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Three Voices

LEITH THOUGHT ABOUT MURDER and its aftermath, all the damage done. There were the victims themselves; that went without saying. Then there were those left behind, their lives forever bent out of shape. The family of the killer, also in tatters. There were the cops, working night and day and getting ulcers. Like himself. Last October, back in Prince Rupert, stomach pains had sent him first to the doctor, and then, for the first time in his life, to a counsellor.

He hated being sent for counselling. He didn’t believe that any external advice could fix any internal problem of any healthy man. He didn’t like being told how to breathe, how to think, how to relax. As he’d said to Alison afterward, what a stinking bunch of hogwash. To avoid a return visit to the shrink, he’d determined not to get another ulcer, and so far hadn’t.

This gloomy afternoon, sitting eating lunch in Giroux’s office, he felt something gnawing at his gut again, and it wasn’t just all the takeout he’d been downing lately; it was the proliferation of trucks in the north.

All eyes were open for reports of suspicious pickups, but every other person drove a pickup, and with a little imagination, every other person could look suspicious. A map lay before him, in his mind the constellation of burial sites and the voices of three women telling him what they’d been through as their time ran out. Joanne Crow, the last known victim, had the most to say. This evil man raped me, held me captive for days, bound and gagged me, starved me and let me freeze. Look at my hands and toes and nose and cheeks, destroyed by frostbite. He didn’t even have the heart to put me out of my misery. I did not go easily.

That was the big thing to consider, the evidence of escalation of this man’s tormenting, again as whispered by the dead. The first killing had been vicious but relatively swift. Abduction, rape, and strangulation. The second had been kept alive for maybe two days, possibly in a house, possibly in a vehicle, but most likely a shed with rotting floors, according to trace evidence. The third, Joanne, had endured at least a week before exhaustion and the elements got her. There had been no rotted wood fibres found embedded in her wounds. She had died in her zap-strap handcuffs and been dumped in the mud, somewhat farther to the north from Terrace than the first two.

If the killer had taken to keeping his victims captive, it followed there was a good chance that Kiera could still be alive — in that house, that cabin, that cave, that vehicle, wherever the hell he had her — and if Leith’s days were long and difficult, hers were eternities of sheer, unthinkable hell.

“Still bothers me that Kiera’s grabbed over here,” he said, speaking more to himself than Bosko over on the other wing of Giroux’s enormous desk. “While the others happened over there.” In the Terrace area. “Is he expanding his hunting ground, or was he just passing through?”

The question belonged not to him but to the Terrace task force, Corporal Stoner, and it had been beaten to death here, there, and everywhere, really not worth putting to words for the hundredth time. Bosko was on his laptop, communicating with his home office, but present enough to look at Leith and say, “Might be worth it to go over the timeline again.”

The timeline was fixed in Leith’s mind like a fiery branding. “Karen Blake was taken March of 2008, two years ago. Lindsay Carlyle, nearly nine months later, Nov­­ember 2008. Joanne Crow just two months later, December 2009. And nothing since. Nothing for over a year. We found Joanne over fourteen months ago, on Christmas Day. It’s not much of a pattern.”

“But a pattern, however you look at it,” Bosko said. “And it’s more likely opportunity than urge that’s dictating when he strikes. That should prove helpful.”

Leith got his point, of course. If it was a pattern, there weren’t enough hits to make even a rudimentary shape, but it was the ABCs of profiling. Use the pattern as a template against the comings and goings of anybody who might come under suspicion — truckers, hunters, forestry workers — and it could help sift out the perpetrator. These were all winter kills, sure. That, if nothing else, stood out loud and clear. When it came to the Pickup Killer, death was tied to the seasons.

Bosko asked how many light-coloured pickups were registered in the area between Terrace and Smithers, a question that took Leith back to the pain in his gut.

“Every other guy has a pickup,” he said. “I have a pickup. And every other pickup is light in colour. Like mine. There are lots.”

“I’ve noticed,” Bosko said.

