Spacey said, “Kiera’s a high school grad. She has plans of attending music school in Vancouver somewhere down the road. Good reputation in the community, no criminal history. She’d been employed at the Chevron gas station until last summer, when she quit to devote herself to her music. We all know Fling’s a successful band and seems to be going places. Her parents support her financially and morally, it seems. I haven’t taken full statements from them yet, but like the boss just said, we have no reason to focus on them at this point. Kiera’s dad is with the Ministry of Forests, and her mom’s a physiotherapist at the hospital, so they’re financially secure.”
Leith admired how Spacey had progressed since they’d last met. He wondered if her straight-shouldered stance and lucid delivery had anything to do with the presence of the brass from the city. He wondered if his own blustering did as well, and hoped not.
Spacey said, “Now for the here’s-what-we-know part. Kiera’s boyfriend is Frank Law, who’s the guitarist in the band. She spends much of her time at his place in Kispiox.” She passed around several copies of a map marked in red with points of interest. “It’s the ‘L,’ and I’ve been there as well today. It’s a good-sized house on an acreage he shares with his two brothers, Leonard and Robert, better known as Lenny and Rob. It’s here Fling has been rehearsing since the house was built, about four years ago. They were rehearsing there yesterday when Kiera left the house, alone, drove off, and didn’t come back. She left at the lunch break, around noon, but nobody can give a precise time. She was seen driving northwest on Kispiox Road about an hour later by a friend of the Law brothers, Scott Rourke.”
She went on detailing the eyewitness account of Scott Rourke, who had been riding down Kispiox Road on his motorbike when Kiera had passed him in her Isuzu, upward bound. Leith had heard most of this up on the mountainside, but he made notes now. Most everybody at the table did the same, except for the dark-haired uniformed constable at Leith’s left, who couldn’t seem to find a pen. Leith gave him his spare and said to Spacey, “A motorbike? In these conditions?”
“More like a dirt bike,” Spacey said. “And Rourke’s a maniac.” She went on. “Also on the map you’ll see an ‘RL’ up on Kispiox Mountain. That’s where the Law brothers, more specifically Frank’s older brother Rob, run a logging show. We have reason to believe she was heading up to see him when her truck broke down at the ‘M’ you’ll see there, the Matax hiking trail. Kiera and Frank texted briefly around one thirty, and that was their last communication. We got it off Frank’s phone.”
Another photocopy was passed around, a printout of a direct screenshot from an iPhone. Bosko looked it over and then passed it to Leith. The text came from Kiera at 1:26 p.m.
Kiera: “Screw U. Find yrsf another lead”
Frank: “WTF? Where RU?”
Spacey said, “Kiera didn’t reply, and Frank more or less put it out of his mind till later in the evening, when Rob Law came upon her black Isuzu Rodeo at the Matax trailhead as he was coming down from the cut block around seven. He got home at seven thirty. That’s when Frank collected Chad and went up.”
She paused as the waitress brought food. Not a moment too soon, Leith thought, his stomach grumbling. The constable to his left, the one who’d forgotten his pen, was in his mid-twenties, maybe, pale-skinned but dark-haired and dark-eyed, beat-up looking. He was staring with doubt at the Denver sandwich placed before him, and in a low-grade epiphany Leith realized this was the guy Jayne Spacey had called “kinda cute but not too bright.” Dion, the temp in from Smithers.
The long-awaited “Special” burger with extra fries landed in front of Leith, and he dug in. Spacey ignored her wrap, still on her feet, and went on briefing the team. She told them who had been at the house yesterday at noon when Kiera walked out: Chad Oman, the drummer, Stella Marshall, who played fiddle, and Frank Law’s younger brother Lenny Law, who was seventeen and home-schooled. Lenny wasn’t involved with the band, as far as Spacey knew, and there was some question about whether he was present at the time Kiera left.
Giroux told Spacey to sit down and eat, which Spacey did, and for a while there was only the sound of forks and knives hitting china, munching, sipping, and the distant twitter of pop music.
Leith chomped at his burger faster than he should. Down the table, Mike Bosko ate a much healthier salad of some kind and made conversation with Corporal Fairchild, Ident Team Leader, at his side. Constable Dion picked up the first quarter of his Denver and devoured it in two big bites, then closed his eyes and looked ill.
Bosko left his conversation with Fairchild to ask Spacey, if she didn’t mind, about more general background on the band itself. “I’ve heard they’re putting out a CD?”
“Was supposed to come out at Christmas,” Spacey said. “There were some delays, and I’m not sure where that’s at right now. Mercy Blackwood would be the one to talk to, the band’s manager. I’ll set her up for an interview.”
Leith added the name Blackwood to his list of interviewees and listened as Constable Spacey described a barrette she’d found in the snow near where Kiera’s cellphone was found. Both barrette and phone would have to be fingerprinted, and Kiera’s family would be asked to identify the items.
Leith scrubbed the mayo off his mouth and told the team of the critical clue, the body glitter, possibly linking up this disappearance with two of the three Terrace murders. Some discussion followed on the importance of eliminating or confirming the link, then he turned to the cellphone, now Police Exhibit 1, which wouldn’t give up any secrets till he got it unlocked. “Nobody knows her password?” he asked Spacey. “BFF, family, boyfriend?”
“Not so far,” Spacey said.
Bosko said, “And who is her BFF, by the way?”
Corporal Fairchild said, “What the hell is a BFF?”
“Best friends forever in teen-speak,” Spacey told him. “And WTF is what the fuck.”
“Everybody knows what the fuck,” Fairchild said testily.
Spacey ignored him and said to Bosko, “Her BFF would be Frank. She’s got tons of Facebook friends, I know because I checked, but not a lot of real up-close and touch-em people in her life. The band is kind of insular in that way. They stick together.”
Leith was thinking about the cellphone. He told Fairchild, “If you could find out who her provider is—”
“Rogers,” Spacey said. “I checked.”
Leith nodded at her. “Contact Rogers,” he told Fairchild. “Crack the code, get a printout of her call and text history.”
“I’ll get on it,” Fairchild said. “I’ll see what I can do about a data dump, but it may take a while. For starters I can grab some screenshots. How far you want me to go back, Dave?”
Leith suggested a month.
Fairchild put the question out about the Isuzu — which was being scoured for evidence by his team even as they spoke — why it had stalled, whether an engine could be sabotaged without leaving a trace. Leith didn’t know the answer. Nobody did, not even the fountain of knowledge named Bosko. Giroux said she’d ask Jim of Duncan’s Auto Repair; he’d know.
Spacey passed around a snapshot of Kiera Rilkoff and Frank Law. Leith had only glanced at the photo earlier, and he took the time to study it now, Kiera smiling gorgeously at the camera, her boyfriend seated beside her, also smiling. Frank’s smile could be judged gorgeous too, he supposed, if the judge was a young girl.
Frank Law, like Kiera, was white, in his early twenties. He had longish hair, dirty blond, and in the photo he wore a clingy black short-sleeved shirt, a thorny tattoo banding his upper bicep. Leith angled the photograph to Giroux. “Any kind of a record on this guy?”
She nodded. “Pretty minor. Assault, few years back. Got one year probation and a stern eye from the judge is about it.”