trouble brewing, and she’d pushed him inside the cabinet for safety. This implied that the intruder had burst in rather unexpectedly. Enough time to hide the son, but not enough time to protect the infant, Rosalie — or Rosie, another name he had since added to the file — or herself.
What had Joseph seen, heard? What would he forget and what would he remember for the rest of his life?
“Hey, Joseph,” Leith tried.
Nothing.
From her chair, JD said, “Who calls their kid Joseph? He goes by Joey.”
“You figure?”
“Sure.”
“Hey, Joey,” Leith said.
Still nothing.
“Let me try,” JD said.
She switched places with him, and her voice softened as she leaned over the bed. “How are you feeling, Joey?”
Leith admired the simple tactic. Joseph was not only human, but Canadian, and as such he would feel obliged to answer if asked a direct question, even if that meant struggling out of a drugged sleep.
Leith was ready to give up and leave when Joseph’s foot gave a kick. The boy’s eyes flew open, now looking at the ceiling, and now at JD.
There was no fright in those eyes that Leith could see from where he sat. Just bleary astonishment. Leith could see JD’s smile reflected in the pale-blue windows that spanned the room, and he marvelled again at her transformation from tomboy to angel.
“Are you hungry?” she was asking.
Joey nodded.
“What would you like?” she asked, and she took the extra step of touching his face, smoothing his hair. “You can have anything you want. You name it.”
The boy considered. There would be a battle going on inside his soul, Leith knew. Memories and fear clashing with relief and hunger. Being human, he would suppress the bad and seek out the good. Damn, he’d spend the next however many years suppressing the bad.
“Taco,” was the kid’s first word, with a bit of a question mark on the end.
“Ooh, sounds lovely,” JD said. “I’ll get my assistant here to order some up, okay?”
She glanced around at Leith, and she wasn’t quite smirking, but there was a mean glint in her eye. Leith was already making the call. One taco for Joey, one for JD as a reward for good work. And two for himself, because he was suddenly ravenously hungry.
* * *
In the end, though, there were no breakthroughs. Joey — the name he responded to best — could tell them little they didn’t already know. Except that, no, mom hadn’t pushed him in the cabinet. He’d been playing hide-and-seek with her. Leith doubted mom and child had been playing hide-and-seek, at least not in the playful sense. Cheryl had probably only said so to make Joey hide. And fast.
And then — only a teaser — Joey said he had seen the man.
He couldn’t say whether this man knocked or rang the bell first. He couldn’t say where he had come from, either, the front door or back. Or whether he was admitted or barged in without invitation. He couldn’t say how long the man was in the house before the violence began. He didn’t know if his mom knew this man, or what they had said to one another, except the man was shouting at his mom. If she had addressed the man by name, he couldn’t say. Joey had never seen him before, he didn’t think. He couldn’t describe him, except he was big. Between every answer, he had a question, piercing and plaintive: Where’s my mom? Sometimes it switched to Where’s my dad?
How do you tell a four-year-old that all he considers safe and forever is gone? JD explained that something had happened to his mom, and she couldn’t be here with him, but she loved him very much. They would find his dad soon, she promised. She also reassured him — this time it wasn’t a big white lie — that his grandmother Zan was on her way to see him. This news seemed to ease his heart a bit. Just a bit, though his chin wobbled and his eyes filled with tears.
When JD asked what colour the man’s hair was, he couldn’t say. If he had a beard or not, couldn’t say. Joey didn’t see anybody else except the big man shouting at his mom. Rosie was crying. He heard his mom screaming. Joey demonstrated how he had covered his ears so as not to hear.
JD asked Joey if he’d been hiding before the man came, or after. Again, he couldn’t say. He was beginning to withdraw again, softly sobbing, and Leith decided it was enough for now.
He returned to the house on Mahon with JD, and they looked at the cabinet where the boy had hidden. JD squatted down and looked inside. “This is the kind of useless space where things get lost, so people end up installing those spinny rack things.”
Leith knew what she referred to, a circular wire shelf unit that rotates, just like he had in his own home back in Rupert. He shivered to think what would have happened if the Mahon homeowners had stuck one of those contraptions in here. There would have been no room for a four-year-old to hide, in that case. And then maybe there’d be a third victim in this attack. With gloved hands he tried the door, opening and closing it. The door was split down the middle, hinged for its corner configuration. It had been shut tight when Ident discovered the little boy five hours ago.
He said, “Get in there and see if you can shut it from inside.”
JD said, “You’re joking.”
He was, and like all his attempts at humour, it fell flat. He said, “Wouldn’t be easy, though, would it?”
JD agreed, it would be a hell of a job, shutting that door from inside. Especially if you were four, squished into the lower shelf, and scared out of your wits. “Someone shut it,” she suggested. “Mom, I guess.”
Except Joey said he had seen the man. Leith and JD looked from the cabinet door to the living room, visible from here but some distance away. Leith didn’t think Cheryl had been close enough to shut the cabinet door. She was over there, dealing with her assailant. An assailant who had wrestled her child from her arms. Rosalie had fallen or been thrown, banged her head on the coffee table. Blood had seeped through her brain, eventually killing her.
Leith said, “Or how about it was the killer himself? How about it was the dad? Loved his son too much to harm him. Shut him in here so he wouldn’t witness what he was about to do to Mom?”
JD didn’t answer right away, but studied him so pointedly he thought he had the remains of a taco on his chin. He swiped at it with his palm. She said, “If it was his dad, he would say it was his dad. The kid’s shocked, but he’s grounded. I think he saw a stranger in his house. Not his dad, and not somebody he knows. If it was someone he knew, he’d say so. Lance Liu didn’t do this.”
So who shut the cabinet door, and where was Lance Liu? Leith wondered. He checked his watch and realized it was getting close to quitting time. His phone rang as he and JD left the murder house — Doug Paley calling him back for the debrief.
* * *
The late afternoon debriefing had gone well, and Dion was pleased with himself. He drove away from the office in his new used Honda Civic, replaying it in his
