Cold Girl

by R. M. Greenaway

  Giroux started the car and drove away from the Royal Bank, turning onto yet another small byway that connected the communities. Dion watched homes and ranch land, river and roadside bushes blur by. Nadia had said, “Don’t look too far forward or too far back, one step at a time, sweetie.” That’s what she’d always called him, sweetie, in her South Pacific accent. He’d taken the name at face value until it dawned on him that was what she called everyone she was trying to bend back into shape. Sweetie. It meant nothing, like pet meant nothing from Giroux.

  She was sharing her thoughts again as she drove along, maybe because she wasn’t giving up on him so easy, but more likely because she was in the habit of talking to herself aloud. “Poor Kiera, if that sick freak from Terrace got his hands on her. At least now we have something to work with, hey?”

  Dion turned her way and tried to sound smart, not with the usual yes ma’am but a full sentence, complete with theory attached. “The pickup sighting, right. Black glass, that should narrow it down. In fact —” he said, and the words were knocked from his head as the world went into a skid. He grabbed for the dashboard, heart slamming, and found that instead of slithering into the second catastrophic collision in his life the car was idling safely at the side of the road.

  “Damn,” Giroux said. “I forgot all about them. The photos.”

  Without explanation, she carved a U-turn on the frosty asphalt and headed back the way they had come.

  “It was inadvertent,” she said, not so much to Dion as to the windshield, which wasn’t clearing properly, fogged at the edges. “They were right there on the counter by the coffee maker, and I wanted to ask Frank if I could look at ’em, because maybe they were from the day in question. But I put ’em in my pocket and forgot.”

  They crossed the frightening chasm bridge to an area Dion was familiar with, the road to Scottie Rourke’s trailer, but turned instead down somebody’s driveway, where Giroux slowed to a crawl, for it was barely a lane tunnelling through branches. A minute later, no house in sight, she stopped the car and let it rumble on standby. Here she sat rock still, hands on the wheel, looking up. Dion followed her stare at the clouded sky, chopped by branches. The branches were fine, pale and leafless. Giroux said, “Well, since I have ’em, might as well take a quick look. Hand me my bag there, would you?”

  He watched her draw a white drug-store envelope from the handbag, about six inches by eight, and from it she brought a thin stack of what he saw as glossy photographs. “Who does the snapshot thing these days, with all your digital slideshows and whatnot?” Giroux asked herself. “Nobody but my Aunt Jean and the three bears, I guess. They’re probably Lenny’s, actually. He’s the sentimental one in the family. The reader of books, the poet. The historian.” She shuffled through the pictures, shaking her head, giving a brief running narrative. “Nope, nope, not even from winter, obviously. There’s Kiera. What a pretty smile she’s got, hey?”

  She showed him the picture, but too fast for Dion to absorb, and kept shuffling.

  Excluded, he sat waiting. Out the side window, high up in the endless grey, a hawk of some kind wheeled in a slow drift out of sight. The Chev had settled into waiting mode and purred quietly. “These are from the summer,” Giroux said. “Rob with his new truck, looking like a proud dad. Frank jumping in the river. Kiera again.” She paused on a photograph and said, “Who’s this? Don’t know this girl at all.”

  She angled the shot at Dion, and he caught a glimpse of a young woman in an ice-blue shirt, native, the young woman from the fall fair, and Giroux had maybe noticed his inner lurch, because she searched his face. “You okay? Going to be sick? For god’s sake, get out of my car and do it in the bushes.”

  “No, just …” he said, and stalled. The girl in the photo wasn’t the girl at the fair, of course not. That would be crazy. But she was a reminder of a sick feeling past and a sick feeling present, that he hadn’t done up the report, a double failure.

  Giroux was still fixed on him, sharp-eyed, peeling back his thoughts. She tapped the picture at him. “This picture startled you? Why? You know her?”

