said. “Thanks for listening. Take care.”
He put money on the table and left, driving back to the Hazelton detachment. Night shift was on duty, two constables he had only met once or twice and whose names he had forgotten. Under the annoying buzz of the fluorescents, he sat at his computer, wrote out the brief report, and filed it. Then he went back to his accommodations across the highway at the Super 8. Passing the room he knew belonged to Sergeant Mike Bosko of the Serious Crimes Unit, North Vancouver, where he had come from himself and where he belonged, he paused and stood before the door, considering its surface. He pulled in air, raised his knuckles, gave a light rap.
Nothing happened. And had that door opened, what would he have said? He wasn’t even sure.
Back in his room, he turned the TV on for company and managed to get some sleep. Sleep was pocked with disturbing dreams, haunted as usual by Looch, who stood on the pavement below the Super 8. Dion looked down and saw the car parked curbside. The river ran beyond instead of the highway, black cottonwoods ranged along the far shore, dense as a wall. Looch wore a dark overcoat and was packing something in the car’s trunk, an awkward parcel like a side of beef bundled in tarpaulin. Looch was leaving town, and Dion was crushed. The wall of trees was a wall of stone looming high into the sky. A figure appeared on the sidewalk, approaching Looch from behind, and Dion tried to open the window to either shout a warning or jump out, but the window wouldn’t open. The figure was nearing and would soon be at Looch’s back, and Dion banged on the glass with both palms until the strain of his foiled efforts woke him.
He had shifted across the bed in a tangle of blankets. He sat and stared at his own hands, pale blue and flickering in the light of the TV. Just a nightmare, but the message in the dream remained, a sour fear in the pit of his stomach. All the things he’d done wrong, the mistakes he’d made, they weren’t buried deep enough. Like the figure on the sidewalk, they were slowly but surely catching up.
Nine
The Walk
SUNRAYS SLASHED ACROSS the village in the morning, but Leith had a feeling it wouldn’t last. Still, there were sparrows twittering in the bushes and at least a remote sense of spring on its way. He stepped into the diner downstairs off the Super 8 lobby, which was empty except for some old guy by the window — no colleagues, no Dion — and had a quick breakfast.
Across the highway at the office, a fresh-faced Renee Giroux handed over an occurrence report for himself and Bosko to look at. Leith went first, scanning over a single paragraph so riddled with typos and incomplete sentences that he had to read between the lines. “‘STELLA MARSHAL,’” he read out, “‘Avised Constable Dion that KEIRA RILKOFF spilt up a few months ago with FRANK LAW. It was by mutual content and.’ Okay, sure.”
“Split, I think,” Giroux said.
“He spelled Rilkoff right,” Leith said. “And mutual. Impressive. Ends the second sentence with ‘and,’ which is probably grammatically incorrect, but hey, what do I know?”
“Mm-hmm,” Bosko remarked, taking his turn reading the report. As he did too often, he seemed to catch Leith’s words but not the inflection, and Leith could never figure out how much of the misunderstanding was deliberate. “Interesting. Dave, you want to talk to the girl, get this story nailed down?”
Leith did not. There weren’t many people he dealt with who made him feel foolish, but Stella Marshall was one. She only had to roll those pale blue eyes in his direction and he felt oversized and dim. “Sure,” he said. “No problem.”
He argued with her on the phone. She was at work and couldn’t come in, so he agreed to meet her at her place of employment.
She was a teller at the Royal Bank in Old Town. The bank wasn’t yet open when he arrived within the hour, but she unlocked for him, let him in, saying, “Good morning, Officer Leith.” She locked the door behind him, mentioned that it was an exceptionally cold morning, and offered coffee.
“No, thanks,” he said. “This’ll be quick. I wanted to talk to you about the statement you gave to Constable Dion last night.”
There was nobody else in the bank, and Stella led him to the manager’s office, a posh little set-up. She lounged in the big leather chair, and Leith sat before her like a man seeking a loan. A man without equity, in his case.
“I haven’t anything to add to what I told Constable Dion,” she said.
“Well, I have things to ask.”
“So do I.”
He paused, already thrown.
She said, “I understand you want to see my phone records. Am I a suspect?”
“Ma’am, you’re definitely not a suspect. We’re looking at everybody’s records right now, not for anything incriminating, but to help piece together Kiera’s day around the time of her disappearance. It’s a procedural thing. No worries.”
“Okay. Thank you. Your turn.”
He wanted her to pinpoint the date of this alleged lovers’ break up, and she couldn’t, since it was more a slow dissolution and nothing official, and probably nothing Frank was quite ready to admit, at least not to the world at large. “But think about it,” she said. “It was inevitable. He and Kiera have known each other since they were ten. How can you stay in love with someone when there’s nothing left to discover? They both wanted out, and they were very cool-headed about it, and they remained close friends.”
“I heard they were engaged.”
“It was just talk.”
“You say she was seeing somebody else, a married man. It sounds like you know who that person is.”
“No, actually, I don’t. I’m not supposed to know any of it, and I have to say, maybe I’m way off base. It’s just stuff I pick up. Big ears. As I told Constable Dion.”
“You think Kiera met this guy on the Matax on Saturday? Is that what you’re saying?”
She shook her head. “I really don’t know.”
But it was what she wanted them to think. She could be lying, Leith realized, about all of it. Frank Law was under the gun now, and one way she could deflect that suspicion would be invent a new suspect and throw him into the mix, like nuts into the cookie batter. The mystery man on the Matax. He said, “Did Frank have a love interest of his own?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Was Frank upset with her when she left rehearsal on Saturday?”
“Yes, just like Chad and I were. It wasn’t great timing on her part. But what could we do? The demo’s a bust anyway. I think we all knew it.”
Leith heaved a sigh. “How about giving us some names we can discreetly check out, at least. There can’t be that many local men she could be seeing on the sly.”
She only shook her head, swivelling in her bank manager chair, eying him in that way that made him feel so foolish. “I have no idea. He may be an out-of-towner, a travelling businessman, say. Or a cop. He may be yourself, for all I know.”
Leith was done, and he stood. “Thanks,” he said. He felt absurdly like a
