LITMIR.BIZ

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dressed in fresh clothes. Then placed here, under a tree, with his kangaroo hood pulled over his head.”

      Jinnah shuddered. His mind instantly tried to reconstruct the crime. He could see a Dark Figure bending over a kneeling Thad, a sword raised over his head. The blade flashed downwards and … Jinnah’s legendary weak stomach skipped the gruesome details. But he did imagine Main and Terminal at night. With everyone asleep or stoned, the Figure, having arranged Thad’s body to look as if he was sleeping, would stuff the body bag he’d carried the boy’s corpse in back into a knapsack and walk away, unquestioned, into the darkness. It was terrible.

      “Sonofabitch,” said Jinnah. “Who found him?”

      Graham pointed to a young woman sobbing uncontrollably a few metres from the tree, her face obscured by a Victim Services officer trying to calm her down. Good luck, thought Jinnah.

      “She says she knows him. But that’s all I’ve been able to get out of her. She was with another kid. An Andy Gill. Know him?”

      Jinnah shrugged, irked. “How should I know? There are thousands of Gills in the Indo-community, for God’s sake. Even after all these years, you still seem to think I know every damned person with brown skin in B.C.”

      Before Graham could apologize, a strident, amplified voice suddenly sounded close behind them. Jinnah flinched.

      “The wages of sin is death! But the gift of God is eternal life through Christ our Lord!” bawled the Reverend Peter Hobbes.

      “Jesus, that guy!” cursed Graham. “I’ve already got a bastard of a headache!”

      Jinnah shifted himself slightly so Graham was between him and Hobbes. The last thing he needed was to have Hobbes make a beeline for him and demand to be interviewed. He need not have worried. Graham grabbed Jinnah’s arm and swung him around. He started marching across the park towards the bus station.

      “Come on, we need to talk.”

      “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

      Jinnah allowed himself to be led, a little concerned at Graham’s behaviour. He’d never seen him on edge like this before.

      “I just wish that goddamn born-again would let me get on with my job,” the sergeant said vehemently.

      “He means well,” said Jinnah. “He’s fought a lonely war on drugs for years —”

      “Well, he’s losing!”

      They stepped over the concrete curbing, which marked the edge of the bus station’s parking area, in silence. Jinnah ransacked his memory, trying to guess what was eating his friend. The violence of the murder? He’d seen worse — just. The kid’s age? Graham had handled cases involving infants. The macabre nature, maybe? It was, in a way, a ritualistic killing. Maybe that was it. Jinnah suddenly realized he had no idea what religion Graham was, or if indeed he had any. Graham took Jinnah over towards the deserted arrivals area and turned abruptly.

      “Look, Jinnah, I gotta tell you something off the record.”

      “Is that off the record as in, ‘Confirm it somewhere else and run with it’ off the record or ‘If this gets out I’ll kill you?’ off the record?” asked Jinnah.

      “It’s ‘breathe a damn word and my careers over’ off the record.”

      Jinnah whistled and closed his notebook as a show of good faith. This was serious. “Okay. My lips are sealed. So is my pen. And my keyboard.”

      “It’s like this: Thad Golway was a good kid. He got caught up in the rave scene and started dealing. But he had a change of heart. Remember that bust I engineered down here last month?”

      Jinnah nodded. It hadn’t been a front page key story. He’d managed to get a page top on five out of it. Twenty dealers, mostly squeegee kids, busted. More important, their supplier had been nailed and his operation shut down. A rare victory in the war on drugs.

      “Well, Thad was one of my informants. He and two of his buddies, they helped me get the warrants.”

      “Oh, shit,” said Jinnah with feeling. “Craig, I’m sorry.”

      “It gets worse,” said Graham. “I wanted to put Thad into Witness Protection. Move him outta town with his two friends, right? Only they wouldn’t go. Dropped outta sight on their own. So now …” Graham trailed off.

      Jinnah read his thoughts. “Now you have one dead and two missing, both possible targets — or victims. Right?”

      Graham forced a wretched smile out of his facial muscles. “Yeah. Jinnah, about the informant angle — how long do you think I can keep it quiet?”

      Jinnah did the math instantly in his head. “Think you can catch the killer in three days?”

      “Why three days?”

      “Simple, my friend. Day one, a brutal and macabre killing. Who would do such a thing, hmm? The standard, ‘Why did he have to die?’ story.”

      “You mean user-key one.”

      Jinnah ignored this slight. It was a standing joke around the cop shop. Jinnah only wrote three kinds of articles and did so with such a consistent formula that they were referred to as “User-key” stories. User-key one, “Why did he/she have to die?” Usually guaranteed the front page. And this was definitely front page material.

      “Day two,” Jinnah continued. “Find the boy’s parents. His sweetheart. His high school teacher. Great TV clips. Did his parents know he was working for you, by the way?”

      “Nice try, Hakeem,” said Graham. “No comment.”

      “Day three: in the absence of any suspects, hmm? Where were the police while a body was being placed in plain view on one of Vancouver’s busiest street corner? One that has a history of drug deals and drug busts. You had to file an affidavit to get the warrant, right?”

      “Of course,” said Graham. “But the informant’s names are severed from the document.”

      “Won’t take long for someone to guess,” said Jinnah sadly. “Might even take less time if that bastard in traffic gets wind of it and leaks it to one of his pet reporters.”

      Graham gave a little, disapproving cough. There was a certain corporal in the traffic section that made it his business to make his life misery. Graham suspected even Jinnah had likely been fed one or two tips by the son of a bitch over the years.

      “Three days to catch the perp with dick all to go on. Not bloody likely, Hakeem.”

      “Then what, Sergeant Graham, sir, do you propose?”

      Graham eyed Jinnah warily. He was, he knew, playing with fire. But he had little option. Jinnah’s assessment of the media’s moods and appetites had been too brutally realistic and had corresponded too closely with his own suspicions.

      “Look, if I can feed you stuff, exclusive, so the pack is busy chasing you, it’ll take ’em longer to start asking awkward questions, right?”

      There was a pleading note in Graham’s voice that Jinnah didn’t like. It was usually his job to whine about getting an exclusive. He genuinely felt sorry for Craig. But it did not do to accept such a generous offer without a bit of unseemly haggling first. Pride would not allow it.

      “I don’t know, Craig,” said Jinnah, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. “A petty detail here, a petty detail there. That’s your usual idea of an exclusive.”

      “I’m not talking about giving you what kind of clothes the kid was wearing when we found him,” said Graham irritably. “I mean good stuff. Juicy stuff.”

      Jinnah took out his gold lighter and flicked its beautifully crafted wheel. He inhaled deeply. “Front page stuff?” he asked, the words entombed in a shroud of blue smoke.

      Graham coughed and waved a hand in front of

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