back, a few clicks slower than Giroux seemed to appreciate, he reflected on the look on Lenny’s face when he’d opened the door, a kind of fear he’d seen before and should be able to categorize, but couldn’t quite. And the strange laugh, full of contempt, but concealing some kind of pain. In the passenger seat Giroux said, “’Course Rob won’t call in with that number, but like Lenny says, why bother. Just look up her stats for the file and fill it in as best you can. Think you can do that for me, fill in the blanks?” She didn’t sound optimistic.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and for a change he was one step ahead of her. “I will.”
* * *
Once all the sleuthing was done, the rest, Leith realized, was basically a crapshoot. A chance sighting of a pickup truck heading down a mountain, for instance, can take a case out of the fridge and back onto the burner. Which always got his blood coursing. He was in Terrace, the middle-sized city that sat between Rupert and the Hazeltons, probable base of operations for the Pickup Killer, though probably not his home. Because of the pickup sighting by Dean Caplin the trucker, Leith was here turning the stones over once again, re-interviewing witnesses, having all local security footages reviewed from the last weekend, scrambling the map points and timelines and trying the gestalt thing. He wasn’t great at gestalt, but it didn’t stop him trying.
But he’d been at it too long without a break, back here in Terrace like a recycling bad dream, and he could see himself running into yet another brick wall. He tried not to punch something in frustration, but when deep breaths and happy thoughts didn’t work, he hammered his own thigh with a fist hard enough to hurt. Mike Bosko, standing at the pin board nearby, said, “Problem?”
“All it’s done is throw doubts all over my best leads,” Leith complained. “I have to start a whole new category of what-ifs now. Frankly, it’s bullshit. I don’t think it’s him.”
“Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
Yes and no. Ironically, Kiera had a better chance of being alive if she was with this particular lunatic, who liked to savour his prey for days. But it was the ugliest silver lining Leith could imagine. He didn’t answer.
“There’s this fellow, Andrew Blair,” Bosko said. He was facing the board where all the key info was pinned. “Why isn’t he front and centre?”
“Because we looked him up, down, and sideways. All we got on him is he said something to somebody which led to a Crimestoppers tip, which led to nothing.”
“What did he say?”
“Something about women and where they belong,” Leith said. “Something any natural-born dickhead in a bar would say when talking to his buddies.” He didn’t add it was something his own misogynistic asshole buddies might say in bars, in fact.
“And what did he say when you asked him about it?”
“Not much. Apologized and admitted he’s a dickhead. Maybe not those exact words.” Leith flipped through files until he had the statement and handed it over.
Bosko sat and read through it, then set it aside. “I don’t know. You’re right, there’s nothing to grab onto here. And I’m no profiler by any means, but he’s the only one that clicks in place for me.”
“I talked to him myself,” Leith said, the uneasiness filtering back in, tightening his belly muscles. One of his most enduring fears was that he would be the sloppy one, the detective who couldn’t read the evidence, the one to let another murder happen on his watch. “No alarms went off,” he said, and knew it wasn’t true. He reviewed the statement with a scowl, closed his eyes to see the big picture, and conjured up Andy Blair, that person of interest, and he felt it again: Blair was one of the faces that had continued to nudge even when cleared, if only in the back of his mind. Blair lived in Terrace, and the profilers said the killer didn’t, but profilers could be wrong. “Yes,” he said. “We should at least check where he was on Saturday.”
Bosko said, “The guy’s got the resources, anyway.”
And that was a big reason it nagged. Blair had access to trucks. An assortment of them, new and used. Which might explain the variations in the witness reportings.
Leith reached for the phone to round Blair up, but Bosko stopped him. “Hang on. Let’s save him the trip and see where he works.”
They drove together to the Terrace Chev dealership owned by Blair’s father, where Andy did anything that needed doing, apparently, from selling cars to detailing them. “There’s a lot of used trucks here, as well as new,” Leith said as they left their SUV and headed for the glass doors of the showroom. “They gave us access to the records, and we found nothing in them that jibed with the abductions. But Blair being second in command here, he could fiddle the numbers and we’d never know. Believe me, I looked into it. Nothing panned out.”
They found Blair inside at the main desk, feet up, chatting with the receptionist. The woman, like most car dealership receptionists, should have been a runway model. Blair was nowhere close to runway material. He was thirty-seven, on the comfortable side of ugly, had no criminal record, wasn’t a troublemaker, had a long-term girlfriend and a healthy set of friends. Lately, he drove a little Ford Focus.
Blair rose from his chair with a salesman’s grin, which didn’t cool even as he recognized Leith as the cop who’d harassed him no end some months ago. He reached, shook hands, nodded as Bosko introduced himself, and took them to a sleek little office with a set of chairs, desk, and computer. He offered coffee, cracked a used-car-salesman joke or two, and waited for the questions Leith would throw at him.
“There’s been another disappearance,” Leith said. “So we’re basically re-canvassing old ground, right?”
“What, another girl?” Blair looked at Leith, looked at Bosko, snapped his fingers and said, “Kiera Rilkoff? It was in the paper. She’s kind of a big name down in Hazelton there, so they made a big deal about it. You know, I’ve seen ’em play, her and her band. They did a gig at a benefit concert here, I forget for what. She was outstanding, if you’re into that kind of thing. Terrible. So you’re thinking it’s the Pickup Killer strikes again? Hazelton’s a bit out of his usual range, isn’t it?”
“It’s really not that far,” Leith said. “If you have a truck. So what were you up to this past weekend?”
Working, Blair explained. The girlfriend was away, and he’d watched an amateur game at the local rink, had a buddy over for beer, Friday night. Was alone Saturday, nursing a bit of a hangover, and didn’t see anybody and didn’t go out.
Which left him without an alibi for the critical time. Leith said he’d like to look around the lot. “Be my guest,” Blair said. “Especially take a look at the newest Camaro. Very hot.”
Colourful flags with Chev logos flapped under a dull winter sun. The detectives walked the entire car lot like a pair of hard-to-please buyers. They looked into the shop, asked to see the recent sales records, and even checked the side avenues for overflow inventory. There was no white pickup with black glass in sight.
Leith was feeling one part energized and nine parts spent. He had found the devil — he believed it, if for no clear reason — but was nowhere near able to rattle its bones.
* * *
The evening took Dion back to Rourke’s neat junkyard, parking his cruiser alongside
