Cold Girl

by R. M. Greenaway

  “Not yet,” he said, about all he was willing to say about the case. “Sorry.”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “I can’t say that.”

  He considered asking Rourke and Evangeline about Charlie West again, but there was really no point. His assigned task to locate the woman had been taken off his hands by Jayne Spacey within minutes of his first attempts, when he was leaving a message with the Dease Lake detachment. Spacey was working on crushing him. She confis­­cated his duties whenever she could, didn’t want him claiming any accomplishments, even small ones. She would tell the boss that Dion couldn’t cope with even this, tracking down contact information, that she had to do it herself.

  In the end, it hardly mattered. He’d checked Spacey’s file notes and saw that she did manage to reach Charlie West in Dease Lake, which meant Charlie wasn’t the girl walking away from the fall fair, which didn’t surprise him, brought no comfort, only crossed out one of a million possibilities.

  A space heater hummed, roasting the air. The beer Evangeline had given him was cold. Rourke brought over the Smiths and handed it to its owner, almost tenderly. “You’re lucky,” he said. “It’s not every repairman who keeps every bit of junk he ever comes across in his whole godforsaken life. I got a shoebox full of watch corpses. Happened to find one that matches close enough, and I replaced the gizmo, there, and put it all back together. I don’t guarantee eternity, but she’s got another ten years under the belt, easy.”

  Dion listened to the watch ticking, and it sounded robust. He strapped it to his wrist and felt whole again, ready to take on the world. Rourke was back at his workbench, beer in hand. “No sir, they don’t make things like they used to. It’s a setup. Everything you buy self-destructs on deadline, otherwise known as warranty expiration. Right, Evie?”

  “Absolutely,” said Evangeline from her armchair. She pulled a knee up and embraced it, smiling at Dion.

  He returned the smile briefly. He was running on an empty stomach, and even a few sips of beer, combined with the relief at having his Smiths back in running order, made him feel light, happier than he’d felt in months. He said to Rourke, “Are you really incorporated?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Watch it, Scottie,” Evangeline said. “He’s a cop.”

  “You could say I’m incorporated,” Rourke said. He was tinkering with something at his bench, back turned on his guest. “In the broad sense.”

  “He doesn’t even know what incorporated means,” Evangeline told Dion. “Leave the guy alone. It just sounds good. Like you tack ‘esquire’ behind your name, when you’re for sure no squire.”

  “Oh, I’d never do that,” Dion said. He swallowed beer, taking in the environment, feeling present. Integral. Evangeline’s arm moved and her bracelet caught the light, shooting turquoise sparks into his eyes. “So, are you Scottish?” he said to Rourke’s back. Rourke wore overalls and a tank top, neither flattering his ribby frame.

  “Sort of Norwegian-Mohawk strain,” Rourke said. “Bit of this, bit of that.”

  “He’s a mongrel,” Evangeline said. “But no Scot in Scottie. You can ignore the name.”

  Rourke said, “And what kind of a name is Dion, anyway? Dion. Sounds girly.”

  “It’s my surname.”

  “Well, obviously,” Evangeline said. “You got a regular name?”

  He downed more beer, watching her watching him, safe enough at the moment, with Rourke’s focus down his magnifying glass. “No, I don’t have one, actually.”

  “Like hell you don’t have one,” Rourke said. “Everyone’s got a first name. It’s the law.”

  “It’s probably a really goofy name he’s embarrassed to say,” Evangeline said, eyes gleaming. “Like Jasper, or Stanley. To go with the haircut.”

  Dion checked his watch once more and compared it with the satellite-perfect time on his cellphone. Dead on. “You fixed it, Rourke,” he said. “Guess that means I’d better pay you.” He pulled out his wallet and riffled through it. Not that there was much to riffle. His pay rate had been chopped since November, since vehicular triple somersaults and crash landings and diminished capacity. The short-term disability payments had stopped the moment he’d been cleared to return to full-time employment, and none of it mattered a bit anyway, now that he was back in working order. “How much do I owe you?”

  Rourke turned around. “Honestly, the time it took me fixing that thing, you’d owe me your next ten paycheques. But give me thirty and we’ll call it even.”

