Читать книгу B.C. Blues Crime 4-Book Bundle - R.M. Greenaway - Страница 15

The Run

MORNING BROKE, WET and drizzly. A new document was up on the board when Leith arrived in the office, a large-scale aerial shot with a line arcing across in crooked formation. Giroux and Bosko stood in front of the board, talking about departures. Bosko was saying he was due back on the Lower Mainland in a day or so but would keep in touch; he just had to know how it all panned out.

“What pans out?” Leith said.

Giroux thumped the aerial shot with the side of her fist. “Spacey found a way through. We’re zeroing in.”

Leith looked at the photograph, at Spacey’s trail drawn in black marker, at the mileage scale. Doing the quick and dirty math, he didn’t think they were zeroing in at all, were just wasting taxpayers’ money. The whole thing was crazy, as he went about telling his colleagues now. “That’s at least five clicks. You can run five clicks in an hour, sure, on an even sidewalk. But we’re talking woods here. We’re talking incline, nasty weather, lot of weaving and climbing. And say he’s fast enough to get there and back in the time frame — that doesn’t leave him a lot of minutes to commit the crime, does it? Three, four minutes? What, he races up to the girl, hits her on the head, wheels about, and starts tearing back to the worksite? Face it, Renee, it’s brilliant, but it’s a write-off.”

Giroux seemed unworried by his logic. “Right,” she said. “So to put a mileage or timing on it, Spacey’s going to run it again. Soon as she gets in, we’ll set her up and get her on her way. I’ll send Thackray out to spot her from a distance. He can’t run, but he can handle a radio.”

Leith gave up trying to convince her of anything, let alone who was in control here. He saw Bosko was studying the map up close, as if he could see a tiny runner making its way along the black line. Bosko said, “Jayne Spacey is quite the powerhouse, isn’t she? Why hasn’t she put in for promotion?”

“She has,” Giroux said. “Twice. Always something gets in the way. Why, you’re not thinking of stealing her away from me, are you?”

“She may just steal herself away.”

Leith frowned at the back of Bosko, big and graceless, a circus bear in an off-the-rack suit. He’d never been great at reading between the lines, but it sounded to him like Spacey was going places, city-bound, to join that man in his shiny new Serious Crimes Unit. It didn’t surprise him, but did tweak his professional jealousy, and he said grumpily, “Did Spacey tell you about the menace? Who I fired, by the way.”

Bosko turned, eyes vanishing behind white sheen as his glasses caught the light. “You mean Dion,” he said, as if he knew of the incident already.

Giroux was looking at Leith too, expressing overblown shock. “What d’you mean, you fired Dion? You can’t do that. If any officer could fire any other officer, there would be no officers left to keep the peace.”

“I know that,” Leith said. “Let’s just say he’s suspended till you get him in front of the board, or whatever you have to do. I’m not saying this lightly, but he’s got to go. He’s worse than incompetent. He’s dangerous. They were supposed to stay together on the mountain yesterday. He didn’t. He abandoned the search, got lost in the woods, and Jayne had to go find him, wasting an hour in the bush. Then they get back to the office and he physically assaults her. He grabbed her arm and pushed her down, all witnessed by Pam. All over some dumbass misunderstanding.”

Giroux was upset, her plans and diagrams on hold as she dealt with this troubling personnel issue. “Dion assaulted Spacey? Why? Was she hurt? How come she didn’t mention it to me? Is she going to lodge a complaint?”

“Actually, I heard something about crucifixion,” Leith muttered. He frowned at the awful ring of the word, reminded of the seriousness of being fired from the RCMP. It was tragedy to some officers, tantamount to execution to others. Dion struck him as an officer on the edge, the sort that might jump off a bridge. He glanced at Bosko, who was still looking at him, still shielded by the glare off his lenses.

“Spacey won’t be pursuing the matter,” Bosko said. “She and I discussed it last night. It was a rough day. Tempers flared. But she did mention something about a notebook?”

