“They’re going to know about Potter. Right? We can’t lie and say he’s our man. They’re going to know they’re now in the spotlight.”
Leith said, “There are still enough distractions. There’s the white truck, our potential mystery abductor. And there’s the question in the back of all our minds: What if Kiera ran away? We’ll just give the impression, at least, of focussing on those two avenues for now.” He directed his words to Spacey. “We’ll need the phone records of Chad Oman, Stella Marshall, Frank Law, Rob Law, and Lenny Law, so if you’ll bang out the production orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
“They’ll know they’re being looked at, and they’ll be upset and need soothing,” he told the team. “Let them know it’s only procedural and hope they accept it. Any interview I’m not at personally I’ll be monitoring, so make sure they’re all well recorded. And I mean press ‘record.’” At the back of the room, Dion didn’t look up to meet his glare. “At one point we may turn on the fear,” Leith finished. “But you’ll get fair warning. It’s got to be coordinated.”
The team, which had doubled in size over the week, listened and nodded, and probably more or less got the message. The expanding investigation brought more members every day, and soon Leith feared he would have to commandeer the school gym or some other space with breathing room. The facts were building up like sediment, none of it helpful. All had been put before the team, in hopes that it might snag a real lead. The fingerprints on the cellphone belonged to Kiera only. Same with the barrette. Hairs had been caught in the barrette, and they belonged to Kiera. Fibres had been extracted from the snow, along with the pink body glitter. The fibres were synthetic, from a so-far unknown fabric, and the glitter was no match to that found on John Potter’s victims, or to any known body-glitter brand.
Leith glanced at Sergeant Mike Bosko, always trying to gauge the man’s mood. The gauging had something to do with his own ambitions, and something to do with a growing apprehension of the real reason for Bosko’s presence. When Bosko wasn’t giving advice from the sidelines, he was out there like a journalist, asking questions. Getting to know the beast, he’d said over drinks.
Now Bosko stood at the crowded perimeter, hands in pockets. He was looking not at Leith but toward the back of the room, either at the Mr. Coffee machine or beyond it to Constable Dion busy making notes. He had no good reason to look at either.
Leith was sore from talking. He rapped on the whiteboard behind him and closed the meeting with a final word of inspiration for the troops: “There’s the strategy. Now for the action.”
* * *
Fortunately for Dion, he didn’t have to worry about strategy or action. Following the briefing, he was back at his computer, going through vehicle registrations for the area in an expanding radius, listing the owners of trucks and making phone calls. Others were following up on that list out in the field, actually eyeballing those trucks. The north was huge and sparsely populated, and there was a lot of driving involved. He was just grateful not to be out battling the wind and ice and slippery asphalt.
There was a Post-It note stuck to the glass of his monitor on which he had written the vehicle description, to keep him focussed. Without that Post-It, in no time he would end up looking for something like a late-model blue sedan among all these names and numbers, instead of …
He glanced at the sticky again. Wt pickup, 10+ YO 2-wheel drive, blk glassed rear window.
In one of the briefings, somebody had said they thought the black glass was maybe just temporary, that peel-off crap. Somebody else had pointed out from personal experience that that peel-off crap was not so easy to peel off. A person would have to spend a day scraping, steaming, and vacuuming to get rid of all traces of the stuff, and even then on a forensic level they would fail. And according to the transcription on file, the trucker, Caplin, had been re-interviewed, and he said it wasn’t that peel-off tinting crap, in his opinion. That stuff had a purplish tinge and wasn’t, whatchoocallit, opaque. Even with a bit of ambient light from high-beams glaring off snow, you could see shapes through it and whatnot. No, this, he said, was black glass, as in black.
Dion didn’t think the truck would ever surface, at least not with telltale black glass installed. Whoever was driving it that night down that mountain would have known they’d been spotted, and if they had just committed a serious crime like abduction, they would know they would be tracked down eventually. The glass would have to go.
There were other ways of making glass dark, aside from the tinting film. You could spray-paint the window. That would make it opaque, and the paint could potentially later be removed. Or an even faster and easier fix, duct-tape up some kind of dark material, paper or fabric, or even, say, black garbage bags. Fabric would be more light-absorbent, though. Black velvet. At night, in the headlights, glass covered in black velvet would look simply black. Like the night pressing in on Scottie’s window. Black.
It wasn’t likely permanent custom-installed black glass. If a truck with black glass for a rear window was driving about, somebody would have seen it previously and remembered it. Neighbours would for sure remember something like that, let alone friends or family. So unless it was from out of town and just passing through, which he didn’t believe was the case, then it didn’t exist. Which meant the glass was darkened temporarily, which meant the abduction, or an abduction, at least, was premeditated.
Were the other windows tinted? Probably not, for the same reason: People would remember an older truck with all-tinted windows. What would be the good of blacking out the rear window, then, when there were front and side windows to worry about as well?
He considered further, pen in hand, doodling cubes within cubes in ballpoint, until he’d answered his own question. Because it was better than nothing. It simply cut down the odds of being identified.
So the crime was premeditated but rushed. Haphazard. He was almost there, almost had the answer, but he was distracted, and it slipped away. He could sense a superior in the room, somewhere behind him, and he sat straighter and got back on task. Except he’d forgotten what that task was and had to check the sticky once again. White pickup, ten years or older …
* * *
Hazelton didn’t have a “soft” interview room, exactly, a place set up to relax the subject rather than intimidate. But somebody at some point had read the new guidelines and made the effort, placing two chunky upholstered chairs against one wall with a coffee table in between, fake flowers and an array of magazines. The effect was odd, at best, like chandeliers in a fast food joint. The classic hard table and three hard chairs remained in the centre. Frank Law sat in one chair, Leith and Bosko occupying the others. This final re-interview, like all the others they’d ground through all day long, was being video-recorded.
Frank hadn’t shaved, apparently hadn’t showered, probably hadn’t slept much since Saturday. There were not just rings of shadow around his eyes, but grooves, like a super-fast aging. Leith’s opening approach was gentle. “You’ve been dating the girl forever and probably know her better than anybody. How does she deal with stress? Does she bottle it up, let it all out? Does she sulk, get drunk, go for a jog, or what?”
Interestingly, Frank wasn’t swallowing the ran away scenario. “Number one,” he said. “She doesn’t get stressed. Anything bugs her, she talks about it. She’s stronger than anyone I know. If she had a problem, she wouldn’t run away from it. She’d run at it and wrestle it to the ground. That day she went away to think things over, but she wasn’t running away. You can forget that idea.”
“Right. So what’s the alternative? If she’d gotten lost on the mountain, we’d have found her by
