Cold Girl

by R. M. Greenaway

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Was Frank upset with her when she left rehearsal on Saturday?”

  “Yes, just like Chad and I were. It wasn’t great timing on her part. But what could we do? The demo’s a bust anyway. I think we all knew it.”

  Leith heaved a sigh. “How about giving us some names we can discreetly check out, at least. There can’t be that many local men she could be seeing on the sly.”

  She only shook her head, swivelling in her bank manager chair, eying him in that way that made him feel so foolish. “I have no idea. He may be an out-of-towner, a travelling businessman, say. Or a cop. He may be yourself, for all I know.”

  Leith was done, and he stood. “Thanks,” he said. He felt absurdly like a man who’d just been turned down for a loan, stiff and offended, as he turned and walked out of the bank.

  * * *

  The phone records hadn’t yielded much of interest. The ream of paper was more a bog than a useful tool. There had been a flurry of calls between all subjects on Saturday evening, after word spread that Kiera was missing. Leith was more interested in the hours and days leading up to the disappearance.

  As far as he could see, communications between Frank and Kiera had been fairly frequent and friendly. The texts printed out from Kiera’s phone neither proved Stella Marshall’s story of a rift nor disproved it. They weren’t steamy texts at all, but neither were they cool.

  Another call stood out to Leith. At 12:25 that Saturday, soon after Kiera had so inexplicably walked out, around the time Chad and Stella had left the house as well, and possibly Lenny as well, Frank had made one short call. The number turned out to belong to Scott Rourke’s landline, and it lasted about half a minute.

  “Gotta get Rourke’s records too,” Leith told the wall, and made a note to self.

  Frank Law had spoken to his Legal Aid lawyer, Jack Baker, and now he was brought into the New Hazelton interview room, sat down, and given his warnings once again.

  Leith put it to Frank that he and Kiera were no longer a couple, and watched the response with interest. It was odd. Frank yanked his mouth out of shape, blushed, and said, “What? That’s bullshit.”

  Yet he wasn’t completely surprised by the allegation. It wasn’t news to him at all. So, was it true? Maybe, maybe not. Leith followed up on a new suspicion. “Your band is on hold for now, I know that, but do you guys still hang out, you and Stella and Chad?”

  “Not much.”

  But some, and some was enough. “It’s Stella’s idea, isn’t it? She told you to tell us that you and Kiera have broken up. Right? Why would she do that?”

  Frank remained pink-cheeked with anger. “She never told me to say that.”

  “Maybe to throw us off what really happened, d’you think?”

  Frank pulled in a breath and then inclined his upper body forward to give thrust to his question, loud, bitter, and sarcastic: “And what really happened, d’you think?”

  The last thing Leith wanted to do was rile the man up. The interview was being videotaped, and he knew what defence counsel would do with footage of an interrogation that started to climb the walls. There would be endless app-

  lications and voir dires and nasty cross-examination, and he didn’t need another lawyer in his face any more than he needed another ulcer. He backed off and changed subjects, asking Frank instead about that brief call to Scott Rourke.

  “Oh, that,” Frank said, sullen now, the heat seeping away from his cheeks. “I thought I’d call him up after practice shut down early, see if he wanted to go for a beer. Got his answering machine. Didn’t bother leaving a message.”

  Leith looked at the phone records. “Thirty-two seconds. You waited through his recorded spiel, did you?”

  “In case he was screening calls. Said ‘pick up, asshole, it’s me.’ But he didn’t.”

  “He screens his calls? Why?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”

  Leith closed the interview.

  Chad Oman was brought in for a third round of questioning and said he didn’t know anything about the breakup or another man in Kiera’s life. He seemed genuinely surprised at the very idea.

  Nobody the investigators spoke to over the course of the day, friends and family, Kiera’s parents and her sister Grace, knew anything about it. In the late afternoon, after a long and tiresome day, Leith told his colleagues that frankly, in his opinion, the whole thing was a fiction in Stella Marshall’s head, and she should be charged with mischief in the first degree.