A demand was embedded in the question, Leith realized, and once again he felt there was some off-the-record connection between Bosko and Dion, and it worried him. “It’s not his duty notebook, I think,” he said, hesitantly. “It’s personal.”

“Right,” Bosko said, still waiting.

Leith walked to his desk, unlocked it, and produced the little book, which he had flipped through last night, finding nothing remarkable, lists and diagrams, strange catalyst for a dust-up. Bosko took it from him and slipped it into an evidence bag.

“Well, excuse me,” Giroux said. “If that’s his personal property, you can’t just seize it without cause and without warrant. Can you?”

“I have cause, and I can, actually,” Bosko said. “Don’t worry. He’ll get it back.”

She blinked at him. “So what am I supposed to do with him today? Send him packing?”

“Cancel the suspension, please,” Bosko said. “Give him a warning to be good. He’ll finish his week here then return to Smithers, where he’ll get his orders. I don’t have time to deal with it right now, but I’ll be making arrangements.”

“And why exactly is he your problem?” Leith asked.

“He’s my problem because he’s officially posted in North Vancouver,” Bosko said pleasantly. “And that’s my turf.”

Giroux said, “Smithers isn’t his first posting? Wow. We all thought he was fresh out of boot camp. Why didn’t you tell us before?”

“I’ve only found out myself,” Bosko said, and Leith thought it was a lie, and alarm bells were going off in his head now. No doubt about it, the troublesome Constable Dion was under investigation. He crossed his arms, wanting to ask more questions but afraid to step over the line, because a shadow crossed Bosko’s face, the first Leith had ever seen, and it looked like impatience. He didn’t know Bosko was capable of such thing. “Anyway,” the man said. “Excuse me, I have to make some travel arrangements. Don’t want to miss the bus.” He gave an apologetic smile but was on his phone already, thumbing in a number as he left the room. The door banged shut behind him.

When he was safely out of earshot, Giroux said, “Who is that guy? I mean, really.” She sat at her desk and pushed papers around for a bit, still upset. “Hang on,” she said. “Dion. I know that name. Isn’t he the detective in North Vancouver who crashed his car last year? His colleague was riding with him, and died? Remember that, Dave?”

If Leith had heard of the incident, it was long since forgotten. His memory banks were overstuffed with work-related crap these days, and didn’t have room for much else. But Giroux was already answering herself. “Couldn’t be him. The guy in the crash was older, and exper­ienced. A vet. Our Dion’s just a boy, and greener than spring.” She checked a folder and said with triumph, “Yes, I’m right, he’s the one. Crashed his car and was out of commission for a while. Lucky man, to walk out of that mess in once piece.”

She assumed he’d been repaired. Leith wasn’t so sure. Dion must have passed whatever tests they’d put him through, but somewhere along the way there’d been an error. With that attitude, that temper… He looked up as Jayne Spacey walked in, bright-eyed and sharp as a whip, a study in contrasts. She bounced to attention, telling Giroux she was ready to hit the trail again, this time with a stopwatch, and would have bounced right out the door to put her boots to the ground, but Giroux called her back. “Hang on there, Jayne. Come here. Look at me. What’s wrong?”

Leith didn’t see anything wrong with Jayne Spacey. No broken arm, no post-traumatic stress, no anger. She looked good as new, to him. A woman who was going places, places he would never see, damnit.

Spacey hung in the doorframe. “Nothing’s wrong, boss.”

“Don’t give me that. You’re sick.”

“Bit of a cold. It’s nothing.”

And Leith saw it now too, that the young constable wasn’t herself. Her voice was thick, nasally, and her eyes swam about, and it came to him in an epiphany that she had emptied her medicine cabinet to get her through this day. Nothing to do with the assault, probably, but yesterday’s traipsing about in the cold. Traipsing about looking for Dion.

The women were arguing now, loudly, about Spacey’s fitness to run the trail in this condition, and the argument was lively but brief, ending in Giroux physically marching the young woman to the door and telling her, “Go home. Now. Somebody else can do this.”