  He didn’t take the photo from her but looked at the image, a black-haired girl, somewhere in her late teens or early twenties, hard to judge. The ice-blue T-shirt he’d seen at first glance was actually a sky-blue summer dress. She had soft round shoulders and had turned her face down with the reticence of so many native girls he’d dealt with in life, all in the line of duty, down in the Lower Mainland, where most native guys he confronted were belligerent, and most native girls looked they would rather disappear than have to face the world and all its tough questions. The girl in the picture didn’t look like she was in a bad place. She was at a kitchen counter here, cutting vegetables, and though she hid from the camera, he could sense she was smiling.

  He squeezed his eyes shut for the beat of a moment and saw the girl at the fair like it was yesterday, walking away. How could someone forever walking away never go away? She would keep walking away and dragging him along till she pulled him under. He spoke heavily, looking pointedly at the photograph. “That could be Charlie West. Rob Law’s fiancée, or was, from Dease Lake. She left him last fall. I meant to type it up.”

  Giroux drew in a loud breath. “And how the hell do you know all that?”

  “Scott Rourke told me. I had meant to put it in my report —”

  “You already said that. Why didn’t you? You forgot?”

  Worse than forgot, he’d procrastinated. “It didn’t seem important,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “And what the hell conversation is this, with Scott Rourke?”

  “I have this watch, needs fixing, just asked him —”

  “Yeah, okay.” The woman in charge of his life sighed, and in that breath he felt himself dismissed, papers to follow. “You don’t make calls like that, what’s important and what isn’t, till you’ve got some status,” she said. “Which doesn’t look promising. Though I’m not much of a role model, am I, grabbing evidence without a warrant? Better get this back to them before I get sued for trespass.”

  She rolled the car the rest of the way down the driveway, where a boxy blue house sat, and climbed out of the car. Dion followed. She walked up the steps, knocked on the door, then banged on it, and eventually a boy opened in tank top and pajama bottoms, the youngest brother, Lenny Law, looking wretched and under-slept. Nobody else was home, he told Giroux, letting her and Dion pass inside. Frank and Rob were up there, he said, gesturing vaguely to heaven. Working. The house was cold. Giroux asked him why he wasn’t in school.

  “I am,” he said, crushing an eye with a palm.

  “Oh right, I forgot,” she said. “Homeschooler. I won’t keep you. Just wanted to stop by and see how you’re doing, okay? You and your brothers. Can we sit down a minute?”

  He rolled his eyes and made a show of just how baggy-faced and irritable he was feeling, but nodded.

  “It’s an icebox in here,” Giroux said. “Go put on a robe or you’ll catch pneumonia.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “That’s an order.”

  He went off to do as he was told, and Giroux slipped into the kitchen. She came back with a cup of coffee in hand. “Always coffee on the go here,” she told Dion with a wink. “It’s terrible. You want some?”

  He didn’t want coffee. Lenny returned, swaddled in not a robe but a heavy cardigan, and Giroux said, “Tell me about Charlie West.”

  His brows went up. “Charlie? What’s to tell?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But if she knew Kiera, I want to know about it. That’s all.”

  The boy shrugged. “She was Rob’s girlfriend for a while. They were supposed to get married, but it didn’t work out. She left at the end of last summer. Went back home. To Dease.”

  Dion watched the boy, wanting to pin him down on her date of departure. Did she go straight home? Any chance she’d go
south instead? While he was considering opening his mouth to ask just that, Giroux said, “Does she stay in touch?”

  “No way. And if she tried, she’d get blown off. She’s burned her bridges in this house, leaving Rob like that.”

  “You have any photos of her, so I can have something for the file?”

  “I did,” he said, with sudden anger. “They disappeared. Probably Rob got rid of them.”

  “Well, have another look around,” Giroux said. “How did Charlie and Kiera get along?”

  Another shrug. “Fine. Charlie was quiet. She was always just kind of there.”

  “D’you have her contact info? I’d like to talk to her all the same.”

  This was what Dion was waiting for. He held his breath.

  “I don’t know why you’d bother,” Lenny said. “What, you’re thinking Kiera and Charlie ran off together?” He brayed a snarky laugh. Dion stopped holding his breath and frowned, watching the kid laugh, and watched the smile fade back to glum, and willed Giroux to get tough, ask more questions.