“Rob Law has a tan pickup, but it’s pretty new. Both sightings say it was probably an older model. One tip, from November, says it’s white; the December tip says silver. Different trucks or just a trick of the light, who knows. Neither witness knew much about vehicle makes and models.”

Bosko spoke of how important it was not to get in a rut with this truck-sighting business. “Like you say, Dave, there are only two leads in that direction, both tenuous. Now, if we had a third sighting —” he added, and it was at this exact moment, at least as Leith later recalled it, that Constable Jayne Spacey stepped into the room with news, and the timing was surreal.

“We got a truck sighting,” she told them, flapping her notebook. “Dean Caplin. I’ve got him in the interview room. He’s a driver for Whittaker Contracting, working in the cut-block above the Law outfit. He was pulling a loaded rig down the mountain at fifteen twenty hours on Saturday afternoon —”

Which fell, Leith knew, some five hours before the search for Kiera got underway, and his interest was definitely piqued.

“— and he passed Kiera’s Rodeo on the lookout, which stood out to him, because it’s hardly tourist season. But it’s what he saw a couple minutes later you gotta hear. He passed her Rodeo, and two or three minutes later, that’s his best estimate, he came up behind a vehicle driving down the road ahead of him. We missed him earlier because he was out of town, just got back, heard we wanted to talk to him, called in right away. You’re going to want to talk to this guy, like, now.”

Leith was already on his feet, inviting Spacey to join him.

The witness, Dean Caplin, stood when they entered, a man who fell into the “good citizen” camp, in Leith’s snap-judgement opinion. Introductions were made, hands were shaken. Caplin’s hands were huge, calloused, cold, and oily. Not only a good citizen but a hard worker.

“Yeah,” he told Leith when they were all seated around the table. “It was a white pickup, five, ten years old, some old Nissan or something, two-wheel drive, had no business on them roads. Couldn’t see who all was inside because rear window was some kind of custom job, black glass.”

Leith had laid out a forestry map, and he asked Caplin to pinpoint as best he could where he’d first seen this pickup with the black window.

Caplin pointed to a spot just down from the lookout where Kiera’s Rodeo had been found. “It was going pretty slow till I came up behind it, then it shot off, eh. Kind of fishtailing a bit. I thought it was going to go over the bank, and I’d be picking up the pieces. I probably lost sight of it about here, around this bend.” His finger traced a short line and stopped.

“I don’t suppose you caught —”

“Christ, no, sir. Licence plate was covered in mud. And even if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have made note of it. Had no idea it was a crime in progress. Sorry.”

When Caplin was gone, Leith made some phone calls, talked with Giroux and Bosko, and decided it was time to take this last bit of info to Terrace and upturn the files again, see if it clicked anywhere, small white pickup with black rear window. He’d go himself, he’d go now, and preferably he’d go alone.

“I might as well join you,” Bosko said. “Does that work?”

“Does it ever,” Leith said, two thumbs up. “Wonderful.”

* * *

By mid-afternoon a hard wind was blowing, and the undersized detachment seemed to creak and strain on its foundations. Dion had been aware of some excitement earlier, something that had taken Leith off in a hurry to Terrace, the small city farther to the north. The search for Kiera seemed to have settled already into a lower gear, and the crowds were gone, the place hushed but for a woman sobbing in one of the interview rooms down the hall, an unrelated case. His fingers were smashing at the keyboard, spell-checker racing along and underlining half the words he laid down. He had been tasked with assisting Constable Thackray with exhibit documentation, and he was in a trance of words and numbers when something came clomping over and hovered into his left-hand peripheral vision, too short to be Thackray, too graceless to be Spacey. He looked sideways and stopped typing.

“We’re going out,” Sergeant Giroux said. “Witness interview. Take a fresh pen.”

Outside, small vapour ghosts raced over the tarmac, forming lines and breaking up again. The sergeant had marched to Dion’s cruiser, to the passenger side, which meant they’d take his car and that he’d be the driver. He stood by the driver’s door and searched himself for keys, a minor pastime of his lately. The keys weren’t where he expected, and he had a lot of other pockets to check, and it wasn’t long before Giroux shouted across the roof at him from the passenger side, “Just pretend this is an emergency callout and people’s lives are at stake. What’s the matter with you? You don’t like driving?”

