“Yes, sir.”
“They’ll know they’re being looked at, and they’ll be upset and need soothing,” he told the team. “Let them know it’s only procedural and hope they accept it. Any interview I’m not at personally I’ll be monitoring, so make sure they’re all well recorded. And I mean press ‘record.’” At the back of the room, Dion didn’t look up to meet his glare. “At one point we may turn on the fear,” Leith finished. “But you’ll get fair warning. It’s got to be coordinated.”
The team, which had doubled in size over the week, listened and nodded, and probably more or less got the message. The expanding investigation brought more members every day, and soon Leith feared he would have to commandeer the school gym or some other space with breathing room. The facts were building up like sediment, none of it helpful. All had been put before the team, in hopes that it might snag a real lead. The fingerprints on the cellphone belonged to Kiera only. Same with the barrette. Hairs had been caught in the barrette, and they belonged to Kiera. Fibres had been extracted from the snow, along with the pink body glitter. The fibres were synthetic, from a so-far unknown fabric, and the glitter was no match to that found on John Potter’s victims, or to any known body-glitter brand.
Leith glanced at Sergeant Mike Bosko, always trying to gauge the man’s mood. The gauging had something to do with his own ambitions, and something to do with a growing apprehension of the real reason for Bosko’s presence. When Bosko wasn’t giving advice from the sidelines, he was out there like a journalist, asking questions. Getting to know the beast, he’d said over drinks.
Now Bosko stood at the crowded perimeter, hands in pockets. He was looking not at Leith but toward the back of the room, either at the Mr. Coffee machine or beyond it to Constable Dion busy making notes. He had no good reason to look at either.
Leith was sore from talking. He rapped on the whiteboard behind him and closed the meeting with a final word of inspiration for the troops: “There’s the strategy. Now for the action.”
* * *
Fortunately for Dion, he didn’t have to worry about strategy or action. Following the briefing, he was back at his computer, going through vehicle registrations for the area in an expanding radius, listing the owners of trucks and making phone calls. Others were following up on that list out in the field, actually eyeballing those trucks. The north was huge and sparsely populated, and there was a lot of driving involved. He was just grateful not to be out battling the wind and ice and slippery asphalt.
There was a Post-It note stuck to the glass of his monitor on which he had written the vehicle description, to keep him focussed. Without that Post-It, in no time he would end up looking for something like a late-model blue sedan among all these names and numbers, instead of …
He glanced at the sticky again. Wt pickup, 10+ YO 2-wheel drive, blk glassed rear window.
In one of the briefings, somebody had said they thought the black glass was maybe just temporary, that peel-off crap. Somebody else had pointed out from personal experience that that peel-off crap was not so easy to peel off. A person would have to spend a day scraping, steaming, and vacuuming to get rid of all traces of the stuff, and even then on a forensic level they would fail. And according to the transcription on file, the trucker, Caplin, had been re-interviewed, and he said it wasn’t that peel-off tinting crap, in his opinion. That stuff had a purplish tinge and wasn’t, whatchoocallit, opaque. Even with a bit of ambient light from high-beams glaring off snow, you could see shapes through it and whatnot. No, this, he said, was black glass, as in black.
Dion didn’t think the truck would ever surface, at least not with telltale black glass installed. Whoever was driving it that night down that mountain would have known they’d been spotted, and if they had just committed a serious crime like abduction, they would know they would be tracked down eventually. The glass would have to go.
There were other ways of making glass dark, aside from the tinting film. You could spray-paint the window. That would make it opaque, and the paint could potentially later be removed. Or an even faster and easier fix, duct-tape up some kind of dark material, paper or fabric, or even, say, black garbage bags. Fabric would be more light-absorbent, though. Black velvet. At night, in the headlights, glass covered in black velvet would look simply black. Like the night pressing in on Scottie’s window. Black.
It wasn’t likely permanent custom-installed black glass. If a truck with black glass for a rear window was driving about, somebody would have seen it previously and remembered it. Neighbours would for sure remember something like that, let alone friends or family. So unless it was from out of town and just passing through, which he didn’t believe was the case, then it didn’t exist. Which meant the glass was darkened temporarily, which meant the abduction, or an abduction, at least, was premeditated.
Were the other windows tinted? Probably not, for the same reason: People would remember an older truck with all-tinted windows. What would be the good of blacking out the rear window, then, when there were front and side windows to worry about as well?
He considered further, pen in hand, doodling cubes within cubes in ballpoint, until he’d answered his own question. Because it was better than nothing. It simply cut down the odds of being identified.
So the crime was premeditated but rushed. Haphazard. He was almost there, almost had the answer, but he was distracted, and it slipped away. He could sense a superior in the room, somewhere behind him, and he sat straighter and got back on task. Except he’d forgotten what that task was and had to check the sticky once again. White pickup, ten years or older …
* * *
Hazelton didn’t have a “soft” interview room, exactly, a place set up to relax the subject rather than intimidate. But somebody at some point had read the new guidelines and made the effort, placing two chunky upholstered chairs against one wall with a coffee table in between, fake flowers and an array of magazines. The effect was odd, at best, like chandeliers in a fast food joint. The classic hard table and three hard chairs remained in the centre. Frank Law sat in one chair, Leith and Bosko occupying the others. This final re-interview, like all the others they’d ground through all day long, was being video-recorded.
