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Found in Translation

MORNING CAME, ALONG WITH a steady fall of big snowflakes, fat and wet. The case wasn’t over, not even close. After six hours of interrogation, Frank stood firm that he was innocent, and there was nothing Leith could do but keep scrounging for evidence.

On this day Mike Bosko was truly and finally abandoning ship, hitching a ride with the sheriffs on the prisoner shuttle and flying out from George, as he’d planned to do so many days ago. “It just kept getting more interesting,” he said in his cheerful way to Leith and Giroux. Leith was glad to see the last of him. Bosko was a grating reminder of what Leith had no chance of becoming. Too smart, too high-ranking for his age, and to top it off, he didn’t even seem to realize it. Too big, too worldly, too modest, and quite possibly a vegetarian, were some of his flaws. And he was slow. Right now he wasn’t snapping up his briefcase and flying out the door, as he should be, but finishing a cup of coffee and chatting with Giroux about something anthropological, a native legend about frogs, or foxes, or the reinvention of self.

Mike Bosko probably knew more about First Nations culture than Giroux, by the looks of her face as she listened, awe mixed with offence. Leith only tuned in when the conversation somehow tied back in to the case, Bosko and Giroux back to an earlier debate about Scottie Rourke’s intentions up on the East Band lookout, holding a gun to Frank Law’s head when Frank wasn’t looking, a supposed act of euthanasia against the ills to come. “Oh, you bet Rourke would have shot the kid,” Bosko told Giroux. “Then he might well have shot himself to wrap it up, but I doubt it. Anyway, that’s my take on it.”

Leith stashed that takeaway to think about later, but for now Bosko had turned to him, reaching out a hand. “You know,” he said, as they shook, “I know it wouldn’t be easy, leaving the north, but think about it. I’m looking for the best for my new team, out with the old SCU and in with the new, and I could sure use a guy of your talents and energy.”

Leith stood blinking. Talent? Energy? “Yes, sir, thanks, sir,” he said, and it came out in a blurt after his first stunned silence. “I’ll sure think about it. Thanks.”

“Excellent. Be hearing from you soon, then, I hope?”

“Yes, sir. Thanks. Was great working with you. Safe travels. I’ll be in touch.”

Now it was Giroux’s turn. Unlike Leith, she didn’t blather like a drunken lotto winner, but promised to keep Bosko posted about the Rilkoff case. “Things aren’t over till they’re over, right?”

Leith watched Bosko out the window, somewhat infatuated. The big man stood and chatted with the sheriffs from Prince Rupert, who had been waiting patiently at their transport van. The snow fell, and the sheriffs seemed content to stand chatting for a while longer with a man they didn’t know. They were pointing toward Hagwilget Peak, talking geography now, probably. Talking stats. Sharing hiking stories. God, Leith thought. He wants me.

Finally, they all piled into the van and it trundled off, full of cops and robbers making the world go round. “Sad,” Giroux said. “Just when you get used to somebody in your life, poof, they’re gone.”

“Yes, and I’m next,” Leith said, two thumbs up, thinking about Ali and Izzy, cranky wife and truculent daughter, home and haven. His big smile and two thumbs up seemed to bother Giroux, and he understood why. This was her universe, this little spattering of villages, and she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to leave.

Not that it was over, quite yet. There would be many interviews to conduct over the next day or so. He recalled another unpleasant item on his mental agenda, and with a sigh told Giroux about Spacey and her disturbing lack of expediency when it came to mustering backup to the East Band lookout, night before last. He told her of Dion’s version of the delay. Giroux listened, her fierce black eyes shooting sparks, and Leith noticed for the first time that she was going grey at the temples. Just like Alison, who’d told him last month during one of their tiffs, “I’m going grey, take it or leave it.”

He would take it, of course he would. But with Renee Giroux he felt a pang of pity. Maybe because she was a firecracker that would sail high but burn fast, and she would never reach the stars.

“No way,” she exclaimed in answer to his ratting out of young Spacey. “No way would she put anybody’s life at risk, dragging her feet like that. If she complained that Dion had been unclear on the phone, then he had been unclear on the phone. Unclear is his middle name, for Pete’s sake.”

