car too, and they were coming toward us, the woman holding out a small tape recorder. Then a few more people started up the driveway—I don’t know where they came from—and they crowded around the car.
“Keep your head down, Mike,” Riel said.
He kept inching the car forward, a little at a time so that the people in front of it had to keep moving back even though they didn’t want to. Someone knocked on the driver’s-side window. Someone else rapped on my window. Riel didn’t look to see who it was. He just kept edging the car forward. Then two police patrol cars pulled up across the street, and four uniformed cops got out and came over and started moving the press away from Riel’s car. One of them tapped on the window, and this time Riel pressed the button to roll it down.
“You okay?” the cop asked.
Riel nodded.
“It’s gonna be a long day,” the cop said. He moved back, and Riel cleared the driveway. As soon as he did, all the press ran for their cars and vans.
“They know where we’re going,” he said. “They’ll probably be at school before we are.”
They were.
There were cop cars down there too, keeping the media aside while Riel pulled into the underground parking and the door closed behind him. He pulled the key from the ignition and turned to me.
“You sure you don’t want to stay with Susan for a couple of days, until things quiet down?”
I said I was sure.
“Or you could stay with Dave. You seem to get along okay with him. He lives alone.”
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