Instead of an answer she said, “We weren’t tight. You understand? You’d think we would be, after all we’ve been through. But it just got in between us, which is how he wanted it, right? Divide and conquer. He’s dead now, which is sweet, and like I said, I kicked the booze, and I think we’ll be okay now, me and her. Just wish she’d call.”
Leith asked her who “he” was and what he’d done.
“Uncle Norm. Norman Wesley. And what he did is none of your business. He’s dead now. It doesn’t matter.”
Leith knew the name, Norman Wesley, a Dease Lake resident who’d got himself murdered last September. He could guess what Wesley had done. So Wesley was Charlie’s uncle, and he’d been murdered in September, which was when she’d left home, which was interesting.
Charlene said, “Charlie’s got a way with words. You wouldn’t know it if you talked to her, but she does. And she wrote these songs, she says, and she’s got ’em on CD, and she’s going to go sell ’em to a recording company and get rich and famous. She was kidding, you know, about the rich and famous, but she wasn’t kidding about trying. Sounded to me like she was heading south, to the city. Scary place for a girl like her. I told her come home to Dease, but for the first time in her life she stuck to her guns, and I guess that’s a good thing. But I know what’s going to happen. She’s just going to get trampled all over again.”
“What d’you mean?”
Charlene’s answer was vague and peppered with language Leith didn’t quite get, but the sense he got was her wayward older sister knew what she wanted, but just didn’t have the strength to get there without being dragged back.
“Dragged back by what?” Leith asked her.
“By a man,” she said. “She’s with some fucking guy, probably. And she’s native, right? So she’s got nowhere to take cover when he gets mean, which they all do in the end. No cover in Dease, no cover in Vancouver. Really, when you come down to it, she’s got nowhere.”
“Sure,” Leith said, knowing what she meant.
Charlene paused, maybe to take a breath, maybe to puff at a cigarette. She said with forced cheer, “Anyway, this isn’t really about Charlie, is it? It’s all about that missing chick, Rilkoff, right?”
“Yeah, it is,” he said. Though really this was becoming more about Charlie West than Kiera Rilkoff. Well, actually it was about both. Two girls gone missing, two singers, mysteriously silent, as he was going to have to tell Charlene now, break the news. He’ d also have to get all she’d just told him taken down in a proper statement via the Dease Lake detachment.
The case was far from over, then. In a way it had just begun.
* * *
Leith had talked to Giroux, and they agreed to talk to Willy again, find out more about this song writing, because music, it seemed, was at the heart of this tragedy. They needed to learn how intimate Frank had been with this other singer, Charlie West.
Leith talked with Frank, but Frank had spoken to his lawyer again and was still saying nothing. Mercy Blackwood told him Charlie West had submitted a song, but Kiera didn’t like it, and it had been scrapped. As far as Mercy knew, Charlie had left town soon after that, and they’d lost contact. Rob Law had nothing to add, aside from a few words explaining how he met Charlie up north on an equipment-buying expedition. In the end, nobody had anything constructive to say about Charlie West, who seemed not much more than a ghost meandering through this whole affair, saying little but humming a tune.
Leith got Willy back in and brought in a translator for the translator, a serious Nisga’a girl who was studying the language. She did a good job of it, Leith thought. Translating in bits and pieces, she relayed a whole raft of rhetoric on Willy’s behalf. Like, “If you don’t teach the children the language, how will they speak to their ancestors, and if they can’t speak to their ancestors, how will they be taught right from wrong?”
Leith had been brought up Catholic and still swore on the Bible in court, but deep down, he knew the job had more or less bullied the religion right out of him. These days he had little patience for spiritual types of any make or model, to the dismay of his parents and brother, all churchgoers who still prayed over every meal.
“There was a time,” the Nisga’a girl translated, “people knew right from wrong.”
Leith highly doubted that too. He asked for more about Frank and Charlie, how they acted together that day they visited the school. The girl translated that Frank and Charlie seemed to be good friends. But no, they didn’t hold hands, didn’t kiss, nothing like that.
