“There’s this fellow, Andrew Blair,” Bosko said. He was facing the board where all the key info was pinned. “Why isn’t he front and centre?”
“Because we looked him up, down, and sideways. All we got on him is he said something to somebody which led to a Crimestoppers tip, which led to nothing.”
“What did he say?”
“Something about women and where they belong,” Leith said. “Something any natural-born dickhead in a bar would say when talking to his buddies.” He didn’t add it was something his own misogynistic asshole buddies might say in bars, in fact.
“And what did he say when you asked him about it?”
“Not much. Apologized and admitted he’s a dickhead. Maybe not those exact words.” Leith flipped through files until he had the statement and handed it over.
Bosko sat and read through it, then set it aside. “I don’t know. You’re right, there’s nothing to grab onto here. And I’m no profiler by any means, but he’s the only one that clicks in place for me.”
“I talked to him myself,” Leith said, the uneasiness filtering back in, tightening his belly muscles. One of his most enduring fears was that he would be the sloppy one, the detective who couldn’t read the evidence, the one to let another murder happen on his watch. “No alarms went off,” he said, and knew it wasn’t true. He reviewed the statement with a scowl, closed his eyes to see the big picture, and conjured up Andy Blair, that person of interest, and he felt it again: Blair was one of the faces that had continued to nudge even when cleared, if only in the back of his mind. Blair lived in Terrace, and the profilers said the killer didn’t, but profilers could be wrong. “Yes,” he said. “We should at least check where he was on Saturday.”
Bosko said, “The guy’s got the resources, anyway.”
And that was a big reason it nagged. Blair had access to trucks. An assortment of them, new and used. Which might explain the variations in the witness reportings.
Leith reached for the phone to round Blair up, but Bosko stopped him. “Hang on. Let’s save him the trip and see where he works.”
They drove together to the Terrace Chev dealership owned by Blair’s father, where Andy did anything that needed doing, apparently, from selling cars to detailing them. “There’s a lot of used trucks here, as well as new,” Leith said as they left their SUV and headed for the glass doors of the showroom. “They gave us access to the records, and we found nothing in them that jibed with the abductions. But Blair being second in command here, he could fiddle the numbers and we’d never know. Believe me, I looked into it. Nothing panned out.”
They found Blair inside at the main desk, feet up, chatting with the receptionist. The woman, like most car dealership receptionists, should have been a runway model. Blair was nowhere close to runway material. He was thirty-seven, on the comfortable side of ugly, had no criminal record, wasn’t a troublemaker, had a long-term girlfriend and a healthy set of friends. Lately, he drove a little Ford Focus.
Blair rose from his chair with a salesman’s grin, which didn’t cool even as he recognized Leith as the cop who’d harassed him no end some months ago. He reached, shook hands, nodded as Bosko introduced himself, and took them to a sleek little office with a set of chairs, desk, and computer. He offered coffee, cracked a used-car-salesman joke or two, and waited for the questions Leith would throw at him.
“There’s been another disappearance,” Leith said. “So we’re basically re-canvassing old ground, right?”
“What, another girl?” Blair looked at Leith, looked at Bosko, snapped his fingers and said, “Kiera Rilkoff? It was in the paper. She’s kind of a big name down in Hazelton there, so they made a big deal about it. You know, I’ve seen ’em play, her and her band. They did a gig at a benefit concert here, I forget for what. She was outstanding, if you’re into that kind of thing. Terrible. So you’re thinking it’s the Pickup Killer strikes again? Hazelton’s a bit out of his usual range, isn’t it?”
“It’s really not that far,” Leith said. “If you have a truck. So what were you up to this past weekend?”
Working, Blair explained. The girlfriend was away, and he’d watched an amateur game at the local rink, had a buddy over for beer, Friday night. Was alone Saturday, nursing a bit of a hangover, and didn’t see anybody and didn’t go out.
Which left him without an alibi for the critical time. Leith said he’d like to look around the lot. “Be my guest,” Blair said. “Especially take a look at the newest Camaro. Very hot.”
Colourful flags with Chev logos flapped under a dull winter sun. The detectives walked the entire car lot like a pair of hard-to-please buyers. They looked into the shop, asked to see the recent sales records, and even checked the side avenues for overflow inventory. There was no white pickup with black glass in sight.
Leith was feeling one part energized and nine parts spent. He had found the devil — he believed it, if for no clear reason — but was nowhere near able to rattle its bones.
* * *
The evening took Dion back to Rourke’s neat junkyard, parking his cruiser alongside the dingy trailer. He was off duty now, in civvies except for the work boots and rugged RCMP parka, which he needed against the cold.
Rourke told him to come on in. He followed the fix-all into the depths of the trailer and met the woman he’d seen only in silhouette before, the one with the wild hair, not Kiera Rilkoff at all. She rose from a heavy velour armchair and said, “You’re the cop with the watch Scottie was talking about, right?”
“That’s me.”
“Evangeline Doyle, meet Dudley Do-Right,” Rourke said and took his place at his workbench. “Just putting this thing back together for you, Dudley. Two minutes. Make yourself at home. Get ’im a beer, Evie. And me a fresh one.”
She was young and pretty, in a pampered way. Far too pretty for an old greaseball like Scottie. And very pale. She belonged on a stage with a name like Peaches ’n Cream, twirling the chrome pole. She brought a beer for Dion and returned to her chair, gesturing at him to take the tatty loveseat across from her. The trailer was warm, and she wore only a gauzy green dress that showed off her long, solid legs. The fabric was shot through with metallic threads so that it gleamed in the lamplight. Her hair, even wilder than he’d seen in silhouette, was orangey-gold. She sat comfortably and watched him with interest. She said, “So, you guys getting anywhere finding Kiera?”
“Not yet,” he said, about all he was willing to say about the case. “Sorry.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“I can’t say that.”
He considered asking Rourke and Evangeline about Charlie West again, but there was really no point. His assigned task to locate the woman had been taken off his hands by Jayne Spacey within minutes of his first attempts, when he was leaving a message with the Dease Lake detachment. Spacey was working on crushing him. She confiscated his duties whenever she could, didn’t want him claiming any accomplishments, even small ones. She would tell the boss that Dion couldn’t cope with even this, tracking down contact information, that she had to do it herself.
In the end, it hardly mattered. He’d checked Spacey’s file notes and saw that she did manage to reach Charlie West in Dease Lake, which meant Charlie wasn’t the girl walking away from the fall fair, which didn’t surprise him, brought no comfort, only crossed out one of a million possibilities.
A space heater hummed, roasting the air. The beer Evangeline had given him was cold. Rourke brought over the Smiths and handed it to its owner, almost tenderly. “You’re lucky,” he said. “It’s not every repairman who keeps every bit of junk he ever comes across in his whole godforsaken life. I got a shoebox full of watch corpses. Happened to find one that matches close enough, and I replaced the gizmo, there, and put it all back together.