Somebody shouted, and he listened, but was distracted by the forest noises, almost voice-like, wordless mutters and whispers, and a low, demented whistling. The flashlight beam guttered again, and distantly, up on the logging road, he heard car doors slam shut and an engine turn over. He could imagine them forgetting to do a head count and departing without him. He saw himself alone in the woods, following Kiera’s footsteps into the wildest mystery of all. A moment longer he hesitated, and then shifted the gear bag to his other shoulder and headed up the trodden path, almost at a run, to join the departing team.
* * *
Leith and Bosko arrived at the Catalina Cafe, its big yellow sign a blazing landmark on the highway cutting through town. Leith was tired, hungry, and aggravated. He had spent the last hour in conference calls from his new desk at the New Hazelton detachment, and his vocal cords were strained raw. He wanted to return to Terrace and dive straight into the Pickup lead, now that they had a solid link to the Pickup Killer. Phil Prentice thought otherwise, reminding Leith that holding back information could be a valuable tool, but it could also cause havoc. Leaks happened, and supposedly confidential clues could be used and abused, and nothing should be taken for granted at this point. For now, pink glitter be damned, Leith was to remain in the Hazeltons and explore all the other myriad avenues, keeping in regular contact, of course, with the Terrace task force that would be chasing down the Pickup Killer full-tilt, headed up by Corporal Mel Stoner. Furthermore, the glitter angle was to remain, at Stoner’s discretion, held back from the press and disseminated only to the core team.
The back room at the Catalina was too warm, and Leith shed his several layers of coats, jackets, and sweaters, hung them up, and took a seat. He had missed lunch and was glad the briefing would be bracketed around food. Hardly gourmet grub in a place like this, but he didn’t care so long as it was greasily rich in salt and starch. Giroux said the food was great as she sat across from him, but she had to say that, knowing the owners; she knew everybody here. That was the advantage and disadvantage of running a village in the middle of nowhere: familiarity.
They were a party of ten, a few faces Leith didn’t know. Giroux said she’d used this room often for meetings such as this. It was also used for weddings and whatnot. Sound-wise, it was well insulated, private, and the staff knew all about discretion. The one long table they sat at was draped in white. The walls were panelled in fake wood and hung about with genuine mounted animal heads, which in turn were hung about with cobwebs. Swing doors separated this room from the kitchen, but the kitchen sounds were distant enough when the doors clicked shut. Music from a local pop station played, but barely audible.
Coffee was served and orders were taken, and Giroux made introductions, naming herself in charge of New Hazelton. She would be dealing with issues in her community but would be at hand to lend assistance to the team when possible. She introduced Leith as lead investigator, the one who’d assign tasks, make all procedural decisions, and liaise with Sergeant Phil Prentice in Prince Rupert.
She introduced Sergeant Mike Bosko, the brass from the Lower Mainland who was joining the team in a sort of unofficial advisory capacity until further notice. A few brows went up, and Corporal Fairchild from Terrace asked jokingly, “What, just happened to be passing by?” the joke being that nobody just passed by the lonely Hazeltons in mid-February.
Leith watched Bosko for reaction to the jibe and saw the irony had gone right past him. “Pretty well,” Bosko said. “Dave was heading this way, so I hitched a ride.”
Giroux charged through the remaining introductions and then gave the floor to Jayne Spacey, who had opened the file and knew it best. Spacey stood to talk, skimming fast over Kiera Rilkoff’s particulars, since they were all there on her stat sheet: age, height, weight, the colour of her hair and eyes, address, identifying marks. She went on from there. “At twenty-two she still lives with her parents and her sister Grace on 12th Avenue. Sergeant Giroux and I were there early today, and on a preliminary look-around there’s nothing out of ordinary in her room.”
“The family’s completely flummoxed,” Giroux put in. “And devastated. We don’t have to focus on them whatsoever.”
Spacey said, “Kiera’s a high school grad. She has plans of attending music school in Vancouver somewhere down the road. Good reputation in the community, no criminal history. She’d been employed at the Chevron gas station until last summer, when she quit to devote herself to her music. We all know Fling’s a successful band and seems to be going places. Her parents support her financially and morally, it seems. I haven’t taken full statements from them yet, but like the boss just said, we have no reason to focus on them at this point. Kiera’s dad is with the Ministry of Forests, and her mom’s a physiotherapist at the hospital, so they’re financially secure.”
