Undertow. R.M. Greenaway

he died. If it was Phillip Prince who went over there to kill him in revenge for wrecking his bike — which, give me a break, even Prince isn’t that shallow — it would be the other way around. He’d get to the family first and then carry on with his mission of finding Lance. At worst, and it’s even more unlikely, he’d kill the wife in looking for Liu. I don’t believe it. If you work through the whole thing backward, there’s loads of information there, but it’s like it’s just out of reach. This guy was looking for something. How did he get the phone passcode? Did Liu give it to him? Was it forced out of him? And who’s the woman who shut the kid in the cabinet? It’s bizarre.”

      “Huh,” Leith said, setting down his empty glass. He rubbed his gut and winced. “You know what? I should go to bed. G’night.” He tapped his watch face. “Early tomorrow, right?”

      “Right. See you,” Dion said.

      He watched Leith rise unsteadily to his feet and make his way to the till, pay with a credit card, nearly forget to collect a receipt, then leave. Alone, Dion stayed another ten minutes, finishing his beer. People came and went around him. He said no thanks to a second drink when the server came by. She took away the plate, the barely touched heap of nachos under its layer of congealed cheese not much touched by anyone.

      * * *

      On the flight home Dion had the window seat. He watched the dusty-green foothills fall away as the plane lifted, and observed aloud that they were going the wrong way. Leith said they were looping around to gain altitude, which was preferable to driving nose-first into the mountains. Leith seemed nicer today, but maybe depressed. He was clean shaven and reeked of aftershave. Over breakfast he had chatted some, get-to-know-you type stuff, but just filling time. Dion had mostly focussed on eating.

      Now, buckled into his airplane seat, Leith apologized for last night. “I think you were trying to tell me something, and I couldn’t follow. Had a bit to drink over dinner, and a few more in the lounge. Sorry about that. Want to try again?”

      “No. I typed it up in a full report.”

      Dion thought about the report glowing on his laptop late last night. He had sat on the bed, referring to the online dictionary for every word he had doubts about. Even ran a few through the thesaurus, for variety. Worked extra hard on the thing, to make it readable, almost poetic, still trying to impress Bosko. He thought of Bosko’s advice to stick it out for a month. He thought of Bosko saying I’d hate to lose you.

      He tried to imagine sitting here next to Leith on this one-point-five-hour flight, telling him everything. He shook his head and looked out the window. Now he saw clouds and the planet far below, squares of green and grey, snaking rivers, as their aircraft drifted toward the Pacific.

      When he was twenty, he had gone autumn hiking with friends up at Hollyburn. High on the trails he had argued with someone, which led to him getting separated from the group, which left him lost on the mountain, walking half a day and into the evening, shouting and stumbling through wilderness. By nightfall he was cold, wet, tired, and sure he was going to die up there alone. When he found his friends, or when they found him, he sat in the car, somebody’s arm around him, and dropped into the deepest, happiest sleep he’d ever known.

      Would telling Leith be something like that? Would he disclose, and then fall into a dreamless sleep? No, it wouldn’t be like that. Maybe at first there would be relief, but it wouldn’t last. Wouldn’t last beyond the snap of the handcuffs.

      * * *

      Leith, never a great fan of flying, was glad to be back on terra firma. He and Dion arrived at the detachment midafternoon, walking into a hubbub of exciting news. The excitement seemed to centre around a suntanned, white-haired couple who were trying in a frenetic way to tell Doug Paley something obviously important. Before Leith could get a sense of what it was, Paley began to usher the couple out of the GIS office and away to an interview room.

      “Nance spotted it to starboard,” the white-haired man was saying, and Leith saw him gesture at the ratty-looking plastic shopping bag Paley held. “We were drifting. She grabbed the long net, nearly fell in fetching it up.”

      “Bombay Sapphire,” the woman said. “But I didn’t know that at the time, did I? With the cap on, of course. Or not a cap. A cork. Like a funny little homemade cork.”

      “Great,” Paley said, for the third time. “This way, folks.”

      “Floating out in the middle of the Burrard Inlet,” the man put in.

      The three turned the corner and disappeared from Leith’s view, but the woman’s shrill voice floated back. “Like a message in a bottle!”

      Then there was silence as a door down the hallway clicked shut.

      Leith asked anyone within earshot, “What was the message?”

      JD Temple said, “A baby bootie, that’s what.”

      Ten

      Hurricane

      A long night of heavy rain had washed the city clean, and the morning air was warm and humid, with mist lifting from the pavement and awnings. At 9:00 a.m., when Bosko arrived, Leith visited him in his office, first to give him the good news, then the bad. “It’s definitely the bootie we’re looking for, sir. No obvious evidence on it, but it’s gone in for analysis. Unfortunately, the only prints on the bottle belong to the Stubbs. The couple who found it.”

      “And why did they fish it in?”

      “Nancy Stubbs did that,” Leith said. “She says it was pretty, bobbing in the waves. So she scooped it out, and saw there was something inside, and, you know, if it was me, I’d think twice about opening up a mysterious gin bottle, but the Stubbs did just that. They chucked the cork in the water — unfortunately — and used a wire bent into a hook to pull out the bootie. It didn’t click right away, but then Ernie Stubbs recalled the newsflash, and so they brought it in. Not before handling the thing, though. Bet all the DNA we’ll get off it belongs to them and Rosalie Liu.”

      “We can always hope,” Bosko said. “Without prints or DNA, does it advance us at all?”

      “Far as I can see, it’s just an extra bit of weirdness to add to the file. The Lius weren’t drinkers, so unless they kept a stock for guests, it doesn’t seem it came from their place.”

      Bosko thanked him for the update, and since they were talking, asked about the Alberta lead. “Doug tells me it didn’t quite pan out.”

      “Not quite written off, but not promising,” Leith agreed, and gave a rundown of his interview with the biker Prince, Prince’s hot denials, and the consensus between himself and Dion that Prince had not killed the Lius.

      “Yes, I actually read Cal’s report,” Bosko said, grinning. “Did you see it? It’s amazing. Reads like a runaway haiku. But in the end, when you step back, it’s quite thorough.”

      “He’s definitely running circles around me,” Leith admitted.

      “Anyway, so Mr. Prince is a dead end. At least you got a bit of a field trip out of it. The prairies revisited. Suffer any pangs of homesickness, seeing that boundless horizon?”