LITMIR.BIZ

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the Queen of Hyperbole. “They had to drag him in half- dead from the cold. If that’s not sweet, what is?”

      Leith sighed.

      “It’s your case,” she added. “But my people. So just keep that in mind.”

      By my people she meant all the registered locals, he realized. Not just the dark-skinned Aboriginals that populated much of the north. Whites were the minority in the Hazeltons, but not by far, and they too belonged to Renee Giroux.

      Clouds had gathered, thick. A few flakes fluttered down, not nearly the whiteout of last night. Giroux steered them through Two Mile, through Old Town, over the bridge that spanned a rather gut-wrenching canyon, and on for another quarter hour down a narrow, snowy backroad, finally turning into a driveway made of tire ruts.

      The driveway seemed to go on forever, dead straight through a young poplar forest, ending in a clearing, and through the windshield Leith saw a big ugly rancher set down amongst the trees with all the grace of a beer can on a beach. Powder blue, vinyl-sided, green metal roof sloping at a shallow pitch. Machinery and cars and clutter in the yard. The kind of place a pit bull would run around looking for man-sized snacks. He kept an eye out but saw no animals lurking in the gloom.

      “Been out here before?” he asked.

      “Once,” she said, puffing vapour ghosts. “About four years back. That incident I told you about. House was just bare bones then. The Law boys built it pretty much on their own. Dispute with the building inspector became a verbal firestorm and ended in Marty — that’s the inspector — on his ass. Frank did his penance, and far as I know it never happened again. Far as I know, Frank and Marty still drink together.”

      Up on the porch, Giroux rapped her knuckles on the door. Leith, listening for dogs still, saw deck chairs, ashtrays, beer cans, and what was probably a mega-gas barbecue under a tarp. The three bears enjoyed their house in the woods, it seemed. Heavy wool blankets thrown over the deck chairs suggested they enjoyed it even on a cold winter day.

      The door opened, and he got his first look at his only real suspect so far, Frank Law. The guy was twenty-three, still at the concave-gut stage of life, a lanky powerhouse. Tallish, lightly bearded, eye sockets dented by what was maybe exhaustion, maybe guilt, maybe a good brew of both. “Anything?” he asked.

      “Sorry, nothing yet,” Giroux said. “Frank, this is Constable Leith, up from Prince Rupert. He’s come to make sure we look in all the right places, okay?”

      Frank looked far from reassured but allowed them in with a good show of manners. In the living room, among more macho mess and the not-so-faint smell of pot smoke, they took seats.

      Leith fiddled with his pocket recorder, prefaced the recording with date and time and who all was present, and asked Frank to take them to the beginning, starting from the day before Kiera had gone missing, that being Friday. “Just take your time,” he said, “and give me a visual replay of everything you can remember, okay?”

      “Friday,” Frank said. His voice was husky and sore. “Helped Rob up on the landing all morning, bucking some old windfall out of the way for the crew. I left for home about four. It was getting dark. Rob stayed on alone, breaking his own rules. You don’t work alone in this business unless you got a death wish, but there’s only so far you can push him, and he just shuts you out. That’s Rob. Anyway, he’s got these new lights set up there, wants to get his money’s worth. Told me not to worry. So I didn’t.” His frown deepened, and he seemed already lost. Giroux prompted him with an encouraging murmur, and he gave a start and carried on. “Friday night. Came back, had dinner with Lenny and Kiera. She came over for dinner.”

      He didn’t recall the conversation around the dinner table or what they’d done that evening except watch some dumb show on TV. Leith asked if Kiera had mentioned anything out of the ordinary happening in her life, if she’d met anyone, even just a casual encounter. Did she have any special plans for the upcoming days?

      Frank didn’t recall anything unusual in their conversation. Kiera went home pretty early, around ten o’clock. Frank went to bed soon after.

      Leith asked him about the day that really mattered now, Saturday. “Just go through it, minute by minute. What happened?”

      “I got up about seven thirty, had toast and coffee.”

      “And Rob had stayed up on the mountain, right? What about Lenny? Was he around?”

      Frank scowled. “Sleeps like a pile of rocks these days. He’s seventeen. Such a shitty age. Used to be our soundman, and a good one, but lost interest. Lost interest in everything, pretty well.”

      Leith studied Frank’s downturned lashes, the troubled lines of his face, his shoulders, that almost visible inner quaking of emotional trauma. Not a cruel man, but poss­ibly a killer. Anybody could be, really.

      Frank went ploughing on, talking in machine-gun bursts now, like all he wanted was to get this over with. “So Lenny was in his room, and Kiera came over a bit later than she said, nearly nine. We’d agreed on eight thirty.”

      “Was that unusual?”

      He shrugged. “Kind of. No big deal. I was already setting up the equipment. We went over some of the music, played a bit, waited for the others to show up.”

      “You have an in-house studio?”

      “Top of the line,” Frank said, sitting straighter and flicking hair out of his eyes. “Just finished last November. To die for.” He looked pugnacious as he said it, as though daring Leith to contradict him. Now he was glum again. Leith prompted him back on track.

      “Chad and Stella showed up minutes after Kiera, around nine, quarter after,” Frank said. “Chad’s wrecked his truck, so he caught a ride in with Stella.”

      Chad was Chad Oman, the band’s drummer. He was native, local born, once a bit of a troublemaker, according to Giroux, but nothing worse than the usual teenage joie de vivre. Now that he was in his twenties, working at the Home Hardware, and with a great career as a drummer on the horizon, he was behaving “pretty good.” And Stella was Stella Marshall, also a band member, also local born, also in her early twenties, who apparently played the electric fiddle.

      Frank described how the band had rehearsed for a couple of hours, till lunch break. More to get a sense of the group dynamics than anything, Leith asked if it had been a good rehearsal. The answer was short, snappy, and surprising. “No,” Frank said. “It was crappy. Got nothing accomplished. It’s the pressure. We need to get this demo put together by the end of the month because the last one bombed, so we were all just on edge. Especially Kiera. So we took an early break, and I put out some food, but nobody seemed hungry. Kiera said she was going out for a while, and she just took off. Drove off in her truck. It was just after noon, I guess.”

      “Did you see which way she went?” Leith asked, though he knew the answer before Frank shook his head. There was only one way she could have gone by vehicle, and that was off down that long, tree-shrouded driveway. Unless somebody followed her, they couldn’t know which way she went once she hit the narrow two-lane Kispiox Road, whether it was south toward town or north toward the Kispiox Range, where her truck had been found.

      “What did she say, exactly, as she left?”

      “Not much. ‘Back in a while.’ That’s about it.”

      “She was upset?”

      “Not upset. Fed up.”

      “With who, or what?”

      “Like I said, the music wasn’t coming together. They’re upbeat tunes. You can’t force upbeat, can you?” It was a black, rhetorical question. He said, “Stella said there wasn’t much point sticking around, so she and Chad left. Lenny crawled out of his room, grabbed a sandwich, went off with Tex to Prince George. That was my idea. I wanted him out of there. Last thing I needed was a sullen teenager hanging around.”

      This part Leith didn’t know so well, but he’d seen in the statements

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