So it’ll go into the personnel cold case files, Leith thought. An unsolved case of he said, she said. Like Giroux, he believed the she.

Back at his desk in the main room, he was struggling through the paperwork of Frank’s arrest when he was distracted by a commotion. Constable Thackray had arrived, helping a little old native lady up the front steps and into the detachment, bringing gusts of brisk air and a swirl of snow crystals. Leith delayed a phone call to observe the little old lady, who looked older than the village itself, and wondered what it must be like to have existed before the escalation of convenience, before mass transportation, mass media, mass instantaneous gratification had set in. Must have been slow days, then. Must have been kind of nice, listening to the crickets at night. For entertainment you sat on the front stoop, watching the sunset, having a real conversation about real things with real people.

His iPhone buzzed, a text from home: When? He texted back: ASAP. With a happy face.

It was amusing, anyway, watching Thackray, the lanky young constable, trying to communicate with the little old lady, but she wasn’t speaking the language, except in fragments. Thackray tried Police Pidgin, then a kind of ad lib sign language, then sighed and caught Leith’s eye and said, “She wants to report something, but I can’t understand what the problem is.”

Dion had arrived, not in uniform but civvies, looking preoccupied. He brushed past Thackray, went to his cleared-off desk, and started searching for something in the drawers and behind the computer monitor.

Leith asked Thackray, “Don’t you guys have an on-call translator?”

“Yeah, we do, but she’s out of town.”

Dion said, “My keys.”

Leith said, “I gave ’em to Thackray.”

Thackray pointed at the bulletin board on the wall, where he’d tacked Dion’s keys. Dion stuck them in his pocket and headed for the exit, but didn’t get far. The little old lady stepped in front of him and spoke to him in tongues. Even after he told her he didn’t speak her language, she kept at it. Leith wasn’t sure why she picked on Dion. Maybe because he had dark hair and dark eyes and looked like he could be at least part native. In the right light.

Like Thackray before him, Dion did his best, making a yacking gesture with his hand at his mouth, shaking his head at the woman, saying, “Sorry.” Leith and Thackray grinned at each other, and the old lady went quiet. Dion turned to Leith with arm outstretched, pointing at the wall, and said, “Willy’s at the Super 8 diner every morning about seven. You must have seen him there, old Indian guy, white hair. He could translate for you. Ken could probably tell you how to reach him.”

“Willy …” Vaguely, Leith recalled a white-haired gentleman in the Super 8’s little gingham-tabled restaurant, sitting at the window booth, outlined by predawn darkness, drinking coffee. “Ken,” he said. “Who’s that?”

Dion stared at him. “He serves you breakfast every morning. Right? Ken Cheng?”

And with that he was reaching for the door handle again, and Leith wondered if this was it, he would now just climb into his cruiser and shoot away back to his home posting of Smithers, a one hour’s drive south, without so much as a goodbye or a swell to know you. Recalling the paperwork Giroux had been flapping about earlier, Leith shouted after him, “You have to clear it with the boss before you go, right?”

“I did,” Dion shouted back, and was gone, out into the falling snow.

The old native lady looked exasperated, and Thackray said to the door, “Goodbye, Mr. Sunshine.”

* * *

Getting a translator for the little old lady was Thackray’s problem, really, but Leith decided a change of pace to the day would be good for him, and he offered to do it himself. Sometimes to run a simple errand is rejuvenating. Solve an easy puzzle and feel good about yourself for a change.

He crossed the highway on foot to the Super 8 and talked to the short-spoken little Asian fellow who served him and the other out-of-towners breakfast every morning — sure enough, the name was Ken Cheng — and asked him about a customer named Willy. Mr. Cheng told him, yeah, Willy hung out here most mornings — in fact, he left about an hour ago. He didn’t have a lot of money, taught languages at the Continuing Ed place sometimes, for free. But not many people were interested in language learning, so Willy mostly just walked about town or went fishing in the season. Mr. Cheng didn’t know Willy’s address.

