“You walked back home to Kispiox?”
Lenny smirked. “No way, man. Frank would be pissed if I showed up there after he’d sent me packing. I went to my parents’ place.”
“You stayed with your parents?” Leith asked, surprised. He’d read an interview with Roland and Clara Law, typed up by Constable Dion, which said in black and white — albeit Dion’s black and white — that they hadn’t seen any of their sons in years.
“I stayed in their old gazebo thing,” Lenny said. “Out back. I stash a bag there, a book or two, hang out sometimes, whenever I want to get away from Frank. He can be a real old lady.”
Leith briefly marvelled that there existed a teenaged boy who read books, and without a cattle prod. “And your parents don’t know you’re there?”
Lenny Law gave a mean laugh and asked if he could go now. He said he was hungry and tired, and Leith had no right to detain him.
Leith let him go and sat thinking. Lenny’s words hadn’t shed new light on the situation, exactly, just a different pall. The tension within the band was ramping up, if Lenny could be believed. Kids could be wildly inaccurate in their statements, but usually Leith could find a grain of truth in there worthy of follow-up.
The day ended and nothing further came in, not from Frank Law’s mouth or further anonymous tipsters or the community at large. Nothing but a higher stone wall, Leith thought, gloomily enjoying his metaphors, and the waters were indeed muddied. Still, Bosko seemed pleased. He had told Leith in an aside, “They sure do love Frank, don’t they?”
Across the squad room, the big man was now talking to Giroux about something less serious. Beer, it sounded like. Leith scowled and eavesdropped. Microbreweries, calories, and warm versus cold. Giroux maybe saw him scowling and called across the room to him, “So we’re going up to my place to confer about all this stuff further. Top brass only, but you’re invited too. Coming?”
* * *
As he pulled his jacket on, Dion asked Jayne Spacey out for a beer, thinking that after a pint or two maybe she’d edge toward forgiveness. But she was great at holding a grudge, it seemed, and told him that no, she’d love to except she’d stepped in a big pile of dog crap and was looking forward to spending the evening cleaning her boots. There was wit and sarcasm in that, but there was also true hatred. He’d noticed the other constables seemed to like him less too, even easygoing Thackray, and Pam the desk clerk. No smiles, no attempts at small talk. And maybe it was just himself, or maybe it was something Spacey had said about him, a half-truth of some kind. Or outright lie.
He signed out, drove to the IGA for a deli wrap, then returned to his car and followed his fold-up tourist map northeast out of town, looking for somewhere wild where he couldn’t possibly run into anybody he knew. Using the cruiser for recreation wasn’t permitted, but this wasn’t recreation any more than driving out to the Black Bear for dinner was, and they all did that. The map led through Kispiox, more or less where Scott Rourke lived, but splitting off onto a different gravel road. He landed on an outcrop of rock, where he left the car and walked down a steep trail criss-crossed with dirt bike tracks, down to where the map said a river would flow. And it did, broad and ice-cluttered, green and strong.
From studying maps and brochures, he knew this water had shed off the mountain ranges to the north, joining forces to become this, the Skeena. The river travelled through the land, past his boots, down around that S-bend, and on for another five hundred kilometres before releasing into the ocean at Prince Rupert.
He felt bloodless, not quite alive, and his eyes were watering in the wind. The cold day grew colder as the sun went down, leaving the world steel grey and thunder blue. He sat on a fallen log with a first-class view of the water coursing by on its endless journey. On the far shore those ragged black trees towered into the sky. There was a muted feel to the place, as if his ears were plugged, but he could hear the throaty roar of the river and the clack and thud of rocks in its depth, shifted by the current. The river had muscle, and resolve. Nothing would stop it getting to where it wanted to go.
He sighed and looked down, pushed back the cuff of his jacket, and looked at the face of his watch, knowing what he’d see. Not quite an hour ago he had adjusted its hands as he waited for his deli dinner to be wrapped and bagged. The watch told him forty-five minutes had passed. With sinking heart he checked it against his phone, and there was the living proof. The watch was off by seven minutes, and Scott Rourke had failed in keeping it alive, and so would the greatest surgeon in the world, and what good was a watch that couldn’t keep time?