With Spacey gone, Giroux was back at her roster, once again looking for volunteers. “So which of you wants to do it? I would, but I’m about half the size of Rob Law.”

“Get Mike Bosko to do it,” Leith grumbled.

Giroux gave him a sour look. “How about you? About time you shifted your weight.”

Leith was fit enough, just barely, but desperately didn’t want to run that trail. He said, “One of the constables, then. Thackray.”

“I told you, Thackray can’t run.”

Leith’s mood was starting a dangerous downhill slide. Maybe it was the fact that Spacey had been wooed away by Mike Bosko, while he hadn’t even been courted. Maybe it was distrust of Bosko’s weird agenda. More likely it was just the threat of having to run up a mountainside in the pouring rain. He raised his voice. “What d’you mean Thackray can’t run? He’s a cop. He’s got to be able to run. It’s a prerequisite.”

“And Ecton’s been working all night,” Giroux went on, ignoring him. “Lynn Daniels couldn’t compete with Rob Law any better than me. Well, a bit better. Augie’s on another file that requires his undivided attention, and my other two are testifying in Prince George as we speak.”

There were half a dozen others that she and Leith ran through before he gave up. They were out-of-towners, all good candidates, he thought. But Giroux seemed to think it unnecessary to pull them from their tasks when a perfectly good David Leith was going to be sitting around twiddling his thumbs all day.

He looked at the sleety grey window and saw himself slogging along at two thousand metres above sea level with a stopwatch. Exercise was not his thing these days, and so what he if was looking more solid than ten years ago? Alison said it looked good on him, and he agreed.

Giroux said, “Don’t mope. You’re not our last resort. Constable Dion can do it.”

“Dion cannot do it,” Leith snapped. “He’ll fall and break his neck. And while he’s at it, he’ll cause an avalanche that’ll wipe out your precious village.”

But the Queen of the Hazeltons only nodded, a mule at heart. “He can do it. And he will. After he and I have a little talk.”

Leith considered her stubborn face and considered the menace of Dion, and sighed. “No. I’ll talk to him.”

* * *

In civilian clothes, jeans and sweatshirt, boots and leather, Dion stepped into Giroux’s office, finding not Giroux but Constable Leith standing by the window, his back to the outdoors. He looked more tired than usual, and pissed off in advance. “Weren’t you told you’re back on duty?” he asked, eying Dion’s well-worn black jeans and leather car coat that said loud and clear I’m not here to work.

“It’s probably not your choice to make,” Dion said, sounding cool and firm, because he’d thought this out, every word planned in advance. “It’s probably mine.”

David Leith had only three expressions as Dion had counted them: fed up, indifferent, or angry. He looked the first right now. “I see,” he said. “Quitting, are you?”

“I’m not quitting, but I’m leaving,” Dion said, and then an unexpected surge of emotion swept him badly off script. “… and I don’t know why. How did I mess up? Filed a few late reports? Got pushed and pushed back? Forgot to kowtow?”

“You screwed up every task you got, that’s what,” Leith said.

Dion bared his teeth and stepped forward. “Like what?”

The answer came at him in a near shout. “You really want me to count ’em off for you?” Leith tried to count it off on his fingers. “Shoddy paperwork, punctuality issues, snotty attitude. Insubordination. How about assaulting a fellow officer?”

All of it was true, and Dion felt his metabolism rising. “I’m not like this,” he told Leith, hating the sound of his own voice, shaky and maybe insane. “I’m good. I’m better than you and everyone else here put together. I put in years of blood, sweat, and tears, and I got places. Look at my service record, then you go ahead and put my failures on a chart, put ’em against my accomplishments, you’ll see what I am.” He poked himself violently on the chest. “I’m the best. I’m down right now, but I was getting up, not with your help or anybody else’s. If you couldn’t see that, you’re a worse fucking detective than I even thought.”

He stopped, half blind with indignation, and got his bearings. He saw the vague outline of the man he was shouting at, who looked pale and bruised. “Right,” Leith said. “I get it. You didn’t get coddled like you wanted. So what are you waiting for? There’s the door.”

