Cold Girl

by R. M. Greenaway

  Jayne Spacey laughed and blew ice water through her straw at Dion’s face, making him blink. Mike Bosko looked at the temp with brief interest — and maybe only Leith caught his slight double-take — then turned back to Giroux, who was asking him something.

  “So where exactly do you call home, Mike?”

  “I’m kind of between homes right now,” Bosko told her. “I was in Vancouver for four years, with Commercial Crimes, and I’m making the move over to North Van to help rewire their Serious Crimes Unit. Just needs some tweaking here and there, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

  “From white collar to SCU to clambering about in the mountains,” Giroux said. “Impressive.”

  Spacey leaned forward in a sparkly way, getting Bosko’s attention. “Does your rewiring include seeking out new talent by any chance, sir?”

  He smiled back at her. “It certainly does.”

  The exchange got Leith’s attention, and he checked Bosko’s face, trying to see if he meant it about the talent search. If so, it might mean an opening for him too. He wasn’t so sure he wanted it, these days, a radical move to the glittering metropolis. Fifteen years ago, leaving his home in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, to join the RCMP, he’d set his sails for the bright lights of Vancouver, but now that he was comfortably lodged in Prince Rupert, a place he liked, the idea of leaving seemed about as doable as relocating to Mars. Or maybe he was just scared.

  He shifted back in his seat, vaguely depressed, imagining being stuck in dingy backrooms like this for the rest of his working life. On the other hand, stalwarts like him were needed here as everywhere. Missing kids like Kiera Rilkoff needed him.

  His depression deepened, no longer for himself, but for her. Whatever anybody thought, he knew this would be no happy ending. The girl had crossed paths with somebody bad, and was either dead or in that person’s control. He heard Bosko and Spacey discussing North Vancouver, what a great city it was, that buzzing beehive to the south, and from the corner of his eye he noticed Constable Dion had become interested for the first time in something other than his own plate, and the something was Mike Bosko’s face. Was there recognition in his stare, along with a touch of anger? Leith looked at Bosko, thinking he must surely feel the heat of attention, but apparently Bosko didn’t.

  Anyway, Leith realized, it wasn’t a stare so much as a sustained glance, and already Dion was tuned out again. But Bosko’s earlier double-take, together with Dion’s sustained glance, told him something about these two: They either knew each other or knew something of each other, and yet neither wanted to admit it. It was a puzzle, but probably just his imagination at work. And even if it wasn’t his imagination, it was certainly none of his business.

  The remaining dishes were cleared from the table. An old Harry Nilsson song was on the radio, muted and sad. The SAR people were out there, working hard through the night, FLIR-equipped choppers raking the mountains. APBs were broadcast and reinforcements were on their way for a search that was going to spread ever outward till she was found or resources ran dry. There was nothing more Leith could do right now but rest up for tomorrow. He declared the meeting over and ordered everyone to get a few hours of sleep. All team heads would be up and at it bright and early, for if the Rockabilly Princess was being held by a predator with a pickup truck, there was no question about it: her time was fast running out.

  Two

  Questions

  TALK AT THE CATALINA Cafe had gone on past midnight, and Leith hadn’t made it to his motel bed until one thirty. He woke in the morning when it was still dark out, missing Alison, and missing her more as he stood, toothbrush in hand, and observed the lumps and bumps of his homely face in the bathroom mirror. He’d forgotten all the domestic unhappiness and slamming of doors and the howling child and his aching head. All he knew was he missed them both. Ali and Izzy, his girls.

  His home away from home was a room on the second floor of a long, boxy, two-storey Super 8 motel set right on the highway, mid-range, furnished in the usual murky browns and golds like every other inn Leith had ever been stuck in, not a destination but a contingency for the working traveller. Depending on how things went, he could be struck in this Gyproc haven for days, maybe weeks, along with a growing legion of out-of-towners. For now the team was relatively small.