  “Scottie’s such a shark,” Evangeline said and lazily noodled an index finger around her temple, for Dion’s eyes only.

  “Thirty-five,” Rourke said.

  Dion gave him a fifty and said to keep the change.

  Rourke snapped the bill and held it up to the light. “No, come on, fifty?”

  “Keep it. It’s worth it to me.”

  “Boy, you really are attached to that ticker, aren’t you? I guess you being a cop, I’d better give you a receipt, right?”

  “Forget it.” The mean northern wind had blown up over the last little while, gathering force, and was now rattling the trailer. The windows were pitch black. Dion looked at the pitch-black windows and thought about a pickup truck with a black rear window. He could hear something outside, sounded like those voices again, trying to tell him something, and his transient sense of well-being began to slip away. “I should get going.”

  “You should have another beer,” Rourke corrected, scribbling a receipt. “Evie, get our guest another cold one.”

  “So long as he knows he’s going to have to arrest himself for DUI,” Evangeline said but did as told, rose from her armchair and wandered to the kitchenette.

  Next to Dion the wall was covered in photographs, the ones he’d seen on his first visit, all stuck up with pushpins. Now he threw caution to the wind and had a better look, thinking of Sergeant Giroux’s remark. Who does the snapshot thing these days? But Rourke was a bit of a throwback, didn’t belong in the digital age. Many of the snapshots here were old and faded anyway, he saw, their colours washed out to blue. Quite a few newer shots of Kiera, but Kiera was a celebrity, and the camera loved her, and he didn’t think obsession could be read into it. Kiera on stage, singing, backed up by her group. Kiera embracing friends, including this old greaseball, Scott Rourke. Kiera crouched down chatting with a toddler, riding a horse, grinning at the camera. There were pictures of Frank Law, too, one person of interest Dion hadn’t met, other than seeing him down there on the stage last fall.

  There was a recent-looking shot of Evangeline, and several of the Law brothers over the years. This was Lenny, probably, as a boy, couldn’t be more than four or five, which meant Rourke had known the brothers at least a dozen years. There was a more recent picture of Rourke standing between the two older Law brothers, Rob and Frank, an arm hooked around each of their necks and pulling them to him, like an affectionate dad with two grown sons horsing around in the backyard.

  There were even more faded shots, probably from Rourke’s childhood, and some of his years as a young and not-so-bad looking man, before the scar. None of Rourke’s dead wife, though. Naturally enough.

  Evangeline delivered the fresh bottle of Kokanee to Dion’s hand and stood so close for a moment that he could smell the soap and perfume and the slight mildew of a dress grabbed from a pile on the floor. Rourke was talking about what he’d do to the bastard responsible for Kiera’s disappearance when he got his hands on the sick piece of trash. Rourke was 99 percent certain the Pickup Killer was responsible. “And let me tell you,” he was saying. “It’s not just me. There’s a whole posse of us ready to hang him high. You can bet your cotton socks on that, my friend. And there’s nothing you bleeding-heart cops are going to be able to do about it. Somehow or other, that sonofabitch is going to get himself strung up from the tallest tree in t
he valley.”

  “I wouldn’t talk like that if I were you,” Dion said, not quite serious, but not quite joking either. “Not with me around. I’ll have to remember this conversation when we’re cutting that sonofabitch down.”

  “Yeah, Scottie, keep your big mouth shut,” Evangeline said, back in her chair. And flapping a hand at Dion, dismissing the death threats, “Don’t listen to him. He talks big, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Oh, he’d do a lot worse, Dion thought. Not quite twenty years ago, Scott Rourke had come home a day early from a hunting expedition and caught his wife with a lover. He’d grabbed a baseball bat and clobbered the shit out of the man. The man had lived, but like Dion, he was left with a badly altered trajectory. And the wife, well, she was collateral damage: jumped in a lake and surfaced dead. Dion had heard mention of it in the Wednesday night briefing, and had checked his computer for the details on his own time. If Evangeline was unaware of the violence in her boyfriend’s bones, somebody ought to tell her, and soon.

  “You live in this area?” he asked her. “I get the feeling you’re not from around here.”

