Читать книгу B.C. Blues Crime 4-Book Bundle - R.M. Greenaway - Страница 16

Confession

“HE WHAT?” LEITH SAID.

“Confessed,” Giroux said, again. “He killed Kiera Rilkoff.”

The mountainside run had produced a helluva lot more than time and mileage, then. It had produced a prisoner, and quite possibly the end of the tunnel. Leith took it all in, one part relieved and three parts doubtful. Constable Dion had brought the prisoner in and was now at his desk in muddy jeans, dirt smudged across his face, writing down in ballpoint the conversation he’d had with Rob Law as verbatim as he could get it while it was fresh in his memory. From where he stood in Giroux’s doorway, Leith could see the temp bent over his notebook, putting down the words so carefully he might have been tracing somebody else’s scrawl.

Bosko hadn’t left yet and was at Giroux’s desk, on the phone, speaking with Crown counsel by the sounds of it. Giroux was at her board, considering the map, the path, the time and distance, and the possibilities. Leith joined her at the board.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “If Rob’s not just making this up to save his brother’s neck, where’s the body? Without a body, I say he’s taking us for a ride. And what possible motive could he have for killing Kiera, hey?”

Leith thought about it, and when he answered it was more for Bosko’s ears, Bosko who would be leaving soon, who hadn’t once brought up the subject of Leith joining the bigger, smarter Serious Crimes Unit down in North Vancouver. “Taking us for a ride, for sure,” he said. “He hasn’t got the brains for this fancy alibi nonsense, loading slips and deer trails and all that. I just don’t buy it. He’s lying to cover for Frank, which points to his confidence in Frank’s guilt, which is about the best thing we got from this whole damn exercise.”

Giroux didn’t argue. She stood deep in thought in front of her maps and charts. Bosko’s ears had missed Leith’s snappy logic altogether, and he was laughing about something with whoever he was on the phone with, a deep, comfortable laugh, a man who probably didn’t know the meaning of self-doubt.

Giroux, who had got the ball rolling on this path theory in the first place, now in her contrary way began to tear it down. “So he signs these loading slips,” she said, “Does a two-K run, kills his brother’s girlfriend, does another two-K run, and then signs another loading slip. Before we talk to him, let’s take another look at those papers, see what his signature tells us. A psychopath might be able to fake it, but that’s not him. He was in tears and very scared, from what Dion says.”

Leith wished he’d thought of it, checking the loading slips. Maybe that would have dazzled the man from the city. The only dazzling he’d done so far, he realized, was forcing John Potter into a premature death. He hauled the box out of the exhibit room and found the loading slips stored in a thick, grubby manila envelope. He pulled up a chair and emptied the flimsies out on Giroux’s desk. Those from the Saturday Kiera disappeared were already separated out, and he put on his reading glasses, put the slips side by side on the desk, and inspected Rob Law’s signatures, one against the other.

The writing he saw was sloping and immature, but practiced. It was just a signature that didn’t say much of Rob Law’s intellect, but it gave insight into his state of mind at the moment he put pen to paper. Leith knew from the records that Rob was a dropout, that writing wasn’t his thing. Or reading, or high-tech anything, or current events. How strange, in this day and age, to be so insulated, nose to the ground, machines and money, payables and receivables, while the world accelerates into a breakneck spin around you. He shook his head. “Looks identical to me.”

Giroux had done her own inexpert handwriting analysis, and agreed. “Right. He’s either very cunning or he never left the worksite. Probably the latter. He’s covering for Frank, and I’ll bet he knows what really happened on Saturday. You want me to sit in with you, or do it alone?”

“Alone,” Leith said. “This is going to be a piece of cake.”

* * *

Rob Law told all. He sat in his work clothes, smelling of diesel fumes and the cold outdoors, avoiding Leith’s eyes, not looking at him at all, and confessing to a variety of sins and crimes. “It’s been going on for years,” he said. “Me and Kiera. It just kind of happened. ’Course I felt bad. Every time it happened, I swore never again. But couldn’t stay away from her. Last week she says she’s going to tell Frank about it. I said no, we don’t have to tell Frank nothing. We have to end it and pretend like it never happened. She was okay with ending it but still had it stuck in her head that she was going to tell him. So our last meeting there, we had a fight about it, and I ended up rattling her, and she hit her head on a rock and she just kind of stopped talking.”

