was and had to check the sticky once again. White pickup, ten years or older …
* * *
Hazelton didn’t have a “soft” interview room, exactly, a place set up to relax the subject rather than intimidate. But somebody at some point had read the new guidelines and made the effort, placing two chunky upholstered chairs against one wall with a coffee table in between, fake flowers and an array of magazines. The effect was odd, at best, like chandeliers in a fast food joint. The classic hard table and three hard chairs remained in the centre. Frank Law sat in one chair, Leith and Bosko occupying the others. This final re-interview, like all the others they’d ground through all day long, was being video-recorded.
Frank hadn’t shaved, apparently hadn’t showered, probably hadn’t slept much since Saturday. There were not just rings of shadow around his eyes, but grooves, like a super-fast aging. Leith’s opening approach was gentle. “You’ve been dating the girl forever and probably know her better than anybody. How does she deal with stress? Does she bottle it up, let it all out? Does she sulk, get drunk, go for a jog, or what?”
Interestingly, Frank wasn’t swallowing the ran away scenario. “Number one,” he said. “She doesn’t get stressed. Anything bugs her, she talks about it. She’s stronger than anyone I know. If she had a problem, she wouldn’t run away from it. She’d run at it and wrestle it to the ground. That day she went away to think things over, but she wasn’t running away. You can forget that idea.”
“Right. So what’s the alternative? If she’d gotten lost on the mountain, we’d have found her by now, dead or alive. But we haven’t. An unidentified truck was seen driving down the road just down from the Matax in the hours of her disappearance. And you’re sure you don’t know a truck of that description? Forget the black glass, just the truck itself?”
Frank shook his head. “Can’t think of anybody owns a truck like that, other than that list I gave you already.”
“None of which were white.”
“Well then, I can’t help you.”
Leith opened the folder he’d brought with him, thick with documents cluttered with columns of numbers in what looked like two-point type. The production orders for the phone records had given him what he wanted, a kind of numerical eagle’s eye view of all the chatter that had gone on between the parties in the days leading up to Kiera’s vanishing. It also documented the silences. He said, “You two used to text or call several times a day. Lately I’m seeing a lot of gaps. You were pissed off with each other, and it came to a boiling point on Saturday. There was a fight. She was injured. Is that what happened?”
Frank’s face twisted in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?”
“Now’s the time to tell me, Frank,” Leith said.
“Now’s the time to show you this,” Frank said, and gave him the finger. He got up and walked out.
Leith didn’t stop him. With Frank gone, he gave instructions to Spacey to apply for warrants, and then joined Giroux in her office to make it official. “Things aren’t happening on their own. Guess it’s time we made them.”
Eight
Turn on the Fear
LEITH PLANNED TO MAKE things happen by picking up Frank Law the following morning and placing him under arrest, searching his house again, making a racket. The arrest wouldn’t hold past twenty-four hours, but maybe, as Bosko suggested, those twenty-four hours would stir the waters. Being a pessimist at heart, Leith expected they’d just muddy them.
A meeting was held, all staff including auxiliaries and temps crammed into the case room again at the crack of dawn so they knew what was happening and how to deal with questions about the arrest from the public. Or abuse, or death threats. The warrants had been approved, and after the meeting Leith and Giroux and two constables in battle gear, Spacey and Ecton, drove out in separate vehicles to the Law house in the woods and made the arrest. Behind them came the search team.
Frank and Lenny Law were both at home, but Rob was absent. Frank was silent and grim but submitted to the arrest and went along without a fuss. The fuss, Leith fully expected, was yet to come.
* * *
The search warrant had gone through, and Dion had his first real look around the Law home. It wasn’t tidy, was well lived-in and messy, which kept him well occupied in his role of searching the living room. So far, nothing stood out within the mess, nothing the warrant gave him permission to seize. He studied the floorboards near the woodstove and crouched to pick up a tiny shred of paper that stood out from the other debris. The Law brothers fed paper trash into the woodstove, he guessed, and this had fallen out of the latest bin or bag.
The shred was about four inches long and not even a quarter-inch wide at one end. Good quality paper, not newsprint. Sharp-edged, not ragged. Kind of like a shredder scrap, except it narrowed to a point. It had plainly been slashed from a book, maybe using a straight-edge for cutting, but without mathematical precision.
He read the partial printed sentence. It is vitally important not to believe them, or they will suddenly
It sounded like some kind of instruction manual. Don’t believe who? he wondered. Suddenly what?
He showed it to the exhibit custodian, one of the latest members to join the expanding team, a Sergeant McIntyre from Terrace. McIntyre shook his head, not interested.
Dion stood holding the bit of paper, feeling homesick. As an investigator, he should have some say whether this was interesting or not. It was interesting because it was from a book, and this was a house without books, except for the few lined up on a shelf in Lenny Law’s bedroom. So what was the book, and who had cut it up? Had Lenny? Why? All valid questions, it seemed to him, that deserved at least some inquiry.
Anything not seized had to be left where it was, so he wrote the line into his notebook, dropped the scrap on the floor by the woodstove where he’d found it, and continued his search, looking for anything Corporal McIntyre considered worthy of a second glance.
* * *
The fuss Leith expected began soon after the arrest of Frank Law. Lenny had spread the word, and the word flew. Within half an hour, the detachment’s phone started ringing. Journalists were rerouted by reception, and all other calls were patched through to Giroux’s desk. Bosko happened to pick up the first of the calls, since Giroux had stepped out for a minute. She returned as the call ended, and Bosko picked up a Danish to go with his coffee before relaying the message, in what sounded like an accurate paraphrase: “Rob Law’s coming down here to get his brother out, if it means killing us all.”
Bosko didn’t seem alarmed, and neither did Giroux, who muttered, “Rob’s not exactly the brains in the family.”
Was nobody but Leith thinking about bulletproof vests and pepper spray, or maybe just a good hiding spot? He said, “Kill us all? All of us? Did he mean it?”
Bosko shook his head and spoke around a mouth full of pastry. “No. But he’s upset. He’s got a bit of a drive ahead of him. He’ll calm down by the time he reaches us.”
Leith took the next two calls. Stella Marshall asked him what was going on. She got no satisfactory answer and ended up the call saying they had the wrong guy, that it was typical police scapegoating, and that she knew a lawyer from the city who’d make sure the Hazelton detachment was sued so hard, it would spend the rest of its life picking up pop cans for a living.
Mercy Blackwood phoned, not to rant but to reason. She asked what was happening and insisted Frank was innocent and didn’t belong in jail. She knew Frank wouldn’t hurt a soul. Leith promised her that Frank was speaking to a lawyer right now, and there would be no abuse of process.
Rob Law appeared within the hour, but he didn’t kill anybody or even overturn a desk. He spoke with Bosko for fifteen minutes or so in the privacy of Giroux’s office and then left quietly enough.
An anonymous