The remaining dishes were cleared from the table. An old Harry Nilsson song was on the radio, muted and sad. The SAR people were out there, working hard through the night, FLIR-equipped choppers raking the mountains. APBs were broadcast and reinforcements were on their way for a search that was going to spread ever outward till she was found or resources ran dry. There was nothing more Leith could do right now but rest up for tomorrow. He declared the meeting over and ordered everyone to get a few hours of sleep. All team heads would be up and at it bright and early, for if the Rockabilly Princess was being held by a predator with a pickup truck, there was no question about it: her time was fast running out.
Two
Questions
TALK AT THE CATALINA Cafe had gone on past midnight, and Leith hadn’t made it to his motel bed until one thirty. He woke in the morning when it was still dark out, missing Alison, and missing her more as he stood, toothbrush in hand, and observed the lumps and bumps of his homely face in the bathroom mirror. He’d forgotten all the domestic unhappiness and slamming of doors and the howling child and his aching head. All he knew was he missed them both. Ali and Izzy, his girls.
His home away from home was a room on the second floor of a long, boxy, two-storey Super 8 motel set right on the highway, mid-range, furnished in the usual murky browns and golds like every other inn Leith had ever been stuck in, not a destination but a contingency for the working traveller. Depending on how things went, he could be struck in this Gyproc haven for days, maybe weeks, along with a growing legion of out-of-towners. For now the team was relatively small.
The corridor outside his room was hushed and empty, a hive of sleeping souls. Downstairs in the diner he found Fairchild and Bosko already with coffee in front of them. The only other resident out-of-towner on the case so far, Constable Dion, was nowhere to be seen. The three men had a quick breakfast, asking each other how they’d slept, exchanged motel horror stories, then sat in their vehicles and crossed the silent highway to the small Hazelton detachment.
Small was an understatement. It was a low, squarish building probably built sometime in the seventies, posted with the backlit RCMP signage out front, but otherwise innocuous as a laundromat. The kind of place that would make wandering criminals feel right at home as they cased the town, Leith had told Giroux last night, still seated in the Catalina’s back room with her and Bosko following the dinner briefing. “It’s better than anarchy,” Giroux had answered. Anyway, it would soon be replaced with something bigger and better, and she’d passed over photos not of her nieces and nephews but the architectural rendering of the project to be. In a few years, she said, no more little straw house. She’d be living in brick. “That makes you the smart little pig,” Leith had pointed out.
Unfortunately, for now they were stuck with the straw, hazy under the pre-dawn glow of lamp standards. Inside, he left Bosko and Fairchild in the main room, busy on their respective BlackBerrys at their temporary desks, and found Giroux in her little office, moving colour-coded magnets around her organizational white board. Like the detachment itself, the woman put up an unlikely face of the law, a little middle-aged Métis lady with slightly crazy eyes that always seemed widened on the verge of outrage. Leith, like probably a lot of people, had assumed Renee Giroux had gained her office via reverse discrimination, a local native, female, getting the boost to show the RCMP’s non-sexist forward momentum and open-mindedness. But Phil Prentice had once enlightened Leith to the truth over beers: Renee Giroux had got where she was by the sheer digging in of her stubborn little heels. And she wasn’t local, either, but had blown over like a travelling weed from eastern Canada, made this her home, and refused to budge. She’d started out as a constable at the age of twenty-two and served under a score of commanding officers, mostly big white guys like Leith himself, and against the odds her wit and hard work and loyalty and sheer rootedness had finally paid off, and she’d made corporal, and then sergeant, and now she was officially the queen of this little mud-hole called the Hazeltons.
“Why are you so set on it?” Leith had asked her last night. They’d left the Catalina and were standing at their vehicles, hunching against the bitter wind funnelling down the broad highway, no sign of life in this poverty-stricken little shanty town of hers. “Awesome place,” she’d said, and pointed up to what Leith saw only as midnight skies layered with clouds of thunder grey. “Stood under that mountain there and fell in love, said this is where I’m going to die.”
That was what she said last night. Now she said, “Morning, Big City. You’re late.”
On some level, Leith liked the nickname she’d stuck on him some years ago. It flattered him, which in turn made him feel foolish, because Prince Rupert, City of Rainbows, was hardly a big city; it was a largish funky fishing village on the stormy north coast. He wasn’t awake enough to bandy about cheerful greetings. “You said six thirty.”
The crazy eyes widened at him. “Yes, which means six fifteen. Okay? So Spacey’s organized herself and Thackray to canvass the Bell 3 for any workers that slipped our radar last night, and I got whatshisname, Dion, out looking for Lenny Law. Sound good?”
Lenny Law was Frank Law’s younger brother, one of many witnesses who needed to be rounded up. An important witness, one of the last few to see Kiera on the day of her vanishing. Leith said, “Oh. I figured he slept in.”
“Who?”
“Dion.”
“No, actually, he was in bright and early. Unlike you.”
This was Giroux’s territory, but it was Leith’s case, and he knew there would be some jostling before they got comfortable in their roles. So far the jostling was fairly amiable, and if they didn’t bite each other’s heads off first, it should stay that way. “Fine,” he said.
“Great. Then I’m ready to go tackle our prime suspect, as you called him last night about five times without any grounds whatsoever.”
She pulled on her RCMP-decalled jacket as she spoke, heavy-duty blue nylon, and Leith said, “Yes, and I stick to my guns on that. And by the way, we’re going out there without backup. Should I be worried?”
The jacket swamped her, made her comical. She said, “Worried? About Frank? No. He’s a musician.”
“Last I heard, musicians can be mean too. He’s got a police record involving fists, and I saw the picture. He’s covered in the kind of tattoos that say ‘make-my-day.’ I don’t get along well with people covered in tattoos. You ask me, we should err on the side of caution and take along a uniform. What we in the big city call ‘backup’.”
She laughed. “Get real. I know Frank. He’s a sweetheart. You got a gun, don’t you?”
“I’d rather not use it.”
She snorted, and with that won the argument.
They sat in her vehicle, the dinged black Crown Vic he’d seen parked up on the mountain last night. Like her jacket, the steering wheel looked a couple sizes too big for her. “They live over the bridge and deep in the woods,” she said, conjuring up another children’s classic to brand the boys neatly. “I call ’em the three bears.”
Rob, Frank, and Lenny Law.
“Bears,” Leith said, regretting he hadn’t insisted on that backup. An extra 9mm at the sidelines would be nice, at least till he got a feel for the players in this thing. Being in unfamiliar territory didn’t help. He had worked in the Hazeltons before, but never in depth. The land here was huge and wild, dense with pine and poplar, riddled with rivers and gorges, and within all that chaos of nature sat this starburst of small communities linked by long, meandering roads, much of it barely charted. So, yes, he was a little uneasy.
“And I say it again,” Giroux said. She had fired up the Crown Vic’s eight lusty cylinders and lunged the car out through the chain-linked lot onto the avenue. “And this is why. He’s got an alibi