Cold Girl

by R. M. Greenaway

  Foley left the case room to make enquiries, and Leith stopped Dion from following for a final word in private, a last rebuke. “You could have said something, back in September. At least filed a report.”

  “I had scant information. I saw nothing that could have been put down in black and white. And if I had, it would have come to nothing.”

  “I realize that, but that’s not the point. The point is, you didn’t even try. You’re part of a team, and I’m still not sure you get it. Bottom line is, you gotta ask yourself, are you really cut out for this?”

  Dion appeared to consider his answer carefully. “No, I’m not cut out for this,” he said finally, with vehemence, indicating the detachment walls around them and missing the point altogether. “I’m cut out for that office you’re headed for in North Vancouver. That’s my desk you’ll be sitting across from. But that’s okay, because you know what? Someday I’ll be in that chair again. Maybe someday you’ll be calling me sir.”

  It was maybe his idea of a joke, but even so he had stepped over the line, and in a big way. Leith felt himself pinkening in anger. Just like that, it had become one of their famous confrontations, with lots of eye contact and no understanding. Dion was pink, too, as if he knew he’d said too much, and if he had any sense, he’d apologize. He didn’t. Leith tried to sound not just crisp, but authoritative. “With your attitude, un-fucking-likely. Especially if I have any say in the matter. More likely, if you don’t shape up, you’ll be looking at the job boards. It’s still your choice, Constable, but pretty soon it won’t be. Get it?”

  Dion’s eyes glimmered with what looked like anti­pathy, but he seemed to have run out of smart comebacks. He sealed his mouth into a line, flicked the brim of his baseball cap, said “See you,” and walked out.

  Unbelievable. Standing alone and shaking his head, Leith packed the folders back in the box. He shut the lid and hauled it out for lockup. Barring disaster, it was the last he’d ever see of bloody Constable Dion. “At least I got the last word in,” he said with grim triumph.

  Not until the following day, driving home to Rupert with Alison and Izzy and recounting the conversation in his mind, did he realize he actually hadn’t.

  Eighteen

  Last Snow

  A WEEK AFTER DION had said his farewell to Constable Leith, he was hard at work on a pile of General Investigations dockets in the Smithers office when his desk phone rang. He picked up and said, “Dion.”

  “Hello, Calvin,” a woman’s voice buzzed in his ear, not one he recognized immediately. “It’s Theresa Stein. How are you doing?”

  It was a ghost, Inspector Stein from North Vancouver, an ex-supervisor from before the crash, before his transfer. The voice set his teeth on edge and cooled the blood in his veins. He wheeled his chair into a better alignment, sat up straighter, ready to get up and run. “Yeah, hi,” he said. “Good. Not bad. You?”

  “I’m doing just fine. I’ve been hearing good things about you, Cal.”

  Stein was good at plunging the knife in deep, giving it a little twist. Over the time he’d known her, she’d made sarcasm an art. He braved it out, waiting for the punchline.

  She said, “Do you remember Mike Bosko?”

  Big guy in a white dress shirt, black suit, cheesy necktie, glasses, who’d never spoken to or looked at Dion except in a glancing way. His cooled blood froze, and the knot was back in his stomach, tighter than ever. “Sure. He was involved in the Hazelton case in February that I was on.”

  “You got along well?”

  He listened to the silence that followed her words, trying to read her. “I don’t think he registered my presence much, so yes, I guess we did.”

  “Really?” Stein was puzzled. “Isn’t that funny. Because he asked me about you at some length the other day.”

  The knot gave a painful cinch, and he dragged a hand down his face. He’d found peace of sorts here in Smithers. He’d stopped trying to go back, or forward, had accepted the now. He had started to believe this call would never come, and he’d be safe. But he should have known better.

  Stein said, “Maybe you’ve heard, we’re reorganizing down here. There’s a new gang-control unit, and Serious Crimes is being shuffled around and moving away from drugs, so to speak, and it’s for all intents Bosko’s department now. He’s done wonders, really.”

  He still couldn’t read her, but knew where she was going. It was a subpoena, casually thrown at him, with threats attached. It was a noose. He said, “Yes, and?” Bluffing now, playing his ignorance card. “If this is about what happened in Hazelton, and what he has to say about it, I don’t get why I should care. He can tell his story and I’ll tell mine. Send me an appointment or a questionnaire or whatever the hell, and I’ll answer. One thing for sure, I’m about as far north as you can send me, so if you’re thinking of some iceberg off the Bering Strait —”

  Stein cut in, suddenly irate, her voice jumping an octave. “What are you going on about, icebergs? I’m asking if you’re ready to return to North Vancouver. Bosko’s recommended your placement in SCU. The ultimate decision is mine, of course, and the way you’re blathering I’m not sure you’re ready for this. I really am not. Do you want to discuss this reinstatement, or not?”

  The words took a moment to sink in. Dion wheeled his chair closer to his desk so he could lean against it, catch his breath. Penny McKenzie grinned up at him from a picture frame, freckle-faced and sweet. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Well?” Stein said.

  He opened them again. “You’re saying I’m being transferred? Back to North Van?”

