here to talk over the Prince interrogation, compare notes, and kill some time before the flight home tomorrow.
The Holiday Inn’s idea of a bar was fairly minimal. Leith was at a tall table, getting a head start on the drinking. The server brought Dion’s order for a glass of beer and promised Leith the nachos were on their way. Leith thanked her, then said to Dion, “So what d’you think?”
Dion had gone into the interrogation knowing what he thought, and nothing of what he had seen or heard of Phillip Prince changed his mind. He shrugged and sucked the froth off his beer.
“I’m thinking he’s not our bunny, and you know why?” Leith said. From what Dion knew, Leith was a beer-drinker, but tonight he was enjoying a Scotch. By the looks of it, he’d enjoyed a few already. “’Cause I’m gonna tell you why.”
“Why?” Dion said.
“I have a two-year-old,” Leith said. One eyelid hung slightly lower than the other, and his focal point seemed to drift in and out. “Well, she’s about to turn two. And when she breaks something, and you go, Izzy, did you break that? she says no, like this. Nooo. I mean, since when do two-year-olds lie? What’s the matter with this world? I thought you don’t learn to lie till you’re, what, five, six? Anyway, this is my point …”
But the nachos came just then, and he forgot his point. Once the waitress was gone, Dion prompted him back on track. “He’s not our bunny why?”
Leith munched on a glob of chips, melted cheese, and hot peppers. “My point is, when you accuse her of doing something that she actually didn’t do — my kid Izzy I’m talking about — she’ll flip out. I mean, she’ll crawl the walls screaming, she’ll be that mad. There’s something about being falsely accused, it’s like a deploy button. And it’s the same with Prince. He’s kind of at your two-year-old level, and he flipped out, too, when I put it to him he’d killed the Lius, right? You saw that, right? Kind of more subtle with him than with Izzy, but I caught it. Yup, I’d bank on it, he’s a bad apple, but he didn’t kill those people.”
Leith was finished with his reasoning, and his mood seemed to dip. “But you haven’t told me what you think.”
“I totally agree,” Dion said. He sat forward, glad they were now on the same page, and he could share his thoughts, which had been punching at his brain on and off all day. “’Course he didn’t do it. It felt wrong from the start, because of the missing phone, right? Why would Prince take Liu’s phone? Doesn’t fit. So Lance Liu got attacked first, then whoever did it got the info off the phone — and he’d need the passcode to access it, Sig Blatt confirms Lance used a passcode — and then went after his family on a follow-up basis. Doesn’t matter the pathologist says they died around the same time, Lance and Cheryl. Doesn’t say anything about the time of the attack. Fact is, Lance Liu was lying there for a while before he died. If it was Phillip Prince who went over there to kill him in revenge for wrecking his bike — which, give me a break, even Prince isn’t that shallow — it would be the other way around. He’d get to the family first and then carry on with his mission of finding Lance. At worst, and it’s even more unlikely, he’d kill the wife in looking for Liu. I don’t believe it. If you work through the whole thing backward, there’s loads of information there, but it’s like it’s just out of reach. This guy was looking for something. How did he get the phone passcode? Did Liu give it to him? Was it forced out of him? And who’s the woman who shut the kid in the cabinet? It’s bizarre.”
“Huh,” Leith said, setting down his empty glass. He rubbed his gut and winced. “You know what? I should go to bed. G’night.” He tapped his watch face. “Early tomorrow, right?”
“Right. See you,” Dion said.
He watched Leith rise unsteadily to his feet and make his way to the till, pay with a credit card, nearly forget to collect a receipt, then leave. Alone, Dion stayed another ten minutes, finishing his beer. People came and went around him. He said no thanks to a second drink when the server came by. She took away the plate, the barely touched heap of nachos under its layer of congealed cheese not much touched by anyone.
* * *
On the flight home Dion had the window seat. He watched the dusty-green foothills fall away as the plane lifted, and observed aloud that they were going the wrong way. Leith said they were looping around to gain altitude, which was preferable to driving nose-first into the mountains. Leith seemed nicer today, but maybe depressed. He was clean shaven and reeked of aftershave. Over breakfast he had chatted some, get-to-know-you type stuff, but just filling time. Dion had mostly focussed on eating.
Now, buckled into his airplane seat, Leith apologized for last night. “I think you were trying to tell me something, and I couldn’t follow. Had a bit to drink over dinner, and a few more in the lounge. Sorry about that. Want to try again?”
“No. I typed it up in a full report.”
Dion thought about the report glowing on his laptop late last night. He had sat on the bed, referring to the online dictionary for every word he had doubts about. Even ran a few through the thesaurus, for variety. Worked extra hard on the thing, to make it readable, almost poetic, still trying to impress Bosko. He thought of Bosko’s advice to stick it out for a month. He thought of Bosko saying I’d hate to lose you.
He tried to imagine sitting here next to Leith on this one-point-five-hour flight, telling him everything. He shook his head and looked out the window. Now he saw clouds and the planet far below, squares of green and grey, snaking rivers, as their aircraft drifted toward the Pacific.
When he was twenty, he had gone autumn hiking with friends up at Hollyburn. High on the trails he had argued with someone, which led to him getting separated from the group, which left him lost on the mountain, walking half a day and into the evening, shouting and stumbling through wilderness. By nightfall he was cold, wet, tired, and sure he was going to die up there alone. When he found his friends, or when they found him, he sat in the car, somebody’s arm around him, and dropped into the deepest, happiest sleep he’d ever known.
Would telling Leith be something like that? Would he disclose, and then fall into a dreamless sleep? No, it wouldn’t be like that. Maybe at first there would be relief, but it wouldn’t last. Wouldn’t last beyond the snap of the handcuffs.
* * *
Leith, never a great fan of flying, was glad to be back on terra firma. He and Dion arrived at the detachment midafternoon, walking into a hubbub of exciting news. The excitement seemed to centre around a suntanned, white-haired couple who were trying in a frenetic way to tell Doug Paley something obviously important. Before Leith could get a sense of what it was, Paley began to usher the couple out of the GIS office and away to an interview room.
“Nance spotted it to starboard,” the white-haired man was saying, and Leith saw him gesture at the ratty-looking plastic shopping bag Paley held. “We were drifting. She grabbed the long net, nearly fell in fetching it up.”
“Bombay Sapphire,” the woman said. “But I didn’t know that at the time, did I? With the cap on, of course. Or not a cap. A cork. Like a funny little homemade cork.”
“Great,” Paley said, for the third time. “This way, folks.”
“Floating out in the middle of the Burrard Inlet,” the man put in.
The three turned the corner and disappeared from Leith’s view, but the woman’s shrill voice floated back. “Like a message in a bottle!”
Then
