phone records hadn’t yielded much of interest. The ream of paper was more a bog than a useful tool. There had been a flurry of calls between all subjects on Saturday evening, after word spread that Kiera was missing. Leith was more interested in the hours and days leading up to the disappearance.
As far as he could see, communications between Frank and Kiera had been fairly frequent and friendly. The texts printed out from Kiera’s phone neither proved Stella Marshall’s story of a rift nor disproved it. They weren’t steamy texts at all, but neither were they cool.
Another call stood out to Leith. At 12:25 that Saturday, soon after Kiera had so inexplicably walked out, around the time Chad and Stella had left the house as well, and possibly Lenny as well, Frank had made one short call. The number turned out to belong to Scott Rourke’s landline, and it lasted about half a minute.
“Gotta get Rourke’s records too,” Leith told the wall, and made a note to self.
Frank Law had spoken to his Legal Aid lawyer, Jack Baker, and now he was brought into the New Hazelton interview room, sat down, and given his warnings once again.
Leith put it to Frank that he and Kiera were no longer a couple, and watched the response with interest. It was odd. Frank yanked his mouth out of shape, blushed, and said, “What? That’s bullshit.”
Yet he wasn’t completely surprised by the allegation. It wasn’t news to him at all. So, was it true? Maybe, maybe not. Leith followed up on a new suspicion. “Your band is on hold for now, I know that, but do you guys still hang out, you and Stella and Chad?”
“Not much.”
But some, and some was enough. “It’s Stella’s idea, isn’t it? She told you to tell us that you and Kiera have broken up. Right? Why would she do that?”
Frank remained pink-cheeked with anger. “She never told me to say that.”
“Maybe to throw us off what really happened, d’you think?”
Frank pulled in a breath and then inclined his upper body forward to give thrust to his question, loud, bitter, and sarcastic: “And what really happened, d’you think?”
The last thing Leith wanted to do was rile the man up. The interview was being videotaped, and he knew what defence counsel would do with footage of an interrogation that started to climb the walls. There would be endless app-
lications and voir dires and nasty cross-examination, and he didn’t need another lawyer in his face any more than he needed another ulcer. He backed off and changed subjects, asking Frank instead about that brief call to Scott Rourke.
“Oh, that,” Frank said, sullen now, the heat seeping away from his cheeks. “I thought I’d call him up after practice shut down early, see if he wanted to go for a beer. Got his answering machine. Didn’t bother leaving a message.”
Leith looked at the phone records. “Thirty-two seconds. You waited through his recorded spiel, did you?”
“In case he was screening calls. Said ‘pick up, asshole, it’s me.’ But he didn’t.”
“He screens his calls? Why?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”
Leith closed the interview.
Chad Oman was brought in for a third round of questioning and said he didn’t know anything about the breakup or another man in Kiera’s life. He seemed genuinely surprised at the very idea.
Nobody the investigators spoke to over the course of the day, friends and family, Kiera’s parents and her sister Grace, knew anything about it. In the late afternoon, after a long and tiresome day, Leith told his colleagues that frankly, in his opinion, the whole thing was a fiction in Stella Marshall’s head, and she should be charged with mischief in the first degree.
In the late afternoon he chanced to run into Constable Dion in the detachment hallway that led to the rear exit and staff washrooms, and at the time it struck Leith as a good time to chat about that man’s certain weak-kneed questioning of Stella Marshall last night, a witness who’d been apparently eager to talk and might well have had something important to divulge, even if it was an elaboration on a lie. “It’s just one damn good example of when you should have pressed a witness for more information and didn’t,” he finished.
Dion listened through the advice, wide-eyed, and when Leith was done he gave a short yessir that sounded more like fuck you, and tried to trade places in the narrow hall and move on toward the men’s.
But Leith wasn’t done. He called after him, “If you hate this job so much, why don’t you do yourself a favour and quit?”
“I love this job.”
“You could fool me.”
“I noticed.”
“What?”
“Excuse me. Need to use the washroom.”
Leith returned to Giroux’s office with a scowl, just in time to hear her new theory, which was just a rehashing of an old theory, that maybe there was another man in the picture, and that his sin wasn’t that he was married but that he was somebody too close for comfort. Namely, Frank’s older brother. “Look at it,” she said, standing by the large Google Earth printout they were using for a map, posted up on the wall and marked with points of interest. She moved her finger between points. “The Matax is halfway up the mountain, not far from Rob’s worksite. What if Rob and Kiera agreed to meet halfway?”
“There’s no calls between them in the phone records,” Bosko said.
Giroux had an answer for that too. “Phone records are notoriously easy to check these days, so they thought they’d better set up their meetings the old-fashioned way.”
“Smoke signals?” Leith said.
“Ha-ha,” she said. “No. With good old-fashioned words. Set up in advance. They’re both at the house often enough. Brush by each other in the kitchen, pretend to talk about the weather, but they’re actually setting up a time and place. Saturday at 1:00 p.m. at the Matax trailhead, wink wink, slap on the ass. And next thing you know they’re up there, sitting in his truck, whispering sweet nothings and managing to get their rocks off across the console.”
Leith doubted it. He recalled getting his rocks offs with girls in vehicles — or one girl, one vehicle, one time — in his early twenties. It was an uncomfortable memory, in every sense of the word. But whatever was happening between Kiera and Rob, if anything, wasn’t necessarily lewd. That was just Giroux, who had a way with words. Maybe the two were just talking, figuring out how to break it to Frank. Maybe they argued. Maybe one of them was putting some kind of pressure on the other. Maybe things went terribly wrong.
Aloud, he said, “Rob is alibied all Saturday, but that aside, you have to consider this. He’s got access to a few acres of ripped ground and a backhoe. The ground’s frozen, but if he banged at it long enough, found a soft spot, he could bury her so deep she’d never surface.”
They all stood looking at the map and talking over Rob Law’s alibi for Saturday in the hours of Kiera’s disappearance. Six employees with a clear line of sight on him, or at least on his office trailer and his pickup,
