LITMIR.BIZ

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but he wasn’t present, Dion could tell. He was elsewhere, talking, smoking, drinking coffee, all in a trance, going on in a low, fast mutter. “Jail just about killed him. He says it’s kind of a chemistry, that you either cope or you don’t, depends who you are. If you’re too soft, you’re better off dead. I’ll cope, I think. I’m tough. Yeah, I’ll cope.” His eyes had widened in a blind stare at the tabletop in front of him, the mangled spoon that lay there. He seemed to lurch at a new thought, and this time the fear was sharp enough that he visibly paled. “Or electrocute?”

      He wasn’t being cute. Dion said, “There’s no capital punishment in Canada.”

      Law watched him, registered the words, and that was about all. There were tears in his eyes, but they didn’t fall yet. He couldn’t seem to get the cigarette to his mouth now, and it smouldered between his fingers. Couldn’t get another word out either, though it seemed he was trying.

      Dion had been in much the same shape earlier today, but his problems were nothing compared to this man’s right now. He said, “It’s okay. I’ll take you down in my vehicle. Gather what you need. I’ll wait right here.”

      Law nodded. The tears were making creeks now, but he didn’t crumple, didn’t seem to even notice as he crushed out the cigarette and stood and looked around, wondering what he might need for the strangest trip of his life. Dion stood near the door and kept an eye on the patch of night sky through the window, but mostly he watched Rob Law, a man on a cliff right now, who might need catching.

      Eleven

      Confession

      “HE WHAT?” LEITH SAID.

      “Confessed,” Giroux said, again. “He killed Kiera Rilkoff.”

      The mountainside run had produced a helluva lot more than time and mileage, then. It had produced a prisoner, and quite possibly the end of the tunnel. Leith took it all in, one part relieved and three parts doubtful. Constable Dion had brought the prisoner in and was now at his desk in muddy jeans, dirt smudged across his face, writing down in ballpoint the conversation he’d had with Rob Law as verbatim as he could get it while it was fresh in his memory. From where he stood in Giroux’s doorway, Leith could see the temp bent over his notebook, putting down the words so carefully he might have been tracing somebody else’s scrawl.

      Bosko hadn’t left yet and was at Giroux’s desk, on the phone, speaking with Crown counsel by the sounds of it. Giroux was at her board, considering the map, the path, the time and distance, and the possibilities. Leith joined her at the board.

      “Okay, fine,” she said. “If Rob’s not just making this up to save his brother’s neck, where’s the body? Without a body, I say he’s taking us for a ride. And what possible motive could he have for killing Kiera, hey?”

      Leith thought about it, and when he answered it was more for Bosko’s ears, Bosko who would be leaving soon, who hadn’t once brought up the subject of Leith joining the bigger, smarter Serious Crimes Unit down in North Vancouver. “Taking us for a ride, for sure,” he said. “He hasn’t got the brains for this fancy alibi nonsense, loading slips and deer trails and all that. I just don’t buy it. He’s lying to cover for Frank, which points to his confidence in Frank’s guilt, which is about the best thing we got from this whole damn exercise.”

      Giroux didn’t argue. She stood deep in thought in front of her maps and charts. Bosko’s ears had missed Leith’s snappy logic altogether, and he was laughing about something with whoever he was on the phone with, a deep, comfortable laugh, a man who probably didn’t know the meaning of self-doubt.

      Giroux, who had got the ball rolling on this path theory in the first place, now in her contrary way began to tear it down. “So he signs these loading slips,” she said, “Does a two-K run, kills his brother’s girlfriend, does another two-K run, and then signs another loading slip. Before we talk to him, let’s take another look at those papers, see what his signature tells us. A psychopath might be able to fake it, but that’s not him. He was in tears and very scared, from what Dion says.”

      Leith wished he’d thought of it, checking the loading slips. Maybe that would have dazzled the man from the city. The only dazzling he’d done so far, he realized, was forcing John Potter into a premature death. He hauled the box out of the exhibit room and found the loading slips stored in a thick, grubby manila envelope. He pulled up a chair and emptied the flimsies out on Giroux’s desk. Those from the Saturday Kiera disappeared were already separated out, and he put on his reading glasses, put the slips side by side on the desk, and inspected Rob Law’s signatures, one against the other.

      The writing he saw was sloping and immature, but practiced. It was just a signature that didn’t say much of Rob Law’s intellect, but it gave insight into his state of mind at the moment he put pen to paper. Leith knew from the records that Rob was a dropout, that writing wasn’t his thing. Or reading, or high-tech anything, or current events. How strange, in this day and age, to be so insulated, nose to the ground, machines and money, payables and receivables, while the world accelerates into a breakneck spin around you. He shook his head. “Looks identical to me.”

      Giroux had done her own inexpert handwriting analysis, and agreed. “Right. He’s either very cunning or he never left the worksite. Probably the latter. He’s covering for Frank, and I’ll bet he knows what really happened on Saturday. You want me to sit in with you, or do it alone?”

      “Alone,” Leith said. “This is going to be a piece of cake.”

      * * *

      Rob Law told all. He sat in his work clothes, smelling of diesel fumes and the cold outdoors, avoiding Leith’s eyes, not looking at him at all, and confessing to a variety of sins and crimes. “It’s been going on for years,” he said. “Me and Kiera. It just kind of happened. ’Course I felt bad. Every time it happened, I swore never again. But couldn’t stay away from her. Last week she says she’s going to tell Frank about it. I said no, we don’t have to tell Frank nothing. We have to end it and pretend like it never happened. She was okay with ending it but still had it stuck in her head that she was going to tell him. So our last meeting there, we had a fight about it, and I ended up rattling her, and she hit her head on a rock and she just kind of stopped talking.”

      “How’d you arrange to meet?”

      He shrugged. “We talked it over few days before. Time and place.”

      “What time and place was it.”

      To Leith’s surprise, Rob answered promptly. “Two thirty, Saturday.”

      “Carry on, then.”

      “I tried to bring her back, but she was dead. I hid her as best I could and ran back to the site before they figured out I was away. After work, when all the guys had gone home, I drove my truck down to the Matax. I scooped her up and drove up the old Bell 6 a few miles, into the woods, buried her deep. I can try to find the place, but won’t be easy. I was just in shock, eh. Doing things without much thinking. All I could think was I didn’t want Frank to find out about me and her. Or that I’d killed her.”

      He bowed his head, about as genuinely miserable as a suspect could be. Leith said, “Took a shovel along, did you?”

      The suspect nodded.

      “Buried her and covered her back up?” Leith knew the ground was too hard to dig up — you’d break your shovel before you could make a dent — and already he was fixing a snare on the story, proving not that Rob was guilty, but that he wasn’t, and the only charge he’d be slapped with was one of aggravated obstruction.

      Rob nodded again, and he spoke now with an effort, pushing the words out in a hoarse whisper as he stared at the table. He looked revolted, horrified, maybe awed by what he’d done. “Ground’s like iron. Can’t dig. Found a pile of deadfall. Rolled her in. Heaped snow over top.”

      The snare had tripped, and all it had caught was what looked like genuine remorse. “Ah,” Leith said. “You’ll be able to find her for us, will you?”

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