“How’d you arrange to meet?”

He shrugged. “We talked it over few days before. Time and place.”

“What time and place was it.”

To Leith’s surprise, Rob answered promptly. “Two thirty, Saturday.”

“Carry on, then.”

“I tried to bring her back, but she was dead. I hid her as best I could and ran back to the site before they figured out I was away. After work, when all the guys had gone home, I drove my truck down to the Matax. I scooped her up and drove up the old Bell 6 a few miles, into the woods, buried her deep. I can try to find the place, but won’t be easy. I was just in shock, eh. Doing things without much thinking. All I could think was I didn’t want Frank to find out about me and her. Or that I’d killed her.”

He bowed his head, about as genuinely miserable as a suspect could be. Leith said, “Took a shovel along, did you?”

The suspect nodded.

“Buried her and covered her back up?” Leith knew the ground was too hard to dig up — you’d break your shovel before you could make a dent — and already he was fixing a snare on the story, proving not that Rob was guilty, but that he wasn’t, and the only charge he’d be slapped with was one of aggravated obstruction.

Rob nodded again, and he spoke now with an effort, pushing the words out in a hoarse whisper as he stared at the table. He looked revolted, horrified, maybe awed by what he’d done. “Ground’s like iron. Can’t dig. Found a pile of deadfall. Rolled her in. Heaped snow over top.”

The snare had tripped, and all it had caught was what looked like genuine remorse. “Ah,” Leith said. “You’ll be able to find her for us, will you?”

Law nodded, wet-eyed. “Yeah, for sure.”

Was it true, then, all of it? Had the logger actually done the killing, as he said, hidden the body, and was now coming clean? Maybe so, and if so, then Leith needed to switch modes. He was no longer bent on debunking Law’s confession but hammering it into place, closing off any escape routes. “So tell me,” he said. “Why the urgent need to meet her on Saturday at two in the afternoon?”

Law had a good answer for that one too. “Her and Frank and the others were planning an out-of-town trip in a couple days, playing at a dance down in Burns Lake, then another in Vanderhoof. It was about my last chance to talk to her alone. Convince her not to tell Frank.”

“Vanderhoof is hardly the moon. They’d be back in a couple of days. Why not wait?”

“I couldn’t wait. She was going to tell him, who knows when.”

“Okay,” Leith said. “One more thing I need to tie off before we head up the mountain. Tell me about your relationship with Charlene West.”

There was a lengthy pause while the logger studied him. “Didn’t work out,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. She got sick of me, or sick of this place, left a note and went back home. Why, did you talk to her?”

“We had a few words,” Leith said, loading more meaning into the statement than it deserved. In fact, it was Jayne Spacey who’d done some investigation a few days back, and with help from the Dease Lake RCMP had tracked down Charlene West’s cell number and given the girl a call to have a few words. And “few” was a stretch:

Q: Ms. West, you lived with Robert Law down here in Kispiox, and his brothers Frank and Lenny last year?

A: Little bit, yeah.

Q: Why’d you leave?

A: Had a fight.

Q: Do you know Kiera Rilkoff?

A: Sure.

Q: She’s missing; any idea what happened to her?

A: Nope.

And that was about it, according to Spacey’s transcription. But Rob didn’t know any of that, so Leith used it for what it was worth, giving the suspect the quiet, confident stare that said the gig’s up, buddy, I had a good long talk with your ex and she spilled the beans on your dirty little secrets.

But maybe Rob wasn’t reading the stare, gawping back at him with dull and distant wonder, and finally blurting out, “Yeah? So?”

Leith rose to his feet and led Rob out to the main room, where they pulled on coats, hats, and gloves. Then they joined the others in the rear parking lot and climbed into trucks, bound for a search that would maybe turn up the remains of the Rockabilly Princess at last.