  In the late afternoon he chanced to run into Constable Dion in the detachment hallway that led to the rear exit and staff washrooms, and at the time it struck Leith as a good time to chat about that man’s certain weak-kneed questioning of Stella Marshall last night, a witness who’d been apparently eager to talk and might well have had something important to divulge, even if it was an elaboration on a lie. “It’s just one damn good example of when you should have pressed a witness for more information and didn’t,” he finished.

  Dion listened through the advice, wide-eyed, and when Leith was done he gave a short yessir that sounded more like fuck you, and tried to trade places in the narrow hall and move on toward the men’s.

  But Leith wasn’t done. He called after him, “If you hate this job so much, why don’t you do yourself a favour and quit?”

  “I love this job.”

  “You could fool me.”

  “I noticed.”

  “What?”

  “Excuse me. Need to use the washroom.”

  Leith returned to Giroux’s office with a scowl, just in time to hear her new theory, which was just a rehashing of an old theory, that maybe there was another man in the picture, and that his sin wasn’t that he was married but that he was somebody too close for comfort. Namely, Frank’s older brother. “Look at it,” she said, standing by the large Google Earth printout they were using for a map, posted up on the wall and marked with points of interest. She moved her finger between points. “The Matax is halfway up the mountain, not far from Rob’s worksite. What if Rob and Kiera agreed to meet halfway?”

  “There’s no calls between them in the phone records,” Bosko said.

  Giroux had an answer for that too. “Phone records are notoriously easy to check these days, so they thought they’d better set up their meetings the old-fashioned way.”

  “Smoke signals?” Leith said.

  “Ha-ha,” she said. “No. With good old-fashioned words. Set up in advance. They’re both at the house often enough. Brush by each other in the kitchen, pretend to talk about the weather, but they’re actually setting up a time and place. Saturday at 1:00 p.m. at the Matax trailhead, wink wink, slap on the ass. And next thing you know they’re up there, sitting in his truck, whispering sweet nothings and managing to get their rocks off across the console.”

  Leith doubted it. He recalled getting his rocks offs with girls in vehicles — or one girl, one vehicle, one time — in his early twenties. It was an uncomfortable memory, in every sense of the word. But whatever was happening between Kiera and Rob, if anything, wasn’t necessarily lewd. That was just Giroux, who had a way with words. Maybe the two were just talking, figuring out how to break it to Frank. Maybe they argued. Maybe one of them was putting some kind of pressure on the other. Maybe things went terribly wrong.

  Aloud, he said, “Rob is alibied all Saturday, but that aside, you have to consider this. He’s got access to a few acres of ripped ground and a backhoe. The ground’s frozen, but if he banged at it long enough, found a soft spot, he could bury her so deep she’d never surface.”

  They all stood looking at the map and talking over Rob Law’s alibi for Saturday in the hours of Kiera’s disappearance. Six employees with a clear line of sight on him, or at least on his office trailer and his pickup, made for one solid alibi. If he’d gone anywhere that
day, those six would have known it.

  Leith said, “What about this one hour he had after his crew left at 6:00 p.m. and before he headed down the mountain at seven?”

  “Doesn’t work,” Giroux said. “He’d have travelled down, stopped at her truck to call her name, and was home half an hour later. All that time would be taken in travel. Not enough time to deal with the body. And of course, soon after that the search began.”

  She was probably right; it didn’t work. So it was earlier in the day or not at all.

  Leith brought in the file box, and they looked through statements and evidence. There were loading slips that Rob had signed when rigs were loaded up and left the site, and there were times on those slips, and in all the scribbles the only window of opportunity emerged, a block of time when Rob Law had signed nothing and supposedly been in his trailer. Bosko wrote that window of opportunity on the whiteboard. One fifty-seven to two fifty-two, just under one hour, and all that time his truck had remained in place alongside all the others.

  “So much for that,” Leith said.

  Giroux said, “Unless he walked.”

  Leith laughed aloud, but Giroux was once again running her finger along the map, not along the lengthy switchbacks of the Bell 3, but skimming over the pines as the crow flies. And suddenly it was not 12.7 kilometres between the cut block and the Matax trailhead, but perhaps three.

