“About half an hour after Kiera left, I guess.”
“What does Tex drive?”
“Old Toyota station wagon. Silver.”
Leith asked why the boys were going to Prince George.
“There’s stuff to do in George. Tex has family down there. His dad’s there, has a big place, so they go there whenever they can.”
Leith told him to carry on, and Frank was slumped again, eyes closed to help track his memories. “I had a bite to eat then called Parker in to see if we could salvage anything from what we had so far. Parker had a listen and said pretty flat-out, no, we couldn’t fix this. It was garbage.”
“Parker?” Leith said, taken aback. “Who’s that?”
“Techie, works at the college, does our post-op mix for us.”
Leith got the gist. He asked for Parker’s full name and address, but all Frank had was a cell number, which he read out from his phone. Leith wrote it down and asked for a timeline for Parker’s attendance. Frank looked at his phone again and said he’d called Parker at 12:50, and the guy had come by within about fifteen or twenty minutes.
Leith said, “So Parker comes over, listens to your recording. Now what?”
“Like I told Constable Spacey, Kiera texted me. ‘Screw you. Get yourself another lead.’ Didn’t take it too seriously. She was just sulking. I texted back, asked her what that was all about. No answer.”
“Right,” Leith said. “I’ve seen the texts. You didn’t press her for more. Why? Weren’t you worried?”
“I was wondering where the hell she was off to, but I wasn’t going to play any head games. I figured she’d be back eventually, and we’d kiss and make up like always.”
“Were you surprised when her truck was found up on the Matax?”
“Totally. I guess she was going to see Rob. She wouldn’t be hiking the Matax, not at this time of year. Not dressed like she was. Unless she went home and changed. Which she might have, for all I know, because she was gone quite a while before she texted, and she couldn’t have texted from up on the mountain. No signal.”
Leith said, “She hadn’t mentioned visiting Rob before she left?”
“No, never, and I have no idea why she’d want to see him.”
“How do she and Rob generally get along? Are they close?”
Frank shrugged, cracking his knuckles. “They get along okay, as much as Rob gets along with anyone. Don’t have much in common, except me. I’ve got no clue why she’d all of a sudden go up to see him. Maybe she had something to tell him that she couldn’t tell me. I just can’t say. I asked Rob. He says she didn’t call, didn’t talk to him beforehand, and she never showed up there. I think she’s only been to the cut block once, me just showing her the operation last summer. You can ask Rob yourself, but he’ll say the same thing. He hasn’t got a clue.”
Along with the knuckle cracking, there was a vicious undertone to his words that Leith made mental note of. It made him wonder, was there something between the lines he should be reading? He now went about angering Frank by backtracking for further detail, such as what was served for lunch, food and beverage, stuff that could be pertinent only in the grim event of an actual autopsy. Frank didn’t know what Kiera had or hadn’t eaten or drunk. Leith next asked about the pot smell. “Who’s the smoker in the house?”
“None of us smoke.”
“I’m not talking cigarettes.”
Frank crossed his arms, an irritated man, paddling his feet on the floorboards.
Leith said, “C’mon, Frank. I’m getting stoned just sitting here.”
Frank sighed. “We all smoke. Everybody in the world smokes a bit of herb.”
Except me, Leith thought. He wondered about the drugs, their source, whether they figured into the abduction at all, but it was a diversion he didn’t want to take quite yet. Except for one more question, relevant to nothing but his own concern for the welfare of a young person. “Does that include Lenny?”
“Definitely not Lenny,” Frank said. “I won’t let him touch the stuff.”
He said it adamantly, and Leith believed him and was slightly cheered. “Glad to hear it. So Kiera’s texted you. Go on from there.”
“Parker left. I think I just worked on a song till Rob got home, saying he’d found her truck up at the Matax trailhead. Then I got scared.”
At this point Giroux said she could smell coffee. Would it be okay if she helped herself to a cup? Frank nodded at her, and she rose and went to the kitchen, just visible from the living room through an opening in the wall, and banged around in the cupboards. “Carry on,” she said. “I can hear you from here.”
Leith asked Frank to describe what Kiera was wearing when she left. Frank described distressed jeans, grey T-shirt, the heavy shapeless cardigan that looked straight off a homeless man’s back but was actually a pricey piece of steampunk she’d bought in Vancouver. And the boots to match, the army-of-the-future look. If she had a coat, she’d left it in her truck.
There was no coat in the truck, Leith knew, so it was probably still on her back. What about her hair, he asked. Did Frank remember how was it done up that day?
Frank shrugged. “She usually ties it back, for practice. Keeps it out of her face.”
Giroux was back with a coffee mug between her palms. Leith said, “Photos. Were any taken on Saturday? Of Kiera, I’m interested in mostly.”
Frank checked his phone and found one shot he’d chanced to take during the rehearsal. Leith had a look, and from what he could see Kiera’s hair was in a ponytail and clipped to one side with a barrette. The colour of the hair clip was indiscernible, and he suspected that no amount of pixel-tweaking would tell them if it matched the metallic blue clip found on the mountain. Still, it was something.
He asked if he could skim through the shots, and Frank didn’t care, so he did, flicked through a few weeks’ worth and found typical pictures that young people take of each other and themselves, mostly out of focus and chaotic. A talented photographer Frank was not. It did tell him that however gloomy they’d been on the day of Kiera’s disappearance, they’d been happy enough in the days before. Of course the metadata would tell him a lot more, but he couldn’t get the metadata without a warrant, and he wasn’t even close to that yet.
He asked if he could keep the phone for a day or two, upload that photo of Kiera? Frank looked at him aghast. “No way. I can email anything you want, but no way you’re taking my phone.”
“Cool,” Leith said — not the word he had in mind. He handed over his business card. “Send me that shot, but soon as possible. Okay?”
“Sure, I can do it now,” Frank said, and he sat there tapping at his phone, transferring the shot to Leith’s email address off the business card.
Leith said, “Once you heard from Rob of the Isuzu at the Matax, then what happened?”
“I picked up Chad, and we dressed up warm and got flashlights and went up to have a look. Got there about eight thirty. Pitch black already. Her truck’s cold as ice. Doors were unlocked. She’s careful about stuff like that, locking her car. There was no notes, no keys, no handbag. Saw a bunch of footprints in the snow going down the slope toward the trail. There’s that little dip there before it climbs. So that’s where we went.”
“Did you touch anything in the truck?”
“No.”
“See her coat there?”
“No.