Leith re-crossed the highway on foot, jumped into his SUV, and drove to the Continuing Education building, where he spoke to a woman there who knew Willy and had his address on file. No phone number, sorry. She told Leith that Willy wasn’t a translator, really, not too good with English, more a teacher of the old language, but he’d probably be able to help out in a pinch.

Not feeling much rejuvenated, Leith punched the address into his GPS and drove to the address the woman gave him, a rundown apartment low-rise in the poorest nook of the village. He climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. He heard loud music and loud shouting and a loud dog barking incessantly, all from behind thin walls, and his nerves danced. Nobody answered his knocking, but the shouting in the next apartment went quiet, and a native teenager who should have been in school looked out and asked him what he wanted. Leith told him he was looking for Willy. The kid said, “What’s Willy done?”

Being in plainclothes, Leith mentally bellowed, Now why d’you assume I’m a cop? I could be the old guy’s perennial fishing pal. But on reflection he realized he couldn’t be anybody’s fishing pal; in this scenario, he could be nothing else but a cop. He said, “Willy’s not in trouble. I need him to translate for me. D’you know anybody else who could translate?”

“Translate what?”

Leith realized he didn’t have any idea. “Gitxsan, I’m pretty sure.”

The kid shook his head.

“Thanks,” Leith said.

“No problem,” the kid said and shut the door, and the shouting started all over again, and Leith realized it was aggressive but not angry shouting, and there was laughter thrown in, so it wasn’t murder after all, just some kind of party. The shouting was in English, but it wasn’t good English. It was slurred and mangled. Leith was glad he was white and middle-class and didn’t have to live next to these noisy bastards. Better yet, he didn’t have to be these noisy bastards. Poor Willy. No wonder he wandered the town.

Outside, the snow was ankle-deep but heavy and wet. His mission was a failure, and he felt far from good about himself, and it was high time to hand it back to Thackray, say go find your own damn translator. But then he saw him, a shambling figure walking along the side of the highway, head bowed, heavily dressed, and Leith said aloud, “I’ll bet my right arm that’s our man.”

He stopped the SUV and approached with his ID out, and the shambling figure stopped to watch him come in stony silence.

“Hi, excuse me, I’m looking for William Lloyd?”

“Why?” came the answer. “What’s ol’ Willy done?”

This wasn’t the first time Leith had lost his right arm, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. He pocketed his ID. “Any idea where he is right now?”

The man who wasn’t Willy pointed to the big yellow sign on the main drag not too far ahead.

Leith drove the two blocks to the Catalina, stepped inside, and found a table where four native men sat. There were three middle-aged men speaking English — something about construction of a new road — and one old guy with wild white hair and mismatched eyes, one milky blue, who seemed to be mostly just listening. All four men looked at Leith as he walked over. This time there could be no doubt which was Willy.

There were greetings all around, and he was invited to sit down, in spite of being a fair-skinned, hazel-eyed detective from Prince Rupert. The three men listened while Leith spoke with Willy, asking him if he could do some translating for him. He didn’t mention the complainant’s name, Paula Chester, in case one of the three men listening was somehow involved in the crime. Who knew?

Willy said sure, he could do that, and his English didn’t seem so bad, actually. “Now?”

Leith called the detachment, and Thackray said Mrs. Chester had left, but he would pick her up again and bring her back. Fifteen minutes? Leith would have left with Willy then, except one of the three men had bought him a coffee. This guy too was from Prince Rupert but hadn’t been back in a while and wanted to know how things were going in the City of Rainbows.

After the unwanted coffee and chat, Leith drove Willy back to the detachment and found Thackray hadn’t yet returned with Mrs. Chester, so he left the old man in the more comfortable interview room, which would be the best place, he thought, for the translation process. Then he went back to his desk to get stuff done. The cute little errand hadn’t been so cute in the end, not the mood-boost he’d been aiming for.

As he was to find out later, it was some minutes after he’d left Willy in that room that the old man must have gotten bored with sitting looking at travel magazines and got up and wandered about the detachment a bit, finding himself in the primary case room, which should have been locked but wasn’t, and which took the Hazelton case on a whole new trajectory.