Leith asked for more details on the music itself and learned Charlie West was shy about her singing. She told Willy she had made a CD of the songs she wanted to translate, and she’d bring it next time. She sang one song, and it was a good and beautiful thing, Willy said. He had told her that translation would not be easy, that really she would have to learn the language, be fluent at it, before she could sing those words in a meaningful way, but that he would help as best he could.
Leith asked if Willy remembered any of the words to that song.
The translator spoke to Willy and then spoke to Leith. “It was a love song.”
Every other song, in Leith’s experience, was a love song. But then every other thought in a young person’s mind was about love. And this was about love, as it should be. “Did Frank say anything through all this?”
The translator spoke to Willy some more — it was a lot of back and forthing this time — and finally gave Leith the gist. “Frank said nothing, except forgiveness. He kept telling Charlie about forgiveness.”
Forgiveness? Leith thought, startled. About what? Kiera? This was last September, long before Kiera went missing. Was it no crime of passion, then, but a long-planned act, a conspiracy between Frank and Charlie? “What do you mean, forgiveness?” he asked, tamping down a growing impatience. “Forgiveness for what? What did he say exactly?”
But Willy didn’t know. Mostly Frank had just stood around waiting, except for those few words overheard.
Leith jotted it down, underlined it twice, and finally asked the man, “So did she bring you her CD, as promised?”
No, she didn’t. Willy never saw her or Frank again. He had one last thing to say, through the translator, as Leith stood to signal the interview was over. “I hope you find her, Bilaam. I’m very worried. She is water.”
“Water?” Leith asked.
After some more back and forthing, the translator corrected herself. “Dew. She is a dewdrop.”
* * *
Leith needed a break. He had made some calls to arrange for time off, five days in which he would return home to Prince Rupert to recharge, and today was the day. This was also the day Scott Rourke was released from lockup in Smithers.
Rourke reported in to the Hazelton detachment, where he met with a probation officer and went over the terms of his recognizance. It was a strict one, loaded with conditions, one being to stay clear of the Law residence. He signed his name, gave the PO a piece of his mind — which Leith and everybody else heard — then was let loose, back onto the streets. Giroux stood at her office window, looking out, and laughed. “There he goes,” she said. “Bow-legged old greaseball. I don’t often say this, but that is one scrawny waste of skin.”
Leith joined her, peering outward. “Who are those guys?”
“Look vaguely familiar. He’s chatting ’em up pretty good. Must be friends.”
Two men stood on the sidewalk, one white, one native, both in their late forties, dumpy and on the rough side, truckers or loggers by the looks of it. And she was right, they were chatting with Rourke. The conversation looked friendly. Rourke flapped a hand at the police station, then all three sauntered off toward a beat-up pickup parked at the curb.
“Should we be worried?” Leith said.
“About what?” Giroux said.
“He’s said it himself, he’s got
friends far and wide. A network of anarchists. He’ll go into hiding.”
“Good riddance. Waste of taxpayers’ money, putting him through trial. For what, being a goof?”
“He tried to kill two people, one of them a police officer. That’s goofy to you, is it?”
“Public disturbance and careless use of a firearm. I don’t care what Mike says, Rourke wouldn’t have shot anybody up there. He was being, what d’you call it, Shakespearean.”
“You’re forgetting he nearly bludgeoned a guy to death, Renee?”
“That was different. It was libido-driven. This was dramatic flair, and our fellow Dion just made it worse. Probably what happened was he startled Rourke’s trigger finger.”
Leith shrugged irritably. Giroux was the worst to argue with, inflexible, swift and resilient. Still, he tried to implant in his memory the faces of the men who’d wafted Rourke away, in case it came up again later. He did the same with their vehicles as they spat exhaust and tore off onto the adjacent highway, but didn’t catch a single licence plate number in the process. Which meant he didn’t only need reading glasses; pretty soon he’d need distance glasses too. Or like his dad, those godawful bifocals. As much as he loved his dad, the idea of becoming him was pretty damn scary.