* * *

They had spent many long hours on the mountainside, traipsing about in a land without landmarks, hunting for a burial spot on the heels of the self-confessed killer, but no body had been found. Rob Law seemed as distressed about his failure as anybody. Just couldn’t remember exactly which goddamn spur he had taken, he said.

He was back in his holding cell now, and Leith was at his own holding cell, Room 213 at the Super 8. Surprisingly, it was only seven o’ clock, the evening sky cloudless for a change, sharp and clear, each star a bright sparkle against the heaviest blue. He was helping himself to a mickey of Scotch to soothe his nerves, sitting on his bed, on the phone with his wife. He told her of the new schedule, not a happy one, and he swore too much in the telling, until she told him to stop, because she didn’t like that kind of language. Alison wasn’t a prude, just sensible, and she saw no point in saying the F-word with every out-breath like most cops and criminals were prone to. It jarred the ears.

“Anyway,” he told her, “he says he did it, and I think he did it, but he led us all over kingdom come and can’t find her now in all those woods. So we’re going to have to bus in a bunch of cadaver dogs from Rupert, George, Terrace, wherever we have kennels. So it’ll be another few days at least. If that doesn’t work, we’re going to excavate the cut block, top to bottom. Yup, pull it all up, inch by fucking inch. Sorry. Because maybe he’s just leading us on a wild goose chase miles uphill when really she’s right there under our feet. Imagine that. He’s got an eight-foot bucket at his disposal. Can you imagine the hole you can dig with that thing in about two minutes flat?”

“I can imagine,” Alison said from across the miles, that warm and familiar voice that he missed so much. Time and distance made all the wrangling seem ridiculous now. The arguments about how he shut her out, about how she needed to lay off when he was tired, about having a second child (she wanted one, he didn’t), about his opinions about certain of her family members, her opinions about certain of his, it all seemed trite now, and he only knew he loved her madly.

She let him ramble on a bit longer about the pursuit of a body and then interrupted, saying, “That’s enough. You’re really wound up, you know? You make my head spin. There is a world beyond crime, and you gotta get your mind off it. Go for a walk. Read a book. Listen to some music. Okay, hon? Then get some sleep.”

“Okay, hon,” he murmured. “Thinkin’ of you, babe.”

“Thinkin’ of you too,” she said.

He signed off, feeling better, wandered with his plastic tumbler of Scotch to the window, and gasped. Above the black rip-line of the mountains, a light-show played out in undulating waves of green and pink. The phone at his hip buzzed urgently, and it was Renee Giroux in his ear now, saying, “Finally. I tried your work phone, and it went to voicemail. So I tried this number, and it went to voicemail too, so I had to assume you’re on a long call somewhere. You’re worse than my thirteen-year-old niece. D’you see the goddamn sky?”

“I see the goddamn sky right now,” Leith said, still lost in love. “It’s the best goddamn sky I’ve seen in a long time.”

“We’re at the Black Bear,” Giroux said. “Myself and Mike and Spacey. We’re saving a spot for you. And make it fast because we need a distraction here in a big way. It’s Mike’s last night here, so he’s pulling out all the stops, if you know what I mean. He’s telling us in great detail the dynamics of aurora borealis, which I so do not want to know.”

“Trashing the magic for you?”

“No, he couldn’t do that. It’s just really, really not interesting.”

Leith smiled. “Sorry, but I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got my own bar right here in front of me. But I do have a question for you. Did anybody manage to contact the two little bears?”

Frank and Lenny Law, he meant. Since Rob Law’s arrest, nothing had been heard of them, neither hide nor hair, and it was becoming worrisome.

“No,” Giroux said. “I’ll check with my people on the road, see what’s happening, and call you back.”

A few minutes later, she did call back, not with an update but breaking news. “Sorry, but we have to meet, like, now. Augie and Ecton just picked up Lenny. He was hitchhiking up the Old Town road. He’s got something to say, they’re telling me, but he’s not saying it. Whatever it is, doesn’t look good, Dave.”

The detachment being just across the highway from the Super 8, Leith didn’t have to drive, which would be breaking his own laws. He capped the mickey, pulled on jacket and boots, and made tracks.

