think? Well, what happened at Morris’s?”
“Cops knocked on the door, but we’d seen ’em coming, and Scottie yanked me into the back bedroom. Morris got rid of ’em, then he came and told us the cops were looking for me and he wanted us to get lost in a big way. So we did. Went on up to the lookout, and Scottie had some hooch, and I wanted to get bombed, so we went to the arch and were just talking about shit when the constable jumped out at us from nowhere and was yelling at Scottie to let me go. And suddenly Scottie’s got me in a chokehold with his gun shoved up my nostril, so I don’t know, but I think that cop had things a bit backward. Anyway, I can tell you, I was pretty damn confused.”
Which makes two of us, Leith thought. “So it was some kind of standoff?”
“Don’t ask me what it was. Scottie would never shoot me. He’s not that kind of guy. Anyway, him and the cop yelled back and forth for a while, and Scottie fired at the cop but didn’t hit him, and finally he let me go.” The young man pulled a face, brows up, mouth turned down, a mime portraying bewilderment.
“What happened between the gunshot and him letting you go? What changed his mind?”
Frank’s stare went distant, and Leith thought he was blushing, but it was maybe just the central heat parching the air. A big chunk of the story had just been skipped over, it seemed, and Leith waited, but Frank didn’t carry on and fill in the blanks. He said, “I don’t know why he changed his mind. Probably because there was a cop telling him to let me go, so he did. I still can’t believe Scottie killed Kiera.”
“Neither can I,” Leith said. “And I don’t. It’s time to cut the bullshit, Frank. We all know Rourke didn’t kill Kiera. The truth will come out one way or another, and it’ll be a hell of a lot better for your own interests if it comes from you, here, now. Her family is waiting for closure. You’re not a bad person. You know what’s right.”
Frank hung his head, pressing fingertips against his eyelids. After a minute of the hung head, he said he was going to heed his lawyer’s advice and say no more.
Leith took him back to cells and then joined Mike Bosko in the monitor room. Bosko was eating a sandwich and didn’t look nearly as steamed as Leith felt. He said, “Well, you can hardly blame him for not looking the gift horse in the mouth.”
What did that even mean? Leith said, “So that’s it, then. We can’t hold him. Rourke’s going to claim responsibility, and unless we get something solid, we’re going to have to go with it, right down the line till trial. Do I have all that right?”
Bosko shrugged. He put the sandwich aside and said, “There’s something I want to ask you about. Let’s go to the case room for a minute.” He lumbered out of his chair and led the way. In the case room he sorted through folders, found one, flipped through statements, and folded the clipped pages back on one where he’d put a sticky note. The statement was of Chad Oman, and the handwriting was not Leith’s, but Leith’s scribe of the day, Constable Dion. Bosko put his finger on a notation appended to the end that was in Leith’s handwriting and read it aloud. “‘Constable Dion suggests he’s lying but can’t say why.’ What’s that about?”
Leith skimmed through the statement to refresh his memory. “I interviewed Oman,” he said. “Dion’s notes were useless, and he’d forgotten to press ‘record,’ so all he got was dead air. We ended up writing out the interview from memory. My memory, because he didn’t have any. At the end he apologized for messing up, then added that he thought Oman was lying. I tried to get out of him what he meant, lying about what, and he couldn’t elaborate. In the end I figured he was just trying to impress me, the old newbie with keen intuition senses a witness is lying and breaks case wide open scenario. I was going to ignore it altogether, but next day, when my hand wasn’t so sore, I decided I’d better add that note. And that’s about all I can tell you.”
“Good thing you did,” Bosko said. “Since as we now know, he’s not a newbie at all. Right?”
Leith had to acknowledge something that had been niggling at him; maybe saving Dion’s life made Leith his guardian ad litem, in a sense, or maybe it was just his own dislike of loose ends, but he needed to know. “What’s going to happen to him?”
Bosko looked at him with interest. “The man’s had a serious head injury. It wasn’t something headquarters wanted to advertise, but it is something they need to monitor, and that’s what they’re doing, if it makes you feel better.”
“Is that why you’re here, to monitor one of your constables?”
Bosko grinned. “For one thing, he’s not my constable. He left North Vancouver before I moved in, so we haven’t crossed paths till now. For another, I wouldn’t be flying halfway across the province and taking lodgings to watch one brain-damaged constable. Wouldn’t be very cost-effective, would it? The locals in charge were supposed to send in regular reports, however, for the first six months, which they’ve been doing, but Renee didn’t notice the letter that accompanied her temp, and Willoughby didn’t stress the importance of the letter, so between them, he’s kind of dropped off the radar. Kind of frightening, isn’t it?”
Very, Leith thought. He crossed his arms, then uncrossed them and stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. When Bosko was reticent, it bothered him. When he was forthcoming, it bothered him even more. Bottom line, he still didn’t trust the man or his agenda.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Bosko said. “We’ve got our eye on him. All right?”
It wasn’t all right. Head injuries changed people, diminished them. Leith had never heard of a head injury improving on a man’s powers or personality, and Dion was clearly no exception to the rule. Maybe he’d been a prodigy, as he claimed, but he was now just bad news. If he didn’t get somebody else killed, he’d kill himself. Neither struck Leith as all right.
Bosko was looking at the document in question again. He said, “His abilities aside, do you have any idea what he thought Oman was lying about?”
Leith shook his head. “No clue.”
“Then talk to Oman again, go over the same ground, and watch for tells. Get tough if you have to. And ask Dion what he recalls, soon as he’s back in the now.”
“How about I get Giroux to grill him?” Leith asked. “Whenever I talk to the man, I get these homicidal thoughts.”
Bosko was amused, but only for a moment. “Seriously, I think you should deal with him yourself. I think you have a way with him. And try to be patient, Dave.”
A way with him? Leith ground his teeth. He wasn’t sure Constable Dion would ever be in the now, or could recall what he ate for breakfast, let alone the nuances of Chad Oman’s veracity over a week ago. And now, thanks to that brain damaged cop’s whimsical I think he was lying remark, he, Leith, was going to have to play bad cop with the drummer, a man who was quite possibly blameless, and that was a role he didn’t relish. Yes, it rankled. His phone buzzed before he could put his resentment to words, and speak of the devil, it was the hospital calling to say Dion was ready to talk.
Thirteen
White Lies
WAKING HAD BEEN BAD, but not hellish. Not like rising from the coma last year, when he’d dragged his own broken body through a dark, wet corridor for endless miles in pain, confusion, and bouts of genuine terror. This was easy, dry, bright, and the painkillers worked wonders. Dion sat on a straight-backed