He looked aside, between buildings and signposts, toward what he could see of the highway, its surface glittering in the dull light of day like it was strewn with crushed glass. “No, ma’am. It’s pretty icy.”

He’d found the keys, not in any of his jacket pockets or duty-belt but in his trousers, and beeped the locks, but too late because Sergeant Giroux had struck off across the parking lot toward an older model sedan. “We’re taking my Celeb,” she called back at him. “Sacre! I’m not riding with a man who’s afraid of a little ice.”

When he was in the passenger seat, she said, “Never before met a constable afraid of the road.”

“No, ma’am,” he said, and fastened the seat belt.

Giroux cranked the key, and the engine woke with a ragged snarl, mellowing to a purr. She drove off the avenue and onto the highway. The trip to Hazelton’s Old Town took about ten minutes, a distance they covered in silence. She parked in front of a pint-sized Royal Bank. Inside the bank Dion waited next to a stand of brochures, not sure why he’d been brought along, while Giroux sat in a cubicle dealing with the bank manager for nearly twenty minutes, poring over a computer monitor and making notes.

After she was done with the computer, she stopped at one of the two teller stations and spoke to the young woman there, who Dion now recognized as one of the band members who had been interviewed by Leith — the violinist with the white-blond hair, looking different in the context of work. She had given him a friendly wave some minutes ago, and he’d nodded back, but still hadn’t placed her.

“Afternoon, Stella,” he heard Giroux saying. “Howarya? Just a couple questions.”

Dion remained standing at his distance and didn’t hear much of their conversation, something about an argument with Mercy at the Catalina. Mercy was a name on the file, but he couldn’t put a face to her, or any significance.

He consulted his second notebook, the one he kept separate from his duty notebook. This was the one he’d nearly left with Leith by accident, where he listed names from any file he was assigned to, in chart form, to keep them in order. Nadia, his rehab professional, had told him not to be ashamed to keep notes of even the most minor details. Anything to get you through the day. And it worked. On top of field notes, he had reminders of all sorts of crap that hampered his day-to-day living, PIN codes, and basic computer procedures. He even had a necktie-knotting diagram, which was embarrassing. Still needed it once in a while, when he lost the moves and stood with a tie end in each fist, no idea where they were supposed to go next. That was when the panic set in.

Giroux was done, leaving the bank, so he followed. When they were in the car, breath gusting white, she snapped at him, “Why didn’t you join me? It’s your job to pay attention. You’re a highly intelligent sponge, not a dumbass doorstop.”

He wasn’t so sure about that, so he couldn’t agree. Even apologizing seemed futile. He busied himself with his seat belt instead.

Giroux’s voice hardened. “This is off the record, Constable Dion. I worry about you, maybe because you’re First Nations, and I’m Métis, and we’re different creatures from the present governing race, and we have to look out for each other. I want to help you. So how can I put this nicely? There’s something wrong with you. Are you on drugs?”

He stared at her, trying not to gape. “I’m not First Nations.”

“Sure you are.”

“No, ma’am.”

“You’ve got Cree eyes. Take that as a compliment, if you want.”

She seemed to mean what she said, and he began to wonder if he was First Nations. Spacey had suggested he was. The old guy in the Super 8 diner had jabbered at him like he was. And now this. And maybe they were all right, and he was wrong. He looked at his own hands and saw the skin was white as ever. His father was white. His mother was maybe on the dark side, from what he could remember, her arms going around him, tight, hair cascading over him, black, on one of her good days, few and far between. He knew nothing else about her, really, and had made no inquiries, and never for a moment had he considered she might be native.

Giroux said, “So you protest your bloodlines but not the drugs, so what are you on?” Her palm went up, a stop sign. “No, I don’t want to know, because you’re right, I couldn’t let it slide if you fess up. But take this as a serious warning. If you’re on something, get off it. Now.”

“Ibuprofen,” he said with anger, pointing hard at his own temple. “That’s all. For headaches.” He crimped his mouth. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure what you wanted me to do, take notes or guard the door.”

