Rupert. He’s come to make sure we look in all the right places, okay?”
Frank looked far from reassured but allowed them in with a good show of manners. In the living room, among more macho mess and the not-so-faint smell of pot smoke, they took seats.
Leith fiddled with his pocket recorder, prefaced the recording with date and time and who all was present, and asked Frank to take them to the beginning, starting from the day before Kiera had gone missing, that being Friday. “Just take your time,” he said, “and give me a visual replay of everything you can remember, okay?”
“Friday,” Frank said. His voice was husky and sore. “Helped Rob up on the landing all morning, bucking some old windfall out of the way for the crew. I left for home about four. It was getting dark. Rob stayed on alone, breaking his own rules. You don’t work alone in this business unless you got a death wish, but there’s only so far you can push him, and he just shuts you out. That’s Rob. Anyway, he’s got these new lights set up there, wants to get his money’s worth. Told me not to worry. So I didn’t.” His frown deepened, and he seemed already lost. Giroux prompted him with an encouraging murmur, and he gave a start and carried on. “Friday night. Came back, had dinner with Lenny and Kiera. She came over for dinner.”
He didn’t recall the conversation around the dinner table or what they’d done that evening except watch some dumb show on TV. Leith asked if Kiera had mentioned anything out of the ordinary happening in her life, if she’d met anyone, even just a casual encounter. Did she have any special plans for the upcoming days?
Frank didn’t recall anything unusual in their conversation. Kiera went home pretty early, around ten o’clock. Frank went to bed soon after.
Leith asked him about the day that really mattered now, Saturday. “Just go through it, minute by minute. What happened?”
“I got up about seven thirty, had toast and coffee.”
“And Rob had stayed up on the mountain, right? What about Lenny? Was he around?”
Frank scowled. “Sleeps like a pile of rocks these days. He’s seventeen. Such a shitty age. Used to be our soundman, and a good one, but lost interest. Lost interest in everything, pretty well.”
Leith studied Frank’s downturned lashes, the troubled lines of his face, his shoulders, that almost visible inner quaking of emotional trauma. Not a cruel man, but possibly a killer. Anybody could be, really.
Frank went ploughing on, talking in machine-gun bursts now, like all he wanted was to get this over with. “So Lenny was in his room, and Kiera came over a bit later than she said, nearly nine. We’d agreed on eight thirty.”
“Was that unusual?”
He shrugged. “Kind of. No big deal. I was already setting up the equipment. We went over some of the music, played a bit, waited for the others to show up.”
“You have an in-house studio?”
“Top of the line,” Frank said, sitting straighter and flicking hair out of his eyes. “Just finished last November. To die for.” He looked pugnacious as he said it, as though daring Leith to contradict him. Now he was glum again. Leith prompted him back on track.
“Chad and Stella showed up minutes after Kiera, around nine, quarter after,” Frank said. “Chad’s wrecked his truck, so he caught a ride in with Stella.”
Chad was Chad Oman, the band’s drummer. He was native, local born, once a bit of a troublemaker, according to Giroux, but nothing worse than the usual teenage joie de vivre. Now that he was in his twenties, working at the Home Hardware, and with a great career as a drummer on the horizon, he was behaving “pretty good.” And Stella was Stella Marshall, also a band member, also local born, also in her early twenties, who apparently played the electric fiddle.
Frank described how the band had rehearsed for a couple of hours, till lunch break. More to get a sense of the group dynamics than anything, Leith asked if it had been a good rehearsal. The answer was short, snappy, and surprising. “No,” Frank said. “It was crappy. Got nothing accomplished. It’s the pressure. We need to get this demo put together by the end of the month because the last one bombed, so we were all just on edge. Especially Kiera. So we took an early break, and I put out some food, but nobody seemed hungry. Kiera said she was going out for a while, and she just took off. Drove off in her truck. It was just after noon, I guess.”
“Did you see which way she went?” Leith asked, though he knew the answer before Frank shook his head. There was only one way she could have gone by vehicle, and that was off down that long, tree-shrouded driveway. Unless somebody followed her, they couldn’t know which way she went once she hit the narrow two-lane Kispiox Road, whether it was south toward town or north toward the Kispiox Range, where her truck had been found.
“What did she say, exactly, as she left?”
“Not much. ‘Back in a while.’ That’s about it.”
“She was upset?”
“Not upset. Fed up.”
“With who, or what?”
“Like I said, the music wasn’t coming together. They’re upbeat tunes. You can’t force upbeat, can you?” It was a black, rhetorical question. He said, “Stella said there wasn’t much point sticking around, so she and Chad left. Lenny crawled out of his room, grabbed a sandwich, went off with Tex to Prince George. That was my idea. I wanted him out of there. Last thing I needed was a sullen teenager hanging around.”
This part Leith didn’t know so well, but he’d seen in the statements taken by Spacey, drafted up for review, that Tex was Lenny’s buddy who’d picked up Lenny and taken him off to Prince George for the day. So far neither boy had been reached, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. He also knew that both Lenny and Tex were homeschoolers, so they chose their own reading assignments and wrote their own schedules, which also made them harder to pin down. “What time was it they took off?”
“About half an hour after Kiera left, I guess.”
“What does Tex drive?”
“Old Toyota station wagon. Silver.”
Leith asked why the boys were going to Prince George.
“There’s stuff to do in George. Tex has family down there. His dad’s there, has a big place, so they go there whenever they can.”
Leith told him to carry on, and Frank was slumped again, eyes closed to help track his memories. “I had a bite to eat then called Parker in to see if we could salvage anything from what we had so far. Parker had a listen and said pretty flat-out, no, we couldn’t fix this. It was garbage.”
“Parker?” Leith said, taken aback. “Who’s that?”
“Techie, works at the college, does our post-op mix for us.”
Leith got the gist. He asked for Parker’s full name and address, but all Frank had was a cell number, which he read out from his phone. Leith wrote it down and asked for a timeline for Parker’s attendance. Frank looked at his phone again and said he’d called Parker at 12:50, and the guy had come by within about fifteen or twenty minutes.
Leith said, “So Parker comes over, listens to your recording. Now what?”
