“Afraid of flying?” Leith asked, still reading.
“No. Are you?”
“No.”
An hour later, as they soared toward the jagged rip line of the Rockies, Leith shut the magazine. He said, “I’ve never lived in biker territory. Started out in Slave Lake, did time in Fort St. John. Didn’t face much big-time gang action. Maybe these days Hells Angels are trying to set up shop there, but not so much back then. Spent the last seven years in Prince Rupert, where we had some HA port crimes, but it wasn’t my department. And that’s it. So not much experience with the two-wheeled species. What about you?”
“I’ve dealt with a few bike gangs. Never head-on. They’re more a Surrey problem, Abbotsford. They seem to like wide open spaces.”
“Huh,” Leith said, after a moment’s thought. Then, “I’m thinking I’ll go at this one straight up, what d’you say? Hell with the friendly approach.”
“Sure,” Dion said. “What did you do before you became a cop?”
Leith looked at him with some mistrust. “Who says I did anything? Maybe I joined the force straight out of school.”
“Maybe you did. But I doubt it.”
“Okay, sure. I worked a few years first.”
“In construction,” Dion said.
Leith lowered a brow. “That’s pretty much it.”
“Till you were thirty, then joined up.”
“Twenty-eight. Also pretty close. How d’you figure?”
“It’s easy. I did the math. Two postings, averaging four years each, then seven in Prince Rupert, that’s fifteen years. And you’re about forty-five, so you joined up around thirty. Which is kind of late.”
“I’m forty-four. But how do you figure construction? For all you know I was an accountant.”
Dion laughed. “No way you were an accountant. You’re like me, not the academic type. But you’re hard working, so you probably got a job straight out of school. Best job guys can get straight out of school is in the construction industry. But you felt there was more to life than bending nails. You wanted to make the world a better place. So you joined up.”
Leith gave him a smile, then looked out the window and downward. “Look at all that range,” he said, but more to himself. Then he went back to his magazine.
* * *
They had lunch with some Calgarian police officers, more social than business. Dion enjoyed the neutrality of it, and wondered if he should try for a transfer eastward instead of north. He and Leith then spent the afternoon in an interview room talking to Phillip Prince. Physically, Prince wasn’t overwhelming, but he was a bully, complete with bully tattoos, bully facial hair, and bully attitude. Leith started out by asking him what he had against Lance Liu.
“What d’you mean?” Prince said.
“People have been telling me you wanted to kill the guy. What was the gripe? How’d he step on your toes?”
Prince’s face knotted defensively. “The fuck you talking about?”
Dion saw it coming, the usual let’s-get-acquainted song and dance, and zoned out. It went on for about an hour, as he noted on his watch, before the talk became substantive, and in bits and pieces dense with obscenities, Prince told the story.
It turned out that in Prince’s mind, Lance Liu was a clumsy motherfucking spark plug whose truck, while backing out of the driveway, had knocked over Prince’s custom Harley Wide Glide. Liu and Prince weren’t friends or associates, had never met before that day, were just thrown together by that one twist of bad fucking luck. Liu had been hired for an electric panel upgrade at the Prince home, that’s all. He’d put in his hours and was done for the day, and departed. Prince was popping a Budweiser, heard a crash, ran outside, and after a bit of a fistfight, the two men had settled, off the books. Liu went away with a bunch of death threats thrown at his back, but he got off lucky. Prince used the settlement to repair his bike, but he was never happy with the machine after that. “It’s just not fuckin’ the same,” he said. “When you fuckin’ go over one fuckin’ ten, something fuckin’ rattles.”
“So stay under one ten,” Leith said. “Anything over, you’re breaking the fuckin’ limit.”
“You’re a fuckin’ cunt,” Prince said.
Next Leith put to Prince that Prince had hopped on his bike last week, driven to B.C., and wiped out the whole Liu family, all over one damned rattle. The accusation nearly popped a vein in Prince’s temple, and on that note the interview ended.
* * *
They were put up in two rooms on the fourth floor of the Holiday Inn. Dion unloaded his travel bag. He had a shower, then took time by the big window to admire the view. He saw a flattened version of urban sprawl, lit up as far as the eye could see, and imagined living here, not as an RCMP officer, but a city detective. Because that was definitely an option.
When his watch beeped nine, he closed the blinds. He went downstairs, as agreed, and found Leith in the bar, waiting for him. They had dined separately because Leith had accepted an invitation by a few of the Calgary officers who wanted to hear the coastal perspective on crime, and Dion hadn’t. Now they were here to talk over the Prince interrogation, compare notes, and kill some time before the flight home tomorrow.
The Holiday Inn’s idea of a bar was fairly minimal. Leith was at a tall table, getting a head start on the drinking. The server brought Dion’s order for a glass of beer and promised Leith the nachos were on their way. Leith thanked her, then said to Dion, “So what d’you think?”
Dion had gone into the interrogation knowing what he thought, and nothing of what he had seen or heard of Phillip Prince changed his mind. He shrugged and sucked the froth off his beer.
“I’m thinking he’s not our bunny, and you know why?” Leith said. From what Dion knew, Leith was a beer-drinker, but tonight he was enjoying a Scotch. By the looks of it, he’d enjoyed a few already. “’Cause I’m gonna tell you why.”
“Why?” Dion said.
“I have a two-year-old,” Leith said. One eyelid hung slightly lower than the other, and his focal point seemed to drift in and out. “Well, she’s about to turn two. And when she breaks something, and you go, Izzy, did you break that? she says no, like this. Nooo. I mean, since when do two-year-olds lie? What’s the matter with this world? I thought you don’t learn to lie till you’re, what, five, six? Anyway, this is my point …”
But the nachos came just then, and he forgot his point. Once the waitress was gone, Dion prompted him back on track. “He’s not our bunny why?”
Leith munched on a glob of chips, melted cheese, and hot peppers. “My point is, when you accuse her of doing something that she actually didn’t do — my kid Izzy I’m talking about — she’ll flip out. I mean, she’ll crawl the walls screaming, she’ll be that mad. There’s something about being falsely accused, it’s like a deploy button. And it’s the same with Prince. He’s kind of at your two-year-old level, and he flipped out, too, when I put it to him he’d killed the Lius, right? You saw that, right? Kind of more subtle with him than with Izzy, but I caught it. Yup, I’d bank on it, he’s a bad apple, but he didn’t kill those people.”
Leith was finished with his reasoning, and his mood seemed to dip. “But you haven’t told me what you think.”
“I totally agree,” Dion said. He sat forward, glad they were now on the same page, and he could share his thoughts, which had been punching at his brain on and off all day. “’Course he didn’t do it. It felt wrong from the start, because of the missing phone, right? Why would Prince take Liu’s phone? Doesn’t fit. So