“I’m going,” Dion said, and looked sideways at the open doorway. His eyes were clouded with inner heat, and the door seemed murky and distant, a challenge to reach.

A moment passed, and Leith said, “I may be a lousy detective, but even I can see you’re not. Or did I get that wrong too?”

The room came into focus, but it shimmered and glitched. Past Leith were maps on the walls, the window looking out on New Hazelton, the flowering cactus on the sill, the desk with its clutter. Dion felt the breath socked right out of him. He moved toward the door and stalled again. From the corner of his eye he saw Leith had turned to face the window and was looking out, and he was speaking now matter-of-factly. The words were strange and incongruous in the moment, halting Dion in his tracks. “As you’re in no big rush, I might have a job for you. Come here.”

Dion joined him at the window. He followed Leith’s gaze outside to the bleak scenery, the pelting rain.

“That trail you walked yesterday with Spacey,” Leith said. “She can’t time it now because she’s sick. You have to go as fast as you can and log it for time and distance. Pretend you’re a desperate man, not a moment to lose. Can you do that?”

“What?”

Leith laid out the details of the mission. “Sergeant Giroux says she’s got a pedometer that’ll do both measurements,” he finished. “So you’ll use that. Spacey’s got the path all flagged out in pink ribbons, so it’s just a matter of following ’em all the way to the Matax trailhead, making note of the time, and doing a fast return trip. Fast, but without breaking your neck. Ignore the blue and the green ribbons. They’re dead ends. Stick with the pink. Think you can manage that?”

“Of course I can manage that,” Dion said. “But why should I?”

“Because you couldn’t walk out that door,” Leith said, losing patience again. “Because you have something to prove, and here’s your chance. And believe me, it’s your very last.”

Dion burst into scornful laughter, because he wasn’t that much of a fool. “I get it. Give me the dirty job nobody else wants to do and dress it up like a big favour.”

“Is that a no?”

Dion snorted. He looked again at the rain, and his first instinct of point-blank refusal was already complicated by a stronger desire to take on the challenge. A minute dragged by, and he knew that point-blank refusals had to be made point blank, not sometime later. He sniffed, and tried to match Leith’s irritation with his own. “How much time did he have to get there and back?”

“Fifty-five minutes between loading slips. Anything else?”

There was something else, but it was touchy. “That thing you mentioned, is it easy to use?”

“Thing?” Leith said.

Dion narrowed his eyes at him. “For measuring distance.”

“Oh, the pedometer? Easy as a wristwatch. Hang on.”

Leith left the room and came back with the gadget. Dion paled as he took it, looking at its LCD display, numbers blinking at him as he thumbed one button then the other. He thought of his new Timex that beeped at him at odd moments throughout the day, and even with instructions he couldn’t figure out why, or how to mute it, or how to make it beep when he needed it to. This was a hurdle he didn’t need right now. But no sweat. He’d just go on the Internet when Leith wasn’t looking. There was a how-to page for everything these days. Except somebody would catch him googling it. Spacey would notice. She’d point it out for all the world to see, him googling how to use an idiot-proof pedometer.

He had no choice but to back out now, tell Leith he couldn’t do this run. His face burned, and the lump in his throat made it difficult to pull in air. Shallow breathing made his ribs ache and the room vibrate. He looked at Leith, and the face was a blur, starting to run, and still he couldn’t put the words together.

Leith took the pedometer from him and dragged over a couple of chairs. “No problem,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

* * *

Dion had no running gear, so he wore his casual civvies, the hiker-like boots from Mark’s, his favourite black jeans, and on top the layers that somebody had suggested, tank, sweatshirt, patrol jacket, rain cape. He and Thackray drove up the mountain, that long, jouncing crawl with the heat blasting, to Rob Law’s cut block. They parked and in the shelter of the SUV went over the plan. Thackray would wait in the vehicle, ears on alert, and be ready to respond in case there were any problems. If he didn’t get any updates for fifteen minutes straight and couldn’t get through to Dion, he’d call in backup and hit the path himself to see what was amiss. Thackray pressed his bony hands into a prayer and told Dion to please, please report in diligently, because he really, really didn’t want to hit the path. Dion promised.

