He found Potter hunkered deep in the hollow formed by two firs, head bowed forward between his knees as if ashamed of the big bloody mess he’d made of his life.
Leith made his radio call, bringing in the medics. Then he mirrored Potter in a way, head hung, nothing left to do or say.
* * *
Some hours later, from the case room in Terrace, he called Giroux to tell her about Potter. Not just the death, but what had been found in the remains of Potter’s burned down house. “Convenience store receipts,” he said. “For cigarettes. Dated Saturday. Checked the security footage, and we got Potter alibied, no doubt about it. We’ve almost certainly got him on the Pickup killings, but he wasn’t involved in our girl’s disappearance, and we’re back to square one. Bosko’s just dealing with some stuff here, then we’ll head back to Hazelton. Be there in two hours, max.”
Giroux spoke quietly, which was a departure for her. “I’ll put on a fresh pot of coffee, Big City. See you soon.”
* * *
With all hands on deck for a full-team briefing, the small detachment was filled to capacity. The air was overtaxed, dry and hot. Leith’s nose was stuffed, a new discomfort to go with the headache, the guilt, and the dull pain in his wrist left over from the sprain. Any spiritual satisfaction he might have felt for stopping John Potter in his sadistic tracks would just have to wait. Right now his focus was on Kiera.
Outside the snow pelted down on New Hazelton, thick and fast, blanketing the village afresh. Four names were up on the board now: Frank, Stella, Chad, and Rob, four young people suddenly cast in a far harsher light. Bosko had suggested the approach to be taken, and Leith spread the word to the team. “We don’t want the tenor of our relationship with these kids to change just now,” he said. “But we’ll have to get fresh statements, and this time we’re going to trawl for inconsistencies.”
Jayne Spacey asked how that tenor was supposed to go unchanged. “They’re going to know about Potter. Right? We can’t lie and say he’s our man. They’re going to know they’re now in the spotlight.”
Leith said, “There are still enough distractions. There’s the white truck, our potential mystery abductor. And there’s the question in the back of all our minds: What if Kiera ran away? We’ll just give the impression, at least, of focussing on those two avenues for now.” He directed his words to Spacey. “We’ll need the phone records of Chad Oman, Stella Marshall, Frank Law, Rob Law, and Lenny Law, so if you’ll bang out the production orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
“They’ll know they’re being looked at, and they’ll be upset and need soothing,” he told the team. “Let them know it’s only procedural and hope they accept it. Any interview I’m not at personally I’ll be monitoring, so make sure they’re all well recorded. And I mean press ‘record.’” At the back of the room, Dion didn’t look up to meet his glare. “At one point we may turn on the fear,” Leith finished. “But you’ll get fair warning. It’s got to be coordinated.”
The team, which had doubled in size over the week, listened and nodded, and probably more or less got the message. The expanding investigation brought more members every day, and soon Leith feared he would have to commandeer the school gym or some other space with breathing room. The facts were building up like sediment, none of it helpful. All had been put before the team, in hopes that it might snag a real lead. The fingerprints on the cellphone belonged to Kiera only. Same with the barrette. Hairs had been caught in the barrette, and they belonged to Kiera. Fibres had been extracted from the snow, along with the pink body glitter. The fibres were synthetic, from a so-far unknown fabric, and the glitter was no match to that found on John Potter’s victims, or to any known body-glitter brand.
Leith glanced at Sergeant Mike Bosko, always trying to gauge the man’s mood. The gauging had something to do with his own ambitions, and something to do with a growing apprehension of the real reason for Bosko’s presence. When Bosko wasn’t giving advice from the sidelines, he was out there like a journalist, asking questions. Getting to know the beast, he’d said over drinks.
Now Bosko stood at the crowded perimeter, hands in pockets. He was looking not at Leith but toward the back of the room, either at the Mr. Coffee machine or beyond it to Constable Dion busy making notes. He had no good reason to look at either.
Leith was sore from talking. He rapped on the whiteboard behind him and closed the meeting with a final word of inspiration for the troops: “There’s the strategy. Now for the action.”
* * *
Fortunately for Dion, he didn’t have to worry about strategy or action. Following the briefing, he was back at his computer, going through vehicle registrations for the area in an expanding radius, listing the owners of trucks and making phone calls. Others were following up on that list out in the field, actually eyeballing those trucks. The north was huge and sparsely populated, and there was a lot of driving involved. He was just grateful not to be out battling the wind and ice and slippery asphalt.
There was a Post-It note stuck to the glass of his monitor on which he had written the vehicle description, to keep him focussed. Without that Post-It, in no time he would end up looking for something like a late-model blue sedan among all these names and numbers, instead of …
He glanced at the sticky again. Wt pickup, 10+ YO 2-wheel drive, blk glassed rear window.
In one of the briefings, somebody had said they thought the black glass was maybe just temporary, that peel-off crap. Somebody else had pointed out from personal experience that that peel-off crap was not so easy to peel off. A person would have to spend a day scraping, steaming, and vacuuming to get rid of all traces of the stuff, and even then on a forensic level they would fail. And according to the transcription on file, the trucker, Caplin, had been re-interviewed, and he said it wasn’t that peel-off tinting crap, in his opinion. That stuff had a purplish tinge and wasn’t, whatchoocallit, opaque. Even with a bit of ambient light from high-beams glaring off snow, you could see shapes through it and whatnot. No, this, he said, was black glass, as in black.
Dion didn’t think the truck would ever surface, at least not with telltale black glass installed. Whoever was driving it that night down that mountain would have known they’d been spotted, and if they had just committed a serious crime like abduction, they would know they would be tracked down eventually. The glass would have to go.
There were other ways of making glass dark, aside from the tinting film. You could spray-paint the window. That would make it opaque, and the paint could potentially later be removed. Or an even faster and easier fix, duct-tape up some kind of dark material, paper or fabric, or even, say, black garbage bags. Fabric would be more light-absorbent, though. Black velvet. At night, in the headlights, glass covered in black velvet would look simply black. Like the night pressing in on Scottie’s window. Black.
It wasn’t likely permanent custom-installed black glass. If a truck with black glass for a rear window was driving about, somebody would have seen it previously and remembered it. Neighbours would for sure remember something like that, let alone friends or family. So unless it was from out of town and just passing through, which he didn’t believe was the case, then it didn’t exist. Which meant the glass was darkened temporarily, which meant the abduction, or an abduction, at least, was premeditated.
Were the other windows tinted? Probably not, for the same reason: People would remember an older truck with all-tinted windows. What would be the good of blacking out the rear window, then, when there were front and side windows to worry about as well?
He considered further, pen in hand, doodling cubes within cubes in ballpoint, until he’d answered his own question. Because it was better than nothing. It simply cut down the odds of being identified.
So the crime was premeditated but rushed. Haphazard. He was almost there, almost had the answer, but