LITMIR.BIZ

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Kiera had eaten or drank or smoked, and what she was wearing as she left, and how her hair was done up, and her mood at the time. Oman didn’t know if Kiera drank any beer or smoked any dope. He didn’t recall what she was wearing, in particular. Jeans and a baggy sweater, probably, and those battered Blundstones of hers. He didn’t recall her leaving with her coat on. She left alone. He agreed that Frank was in a bad mood, but not angry or anything. They were all glum. Soon after Kiera left, Oman left with Stella, and later that night Frank buzzed in a big panic, and Oman had put on his winter gear and gone up the mountain with him to look for Kiera. They hadn’t found her, and that was that.

      The interview wound down and Dion was breathing hard, as if he’d just jogged up a steep hill. The witness was having a few last words with Leith and seeing himself out. Dion reviewed his notes and felt the familiar sliding chill of defeat. The witness was gone, and Leith was by the door, studying him. “There a problem?”

      “Couldn’t keep up so well at the end there,” Dion told him.

      “It’s just for reference,” Leith said irritably, coming around, taking his seat, prepping for the next interview. “You got it recorded, right?”

      Dion rewound the recorder to check with a brief playback. Nothing issued forth but a faint hiss. His pulse went into overdrive. He must have pressed play but not record. He looked at Leith and saw the kind of restrained anger that was worse than a blowup. Leith took Dion’s notebook, looked it over, and tossed it back at him. “I’ll dictate what I recall of the conversation. You write.”

      They spent half an hour getting down what had been said, and Dion discovered that Leith had an excellent memory. When it was done, his nerves were still jangling, but the stifling fear had lifted. He said, “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

      “Not a big deal,” Leith said curtly. “Just be happy it wasn’t our prime suspect.”

      Dion nodded, and Leith devoted himself to his file documents.

      “He was lying, there. I think,” Dion said.

      Leith stared up from his papers. “What?”

      The stare was direct and unsettling, and whatever lightbulb had been burning in Dion’s brain blew a fuse and went black. He said, “It just seemed … no, probably not. I thought … but … sorry.”

      The detective’s unfriendly blue eyes stayed on him. “Thought but what?”

      “Nothing. Sorry.”

      “You just said you think he’s lying. Lying about what? What makes you say that?”

      Dion was starting to sweat. He searched his mind for something, anything, but all he found was more dead air. He said, “Actually I forget.”

      “You forget what?”

      They were staring at each other now, the inevitable answer to the question lying heavy and silent between them.

      With a slap on the tabletop, Leith said, “Just get Stella Marshall in here, please.”

      Stella was a tall, solidly built woman in her early twenties with white-blond hair. Her eyes were pale and bulgy. Her pink skin was blotched, and a fine white down picked out by the fluorescent lights ran down her cheeks like vague sideburns. She spoke much slower than the drummer, to Dion’s relief, glancing his way from time to time as if to be sure his pen was keeping up. Sometimes she smiled at him. “I’ve known Frank forever,” she told Leith. “I joined his band in grade ten. I played bass guitar then, but I’ve gravitated toward fiddle, and I think that worked better in the long run. It branded us country and western, but that’s okay. We’re very popular around here. Produced our own CD. Didn’t exactly go viral, but we get some good paying gigs. And as you’ve heard by now, we’ve hit the big time with Mercy Blackwood coming along to back us. She’s got connections. She’s going to put us out there. Have you heard us play?” she asked Dion.

      Leith brought her attention back his way, saying, “Let’s go over Saturday again. Give me a play-by-play of what happened that day, start to finish.”

      Her narrative paralleled that of Chad Oman. Kiera had left rehearsal prematurely. She was in a bad mood, but her nastiness didn’t seem directed at anybody in particular. She hadn’t eaten anything or drunk any beer or smoked any pot. She might have been wearing a coat when she left, but Stella couldn’t be sure. Her hair was definitely tied back, and maybe pinned back too, on one side. Stella and Chad had left soon after lunch because there was no point hanging around. Frank had called her later that night, about eight, asking if she’d seen Kiera, and saying something about the Rodeo up on the Bell 3. Stella had taken part in the search deep into the night.

      She tilted her head, and her long blond bangs swung. “They’re saying it’s the Pickup Killer. But I don’t believe it. Way up there, in the middle of nowhere? Do you want to hear my theory?”

      “Sure,” Leith said.

      “I think she had engine trouble, and she was walking down the road, and maybe decided to cut through the woods to avoid the switchbacks, and fell and twisted her ankle or something. She’s probably alive, just can’t move. She’s very outdoorsy and savvy about survival. But I imagine your SAR guys have checked the area far and wide with a helicopter and dogs and the works, right?”

      Leith said yes, they had, and Stella said in that case she didn’t have a clue. She said that she was glad she’d kept the day job, and now she was done too and was allowed to leave, wishing Dion a good afternoon and ignoring Leith.

      A man named Parker Chu came next. Chinese-Canadian, thin and unsmiling, a self-admitted nerd. Parker told Leith he wasn’t friends with Frank or the others, that it was just a job for him doing their sound work. He was employed at the community college some days, teaching computer, but it wasn’t great pay. He was planning to move to Alberta soon as he could pin down a better job.

      The band paid him by the hour, he said, though the hours were running thin. He recounted how Frank had called him up Saturday just before one, and he’d gone right over, because work was work, and listened to the tracks, which weren’t tracks at all, but random noises. No, he exaggerated, he said, with a smile. But it was bad. He’d talked it over with Frank, trying to be diplomatic about it, and left within the hour.

      Yes, he recalled Frank’s phone pinging, and Frank sending a text moments later. Just one, two at most. He looked kind of peeved as he did it.

      Parker left, and before Dion could go out to fetch the next interviewee in line, one was brought to them by Sergeant Giroux. She darkened the doorway with a boy in his late teens at her side, tall and solidly built, his brows bunched into a thundercloud of anger.

      “Look who showed up,” she told Leith. “This is Leonard Law, better known as Lenny.”

      She left, and the seventeen-year-old took the interviewee’s seat. His brown hair was long at the front and short at the back. He wore skinny black jeans and a bulky black hoody covered in bold white graphics. The hoody looked new, to Dion, and expensive.

      “I just got back,” Lenny said, nearly spitting the words at Leith. “And Frank says Kiera’s missing and you guys are looking for me. You think I did something to her, is that it? ’Cause I didn’t do nothing, and I got an alibi to say so, and I want a lawyer, and I want it now.”

      Leith opened his mouth, but the boy wasn’t done. “I don’t have to say nothing till I got a lawyer. And I want a real one, not your Legal Aid joke-in-a-suit who can’t get your name right, let alone what you’re supposed to have done.”

      Leith said, “Sit down, Leonard — should I call you Leonard or Lenny?”

      “You can call me nothing, ’cause I got nothing to say. I get one phone call, right? I think your talking to me before I get my phone call is a breach of my rights, and none of this can be used against me in court, and you know what? This is all you’re getting from me from here on in.” He stood looking combative, mouth turned down and arms crossed tight.

      Leith

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