LITMIR.BIZ

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the find was significant. Leith stood and paced, playing the devil’s advocate. “Like Stella said, Chad was stoned. So he forgot he’d seen her walk out with her coat under her arm.”

      “Chad’s description of her leaving the house was convincingly detailed,” Spacey countered. “He saw her with both hands in her pockets. There’s nowhere for a coat to hide in that memory.”

      “Hooked under her arm, like this?”

      “It’s a bulky winter coat. It would have been part of his mental image.”

      “Maybe this blue thing is a different coat altogether. Maybe it belongs to Lenny, and it went with him when he left for Prince George. Or Chad’s or Stella’s.”

      “All will have to be checked,” Giroux said. “But I agree with Spacey here. I’m pretty sure that’s her coat.”

      So, Leith thought, assuming for the moment it was Kiera’s coat. The door’s closed, and Kiera’s out there in the cold with only a sweater and jeans. Ten minutes later Frank had returned. The Rodeo was gone, according to Stella and Lenny; maybe so, according to Chad. Whatever the case, the coat was in the house when she left, and wasn’t there when the police photographer showed up with the ident team the next day, and nobody had an explanation. If nothing else, that showed somebody in the house was covering his or her tracks.

      Spacey took the photograph and went to visit Kiera’s parents. She phoned back with the results half an hour later. “Yes, it’s her coat,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent positive.”

      Leith spent an hour on the phone with Crown counsel, in spite of the hour, and that same night Frank Law was arrested and charged with the murder of Kiera Rilkoff.

      Fourteen

      Found in Translation

      MORNING CAME, ALONG WITH a steady fall of big snowflakes, fat and wet. The case wasn’t over, not even close. After six hours of interrogation, Frank stood firm that he was innocent, and there was nothing Leith could do but keep scrounging for evidence.

      On this day Mike Bosko was truly and finally abandoning ship, hitching a ride with the sheriffs on the prisoner shuttle and flying out from George, as he’d planned to do so many days ago. “It just kept getting more interesting,” he said in his cheerful way to Leith and Giroux. Leith was glad to see the last of him. Bosko was a grating reminder of what Leith had no chance of becoming. Too smart, too high-ranking for his age, and to top it off, he didn’t even seem to realize it. Too big, too worldly, too modest, and quite possibly a vegetarian, were some of his flaws. And he was slow. Right now he wasn’t snapping up his briefcase and flying out the door, as he should be, but finishing a cup of coffee and chatting with Giroux about something anthropological, a native legend about frogs, or foxes, or the reinvention of self.

      Mike Bosko probably knew more about First Nations culture than Giroux, by the looks of her face as she listened, awe mixed with offence. Leith only tuned in when the conversation somehow tied back in to the case, Bosko and Giroux back to an earlier debate about Scottie Rourke’s intentions up on the East Band lookout, holding a gun to Frank Law’s head when Frank wasn’t looking, a supposed act of euthanasia against the ills to come. “Oh, you bet Rourke would have shot the kid,” Bosko told Giroux. “Then he might well have shot himself to wrap it up, but I doubt it. Anyway, that’s my take on it.”

      Leith stashed that takeaway to think about later, but for now Bosko had turned to him, reaching out a hand. “You know,” he said, as they shook, “I know it wouldn’t be easy, leaving the north, but think about it. I’m looking for the best for my new team, out with the old SCU and in with the new, and I could sure use a guy of your talents and energy.”

      Leith stood blinking. Talent? Energy? “Yes, sir, thanks, sir,” he said, and it came out in a blurt after his first stunned silence. “I’ll sure think about it. Thanks.”

      “Excellent. Be hearing from you soon, then, I hope?”

      “Yes, sir. Thanks. Was great working with you. Safe travels. I’ll be in touch.”

      Now it was Giroux’s turn. Unlike Leith, she didn’t blather like a drunken lotto winner, but promised to keep Bosko posted about the Rilkoff case. “Things aren’t over till they’re over, right?”

      Leith watched Bosko out the window, somewhat infatuated. The big man stood and chatted with the sheriffs from Prince Rupert, who had been waiting patiently at their transport van. The snow fell, and the sheriffs seemed content to stand chatting for a while longer with a man they didn’t know. They were pointing toward Hagwilget Peak, talking geography now, probably. Talking stats. Sharing hiking stories. God, Leith thought. He wants me.

      Finally, they all piled into the van and it trundled off, full of cops and robbers making the world go round. “Sad,” Giroux said. “Just when you get used to somebody in your life, poof, they’re gone.”

      “Yes, and I’m next,” Leith said, two thumbs up, thinking about Ali and Izzy, cranky wife and truculent daughter, home and haven. His big smile and two thumbs up seemed to bother Giroux, and he understood why. This was her universe, this little spattering of villages, and she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to leave.

      Not that it was over, quite yet. There would be many interviews to conduct over the next day or so. He recalled another unpleasant item on his mental agenda, and with a sigh told Giroux about Spacey and her disturbing lack of expediency when it came to mustering backup to the East Band lookout, night before last. He told her of Dion’s version of the delay. Giroux listened, her fierce black eyes shooting sparks, and Leith noticed for the first time that she was going grey at the temples. Just like Alison, who’d told him last month during one of their tiffs, “I’m going grey, take it or leave it.”

      He would take it, of course he would. But with Renee Giroux he felt a pang of pity. Maybe because she was a firecracker that would sail high but burn fast, and she would never reach the stars.

       “No way,” she exclaimed in answer to his ratting out of young Spacey. “No way would she put anybody’s life at risk, dragging her feet like that. If she complained that Dion had been unclear on the phone, then he had been unclear on the phone. Unclear is his middle name, for Pete’s sake.”

      So it’ll go into the personnel cold case files, Leith thought. An unsolved case of he said, she said. Like Giroux, he believed the she.

      Back at his desk in the main room, he was struggling through the paperwork of Frank’s arrest when he was distracted by a commotion. Constable Thackray had arrived, helping a little old native lady up the front steps and into the detachment, bringing gusts of brisk air and a swirl of snow crystals. Leith delayed a phone call to observe the little old lady, who looked older than the village itself, and wondered what it must be like to have existed before the escalation of convenience, before mass transportation, mass media, mass instantaneous gratification had set in. Must have been slow days, then. Must have been kind of nice, listening to the crickets at night. For entertainment you sat on the front stoop, watching the sunset, having a real conversation about real things with real people.

      His iPhone buzzed, a text from home: When? He texted back: ASAP. With a happy face.

      It was amusing, anyway, watching Thackray, the lanky young constable, trying to communicate with the little old lady, but she wasn’t speaking the language, except in fragments. Thackray tried Police Pidgin, then a kind of ad lib sign language, then sighed and caught Leith’s eye and said, “She wants to report something, but I can’t understand what the problem is.”

      Dion had arrived, not in uniform but civvies, looking preoccupied. He brushed past Thackray, went to his cleared-off desk, and started searching for something in the drawers and behind the computer monitor.

      Leith asked Thackray, “Don’t you guys have an on-call translator?”

      “Yeah, we do, but she’s out of town.”

      Dion said, “My keys.”

      Leith said, “I gave

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