Читать книгу B.C. Blues Crime 4-Book Bundle - R.M. Greenaway - Страница 12

Up in Smoke

THEY DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH about Potter to tackle him scientifically. He lived alone far from downtown, out in the country, up a long, straight road that shot away into the foothills. Leith was seated in car two of a fleet of six, passenger side. Bulked out in Kevlar, he stared ahead and worried that the man, if he was the killer, could be on his toes, braced for this pending Armageddon. The team had considered a surreptitious approach, but the long, straight road posed a problem, with nothing on either side for cover but scraggly fields now smothered in snow. Sneaking up would be an elaborate operation, would take time to arrange, and time was too precious right now to waste. So it was the shock-and-awe approach, carom in fast and roust the bastard; he’d be face down on the floorboards before he knew what hit him.

The house that came racing into view through the dusk was small and cute, white and turquoise, with a generous deck, lots of lattice and neat landscaping, and something about it jarred Leith as he stared forward. The little house was backed by dark woods and a steeply ascending rock wall, and all was still and silent and unlit. A truck sat in the driveway, fairly new looking. Leith ordered the vehicles to a stop here at a good distance, and he jumped out of the SUV and stood in the snow and stared at the little white house, not taking his eyes off it, because whatever it was that prickled at his nerves, intuition or superstition, or simply a wealth of bad experiences, he was certain the place was booby-trapped.

The standoff continued, unilateral and surreal. The ERT commander joined him, and together they watched the little house at the end of the driveway, the parked truck, the closed drapes. They were discussing Leith’s gut feeling and the approach they’d take when lights came on in the house, in a slow-blooming way, from darkness to dull orange. “Aw, shit,” Leith said, starting forward, stopping when he saw it was too late. The ERT was making a call. The dull orange glared bright, the curtains flared, and there came a thud of internal explosion, and another, and a third. Car doors opened and closed and the team was out, a band of helpless spectators as the house became engulfed in flames.

Was she in there? Was she going to burn? Was that all they had accomplished?

Leith conferred with the team, and they spread out to explore the perimeter of the burning building. He was called over to view the fresh snowshoe tracks at the back, leading up into the mountains. One set. He and four others took up pursuit but found the trail was narrow, the snow deep, and the risk too great that Potter would be waiting ahead with a scope and nothing to lose. So they turned back to make a plan, wait for the dogs and gear and reinforcements. Leith stood watching the frantic swivelling of red and white lights from fire trucks approaching along the beeline road. Potter would have had the same kind of view, would have had maybe five minutes to splash the gasoline, light the fuse, and grab his bag, pre-packed, and take off. He wouldn’t be far, but every moment now he was adding distance.

He was probably one of those goddamn survivalists who could burrow into the scree for months, catching rabbits and sipping melted snow. Leith spent ten minutes on the phone, calling in choppers and dogs and as many hands as he could rope in on short notice to search the property for Kiera or the clues that would lead him to her.

And then he joined in the search himself.

* * *

But she wasn’t anywhere on the property. The dogs arrived, and it was a dog that found Potter, or at least drew them close enough to his hiding spot that Potter opened fire, three blasts, rapid-fire, and by the sound of it the fugitive had not only the registered bolt-action Browning but an unregistered semi-automatic.

They had forged high enough on the mountainside that the air felt thin in Leith’s nostrils. The blasts had come horribly close, had frozen him in his tracks alongside the others in the posse, nine in all, and in the time it took for the sound waves to disperse, he went through his half-second mantra, always there for him when things got dicey, to bring scant comfort: That he would have to lead the way, might die, Ali and Izzy would have to carry on without him, but luckily his insurance plan should cover them well, even put the kid through university if she was so inclined.

On that note of slight comfort he could go forward now, in ERT mode. Some days there just wasn’t enough manpower and he had no choice but pitch in, join the front lines, and today was one of those special days. Possibly his last. The plan of the hour was simple: encircle the hideout, give Potter nowhere to run, and then try talking him out. Failing that, because time was of the essence, Leith would fire a warning shot. Failing that, he would coordinate moving in by cautious degrees. He didn’t have to remind his team that it was imperative Potter be taken alive. Nor was there time for a nice leisurely siege.