  She rested her chin in her palm and challenged him with a stare. “What gives you that feeling?”

  She looked and moved and talked and smelled like city, that’s what. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just —”

  “Just quit chatting up my woman,” Rourke interrupted with mock menace, arms crossed, staring across the gloom at Dion.

  There was not much fun in the mock menace, though, and Dion made sure to keep his eyes and conversation, if not his thoughts, well off Scottie’s girl.

  Six

  Aam niin (You are good)

  MORNING HAD BROKEN, and down in the Super 8’s diner over coffee and toast, Dion had folded aside his paper and was mostly listening.

  “I had a pal once,” the old Indian named Willy told him, turtle-slow. They were sitting at the window booth, sharing the view on highway and windblown litter. “He’s Gitxsan. Looks lot like you. You got some Gitxsan in you, not so far off.”

  It was a statement, not a question, and probably as wrong as Giroux calling him Cree. “Lot like you,” Willy repeated, nodding. “Name is Johnny.”

  “Oh, so that’s why you keep calling me that.”

  “Hey?”

  “Forget it. What happened to him?”

  “Dead. It’s years ago, before you came into this world. He’s dancing now … at the big powwow in the sky.”

  Dion shut an eye in case his collar was being yanked. But Willy’s expression, side-lit by the low morning light and gnarled by age, gave nothing away.

  “So how’d he die?”

  No answer came. Willy seemed to go adrift, unlit cigarette clamped between his puckered lips. Dion dropped his attention back to the news of the day, stale breaking news from the Lower Mainland, all that murder and mayhem he was forced to watch from the sidelines.

  “Drowned,” Willy said, minutes later. “Twenty-two.”

  “That’s too bad. Was he a good friend?”

  “No. He’s a liar and a cheat and he drinks too much. We worked together. Deckhands. Trawlers, just out of Rupert.”

  “Oh. So it happened on the job, did it?”

  “No. Fell in the river, down here.” Willy’s bluish left eye and semi-clear right eye stared at Dion fiercely, as if he’d had something to do with the tragedy.

  “So how did it happen?”

  Again no answer, and this time it seemed there would be none any time soon. Willy was looking at his own hands on the tabletop, cradling the cup of coffee Dion had ordered for him.

  “Well, tell me about it tomorrow,” Dion said. He pushed Willy’s book of Eddy Lites across the table. “It’s bad for you, you know that? Bad for me too.”

  “I know. Tried to quit. Can’t.”

  “Go ahead, few puffs, then put it out.”

  “Aam niin,” Willy said, slowly. Slow even for him. It was an annoying habit of his, teaching. “You are good,” he translated, and waited.

  “Aam niin,” Dion said. “You are good.”

  Willy struck a match to light his hand-rolled. He took a pull then sat back pluming smoke like a chip-burner. “I will teach you not Gitxsan,” he said. “I will teach you Nisga’a, my language. But close enough. Don’t want to lose the language.”

  “Thanks, no. I have a hard enough time with English.”

  But the old Indian sat there being willfully deaf, nodding to himself, making plans. “It’s a good thing,” he said. He put out his cigarette and tapped at his own chest, somewhere over his heart. “Time to come home, eh?”

  * * *

  Andy Blair was being watched, everywhere he went, and the surveillers weren’t shy about it, ranged around the Chev dealership in their shiny cars and trucks. “Maybe now he’ll break a sweat,” Leith said from the office, pushing papers around, waiting for something to give.

  In the afternoon it gave, in the shape of Andy Blair’s father Clive, local big shot, owner of the dealership, with Andy pushed and prodded in front of him through the police station doors. “Little asshole has something to tell you,” Clive told the desk constable and marched out.

  Andy Blair’s hair and clothes hadn’t settled back into shape after whatever shaking he’d just received. Leith sat down with him in the nastiest of the Terrace interview rooms and said, “What is it your dad wants you to tell me, Andy?”

  “Nothing. He thinks I’ve been taking cars off the lot without permission and joyriding. Not true. I grew out of joyriding long time ago.”

  “Oh, so your dad’s just assumed you’re the Pickup Killer for no reason, is that right? You have nothing to say to that except he’s wrong?”