The light was fading fast, and Dion was alone. He unstrapped the Smiths. Down by the edge of the water he coiled back his arm and released with a hoarse shout of rage. The watch arced out and down, into an open patch of water and disappeared.
He stood a moment longer and then grabbed up the deli bag and walked back through light forest and across the wild-grass fields and up the steep four-by-four trail to his car.
Having no watch, and not wanting to be always checking his phone for the time, he drove to the drug store in Old Hazelton, stepped into the store, and spun the watch rack for a while, choosing a black plastic Timex with LCD display and backlighting. Water-resistant up to two hundred metres, it said, and it had a one-year warranty.
The watch cost him $49.99, plus GST, a blowout special. He drew out his wallet and chanced to look around and meet the stare of the woman in line behind him. She was tall and solid and pale, bundled in a long, puffy parka and fluffy pink scarf. Her hair was long, almost white-blond, her arms loaded with a supersized pack of Charmin TP, and it took him a moment to place her as Stella Marshall, the fiddler in the band.
“Well, hey,” she said. “Just the man I wanted to talk to.”
He nodded hello, found his debit card, gave it to the teller. When he was handed the receipt, the fiddler said, “Don’t run off, now. I’ll just pay for this stuff and be with you in a sec.”
Darkness had fallen by now. He waited outside by his cruiser, removing the packaging of the Timex. He still hadn’t figured out how to set it to the correct time when Marshall approached. She threw the TP into the back seat of a beat-up red Sunbird and came over to him, saying, “Here, let me.”
She set the time in a few moves and gave it back to him. He thanked her and strapped it on. He tested the backlight button and pretended to be impressed. She said, “Now you owe me one. You can start by telling me what’s going on. Why are you charging him? What proof do you have? Tell me that.”
The instructions from the early morning briefing were simple. Frank was being arrested. If approached by the public with questions about the arrest, the questioner was to be directed to the officers in charge, Giroux or Bosko or Leith. That didn’t mean Dion couldn’t chat with people who had information to offer, and he probably should, and probably would have, if there had been any steel left in him. But there wasn’t. “I’m just a temp,” he said. “You’ll have to go down to the detachment and talk to somebody in charge. Or I can give you the number.”
Out in the open parking lot, the air was icy cold. Marshall’s long hair and pink scarf took turns lifting then plastering across her face. She elbowed the tangles away and pointed across the road to a fish and chip joint that looked closed, not least because of the flip-around sign that was flipped around to closed. “Let’s go sit down before we freeze to death. I have to tell you something, and it’s a matter of life and death.”
“Like I said —”
“And like I said, I have something to tell you, and you’re going to listen. That’s your job, right? To listen to the good citizens of the world?”
“I think they’re closed,” he said.
“They’re not closed, just stupid.”
They crossed the road and stepped into the little restaurant. The doorbell tinkled, but nobody emerged. A radio was playing on a pop station. Marshall turned
the sign around to open then went behind the counter and poured two cups of coffee. She brought them around and ordered Dion to sit. Not there. There. He sat in the booth she’d chosen, and she sat across from him. She said, “They actually serve really good fish and chips, if you can catch ’em. Now, get out your notebook and write this down.”
He brought out his duty notebook, found the first blank page, and wrote down the date and time. Marshall said, “He didn’t do it. Write that down.”
He wrote down nothing. He said, “What d’you have to tell me, Ms. Marshall?”
She sipped her coffee in silence for a minute, watching him watching her. She spoke softly. “Please call me Stella. Say it. Stella. It’s not so hard.”
“I told you, and I mean it, I’m not the right person to be talking to.” He took the cellphone from his jacket’s breast pocket and showed it to her. “Here, I can put you in touch with the office right now, and you can arrange to talk to someone who can be more helpful.”
