Leith didn’t break the flow to correct the kid’s vocabulary and went on ramping up the tension. “It was a rough day. Everyone was upset, including Frank. Kiera didn’t leave on her own, did she? Frank went with her.”
“Yes, sir, she left on her own.”
“You sure of that?”
“Yes, sir.”
And there’s the tell, Leith thought. The yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir. His own bad cop routine was a well-worn thing, simple and not very imaginative, but effective, especially with the young and the inexperienced. It was the arctic blast stare-down. He stared Oman down with icicles and said, “You know where this is going to lead, Chad? You don’t tell me the truth, it’s not going to be good.”
“Yeah, how so?” Oman snapped back, maybe more aware of his rights than Leith gave him credit for, maybe knowing where threats and inducements would lead, eventually. Nowhere.
Leith crossed his arms but toned down the bullying. “How so in that you’ll be charged with obstruction, is how. It’s not the kind of thing you can wiggle out of, you sitting here telling me she left alone, then later it comes out she didn’t. You’re going to turn on your heels then? How?”
“It’s what I saw,” Oman stated.
“You actually watched her walk out the door alone?” Leith asked, and held up a warning hand. “Here’s where you better be damned sure you’re telling the truth, because here’s where there’s no going back. Understand?”
Oman hesitated. He said, “Yeah, she walked out the door alone, cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Where was Frank when she walked out the door alone? You might want to cross your heart again, now.”
Oman was silent. Leith watched him, still as a rock, like he would sit here still as a rock all day and all night, if that’s what it took.
Oman said, “I think he …”
“He what, Chad?”
“I think he might have stepped out too, a minute or two before her. For a smoke, maybe. But I’m not a hundred percent on that.”
“Right,” Leith said. He was buzzing within now but speaking calmly, as if he was merely hammering down the details of facts he already had. “And Stella Marshall, where was she when Kiera walked out the door?”
“She was around. In the room there with us.”
“So she saw Frank leave?”
“I guess so.”
“And Lenny?”
“I’m not sure on that. He wasn’t around, but probably in his room. I think he left afterward.”
“So you’re in the house, and Frank’s gone out, maybe for a smoke, and a minute or two later Kiera goes out as well, and now they’re both outside. Did you watch them from the window at all, see where they went at all, what they did out there?”
“No.”
“Hear any vehicles starting up?”
Oman paused and admitted he hadn’t heard any vehicles starting up, and it looked to Leith like a dishonest pause but an honest admission. Which was interesting.
“When you left the Law house that day, her Rodeo was still there, wasn’t it?”
Oman shook his head vaguely.
“Yes or no?” Leith said, wanting something for the record.
“No, I don’t think it was,” Oman said.
“For how long were they out there, Frank and Kiera?”
Oman’s bluff facade was breaking down, nearly gone. He said in a low and husky voice, “I never saw Kiera again.”
“Sure. What about Frank, when did you see him again?”
“He came back.”
Leith raised his voice, just enough to give the kid a jolt. “I know he came back, and I know damn well when he came back. I want to know when you say he came back so I don’t have to waste any more time writing up criminal charges here. This is a homicide we’re dealing with, right? If you think I’m grim to deal with, think again. Next to the prosecutor, I’m a pretty nice guy.”
“Yeah, sorry, I was just trying to think, is all. I’d say … ten.”
“Ten what?”
“He was out for ten minutes, maybe,” Oman said, and looked away, rosy-cheeked and wet-eyed. “Fuck.”
Fuck said it all, in Leith’s mind. The drummer boy’s last hope for a rosy future had just gone up in smoke.