* * *

The kid was a wreck. His mouth hung open. Bilious-looking, like he’d been into the liquor cabinet. Or the pharmaceuticals, maybe. And his eyes were swollen and bloodshot, sticky and heavy-lidded, like he’d been crying long and hard.

“What is it?” Leith asked him. “What happened?” He and Giroux sat with the youngest of the Law brothers in Giroux’s office, trying not to loom over him, trying to make him comfortable. So far he hadn’t said much of anything to anyone, and another minute passed, and finally he came out with it, but in a faraway voice, like someone — Leith imagined — sucked into the fourth dimension. “He’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“Frank.”

“Where did he go?”

Lenny Law pointed more or less at Giroux. “Here. To see you.”

Leith questioned Giroux with his eyes. She shook her head. “He’s not here,” he told Lenny. “He hasn’t been here at all today.”

“He dropped me at home and said he was coming here, and took off. An hour ago. He wouldn’t let me go with him.”

“Why was he coming here?”

“To tell you something.”

“D’you know what he wanted to tell us?”

“What he’s done,” Lenny Law said in that airy voice that was beginning to give Leith the creeps.

He asked the boy to tell them everything he knew about what Frank had done, what exactly he had said, but the youngest brother wouldn’t say. Leith asked him where they’d been all day, him and Frank, and did they drive there? If Frank was driving and had left half an hour earlier, he should have been here many minutes ago. Had he stopped somewhere along the way? Did he say where he might be stopping?

But Lenny was done divulging. It was Frank’s thing now, and whatever Frank had to say he would have to say himself.

Giroux and Auxiliary Constable Daniels took Lenny back to his home to wait there, in case Frank changed his mind and returned. Leith stayed in the office, having instructed Constable Spacey to organize everyone on staff, on duty and off, including auxiliaries, to launch a dedicated search in the area for Frank and/or his green 1982 Jeep.

Spacey promised she’d scour the planet till she found him, no problem.

Spacey is a good cop, thought Leith, still with a mix of envy and admiration. She’ll go far.

* * *

The sad warbling of a small bird buried deep under the snow woke Dion, and he looked at the ceiling. He didn’t know which ceiling it was until the bird warbled again and he recognized the sound as his cellphone and the place as the Super 8, and he recalled he’d gotten off shift and lain down to rest and must have fallen into a deep sleep. He found the phone on the fourth ring, and Spacey’s brittle voice was in his ear, telling him to get in to work right away.

He looked at his watch. “But —”

“Now,” she said.

Across the highway he found the office fully lit, in spite of the late hour, and it looked like all were in attendance for whatever emergency this was. Spacey gave Dion and the others detailed instructions to grid-search certain areas of town for Frank Law and/or his vehicle. Dion took his copy of the bulletin and asked what was happening, and Spacey spoke in a low voice, for his ears only. “As I just finished explaining, but maybe you didn’t click, word is he was on his way in to make a confession, but he disappeared en route. So if by chance you apprehend him, don’t fuck up by having a nice little chat with him. Just shut up and bring him in and let somebody with a functioning brain get his statement. Okay?”

He worked on a mean, snappy reply, but not fast enough; she had moved on and was talking to somebody else. Dion drove out to find the area assigned to him, and it happened to be in the area to the west of the 7-Eleven mini-mall, and once within its quiet avenues and cul-de-sacs, he knew that this was the last place on earth Frank Law would be found. It was a small new subdivision with a middle-class feel to it, Hazelton’s version of urban sprawl, and he knew Spacey had done it on purpose, given him the least likely zone to search. It was all about revenge with her.

He followed about half her instructions, visually checked driveways as he passed, but didn’t stop at every closed garage or outbuilding and pester the residents about permission to search. It was cutting corners, but Frank wasn’t here, not in plain sight and not hidden either.