  The corridor outside his room was hushed and empty, a hive of sleeping souls. Downstairs in the diner he found Fairchild and Bosko already with coffee in front of them. The only other resident out-of-towner on the case so far, Constable Dion, was nowhere to be seen. The three men had a quick breakfast, asking each other how they’d slept, exchanged motel horror stories, then sat in their vehicles and crossed the silent highway to the small Hazelton detachment.

  Small was an understatement. It was a low, squarish building probably built sometime in the seventies, posted with the backlit RCMP signage out front, but otherwise innocuous as a laundromat. The kind of place that would make wandering criminals feel right at home as they cased the town, Leith had told Giroux last night, still seated in the Catalina’s back room with her and Bosko following the dinner briefing. “It’s better than anarchy,” Giroux had answered. Anyway, it would soon be replaced with something bigger and better, and she’d passed over photos not of her nieces and nephews but the architectural rendering of the project to be. In a few years, she said, no more little straw house. She’d be living in brick. “That makes you the smart little pig,” Leith had pointed out.

  Unfortunately, for now they were stuck with the straw, hazy under the pre-dawn glow of lamp standards. Inside, he left Bosko and Fairchild in the main room, busy on their respective BlackBerrys at their temporary desks, and found Giroux in her little office, moving colour-coded magnets around her organizational white board. Like the detachment itself, the woman put up an unlikely face of the law, a little middle-aged Métis lady with slightly crazy eyes that always seemed widened on the verge of outrage. Leith, like probably a lot of people, had assumed Renee Giroux had gained her office via reverse discrimination, a local native, female, getting the boost to show the RCMP’s non-sexist forward momentum and open-mindedness. But Phil Prentice had once enlightened Leith to the truth over beers: Renee Giroux had got where she was by the sheer digging in of her stubborn little heels. And she wasn’t local, either, but had blown over like a travelling weed from eastern Canada, made this her home, and refused to budge. She’d started out as a constable at the age of twenty-two and served under a score of commanding officers, mostly big white guys like Leith himself, and against the odds her wit and hard work and loyalty and sheer rootedness had finally paid off, and she’d made corporal, and then sergeant, and now she was officially the queen of this little mud-hole called the Hazeltons.

  “Why are you so set on it?” Leith had asked her last night. They’d left the Catalina and were standing at their vehicles, hunching against the bitter wind funnelling down the broad highway, no sign of life in this poverty-stricken little shanty town of hers. “Awesome place,” she’d said, and pointed up to what Leith saw only as midnight skies layered with clouds of thunder grey. “Stood under that mountain there and fell in love, said this is where I’m going to die.”

  That was what she said last night. Now she said, “Morning, Big City. You’re late.”

  On some level, Leith liked the nickname she’d stuck on him some years ago. It flattered him, which in turn made him feel foolish, because Prince Rupert, City of Rainbows, was hardly a big city; it was a largish funky fishing village on the stormy north coast. He wasn’t awake enough to bandy about cheerful greetings. “You said six thirty.”

  The crazy eyes widened at him. “Yes, which means six fifteen. Okay? So Spacey’s organized herself and Thackray to canvass the Bell 3 for any workers that slipped our radar last night, and I got whatshisname, Dion, out looking for Lenny Law. Sound good?”

  Lenny Law was Frank Law’s younger brother, one of many witnesses who neede
d to be rounded up. An important witness, one of the last few to see Kiera on the day of her vanishing. Leith said, “Oh. I figured he slept in.”

  “Who?”

  “Dion.”

  “No, actually, he was in bright and early. Unlike you.”

  This was Giroux’s territory, but it was Leith’s case, and he knew there would be some jostling before they got comfortable in their roles. So far the jostling was fairly amiable, and if they didn’t bite each other’s heads off first, it should stay that way. “Fine,” he said.

  “Great. Then I’m ready to go tackle our prime suspect, as you called him last night about five times without any grounds whatsoever.”

  She pulled on her RCMP-decalled jacket as she spoke, heavy-duty blue nylon, and Leith said, “Yes, and I stick to my guns on that. And by the way, we’re going out there without backup. Should I be worried?”

  The jacket swamped her, made her comical. She said, “Worried? About Frank? No. He’s a musician.”