  Giroux said, “Get her number for me, would you?”

  “She doesn’t have a cellphone.”

  “How about a home number?”

  “You’ll have to get it off Rob,” Lenny said. “He might have something. Unless he threw it away, which he probably did. He was pissed off when she left.”

  “Well, tell him to look for it and call it in to me, okay?”

  Lenny nodded and saw them out. Out on the driveway, Giroux gave Dion the car keys and said, “Better get used to it.”

  Driving back, a few clicks slower than Giroux seemed to appreciate, he reflected on the look on Lenny’s face when he’d opened the door, a kind of fear he’d seen before and should be able to categorize, but couldn’t quite. And the strange laugh, full of contempt, but concealing some kind of pain. In the passenger seat Giroux said, “’Course Rob won’t call in with that number, but like Lenny says, why bother. Just look up her stats for the file and fill it in as best you can. Think you can do that for me, fill in the blanks?” She didn’t sound optimistic.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and for a change he was one step ahead of her. “I will.”

  * * *

  Once all the sleuthing was done, the rest, Leith realized, was basically a crapshoot. A chance sighting of a pickup truck heading down a mountain, for instance, can take a case out of the fridge and back onto the burner. Which always got his blood coursing. He was in Terrace, the middle-sized city that sat between Rupert and the Hazeltons, probable base of operations for the Pickup Killer, though probably not his home. Because of the pickup sighting by Dean Caplin the trucker, Leith was here turning the stones over once again, re-interviewing witnesses, having all local security footages reviewed from the last weekend, scrambling the map points and timelines and trying the gestalt thing. He wasn’t great at gestalt, but it didn’t stop him trying.

  But he’d been at it too long without a break, back here in Terrace like a recycling bad dream, and he could see himself running into yet another brick wall. He tried not to punch something in frustration, but when deep breaths and happy thoughts didn’t work, he hammered his own thigh with a fist hard enough to hurt. Mike Bosko, standing at the pin board nearby, said, “Problem?”

  “All it’s done is throw doubts all over my best leads,” Leith complained. “I have to start a whole new category of what-ifs now. Frankly, it’s bullshit. I don’t think it’s him.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  Yes and no. Ironically, Kiera had a better chance of being alive if she was with this particular lunatic, who liked to savour his prey for days. But it was the ugliest silver lining Leith could imagine. He didn’t answer.

  “There’s this fellow, Andrew Blair,” Bosko said. He was facing the board where all the key info was pinned. “Why isn’t he front and centre?”

  “Because we looked him up, down, and sideways. All we got on him is he said something to somebody which led to a Crimestoppers tip, which led to nothing.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Something about women and where they belong,” Leith said. “Something any natural-born dickhead in a bar would say when talking to his buddies.” He didn’t add it was something his own misogynistic asshole buddies might say in bars, in fact.

  “And what did he say when you asked him about it?”

  “Not much. Apologized and admitted he’s a dickhead. Maybe not those exact words.” Leith flipped through files until he had the statement and handed it over.

  Bosko sat and read through it, then set it aside. “I don’t know. You’re right, there’s nothing to grab onto here. And I’m no profiler by any means, but he’s the only one that clicks in place for me.”

  “I talked to him myself,” Leith said, the uneasiness filtering back in, tightening his belly muscles. One of his most enduring fears was that he would be the sloppy one, the detective who couldn’t read the evidence, the one to let another murder happen on his watch. “No alarms went off,” he said, and knew it wasn’t true. He reviewed the statement with a scowl, closed his eyes to see the big picture, and conjured up Andy Blair, that person of interest, and he felt it again: Blair was one of the faces that had continued to nudge even when cleared, if only in the back of his mind. Blair lived in Terrace, and the profilers said the killer didn’t, but profilers could be wrong. “Yes,” he said. “We should at least check where he was on Saturday.”

  Bosko said, “The guy’s got the resources, anyway.”

  And that was a big reason it nagged. Blair had access to trucks. An assortment of them, new and used. Which might explain the variations in the witness reportings.

