What d’you think, Dave?”
Leith eyed him coldly. “That works too.”
He went about dividing up the rest of the interviews, with Spacey making notes. The songs playing distantly on the radio were melancholy, making Leith crave beer, but drinking wasn’t in the cards tonight. The meeting began to wind down, and there followed some less formal chit-chat and housekeeping matters. Giroux talked about disbursements and accommodations for the out-of-towners, Leith from Prince Rupert, Bosko from the Lower Mainland, Fairchild from Terrace, and the dumbass temp from Smithers, Dion, who was too busy cramming the last of his sandwich to notice he was being addressed, which made Giroux raise her voice in irritation and flap her hand at his face. “Constable. Yes, that’s you. Did you get yourself a room yet?”
With mouth full, Dion stared across at her.
A familiar anger began to crawl in Leith’s veins, and for good reason. Sometimes, somehow, a real bonehead crossed the recruitment hurdle and made it onto the force. Dion was one of those, just out of training, shell-shocked by the grim reality of his job. Probably expected respect, glamour, fun. Probably on day one he’d been posted roadside for eight hours with a radar gun in his hand and was already balking. Well, fuck you, we’ve all done it, Leith thought.
Maladjustment was just the base of the problem; the reputation of the force was at stake, and by extension the reputation of Leith. As though scandals and leadership issues weren’t bad enough, last year a bonehead rookie such as this one, under his command, had blown an investigation, costing the Crown a rock-solid conviction. It was a big case, and the acquittal still left a genuine twinge of pain in Leith’s chest when he thought of it.
So no, he didn’t find stupidity in the ranks funny. And neither did Renee Giroux, who barked at the temp now, “I take that as a no. So, not for the first time, please get yourself booked in over at the Super 8 and bring in the paperwork. Got that? It’s right across the highway there.”
Everyone watched Constable Dion absorbing the instructions, and Corporal Fairchild asked him, “Up from the city, are you? Touch of culture shock? How’d I guess? Easy. You got that what’s with all these fucking trees look about you. Where’s the malls? Where’s the Starbucks?”
Jayne Spacey laughed and blew ice water through her straw at Dion’s face, making him blink. Mike Bosko looked at the temp with brief interest — and maybe only Leith caught his slight double-take — then turned back to Giroux, who was asking him something.
“So where exactly do you call home, Mike?”
“I’m kind of between homes right now,” Bosko told her. “I was in Vancouver for four years, with Commercial Crimes, and I’m making the move over to North Van to help rewire their Serious Crimes Unit. Just needs some tweaking here and there, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.”
“From white collar to SCU to clambering about in the mountains,” Giroux said. “Impressive.”
Spacey leaned forward in a sparkly way, getting Bosko’s attention. “Does your rewiring include seeking out new talent by any chance, sir?”
He smiled back at her. “It certainly does.”
The exchange got Leith’s attention, and he checked Bosko’s face, trying to see if he meant it about the talent search. If so, it might mean an opening for him too. He wasn’t so sure he wanted it, these days, a radical move to the glittering metropolis. Fifteen years ago, leaving his home in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, to join the RCMP, he’d set his sails for the bright lights of Vancouver, but now that he was comfortably lodged in Prince Rupert, a place he liked, the idea of leaving seemed about as doable as relocating to Mars. Or maybe he was just scared.
He shifted back in his seat, vaguely depressed, imagining being stuck in dingy backrooms like this for the rest of his working life. On the other hand, stalwarts like him were needed here as everywhere. Missing kids like Kiera Rilkoff needed him.
His depression deepened, no longer for himself, but for her. Whatever anybody thought, he knew this would be no happy ending. The girl had crossed paths with somebody bad, and was either dead or in that person’s control. He heard Bosko and Spacey discussing North Vancouver, what a great city it was, that buzzing beehive to the south, and from the corner of his eye he noticed Constable Dion had become interested for the first time in something other than his own plate, and the something was Mike Bosko’s face. Was there recognition in his stare, along with a touch of anger? Leith looked at Bosko, thinking he must surely feel the heat of attention, but apparently Bosko didn’t.
Anyway, Leith realized, it wasn’t a stare so much as a sustained glance, and already Dion was tuned out again. But Bosko’s earlier double-take, together with Dion’s sustained glance, told him something about these two: They either knew each other or knew something of each other, and yet neither wanted to admit it. It was a puzzle, but probably just his imagination at work. And even if it wasn’t his imagination, it was certainly none of his business.
The remaining dishes were cleared from the table. An old Harry Nilsson song was on the radio, muted and sad. The SAR people were out there, working hard through the night, FLIR-equipped choppers raking the mountains. APBs were broadcast and reinforcements were on their way for a search that was going to spread ever outward till she was found or resources ran dry. There was nothing more Leith could do right now but rest up for tomorrow. He declared the meeting over and ordered everyone to get a few hours of sleep. All team heads would be up and at it bright and early, for if the Rockabilly Princess was being held by a predator with a pickup truck, there was no question about it: her time was fast running out.
Two
Questions
TALK AT THE CATALINA Cafe had gone on past midnight, and Leith hadn’t made it to his motel bed until one thirty. He woke in the morning when it was still dark out, missing Alison, and missing her more as he stood, toothbrush in hand, and observed the lumps and bumps of his homely face in the bathroom mirror. He’d forgotten all the domestic unhappiness and slamming of doors and the howling child and his aching head. All he knew was he missed them both. Ali and Izzy, his girls.
His home away from home was a room on the second floor of a long, boxy, two-storey Super 8 motel set right on the highway, mid-range, furnished in the usual murky browns and golds like every other inn Leith had ever been stuck in, not a destination but a contingency for the working traveller. Depending on how things went, he could be struck in this Gyproc haven for days, maybe weeks, along with a growing legion of out-of-towners. For now the team was relatively small.
The corridor outside his room was hushed and empty, a hive of sleeping souls. Downstairs in the diner he found Fairchild and Bosko already with coffee in front of them. The only other resident out-of-towner on the case so far, Constable Dion, was nowhere to be seen. The three men had a quick breakfast, asking each other how they’d slept, exchanged motel horror stories, then sat in their vehicles and crossed the silent highway to the small Hazelton detachment.
Small was an understatement. It was a low, squarish building probably built sometime in the seventies, posted with the backlit RCMP signage out front, but otherwise innocuous as a laundromat. The kind of place that would make wandering criminals feel right at home as they cased the town, Leith had told Giroux last night, still seated in the Catalina’s back room with her and Bosko following the dinner briefing. “It’s better than anarchy,” Giroux had answered. Anyway, it would soon be replaced with something bigger and better, and she’d passed over photos not of her nieces and nephews but the architectural rendering of the project to be. In a few years, she said, no more little straw house. She’d be living in brick.
