Kiera’s name and blasting whistles.
He and Bosko reached a clearing, a kind of muster zone, and arrived at the lights and action they had seen from afar. Officers were spread out in the trees, marked distantly by the bobbing of their flashlights. The muster zone was lit by heavy-duty portables on stands, and under their raking glare stood a roundish bundle named Renee Giroux.
“My big-city detective at last,” she called out as the men arrived before her. She stared past Leith at Bosko. “And you are?”
Leith made introductions, and the little First Nations CO forgave Bosko for being a stranger enough to shake his hand. “I was just leaving,” she said. “Good thing you got up here to see what we’re dealing with. But this,” she said, and scanned about the site, which was a confusion of crime scene tape strung between bushes, “is going nowhere fast.” She pointed to where several officers were concentrated, performing a finer grid search. “Possible burial site there, snow heaped about, but no body. Her friends and family from here to kingdom come were up yesterday and spent the night looking for her. Natural enough, but what a disaster. SAR made a couple passes overhead, and they’re on the ground now, team of eight, doing the crags and crevasses. Reason I’m up here is Dash drove in from Terrace about half past four and yanked his handler into the bushes, where we got us a game-changer.” She pointed to where two constables were searching the forest floor. “Found it over at that marker. Which is, what, a hundred feet from her car. So all of a sudden it’s looking not like a girl lost in a woods but a girl taken by persons unknown.”
Leith told Bosko that Dash was a tracker dog from Terrace and that actually it was probably the dog’s handler who drove, and asked Giroux what exactly the game-changer was.
“A cellphone,” she said. “Looks new, and I’d be stunned if it wasn’t Kiera’s. Haven’t looked at it yet, was waiting for Big City to show up and do things proper.”
Big City was her nickname for Leith. She grinned fleetingly, not pleasantly, and looked around and again pointed. “Dash said there’s nothing of interest beyond that point, so that leaves us with two scenarios. A) She lost or discarded her phone, then got a ride with someone we don’t know and is some place we don’t know, safe and sound but phoneless and for some reason unwilling or unable to get in touch. B) She was abducted and lost her phone in the struggle.”
She paused, and Leith knew she would be thinking of the faint but frightening possibility that the Pickup Killer had moved in. Here, to her zone of responsibility. Bosko said, “We didn’t see her vehicle on the parking flat. It’s been towed down, has it?”
Giroux nodded. “Fairchild’s call, not mine.”
Leith told Bosko that Corporal Fairchild was head of the Terrace Ident section. He was on scene now, overseeing the search.
Giroux said, “Duncan’s sent their big rig and came and got it. Had my doubts, but got lots of pictures before it was touched, inside and out, and figured we’d be better off giving it the once-over in the garage.”
Bosko scratched his ear as if he had his doubts and looked at Leith. Leith nodded shortly at him. “Life in the outback, sir. They use Duncan’s Auto Repair around here for tows.”
“Anyway,” Giroux said, “Fairchild wants us to get that phone down to a signal and see if there’s any messages. Where’s my exhibit man?” She turned and bellowed at her crew, “I’m taking the phone and going down. Spacey, shoot it over.”
A figure approached from the shadows, and the exhibit man, it turned out, was Jayne Spacey, a regular constable Leith had once worked alongside. Spacey, in heavy fur-lined parka, pulled off a mitt and handed an exhibit baggie to Giroux. She noticed Leith and smiled a crooked hello at him, which impacted him now as it did every time they met, taking his breath away. That was young Jayne Spacey, her face asymmetric like she’d suffered a stroke, but all the more beautiful for it.
Before he could fumble out a greeting, she turned to go, saying something about another missing person she had to go search for and rescue.
Leith called after her, “What?”
She walked backward a step or two, grinning. “Just kidding. Our temp, Constable Dion, from Smithers. Went off into the woods and didn’t come back. Kinda cute but not too bright.” She laughed, faced around, and trudged away into the dark.
He watched her go. He heard a murmuring of voices from the possible burial area and looked sidelong to see Corporal Fairchild beckoning him. He left Giroux and Bosko talking and joined the man and a small crew of Giroux’s constables, who stood by a square of land about ten by ten, marked into a search grid with pegs and string.
Fairchild was near retirement, shorter than average, with a heavy grey moustache and gloomy eyes. He looked at Leith and said, “We got glitter, Dave.”
Which to anyone else might sound silly, but filled Leith with dismay. “Damn,” he said. “What colour?”
“Take a look.” Fairchild pointed with his penlight beam, and Leith crouched and aimed his own penlight at the same clumps of snow within the grid. He angled his beam this way and that until the light bounced back at him in a pink flash.
It was the holdback info, the quirk, the fact that traces of body glitter had been found on two of the Pickup Killer’s victims. Lab work had tracked it down to the same brand in both cases, and even to the chain store that sold it, if not the store itself. The store was found in just about every mall in the province.
He stood, swearing. Fairchild said, “Doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Lotta girls wear it these days. And pink’s a popular colour. Could be from lip gloss, or they put it in their hair, on their fingernails. They even glue it all over clothes. We’ll scoop what we can, send it in, see if it’s Hello Kitty.”
Even if it matched the brand, Leith realized, it wouldn’t be definitive proof. Up here shoppers didn’t have a huge choice in anything when it came to the more esoteric products. If you were after body glitter, as he knew from those earlier investigations, Hello Kitty was pretty well what you were stuck with. Fairchild was right; maybe it meant nothing. But it sure didn’t make him happy, those tiny sparkles of pink in the snow.
* * *
Dion was in trouble. He’d lost track and was wandering in circles, every step a struggle in the deepening snow. She had sent him this way, but how far was he supposed to go, and how far had he gone? He ploughed along farther from the lights, farther off the trail and into darkness, until there was nothing but his flashlight beam for company, and the woods were dense, the sky blacker than he had imagined possible. He swore at his own feet that couldn’t seem to keep him upright, at the ear-popping elevation, the chill, the gloves he’d left behind. At himself for telling his CO back in Smithers that he was up for the challenge, and at the CO for believing him and sending him this far north. It had been a murderously long drive on slick roads, where logging trucks barrelled at him like monsters from the darkness, wood bits flying in their wake. He’d nearly lost his life on that road, lost traction twice, fishtailed once, then slowed to a crawl till his cruiser gathered a parade of headlights at its rear. But he’d finally arrived, two hours and fifteen minutes later, not the “one hour max” they’d told him.
The town they’d sent him to was called New Hazelton, about a quarter the size of his Smithers posting. From the New Hazelton RCMP office — the smallest detachment he’d ever stepped foot into — he’d been sent still farther out, twenty kilometres of back roads and then up the scariest mountain he’d ever faced, and now here he was, swallowed in wilderness, searching