* * *
With Dion dismissed for the night, back to his room at the Super 8 to sleep off the pain pills, Leith was on his own now, interviewing Stella Marshall. It didn’t go well. However much he bullied her, she stuck to her original story, that Kiera had left on her own, that she’d left in her truck, and that Frank had stepped out earlier for a smoke, but had come back, and he had nothing to do with her disappearance. Breezily, she went about shooting down the case built up against Frank by Chad Oman’s latest admissions. Chad, she said, had been smoking some pretty high-grade zombie all morning and wasn’t firing on all cylinders to begin with. “Let’s just say he’s pliable,” she said, lounging in her interrogation chair, inspecting Leith with those pale marble eyes as she twined her hair about a finger. “Especially in the face of a policeman with lots to lose, right? I’m sure you didn’t exactly handle him with kid gloves, as they say. Did you?”
This lady really should get into politics, Leith thought. He said, “First I’ve heard of zombie.”
“It’s the kind of thing you don’t blather about to cops if you don’t need to.”
“Everybody was smoking hard?”
“No. I only smoke on weekdays, and only what I can bum off friends. Frank only had a toke after Lenny left, so he doesn’t set a bad example. Very old-lady, Frank is, when it comes to Lenny. If he only knew. Kiera tokes once in a blue moon, and I don’t recall her smoking that day. So it was just Chad indulging.”
“What d’you mean, if Frank only knew. Only knew what?”
“The kid’s a total pothead, when big brother’s not looking.”
“Where do y’all get your weed?”
“I really don’t know,” Stella said.
Like hell she didn’t.
When he’d let her go too, Lenny Law took the seat next and told Leith that Kiera’s Rodeo was gone when Tex had picked him up that day for their trip to George. And you could hypnotize him or put him through a lie detector, and you’d get the same answer, he said, swear to god.
Even without the swearing to god, Leith believed the kid. He considered pressing him about the weed angle, but it was barely a tangent at this point, and he didn’t want the trouble. So that was the end of his eyewitness list, barring Frank, who on the advice of counsel continued his right to say nothing. Not a word.
* * *
They didn’t arrest Frank. Crown counsel didn’t think they had enough and didn’t want to blow it by jumping the gun. You can’t base an arrest on a boatload of probablys and one witness’s foggy say-so. So the team heads sat about with take-out dinner and a steady supply of caffeine and brainstormed, looking for a solid bit of proof. There was the matter of Kiera’s coat, and it bothered Leith enough that he went over it again. And again. A striking purple coat, with embroidered cuffs and flamboyant fake fur trim, as described by her family and friends, that hadn’t been found, either at her own home, or at the Law house in the woods, anywhere on the property, or in her vehicle or anybody else’s. It was nowhere. So it was presumed to have been on her back when she’d been taken and was maybe buried with her now. Except Chad Oman had sworn she’d left the house without that or any other coat on, just the sweater, and in that respect Leith believed him.
All of which led him to the conclusion that somewhere between her walking out of the house that day and vanishing into the unknown, she had somehow been reunited with her famous purple coat, and that coat had gone with her to the grave. Probably it had been in her Rodeo, and she’d gone out and put it on, before or after her interaction with Frank.
In the preva
iling theory, Frank had killed her, there in the woods near the home, even though a pair of dogs with keen nostrils had snuffled about the whole five acres and located no trace of cadavers or shed blood. So the killing had been clean, a strangulation, maybe, or suffocation.
And then? Then he had left her there, and later, when the band had gone, with Lenny safely packed off with Tex to Prince George — or so he thought — he had placed her into her Rodeo, which despite what Lenny said remained in the driveway, and driven her somewhere and disposed of her, either alone or with the help of his lying, cheating friends. But there the theory became impossibly dilute.
The windows were solid black when Jayne Spacey said, “What’s this?”
She tossed over a photograph that Leith recognized as one of the printouts from Frank Law’s iPhone. The image was tilted, blurred, and would have been deleted off the phone immediately if Frank had been the efficient type, a shot of Chad Oman doing what many kids did these days to show how smart they are, giving the camera the two-handed middle-finger salute.
“Why do they do that?” Leith said. “In my day we smiled and said cheese.”
“Fuddy-duddy,” Spacey said. She leaned, pointed. “It’s this blue thing here.”