  “He didn’t say I’m the Pickup Killer. He said I have something to tell you. Which I have not. That’s where he’s wrong.”

  Leith chose to lose his patience at this point, a faster escalation than usual, but he didn’t have the luxury of time. “I’m here investigating the Pickup Killer,” he blasted. “And your father knows it. He’s not going to turn you in for some minor infraction, is he? What’s it about, Andy? You need a lawyer? You want me to get you a lawyer so we can get to the truth without fucking around here?”

  Blair’s eyes widened. “Oh, c’mon. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Is that what your father’s going to tell me?”

  Blair’s thumbs twiddled fast, like whirligigs in a storm. “I maybe helped out a friend once or twice, let him take a truck out. Not the good ones. The trade-in junk from the back of the lot. And it wasn’t for any killing sprees, that I can swear to.” He lifted the left hand in oath and switched swiftly to the right, and grinned, not a criminal, just a charming brat.

  Leith sat for a moment, looking at the brat, wondering. Blair could be a sociopath, but he didn’t think so. “Who’s the friend?”

  He expected more waffling and instead got a straight-up answer, at least a partial. “John. Not a friend, really. Just an acquaintance.”

  “John’s got a last name?”

  “I don’t know. Knew him on first-name basis only.”

  Leith stood with purpose, and Blair said, “No, wait, I remember. John Portman. No, Porter. No, Potter. Yeah, Potter. John Potter.”

  Leith was back in his chair, asking who exactly John Potter was and where he lived. The name was familiar in only the foggiest way, one name of thousands he’d maybe read on a list in the course of the investigation. But that was good; if the name were on a list, they’d find him. They’d drag him into the light and scrutinize him, if this was actually going anywhere.

  Blair said he didn’t know where Potter lived, but he had the feeling it wasn’t close. Or what he did for a living. Some kind of a contractor, he believed.

  Leith said, “So you helped him out. Go on.”

  “He wanted to buy this old t
rade-in truck, it was a 2004 Tacoma, I think, not in good shape, which I told him so. But I slapped on the plates and let him take it for the spin. Around the block, he said. It must have been a pretty big block, ’cause he brought it back about a week later. So we had a fight about it and came to terms. It was a misunderstanding, okay? A miscommunication. He acknowledged that and paid me under the table for the inconvenience. Which I declared on my income tax as ‘other,’ by the way. You can check.”

  Leith didn’t care about the payoff at this point. He wanted more on Mr. Potter, and he wanted to tread softly now. Treading softly wasn’t his forte, so he did as Blair did, twiddled his thumbs. Not fast, but slow, a kind of metronome. “You grabbed a copy of the guy’s BCDL, I take it, before he took the truck out?”

  Blair seemed to gaze into the past. “Hell, I must have at least looked at his driver’s licence. Might not have copied it. Not for a spin around the block.” He flung up both hands in surrender. “I know, I know, it’s the law. But I spent my week in hell. Learned my lesson. Never cut corners again. Dad never found out, ’cause I’m in charge of inventory. So in the end I thought, hey, no harm done. No big deal, right?”

  “Can we narrow it down to a date, when Potter took this Tacoma?”

  Blair smiled. “Nope, sorry.”

  But he was nervous, Leith could tell. No longer twiddling, but twitchy and damp. “So why’d you let him take a vehicle a second time, if he caused you so much trouble on the first one?”

  “Huh? What second time? I never said there was a second time.”

  “You said once or twice.”

  “Manner of speaking. I meant once.”

  Leith stood again, this time with no show of threat. “Hang on a moment. Be right back. You want a coffee?”

  In the case room, he sat down with Bosko and told him what he had. “He’s lying. He thinks he’s a smooth operator, but he’s a fool. It lights up in flashing neon across his forehead, I’m lying now. He’s always been like this, cocky but scared. The fact he’s scared is interesting, because there’s no paper trail, and we can’t prove anything. So whatever it is he’s covering up, it’s serious. I think he’s trapped into this lie. I think he wants out, but he can’t make a move. The question is, should I charge him now so I can lean on him properly? Or keep cajoling.”