Scotch and handed her the glass. “No, thanks. I need to call a cab. I don’t know the number.”
“Oh, of course, you mentioned you were walking back to the highway.” It was about all she knew of him, which way he was heading. She didn’t know his name or that he was with the police, and since he actually was no longer with the police, it didn’t really matter. She had a cellphone in hand, ready to call that cab for him, but paused and said, “I’m getting the feeling you’re from elsewhere. What’s your name?”
He didn’t answer, distracted by her stare. It was unsettling. She was attractive, somewhere in her forties. She had clear skin and well-defined features, but most startling were her probing grey eyes. She was concerned about him, he could see, but the concern was scientific. She said, “Have we met? You look familiar.”
“I doubt it. I live in Smithers.”
“And what are you doing on this lonely road in the Hazeltons in the middle of the night?”
“Just finishing a job,” he said.
“Oh. Who do you work for?”
“Odd jobs,” he said, admiring his own ability to lie on the fly. Better yet, to lie without actually lying.
“That’s kind of serendipitous,” she said, with a lift of her brows. “Because as you can see, I’m in desperate need of an odd-jobber. I’m tackling this house on my own, and not too well. Maybe we can work something out.” She didn’t allow him to answer, moving on to a more immediate problem. “You’re still quite dirty, you know. And you stink. You’re welcome to have a shower. You’re welcome to stay the night, if you’re in no big hurry to leave.”
True, he stank, and he took her words at face value. There was nothing scientific in her manner now, only concern. She said, “Sometimes a person can be more traumatized than he knows. I think you’re traumatized. I probably am too, it just hasn’t hit me yet.”
He had a shower, but he didn’t stay the night, though she offered again, almost insistently. Instead she drove him back to the hotel in a silver Beamer that might have been glamorous once but now had a cracked windshield and a great dent on one side. She kept her eyes on the road the entire way, as if enemies might pounce, and he wondered if her nerves had been shot by a recent MVA. Like his. She repeated her suggestion of hiring him to help with the renos.
“Also, I’ll need Coal taken care of,” she said. “Poor Coal. How about it? There’s at least a month of work for you, with that drywall. You could stay at my place, of course. It’s huge. You could have the whole top floor to yourself. I’ll pay well, better than what you usually get.”
“I don’t think I’ll be back this way,” he said.
Her profile looked tense, angry. She said, “Still, take my number, in case you change your mind. And give me yours.”
“I saw some ads on the bulletin board at the IGA, men looking for work.”
“Hm,” she said. “Okay.”
At the parking lot of the Super 8, she idled the engine, wrote her number on the back of an old business card, and handed it over. He didn’t offer his number in return. Then he climbed out and the Beamer scudded off, slithering on the entrance to the highway. One thing was for sure, he thought, watching the tail lights disappear: her send-off of Coal was about as moving as the flick of the fingers.
Ten
The Run
MORNING BROKE, WET and drizzly. A new document was up on the board when Leith arrived in the office, a large-scale aerial shot with a line arcing across in crooked formation. Giroux and Bosko stood in front of the board, talking about departures. Bosko was saying he was due back on the Lower Mainland in a day or so but would keep in touch; he just had to know how it all panned out.
“What pans out?” Leith said.
Giroux thumped the aerial shot with the side of her fist. “Spacey found a way through. We’re zeroing in.”
Leith looked at the photograph, at Spacey’s trail drawn in black marker, at the mileage scale. Doing the quick and dirty math, he didn’t think they were zeroing in at all, were just wasting taxpayers’ money. The whole thing was crazy, as he went about telling his colleagues now. “That’s at least five clicks. You can run five clicks in an hour, sure, on an even sidewalk. But we’re talking woods here. We’re talking incline, nasty weather, lot of weaving and climbing. And say he’s fast enough to get there and back in the time frame — that doesn’t leave him a lot of minutes to commit the crime, does it? Three, four minutes? What, he races up to the girl, hits her on the head, wheels about, and starts tearing back to the worksite? Face it, Renee, it’s brilliant, but it’s a write-off.”
Giroux seemed unworried by his logic. “Right,” she said. “So to put a mileage or timing on it, Spacey’s going to run it again. Soon as she gets in, we’ll set her up and get her on her way. I’ll send Thackray out to spot her from a distance. He can’t run, but he can handle a radio.”
Leith gave up trying to convince her of anything, let alone who was in control here. He saw Bosko was studying the map up close, as if he could see a tiny runner making its way along the black line. Bosko said, “Jayne Spacey is quite the powerhouse, isn’t she? Why hasn’t she put in for promotion?”
“She has,” Giroux said. “Twice. Always something gets in the way. Why, you’re not thinking of stealing her away from me, are you?”
“She may just steal herself away.”
Leith frowned at the back of Bosko, big and graceless, a circus bear in an off-the-rack suit. He’d never been great at reading between the lines, but it sounded to him like Spacey was going places, city-bound, to join that man in his shiny new Serious Crimes Unit. It didn’t surprise him, but did tweak his professional jealousy, and he said grumpily, “Did Spacey tell you about the menace? Who I fired, by the way.”
Bosko turned, eyes vanishing behind white sheen as his glasses caught the light. “You mean Dion,” he said, as if he knew of the incident already.
Giroux was looking at Leith too, expressing overblown shock. “What d’you mean, you fired Dion? You can’t do that. If any officer could fire any other officer, there would be no officers left to keep the peace.”
“I know that,” Leith said. “Let’s just say he’s suspended till you get him in front of the board, or whatever you have to do. I’m not saying this lightly, but he’s got to go. He’s worse than incompetent. He’s dangerous. They were supposed to stay together on the mountain yesterday. He didn’t. He abandoned the search, got lost in the woods, and Jayne had to go find him, wasting an hour in the bush. Then they get back to the office and he physically assaults her. He grabbed her arm and pushed her down, all witnessed by Pam. All over some dumbass misunderstanding.”
Giroux was upset, her plans and diagrams on hold as she dealt with this troubling personnel issue. “Dion assaulted Spacey? Why? Was she hurt? How come she didn’t mention it to me? Is she going to lodge a complaint?”
“Actually, I heard something about crucifixion,” Leith muttered. He frowned at the awful ring of the word, reminded of the seriousness of being fired from the RCMP. It was tragedy to some officers, tantamount to execution to others. Dion struck him as an officer on the edge, the sort that might