  “Last I heard, musicians can be mean too. He’s got a police record involving fists, and I saw the picture. He’s covered in the kind of tattoos that say ‘make-my-day.’ I don’t get along well with people covered in tattoos. You ask me, we should err on the side of caution and take along a uniform. What we in the big city call ‘backup’.”

  She laughed. “Get real. I know Frank. He’s a sweetheart. You got a gun, don’t you?”

  “I’d rather not use it.”

  She snorted, and with that won the argument.

  They sat in her vehicle, the dinged black Crown Vic he’d seen parked up on the mountain last night. Like her jacket, the steering wheel looked a couple sizes too big for her. “They live over the bridge and deep in the woods,” she said, conjuring up another children’s classic to brand the boys neatly. “I call ’em the three bears.”

  Rob, Frank, and Lenny Law.

  “Bears,” Leith said, regretting he hadn’t insisted on that backup. An extra 9mm at the sidelines would be nice, at least till he got a feel for the players in this thing. Being in unfamiliar territory didn’t help. He had worked in the Hazeltons before, but never in depth. The land here was huge and wild, dense with pine and poplar, riddled with rivers and gorges, and within all that chaos of nature sat this starburst of small communities linked by long, meandering roads, much of it barely charted. So, yes, he was a little uneasy.

  “And I say it again,” Giroux said. She had fired up the Crown Vic’s eight lusty cylinders and lunged the car out through the chain-linked lot onto the avenue. “And this is why. He’s got an alibi for the time she went missing, unless it’s a three-way conspiracy, which I guess we can’t discount. And he was the first to put on his boots and go out searching. And he searched till he bled,” she added, the Queen of Hyperbole. “They had to drag him in half- dead from the cold. If that’s not sweet, what is?”

  Leith sighed.

  “It’s your case,” she added. “But my people. So just keep that in mind.”

  By my people she meant all the registered locals, he realized. Not just the dark-skinned Aboriginals that populated much of the north. Whites were the minority in the Hazeltons, but not by far, and they too belonged to Renee Giroux.

  Clouds had gathered, thick. A few flakes fluttered down, not nearly the whiteout of last night. Giroux steered them through Two Mile, through Old Town, over the bridge that spanned a rather gut-wrenching canyon, and on for another quarter hour down a narrow, snowy backroad, finally turning into a driveway made of tire ruts.

  The driveway seemed to go on forever, dead straight through a young poplar forest, ending in a clearing, and through the windshield Leith saw a big ugly rancher set down amongst the trees with all the grace of a beer can on a beach. Powder blue, vinyl-sided, green metal roof sloping at a shallow pitch. Machinery and cars and clutter in the yard. The kind of place a pit bull would run around looking for man-sized snacks. He kept an eye out but saw no animals lurking in the gloom.

  “Been out here before?” he asked.

  “Once,” she said, puffing vapour ghosts. “About four years back. That incident I told you about. House was just bare bones then. The Law boys built it pretty much on their own. Dispute with the building inspector became a verbal firestorm and ended in Marty — that’s the inspector — on his ass. Frank did his penance, and far as I know it never happened again. Far as I know, Frank and Marty still drink together.”

  Up on the porch, Giroux rapped her knuckles on the door. Leith, listening for dogs still, saw deck chairs, ashtrays, beer cans, and what was probably a mega-gas barbecue under a tarp. The three bears enjoyed their house in the woods, it seemed. Heavy wool blankets thrown over the deck chairs suggested they enjoyed it even on a cold winter day.

  The door opened, and he got his first look at his only real suspect so far, Frank Law. The guy was twenty-three, still at the concave-gut stage of life, a lanky powerhouse. Tallish, lightly bearded, eye sockets dented by what was maybe exhaustion, maybe guilt, maybe a good brew of both. “Anything?” he asked.

  “Sorry, nothing yet,” Giroux said. “Frank, this is Constable Leith, up from Prince Rupert. He’s come to make sure we look in all the right places, okay?”

  Frank looked far from reassured but allowed them in with a good show of manners. In the living room, among more macho mess and the not-so-faint smell of pot smoke, they took seats.

