Cold Girl

by R. M. Greenaway

  Which makes two of us, Leith thought. “So it was some kind of standoff?”

  “Don’t ask me what it was. Scottie would never shoot me. He’s not that kind of guy. Anyway, him and the cop yelled back and forth for a while, and Scottie fired at the cop but didn’t hit him, and finally he let me go.” The young man pulled a face, brows up, mouth turned down, a mime portraying bewilderment.

  “What happened between the gunshot and him letting you go? What changed his mind?”

  Frank’s stare went distant, and Leith thought he was blushing, but it was maybe just the central heat parching the air. A big chunk of the story had just been skipped over, it seemed, and Leith waited, but Frank didn’t carry on and fill in the blanks. He said, “I don’t know why he changed his mind. Probably because there was a cop telling him to let me go, so he did. I still can’t believe Scottie killed Kiera.”

  “Neither can I,” Leith said. “And I don’t. It’s time to cut the bullshit, Frank. We all know Rourke didn’t kill Kiera. The truth will come out one way or another, and it’ll be a hell of a lot better for your own interests if it comes from you, here, now. Her family is waiting for closure. You’re not a bad person. You know what’s right.”

  Frank hung his head, pressing fingertips against his eyelids. After a minute of the hung head, he said he was going to heed his lawyer’s advice and say no more.

  Leith took him back to cells and then joined Mike Bosko in the monitor room. Bosko was eating a sandwich and didn’t look nearly as steamed as Leith felt. He said, “Well, you can hardly blame him for not looking the gift horse in the mouth.”

  What did that even mean? Leith said, “So that’s it, then. We can’t hold him. Rourke’s going to claim responsibility, and unless we get something solid, we’re going to have to go with it, right down the line till trial. Do I have all that right?”

  Bosko shrugged. He put the sandwich aside and said, “There’s something I want to ask you about. Let’s go to the case room for a minute.” He lumbered out of his chair and led the way. In the case room he sorted through folders, found one, flipped through statements, and folded the clipped pages back on one where he’d put a sticky note. The statement was of Chad Oman, and the handwriting was not Leith’s, but Leith’s scribe of the day, Constable Dion. Bosko put his finger on a notation appended to the end that was in Leith’s handwriting and read it aloud. “‘Constable Dion suggests he’s lying but can’t say why.’ What’s that about?”

  Leith skimmed through the statement to refresh his memory. “I interviewed Oman,” he said. “Dion’s notes were useless, and he’d forgotten to press ‘record,’ so all he got was dead air. We ended up writing out the interview from memory. My memory, because he didn’t have any. At the end he apologized for messing up, then added that he thought Oman was lying. I tried to get out of him what he meant, lying about what, and he couldn’t elaborate. In the end I figured he was just trying to impress me, the old newbie with keen intuition senses a witness is lying and breaks case wide open scenario. I was going to ignore it altogether, but next day, when my hand wasn’t so sore, I decided I’d better add that note. And that’s about all I can tell you.”

  “Good thing you did,” Bosko said. “Since as we now know, he’s not a newbie at all. Right?”

  Leith had to acknowledge something that had been niggling at him; maybe saving Dion’s life made Leith his guardian ad litem, in a sense, or maybe it was just his own dislike of loose ends, but he needed to know. “What’s going to happen to him?”

  Bosko looked at him with interest. “The man’s had a serious head injury. It wasn’t something headquarters wanted to advertise, but it is something they need to monitor, and that’s what they’re doing, if it makes you feel better.”

  “Is that why you’re here, to monitor one of your constables?”

  Bosko grinned. “For one thing, he’s not my constable. He left North Vancouver before I moved in, so we haven’t crossed paths till now. For another, I wouldn’t be flying halfway across the province and taking lodgings to watch one brain-damaged constable. Wouldn’t be very cost-effective, would it? The locals in charge were supposed to send in regular reports, however, for the first six months, which they’ve been doing, but Renee didn’t notice the letter that accompanied her temp, and Willoughby didn’t stress the importance of the letter, so between them, he’s kind of dropped off the radar. Kind of frightening, isn’t it?”