  “I’m saying there’s a suggestion you might be, if you feel you’re up for it.”

  Up for it. For a moment he dared to believe, but the cold shadow soon followed, and he fully understood. Bosko didn’t have anything on him, not yet, but he was working on it. The distance was a hindrance, so he wanted to drag his suspect up close where he could keep an eye on him, read his mail, put a bug on him. Well, fuck Bosko. That wasn’t going to happen. He answered Stein shortly. “I’m okay where I am. Thanks for calling. Appreciate it. Bye.”

  He hung up firmly and got back to his filing, but he was shaking inside. It was too late, and she’d blown his peace to shrapnel. Because what if he was wrong about Bosko? What if in his paranoia he was passing up a chance to go home? He looked beyond the personal peril and saw the greater danger, a wild bar graph of a skyline, noise, and traffic, sirens weaving through the grid work sprawl. The briny stink of a polluted ocean, the road rage, the rampant crime. He could see himself back among friends, back with Kate, back on top of the world. Sick with a longing that hadn’t let up since he’d got off the Greyhound nearly a year ago, he called Stein back and asked if it would still be an option tomorrow, the offer, once he’d had time to think about it.

  “Of course it’ll still be an option,” she said. “This isn’t eBay.”

  He set down the receiver with care and stared at it, wondering what it was, really, a telephone receiver or a baited hook.

  “North Van,” he said, chewing his lip. He smiled.

  * * *

  The next day it snowed across the north. Winter’s last stand, as Dion had heard people say. On this day as well, Charlie West was found. He’d been following the progress, profilers circling some regions, studying the aerials. Volunteer bushwhackers and native trackers on foot had discovered an abandoned camp, and finally today a cadaver dog had zoned in on a piece of disturbed ground, not too far from the cold remains of a fire pit. The dog had sat its rump down to say the search was over.

  A brother officer had come by Dion’s apartment in the evening to tell him about it, describing how the body had been almost for sure identified by a distinctive tattoo, that she was found too late in the day to be fully exhumed and would stay in situ until morning. Dion had the officer point out where, on a map, and then borrowed the man’s
four-by-four and headed out. First he drove twelve kilometres south from Smithers, nearing the much smaller community of Telkwa, then struck up a level grit road heading east off Highway 16. In the headlights he watched the road shooting ahead through rolling hills covered in scrub, then the woodlands closing in. Pebbles banged the chassis for another twenty minutes until he saw a figure in his headlights, and took his foot off the gas.

  She walked the road ahead of him, a girl, her back to him, trudging along, bent against the cold of the night. Way out here in the middle of nowhere. He slowed further as he approached and stared at her hard. She started to glance around, and he saw her long black hair, whipping in a ponytail, and the curve of her cheek lit by his headlights as he slowed even further, slowed to a crawl. Her hand went up to hold back her fluttering hair, and he stopped the truck and waited, and watched her turn all the way around, and he wouldn’t look away, not this time. He saw her face, just as he imagined it would be, and he gasped, almost a sob.

  He was looking at the girl from the fall fair. She walked toward him. He scrolled down the window. The cold blew in, and she was looking up at him in the high cab of the truck. She said, “Oh my god, I been walkin’ all fuckin’ night. Think I’m going to freeze to death. Gimme a ride?”

  “’Course,” he said.

  She climbed into the passenger seat and said, “Try anything, you’re dead.”

  He didn’t doubt it. “Where are you going?” he asked, but he already knew.

  “Be with my sister. She’s buried somewhere around here. There’s supposed to be a cop car sitting there guarding it, and I know they won’t let me see her, but I just want to be near her.”

  Tears glinted in her dark eyes, black as onyx. She’d taken off her packsack and held it tight against her chest like a child. Dion drove farther, another twenty minutes, till pylons glowed ahead, marking the spot. He parked behind a lone RCMP Suburban and told the girl to wait there. He left the truck and found a constable he worked with sitting behind the wheel of the RCMP vehicle, keeping guard. They talked about the burial site, and the constable agreed to escort him there.

  “I picked up her sister on the way,” Dion said. “She can come with us, far as the barricade?”

  “I guess that’ll be okay.”

  Dion beckoned, and the girl joined them. She trailed the men at some distance as they walked into the trees. “You knew the victim?” the constable asked Dion.

  “Kind of. Was anything else found?”

  “Just bits of things in the fire pit. A CD, burned to shit, and some documents.”

  They continued up a narrow footpath flagged for ingress and egress, mostly uphill, for fifteen minutes. They arrived at an abandoned camp with scant evidence of a squatter in the scrub, and the constable pointed Dion to the gravesite itself, a little farther into the trees, where crime scene tape billowed. He said, “I’ll watch from here, if you don’t mind.”

  Dion said he’d be five minutes, max. He walked with the sister up a knoll to the marked grave, and saw it was covered by a blue tarp.

  “Charlie,” said the girl. She stared at the tarp for a long moment, then began to talk to her sister, telling her those things she’d failed to say in life. There was lament in her words, mixed with harangue, and a little bit of teasing thrown in.