He left instructions for the hunt to continue in his absence and went out to his truck for the long drive home. Normally he’d be whistling a merry tune, heading home after such a grind. But there was nothing to whistle about today. Midday and he was pushing into a dark highway, high beams on against the falling snow, mission far from accomplished.
* * *
Leith’s week off was antsy and far from restful. He spent much of his time on the phone with his team, drank too much, slept too little, made love with his wife only once, and barely noticed his daughter toddling about destroying whatever she could get her tiny hands on. He also caught a bad cold. He returned to New Hazelton, drugged and more tired than ever, to pick up the pursuit, the search for Charlie West, still haunted by the notion that Charlie was somehow involved in Kiera’s disappearance, that maybe if he tracked her down, he’d have tracked down the motive, if nothing else.
Mike Bosko was back in the North Van SCU, re-immersed in big city crime, no doubt, the Hazeltons just a fading memory in his busy mind. Dion was no longer around, which was just plain nice. And Spacey was gone too. Promoted to some more glamorous place, Leith thought, but Giroux told him no, there was no glamour to Spacey’s whereabouts. She was in big trouble, facing some serious allegations. Allegations that Giroux herself had made.
The news startled Leith, like he’d just learned of a death in the family. “What happened?”
“We had words. She was having problems in her life. Messy divorce. Her ex filed for a restraining order, and so did his girlfriend, who’s the bartender at the Black Bear you met, Megan. I love Spacey like a daughter, but I see now she’s not looking for a mother. She’s looking for a punching bag. Your life’s out of balance, I told her. She told me to get stuffed, except not so politely.”
Beating around the bush like this wasn’t Giroux’s way, normally, and neither was looking wounded. “Anyhow,” she said, “I pulled up the East Band issue again, her calling for backup. The timing was so off that I had to get to the bottom of it. She maintained it’s Dion’s fault. I told her I didn’t believe her. And I still don’t, because you know what? When that young man wants to talk, he talks better than you and me. And so I wrote it up. I had to. She said she’d fight it to the end, but she won’t. She’ll see the writing on the wall. She’ll resign.”
They stood a moment in silence, and it really was like a death in the family. Not some distant aunt, but a beloved cousin. Leith couldn’t help but blame Dion for the loss. And Giroux. He said, “Was it really worth losing a good officer over that? She made a bad judgment call. Didn’t jump to it quite fast enough. You or I might have done the same in the circumstances.”
Giroux shook her head. “At great expense and difficulty, I pulled in Evangeline Doyle, all the way from Edmonton. What she says fits with Dion’s version, not Spacey’s. It’s not a trivial matter. Spacey lied. She tried to take credit away from Dion and tried to make him look the fool, and in the process she put his life in jeopardy. You can’t turn a blind eye to that kind of behaviour, now, can you?”
“No, ma’am,” Leith agreed.
But it still hurt. There was a sense of deconstruction here, now that the group had shrunk to so few familiar faces, and in an odd way, Leith missed all those who were gone. As for the Law boys, Giroux wondered if Frank would be deemed by the circuit judge to be neither a flight risk nor a danger to the public and would be let go on a condition-laden recognizance. It would be good, she said. For a little while at least the three bears would be together in their home in the woods.
Leith doubted it. Frank might not be a flight risk, but Kiera was still missing, and if her bones lay too close to the surface, somewhere out there in the ever-shrinking snow mass, there was a danger the killer would steal out one night and make sure she was never found.
Dismantle her, scatter her to the winds. And then how would the poor girl ever rest in peace?
Fifteen
Smithers
NOT ALLOWED BACK TO WORK till he got his doctor’s okay, Dion was learning the fine art of being idle. After a solidly overcast week, he opened the drapes one morning and saw the sky had shed its murk and become a broad, dazzling blue vista over Smithers, shot through with sunlight so sharp it made him wince. The stitches in his side were out, but it still hurt when he inhaled too deeply. When he eventually returned to work, they said he’d be put on light duties for at least a month.
