LITMIR.BIZ

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to have caught the sheriff shuttle to Prince George this morning but apparently hadn’t. Like a bad rash, he’d take his time fading away.

      Bosko looked up, smiled, said, “How’s it going with Rourke?”

      “He says he didn’t shoot Dion,” Leith told him. “And he’s full of hot air on every point except this. Are we sure it’s actually a bullet that got him?”

      Giroux stepped in, sparing Bosko the trouble of saying I don’t know in his long-winded way. “Not a bullet, guys,” she said. “Just heard from the hospital. He woke up long enough to confirm what the doctor suspected. It was a jab, not a bullet. And self-inflicted.”

      Naturally, Leith thought.

      The same blast of contempt had maybe crossed Giroux’s mind, the way she tossed her hands. She said, “Seems he impaled himself on a branch during a fall. Lost some blood, but no vital organs. Exhaustion is the diagnosis, few stitches and rest is the cure. So he’ll be okay, but we can’t talk to him till they say so.”

      “Well, they better say so fast,” Leith said.

      On the other hand, he wasn’t too concerned about what Dion had to say. Frank’s confession had been in the works last night, and the East Band was just an aggravating little diversion masterminded by that idiot Rourke. Now they were back on track, and Frank was being brought in for his turn at the podium, and Leith felt cautiously optimistic that this would be the grand finale. The interview that would close the file forever.

      * * *

      Things seemed to go well, at first. Frank Law, in a choppy, solemn way, told Leith that after a day of reflecting, sitting up at Sunday Lake with Lenny, chilled to the bone, he’d known what he had to do: come clean with what had happened to Kiera, and for the first time in a long time Leith’s hopefulness marched forward. He nodded encouragement to this intelligent young man who could see the writing on the wall, who was going to do the right thing now and save everybody a lot of time and trouble and admit he’d done it.

      Frank took a deep breath and said, “Scott Rourke killed her.”

      Leith went through the motions in his mind of slamming the table and howling rude words at the heavens. But only in his mind. He gave Frank his steadiest gaze, rimed with ice, and waited for more.

      The not-so-intelligent young man nodded, something earnest in his demeanour, almost sweet, and Leith thought about juries and their fallibility. “Ask him,” Frank said. “He’ll tell you.”

      So the long way around they would have to go. Some cases were quick wraps, others were like playing musical chairs in a fevered dream. Leith put Kiera aside for the moment, made a note to himself, and got onto the more recent past, asking about the shootout on the East Band lookout.

      “Not much to tell,” Frank replied. “I’d just dropped Lenny back at home, was on my way here, to tell you guys everything. But met Scottie, he was heading home on his bicycle, and I made the mistake of stopping to say hi, and he said he wanted to talk about something, so he hopped in my Jeep and we went up to the lookout.”

      “Long ways to go for a chat in the middle of the night.”

      “Around here, man, logging roads are entertainment.”

      “You went straight up the mountain, then?”

      Frank shrugged uncomfortably. “First we went over to Morris’s place. Scottie was saying he’d be needing a place to lie low for a while. He has this idea that he’s got friends all over the planet who’ll hide him till the heat blows over. I think he’s kind of delusional.”

      “You think? Well, what happened at Morris’s?”

      “Cops knocked on the door, but we’d seen ’em coming, and Scottie yanked me into the back bedroom. Morris got rid of ’em, then he came and told us the cops were looking for me and he wanted us to get lost in a big way. So we did. Went on up to the lookout, and Scottie had some hooch, and I wanted to get bombed, so we went to the arch and were just talking about shit when the constable jumped out at us from nowhere and was yelling at Scottie to let me go. And suddenly Scottie’s got me in a chokehold with his gun shoved up my nostril, so I don’t know, but I think that cop had things a bit backward. Anyway, I can tell you, I was pretty damn confused.”

      Which makes two of us, Leith thought. “So it was some kind of standoff?”

      “Don’t ask me what it was. Scottie would never shoot me. He’s not that kind of guy. Anyway, him and the cop yelled back and forth for a while, and Scottie fired at the cop but didn’t hit him, and finally he let me go.” The young man pulled a face, brows up, mouth turned down, a mime portraying bewilderment.

      “What happened between the gunshot and him letting you go? What changed his mind?”

      Frank’s stare went distant, and Leith thought he was blushing, but it was maybe just the central heat parching the air. A big chunk of the story had just been skipped over, it seemed, and Leith waited, but Frank didn’t carry on and fill in the blanks. He said, “I don’t know why he changed his mind. Probably because there was a cop telling him to let me go, so he did. I still can’t believe Scottie killed Kiera.”

      “Neither can I,” Leith said. “And I don’t. It’s time to cut the bullshit, Frank. We all know Rourke didn’t kill Kiera. The truth will come out one way or another, and it’ll be a hell of a lot better for your own interests if it comes from you, here, now. Her family is waiting for closure. You’re not a bad person. You know what’s right.”

      Frank hung his head, pressing fingertips against his eyelids. After a minute of the hung head, he said he was going to heed his lawyer’s advice and say no more.

      Leith took him back to cells and then joined Mike Bosko in the monitor room. Bosko was eating a sandwich and didn’t look nearly as steamed as Leith felt. He said, “Well, you can hardly blame him for not looking the gift horse in the mouth.”

      What did that even mean? Leith said, “So that’s it, then. We can’t hold him. Rourke’s going to claim responsibility, and unless we get something solid, we’re going to have to go with it, right down the line till trial. Do I have all that right?”

      Bosko shrugged. He put the sandwich aside and said, “There’s something I want to ask you about. Let’s go to the case room for a minute.” He lumbered out of his chair and led the way. In the case room he sorted through folders, found one, flipped through statements, and folded the clipped pages back on one where he’d put a sticky note. The statement was of Chad Oman, and the handwriting was not Leith’s, but Leith’s scribe of the day, Constable Dion. Bosko put his finger on a notation appended to the end that was in Leith’s handwriting and read it aloud. “‘Constable Dion suggests he’s lying but can’t say why.’ What’s that about?”

      Leith skimmed through the statement to refresh his memory. “I interviewed Oman,” he said. “Dion’s notes were useless, and he’d forgotten to press ‘record,’ so all he got was dead air. We ended up writing out the interview from memory. My memory, because he didn’t have any. At the end he apologized for messing up, then added that he thought Oman was lying. I tried to get out of him what he meant, lying about what, and he couldn’t elaborate. In the end I figured he was just trying to impress me, the old newbie with keen intuition senses a witness is lying and breaks case wide open scenario. I was going to ignore it altogether, but next day, when my hand wasn’t so sore, I decided I’d better add that note. And that’s about all I can tell you.”

      “Good thing you did,” Bosko said. “Since as we now know, he’s not a newbie at all. Right?”

      Leith had to acknowledge something that had been niggling at him; maybe saving Dion’s life made Leith his guardian ad litem, in a sense, or maybe it was just his own dislike of loose ends, but he needed to know. “What’s going to happen to him?”

      Bosko looked at him with interest. “The man’s had a serious head injury. It wasn’t something headquarters wanted to advertise, but it is something they

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