Leith admired how Spacey had progressed since they’d last met. He wondered if her straight-shouldered stance and lucid delivery had anything to do with the presence of the brass from the city. He wondered if his own blustering did as well, and hoped not.
Spacey said, “Now for the here’s-what-we-know part. Kiera’s boyfriend is Frank Law, who’s the guitarist in the band. She spends much of her time at his place in Kispiox.” She passed around several copies of a map marked in red with points of interest. “It’s the ‘L,’ and I’ve been there as well today. It’s a good-sized house on an acreage he shares with his two brothers, Leonard and Robert, better known as Lenny and Rob. It’s here Fling has been rehearsing since the house was built, about four years ago. They were rehearsing there yesterday when Kiera left the house, alone, drove off, and didn’t come back. She left at the lunch break, around noon, but nobody can give a precise time. She was seen driving northwest on Kispiox Road about an hour later by a friend of the Law brothers, Scott Rourke.”
She went on detailing the eyewitness account of Scott Rourke, who had been riding down Kispiox Road on his motorbike when Kiera had passed him in her Isuzu, upward bound. Leith had heard most of this up on the mountainside, but he made notes now. Most everybody at the table did the same, except for the dark-haired uniformed constable at Leith’s left, who couldn’t seem to find a pen. Leith gave him his spare and said to Spacey, “A motorbike? In these conditions?”
“More like a dirt bike,” Spacey said. “And Rourke’s a maniac.” She went on. “Also on the map you’ll see an ‘RL’ up on Kispiox Mountain. That’s where the Law brothers, more specifically Frank’s older brother Rob, run a logging show. We have reason to believe she was heading up to see him when her truck broke down at the ‘M’ you’ll see there, the Matax hiking trail. Kiera and Frank texted briefly around one thirty, and that was their last communication. We got it off Frank’s phone.”
Another photocopy was passed around, a printout of a direct screenshot from an iPhone. Bosko looked it over and then passed it to Leith. The text came from Kiera at 1:26 p.m.
Kiera: “Screw U. Find yrsf another lead”
Frank: “WTF? Where RU?”
Spacey said, “Kiera didn’t reply, and Frank more or less put it out of his mind till later in the evening, when Rob Law came upon her black Isuzu Rodeo at the Matax trailhead as he was coming down from the cut block around seven. He got home at seven thirty. That’s when Frank collected Chad and went up.”
She paused as the waitress brought food. Not a moment too soon, Leith thought, his stomach grumbling. The constable to his left, the one who’d forgotten his pen, was in his mid-twenties, maybe, pale-skinned but dark-haired and dark-eyed, beat-up looking. He was staring with doubt at the Denver sandwich placed before him, and in a low-grade epiphany Leith realized this was the guy Jayne Spacey had called “kinda cute but not too bright.” Dion, the temp in from Smithers.
The long-awaited “Special” burger with extra fries landed in front of Leith, and he dug in. Spacey ignored her wrap, still on her feet, and went on briefing the team. She told them who had been at t
he house yesterday at noon when Kiera walked out: Chad Oman, the drummer, Stella Marshall, who played fiddle, and Frank Law’s younger brother Lenny Law, who was seventeen and home-schooled. Lenny wasn’t involved with the band, as far as Spacey knew, and there was some question about whether he was present at the time Kiera left.
Giroux told Spacey to sit down and eat, which Spacey did, and for a while there was only the sound of forks and knives hitting china, munching, sipping, and the distant twitter of pop music.
Leith chomped at his burger faster than he should. Down the table, Mike Bosko ate a much healthier salad of some kind and made conversation with Corporal Fairchild, Ident Team Leader, at his side. Constable Dion picked up the first quarter of his Denver and devoured it in two big bites, then closed his eyes and looked ill.
Bosko left his conversation with Fairchild to ask Spacey, if she didn’t mind, about more general background on the band itself. “I’ve heard they’re putting out a CD?”