* * *

The apartment, which Dion had rented partially furnished when he’d moved to Smithers five months ago, still had the echo of an unloved place, and now on his return it had also the chill of vacancy. He dropped his gym bag to the floor and turned up the thermostat. The baseboards ticked alive, and in time the iciness began to thaw from walls and furniture.

One of the first things he’d bought after landing in Smithers had been a Sony ghetto blaster from the local stereo store, and he stooped now to bang in a synthpop CD to scare away the silence. On the kitchen counter stood another welcome-back bonus, five beer left over from a twelve-pack he’d started on before heading out on the out-of-town assignment so many days ago.

With a beer in hand and the music blaring, he sat on the sofa and worked on forgetting the dirty backwaters of the Hazeltons and all its troubles. He was glad to be out of there and back into this pocket-sized city, with its fast food and yuppie pub and its strip mall. But there was a sense of something left unresolved, and it wasn’t just the full and sworn statements he had yet to give. It was mixed somewhere in the faces and the conversations that had flowed at and around him in the strange little settlement under that big mountain. There were conversations yet to be had and faces yet to be met, it seemed, and it was a weird and unsettling notion that nagged him even as he shook it off, finished a second beer, and bobbed his head to the music.

Whatever.

He had picked up a pile of mail from his box in the lobby, and he sat on the sofa and sorted through it. Most of it was junk and flew into the waste bin. Some bills to set aside and deal with later. There was also one slim envelope from Kate, which he looked at in wonder. She still wrote. After all his cold shouldering.

When he was in rehab, he’d refused to see her because his face was skewed and bruised, and he drooled when he spoke. He’d sent her a note saying the accident made them strangers, so she’d better delete his number from her list, find someone else. Even after his face straightened out and he learned to control his tongue, he knew he was far from fixed, and wouldn’t see her. He returned home, and since he’d been battling the RCMP to keep his job, he’d been in no mood to see her then either. So “just go” were the exact words he used at his apartment door as she stood there with a bottle of wine in her hand. He’d been blunt. “Don’t call, don’t write. When I’m good again, I’ll be in touch.”

The letter he held now was proof she just didn’t get it.

He went to add it to her other three envelopes he’d received since arriving in Smithers, stored away in a shoebox on the shelf, but it occurred to him that things had shifted again, and the faint hope of Kate was no longer even faint. He tapped all four envelopes on the counter until they were nicely square with each other, hesitated once more, and tore them in half. It hurt, but in a good way, he told himself, as he dropped the tatters in the wastebasket with the other junk mail. It was just another lightening of the load.

* * *

The old man named Willy was looking at the photographs still up on the bulletin board in the case room when Leith came looking for him. The photograph he seemed most interested in was that of Frank Law, blown up from a snapshot to show his handsome, smiling face. Frank’s front tooth was chipped, but otherwise his teeth were straight and white. And ask any local girl, she’d say the damage only added to his charms.

Leith said, “Sir, sorry, but this room —”

And Willy said, “Where has his girl gone?”

Leith stood next to him and looked at the picture of Frank. Posted within inches was the photo of Kiera, but Willy didn’t seem interested in her, which didn’t mesh with the question he’d just asked.

“She hasn’t been found,” Leith told him. “We’re still looking. We’ll never stop looking.”

Willy nodded, still studying Frank.

Leith frowned. Maybe the old guy was blindish. He put his finger under Kiera’s picture and said, “D’you know her, sir? Ever met her in person?”

Willy looked at him and at the photo he was indicating. He looked harder at the picture and said, “Nope.”

“She’s the singer who went missing. Kiera Rilkoff?”

“Yes, yes.” Willy nodded in recognition at the name. “It’s a sad story.”

There was still something off-key with this whole exchange. “She’s Frank’s girl. You know that, right?”

Willy grinned. “He got a lot of girls.”

“Hey?”

Willy stopped grinning and said something in his native tongue, but only to himself.

Leith tried for the unequivocal approach. “You asked about his girl. You mean her?” His finger was on Kiera’s picture again.

“No,” Willy said. “The Laxgibuu. Wolf House. Bilaam is her name. The singer.”