Giroux pulled more photos now, crime scene shots, spreading them around and hovering over them like a plump little human scanner. “Holy smokes. I don’t see it anywhere. It’s gone.”
Leith looked at the blue thing in the blurry shot of Chad flipping the bird. It was there in the background, barely a smudge. Could be a garment, he thought. Her coat? Gotta see if we can find a picture of her in her coat, he thought. “Her family called it purple, not blue. This is definitely blue.”
“Frank’s still got the old iPhone,” Spacey said. “Not great at handling some colours.”
Leith inspected the photo as close as his not-so-great eyes would allow without reading glasses. “There’s this paler stuff around the top. That could be the fake fur trim her sister mentioned.”
Spacey and Giroux agreed, it could be furry trim. Spacey said, “We’ll show it to her family. They’ll be able to identify it better for us.”
If the blue smudge in the photo was indeed Kiera’s coat, the find was significant. Leith stood and paced, playing the devil’s advocate. “Like Stella said, Chad was stoned. So he forgot he’d seen her walk out with her coat under her arm.”
“Chad’s description of her leaving the house was convincingly detailed,” Spacey countered. “He saw her with both hands in her pockets. There’s nowhere for a coat to hide in that memory.”
“Hooked under her arm, like this?”
“It’s a bulky winter coat. It would have been part of his mental image.”
“Maybe this blue thing is a different coat altogether. Maybe it belongs to Lenny, and it went with him when he left for Prince George. Or Chad’s or Stella’s.”
“All will have to be checked,” Giroux said. “But I agree with Spacey here. I’m pretty sure that’s her coat.”
So, Leith thought, assuming for the moment it was Kiera’s coat. The door’s closed, and Kiera’s out there in the cold with only a sweater and jeans. Ten minutes later Frank had returned. The Rodeo was gone, according to Stella and Lenny; maybe so, according to Chad. Whatever the case, the coat was in the house when she left, and wasn’t there when the police photographer showed up with the ident team the next day, and nobody had an explanation. If nothing else, that showed somebody in the house was covering his or her tracks.
Spacey took the photograph and went to visit Kiera’s parents. She phoned back with the results half an hour later. “Yes, it’s her coat,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent positive.”
Leith spent an hour on the phone with Crown counsel, in spite of the hour, and that same night Frank Law was arrested and charged with the murder of Kiera Rilkoff.
Fourteen
Found in Translation
MORNING CAME, ALONG WITH a steady fall of big snowflakes, fat and wet. The case wasn’t over, not even close. After six hours of interrogation, Frank stood firm that he was innocent, and there was nothing Leith could do but keep scrounging for evidence.
On this day Mike Bosko was truly and finally abandoning ship, hitching a ride with the sheriffs on the prisoner shuttle and flying out from George, as he’d planned to do so many days ago. “It just kept getting more interesting,” he said in his cheerful way to Leith and Giroux. Leith was glad to see the last of him. Bosko was a grating reminder of what Leith had no chance of becoming. Too smart, too high-ranking for his age, and to top it off, he didn’t even seem to realize it. Too big, too worldly, too modest, and quite possibly a vegetarian, were some of his flaws. And he was slow. Right now he wasn’t snapping up his briefcase and flying out the door, as he should be, but finishing a cup of coffee and chatting with Giroux about something anthropological, a native legend about frogs, or foxes, or the reinvention of self.
Mike Bosko probably knew more about First Nations culture than Giroux, by the looks of her face as she listened, awe mixed with offence. Leith only tuned in when the conversation somehow tied back in to the case, Bosko and Giroux back to an earlier debate about Scottie Rourke’s intentions up on the East Band lookout, holding a gun to Frank Law’s head when Frank wasn’t looking, a supposed act of euthanasia against the ills to come. “Oh, you bet Rourke would have shot the kid,” Bosko told Giroux. “Then he might well have shot himself to wrap it up, but I doubt it. Anyway, that’s my take on it.”