She blinked at him. “Hover, Constable. Look, listen, analyze. You should know that. I’m not going to be directing your every move. Be interested. Nobody can make you be interested. It’s got to come from within. Are you interested? At all?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked unconvinced. Worse, she looked sympathetic. They both gazed forward, and for a moment it felt to Dion like a first date gone wrong, stuck in Lovers’ Lane with nothing to say. Giroux said, “Actually, I owe you an apology, because I know nothing about you, and I should. I’m supposed to review files of all my people, even if they’re short-term, but I didn’t. I’ll get to it sooner or later, probably after you’re gone when it’s too late anyway. Whatever, never mind, doesn’t matter. I’m just trying to tell you something here. It’s a tough job, and if you don’t walk into it with a sure stride, you’ll fall behind. Get me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And the fact is this job’s not for everyone. There’s no shame in admitting it’s not your calling, pet. Better sooner than later, is all I’m saying.”

He looked away, out the passenger window at parking lot, and beyond that to the drab little village smothered in snow.

Giroux started the car and drove away from the Royal Bank, turning onto yet another small byway that connected the communities. Dion watched homes and ranch land, river and roadside bushes blur by. Nadia had said, “Don’t look too far forward or too far back, one step at a time, sweetie.” That’s what she’d always called him, sweetie, in her South Pacific accent. He’d taken the name at face value until it dawned on him that was what she called everyone she was trying to bend back into shape. Sweetie. It meant nothing, like pet meant nothing from Giroux.

She was sharing her thoughts again as she drove along, maybe because she wasn’t giving up on him so easy, but more likely because she was in the habit of talking to herself aloud. “Poor Kiera, if that sick freak from Terrace got his hands on her. At least now we have something to work with, hey?”

Dion turned her way and tried to sound smart, not with the usual yes ma’am but a full sentence, complete with theory attached. “The pickup sighting, right. Black glass, that should narrow it down. In fact —” he said, and the words were knocked from his head as the world went into a skid. He grabbed for the dashboard, heart slamming, and found that instead of slithering into the second catastrophic collision in his life the car was idling safely at the side of the road.

“Damn,” Giroux said. “I forgot all about them. The photos.”

Without explanation, she carved a U-turn on the frosty asphalt and headed back the way they had come.

“It was inadvertent,” she said, not so much to Dion as to the windshield, which wasn’t clearing properly, fogged at the edges. “They were right there on the counter by the coffee maker, and I wanted to ask Frank if I could look at ’em, because maybe they were from the day in question. But I put ’em in my pocket and forgot.”

They crossed the frightening chasm bridge to an area Dion was familiar with, the road to Scottie Rourke’s trailer, but turned instead down somebody’s driveway, where Giroux slowed to a crawl, for it was barely a lane tunnelling through branches. A minute later, no house in sight, she stopped the car and let it rumble on standby. Here she sat rock still, hands on the wheel, looking up. Dion followed her stare at the clouded sky, chopped by branches. The branches were fine, pale and leafless. Giroux said, “Well, since I have ’em, might as well take a quick look. Hand me my bag there, would you?”

He watched her draw a white drug-store envelope from the handbag, about six inches by eight, and from it she brought a thin stack of what he saw as glossy photographs. “Who does the snapshot thing these days, with all your digital slideshows and whatnot?” Giroux asked herself. “Nobody but my Aunt Jean and the three bears, I guess. They’re probably Lenny’s, actually. He’s the sentimental one in the family. The reader of books, the poet. The historian.” She shuffled through the pictures, shaking her head, giving a brief running narrative. “Nope, nope, not even from winter, obviously. There’s Kiera. What a pretty smile she’s got, hey?”

She showed him the picture, but too fast for Dion to absorb, and kept shuffling.

Excluded, he sat waiting. Out the side window, high up in the endless grey, a hawk of some kind wheeled in a slow drift out of sight. The Chev had settled into waiting mode and purred quietly. “These are from the summer,” Giroux said. “Rob with his new truck, looking like a proud dad. Frank jumping in the river. Kiera again.” She paused on a photograph and said, “Who’s this? Don’t know this girl at all.”

