roads were slick but manageable. He drove faster than the traffic pattern, passing when possible, until a line of loaded B-train freight trucks slowed him to sixty on the straights and a mind-numbing thirty through the curves. And Bosko’s low, plodding voice droned on. As well as knowing pretty much everything about the universe at large, he seemed to have the scoop on the local crime scene. He spoke of the Pickup killings, knew the bodies had been found on forest service roads, knew the names, Karen Blake, Lindsay Carlyle, Joanne Crow, and the stories their bodies told of forceful takedown, bondage, and strangulation. Leith wondered if Mike Bosko had gotten hold of the files at some point, and if so, why? He wondered if Bosko was privy to the holdback information that had been kept back from the press, known only to the inner circle of investigators so far, the killer’s quirk. He said, “You’ve done your research.”
Bosko either didn’t hear or didn’t care to answer.
The Pickup Killer case had gone cool, if not cold, and these days Leith only worked it if something new turned up. Nothing had for over a year now, except faint whispers that kept him awake some nights. The whispers said the beast was still in their midst, still crawling the streets of Terrace.
As they passed through that very city, the killer’s known hunting grounds, darkness fell and the snow came down in earnest. Terrace fell behind, and they were again in lonely wilderness, with another two hours to go before they reached the Hazeltons. Bosko switched to historian mode, telling Leith all kinds of interesting things about the area, Hazelton being rooted in the Omineca Gold Rush, the sternwheeler that ran the Skeena once open a time, the turn-of-the-century search for Simon Gunanoot, much of it news to Leith.
He shifted in his seat and sighed with relief as the lights of their final destination approached, the broad, slow highway that cut through the main settlement of New Hazelton. Passage through town would take about two minutes if a person drove the speed limit, which nobody did, except Leith now, slowing to sixty, then fifty, losing the tandem trucks ahead, which ploughed through and disappeared up the big dark hill that merged again with black forest, probably heading for the mills of Smithers.
“We’re here,” he said, sounding smarter than ever.
There was scant traffic out and about as he cruised the SUV under the orange glow of tall lamp standards, past a gas station and shut-down supermarket, a few darkened restaurants. He pulled at last down a side street and parked in front of the New Hazelton detachment. He shut off the engine and looked at Bosko, hoping the shabbiness of the place was a crushing disappointment to the man. Bosko looked fresh, pleased, and enthusiastic.
Inside the small RCMP detachment they were met by a sleepy-looking auxiliary constable who told them that Renee Giroux, the local sergeant in charge, was up on the Matax with a small search team. Leith said, “Matax, what’s that?”
“Hiking trail heading off the Bell 3,” the auxiliary told him. “Where Kiera’s truck was found.”
“Bell 3 …”
“The logging road.”
Leith told the auxiliary to contact Giroux and let her know he was on his way. The auxiliary said, “I’ll try. Can’t guarantee a connection. The airwaves are thin up there.” She supplied him with a map, marking it with Xs, one for the Bell 3 turnoff and one for the Matax trailhead. Leith thanked her.
“It’s going to be tedious,” he told Bosko as they headed back out to the truck. “You’d be better off checking into your room and kicking back. They’ve got us booked in at the Super 8 over there. I’ll just drop you off?”
“I’ll tag along, if that’s okay.”
They left the town lights behind, and Bosko got a tour of the Hazeltons as they passed through the settlements of Two Mile, Old Town, over a canyon into the heavily forested Kispiox area and beyond, where Leith was soon lost, in spite of map and GPS. With Bosko’s help he did manage to locate the Bell 3 signpost, the words nearly obliterated by driven snow, and took the turn, geared the truck down, and the high-suspension, fat-tired V8 police truck began to climb the snowy road beaten flat by previous tires. The incline steepened steadily and the road narrowed until even Bosko sat mute as the headlights lit the banks falling steeply away inches from his right shoulder.
The second X on the map wasn’t far in theory, a mere 9.7 kilometres of straights and switchbacks, but it was a crawl to get there, and nearly an hour passed before a pylon glowed in the headlights. A moment later a row of vehicles came gleaming into view, a couple of police SUVs and a black four-door sedan that didn’t look fit for the terrain. Leith pulled in behind the sedan and stepped out onto the road, wincing. Crystals fell light but fast, tiny daggers lashing his face. Upslope and deep in the woods a hard light pierced the darkness, a signal to follow.
“Not a good place to break down,” Bosko remarked. He stood now at the nose of the truck, taking in the scene. Leith shone his flashlight toward the man and saw how out of place he looked in urban overcoat, collars turned up, glasses flecked with snow and his short hair flipping about, but no fear on his solid, pale face. Bosko checked his cellphone for signal and confirmed what Leith already knew. “Not a single bar.”
The pylons pointed the way to a parking area for trail users, ribboned off with crime-scene tape, the ground here churned by tires, but no vehicles occupying its space. Leith swung his light about low and caught another line of pylons, and these led him up on a short trek into the woods. Here as everywhere the forest floor was disturbed by foot traffic in every direction, silent evidence of the searchers who would have been and gone, criss-crossing the wilderness, calling out Kiera’s name and blasting whistles.
He and Bosko reached a clearing, a kind of muster zone, and arrived at the lights and action they had seen from afar. Officers were spread out in the trees, marked distantly by the bobbing of their flashlights. The muster zone was lit by heavy-duty portables on stands, and under their raking glare stood a roundish bundle named Renee Giroux.
“My big-city detective at last,” she called out as the men arrived before her. She stared past Leith at Bosko. “And you are?”
Leith made introductions, and the little First Nations CO forgave Bosko for being a stranger enough to shake his hand. “I was just leaving,” she said. “Good thing you got up here to see what we’re dealing with. But this,” she said, and scanned about the site, which was a confusion of crime scene tape strung between bushes, “is going nowhere fast.” She pointed to where several officers were concentrated, performing a finer grid search. “Possible burial site there, snow heaped about, but no body. Her friends and family from here to kingdom come were up yesterday and spent the night looking for her. Natural enough, but what a disaster. SAR made a couple passes overhead, and they’re on the ground now, team of eight, doing the crags and crevasses. Reason I’m up here is Dash drove in from Terrace about half past four and yanked his handler into the bushes, where we got us a game-changer.” She pointed to where two constables were searching the forest floor. “Found it over at that marker. Which is, what, a hundred feet from her car. So all of a sudden it’s looking not like a girl lost in a woods but a girl taken by persons unknown.”
Leith told Bosko that Dash was a tracker dog from Terrace and that actually it was probably the dog’s handler who drove, and asked Giroux what exactly the game-changer was.
“A cellphone,” she said. “Looks new, and I’d be stunned if it wasn’t Kiera’s. Haven’t looked at it yet, was waiting for Big City to show up and do things proper.”
Big City was her nickname for Leith. She grinned fleetingly, not pleasantly, and looked around and again pointed. “Dash said there’s nothing of interest beyond that point, so that leaves us with two scenarios. A) She lost or discarded her phone, then got a ride with someone we don’t know and is some place we don’t know, safe and sound but phoneless and for some reason unwilling or unable to get in touch. B) She was abducted and lost her phone in the struggle.”
She paused, and Leith knew she would be thinking of the faint but frightening possibility that the Pickup Killer had moved in. Here, to her zone of responsibility. Bosko said, “We didn’t see her vehicle on the parking flat. It’s