Leith puffed out a breath. What he needed was a translator for this translator. Willy appeared to be searching his mind too, and finally he said, “Charles West. Bilaam. His girl. Never came back to finish up. I ask around, nobody know.”

“Charlie?” Leith said.

Willy nodded and smiled. “Charlie.”

Leith nodded now, relieved that they were finally getting somewhere. “Charlie West went back to Dease Lake. That’s where she’s from.”

“From Gitlakdamix,” Willy said, correcting him. “New Aiyansh. Whole family went up to Dease. They follow the jobs, eh. Mom and dad died. Car accident, you know? Horrible. Sad.”

“Right, okay. So you know her well, Charlie? What makes you say she’s Frank’s girl?”

“She come by with this boy, to the school. Frank, he wants to see too.”

“See what?”

Willy, so brief till now, suddenly spouted off at length. “Come to see her sing her own words. I teach her the words. She grow up away from all what made her, you know? Lost it all, but they’re coming back. I am bringing them back to her.”

To Leith this was becoming one big, irrelevant headache. Rob Law’s ex-fiancée was taking language lessons, or singing lessons, or find-your-roots lessons, or some combination, from this old guy, and she had taken Frank with her to one of their sessions because he was interested, and the old guy assumed they were a couple. So what? “When was this that she came by with Frank for lessons?”

Willy said it was late last summer. September. He nodded at his memories. “Good singer. Smart. I hope she comes back and finishes up. Her music is fine and good things. You give me her phone number, hey? And I will call her. Maybe she does not understand that I will be gone soon. And then so will her songs be gone.”

Leith went to the files and found the phone number for Charlie West in Dease Lake to give to the old teacher of the old language.

And that would have been the end of it, but the next morning he encountered by chance Willy in the Super 8’s diner and asked him if he’d talked to Charlie, and Willy told him no, he’d talked to Charlie’s sister, and the sister said Charlie had never made it home.

Which was puzzling and worrisome. Leith didn’t want to get into another painstaking back-and-forth with the old man, so he went across to the office and dug up the file once more. He looked at Spacey’s transcription of her call to Dease some seven days ago.

Q: Ms. West, you lived with Robert Law down here in Kispiox and his brothers Frank and Leonard 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.

Charlie was a nickname. Her real name, as on Spacey’s notes, was Charlene. Wasn’t it? Well, wasn’t it? If there was a sister, could the nickname be some kind of … hell, no, that was impossible. He grimaced. Knowing the impossible was often called shit happens, he made some calls himself and learned with dismay that, yes indeed, there had been some gross miscommunication, that Charlene West was Charlie’s sister, one year younger, that Charlie’s legal name was Charlotte, that as far as Dease Lake knew, twenty-year-old Charlotte had gone to live with Rob Law in Kispiox. She hadn’t been home since.

Why hadn’t Rob corrected the mistake when Leith had brought the issue forward in interrogation? Charlene. He recalled now that Rob had paused, had seemed baffled, but then gone on and let it pass. Maybe the logger had motive to uphold the lie; more likely he saw no point in correcting the dumb bull asking him questions.

Following some hours of telephone tag, Leith was able to connect with Charlene herself, and he put her statement to her over the line. “You told Constable Spacey last week that you lived with Rob Law.”

“Well, stayed with,” Charlene said. “Yeah. That week.”

Lived or stayed with, Leith thought. Amazing how a slip of semantics could throw a case so badly off the rails. “What week?” he asked grimly.

Charlene was a girl of short patience, and already she was speaking loudly to show she didn’t appreciate the interrogation. “Sometime April last year. Thought I might move down too, but then we had a big blow-up and I came home. Why?”

“What was the fight about?”

“My drinking, that’s what,” she said, and added belligerently, “But I quit, you know.”

“Good for you.” He said it gravely, wanting her to know he meant it, that he admired anybody who got off that road to ruin, that he hoped she stuck with the program. He said, “Do you know she left Kispiox?”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’m looking to contact her. It’s important. Do you have a number or address for her?”

