Giroux said, “Duncan’s sent their big rig and came and got it. Had my doubts, but got lots of pictures before it was touched, inside and out, and figured we’d be better off giving it the once-over in the garage.”
Bosko scratched his ear as if he had his doubts and looked at Leith. Leith nodded shortly at him. “Life in the outback, sir. They use Duncan’s Auto Repair around here for tows.”
“Anyway,” Giroux said, “Fairchild wants us to get that phone down to a signal and see if there’s any messages. Where’s my exhibit man?” She turned and bellowed at her crew, “I’m taking the phone and going down. Spacey, shoot it over.”
A figure approached from the shadows, and the exhibit man, it turned out, was Jayne Spacey, a regular constable Leith had once worked alongside. Spacey, in heavy fur-lined parka, pulled off a mitt and handed an exhibit baggie to Giroux. She noticed Leith and smiled a crooked hello at him, which impacted him now as it did every time they met, taking his breath away. That was young Jayne Spacey, her face asymmetric like she’d suffered a stroke, but all the more beautiful for it.
Before he could fumble out a greeting, she turned to go, saying something about another missing person she had to go search for and rescue.
Leith called after her, “What?”
She walked backward a step or two, grinning. “Just kidding. Our temp, Constable Dion, from Smithers. Went off into the woods and didn’t come back. Kinda cute but not too bright.” She laughed, faced around, and trudged away into the dark.
He watched her go. He heard a murmuring of voices from the possible burial area and looked sidelong to see Corporal Fairchild beckoning him. He left Giroux and Bosko talking and joined the man and a small crew of Giroux’s constables, who stood by a square of land about ten by ten, marked into a search grid with pegs and string.
Fairchild was near retirement, shorter than average, with a heavy grey moustache and gloomy eyes. He looked at Leith and said, “We got glitter, Dave.”
Which to anyone else might sound silly, but filled Leith with dismay. “Damn,” he said. “What colour?”
“Take a look.” Fairchild pointed with his penlight beam, and Leith crouched and aimed his own penlight at the same clumps of snow within the grid. He angled his beam this way and that until the light bounced back at him in a pink flash.
It was the holdback info, the quirk, the fact that traces of body glitter had been found on two of the Pickup Killer’s victims. Lab work had tracked it down to the same brand in both cases, and even to the chain store that sold it, if not the store itself. The store was found in just about every mall in the province.
He stood, swearing. Fairchild said, “Doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Lotta girls wear it these days. And pink’s a popular colour. Could be from lip gloss, or they put it in their hair, on their fingernails. They even glue it all over clothes. We’ll scoop what we can, send it in, see if it’s Hello Kitty.”
Even if it matched the brand, Leith realized, it wouldn’t be definitive proof. Up here shoppers didn’t have a huge choice in anything when it came to the more esoteric products. If you were after body glitter, as he knew from those earlier investigations, Hello Kitty was pretty well what you were stuck with. Fairchild was right; maybe it meant nothing. But it sure didn’t make him happy, those tiny sparkles of pink in the snow.
* * *
Dion was in trouble. He’d lost track and was wandering in circles, every step a struggle in the deepening snow. She had sent him this way, but how far was he supposed to go, and how far had he gone? He ploughed along farther from the lights, farther off the trail and into darkness, until there was nothing but his flashlight beam for company, and the woods were dense, the sky blacker than he had imagined possible. He swore at his own feet that couldn’t seem to keep him upright, at the ear-popping elevation, the chill, the gloves he’d left behind. At himself for telling his CO back in Smithers that he was up for the challenge, and at the CO for believing him and sending him this far north. It had been a murderously long drive on slick roads, where logging trucks barrelled at him like monsters from the darkness, wood bits flying in their wake. He’d nearly lost his life on that road, lost traction twice, fishtailed once, then slowed to a crawl till his cruiser gathered a parade of headlights at its rear. But he’d finally arrived, two hours and fifteen minutes later, not the “one hour max” they’d told him.
The town they’d sent him to was called New Hazelton, about a quarter the size of his Smithers posting. From the New Hazelton RCMP office — the smallest detachment he’d ever stepped foot into — he’d been sent still farther out, twenty kilometres of back roads and then up the scariest mountain he’d ever faced, and now here he was, swallowed in wilderness, searching for a famous person. Famous locally, at least, far as he knew.
He skimmed his light through the trees. He reminded himself how grateful he was for this first real chance to prove himself. “This is fantastic,” he said aloud, and his voice came out thin and quaky in the heavy silence. His boots slithered again, this time almost taking him down. He steadied himself and swore again. His teeth started to chatter, and to stop the chattering, he gritted them, but the shivers only moved into his shoulders. The light beam he was scoping through the spaces between the trees flickered, came on again strong, then blinked madly. “No, don’t!” he shouted. He banged the torch on his thigh and thought about batteries. How could he forget such a fundamental as putting in fresh ones and packing spares? His heart began to thud.
“No big deal,” he said and was reassured by his own adult voice, low and angry. “Walk back, follow your tracks.”
He turned to head back to where he thought the distant main lights should be, thinking about wolves, and now his heart banged harder because he couldn’t see his own tracks in this dim, wavering light beam. He turned the thing off, in part to conserve what juice was left and in part to make him less of a sitting duck to the nocturnal eyes that watched from the wilderness on all sides. He’d heard the predatory noises, the secretive shifting, the low breathing, the salivating, the circling. The sounds came from here first, then there. He turned, turned again, looked back, looked sideways.
Listening hard, he could now hear nothing but himself existing, the blood coursing through his system, the nylon of his jacket squealing with every shallow breath. Then something else, a distant crunch-crunch climbing toward him. Not a wolf, but maybe worse. He turned with measured speed and breathed out heavily as he saw that it was only her, the local constable, Jayne Spacey, who’d met him on the logging road some hours earlier and given him his instructions. She was following her light beam in his direction, calling out his name. He waved overhead. “Here.”
The light landed on him. She crunch-crunched to a stop before him and cast her beam down so it bounced off the snow and lit her up like an actor before the stage lights, the angel saviour with one eyebrow tilted. She said, “What’re you doing standing in the dark? Been gone so long I thought you froze to death out here.”
“My light’s dying,” he said.
To prove it he raised the torch and clicked the button. Light flared like a small sun, catching her full in the face, making her squint. He shut if off again as fast as his cold fingers would let him, and Spacey said, “Well, lookit that, hey? It’s fixed itself.”
“Sorry about that.”
He tested the light on the snow, the trees, the sky, and she said, “So I guess we’re at a dead end, right?” She was nodding, agreeing with herself. “Yeah, we’re on that thing I like to call the unlikely perimeter.”
“There’s tracks,” Dion said, something he’d almost forgotten. With the light strong now, he found his way back to his only discovery, the mysterious, fairly fresh footprints cutting through a small clearing in a strident way. Spacey leaned to see where they went and then waded through bracken and crouched to inspect the boot prints closer. She smiled back at him and said, “I was hoping they’re yours.