Leith stashed that takeaway to think about later, but for now Bosko had turned to him, reaching out a hand. “You know,” he said, as they shook, “I know it wouldn’t be easy, leaving the north, but think about it. I’m looking for the best for my new team, out with the old SCU and in with the new, and I could sure use a guy of your talents and energy.”
Leith stood blinking. Talent? Energy? “Yes, sir, thanks, sir,” he said, and it came out in a blurt after his first stunned silence. “I’ll sure think about it. Thanks.”
“Excellent. Be hearing from you soon, then, I hope?”
“Yes, sir. Thanks. Was great working with you. Safe travels. I’ll be in touch.”
Now it was Giroux’s turn. Unlike Leith, she didn’t blather like a drunken lotto winner, but promised to keep Bosko posted about the Rilkoff case. “Things aren’t over till they’re over, right?”
Leith watched Bosko out the window, somewhat infatuated. The big man stood and chatted with the sheriffs from Prince Rupert, who had been waiting patiently at their transport van. The snow fell, and the sheriffs seemed content to stand chatting for a while longer with a man they didn’t know. They were pointing toward Hagwilget Peak, talking geography now, probably. Talking stats. Sharing hiking stories. God, Leith thought. He wants me.
Finally, they all piled into the van and it trundled off, full of cops and robbers making the world go round. “Sad,” Giroux said. “Just when you get used to somebody in your life, poof, they’re gone.”
“Yes, and I’m next,” Leith said, two thumbs up, thinking about Ali and Izzy, cranky wife and truculent daughter, home and haven. His big smile and two thumbs up seemed to bother Giroux, and he understood why. This was her universe, this little spattering of villages, and she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to leave.
Not that it was over, quite yet. There would be many interviews to conduct over the next day or so. He recalled another unpleasant item on his mental agenda, and with a sigh told Giroux about Spacey and her disturbing lack of expediency when it came to mustering backup to the East Band lookout, night before last. He told her of Dion’s version of the delay. Giroux listened, her fierce black eyes shooting sparks, and Leith noticed for the first time that she was going grey at the temples. Just like Alison, who’d told him last month during one of their tiffs, “I’m going grey, take it or leave it.”
He would take it, of course he would. But with Renee Giroux h
e felt a pang of pity. Maybe because she was a firecracker that would sail high but burn fast, and she would never reach the stars.
“No way,” she exclaimed in answer to his ratting out of young Spacey. “No way would she put anybody’s life at risk, dragging her feet like that. If she complained that Dion had been unclear on the phone, then he had been unclear on the phone. Unclear is his middle name, for Pete’s sake.”
So it’ll go into the personnel cold case files, Leith thought. An unsolved case of he said, she said. Like Giroux, he believed the she.
Back at his desk in the main room, he was struggling through the paperwork of Frank’s arrest when he was distracted by a commotion. Constable Thackray had arrived, helping a little old native lady up the front steps and into the detachment, bringing gusts of brisk air and a swirl of snow crystals. Leith delayed a phone call to observe the little old lady, who looked older than the village itself, and wondered what it must be like to have existed before the escalation of convenience, before mass transportation, mass media, mass instantaneous gratification had set in. Must have been slow days, then. Must have been kind of nice, listening to the crickets at night. For entertainment you sat on the front stoop, watching the sunset, having a real conversation about real things with real people.
His iPhone buzzed, a text from home: When? He texted back: ASAP. With a happy face.
It was amusing, anyway, watching Thackray, the lanky young constable, trying to communicate with the little old lady, but she wasn’t speaking the language, except in fragments. Thackray tried Police Pidgin, then a kind of ad lib sign language, then sighed and caught Leith’s eye and said, “She wants to report something, but I can’t understand what the problem is.”
Dion had arrived, not in uniform but civvies, looking preoccupied. He brushed past Thackray, went to his cleared-off desk, and started searching for something in the drawers and behind the computer monitor.
Leith asked Thackray, “Don’t you guys have an on-call translator?”
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