She angled the shot at Dion, and he caught a glimpse of a young woman in an ice-blue shirt, native, the young woman from the fall fair, and Giroux had maybe noticed his inner lurch, because she searched his face. “You okay? Going to be sick? For god’s sake, get out of my car and do it in the bushes.”

“No, just …” he said, and stalled. The girl in the photo wasn’t the girl at the fair, of course not. That would be crazy. But she was a reminder of a sick feeling past and a sick feeling present, that he hadn’t done up the report, a double failure.

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, isn’t it?”

Yes and no. Ironically, Kiera had a better chance of being alive if she was with this particular lunatic, who liked to savour his prey for days. But it was the ugliest silver lining Leith could imagine. He didn’t answer.

“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. I don’t guarantee eternity, but she’s got another ten years under the belt, easy.”

Dion listened to the watch ticking, and it sounded robust. He strapped it to his wrist and felt whole again, ready to take on the world. Rourke was back at his workbench, beer in hand. “No sir, they don’t make things like they used to. It’s a setup. Everything you buy self-destructs on deadline, otherwise known as warranty expiration. Right, Evie?”

“Absolutely,” said Evangeline from her armchair. She pulled a knee up and embraced it, smiling at Dion.

He returned the smile briefly. He was running on an empty stomach, and even a few sips of beer, combined with the relief at having his Smiths back in running order, made him feel light, happier than he’d felt in months. He said to Rourke, “Are you really incorporated?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Watch it, Scottie,” Evangeline said. “He’s a cop.”

“You could say I’m incorporated,” Rourke said. He was tinkering with something at his bench, back turned on his guest. “In the broad sense.”

“He doesn’t even know what incorporated means,” Evangeline told Dion. “Leave the guy alone. It just sounds good. Like you tack ‘esquire’ behind your name, when you’re for sure no squire.”

“Oh, I’d never do that,” Dion said. He swallowed beer, taking in the environment, feeling present. Integral. Evangeline’s arm moved and her bracelet caught the light, shooting turquoise sparks into his eyes. “So, are you Scottish?” he said to Rourke’s back. Rourke wore overalls and a tank top, neither flattering his ribby frame.

“Sort of Norwegian-Mohawk strain,” Rourke said. “Bit of this, bit of that.”

“He’s a mongrel,” Evangeline said. “But no Scot in Scottie. You can ignore the name.”

Rourke said, “And what kind of a name is Dion, anyway? Dion. Sounds girly.”

“It’s my surname.”

“Well, obviously,” Evangeline said. “You got a regular name?”

He downed more beer, watching her watching him, safe enough at the moment, with Rourke’s focus down his magnifying glass. “No, I don’t have one, actually.”

“Like hell you don’t have one,” Rourke said. “Everyone’s got a first name. It’s the law.”

“It’s probably a really goofy name he’s embarrassed to say,” Evangeline said, eyes gleaming. “Like Jasper, or Stanley. To go with the haircut.”

Dion checked his watch once more and compared it with the satellite-perfect time on his cellphone. Dead on. “You fixed it, Rourke,” he said. “Guess that means I’d better pay you.” He pulled out his wallet and riffled through it. Not that there was much to riffle. His pay rate had been chopped since November, since vehicular triple somersaults and crash landings and diminished capacity. The short-term disability payments had stopped the moment he’d been cleared to return to full-time employment, and none of it mattered a bit anyway, now that he was back in working order. “How much do I owe you?”

Rourke turned around. “Honestly, the time it took me fixing that thing, you’d owe me your next ten paycheques. But give me thirty and we’ll call it even.”

“Scottie’s such a shark,” Evangeline said and lazily noodled an index finger around her temple, for Dion’s eyes only.

“Thirty-five,” Rourke said.

Dion gave him a fifty and said to keep the change.

Rourke snapped the bill and held it up to the light. “No, come on, fifty?”

“Keep it. It’s worth it to me.”

“Boy, you really are attached to that ticker, aren’t you? I guess you being a cop, I’d better give you a receipt, right?”