  Leith fiddled with his pocket recorder, prefaced the recording with date and time and who all was present, and asked Frank to take them to the beginning, starting from the day before Kiera had gone missing, that being Friday. “Just take your time,” he said, “and give me a visual replay of everything you can remember, okay?”

  “Friday,” Frank said. His voice was husky and sore. “Helped Rob up on the landing all morning, bucking some old windfall out of the way for the crew. I left for home about four. It was getting dark. Rob stayed on alone, breaking his own rules. You don’t work alone in this business unless you got a death wish, but there’s only so far you can push him, and he just shuts you out. That’s Rob. Anyway, he’s got these new lights set up there, wants to get his money’s worth. Told me not to worry. So I didn’t.” His frown deepened, and he seemed already lost. Giroux prompted him with an encouraging murmur, and he gave a start and carried on. “Friday night. Came back, had dinner with Lenny and Kiera. She came over for dinner.”

  He didn’t recall the conversation around the dinner table or what they’d done that evening except watch some dumb show on TV. Leith asked if Kiera had mentioned anything out of the ordinary happening in her life, if she’d met anyone, even just a casual encounter. Did she have any special plans for the upcoming days?

  Frank didn’t recall anything unusual in their conversation. Kiera went home pretty early, around ten o’clock. Frank went to bed soon after.

  Leith asked him about the day that really mattered now, Saturday. “Just go through it, minute by minute. What happened?”

  “I got up about seven thirty, had toast and coffee.”

  “And Rob had stayed up on the mountain, right? What about Lenny? Was he around?”

  Frank scowled. “Sleeps like a pile of rocks these days. He’s seventeen. Such a shitty age. Used to be our soundman, and a good one, but lost interest. Lost interest in everything, pretty well.”

  Leith studied Frank’s downturned lashes, the troubled lines of his face, his shoulders, that almost visible inner quaking of emotional trauma. Not a cruel man, but poss­ibly a killer. Anybody could be, really.

  Frank went ploughing on, talking in machine-gun bursts now, like all he wanted was to get this over with. “So Lenny was in his room, and Kiera came over a bit later than she said, nearly nine. We’d agreed on eight thirty.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  He shrugged. “Kind of. No big deal. I was already setting up the equipment. We went over some of the music, played a bit, w
aited for the others to show up.”

  “You have an in-house studio?”

  “Top of the line,” Frank said, sitting straighter and flicking hair out of his eyes. “Just finished last November. To die for.” He looked pugnacious as he said it, as though daring Leith to contradict him. Now he was glum again. Leith prompted him back on track.

  “Chad and Stella showed up minutes after Kiera, around nine, quarter after,” Frank said. “Chad’s wrecked his truck, so he caught a ride in with Stella.”

  Chad was Chad Oman, the band’s drummer. He was native, local born, once a bit of a troublemaker, according to Giroux, but nothing worse than the usual teenage joie de vivre. Now that he was in his twenties, working at the Home Hardware, and with a great career as a drummer on the horizon, he was behaving “pretty good.” And Stella was Stella Marshall, also a band member, also local born, also in her early twenties, who apparently played the electric fiddle.

  Frank described how the band had rehearsed for a couple of hours, till lunch break. More to get a sense of the group dynamics than anything, Leith asked if it had been a good rehearsal. The answer was short, snappy, and surprising. “No,” Frank said. “It was crappy. Got nothing accomplished. It’s the pressure. We need to get this demo put together by the end of the month because the last one bombed, so we were all just on edge. Especially Kiera. So we took an early break, and I put out some food, but nobody seemed hungry. Kiera said she was going out for a while, and she just took off. Drove off in her truck. It was just after noon, I guess.”

  “Did you see which way she went?” Leith asked, though he knew the answer before Frank shook his head. There was only one way she could have gone by vehicle, and that was off down that long, tree-shrouded driveway. Unless somebody followed her, they couldn’t know which way she went once she hit the narrow two-lane Kispiox Road, whether it was south toward town or north toward the Kispiox Range, where her truck had been found.