He gave the signal and began to climb, upward and around, through dense woods. The climb was hellish. His vest was bulky, his gear catching on the underbrush, branches scratching his face. And god, he was no ninja, every move a snap, crackle, and pop, and he could only pray foolishly that if he should come into the sights of Potter’s gun, he would see it first.

Twenty minutes later they had found their spots, and he was within shouting distance of the lair. Without a megaphone he had to bellow: “John Potter. I’m David Leith, RCMP. D’you hear me?”

The answer was a barrage of bullets. As the echoes faded, his men reported in, all safe. Potter was desperate, and this was going to end badly. Leith stayed low, a leg already starting to cramp, and shouted, “It’s over, John. We’re not here to hurt you. You need help, I understand that. I’m here to get you that help. You’re surrounded now, man. Get out here with your hands up where I can see ’em and let’s get to somewhere warm and dry where we can talk in peace.”

Silence. Maybe Potter was reloading. Maybe he was eating a sandwich. Maybe he was setting a bomb that would blow them all to hell. “Potter,” Leith called out. “I’m coming down so we can talk, okay? Just stay where you are.”

There was another blast, and this one had a different sound, a different sort of finality. A sharp, clean handgun blam. Leith swore out loud, notified his men, and went scrambling cautiously through muck and bracken down the slope.

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 he was distracted, and it slipped away. He could sense a superior in the room, somewhere behind him, and he sat straighter and got back on task. Except he’d forgotten what that task was and had to check the sticky once again. White pickup, ten years or older …

* * *

Hazelton didn’t have a “soft” interview room, exactly, a place set up to relax the subject rather than intimidate. But somebody at some point had read the new guidelines and made the effort, placing two chunky upholstered chairs against one wall with a coffee table in between, fake flowers and an array of magazines. The effect was odd, at best, like chandeliers in a fast food joint. The classic hard table and three hard chairs remained in the centre. Frank Law sat in one chair, Leith and Bosko occupying the others. This final re-interview, like all the others they’d ground through all day long, was being video-recorded.

Frank hadn’t shaved, apparently hadn’t showered, probably hadn’t slept much since Saturday. There were not just rings of shadow around his eyes, but grooves, like a super-fast aging. Leith’s opening approach was gentle. “You’ve been dating the girl forever and probably know her better than anybody. How does she deal with stress? Does she bottle it up, let it all out? Does she sulk, get drunk, go for a jog, or what?”

Interestingly, Frank wasn’t swallowing the ran away scenario. “Number one,” he said. “She doesn’t get stressed. Anything bugs her, she talks about it. She’s stronger than anyone I know. If she had a problem, she wouldn’t run away from it. She’d run at it and wrestle it to the ground. That day she went away to think things over, but she wasn’t running away. You can forget that idea.”

“Right. So what’s the alternative? If she’d gotten lost on the mountain, we’d have found her by now, dead or alive. But we haven’t. An unidentified truck was seen driving down the road just down from the Matax in the hours of her disappearance. And you’re sure you don’t know a truck of that description? Forget the black glass, just the truck itself?”

Frank shook his head. “Can’t think of anybody owns a truck like that, other than that list I gave you already.”

“None of which were white.”

“Well then, I can’t help you.”

Leith opened the folder he’d brought with him, thick with documents cluttered with columns of numbers in what looked like two-point type. The production orders for the phone records had given him what he wanted, a kind of numerical eagle’s eye view of all the chatter that had gone on between the parties in the days leading up to Kiera’s vanishing. It also documented the silences. He said, “You two used to text or call several times a day. Lately I’m seeing a lot of gaps. You were pissed off with each other, and it came to a boiling point on Saturday. There was a fight. She was injured. Is that what happened?”

Frank’s face twisted in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?”

“Now’s the time to tell me, Frank,” Leith said.

“Now’s the time to show you this,” Frank said, and gave him the finger. He got up and walked out.

Leith didn’t stop him. With Frank gone, he gave instructions to Spacey to apply for warrants, and then joined Giroux in her office to make it official. “Things aren’t happening on their own. Guess it’s time we made them.”