  Dion turned off his flashlight to let the night press down. Snow drifted over the tarp and the surrounding grasses and shrubs, paling the world. He gazed at where she lay and thought of Leith’s admonition: you should have said something, at least tried. But what could he have said, or what would anybody have done if he’d said it? I have a bad feeling.

  There’ d been nothing he could have done then. There was nothing he could do now except keep her in mind and move on. “You can’t stay here,” he told Charlie’s sister, and she nodded. They rejoined the constable where he stood waiting, and together they headed down the path toward the road. Dion lagged behind and stopped once to look back. A new kind of sorrow passed through him like a draught, unlike anything he’d experienced before. Unthinkable, that he was walking away, bound for the warmth of his apartment, and would leave her there in the cold dirt, alone.

  Hard to believe he could do such a thing. He turned and followed his flashlight beam to the truck, said goodnight to the constable on guard duty, and with his passenger beside him drove back westward toward Highway 16.

  Next to him the girl pulled a book from her pack, a hefty black hardcover. She turned it over like a mysterious package, looking at it from all sides.

  “What’s that?” Dion asked.

  “Frank’s kid brother Lenny gave it to me. When I stopped by their house looking for info.” She frowned at the title. “It’s about hitchhiking. What the fuck, eh?”

  Dion was thinking more or less the same.

  “Guide to the Galaxy,” she read out. “Weird. He says it’s for Charlie. He says, give her this when you see her.”

  She flipped through the pages, stopped, and said, “Oh, hey.”

  Dion glanced over and saw her pull a slim CD case from the innards of the book. So it wasn’t a book, really, but a receptacle. A square hollow hiding place had been cut into its pages. He thought of the little sliver of paper he’d found by Frank’s woodstove, the leftovers from an X-Acto blade cut, and the words on that sliver he’d copied into his notebook. All he recalled now was suddenly.

  “It says ‘copy,’” Charlene said, reading the scribbles on the disk, holding it up to the glow of the dashboard. “Ten songs here. Says ‘demo.’ Oh my God. This is amazing. Isn’t it amazing?”

  He agreed it was amazing. So Charlie had found at least one good friend in the world: Lenny Law. And she’d left her mark, ten songs. Too bad everything else just got in the way.

  He drove Charlene back to Highway 16, where she wanted to be let out. He asked her where she was staying, and she said it was a B&B right down the road here in Telkwa, and she could get there from here on foot. He said he’d take her to its doorstep, no problem, it was only a few minutes out of his way. She refused. “I really want to walk,” she said. “I’ll be okay. You think anybody’s going to mess with me?”

  “The kinds of men —” he said.

  She shut him up with a lifted palm. “I know. Men are bastards. But not all of them. Okay? You’re proof.”

  He put the truck in park at the crossroads, and she climbed out, clutching her bag. She’ d stashed the CD into its depths but left the book on the seat. The door slammed shut. He watched her go, because she was dead wrong about men. And especially about him. She turned and waved, not just goodbye, but go, get lost.

  He flicked the signal and joined the highway traffic, back toward Smithers, and pulled a U-turn only when far enough away that she wouldn’t notice. Back in the settlement, he cruised till he spotted her under the street lamps. He pulled over and from the shoulder watched the girl walk down a side street. He eased the truck forward and killed the engine as she climbed the stairs of a respectable-looking home. She pressed the bell. The door opened, light shone out, and she went inside.

  The chill was seeping into the truck’s cab. He remained at the wheel, looking ahead, not thinking about the girl in the house or the girl in the ground, but the map in his mind, that slow line crawling down the province through Prince George, Williams Lake, 100 Mile House, Hope. He cranked the key, turned the truck around, and headed back to the lights of Smithers, so dazzling in winter’s last snow.

  Acknowledgements

  In 2013 I was lucky enough to meet two excellent, award-winning writers, Holley Rubinsky and Deryn Collier, two very different authors who had teamed up to lead a mystery writers’ workshop in Kaslo. I signed up for what turned out to be an eye-opening week of learning in the most beautiful little town. I owe a ton of debt to Holley and Deryn. Their knowledge, generosity, and support spurred me on to enter Cold Girl into the 2014 Arthur Ellis Awards — the Unhanged
category for unpublished first novels. I effusively thank the Crime Writers of Canada and Dundurn Press for hosting this program of awards and celebrations; it’s such a great help to artists in a difficult field.

  I thank my literary agent, Carolyn Swayze, who took the reins with style and grace. I’d be floundering without her. I am so pleased to be working with Dundurn Press, Carrie Gleason and her friendly and efficient team. Thank you again for this amazing opportunity. And I thank editor Allister Thompson, for the intensive and productive days he put into this novel.

  In the bigger picture, I thank my parents, gone now, but remembered always. And the important guys in my life, my husband and brothers and son, who keep me stable in the wildest weather.

  Most of all I thank you, reader. If this story clicks with you, that’s what matters most!

  * * *

  The overall geography in this book is real, but some locales, roads, and businesses named are fictitious, and the people are strictly imaginary.

  Copyright © R.M. Greenaway, 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Editor: Allister Thompson

  Design: Laura Boyle

  Cover design: Laura Boyle

  Cover image: © Ollyy/shutterstock.com

  Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication