LITMIR.BIZ

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grinned. “For one thing, he’s not my constable. He left North Vancouver before I moved in, so we haven’t crossed paths till now. For another, I wouldn’t be flying halfway across the province and taking lodgings to watch one brain-damaged constable. Wouldn’t be very cost-effective, would it? The locals in charge were supposed to send in regular reports, however, for the first six months, which they’ve been doing, but Renee didn’t notice the letter that accompanied her temp, and Willoughby didn’t stress the importance of the letter, so between them, he’s kind of dropped off the radar. Kind of frightening, isn’t it?”

      Very, Leith thought. He crossed his arms, then uncrossed them and stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. When Bosko was reticent, it bothered him. When he was forthcoming, it bothered him even more. Bottom line, he still didn’t trust the man or his agenda.

      “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Bosko said. “We’ve got our eye on him. All right?”

      It wasn’t all right. Head injuries changed people, diminished them. Leith had never heard of a head injury improving on a man’s powers or personality, and Dion was clearly no exception to the rule. Maybe he’d been a prodigy, as he claimed, but he was now just bad news. If he didn’t get somebody else killed, he’d kill himself. Neither struck Leith as all right.

      Bosko was looking at the document in question again. He said, “His abilities aside, do you have any idea what he thought Oman was lying about?”

      Leith shook his head. “No clue.”

      “Then talk to Oman again, go over the same ground, and watch for tells. Get tough if you have to. And ask Dion what he recalls, soon as he’s back in the now.”

      “How about I get Giroux to grill him?” Leith asked. “Whenever I talk to the man, I get these homicidal thoughts.”

      Bosko was amused, but only for a moment. “Seriously, I think you should deal with him yourself. I think you have a way with him. And try to be patient, Dave.”

      A way with him? Leith ground his teeth. He wasn’t sure Constable Dion would ever be in the now, or could recall what he ate for breakfast, let alone the nuances of Chad Oman’s veracity over a week ago. And now, thanks to that brain damaged cop’s whimsical I think he was lying remark, he, Leith, was going to have to play bad cop with the drummer, a man who was quite possibly blameless, and that was a role he didn’t relish. Yes, it rankled. His phone buzzed before he could put his resentment to words, and speak of the devil, it was the hospital calling to say Dion was ready to talk.

      Thirteen

      White Lies

      WAKING HAD BEEN BAD, but not hellish. Not like rising from the coma last year, when he’d dragged his own broken body through a dark, wet corridor for endless miles in pain, confusion, and bouts of genuine terror. This was easy, dry, bright, and the painkillers worked wonders. Dion sat on a straight-backed chair in his hospital room waiting for his ride from the hospital. His side hurt, but it was nothing next to the thudding in his chest. He rested his face in his palms, trying not to imagine the hilarity, and imaging it all the same. Frank had told all, by now, every last excruciating tidbit, and the story would have gone viral. They’d be laughing hard. Spacey would laugh hardest.

      The thought of the story doing the rounds in this detachment and spreading to others, probably eventually reaching the world at large, sickened him, literally, and he limped into the bathroom and leaned over the throne, hands splayed on the tank, ready to barf up his hospital breakfast, whatever that had been. The nurse came up behind him as he stood contemplating the plumbing and asked if he was all right. He straightened, wiped his mouth, and accepted the glass of water she offered. Somehow the dizziness had passed, and so had the nausea, and even the rip in his side didn’t seem so bad. Only the worry remained. “I’m okay,” he told her.

      “I don’t think you are,” she said.

      She went to get him a couple of T3s, and he thought about fleeing the scene, walking, jumping on a bus, hitchhiking, anything, just getting out of there, fast. Cross the border, sink into anonymity, become a bearded street person.

      But there was a hitch in that he had no jacket. They had taken it away, along with the uniform he’d been wearing during the farcical confrontation with Scott Rourke last night. He now wore the clothes somebody had brought in from his room at the Super 8, the winter-weight joggers and sweater he usually wore on his days off, the black leather Nike runners, and a scarf around his throat. The scarf he’d wrapped around twice, depressed.

      “Hi there,” Thackray said, poking his head around the door. “Ready to go?”

      Ten minutes later they walked into the detachment, and Dion found it quiet inside, nobody laughing. Spacey was nowhere to be seen. Leith stood from his desk and said, “Hey, glad you’re okay,” then summoned him down the hall to the “soft” interview room.

      They sat across from each other, like accuser and accused, and Leith said, “I really thought you’d caught a bullet. Took you down Code 3, man, made quite a scene.”

      “Yeah, sorry about that.”

      Leith seemed glad to be done with the small talk and got down to business, opening a file that turned out to be an interview with Chad Oman. He told Dion the date and time of the interview and asked Dion if he remembered it.

      Of course Dion remembered it. He answered coldly. “Right, it was last week.”

      Leith read out what they had written out together at the end of that miserable interview, after the disaster with the recording device. He finished reading and said, “You told me you thought he was lying about something but couldn’t remember what it was. But you were flustered then. Maybe now something’s twigged, huh?”

      Dion pulled the statement across the table and read it again, trying to put himself back in the moment, imagining the witness in the room. He couldn’t remember what had prompted him to say Oman was lying. Oman had been loud, a fast talker, hard to track, and his own regrettable comment about lying had come out of him spontaneous as a sneeze.

      He shook his head. “I don’t know. There was that bit where Oman paused here, said something was funny, then wouldn’t say what he thought was funny. Maybe it was there.”

      “That’s kind of what I was thinking. But that’s not really a lie, is it? At worst, that’s holding something back.”

      “I don’t know, then.”

      Leith looked far from shocked and closed the folder. Now it was time for another painful rehashing: what happened on the East Band last night. He let Dion run through the narrative first, no questions asked. Dion did his best and told what he could remember, which was just about everything, from picking up Evangeline, to spotting the abandoned bicycle, to the directions he’d gotten to the Gates of Heaven, to calling Spacey for backup. He told of his drive up the mountain, expecting reinforcements that didn’t seem to be coming, his hesitation, and his ultimate decision to plough on. He told of his conversation with Scott Rourke, and his final ploy of giving Rourke a false motive for not wanting Frank Law to go to jail. Here he fell silent, unable to finish.

      Leith said, “Yes? And what was that false motive?”

      “I told him Frank and I were friends,” Dion said. Which was the truth. Not the whole truth, but enough. He watched Leith’s face, expecting he’d already got the punchline out of Frank and was just holding back the guffaw. But there wasn’t even a smirk. Just an intense and skeptical gaze.

      “And he believed it?” Leith asked.

      Dion basked in relief for a moment. So Frank was just as embarrassed about the whole thing as he was and hadn’t said anything about love at first sight or any of the rest. Maybe it would never come to light. He sat straighter and gave a shrug. “I guess Rourke believed me. He let Frank go. Then you and the others finally got there, and you know the rest. What took you so long, by the way?”

      Leith skirted the question, saying, “Any idea why

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