So why are you telling me this?”
“Because it’s fantastic. It’s a comedy of errors. Rob and Frank each think the other did it, so they’re trying to save each other’s necks, which is insane because neither one should be going through this hell, when I’m the one who did it. Me.” Rourke thumped himself on the chest. “That’s why I’m telling you this. I have that much decency left in me to admit what I done, if it means saving those two bozos from themselves.”
“Why did you and Frank go up to the lookout last night?”
“To talk.”
“Your good friend Morris Fernholdt says you came by yesterday evening, you and Frank, and wanted to hide out there for a few days. He sent you packing. Why would Frank need to hide out if he hadn’t done anything wrong?”
“Frank was just trying to help me out. He’s a good man. Loyal.”
“Sure. That’s a nice .22 you got, by the way. Diamondback. Kind of rare specimen, isn’t it?”
“They’re still common as Ford F-150s, actually.”
“Maybe. But far and few between up here in the sticks. How’d you come upon it?”
“Friend of a friend. An estate acquisition. Fifteen years ago, at least.”
“Interesting. We’ll have to do some tracking, find out when it went off the radar.”
“I got hold of it before the radar was invented, sir, and before I got my firearms ban, by the way. It was an oversight. I guess I just stashed it away and forgot about it. Just doing some spring cleaning the other day and came upon it.”
“And took it with you to talk with Frank on the lookout?”
“That was for cougars.”
“You shot a cop, Mr. Rourke.”
“Huh?”
“And since you’re sitting here readily confessing to one homicide, is there anything else you should get off your chest? We got the gun, we’ll get the riflings. We’ll rummage the archives, and any place that gun shows up, every little gas station holdup, we’ll have to assume you were there too. So save yourself the trouble of a bunch of long boring interrogations and give me the list now.”
Rourke was looking appalled, and like all his emotions, it came across with exquisite exaggeration, Daffy Duck accused of murder. “What d’you mean, I shot a cop? I never shot a cop.”
Leith’s arms and ankles uncrossed themselves, and he sat forward. “Something wrong with your short-term memory? You shot him last night, right in the gut. He bled all over my car, and he’s dying in the hospital as we speak. And you know what? Killing a cop is even worse than your regular civilian homicide.”
Rourke jerked back in his chair. “You talking about Constable Dion here? I never shot him. Never.”
Leith saw outrage, and it puzzled him. He didn’t want to sound puzzled, so he said savagely, “Isn’t that weird, because Frank’s telling us the exact opposite.” This was an on-the-spot invention, because he hadn’t talked to Frank Law yet, but he’d never felt bad about lying to catch a shithead. He raised his voice as Rourke clambered to his feet in indignation and barked, “Sit the hell down.”
“I shot over his head,” Rourke said, back in his chair, still appalled and somehow hurt. “I never aimed anywhere near the jerk. I wouldn’t do that.”
There followed a dead spot in the interview. Rourke moped. Leith sat tapping his pen again, studying the man’s face and wondering.
He left the room to talk to Giroux and found instead a big bear at her desk, Mike Bosko, who was supposed to have caught the sheriff shuttle to Prince George this morning but apparently hadn’t. Like a bad rash, he’d take his time fading away.
Bosko looked up, smiled, said, “How’s it going with Rourke?”
“He says he didn’t shoot Dion,” Leith told him. “And he’s full of hot air on every point except this. Are we sure it’s actually a bullet that got him?”
Giroux stepped in, sparing Bosko the trouble of saying I don’t know in his long-winded way. “Not a bullet, guys,” she said. “Just heard from the hospital. He woke up long enough to confirm what the doctor suspected. It was a jab, not a bullet. And self-inflicted.”
Naturally, Leith thought.
The same blast of contempt had maybe crossed Giroux’s mind, the way she tossed her hands. She said, “Seems he impaled himself on a branch during a fall. Lost some blood, but no vital organs. Exhaustion is the diagnosis, few stitches and rest is the cure. So he’ll be okay, but we can’t talk to him till they say so.”
“Well, they better say so fast,” Leith said.
On the other hand, he wasn’t too concerned about what Dion had to say. Frank’s confession had been in the works last night, and the East Band was just an aggravating little diversion masterminded by that idiot Rourke. Now they were back on track, and Frank was being brought in for his turn at the podium, and Leith felt cautiously optimistic that this would be the grand finale. The interview that would close the file forever.
* * *
Things seemed to go well, at first. Frank Law, in a choppy, solemn way, told Leith that after a day of reflecting, sitting up at Sunday Lake with Lenny, chilled to the bone, he’d known what he had to do: come clean with what had happened to Kiera, and for the first time in a long time Leith’s hopefulness marched forward. He nodded encouragement to this intelligent young man who could see the writing on the wall, who was going to do the right thing now and save everybody a lot of time and trouble and admit he’d done it.
Frank took a deep breath and said, “Scott Rourke killed her.”
Leith went through the motions in his mind of slamming the table and howling rude words at the heavens. But only in his mind. He gave Frank his steadiest gaze, rimed with ice, and waited for more.
The not-so-intelligent young man nodded, something earnest in his demeanour, almost sweet, and Leith thought about juries and their fallibility. “Ask him,” Frank said. “He’ll tell you.”
So the long way around they would have to go. Some cases were quick wraps, others were like playing musical chairs in a fevered dream. Leith put Kiera aside for the moment, made a note to himself, and got onto the more recent past, asking about the shootout on the East Band lookout.
“Not much to tell,” Frank replied. “I’d just dropped Lenny back at home, was on my way here, to tell you guys everything. But met Scottie, he was heading home on his bicycle, and I made the mistake of stopping to say hi, and he said he wanted to talk about something, so he hopped in my Jeep and we went up to the lookout.”
“Long ways to go for a chat in the middle of the night.”
“Around here, man, logging roads are entertainment.”
“You went straight up the mountain, then?”
Frank shrugged uncomfortably. “First we went over to Morris’s place. Scottie
