LITMIR.BIZ

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Lenny?”

      “I’m not sure on that. He wasn’t around, but probably in his room. I think he left afterward.”

      “So you’re in the house, and Frank’s gone out, maybe for a smoke, and a minute or two later Kiera goes out as well, and now they’re both outside. Did you watch them from the window at all, see where they went at all, what they did out there?”

      “No.”

      “Hear any vehicles starting up?”

      Oman paused and admitted he hadn’t heard any vehicles starting up, and it looked to Leith like a dishonest pause but an honest admission. Which was interesting.

      “When you left the Law house that day, her Rodeo was still there, wasn’t it?”

      Oman shook his head vaguely.

      “Yes or no?” Leith said, wanting something for the record.

      “No, I don’t think it was,” Oman said.

      “For how long were they out there, Frank and Kiera?”

      Oman’s bluff facade was breaking down, nearly gone. He said in a low and husky voice, “I never saw Kiera again.”

      “Sure. What about Frank, when did you see him again?”

      “He came back.”

      Leith raised his voice, just enough to give the kid a jolt. “I know he came back, and I know damn well when he came back. I want to know when you say he came back so I don’t have to waste any more time writing up criminal charges here. This is a homicide we’re dealing with, right? If you think I’m grim to deal with, think again. Next to the prosecutor, I’m a pretty nice guy.”

      “Yeah, sorry, I was just trying to think, is all. I’d say … ten.”

      “Ten what?”

      “He was out for ten minutes, maybe,” Oman said, and looked away, rosy-cheeked and wet-eyed. “Fuck.”

      Fuck said it all, in Leith’s mind. The drummer boy’s last hope for a rosy future had just gone up in smoke.

      * * *

      With Dion dismissed for the night, back to his room at the Super 8 to sleep off the pain pills, Leith was on his own now, interviewing Stella Marshall. It didn’t go well. However much he bullied her, she stuck to her original story, that Kiera had left on her own, that she’d left in her truck, and that Frank had stepped out earlier for a smoke, but had come back, and he had nothing to do with her disappearance. Breezily, she went about shooting down the case built up against Frank by Chad Oman’s latest admissions. Chad, she said, had been smoking some pretty high-grade zombie all morning and wasn’t firing on all cylinders to begin with. “Let’s just say he’s pliable,” she said, lounging in her interrogation chair, inspecting Leith with those pale marble eyes as she twined her hair about a finger. “Especially in the face of a policeman with lots to lose, right? I’m sure you didn’t exactly handle him with kid gloves, as they say. Did you?”

      This lady really should get into politics, Leith thought. He said, “First I’ve heard of zombie.”

      “It’s the kind of thing you don’t blather about to cops if you don’t need to.”

      “Everybody was smoking hard?”

      “No. I only smoke on weekdays, and only what I can bum off friends. Frank only had a toke after Lenny left, so he doesn’t set a bad example. Very old-lady, Frank is, when it comes to Lenny. If he only knew. Kiera tokes once in a blue moon, and I don’t recall her smoking that day. So it was just Chad indulging.”

      “What d’you mean, if Frank only knew. Only knew what?”

      “The kid’s a total pothead, when big brother’s not looking.”

      “Where do y’all get your weed?”

      “I really don’t know,” Stella said.

      Like hell she didn’t.

      When he’d let her go too, Lenny Law took the seat next and told Leith that Kiera’s Rodeo was gone when Tex had picked him up that day for their trip to George. And you could hypnotize him or put him through a lie detector, and you’d get the same answer, he said, swear to god.

      Even without the swearing to god, Leith believed the kid. He considered pressing him about the weed angle, but it was barely a tangent at this point, and he didn’t want the trouble. So that was the end of his eyewitness list, barring Frank, who on the advice of counsel continued his right to say nothing. Not a word.

      * * *

      They didn’t arrest Frank. Crown counsel didn’t think they had enough and didn’t want to blow it by jumping the gun. You can’t base an arrest on a boatload of probablys and one witness’s foggy say-so. So the team heads sat about with take-out dinner and a steady supply of caffeine and brainstormed, looking for a solid bit of proof. There was the matter of Kiera’s coat, and it bothered Leith enough that he went over it again. And again. A striking purple coat, with embroidered cuffs and flamboyant fake fur trim, as described by her family and friends, that hadn’t been found, either at her own home, or at the Law house in the woods, anywhere on the property, or in her vehicle or anybody else’s. It was nowhere. So it was presumed to have been on her back when she’d been taken and was maybe buried with her now. Except Chad Oman had sworn she’d left the house without that or any other coat on, just the sweater, and in that respect Leith believed him.

      All of which led him to the conclusion that somewhere between her walking out of the house that day and vanishing into the unknown, she had somehow been reunited with her famous purple coat, and that coat had gone with her to the grave. Probably it had been in her Rodeo, and she’d gone out and put it on, before or after her interaction with Frank.

      In the prevailing theory, Frank had killed her, there in the woods near the home, even though a pair of dogs with keen nostrils had snuffled about the whole five acres and located no trace of cadavers or shed blood. So the killing had been clean, a strangulation, maybe, or suffocation.

      And then? Then he had left her there, and later, when the band had gone, with Lenny safely packed off with Tex to Prince George — or so he thought — he had placed her into her Rodeo, which despite what Lenny said remained in the driveway, and driven her somewhere and disposed of her, either alone or with the help of his lying, cheating friends. But there the theory became impossibly dilute.

      The windows were solid black when Jayne Spacey said, “What’s this?”

      She tossed over a photograph that Leith recognized as one of the printouts from Frank Law’s iPhone. The image was tilted, blurred, and would have been deleted off the phone immediately if Frank had been the efficient type, a shot of Chad Oman doing what many kids did these days to show how smart they are, giving the camera the two-handed middle-finger salute.

      “Why do they do that?” Leith said. “In my day we smiled and said cheese.”

      “Fuddy-duddy,” Spacey said. She leaned, pointed. “It’s this blue thing here.”

      Giroux pulled more photos now, crime scene shots, spreading them around and hovering over them like a plump little human scanner. “Holy smokes. I don’t see it anywhere. It’s gone.”

      Leith looked at the blue thing in the blurry shot of Chad flipping the bird. It was there in the background, barely a smudge. Could be a garment, he thought. Her coat? Gotta see if we can find a picture of her in her coat, he thought. “Her family called it purple, not blue. This is definitely blue.”

      “Frank’s still got the old iPhone,” Spacey said. “Not great at handling some colours.”

      Leith inspected the photo as close as his not-so-great eyes would allow without reading glasses. “There’s this paler stuff around the top. That could be the fake fur trim her sister mentioned.”

      Spacey and Giroux agreed, it

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