Frank hadn’t shaved, apparently hadn’t showered, probably hadn’t slept much since Saturday. There were not just rings of shadow around his eyes, but grooves, like a super-fast aging. Leith’s opening approach was gentle. “You’ve been dating the girl forever and probably know her better than anybody. How does she deal with stress? Does she bottle it up, let it all out? Does she sulk, get drunk, go for a jog, or what?”
Interestingly, Frank wasn’t swallowing the ran away scenario. “Number one,” he said. “She doesn’t get stressed. Anything bugs her, she talks about it. She’s stronger than anyone I know. If she had a problem, she wouldn’t run away from it. She’d run at it and wrestle it to the ground. That day she went away to think things over, but she wasn’t running away. You can forget that idea.”
“Right. So what’s the alternative? If she’d gotten lost on the mountain, we’d have found her by now, dead or alive. But we haven’t. An unidentified truck was seen driving down the road just down from the Matax in the hours of her disappearance. And you’re sure you don’t know a truck of that description? Forget the black glass, just the truck itself?”
Frank shook his head. “Can’t think of anybody owns a truck like that, other than that list I gave you already.”
“None of which were white.”
“Well then, I can’t help you.”
Leith opened the folder he’d brought with him, thick with documents cluttered with columns of numbers in what looked like two-point type. The production orders for the phone records had given him what he wanted, a kind of numerical eagle’s eye view of all the chatter that had gone on between the parties in the days leading up to Kiera’s vanishing. It also documented the silences. He said, “
You two used to text or call several times a day. Lately I’m seeing a lot of gaps. You were pissed off with each other, and it came to a boiling point on Saturday. There was a fight. She was injured. Is that what happened?”
Frank’s face twisted in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?”
“Now’s the time to tell me, Frank,” Leith said.
“Now’s the time to show you this,” Frank said, and gave him the finger. He got up and walked out.
Leith didn’t stop him. With Frank gone, he gave instructions to Spacey to apply for warrants, and then joined Giroux in her office to make it official. “Things aren’t happening on their own. Guess it’s time we made them.”
Eight
Turn on the Fear
LEITH PLANNED TO MAKE things happen by picking up Frank Law the following morning and placing him under arrest, searching his house again, making a racket. The arrest wouldn’t hold past twenty-four hours, but maybe, as Bosko suggested, those twenty-four hours would stir the waters. Being a pessimist at heart, Leith expected they’d just muddy them.
A meeting was held, all staff including auxiliaries and temps crammed into the case room again at the crack of dawn so they knew what was happening and how to deal with questions about the arrest from the public. Or abuse, or death threats. The warrants had been approved, and after the meeting Leith and Giroux and two constables in battle gear, Spacey and Ecton, drove out in separate vehicles to the Law house in the woods and made the arrest. Behind them came the search team.
Frank and Lenny Law were both at home, but Rob was absent. Frank was silent and grim but submitted to the arrest and went along without a fuss. The fuss, Leith fully expected, was yet to come.
* * *
The search warrant had gone through, and Dion had his first real look around the Law home. It wasn’t tidy, was well lived-in and messy, which kept him well occupied in his role of searching the living room. So far, nothing stood out within the mess, nothing the warrant gave him permission to seize. He studied the floorboards near the woodstove and crouched to pick up a tiny shred of paper that stood out from the other debris. The Law brothers fed paper trash into the woodstove, he guessed, and this had fallen out of the latest bin or bag.
The shred was about four inches long and not even a quarter-inch wide at one end. Good quality paper, not newsprint. Sharp-edged, not ragged. Kind of like a shredder scrap, except it narrowed to a point. It had plainly been slashed from a book, maybe using a straight-edge for cutting, but without mathematical precision.
He read the partial printed sentence. It is vitally important not to believe them, or they will suddenly
It sounded like some kind of instruction manual. Don’t believe who? he wondered. Suddenly what?
He showed it to the exhibit custodian, one of the latest members to join the expanding team, a Sergeant McIntyre from Terrace. McIntyre shook his head, not interested.
Dion stood holding the bit of paper, feeling homesick. As an investigator, he should have some say whether this was interesting or not. It was interesting because it was from a book, and this was a house without books, except for the few lined up on a shelf in Lenny Law’s bedroom. So what was the book, and who had cut it up? Had Lenny? Why? All valid questions, it seemed to him, that deserved at least some inquiry.
Anything not seized had to be left where it was, so he wrote the line into his notebook, dropped the scrap on the floor by the woodstove where he’d found it, and continued his search, looking for anything Corporal McIntyre considered worthy of a second glance.
* * *
The fuss Leith expected began soon after the arrest of Frank Law. Lenny had spread the word, and the word flew. Within half an hour, the detachment’s phone started ringing. Journalists were rerouted by reception, and all other calls were patched through to Giroux’s desk. Bosko happened to pick up the first of the calls, since Giroux had stepped out for a minute. She returned as the call ended, and Bosko picked up a Danish to go with his coffee before relaying the message, in what sounded like an accurate paraphrase: “Rob Law’s coming down here to get his brother out, if it means killing us all.”