  Very, Leith thought. He crossed his arms, then uncrossed them and stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. When Bosko was reticent, it bothered him. When he was forthcoming, it bothered him even more. Bottom line, he still didn’t trust the man or his agenda.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Bosko said. “We’ve got our eye on him. All right?”

  It wasn’t all right. Head injuries changed people, diminished them. Leith had never heard of a head injury improving on a man’s powers or personality, and Dion was clearly no exception to the rule. Maybe he’d been a prodigy, as he claimed, but he was now just bad news. If he didn’t get somebody else killed, he’d kill himself. Neither struck Leith as all right.

  Bosko was looking at the document in question again. He said, “His abilities aside, do you have any idea what he thought Oman was lying about?”

  Leith shook his head. “No clue.”

  “Then talk to Oman again, go over the same ground, and watch for tells. Get tough if you have to. And ask Dion what he recalls, soon as he’s back in the now.”

  “How about I get Giroux to grill him?” Leith asked. “Whenever I talk to the man, I get these homicidal thoughts.”

  Bosko was amused, but only for a moment. “Seriously, I think you should deal with him yourself. I think you have a way with him. And try to be patient, Dave.”

  A way with him? Leith ground his teeth. He wasn’t sure Constable Dion would ever be in the now, or could recall what he ate for breakfast, let alone the nuances of Chad Oman’s veracity over a week ago. And now, thanks to that brain damaged cop’s whimsical I think he was lying remark, he, Leith, was going to have to play bad cop with the drummer, a man who was quite possibly blameless, and that was a role he didn’t relish. Yes, it rankled. His phone buzzed before he could put his resentment to words, and speak of the devil, it was the hospital calling to say Dion was ready to talk.

  Thirteen

  White Lies

  WAKING HAD BEEN BAD, but not hellish. Not like rising from the coma last year, when he’d dragged his own broken body through a dark, wet corridor for endless miles in pain, confusion, and bouts of genuine terror. This was easy, dry, bright, and the painkillers worked wonders. Dion sat on a straight-backed chair in his hospital room waiting for his ride from the hospital. His side hurt, but it was nothing next to the thudding in his chest. He rested his face in his palms, trying not to imagine the hilarity, and imaging it all the same. Frank had told all, by now, every last excruciating tidbit, and the story would have gone viral. They’d be laughing hard. Spacey would laugh hardest.

  The thought of the story doing the rounds in this detachment and spreading to others, probably eventually reaching the world at large, sickened him, literally, and he limped into the bathroom and leaned over the throne, hands splayed on the tank, ready to barf up his hospital breakfast, whatever that had been. The nurse came up behind him as he stood contemplating the plumbing and asked if he was all right. He straightened, wiped his mouth, and accepted the glass of water she offered. Somehow the dizziness had passed, and so had the nausea, and even the rip in his side didn’t seem so bad. Only the worry remained. “I’m okay,” he told her.

  “I don’t think you are,” she said.

  She went to get him a couple of T3s, and he thought about fleeing the scene, walking, jumping on a bus, hitchhiking, anything, just getting out of there, fast. Cross the border, sink into anonymity, become a bearded street person.

  But there was a hitch in th
at he had no jacket. They had taken it away, along with the uniform he’d been wearing during the farcical confrontation with Scott Rourke last night. He now wore the clothes somebody had brought in from his room at the Super 8, the winter-weight joggers and sweater he usually wore on his days off, the black leather Nike runners, and a scarf around his throat. The scarf he’d wrapped around twice, depressed.

  “Hi there,” Thackray said, poking his head around the door. “Ready to go?”

  Ten minutes later they walked into the detachment, and Dion found it quiet inside, nobody laughing. Spacey was nowhere to be seen. Leith stood from his desk and said, “Hey, glad you’re okay,” then summoned him down the hall to the “soft” interview room.