The crew was hard at work in the downpour, and Dion knew enough about the logging industry by now to understand that it was a seasonal scramble; they were racing against the spring melt, which would mire the north in mud, bringing operations to a standstill. He shouted a question at one of the workers, and the answer was shouted back at him that Rob was out at the mill dealing with some sort of tally dispute, and would be back within the hour.

Dion climbed to the raw land behind the Atco trailer and stood in his flapping cape at the mouth of the trail, by Spacey’s first ribbon, and set the pedometer as Leith had shown him. The forest ahead looked worse than yesterday. It hadn’t rained on him yesterday, and the sky hadn’t been smothered in blackish clouds that cast shades of nightfall over the land. Rain rattled on his cape and drizzled from the hood brim. He looked up at the sky and back some distance to the worksite, where it seemed half the crew stood watching him.

He pressed the start button and headed down the path at an easy stride, picked up speed only when out of sight of the spectators, and jogged along for some time, the cape catching on bushes. He stopped and struggled out of it and abandoned it by another of Spacey’s markers, and now he was cold but unencumbered. Icy water coursed down his face and neck and back and rode up his pant legs as he ran, chilling him to the bone, but the exercise pumped his blood and warmed him. He hadn’t moved, not really, since the crash. And this was no rehab treadmill but body in motion, complete with the hot rasp of his working lungs and the strain on his thighs.

He tired, recovered, and pressed on, faster, fast as he could push himself, straddling slippery logs, ducking under low branches, pounding through the mud puddles. He slowed when the path narrowed, and slowed further when it became treacherous, but mostly he jogged. He remembered in the nick of time to report in to Thackray, then ran downhill, slithered, righted himself. Splashed through another puddle, and now faced a long, steady slope of rocks, pathless but with pink ribbons marking the way across the scree, and up he went, soaked and grimed head to toe. At the top of the hill he looked down the valley, sweaty, sore, and breathless. Looking to his left, he could see off in the distance the three ribbons set in a triangle that he knew was the Matax trailhead. He clambered up through tall, dead grasses in time to hear, not ten metres beyond, the approaching roar of a truck and the drone of its brakes as it passed on its way down the mountainside on the Bell 3 Road.

One final climb and he stood on the road, almost directly across from the trailhead, the world quiet now except for the pattering of the rain that was softening to snowfall. He stopped the timer and checked. Nineteen minutes. He noted time and distance, contacted Thackray, and started back.

For the return trip he needed no markers. He was limping and nearing the end of his reserves when the upper reaches of the logging site came in view, and he walked like a cripple the last few metres to find the total time of the two runs, not counting the five-minute rest, was forty-four minutes, which as he understood it left the killer eleven minutes to commit his crime.

He stood making final notes in the small yellow book that Leith had given him, specially designed for wet-weather writing, and when he looked up again he found the killer himself stood facing him, a mere seven or eight feet away. He and the killer sized each other up, himself cold and wet and dirty, Rob Law dry and secure in gumboots and olive-green rain gear, eyes glinting from the shadows of his hood. Law was white-faced, fierce, and silent, and with the blackness of the forest at his back he looked like a samurai about to hoist his sword and lop off the enemy’s head.

But Dion was armed and unworried. He squeegeed water off his face with a palm, and in the second it took to do it he’d lost his suspect. Law had turned and was walking back toward the worksite, not a word spoken. Dion called out, “Mr. Law? ’Scuse me. Could I borrow your office for a moment?”

But first he needed to let Thackray know. Down at the SUV, he fetched his gym bag and spoke to the constable, who sat reading a police manual in the warmth of its cab, studying for his next level exams, he’d said. Dion explained what the deal was, that he was going to change into dry things in the trailer, that Rob Law was there, to just keep an eye out. Ten minutes, max. Thackray wondered if it wouldn’t be prudent if they went to the trailer together, considering Law was a suspect. Dion said he didn’t think so, and Thackray went back to his reading.