There was silence on the line, and she said, “Why are you asking about Charlie? What’s going on?”

“Just a few questions about the case. She’s not in trouble.”

She remained tense. “I haven’t heard from her since September. She called from a pay phone, but the line was bad, and all I got out of her was she’s got some big decisions to make, something about her music. Said she may go away a while, has a lot to deal with, not to worry. I didn’t know ‘a while’ to her is six fucking months. I’m this close to reporting her missing.” She paused, and she seemed to listen to his silence, and there was sudden stoniness to her next words. “She is missing, isn’t she?”

“To tell the truth, we thought she was up in Dease Lake with you till now, so we haven’t been looking too hard. Which means she’s probably okay, Charlene. I hear she’s an independent girl. What else did she tell you in that phone call?”

Instead of an answer she said, “We weren’t tight. You understand? You’d think we would be, after all we’ve been through. But it just got in between us, which is how he wanted it, right? Divide and conquer. He’s dead now, which is sweet, and like I said, I kicked the booze, and I think we’ll be okay now, me and her. Just wish she’d call.”

Leith asked her who “he” was and what he’d done.

“Uncle Norm. Norman Wesley. And what he did is none of your business. He’s dead now. It doesn’t matter.”

Leith knew the name, Norman Wesley, a Dease Lake resident who’d got himself murdered last September. He could guess what Wesley had done. So Wesley was Charlie’s uncle, and he’d been murdered in September, which was when she’d left home, which was interesting.

Charlene said, “Charlie’s got a way with words. You wouldn’t know it if you talked to her, but she does. And she wrote these songs, she says, and she’s got ’em on CD, and she’s going to go sell ’em to a recording company and get rich and famous. She was kidding, you know, about the rich and famous, but she wasn’t kidding about trying. Sounded to me like she was heading south, to the city. Scary place for a girl like her. I told her come home to Dease, but for the first time in her life she stuck to her guns, and I guess that’s a good thing. But I know what’s going to happen. She’s just going to get trampled all over again.”

“What d’you mean?”

Charlene’s answer was vague and peppered with language Leith didn’t quite get, but the sense he got was her wayward older sister knew what she wanted, but just didn’t have the strength to get there without being dragged back.

“Dragged back by what?” Leith asked her.

“By a man,” she said. “She’s with some fucking guy, probably. And she’s native, right? So she’s got nowhere to take cover when he gets mean, which they all do in the end. No cover in Dease, no cover in Vancouver. Really, when you come down to it, she’s got nowhere.”

“Sure,” Leith said, knowing what she meant.

Charlene paused, maybe to take a breath, maybe to puff at a cigarette. She said with forced cheer, “Anyway, this isn’t really about Charlie, is it? It’s all about that missing chick, Rilkoff, right?”

“Yeah, it is,” he said. Though really this was becoming more about Charlie West than Kiera Rilkoff. Well, actually it was about both. Two girls gone missing, two singers, mysteriously silent, as he was going to have to tell Charlene now, break the news. He’ d also have to get all she’d just told him taken down in a proper statement via the Dease Lake detachment.

The case was far from over, then. In a way it had just begun.

* * *

Leith had talked to Giroux, and they agreed to talk to Willy again, find out more about this song writing, because music, it seemed, was at the heart of this tragedy. They needed to learn how intimate Frank had been with this other singer, Charlie West.

Leith talked with Frank, but Frank had spoken to his lawyer again and was still saying nothing. Mercy Blackwood told him Charlie West had submitted a song, but Kiera didn’t like it, and it had been scrapped. As far as Mercy knew, Charlie had left town soon after that, and they’d lost contact. Rob Law had nothing to add, aside from a few words explaining how he met Charlie up north on an equipment-buying expedition. In the end, nobody had anything constructive to say about Charlie West, who seemed not much more than a ghost meandering through this whole affair, saying little but humming a tune.

Leith got Willy back in and brought in a translator for the translator, a serious Nisga’a girl who was studying the language. She did a good job of it, Leith thought. Translating in bits and pieces, she relayed a whole raft of rhetoric on Willy’s behalf. Like, “If you don’t teach the children the language, how will they speak to their ancestors, and if they can’t speak to their ancestors, how will they be taught right from wrong?”

