think of as the crew, those who hung about post-debrief and went out pubbing, sometimes into the small hours, as if they couldn’t let go of the blues. Leith knew the feeling.
Tonight he joined them.
The crew was male-centric, probably because after-hours conferences like this were loaded with bad language and political incorrectness, and women had more sense than to put up with that kind of bullshit. JD Temple was the only female who seemed to tag along regularly. Maybe because she was accepted as just another guy. Maybe because she didn’t have any other life to live.
The crew’s hangout of choice was Rainey’s Bar & Grill down near the Quay, walking distance from the detachment. Rainey’s was a dark and classy joint, a good-time pub geared toward aging rockers. Lots of loud music, CCR and Doors and Rolling Stones, to make guys of Leith’s age feel right at home.
“Gimme Shelter.” Rape, murder — like they didn’t hear enough of it on the job. Leith took off his suit jacket, loosened his tie, and ordered whatever draft was on special. He phoned Alison in Prince Rupert to let her know he had made it through another day. Her voice was far away and not quite real in his ear. He told her it was too noisy here to talk, that he’d call again later.
Membership in the crew was self-regulated, and the rules were loose. Joining in the conversation — not mandatory. To Leith’s right sat Doug Paley, letting out a beery belch. To his left was JD, leaning across him to tell Paley what she thought of his manners. On the far side of the table were the big bruiser, Constable Jimmy Torr, and the handsome Viking-type, Sean Urbanski, scruffy because he was pitching to get into Special “E,” undercover ops.
There were two others here Leith hadn’t met before, general duty members Ricky something and Tara something else.
To everyone’s surprise, Dion showed up, too, taking a seat between Urbanski and Tara and joining in the conversation like one of the regulars.
Snacks were ordered and came, crowding the cluttered table with plates of hot, greasy calories. Leith couldn’t catch much of anything being said, amidst the noise of “Fortunate Son” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and “New Sensation.” Mostly he talked with JD. He asked her what “JD” stood for, but she wouldn’t say. Paley overheard the question and supplied the answer: Joan Deirdre.
Somewhere on Leith’s third beer, he was thinking JD would have been pretty if she’d put some effort into it, but she interrupted the dangerous drift of his thoughts by crying out that if they didn’t play something from this fucking century, she’d shoot out the speakers.
Paley, Torr, and Dion were debating case notes, the missing bootie, the missing cellphone, and other developments. Ricky and Tara reminisced about today’s messy takedown at the Quay. Tara showed everyone the stitches on her elbow.
JD’s patience ran out in her usual showy way; she stood and pointed at the speakers, saying, “Fuck this pole-dance shit.” The pole-dance shit was a love song by Foreigner that took Leith back to many floorshows he had watched in his younger years. JD said she was going to catch a cab back to her flat to listen to the Hidden Cameras — if Leith heard right. She danced both middle fingers at Torr’s nose as she left. Torr made obscene motions at her back with his tongue until Tara lobbed something at him, a deep-fried zucchini stick.
The tossed zucchini stick was funny, apparently. There was a lot of laughter at this table of cops. “She’s kind of touchy, isn’t she?” Leith asked Doug Paley.
“JD?” Paley snorted. “You should see her on a bad day.”
Leith’s eardrums were going numb, and he was tiring of the fun. He had finished his third pint and was considering a fourth — because sometimes fun could catch a second wind — when Mike Bosko arrived. He sauntered up with a frothy stein in hand and was greeted warmly by the crew. Warm, Leith thought, but holding back, like they all felt, as he did himself, that this NCO was a little too good to be true, and maybe not really on their level.
Bosko took a chair. He nodded hello at Leith, then broadcast, “How’s it going?” to anyone who cared to answer.
“Not good,” Doug Paley said. “We’ve just debunked Locard’s principle. The killer took a bunch of evidence but left none behind.”
“Remind me, what did he take?”
“One of the baby’s shoes,” Dion said. “And Lance Liu’s cellphone.”
“Trophies,” Jimmy Torr offered, too drunk to hold his tongue in the presence of a superior. “Fucking baby-shoe trophy.”
Bosko was interested. “Well, at least they found the possible murder weapon, I hear, in the case of Lance Liu. I hear it’s big.”
Leith raised his brows, until he got it. The autopsy had shown that Lance Liu had been struck fairly hard by a tree. Or against a tree. Blood, skin, and hair had been found smeared about head-height on the pine that Lance Liu lay below. Leith now knew it wasn’t actually a pine, like everybody was calling it. It was a mature Douglas Fir, which was actually a spruce, or Pseudotsuga menziesii, none of which mattered. What mattered was the bark was dark and gnarly and held plenty of physical evidence. Ident members had searched for such evidence and found it. They had photographed and taken samples from the area of the tree in question, but hadn’t stopped there. A great slab of its trunk had been cut out with a chainsaw to preserve the smear for posterity.
Then there was the truck that had rammed the tree, its chassis covering its owner, its tires just touching Lance Liu’s chest. Neither head trauma nor truck had killed him, as Paley went on to inform Bosko. If not for the heart attack, the poor guy would be now sitting with a head swathed in bandages, telling them what the hell had happened out there.
The truck had been searched, of course, thoroughly. Nothing of great interest, except for a couple items in the glove box: a buck knife and a camera. The buck knife tested negative for blood. The camera was a little point-and-shoot Kodak. It looked brand new, and there was nothing on its memory card except three amazingly uninteresting street shots. JD suggested they weren’t photos, really; they were experiments, an owner trying out an unfamiliar gadget for the first time.
Leith said yes to that fourth pint as the waitress stopped by. He would worry about the calorie overload tomorrow. Bosko sat back and smiled around the table like these were his children. His eyes passed over Ricky and Tara, Dion with a phone to his ear, Jimmy Torr and Doug Paley in conversation.
But there was nothing abstract about Mike Bosko, Leith believed. He could seem spaced-out at times, and could drone on about matters nobody wanted to hear, and was too free with the smiles and compliments, which sometimes struck Leith as dishonest. But he was sharper than he looked. Like a heron in the reeds, Mike Bosko was patient, somewhat camouflaged, and probably deadly, too, when it came time to strike.
* * *
Dion covered one ear with his palm and listened to Kate with the other. “You disconnected me last night,” she said. “In the middle of a conversation. Kind of juvenile, isn’t it?”
He was happy that she’d called. It gave him hope, and already he was rewriting her back into his life. The boyfriend was just a stand-in, and she would now drop him. She would understand the crash was just a test, one they would have to work together to pass.
He told her he was sorry — trying for soft but failing in this impossible environment, and had to repeat himself in a near roar: “I’m sorry.”
“No,