“Was supposed to come out at Christmas,” Spacey said. “There were some delays, and I’m not sure where that’s at right now. Mercy Blackwood would be the one to talk to, the band’s manager. I’ll set her up for an interview.”
Leith added the name Blackwood to his list of interviewees and listened as Constable Spacey described a barrette she’d found in the snow near where Kiera’s cellphone was found. Both barrette and phone would have to be fingerprinted, and Kiera’s family would be asked to identify the items.
Leith scrubbed the mayo off his mouth and told the team of the critical clue, the body glitter, possibly linking up this disappearance with two of the three Terrace murders. Some discussion followed on the importance of eliminating or confirming the link, then he turned to the cellphone, now Police Exhibit 1, which wouldn’t give up any secrets till he got it unlocked. “Nobody knows her password?” he asked Spacey. “BFF, family, boyfriend?”
“Not so far,” Spacey said.
Bosko said, “And who is her BFF, by the way?”
Corporal Fairchild said, “What the hell is a BFF?”
“Best friends forever in teen-speak,” Spacey told him. “And WTF is what the fuck.”
“Everybody knows what the fuck,” Fairchild said testily.
Spacey ignored him and said to Bosko, “Her BFF would be Frank. She’s got tons of Facebook friends, I know because I checked, but not a lot of real up-close and touch-em people in her life. The band is kind of insular in that way. They stick together.”
Leith was thinking about the cellphone. He told Fairchild, “If you could find out who her provider is—”
“Rogers,” Spacey said. “I checked.”
Leith nodded at her. “Contact Rogers,” he told Fairchild. “Crack the code, get a printout of her call and text history.”
“I’ll get on it,” Fairchild said. “I’ll see what I can do about a data dump, but it may take a while. For starters I can grab some screenshots. How far you want me to go back, Dave?”
Leith suggested a month.
Fairchild put the question out about the Isuzu — which was being scoured for evidence by his team even as they spoke — why it had stalled, whether an engine could be sabotaged without leaving a trace. Leith didn’t know the answer. Nobody did, not even the fountain of knowledge named Bosko. Giroux said she’d ask Jim of Duncan’s Auto Repair; he’d know.
Spacey passed around a snapshot of Kiera Rilkoff and Frank Law. Leith had only glanced at the photo earlier, and he took the time to study it now, Kiera smiling gorgeously at the camera, her boyfriend seated beside her, also smiling. Frank’s smile could be judged gorgeous too, he supposed, if the judge was a young girl.
Frank Law, like Kiera, was white, in his early twenties. He had longish hair, dirty blond, and in the photo he wore a clingy black short-sleeved shirt, a thorny tattoo banding his upper bicep. Leith angled the photograph to Giroux. “Any kind of a record on this guy?”
She nodded. “Pretty minor. Assault, few years back. Got one year probation and a stern eye from the judge is about it.”
“Domestic?”
“No, he pushed a guy. Or punched him, depending on which one of them you believe. The guy fell down. It was just stupid, really, but this guy who fell down was a building inspector. We couldn’t just let it slide. Building inspectors have it rough enough, without letting it be known you can push ’em and get away with it, eh.”
Leith passed the photo sideways to Dion and said to nobody in particular, “Girl like this could have her share of stalkers, right? Even without the celebrity status.”
Across from him Corporal Fairchild added to the thought. “She could have her share of anybody. Maybe she did, and maybe Frank didn’t like it. Why is nobody asking why she was heading up to see his brother?”
The team canvassed the issue, but it entered the realm of conjecture, and Leith, suffering the first pangs of indigestion, didn’t take part. The waitress came by, checking if anyone wanted refills. Nobody wanted more coffee except Giroux, a woman who bragged she only needed four hours’ sleep a night. Constable Dion asked for another Coke and ice, and when he received it and stuck the straw in his mouth, Leith felt obliged to turn to him with a warning, thinly disguised as chummy advice. “You heard the latest on sugar, right? They’ve discovered it makes lab rats stupid.”
He didn’t feel chummy about it at all. He was genuinely concerned about stupidity in the ranks, and this man, he could see at a glance, needed to hold onto as many brain cells as he had left.
Constable Dion set down his glass and gave him a blank stare. “’Scuse me?”
Too late, Leith thought. “Forget it,” he said, and watched Dion do just that, returning to the sandwich like it was some kind of do-or-die challenge. Leith glared at him a moment longer and then told the team, “Tomorrow first thing I’ll talk to Frank out in Kispiox, and if he’s agreeable, I’ll get Forensics in there, the sooner the better.” To Giroux he said, “I wouldn’t mind if you came with me to do the introductions. After Frank, we’ll just have to plough through the rest of the band as fast as we can. I also want to talk to Frank’s brothers, Rob and Lenny. Especially Rob.”
Spacey said, “Getting hold of Rob isn’t easy. He’s a workaholic, spends a lot of nights in the Atco up on the cut block. He’s there now, and I can’t reach him to call him in for an interview. No cell service up there, and his satellite phone’s either down or disconnected.”
“Well, somebody’s gotta go haul him down here, then,” Leith said, hoping it wouldn’t be himself doing the hauling. He wasn’t afraid of Rob Law, but he was afraid of that fucking road, the painful crawl along a precipice, tires thumping over the rough-furrowed snow. Nobody around here seemed much fazed by that particular road, but he was a prairie boy, and verticals just weren’t in his genes.
Fairchild shook his head. “Get him on his trucker chat-channel. Or one of his crew’s. Get the message out that he’s to come and see you or face a warrant. We don’t have time or resources to go chasing our witnesses up mountainsides. Not here, not now.”
“Amen,” Leith said. “I’ll leave it to you, then.”
“No problem,” Fairchild said.
“Well, maybe we can work it into a viewing of the trailhead tomorrow,” Bosko offered, countering Fairchild’s great suggestion in that long-winded, easygoing manner that was starting to grate on Leith. “We could go up and take a look around the crime scene in the light of day, then head up to the cut block, if that’s what Rob Law prefers, which might be preferable for us too. Sometimes it’s better talking to people on their own turf. What d’you think, Dave?”
Leith eyed him coldly. “That works too.”
He went about dividing up the rest of the interviews, with Spacey making notes. The songs playing distantly on the radio were melancholy, making Leith crave beer, but drinking wasn’t in the cards tonight. The meeting began to wind down, and there followe
d some less formal chit-chat and housekeeping matters. Giroux talked about disbursements and accommodations for the out-of-towners, Leith from Prince Rupert, Bosko from the Lower Mainland, Fairchild from Terrace, and the dumbass temp from Smithers, Dion, who was too busy cramming the last of his sandwich to notice he was being addressed, which made Giroux raise her voice in irritation and flap her hand at his face. “Constable. Yes, that’s you. Did you get yourself a room yet?”
With mouth full, Dion stared across at her.
A familiar anger began to crawl in Leith’s veins, and for good reason. Sometimes, somehow, a real bonehead crossed the recruitment hurdle and made it onto the force. Dion was one of those, just out of training, shell-shocked by the grim reality of his job. Probably expected respect, glamour, fun. Probably on day one he’d been posted roadside for eight hours with a radar gun in his hand and was already balking. Well, fuck you, we’ve all done it, Leith thought.
Maladjustment was just the base of the problem; the reputation of the force was at stake, and by extension the reputation of Leith. As though scandals and leadership issues weren’t bad enough, last year a bonehead rookie such as this one, under his command, had blown an investigation, costing the Crown a rock-solid conviction. It was a big case, and the acquittal still left a genuine twinge of pain in Leith’s chest when he thought of it.
So no, he didn’t find stupidity in the ranks funny. And neither did Renee Giroux, who barked at the temp now, “I take that as a no. So, not for the first time, please get yourself booked in over at the Super 8 and bring in the paperwork. Got that? It’s right across the highway there.”
Everyone watched Constable Dion absorbing the instructions, and Corporal Fairchild asked him, “Up from the city, are you? Touch of culture shock? How’d I guess? Easy. You got that what’s with all these fucking trees look about you. Where’s the malls? Where’s the Starbucks?”
Cold Girl Page 4