Giroux was still fixed on him, sharp-eyed, peeling back his thoughts. She tapped the picture at him. “This picture startled you? Why? You know her?”
He didn’t take the photo from her but looked at the image, a black-haired girl, somewhere in her late teens or early twenties, hard to judge. The ice-blue T-shirt he’d seen at first glance was actually a sky-blue summer dress. She had soft round shoulders and had turned her face down with the reticence of so many native girls he’d dealt with in life, all in the line of duty, down in the Lower Mainland, where most native guys he confronted were belligerent, and most native girls looked they would rather disappear than have to face the world and all its tough questions. The girl in the picture didn’t look like she was in a bad place. She was at a kitchen counter here, cutting vegetables, and though she hid from the camera, he could sense she was smiling.
He squeezed his eyes shut for the beat of a moment and saw the girl at the fair like it was yesterday, walking away. How could someone forever walking away never go away? She would keep walking away and dragging him along till she pulled him under. He spoke heavily, looking pointedly at the photograph. “That could be Charlie West. Rob Law’s fiancée, or was, from Dease Lake. She left him last fall. I meant to type it up.”
Giroux drew in a loud breath. “And how the hell do you know all that?”
“Scott Rourke told me. I had meant to put it in my report —”
“You already said that. Why didn’t you? You forgot?”
Worse than forgot, he’d procrastinated. “It didn’t seem important,” he said. “Sorry.”
“And what the hell conversation is this, with Scott Rourke?”
“I have this watch, needs fixing, just asked him —”
“Yeah, okay.” The woman in charge of his life sighed, and in that breath he felt himself dismissed, papers to follow. “You don’t make calls like that, what’s important and what isn’t, till you’ve got some status,” she said. “Which doesn’t look promising. Though I’m not much of a role model, am I, grabbing evidence without a warrant? Better get this back to them before I get sued for trespass.”
She rolled the car the rest of the way down the driveway, where a boxy blue house sat, and climbed out of the car. Dion followed. She walked up the steps, knocked on the door, then banged on it, and eventually a boy opened in tank top and pajama bottoms, the youngest brother, Lenny Law, looking wretched and under-slept. Nobody else was home, he told Giroux, letting her and Dion pass inside. Frank and Rob were up there, he said, gesturing vaguely to heaven. Working. The house was cold. Giroux asked him why he wasn’t in school.
“I am,” he said, crushing an eye with a palm.
“Oh right, I forgot,” she said. “Homeschooler. I won’t keep you. Just wanted to stop by and see how you’re doing, okay? You and your brothers. Can we sit down a minute?”
He rolled his eyes and made a show of just how baggy-faced and irritable he was feeling, but nodded.
“It’s an icebox in here,” Giroux said. “Go put on a robe or you’ll catch pneumonia.”
“I’m okay.”
“That’s an order.”
He went off to do as he was told, and Giroux slipped into the kitchen. She came back with a cup of coffee in hand. “Always coffee on the go here,” she told Dion with a wink. “It’s terrible. You want some?”
He didn’t want coffee. Lenny returned, swaddled in not a robe but a heavy cardigan, and Giroux said, “Tell me about Charlie West.”
His brows went up. “Charlie? What’s to tell?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But if she knew Kiera, I want to know about it. That’s all.”
The boy shrugged. “She was Rob’s girlfriend for a while. They were supposed to get married, but it didn’t work out. She left at the end of last summer. Went back home. To Dease.”
Dion watched the boy, wanting to pin him down on her date of departure. Did she go straight home? Any chance she’d go south instead? While he was considering opening his mouth to ask just that, Giroux said, “Does she stay in touch?”
“No way. And if she tried, she’d get blown off. She’s burned her bridges in this house, leaving Rob like that.”
“You have any photos of her, so I can have something for the file?”
“I did,” he said, with sudden anger. “They disappeared. Probably Rob got rid of them.”
“Well, have another look around,” Giroux said. “How did Charlie and Kiera get along?”
Another shrug. “Fine. Charlie was quiet. She was always just kind of there.”
“D’you have her contact info? I’d like to talk to her all the same.”
This was what Dion was waiting for. He held his breath.
“I don’t know why you’d bother,” Lenny said. “What, you’re thinking Kiera and Charlie ran off together?” He brayed a snarky laugh. Dion stopped holding his breath and frowned, watching the kid laugh, and watched the smile fade back to glum, and willed Giroux to get tough, ask more questions.
Giroux said, “Get her number for me, would you?”
“She doesn’t have a cellphone.”
“How about a home number?”
“You’ll have to get it off Rob,” Lenny said. “He might have something. Unless he threw it away, which he probably did. He was pissed off when she left.”
“Well, tell him to look for it and call it in to me, okay?”
Lenny nodded and saw them out. Out on the driveway, Giroux gave Dion the car keys and said, “Better get used to it.”
Driving back, a few clicks slower than Giroux seemed to appreciate, he reflected on the look on Lenny’s face when he’d opened the door, a kind of fear he’d seen before and should be able to categorize, but couldn’t quite. And the strange laugh, full of contempt, but concealing some kind of pain. In the passenger seat Giroux said, “’Course Rob won’t call in with that number, but like Lenny says, why bother. Just look up her stats for the file and fill it in as best you can. Think you can do that for me, fill in the blanks?” She didn’t sound optimistic.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and for a change he was one step ahead of her. “I will.”
* * *
Once all the sleuthing was done, the rest, Leith realized, was basically a crapshoot. A chance sighting of a pickup truck heading down a mountain, for instance, can take a case out of the fridge and back onto the burner. Which always got his blood coursing. He was in Terrace, the middle-sized city that sat between Rupert and the Hazeltons, probable base of operations for the Pickup Killer, though probably not his home. Because of the pickup sighting by Dean Caplin the trucker, Leith was here turning the stones over once again, re-interviewing witnesses, having all local security footages reviewed from the last weekend, scrambling the map points and timelines and trying the gestalt thing. He wasn’t great at gestalt, but it didn’t stop him trying.
But he’d been at it too long without a break, back here in Terrace like a recycling bad dream, and he could see himself running into yet another brick wall. He tried not to punch something in frustration, but when deep breaths and happy thoughts didn’t work, he hammered his own thigh with a fist hard enough to hurt. Mike Bosko, standing at the pin board nearby, said, “Problem?”
“All it’s done is throw doubts all over my best leads,” Leith complained. “I have to start a whole new category of what-ifs now. Frankly, it’s bullshit. I don’t think it’s him.”
“Well, that’s a good thing,