  Leith was still smiling, arms crossed, but Bosko had his specs fixed on the new path she’d etched. “You think there’s a way through, Renee?”

  “Who knows,” Giroux said. “Deer make paths. Winter brings those paths out nicely. Maybe it’s a trail he’s used before. The guy practically lives up there. Maybe he puts on his hiking boots and goes walking for exercise. Maybe he’s gotten to know the lay of the land like the back of his hand.”

  “Lot of maybes,” Leith said.

  “Life is full of maybes,” she said sharply. “Sometimes it’s all we’ve got.”

  He couldn’t deny that one. He looked at the Google Earth view again. He looked at Bosko, checked for skepticism, and saw none. He said, “Sending planes up for more aerials isn’t going to help any, with this dense tree cover. We’ll have to check it out on foot. But first firm up the theory before we go any further. I’ll make some inquiries.” To Giroux he said, “Can you organize a couple pairs of legs to walk the woods?”

  “I’ll put out a bid for volunteers,” she said, and added with smug confidence, “My boys will be fighting over the chance to get outside and play in the snow. Just watch.”

  * * *

  Sergeant Giroux stood at the threshold, asking who wanted to go for a nice hike in the woods on this beautiful winter day. She already had one volunteer, Jayne Spacey, but she needed one more. Everyone looked to the window, including Dion. The morning sun had been blown away by fast-moving rain clouds, and shrubs and treetops were thrashing about as if frightened by what was moving in. Giroux ignored the silence and went on outlining the assignment for them to find a route between the RL Logging site and the Matax trailhead — much like the intrepid Sir John Franklin, except without the ships, she said. Dion didn’t know much about history, but he knew the Franklin expedition had not ended well.

  Maybe everyone else was thinking of Franklin too. Giroux lost patience and snapped, “If nobody puts your hand up in two seconds, I’ll have to raise it for you. I need somebody big and healthy and just bursting with vim.” Still, nobody’s hand went up, and just as Dion feared, she was looking at him. “Big and healthy, anyway. You’ve just volunteered. Thank you very much.”

  * * *

  They gathered their gear and drove together up the mountain in the SUV, Spacey behind the wheel. She seemed to have gotten over her hatred enough to make small talk, but it was just speckles of cool commentary, and he didn’t bother responding much. Up at the cut block, the rain had stopped but the temperature had plummeted. Rob Law was away, but his crew was at work. Spacey advised the foreman that she and Dion would be looking around the site for a bit, if that was okay. She didn’t pose it as a question so much as a fact, and the foreman only rubbed his muddy nose and nodded.

  The two constables walked up to the ridge behind the office trailer and explored its perimeter for twenty minutes before Spacey gave a victory shout. Dion worked his way through the brush toward her and they stood looking downslope together, facing southwest. There were mature conifers above and beyond as far as the eyes could see, giving the place a cathedral feel, and uninvitingly thick undergrowth, mostly bare-branched shrubs. Spacey had found what might be called a track leading through the undergrowth, just wide enough to allow a man through.

  She said, “Deer trail. This is as good as it gets, and it’s headed in the right direction. Stick close, and if you see anything at all of interest, notify me right away and I’ll flag it. Got that?”

  Dion zipped up his jacket and followed on her heels.

  The jobsite fell behind, and with it the noise, and they soon were walking in wild isolation, through evergreen woods that rushed and creaked at the upper reaches, leaving a darkened dead zone below. They didn’t talk, the only noise of their passage the soldierly thud of boots on soggy earth and the occasional muttered curse as they untangled themselves from low-hanging branches.

  The trail lost definition and blurred into many small clearings. Sometimes it petered out and they had to wade through bushes until it picked up again. Sometimes it meandered in circles. Spacey marked their progress, tagging each fork with a strip of fluorescent ribbon, sometimes green, sometimes pink, occasionally blue. Sometimes she replaced the ribbons, one colour for another. She checked her compass and made notations in her log, and when Dion lagged for a third time, she told him if he wanted to go back, it was fine with her, she’d carry on alone.