Bosko didn’t seem alarmed, and neither did Giroux, who muttered, “Rob’s not exactly the brains in the family.”
Was nobody but Leith thinking about bulletproof vests and pepper spray, or maybe just a good hiding spot? He said, “Kill us all? All of us? Did he mean it?”
Bosko shook his head and spoke around a mouth full of pastry. “No. But he’s upset. He’s got a bit of a drive ahead of him. He’ll calm down by the time he reaches us.”
Leith took the next two calls. Stella Marshall asked him what was going on. She got no satisfactory answer and ended up the call saying they had the wrong guy, that it was typical police scapegoating, and that she knew a lawyer from the city who’d make sure the Hazelton detachment was sued so hard, it would spend the rest of its life picking up pop cans for a living.
Mercy Blackwood phoned, not to rant but to reason. She asked what was happening and insisted Frank was innocent and didn’t belong in jail. She knew Frank wouldn’t hurt a soul. Leith promised her that Frank was speaking to a lawyer right now, and there would be no abuse of process.
Rob Law appeared within the hour, but he didn’t kill anybody or even overturn a desk. He spoke with Bosko for fifteen minutes or so in the privacy of Giroux’s office and then left quietly enough.
An anonymous tip came in, too, in the form of a note stuck to the windshield of one of the cruisers parked along the curb. The note said:
We seen Lenny Law Saturday night on Two Mile Rode
Leith found Two Mile Road on the map and followed it along with his eyes from start to end, thinking Lenny Law couldn’t have been there on Saturday night, because he was loitering about the malls of Prince George with his pal Tex.
Tracking down the writer of the note would be tough. He or she would be one of the hundreds of residents of the Hazeltons who had been canvassed in the first days of the search and asked about Lenny, amongst other things. Now, with the heat coming down, the writer of the note was afraid of being implicated in a lie, and since that person hadn’t been alone when they’d supposedly seen Lenny, as the note said “we,” the writer of the note feared their companion would talk first.
The simple but complicated logic scrolled through Leith’s mind as he looked at the wet and grubby little note, and it left him irritated. The writer was mistaken, or Lenny was lying about where he was on Saturday. Either way he would have to be brought in, along with Tex, and questioned once more. Leith called Jayne Spacey and told her to hunt him down.
There was more drama in the late afternoon when Scott Rourke made a personal appearance, the kind that sent papers flying, and had to be escorted out by Constables Thackray and Ecton. Thackray and Ecton returned, dusting their hands and laughing, and Spacey came along soon after, accompanied by a truculent Lenny Law.
Leith sat down with the kid in the interview room. The best approach was direct, he decided, and he laid the note on the table, read it aloud, looked Lenny in the eyes, and said, “So what about it?”
Lenny Law’s approach was even more direct. Arms crossed, he looked Leith in the eyes, and said, “Yeah, so?”
“Yeah, so why’d you tell us you were in Prince George?”
“I was supposed to be is why. Frank thought I was there.”
“You’re going to have to explain yourself. I’m confused.”
Lenny sighed. “I get up Saturday, and Frank’s decided I should go to George with Tex. I said no, I don’t want to go. He said yes, you damn well go, and in fact he’d already called Tex, and Tex was on his way over. He gave me a bunch of spending money and practically pushed me out the door. I know why he wanted me out of there, too, because the rehearsals were shit, and they didn’t want me sitting around hearing them doing fuck-all for Ms. Blackworm.”
Leith op
ened his mouth and shut it. The boy was glowing with emotion, angry as a bee, but he was on a roll, and it was best to just let him spew.
“You want to know why the rehearsals were shit?” the boy went on. “Because of her, Ms. Blackworm, coming around, telling them to be like this, be like that, Kiera should go on the treadmill, Frank should cap his teeth, add some theatre to their act, get professional, making them think they’re something they’re not. She wants them to use other people’s songs, and far as I know, that’s called intellectual theft, right?”
Leith thought it wise to agree and nodded his encouragement.
Lenny finished on a lamer note. “They’re all on edge, ever since she came along with her big ideas. That’s why I didn’t go to George.”
“I don’t get the connection,” Leith said. “Sorry.”
Lenny steamed in silence for a moment and then said ominously, “Something was going to happen. I could feel it. I couldn’t just leave them here by themselves, could I?”
“Something as in what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something between Frank and Kiera? Were they angry with each other?”
“No,” Lenny snapped. “Frank and Kiera are the most in-love people in the world. They’d never do anything to hurt each other, ever.”
Leith knew all too well how the most in-love people in the world could hurt each other. He said, “Where was Kiera when you left the house with Tex?”
“She was gone. Everyone was gone except Frank.”
“And you didn’t go to Prince George?”
“No. I got Tex to dump me just outside of town and walked back. He promised he’d cover for me, but that’s all. He didn’t do anything wrong, so don’t go harassing him.”
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