The trailer inside was as dark as the outdoors, and not much warmer, but Law was working on getting the place running. A generator grumbled and then came a metallic whir, harsh light and dust-scented heat. “Place’ll be too hot in about three minutes here,” he said and went about making coffee in a slow, determined way, mixing sugar, no-name instant, and whitener in two mugs. Dion stripped off sweatshirt and tank and pulled on a clean, dry T-shirt. The jeans he would have to live in till he got back to his room, same with the wet boots. He bundled the soggy mess of used clothes into his bag and joined Law at the table, where a cup of coffee awaited him. As he took his chair, Law spoke so low it was hard to make out the words. “So, you have it all figured out?”

“I’m not the one who figures things out.”

“Well, the path. You got that part figured.”

Dion started to say he was just the runner, but found he couldn’t. He was far from powerless, and to say otherwise would be a lie. He gave a noncommittal nod instead. The coffee he’d just gulped was hot and sweet and awful. Across from him, Law was thinking grim thoughts, if anything could be read in the teaspoon he was absently bending out of shape between two thumbs. But wet feet turning to ice and the fact of Thackray waiting in the truck both spurred Dion to get going, and after another gulp of the awful coffee, he stood. “Thanks for the warm-up. I’ll be off now.”

Law nodded, not moving from his chair, still in his rain gear, and he looked like he might sit like this all night. Dion saw depression, and it worried him. He walked back to the table and asked, “Is there a problem, Mr. Law?”

Law’s throat worked. Eyes turned up, for a moment he looked younger than his years, almost juvenile. The moment passed, and he was himself again, a thirtysomething grown man, a mover of earth and trees without much of an education, now asking a strange question in a near snarl. “They still hang people?”

Dion was back in his chair, startled that anyone wouldn’t know the basics of law and order in this country. But he supposed that if a man doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t listen to the radio, is maybe just not interested in how the world operates, he might go on believing there are still gallows set up in the backrooms of every penitentiary. “No, of course not.”

Law pulled a cigarette from a box on the table then held out the open box. Dion, who hadn’t stuck a cigarette in his mouth since the crash, shook his head. “I never been to jail,” the killer said after lighting up, pulling in and streaming out the exhaust to one side, not to hit his guest in the face with it. “Scottie has, though, like I’m sure you know. Seven and a half years. Got off easy, considering what he did. Nearly killed the poor bastard. But it’s ’cause it was done in the heat of the moment, he says. Beats me. How can a man be excused because he was pissed off? Don’t understand the world. Never will.”

Dion nodded in sympathy.

Law returned the nod, but he wasn’t present, Dion could tell. He was elsewhere, talking, smoking, drinking coffee, all in a trance, going on in a low, fast mutter. “Jail just about killed him. He says it’s kind of a chemistry, that you either cope or you don’t, depends who you are. If you’re too soft, you’re better off dead. I’ll cope, I think. I’m tough. Yeah, I’ll cope.” His eyes had widened in a blind stare at the tabletop in front of him, the mangled spoon that lay there. He seemed to lurch at a new thought, and this time the fear was sharp enough that he visibly paled. “Or electrocute?”

He wasn’t being cute. Dion said, “There’s no capital punishment in Canada.”

Law watched him, registered the words, and that was about all. There were tears in his eyes, but they didn’t fall yet. He couldn’t seem to get the cigarette to his mouth now, and it smouldered between his fingers. Couldn’t get another word out either, though it seemed he was trying.

Dion had been in much the same shape earlier today, but his problems were nothing compared to this man’s right now. He said, “It’s okay. I’ll take you down in my vehicle. Gather what you need. I’ll wait right here.”

Law nodded. The tears were making creeks now, but he didn’t crumple, didn’t seem to even notice as he crushed out the cigarette and stood and looked around, wondering what he might need for the strangest trip of his life. Dion stood near the door and kept an eye on the patch of night sky through the window, but mostly he watched Rob Law, a man on a cliff right now, who might need catching.