Having cut so many corners, he was done sooner than the time allotted to him, and he turned his vehicle back onto the highway, tires scraping on ice, and saw that the skies to the east were strangely pink and writhing, as if the world on the far side of the mountains was ablaze. He was watching the sky as he drove along and almost didn’t see the hitchhiker ahead, standing on the shoulder, a slouchy cap taming her long hair that fluttered sideways like a cape, and her thumb out. She pulled that thumb in fast when she saw the vehicle coming her way was a police cruiser, and at the same time he recognized her under the sickly orange glow of the street lamp. Evangeline Doyle, apparently on her way to a new life. He signalled, pulled over, and stepped from the car, and she gave a whoop of recognition and came forward in a weird lope, burdened by a large backpack. They stood on the shoulder, face to face, and he saw she was already road-weary, though not quite fatigued. Her pretty, round face broke into a grin. “Can you take me to Edmonton, Officer?”

“Bit late to be heading out of town. Why don’t you wait till morning?”

“Nah. I’m a night bird.”

“Still. Chances of getting a ride are slim, I think.” At least with someone safe. He tried to tell her with a stern look what he thought of it, hitchhiking at all, but especially at night. And especially here, this notorious strip from Prince Rupert to Prince George that had earned the mournful name of Highway of Tears for good reason.

She sniffed and looked at the pink sky, now tinged with green. She nodded. “I suppose you’re right. It’s just Scottie’s been in a really shitty mood lately, so we got in a bit of a yelling match, and I guess I burned my bridges.But one more night I guess I can put up with him. Would you look at that, though?”

They looked at the sky together, and then he looked at Evangeline, because the brim of her cap was sparkling pink under the lamplight, which reminded him of something, but he couldn’t say what. She saw him staring at it, and said, “Problem?”

“Can I see it?” he said.

She took it off and handed it over. The cap was fake suede, with a stiff beak that was suede over card. He looked at the glitter, glued on in a deteriorating pattern along the brim. He touched the glitter and Evangeline said, “Careful, there’s not much left, and it’s an old favourite.”

He looked at her and recalled the photo of her on the wall, the girl outside on a windy day, cap on and one gloved hand keeping it from flying away. He said, “Where are the gloves?”

Because it was a matching set, and the glove in the picture was grey, a soft knit fabric, with a little sparkling bow at the wrist, and though it was significant, he couldn’t say why, or whether that significance attached to this file or something else altogether.

“Scottie lost them,” Evangeline said, making a face of exasperation, a mother wearied by her child’s pranks. “They’re those tiny gloves that stretch and fit anybody, so the idiot borrowed them. Can you imagine a man wearing gloves with little pink bows? He probably stretched them all out of shape anyway. Do you mind if I ask why?”

He returned the cap, knowing the why might come to him, eventually. Probably too late to matter.

She put it back on and said with an attractive and challenging smirk, “Wouldn’t be able to zip me over to his place, would you? It’ll take you all of five minutes.”

Zipping her over to Kispiox would be a lot more than five minutes. He phoned Spacey, told her he was finished the subdivision, and asked how about if he took a cruise through the outlying areas for a bit, then report back in. Spacey didn’t care what he did. He loaded Evangeline’s backpack into the trunk, and she got in the passenger seat, and he carved a U-turn on the highway and headed back toward Kispiox.

Which technically he shouldn’t do. Technically, he should report in that he had a civilian in the car, and technically he could be disciplined for providing taxi service to the public. Technically, too, she should be in the rear seat, kept at bay by the bulletproof barrier. But technically he was at the nothing-to-lose stage of his career, and didn’t really care what rules he broke. Anyway, he had a question or two for her, which made it less of a taxi ride and more business. “D’you know the Laws much?”

“Rob, Frank, and Lenny,” she said. “Not too much. I’ve been to a couple parties over there. Scottie adores those guys. Funny, but he’s more of a mother hen than you’d think.”

“You don’t have any idea where Frank could be right now?”

She didn’t, and his duty was done. He said, “I can loan you bus fare if you want. Hitchhiking around here isn’t a good idea. You know that, right?”

“I know that. I’m ready for it.”

“I’ll give you the bus fare.”

She laughed. “I’ve got money, and I’ll take the bus, if that makes you feel better.”

They drove in silence for a bit and had left Two Mile behind, and Old Town, and were deep in the woods that flanked the Skeena when she said, “Hey, that’s his bike.”

“Whose bike?” Dion said, slowing the vehicle, looking at his passenger, following the line of her finger out to the woods.