Leith had been brought up Catholic and still swore on the Bible in court, but deep down, he knew the job had more or less bullied the religion right out of him. These days he had little patience for spiritual types of any make or model, to the dismay of his parents and brother, all churchgoers who still prayed over every meal.

“There was a time,” the Nisga’a girl translated, “people knew right from wrong.”

Leith highly doubted that too. He asked for more about Frank and Charlie, how they acted together that day they visited the school. The girl translated that Frank and Charlie seemed to be good friends. But no, they didn’t hold hands, didn’t kiss, nothing like that.

Leith asked for more details on the music itself and learned Charlie West was shy about her singing. She told Willy she had made a CD of the songs she wanted to translate, and she’d bring it next time. She sang one song, and it was a good and beautiful thing, Willy said. He had told her that translation would not be easy, that really she would have to learn the language, be fluent at it, before she could sing those words in a meaningful way, but that he would help as best he could.

Leith asked if Willy remembered any of the words to that song.

The translator spoke to Willy and then spoke to Leith. “It was a love song.”

Every other song, in Leith’s experience, was a love song. But then every other thought in a young person’s mind was about love. And this was about love, as it should be. “Did Frank say anything through all this?”

The translator spoke to Willy some more — it was a lot of back and forthing this time — and finally gave Leith the gist. “Frank said nothing, except forgiveness. He kept telling Charlie about forgiveness.”

Forgiveness? Leith thought, startled. About what? Kiera? This was last September, long before Kiera went missing. Was it no crime of passion, then, but a long-planned act, a conspiracy between Frank and Charlie? “What do you mean, forgiveness?” he asked, tamping down a growing impatience. “Forgiveness for what? What did he say exactly?”

But Willy didn’t know. Mostly Frank had just stood around waiting, except for those few words overheard.

Leith jotted it down, underlined it twice, and finally asked the man, “So did she bring you her CD, as promised?”

No, she didn’t. Willy never saw her or Frank again. He had one last thing to say, through the translator, as Leith stood to signal the interview was over. “I hope you find her, Bilaam. I’m very worried. She is water.”

“Water?” Leith asked.

After some more back and forthing, the translator corrected herself. “Dew. She is a dewdrop.”

* * *

Leith needed a break. He had made some calls to arrange for time off, five days in which he would return home to Prince Rupert to recharge, and today was the day. This was also the day Scott Rourke was released from lockup in Smithers.

Rourke reported in to the Hazelton detachment, where he met with a probation officer and went over the terms of his recognizance. It was a strict one, loaded with conditions, one being to stay clear of the Law residence. He signed his name, gave the PO a piece of his mind — which Leith and everybody else heard — then was let loose, back onto the streets. Giroux stood at her office window, looking out, and laughed. “There he goes,” she said. “Bow-legged old greaseball. I don’t often say this, but that is one scrawny waste of skin.”

Leith joined her, peering outward. “Who are those guys?”

“Look vaguely familiar. He’s chatting ’em up pretty good. Must be friends.”

Two men stood on the sidewalk, one white, one native, both in their late forties, dumpy and on the rough side, truckers or loggers by the looks of it. And she was right, they were chatting with Rourke. The conversation looked friendly. Rourke flapped a hand at the police station, then all three sauntered off toward a beat-up pickup parked at the curb.

“Should we be worried?” Leith said.

“About what?” Giroux said.

“He’s said it himself, he’s got friends far and wide. A network of anarchists. He’ll go into hiding.”

“Good riddance. Waste of taxpayers’ money, putting him through trial. For what, being a goof?”

“He tried to kill two people, one of them a police officer. That’s goofy to you, is it?”

“Public disturbance and careless use of a firearm. I don’t care what Mike says, Rourke wouldn’t have shot anybody up there. He was being, what d’you call it, Shakespearean.”

“You’re forgetting he nearly bludgeoned a guy to death, Renee?”

“That was different. It was libido-driven. This was dramatic flair, and our fellow Dion just made it worse. Probably what happened was he startled Rourke’s trigger finger.”