  Leith reached for the phone to round Blair up, but Bosko stopped him. “Hang on. Let’s save him the trip and see where he works.”

  They drove together to the Terrace Chev dealership owned by Blair’s father, where Andy did anything that needed doing, apparently, from selling cars to detailing them. “There’s a lot of used trucks here, as well as new,” Leith said as they left their SUV and headed for the glass doors of the showroom. “They gave us access to the records, and we found nothing in them that jibed with the abductions. But Blair being second in command here, he could fiddle the numbers and we’d never know. Believe me, I looked into it. Nothing panned out.”

  They found Blair inside at the main desk, feet up, chatting with the receptionist. The woman, like most car dealership receptionists, should have been a runway model. Blair was nowhere close to runway material. He was thirty-seven, on the comfortable side of ugly, had no criminal record, wasn’t a troublemaker, had a long-term girlfriend and a healthy set of friends. Lately, he drove a little Ford Focus.

  Blair rose from his chair with a salesman’s grin, which didn’t cool even as he recognized Leith as the cop who’d harassed him no end some months ago. He reached, shook hands, nodded as Bosko introduced himself, and took them to a sleek little office with a set of chairs, desk, and computer. He offered coffee, cracked a used-car-salesman joke or two, and waited for the questions Leith would throw at him.

  “There’s been another disappearance,” Leith said. “So we’re basically re-canvassing old ground, right?”

  “What, another girl?” Blair looked at Leith, looked at Bosko, snapped his fingers and said, “Kiera Rilkoff? It was in the paper. She’s kind of a big name down in Hazelton there, so they made a big deal about it. You know, I’ve seen ’em play, her and her band. They did a gig at a benefit concert here, I forget for what. She was outstanding, if you’re into that kind of thing. Terrible. So you’re thinking it’s the Pickup Killer strikes again? Hazelton’s a bit out of his usual range, isn’t it?”

  “It’s really not that far,” Leith said. “If you have a truck. So what were you up to this past weekend?”

  Working, Blair explained. The girlfriend was away, and he’d watched
an amateur game at the local rink, had a buddy over for beer, Friday night. Was alone Saturday, nursing a bit of a hangover, and didn’t see anybody and didn’t go out.

  Which left him without an alibi for the critical time. Leith said he’d like to look around the lot. “Be my guest,” Blair said. “Especially take a look at the newest Camaro. Very hot.”

  Colourful flags with Chev logos flapped under a dull winter sun. The detectives walked the entire car lot like a pair of hard-to-please buyers. They looked into the shop, asked to see the recent sales records, and even checked the side avenues for overflow inventory. There was no white pickup with black glass in sight.

  Leith was feeling one part energized and nine parts spent. He had found the devil — he believed it, if for no clear reason — but was nowhere near able to rattle its bones.

  * * *

  The evening took Dion back to Rourke’s neat junkyard, parking his cruiser alongside the dingy trailer. He was off duty now, in civvies except for the work boots and rugged RCMP parka, which he needed against the cold.

  Rourke told him to come on in. He followed the fix-all into the depths of the trailer and met the woman he’d seen only in silhouette before, the one with the wild hair, not Kiera Rilkoff at all. She rose from a heavy velour armchair and said, “You’re the cop with the watch Scottie was talking about, right?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Evangeline Doyle, meet Dudley Do-Right,” Rourke said and took his place at his workbench. “Just putting this thing back together for you, Dudley. Two minutes. Make yourself at home. Get ’im a beer, Evie. And me a fresh one.”

  She was young and pretty, in a pampered way. Far too pretty for an old greaseball like Scottie. And very pale. She belonged on a stage with a name like Peaches ’n Cream, twirling the chrome pole. She brought a beer for Dion and returned to her chair, gesturing at him to take the tatty loveseat across from her. The trailer was warm, and she wore only a gauzy green dress that showed off her long, solid legs. The fabric was shot through with metallic threads so that it gleamed in the lamplight. Her hair, even wilder than he’d seen in silhouette, was orangey-gold. She sat comfortably and watched him with interest. She said, “So, you guys getting anywhere finding Kiera?”