  They sat across from each other, like accuser and accused, and Leith said, “I really thought you’d caught a bullet. Took you down Code 3, man, made quite a scene.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that.”

  Leith seemed glad to be done with the small talk and got down to business, opening a file that turned out to be an interview with Chad Oman. He told Dion the date and time of the interview and asked Dion if he remembered it.

  Of course Dion remembered it. He answered coldly. “Right, it was last week.”

  Leith read out what they had written out together at the end of that miserable interview, after the disaster with the recording device. He finished reading and said, “You told me you thought he was lying about something but couldn’t remember what it was. But you were flustered then. Maybe now something’s twigged, huh?”

  Dion pulled the statement across the table and read it again, trying to put himself back in the moment, imagining the witness in the room. He couldn’t remember what had prompted him to say Oman was lying. Oman had been loud, a fast talker, hard to track, and his own regrettable comment about lying had come out of him spontaneous as a sneeze.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. There was that bit where Oman paused here, said something was funny, then wouldn’t say what he thought was funny. Maybe it was there.”

  “That’s kind of what I was thinking. But that’s not really a lie, is it? At worst, that’s holding something back.”

  “I don’t know, then.”

  Leith looked far from shocked and closed the folder. Now it was time for another painful rehashing: what happened on the East Band last night. He let Dion run through the narrative first, no questions asked. Dion did his best and told what he could remember, which was just about everything, from picking up Evangeline, to spotting the abandoned bicycle, to the directions he’d gotten to the Gates of Heaven, to calling Spacey for backup. He told of his drive up the mountain, expecting reinforcements that didn’t seem to be coming, his hesitation, and his ultimate decision to plough on. He told of his conversation with Scott Rourke, and his final ploy of giving Rourke a false motive for not wanting Frank Law to go to jail. Here he fell silent, unable to finish.

  Leith said, “Yes? And what was that false motive?”

  “I told him Frank and I were friends,” Dion said. Which was the truth. Not the whole truth, but enough. He watched Leith’s face, expecting he’d already got the punchline out of Frank and was just holding back the guffaw. But there wasn’t even a smirk. Just an intense and skeptical gaze.

  “And he believed it?” Leith asked.

  Dion basked in relief for a moment. So Frank was just as embarrassed about the whole thing as he was and hadn’t said anything about love at first sight or any of the rest. Maybe it would never come to light. He sat straighter and gave a shrug. “I guess Rourke believed me. He let Frank go. Then you and the others finally got there, and you know the rest. What took you so long, by the way?”

  Leith skirted the question, saying, “Any idea why Scott Rourke wanted to blow Frank’s head off in the first place?”

  “Like I said, he thought Frank was going to jail. He wanted to preserve him from a fate worse than death.”

  “Honestly? Sounds like a stretch to me. How about he, Rourke, killed Kiera, and Frank knew it. Rourke thought Frank was going to report him, so he had to silence him.”

  Dion shook his head. “Everything we said up there pointed to a mercy kill. Or that’s the way it looked to me at the time. I figured the only thing that might stop him was my promise that I’d keep Frank out of jail. For personal reasons. So I ad libbed.”

  “You think he would have actually shot him?”

  “No, I don’t,” Dion said glumly. “I should have just sat at the crossroads and waited, and they’d have probably wrapped up their drinking party and come down and met us. But I did what I did, and what happened happened. I don’t expect any medals. I’m just glad nobody got killed, because then I’d really be up to my neck in it, wouldn’t I?”

  Leith agreed. He said, “There’s a lot more we have to talk about yet. You and Scott Rourke, and his girlfriend, Doyle. I don’t know you’ve broken any rules, fraternizing with witnesses, but you’ve sure bent common sense out of shape. Pretty soon you’re going to have to tell me all about it.”