Leith shrugged irritably. Giroux was the worst to argue with, inflexible, swift and resilient. Still, he tried to implant in his memory the faces of the men who’d wafted Rourke away, in case it came up again later. He did the same with their vehicles as they spat exhaust and tore off onto the adjacent highway, but didn’t catch a single licence plate number in the process. Which meant he didn’t only need reading glasses; pretty soon he’d need distance glasses too. Or like his dad, those godawful bifocals. As much as he loved his dad, the idea of becoming him was pretty damn scary.

He left instructions for the hunt to continue in his absence and went out to his truck for the long drive home. Normally he’d be whistling a merry tune, heading home after such a grind. But there was nothing to whistle about today. Midday and he was pushing into a dark highway, high beams on against the falling snow, mission far from accomplished.

* * *

Leith’s week off was antsy and far from restful. He spent much of his time on the phone with his team, drank too much, slept too little, made love with his wife only once, and barely noticed his daughter toddling about destroying whatever she could get her tiny hands on. He also caught a bad cold. He returned to New Hazelton, drugged and more tired than ever, to pick up the pursuit, the search for Charlie West, still haunted by the notion that Charlie was somehow involved in Kiera’s disappearance, that maybe if he tracked her down, he’d have tracked down the motive, if nothing else.

Mike Bosko was back in the North Van SCU, re-immersed in big city crime, no doubt, the Hazeltons just a fading memory in his busy mind. Dion was no longer around, which was just plain nice. And Spacey was gone too. Promoted to some more glamorous place, Leith thought, but Giroux told him no, there was no glamour to Spacey’s whereabouts. She was in big trouble, facing some serious allegations. Allegations that Giroux herself had made.

The news startled Leith, like he’d just learned of a death in the family. “What happened?”

“We had words. She was having problems in her life. Messy divorce. Her ex filed for a restraining order, and so did his girlfriend, who’s the bartender at the Black Bear you met, Megan. I love Spacey like a daughter, but I see now she’s not looking for a mother. She’s looking for a punching bag. Your life’s out of balance, I told her. She told me to get stuffed, except not so politely.”

Beating around the bush like this wasn’t Giroux’s way, normally, and neither was looking wounded. “Anyhow,” she said, “I pulled up the East Band issue again, her calling for backup. The timing was so off that I had to get to the bottom of it. She maintained it’s Dion’s fault. I told her I didn’t believe her. And I still don’t, because you know what? When that young man wants to talk, he talks better than you and me. And so I wrote it up. I had to. She said she’d fight it to the end, but she won’t. She’ll see the writing on the wall. She’ll resign.”

They stood a moment in silence, and it really was like a death in the family. Not some distant aunt, but a beloved cousin. Leith couldn’t help but blame Dion for the loss. And Giroux. He said, “Was it really worth losing a good officer over that? She made a bad judgment call. Didn’t jump to it quite fast enough. You or I might have done the same in the circumstances.”

Giroux shook her head. “At great expense and difficulty, I pulled in Evangeline Doyle, all the way from Edmonton. What she says fits with Dion’s version, not Spacey’s. It’s not a trivial matter. Spacey lied. She tried to take credit away from Dion and tried to make him look the fool, and in the process she put his life in jeopardy. You can’t turn a blind eye to that kind of behaviour, now, can you?”

“No, ma’am,” Leith agreed.

But it still hurt. There was a sense of deconstruction here, now that the group had shrunk to so few familiar faces, and in an odd way, Leith missed all those who were gone. As for the Law boys, Giroux wondered if Frank would be deemed by the circuit judge to be neither a flight risk nor a danger to the public and would be let go on a condition-laden recognizance. It would be good, she said. For a little while at least the three bears would be together in their home in the woods.

Leith doubted it. Frank might not be a flight risk, but Kiera was still missing, and if her bones lay too close to the surface, somewhere out there in the ever-shrinking snow mass, there was a danger the killer would steal out one night and make sure she was never found.

Dismantle her, scatter her to the winds. And then how would the poor girl ever rest in peace?