pre-dawn glow of lamp standards. Inside, he left Bosko and Fairchild in the main room, busy on their respective BlackBerrys at their temporary desks, and found Giroux in her little office, moving colour-coded magnets around her organizational white board. Like the detachment itself, the woman put up an unlikely face of the law, a little middle-aged Métis lady with slightly crazy eyes that always seemed widened on the verge of outrage. Leith, like probably a lot of people, had assumed Renee Giroux had gained her office via reverse discrimination, a local native, female, getting the boost to show the RCMP’s non-sexist forward momentum and open-mindedness. But Phil Prentice had once enlightened Leith to the truth over beers: Renee Giroux had got where she was by the sheer digging in of her stubborn little heels. And she wasn’t local, either, but had blown over like a travelling weed from eastern Canada, made this her home, and refused to budge. She’d started out as a constable at the age of twenty-two and served under a score of commanding officers, mostly big white guys like Leith himself, and against the odds her wit and hard work and loyalty and sheer rootedness had finally paid off, and she’d made corporal, and then sergeant, and now she was officially the queen of this little mud-hole called the Hazeltons.
“Why are you so set on it?” Leith had asked her last night. They’d left the Catalina and were standing at their vehicles, hunching against the bitter wind funnelling down the broad highway, no sign of life in this poverty-stricken little shanty town of hers. “Awesome place,” she’d said, and pointed up to what Leith saw only as midnight skies layered with clouds of thunder grey. “Stood under that mountain there and fell in love, said this is where I’m going to die.”
That was what she said last night. Now she said, “Morning, Big City. You’re late.”
On some level, Leith liked the nickname she’d stuck on him some years ago. It flattered him, which in turn made him feel foolish, because Prince Rupert, City of Rainbows, was hardly a big city; it was a largish funky fishing village on the stormy north coast. He wasn’t awake enough to bandy about cheerful greetings. “You said six thirty.”
The crazy eyes widened at him. “Yes, which means six fifteen. Okay? So Spacey’s organized herself and Thackray to canvass the Bell 3 for any workers that slipped our radar last night, and I got whatshisname, Dion, out looking for Lenny Law. Sound good?”
Lenny Law was Frank Law’s younger brother, one of many witnesses who needed to be rounded up. An important witness, one of the last few to see Kiera on the day of her vanishing. Leith said, “Oh. I figured he slept in.”
“Who?”
“Dion.”
“No, actually, he was in bright and early. Unlike you.”
This was Giroux’s territory, but it was Leith’s case, and he knew there would be some jostling before they got comfortable in their roles. So far the jostling was fairly amiable, and if they didn’t bite each other’s heads off first, it should stay that way. “Fine,” he said.
“Great. Then I’m ready to go tackle our prime suspect, as you called him last night about five times without any grounds whatsoever.”
She pulled on her RCMP-decalled jacket as she spoke, heavy-duty blue nylon, and Leith said, “Yes, and I stick to my guns on that. And by the way, we’re going out there without backup. Should I be worried?”
The jacket swamped her, made her comical. She said, “Worried? About Frank? No. He’s a musician.”
“Last I heard, musicians can be mean too. He’s got a police record involving fists, and I saw the picture. He’s covered in the kind of tattoos that say ‘make-my-day.’ I don’t get along well with people covered in tattoos. You ask me, we should err on the side of caution and take along a uniform. What we in the big city call ‘backup’.”
She laughed. “Get real. I know Frank. He’s a sweetheart. You got a gun, don’t you?”
“I’d rather not use it.”
She snorted, and with that won the argument.
They sat in her vehicle, the dinged black Crown Vic he’d seen parked up on the mountain last night. Like her jacket, the steering wheel looked a couple sizes too big for her. “They live over the bridge and deep in the woods,” she said, conjuring up another children’s classic to brand the boys neatly. “I call ’em the three bears.”
Rob, Frank, and Lenny Law.
“Bears,” Leith said, regretting he hadn’t insisted on that backup. An extra 9mm at the sidelines would be nice, at least till he got a feel for the players in this thing. Being in unfamiliar territory didn’t help. He had worked in the Hazeltons before, but never in depth. The land here was huge and wild, dense with pine and poplar, riddled with rivers and gorges, and within all that chaos of nature sat this starburst of small communities linked by long, meandering roads, much of it barely charted. So, yes, he was a little uneasy.
“And I say it again,” Giroux said. She had fired up the Crown Vic’s eight lusty cylinders and lunged the car out through the chain-linked lot onto the avenue. “And this is why. He’s got an alibi for the time she went missing, unless it’s a three-way conspiracy, which I guess we can’t discount. And he was the first to put on his boots and go out searching. And he searched till he bled,” she added, the Queen of Hyperbole. “They had to drag him in half- dead from the cold. If that’s not sweet, what is?”
Leith sighed.
“It’s your case,” she added. “But my people. So just keep that in mind.”
By my people she meant all the registered locals, he realized. Not just the dark-skinned Aboriginals that populated much of the north. Whites were the minority in the Hazeltons, but not by far, and they too belonged to Renee Giroux.
Clouds had gathered, thick. A few flakes fluttered down, not nearly the whiteout of last night. Giroux steered them through Two Mile, through Old Town, over the bridge that spanned a rather gut-wrenching canyon, and on for another quarter hour down a narrow, snowy backroad, finally turning into a driveway made of tire ruts.
The driveway seemed to go on forever, dead straight through a young poplar forest, ending in a clearing, and through the windshield Leith saw a big ugly rancher set down amongst the trees with all the grace of a beer can on a beach. Powder blue, vinyl-sided, green metal roof sloping at a shallow pitch. Machinery and cars and clutter in the yard. The kind of place a pit bull would run around looking for man-sized snacks. He kept an eye out but saw no animals lurking in the gloom.
“Been out here before?” he asked.
“Once,” she said, puffing vapour ghosts. “About four years back. That incident I told you about. House was just bare bones then. The Law boys built it pretty much on their own. Dispute with the building inspector became a verbal firestorm and ended in Marty — that’s the inspector — on his ass. Frank did his penance, and far as I know it never happened again. Far as I know, Frank and Marty still drink together.”
Up on the porch, Giroux rapped her knuckles on the door. Leith, listening for dogs still, saw deck chairs, ashtrays, beer cans, and what was probably a mega-gas barbecue under a tarp. The three bears enjoyed their house in the woods, it seemed. Heavy wool blankets thrown over the deck chairs suggested they enjoyed it even on a cold winter day.
The door opened, and he got his first look at his only real suspect so far, Frank Law. The guy was twenty-three, still at the concave-gut stage of life, a lanky powerhouse. Tallish, lightly bearded, eye sockets dented by what was maybe exhaustion,