  “Sure,” Dion said. He felt unburdened, empty but free. It was all coming together, reaching a conclusion. Things were wrapping up, and he could walk away with few regrets. He thought about his watch, running slow, the source of all this mess. The watch lay on an icy riverbed now and would rust there till eternity. Looch was dead, which had its advantages, and Cloverdale was worlds away. Everything seemed good. He could breathe.

  “But for now,” Leith said, having ended the interview, turned off the tape recorder, and signed off on his notes, “We’re going to have another chat with Chad Oman. I want you to sit in and pay attention, and maybe you’ll catch it again, whatever you thought he was lying about the first time, for what it’s worth. And just one more thing. You called Spacey last night, and we know the time of your call from the records. I just can’t figure out how it took her an hour to get things moving. She says your message was garbled or unclear, and she had a helluva time trying to locate Evangeline and find out what was really going on. Any comment?”

  “It wasn’t complicated. I was clear as I could be. She doesn’t like me, and she lets it get in the way. When can I get off this case and go back to Smithers? You must have it figured out by now, I’m not much help here.”

  Leith nodded. “I’ll see if I can get you back on the road tomorrow. You might have to return to give further statements, but maybe we can get ’em over the phone. Now, go grab a bite, and I’ll get Thackray to bring Oman in. Report back here at eleven twenty. Okay?”

  He gathered his things and left the room. Dion remained for a few minutes, trying to program his watch to beep at eleven, giving himself a good margin of error, but couldn’t get the sequence right. Too many buttons, too little brains. So he wrote it in ballpoint on his palm, “Oman 11:20.” If that failed, he thought, he’d throw himself in the river too.

  * * *

  The band’s drummer seemed to have lost weight since his first interview, and a good deal of vim, too. But hey, Leith thought, reality’s finally set in. Kiera’s gone, and she’s not coming back. Before her disappearance, these kids were just embarking on an endless party, fun, fame, and good times. Now it was the brink of humdrum for Oman. A slow climb to department manager at the local Home Hardware. Two-inch nails and miscellaneous fasteners. Even without Kiera they could have carried on, led by Frank. Mercy Blackwood seemed to think it was possible, maybe even better, to carry on without Kiera. But now Frank was possibly going away too, and that left, what? Not much. Oman was just a drummer, and no matter how good he was, he would never be the next Ginger Baker.

  Quite a shock to the system to lose all that in the space of two weeks.

  Yet the guy seemed somehow okay with his lot when they first sat down, exchanging the small talk. Maybe he was a flat-bottomed boat, a survivor. Doggedly upbeat, with that off-centre smile on his round, healthy, brown face.

  Dion sat
in, as agreed. He looked physically unfit, still suffering from the stitches and the drugs, but he was doing his best to listen. Oman stuck faithfully to his story the first time around, and Leith could find no cracks to get a fingerhold in, to flip him upside down and get to his vulnerable side, so he did what he had to do, as rotten as it felt, and got mean. He eased into meanness with, “I hate to say it, Chad, but I’m finding it hard to believe what you’re telling me here.”

  Oman looked stunned, and being a bit of a ham, he overdid it, eyes agog, mouth dropped open. “About what?”

  “About Kiera leaving the house without her coat on, for one. It was a bitch of a cold day, as I remember it. Snow was bombing down. Temperatures well below zero, right?”

  Oman’s eyes roved the room and settled back on Leith with some indignation. “She was wearing a pretty good sweater. I figured she was going to jump in her Rodeo, go to town, get something, come back. We’re all of us born and raised in the snow, hey? So that’s what I figured, she was just hopping out for something.”

  “So you clearly remember her leaving without a coat?”

  “Yeah, I do. She turned around, put her hands in her front pockets, her jeans, like this, said see you later, or back soon, or something like that, and she stepped out backward, kind of, and shut the door. I can see it like it’s happening right now.”

  “But when she arrived that day she came in wearing a coat, right?”

  “I don’t know. I got a pretty good photogenic memory, but to a point, eh.”