“There. Scottie’s bicycle.”

Something blue shone from within the trees, and Dion pulled to the shoulder and reversed till he could see it better. “That’s his bicycle?”

“That’s his bicycle. Weird. It’s the only way he gets around these days, ’cause his dirt bike’s out of commission too, and he can’t fix it. How dumb is that, Scottie the Fix-All can’t fix his own bike. Great advertising.”

Dion got out of the car and went to take a closer look. Sure enough, it was Scottie Rourke’s crappy blue one-speed, leaned up against a tree off to the side of the highway. There was no lock and chain around it, and it seemed intact. Its tires were firm. With collar high against the cold, he looked up and down the dark, little-travelled byway that wound through forest toward the Law residence, and beyond that to Rourke’s trailer, with a whole lot of nothingness in between.

The bike was pointing away from the village, so Scottie had been heading home, by the looks of it. He supposed it was no mystery; somebody had driven by and given him a lift. Not to Rourke’s trailer, because why bother leaving the bike for subsequent pick-up if he was just about home anyway? No, he’d been given a lift back to the village, or somewhere else altogether. The police would be out crawling this road looking for Frank, so maybe Rourke had been picked up by one of the constables for questioning. But a pick-up would have been broadcast, and it hadn’t been. Same if he’d gone to the pub or the Catalina. He’d have been scooped, and the scoop would have come across the police frequency. So the drive-by and the pick-up would have happened before the alert went out, and who would be driving by, by chance, on this remote road? One of the Laws. Not Lenny and not Rob. Frank in his old green Jeep. That’s who.

He sat back behind the wheel and drove past the Law driveway, looking for police activity and seeing none, and a minute or two further to Rourke’s trailer. The lights were off in the place except for one burning low in the area of the kitchen. He hauled Evangeline’s pack from the trunk of the car and went up to the door with her. She had found a business card stuck in the jamb, and she showed it to him. Thackray had left his RCMP card with a note scribbled on the back to call this number ASAP.

Evangeline fished into an empty flowerpot and found the house key. She let herself into the trailer, and Dion followed and set down her pack. The place wasn’t warm but not cold either. Evangeline was calling out for Scottie, and Scottie wasn’t answering. She had turned up the heat, switched on lights, was pouring water into a kettle, and asking Dion if he wanted coffee or a beer or anything. How about some antioxidant tea with ginger?

He didn’t. He stood in the middle of the tiny trailer kitchen, and it was coming to him like a home movie played without sound, everything that was happening. He remembered the photos on Rourke’s wall, that snapshot of Rourke grinning at the camera, the grin cut in half by a terrible scar, an arm around each of the two older Law brothers’ necks, throttling them with fatherly affection. That same suffocating love of Rourke’s had destroyed a man and driven a woman to suicide. The crime was history, and maybe he’d mellowed, but it still ran in his veins, that terrible, overblown passion.

Dion experienced a fleeting moment of wonder at himself, that he was still here, knowing some things, not knowing a lot more, facing the end of life as he knew it, but still ticking away as if he must close the deal. He said, “Does Scottie have a gun?”

Evangeline didn’t think so. “Why?”

And maybe he was totally off the wall, but in a further epiphany he could see where it was playing out, too, at least in vague composite form. Now he had to decide: call it in, alert the team what he thought and where they ought to go — or go there himself.

Time and space and a certainty that they’d drag their feet told him he didn’t really have a choice. He would fire up his own engines and go there himself, now. Except he couldn’t go there, because he still didn’t know where there was. What he needed were coordinates. He said, “Evangeline.”

She had her nose in the cabinets, looking for teabags. She turned and said, “Hm?”

“Do you know anything about the Gates of Heaven?”

She abandoned the cupboard and turned so she was facing him, no longer bustling but still and watchful. “The what, sorry?” He saw her glance to her right, at the knife rack, and to her left, at the door, and of course the question had scared her, put that way out of the blue, because psychos roamed the earth, even dressed as policemen. He explained there was a place Scottie had described to him the other day, and he needed to find it, fast, that was all. Did she have any idea?