It seemed to him that if his duties got any lighter he would turn into a puff of smoke and disappear. Two days ago he’d been sat down for assessment with the Internal Investigations people, but they hadn’t seemed too worried about the Spacey incident or anything else he’d done wrong. They’d asked a few questions, returned his confiscated notebook, nothing said, and basically told him to carry on.
He’d have preferred it if they’d bellowed warnings in his face and slammed down a list of conditions to meet before they’d let him back in the door. Instead there was that eerie silence, and he knew what it amounted to. They were going to gently downsize him till he vanished.
He didn’t want to go out like that. He looked out the window, up to the snowy peaks. He imagined if a hiker went missing up there, they’d search for a week then call it off. He’d climb so high the winds would batter him to death. So high they wouldn’t find him till he was bits of bone, white and pure. He decided to go for a walk.
A taxi took him to the base of a popular trail that wound up the ski hill just west of Smithers. Up there past the trodden path he would find pure wilderness, he knew, endless peaks and valleys. But even before he left the car he hit a snag, as the heavy-bellied middle-aged native cabbie he’d never met before balked instead of taking his cash. “What, you’re going to walk up the mountain?” the cabbie asked. “Dressed like that? S’a long haul, you know. It’s not Sunday afternoon in Stanley Park, hey.”
“I know. I’m okay.”
“You got no canteen, no provisions. You start walking, you’ll get thirsty, and you’ll look around and realize you’re miles from anything. No Starbucks up there, my friend. It’s dangerous. It’s a full day to the top, and that’s with all the proper gear. Soon as you’re out of the sun it’ll drop below zero. I’ve never seen anyone go up here without a pack.”
“So I’ll go halfway and come down again.”
“You got gloves? No, look at you, man, you don’t even got gloves!”
Dion sat with the passenger door wide open, exasperated. What was the problem? This guy wasn’t his mother, and even if he were, it wouldn’t be her business. “I’ll be okay,” he said again, and stood.
“And how you going to get back to town once you
get back to this point, thirsty and hungry and cold? Even right here there’s no good cell service, you know. Let alone up there, you got nothing.”
Dion hadn’t thought it out this far, that the cabbie would report him to the police as a self-destructive lunatic, and they’d come and fetch him, and so much for going out with dignity.
“Tell you what,” the cabbie said. “There’s a road I know, gets you pretty high up the base of the glacier there out past the Johnsons’ farm on the 16. You can do the hike, it’s about three quarters of an hour, to this really spectacular kind of waterfall thing, then you come back down and I’ll pick you up at —” he looked at his watch “— one o’clock. How ’bout it?”
Following the cabbie’s orders, he was driven to a different trailhead, and he walked up a gravelly path fit for geriatrics, passing a few other hikers on the way, who all smiled hello at him. At the top he looked at the glacier and the waterfall and stood on a sightseer’s platform and listened to the wind. The wind slapped him hard but didn’t try to kill him. By the time he arrived back to the parking lot at five minutes to one, he was thirsty, hungry, and numbed. He was grateful when the cab pulled in a few minutes later.
“I brought you some coffee,” the cabbie said. “Knew you’d need it.”
Later, back in his apartment, Dion considered how easily he’d been dissuaded from suicide, and had to accept that he just wasn’t ready for it. He also wondered if the cabbie was just being nice, or really just wanted that big tip he’d ended up getting. His own judgment in all things was bad, following the crash, and one big fear of his was being taken for a sucker. Maybe that was why he thought through everything about four times longer than the average man, and sometimes forgot to say thank you.
While he was eating a late lunch in the silence of his apartment, he decided that the cabbie was for sure happy to get that big tip, but it wasn’t what drove him. Niceness was the purest of motives, in the cabbie’s case. Or caring, or common decency. Just as Scottie Rourke was nice, however off-the-rails he was. And Frank Law seemed like a good man, at least through hearsay. No doubt Kiera was good too. Stella Marshall might have been nice, in the right circumstances. Willy, who’d taught him how to say foolish and rabbit in the Nisga’a tongue, was very nice, and he missed Willy’s early morning company. Bunch of nice people, really.
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