“I don’t want to talk to someone more helpful,” Stella Marshall said. “Giroux is a nasty little beastie, and those two goons she’s got running around asking questions, I don’t like them at all. I like you. You’re like this spectacular angel-being come out of the blue.”
“Well, thank you. But —”
“I’m not saying that to be nice. It’s just the truth. You’re very uneasy, I can tell. Like me. We’re akin that way. Well, I have no excuse, I was born antsy. But you? You have every right to be uneasy, when you come flapping down expecting sunlight and butterflies, and instead you drop in the mud. New wings, huh?”
Uneasy was a wild understatement. He tried again to end this interview that was going from bad to worse, but stopped and was silent, seeing something wrong; it showed in her pale bulgy eyes and the pulsing of the artery at her throat. Her stream of nonsense was some kind of shield. She was afraid.
She had maybe caught the shift in his demeanour, from shutting her out to listening in, and she seemed to relax, and he wondered if it was all a game with her, and she’d just scored a point. She closed her eyes, and her lashes were white. Not to look at her colourless lashes and not to be duped any further, he looked outside. Past his own reflection, he saw things scuttling and spinning down the street, bits of garbage and clouds of snow crystals racing toward the river.
When she finally spoke, she was no longer coy and bossy, but calm and direct. “Frank and Kiera split up a few months ago,” she said. “It wasn’t official, and they didn’t want anybody to know. But I knew. I also happen to know it was mutual, and it was amicable. There was no jealousy, no anger, no hostility whatsoever. I also happen to know that she was seeing somebody, secretly, because he was married. So they’d meet in different places.”
Like the Matax trailhead, he supposed. He got his pen ready. “What’s his name?”
“That I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“How do you know all the rest of it?”
“I’m inquisitive and have great hearing.”
“And Frank knew about it and was okay with it.”
“Yes. Like I say, they both wanted to move on.”
He saw in her eyes that she loved Frank Law. She had to, to be sitting here making up diversionary bullshit like this, cheapest trick in the book. Unbelievable. He paraphrased her information into his notebook and snapped it shut. “Okay. I’ll pass this on, and somebody will probably be contacting you for a full statement.”
“Oh my god,” she said, dully. He couldn’t interpret the remark, nor would he pursue it. He watched her heave a theatrical sigh and slump back, maybe disgusted with him, or maybe just depressed. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “Thanks for listening. Take care.”
He put money on the table and left, driving back to the Hazelton detachment. Night shift was on duty, two constables he had only met once or twice and whose names he had forgotten. Under the annoying buzz of the fluorescents, he sat at his computer, wrote out the brief report, and filed it. Then he went back to his accommodations across the highway at the Super 8. Passing the room he knew belonged to Sergeant Mike Bosko of the Serious Crimes Unit, North Vancouver, where he had come from himself and where he belonged, he paused and stood before the door, considering its surface. He pulled in air, raised his knuckles, gave a light rap.
Nothing happened. And had that door opened, what would he have said? He wasn’t even sure.
Back in his room, he turned the TV on for company and managed to get some sleep. Sleep was pocked with disturbing dreams, haunted as usual by Looch, who stood on the pavement below the Super 8. Dion looked down and saw the car parked curbside. The river ran beyond instead of the highway, black cottonwoods ranged along the far shore, dense as a wall. Looch wore a dark overcoat and was packing something in the car’s trunk, an awkward parcel like a side of beef bundled in tarpaulin. Looch was leaving town, and Dion was crushed. The wall of trees was a wall of stone looming high into the sky. A figure appeared on the sidewalk, approaching Looch from behind, and Dion tried to open the window to either shout a warning or jump out, but the window wouldn’t open. The figure was nearing and would soon be at Looch’s back, and Dion banged on the glass with both palms until the strain of his foiled efforts woke him.