  Downhill rose to uphill, and the trees thinned and the path branched again, radiating every which way. Spacey stopped to catch a breath, damp and irritated. “It’s a frickin’ maze,” she said. “Up or down?” It was herself she was asking, and herself who answered. “Up, I guess. Follow the compass needle, right?”

  She started to climb, as if she’d never stop. Dion stopped to take off his jacket, tying it around his waist and elbowing sweat off his brow. He called out that she could take the upper trail and he’d take the lower, maybe they’d narrow it down faster.

  “Oh, that makes a helluva lot of sense,” she called back. “Let’s get separated and when you get lost we’ll just call in another search party. Giroux will be madly impressed.”

  “I wouldn’t get lost,” he shot back angrily. But he followed after her. A few minutes later, the trail became difficult, then impassable, and they had to double back, and to allow her to take the lead he needed to back himself into the bushes, scratching his face and hands as she edged by. He stood wiping blood off his cheek and swearing, and Spacey looked back at him with disgust. She said, “Tell you what. Go back to the truck and put a Band-Aid on that, then have a doughnut or two. I’ll radio if I need you.”

  The doughnuts she spoke of were the half-dozen ass­orted that Giroux had given them to take along for the ride, what she must have thought of as a reward. He didn’t need a Band-Aid and didn’t want doughnuts, but he did want to stop trailing after a woman who treated him like pocket lint. He said, “We’re supposed to stay together.”

  “It’s a formality. Go on. I’ll get in worse trouble if those cuts get infected and you die. Anyway, I’ll get this done a lot faster on my own. Go.”

  He returned alone to the logging site and walked down to Spacey’s SUV parked in the mud with sev­eral other vehicles. He stood looking for his keys. They weren’t in his trousers, but they were in his jacket when he untied it from his waist and went through it. He also found something missing: his personal notebook.

  “God,” he said, standing in the parking lot, being stared at by passing workers. He tried beeping open the SUV to
check if the book had fallen in there, but the doors remained locked. He looked at the keys in his hand and realized they were the wrong ones. These keys were to his cruiser. Spacey had the keys to the SUV.

  He radioed Spacey and asked if she’d found a notebook on the trail. She said she hadn’t. He told her about the keys, and she said he’d just have to come back and get them. He returned to the narrow little deer trail and headed down it, following the fluorescent ribbons and keeping an eye out for the little notebook in its black leather cover. Most likely, though, it had fallen when he’d taken off his jacket to tie around his waist. So why hadn’t he seen it when he doubled back?

  Because Spacey had seen it first.

  The ribbons began to confuse him. He didn’t understand Spacey’s complicated system of colour-coding, and they soon led him into the middle of an unfamiliar glen, surrounded by trees, all identical and dizzying. He backtracked, looking for the flutter of neon plastic that had misled him, but now even that had disappeared in the maze.

  Something seized in his chest, and the pain in his stomach began to cinch and twist. He radioed to Spacey again, and her voice, breaking up over the air, asked him where the hell he was. He said he didn’t know. She called him a jerk-off. She asked if he had his whistle on him. He did. She said to blow it, hard, and to blow it every minute or so until she located him. He did as she said, and eventually heard her voice calling through the trees. He called back, and minutes later she stood before him, puffing out jets of vapour.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Spacey was sweaty and rosy-cheeked, stripped down to her shirtsleeves, jacket slung crookedly around her waist, but she looked pleased. “It’s okay. I got through to the Matax. It’s all ribboned out. We can head back.”

  “You didn’t find my notebook?”

  She walked backward to look at him. “How could you lose your notebook? My goodness, you’re a dumb fuck, aren’t you?”

  Following her, also in his shirtsleeves, cap off and hooked to his gun belt, sweat soaking his back, he made it back to the SUV and climbed in. His faint hope that the notebook had fallen here died as he groped about under the seat. Spacey wasn’t speaking to him at all now, not even in those cold soundbites, which suited him fine. In silence, they returned to the detachment, found it all but empty, and Spacey put the box of doughnuts, untouched, onto the table by the coffee machine.