“Forget it.” The mean northern wind had blown up over the last little while, gathering force, and was now rattling the trailer. The windows were pitch black. Dion looked at the pitch-black windows and thought about a pickup truck with a black rear window. He could hear something outside, sounded like those voices again, trying to tell him something, and his transient sense of well-being began to slip away. “I should get going.”

“You should have another beer,” Rourke corrected, scribbling a receipt. “Evie, get our guest another cold one.”

“So long as he knows he’s going to have to arrest himself for DUI,” Evangeline said but did as told, rose from her armchair and wandered to the kitchenette.

Next to Dion the wall was covered in photographs, the ones he’d seen on his first visit, all stuck up with pushpins. Now he threw caution to the wind and had a better look, thinking of Sergeant Giroux’s remark. Who does the snapshot thing these days? But Rourke was a bit of a throwback, didn’t belong in the digital age. Many of the snapshots here were old and faded anyway, he saw, their colours washed out to blue. Quite a few newer shots of Kiera, but Kiera was a celebrity, and the camera loved her, and he didn’t think obsession could be read into it. Kiera on stage, singing, backed up by her group. Kiera embracing friends, including this old greaseball, Scott Rourke. Kiera crouched down chatting with a toddler, riding a horse, grinning at the camera. There were pictures of Frank Law, too, one person of interest Dion hadn’t met, other than seeing him down there on the stage last fall.

There was a recent-looking shot of Evangeline, and several of the Law brothers over the years. This was Lenny, probably, as a boy, couldn’t be more than four or five, which meant Rourke had known the brothers at least a dozen years. There was a more recent picture of Rourke standing between the two older Law brothers, Rob and Frank, an arm hooked around each of their necks and pulling them to him, like an affectionate dad with two grown sons horsing around in the backyard.

There were even more faded shots, probably from Rourke’s childhood, and some of his years as a young and not-so-bad looking man, before the scar. None of Rourke’s dead wife, though. Naturally enough.

Evangeline delivered the fresh bottle of Kokanee to Dion’s hand and stood so close for a moment that he could smell the soap and perfume and the slight mildew of a dress grabbed from a pile on the floor. Rourke was talking about what he’d do to the bastard responsible for Kiera’s disappearance when he got his hands on the sick piece of trash. Rourke was 99 percent certain the Pickup Killer was responsible. “And let me tell you,” he was saying. “It’s not just me. There’s a whole posse of us ready to hang him high. You can bet your cotton socks on that, my friend. And there’s nothing you bleeding-heart cops are going to be able to do about it. Somehow or other, that sonofabitch is going to get himself strung up from the tallest tree in the valley.”

“I wouldn’t talk like that if I were you,” Dion said, not quite serious, but not quite joking either. “Not with me around. I’ll have to remember this conversation when we’re cutting that sonofabitch down.”

“Yeah, Scottie, keep your big mouth shut,” Evangeline said, back in her chair. And flapping a hand at Dion, dismissing the death threats, “Don’t listen to him. He talks big, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Oh, he’d do a lot worse, Dion thought. Not quite twenty years ago, Scott Rourke had come home a day early from a hunting expedition and caught his wife with a lover. He’d grabbed a baseball bat and clobbered the shit out of the man. The man had lived, but like Dion, he was left with a badly altered trajectory. And the wife, well, she was collateral damage: jumped in a lake and surfaced dead. Dion had heard mention of it in the Wednesday night briefing, and had checked his computer for the details on his own time. If Evangeline was unaware of the violence in her boyfriend’s bones, somebody ought to tell her, and soon.

“You live in this area?” he asked her. “I get the feeling you’re not from around here.”

She rested her chin in her palm and challenged him with a stare. “What gives you that feeling?”

She looked and moved and talked and smelled like city, that’s what. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just —”

“Just quit chatting up my woman,” Rourke interrupted with mock menace, arms crossed, staring across the gloom at Dion.

There was not much fun in the mock menace, though, and Dion made sure to keep his eyes and conversation, if not his thoughts, well off Scottie’s girl.