He had shifted across the bed in a tangle of blankets. He sat and stared at his own hands, pale blue and flickering in the light of the TV. Just a nightmare, but the message in the dream remained, a sour fear in the pit of his stomach. All the things he’d done wrong, the mistakes he’d made, they weren’t buried deep enough. Like the figure on the sidewalk, they were slowly but surely catching up.
Nine
The Walk
SUNRAYS SLASHED ACROSS the village in the morning, but Leith had a feeling it wouldn’t last. Still, there were sparrows twittering in the bushes and at least a remote sense of spring on its way. He stepped into the diner downstairs off the Super 8 lobby, which was empty except for some old guy by the window — no colleagues, no Dion — and had a quick breakfast.
Across the highway at the office, a fresh-faced Renee Giroux handed over an occurrence report for himself and Bosko to look at. Leith went first, scanning over a single paragraph so riddled with typos and incomplete sentences that he had to read between the lines. “‘STELLA MARSHAL,’” he read out, “‘Avised Constable Dion that KEIRA RILKOFF spilt up a few months ago with FRANK LAW. It was by mutual content and.’ Okay, sure.”
“Split, I think,” Giroux said.
“He spelled Rilkoff right,” Leith said. “And mutual. Impressive. Ends the second sentence with ‘and,’ which is probably grammatically incorrect, but hey, what do I know?”
“Mm-hmm,” Bosko remarked, taking his turn reading the report. As he did too often, he seemed to catch Leith’s words but not the inflection, and Leith could never figure out how much of the misunderstanding was deliberate. “Interesting. Dave, you want to talk to the girl, get this story nailed down?”
Leith did not. There weren’t many people he dealt with who made him feel foolish, but Stella Marshall was one. She only had to roll those pale blue eyes in his direction and he felt oversized and dim. “Sure,” he said. “No problem.”
He argued with her on the phone. She was at work and couldn’t come in, so he agreed to meet her at her place of employment.
She was a teller at the Royal Bank in Old Town. The bank wasn’t yet open when he arrived within the hour, but she unlocked for him, let him in, saying, “Good morning, Officer Leith.” She locked the door behind him, mentioned that it was an exceptionally cold morning, and offered coffee.
“No, thanks,” he said. “This’ll be quick. I wanted to talk to you about the statement you gave to Constable Dion last night.”
There was nobody else in the bank, and Stella led him to the manager’s office, a posh little set-up. She lounged in the big leather chair, and Leith sat before her like a man seeking a loan. A man without equity
, in his case.
“I haven’t anything to add to what I told Constable Dion,” she said.
“Well, I have things to ask.”
“So do I.”
He paused, already thrown.
She said, “I understand you want to see my phone records. Am I a suspect?”
“Ma’am, you’re definitely not a suspect. We’re looking at everybody’s records right now, not for anything incriminating, but to help piece together Kiera’s day around the time of her disappearance. It’s a procedural thing. No worries.”
“Okay. Thank you. Your turn.”
He wanted her to pinpoint the date of this alleged lovers’ break up, and she couldn’t, since it was more a slow dissolution and nothing official, and probably nothing Frank was quite ready to admit, at least not to the world at large. “But think about it,” she said. “It was inevitable. He and Kiera have known each other since they were ten. How can you stay in love with someone when there’s nothing left to discover? They both wanted out, and they were very cool-headed about it, and they remained close friends.”
“I heard they were engaged.”
“It was just talk.”
“You say she was seeing somebody else, a married man. It sounds like you know who that person is.”
“No, actually, I don’t. I’m not supposed to know any of it, and I have to say, maybe I’m way off base. It’s just stuff I pick up. Big ears. As I told Constable Dion.”
“You think Kiera met this guy on the Matax on Saturday? Is that what you’re saying?”
She shook her head. “I really don’t know.”
But it was what she wanted them to think. She could be lying, Leith realized, about all of it. Frank Law was under the gun now, and one way she could deflect that suspicion would be invent a new suspect and throw him into the mix, like nuts into the cookie batter. The mystery man on the Matax. He said, “Did Frank have a love interest of his own?”
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