Her shoulders relaxed, and she shook her head. “No. But tell me more. Maybe I can help.”

Dion ploughed backward through that casual conversation at the Old Town Pub. “It’s a place up on a mountain somewhere. It’s got a great view. It’s open to the skies. Scott wants his ashes scattered there when he dies. Ring any bells?”

“Oh, the place with the hubcaps?” she said.

“Hubcaps? Like a wrecking yard?”

“No, hubcaps like stuck on this big log arch thing. We buried the red-tail there.”

This was hardly what he needed right now, more random puzzle bits. “The what?”

She said, “The red-tail, the hawk with the broken wing, last fall. We couldn’t save it, and it died, and Scottie had a truck then, so we went up to the place with the hubcaps. He didn’t call it the Gates of Heaven, far as I know, but it’s something he’d do, Mister Schmaltz. He said he was going to build a cabin there, but raising the two posts and decorating them was about as far as he got. Anyway, he wanted to bury the bird. That was before the ground froze solid, right? So, great, except he wanted to bury it right on the edge there where its soul could soar free, blah-blah-blah, and he wanted me to stand with him as he did so and say prayers, but it was too scary, the edge, way too far down, eh? Made me dizzy. So he did it himself. He’s not afraid of heights. He says he’s got Mohawk blood in him that makes him not afraid of heights, but I don’t believe him. It’s wishful thinking. He’s whiter than I am, and I am very white.”

Dion was weeding words as she spoke, as best and as fast he could. He said, “This hubcap place, is it up the Matax trail, up that way somewhere?”

“No, no. It’s a whole different mountain. It’s over here.” She poked the air to her left.

The Hazeltons were surrounded by mountains, so it wasn’t a helpful poke. “D’you have a map? Could you show me where it is?”

She didn’t have a map. He brought the one printed for tourists from his vehicle and flattened it on the kitchen counter, and Evangeline’s pearly pink fingernail showed him it was pretty well just across the highway from the entrance to the Bell 3. An old logging road that didn’t have a name, far as she knew.

“You take this road called McLeod, past this ranch, and then about five miles along there’s a sign on your left warning people about logging trucks, and you take that. It’s steep and gravelly, but not too bad, you don’t need a four-by or anything….”

Her finger travelled up the mountainside, ended at more or less where she thought the plateau was located, and marked it with an X for him in ballpoint. “East Band,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Scottie called it East Band. I don’t know, East Band mountain, or road. He just said East Band.”

When she was done, he told her to wait there. Out in his car he phoned directly to Jayne Spacey, his point person for the night, and told her where he was, at Scott Rourke’s residence, and where he was going, up to a lookout on a logging road past McLeod, in an area possibly called East Band. He told her that he needed backup, because he believed Scott Rourke was up there with Frank Law, and it could be a dicey situation.

“What, where?” she said.

He looked at the map, so little of it marked with names. The lookout wasn’t a tourist hotspot, and there was nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the green. There was no East Band that he could see. “I can’t explain everything right now,” he said. “But Evangeline Doyle’s here. She’ll give you directions, or maybe she can just take you out there. That would be better.” He thought a moment, staring at his map, struggling through the logistics as the clock ticked. If the team had to come out to Rourke’s trailer to get Evangeline, there would be a good half hour wasted, considering the road leading to the area she had pointed out started somewhere up Highway 37, not up Kispiox Road. The closest point between the detachment and the East Band, as he saw it, was Old Town.

He said, “I’ll leave her at the Black Bear Lodge. You can meet her there. Get a team together. I’ll go up ahead and see what I can find out, and wait there for backup. I’m not sure if Rourke is armed. You have to move fast on this. I don’t know what exactly I’m headed into.”

“Yes, fine,” Spacey said.

He shut his phone and jogged back to the trailer to get Evangeline. She sat in the passenger seat and he fired the engine, aware that it was all wrong, somehow, him and Spacey, the games they were playing and the dynamite they had underfoot. But in this case she would have no choice but to act, and he could hardly sit here mulling it over anyway. Rourke had at least an hour’s head start, and Dion was almost certain that if Frank wasn’t dead already, all in the name of mercy, it was just a matter of time.