unthinkable hell.
“Still bothers me that Kiera’s grabbed over here,” he said, speaking more to himself than Bosko over on the other wing of Giroux’s enormous desk. “While the others happened over there.” In the Terrace area. “Is he expanding his hunting ground, or was he just passing through?”
The question belonged not to him but to the Terrace task force, Corporal Stoner, and it had been beaten to death here, there, and everywhere, really not worth putting to words for the hundredth time. Bosko was on his laptop, communicating with his home office, but present enough to look at Leith and say, “Might be worth it to go over the timeline again.”
The timeline was fixed in Leith’s mind like a fiery branding. “Karen Blake was taken March of 2008, two years ago. Lindsay Carlyle, nearly nine months later, November 2008. Joanne Crow just two months later, December 2009. And nothing since. Nothing for over a year. We found Joanne over fourteen months ago, on Christmas Day. It’s not much of a pattern.”
“But a pattern, however you look at it,” Bosko said. “And it’s more likely opportunity than urge that’s dictating when he strikes. That should prove helpful.”
Leith got his point, of course. If it was a pattern, there weren’t enough hits to make even a rudimentary shape, but it was the ABCs of profiling. Use the pattern as a template against the comings and goings of anybody who might come under suspicion — truckers, hunters, forestry workers — and it could help sift out the perpetrator. These were all winter kills, sure. That, if nothing else, stood out loud and clear. When it came to the Pickup Killer, death was tied to the seasons.
Bosko asked how many light-coloured pickups were registered in the area between Terrace and Smithers, a question that took Leith back to the pain in his gut.
“Every other guy has a pickup,” he said. “I have a pickup. And every other pickup is light in colour. Like mine. There are lots.”
“I’ve noticed,” Bosko said.
“Rob Law has a tan pickup, but it’s pretty new. Both sightings say it was probably an older model. One tip, from November, says it’s white; the December tip says silver. Different trucks or just a trick of the light, who knows. Neither witness knew much about vehicle makes and models.”
Bosko spoke of how important it was not to get in a rut with this truck-sighting business. “Like you say, Dave, there are only two leads in that direction, both tenuous. Now, if we had a third sighting —” he added, and it was at this exact moment, at least as Leith later recalled it, that Constable Jayne Spacey stepped into the room with news, and the timing was surreal.
“We got a truck sighting,” she told them, flapping her notebook. “Dean Caplin. I’ve got him in the interview room. He’s a driver for Whittaker Contracting, working in the cut-block above the Law outfit. He was pulling a loaded rig down the mountain at fifteen twenty hours on Saturday afternoon —”
Which fell, Leith knew, some five hours before the search for Kiera got underway, and his interest was definitely piqued.
“— and he passed Kiera’s Rodeo on the lookout, which stood out to him, because it’s hardly tourist season. But it’s what he saw a couple minutes later you gotta hear. He passed her Rodeo, and two or three minutes later, that’s his best estimate, he came up behind a vehicle driving down the road ahead of him. We missed him earlier because he was out of town, just got back, heard we wanted to talk to him, called in right away. You’re going to want to talk to this guy, like, now.”
Leith was already on his feet, inviting Spacey to join him.
The witness, Dean Caplin, stood when they entered, a man who fell into the “good citizen” camp, in Leith’s snap-judgement opinion. Introductions were made, hands were shaken. Caplin’s hands were huge, calloused, cold, and oily. Not only a good citizen but a hard worker.
“Yeah,” he told Leith when they were all seated around the table. “It was a white pickup, five, ten years old, some old Nissan or something, two-wheel drive, had no business on them roads. Couldn’t see who all was inside because rear window was some kind of custom job, black glass.”
Leith had laid out a forestry map, and he asked Caplin to pinpoint as best he could where he’d first seen this pickup with the black window.
Caplin pointed to a spot just down from the lookout where Kiera’s Rodeo had been found. “It was going pretty slow till I came up behind it, then it shot off, eh. Kind of fishtailing a bit. I thought it was going to go over the bank, and I’d be picking up the pieces. I probably lost sight of it about here, around this bend.” His finger traced a short line and stopped.
“I don’t suppose you caught —”
“Christ, no, sir. Licence plate was covered in mud. And even if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have made note of it. Had no idea it was a crime in progress. Sorry.”
When Caplin was gone, Leith made some phone calls, talked with Giroux and Bosko, and decided it was time to take this last bit of info to Terrace and upturn the files again, see if it clicked anywhere, small white pickup with black rear window. He’d go himself, he’d go now, and preferably he’d go alone.
“I might as well join you,” Bosko said. “Does that work?”
“Does it ever,” Leith said, two thumbs up. “Wonderful.”
* * *
By mid-afternoon a hard wind was blowing, and the undersized detachment seemed to creak and strain on its foundations. Dion had been aware of some excitement earlier, something that had taken Leith off in a hurry to Terrace, the small city farther to the north. The search for Kiera seemed to have settled already into a lower gear, and the crowds were gone, the place hushed but for a woman sobbing in one of the interview rooms down the hall, an unrelated case. His fingers were smashing at the keyboard, spell-checker racing along and underlining half the words he laid down. He had been tasked with assisting Constable Thackray with exhibit documentation, and he was in a trance of words and numbers when something came clomping over and hovered into his left-hand peripheral vision, too short to be Thackray, too graceless to be Spacey. He looked sideways and stopped typing.
“We’re going out,” Sergeant Giroux said. “Witness interview. Take a fresh pen.”
Outside, small vapour ghosts raced over the tarmac, forming lines and breaking up again. The sergeant had marched to Dion’s cruiser, to the passenger side, which meant they’d take his car and that he’d be the driver. He stood by the driver’s door and searched himself for keys, a minor pastime of his lately. The keys weren’t where he expected, and he had a lot of other pockets to check, and it wasn’t long before Giroux shouted across the roof at him from the passenger side, “Just pretend this is an emergency callout and people’s lives are at stake. What’s the matter with you? You don’t like driving?”
He looked aside, between buildings and signposts, toward what he could see of the highway, its surface glittering in the dull light of day like it was strewn with crushed glass. “No, ma’am. It’s pretty icy.”
He’d found the keys, not in any of his jacket pockets or duty-belt but in his trousers, and beeped the locks, but too late because Sergeant Giroux had struck off across the parking lot toward an older model sedan. “We’re taking my Celeb,” she called back at him. “Sacre! I’m not riding with a man who’s afraid of a little ice.”
When he was in the passenger
