LITMIR.BIZ

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off to the right of the chin. Somebody had done a job on him, but a while ago. The scar looked old.

      “I’m self-employed is what I am.” Rourke’s brown arms were crossed, every tendon popped and delineated. “I fix things. Okay? Anything I can fit on my workbench, I fix. Small engines, clocks, microwave ovens, you name it. Well, okay, maybe not microwave ovens. Okay? But everything else under the sun, it’s broke, I fix.”

      “All right,” Leith said. “Self-employed fix-all. Was that so bad? See, I ask you questions, you give me answers, he writes them down, and we move on. That’s how it usually goes.”

      “Thank you for educating me on the fine art of interrogation. So move on.”

      “You said you have some information for me about Kiera Rilkoff. I’ve got your statement about seeing her drive past on Kispiox Road. What else d’you know, sir?”

      “It’s not so much what I know as what I want to know. Time is of the essence, right? The first forty-eight and all that. I don’t see a lot of action happening here, you all sitting around, questioning people like you’re writing some fucking book. What a waste of time. It’s not people that got her, it’s that bastard, and she could be still alive, and you people better get your ass in gear and start turning over rocks.”

      “What bastard got her?”

      “You know the bastard I’m talking about. Mr. Pickup, who strangles young girls and leaves them in shallow graves. He’s been having his sick kicks for two years now, and with all your equipment and your brains and manpower, you keep letting him get away, and now he’s got Kiera, thanks very much.”

      “Is that your information, Mr. Rourke? Are you done? ’Cause I have a few questions myself. You live about a stone’s throw from the Law brothers, is that right?”

      “If you call kilometre and a half a stone’s throw.”

      “You’re a close friend of Kiera Rilkoff?”

      “That’s why I’m here, you fucking genius!”

      “Keep your hair on,” Leith snapped. “This is a police station, not your local watering hole, get that straight. When did you last see her?”

      “You guys already asked me all that.”

      “I’m asking you again.”

      “Last night, then, to be exact. It was a hot day, blue sky, and her and Frank were standing in the river, okay? Down at the S-Bend, up to their navels and side by side. I was on the beach in a purple tux, reading them their vows from a podium made of Popsicle sticks. That’s the last time I saw her.”

      Dion the scribe was clearly not keeping up. Leith picked up the tape recorder, checked its little bars were hopping, and set it down again. He leaned toward his witness and said, quietly, “That’s fascinating, sir. But see, this fellow has to take down everything we say, and he thinks you’re giving him a load of writer’s cramp for nothing. And he doesn’t think it’s cute. And neither do I. So let’s stick to facts. Okay? Not dreams, not your artsy-fartsy sarcasm. Fact.”

      “I thought I’d share an interesting dream.”

      “I don’t want to hear your interesting dreams.”

      Rourke shrugged. “Who the fuck knows the last time I saw her, besides her driving past me on Saturday. On the street maybe, few weeks ago, stopped to chat, whatever. Or I was over there for dinner, or they dropped by. We just bump into each other all over the place, helter-skelter, willy-nilly.”

      Dion’s pen fell to the floor with a clatter. Leith waited till he was back in business and said, “Your relationship with Kiera. In your mind it’s a little more than just friends, isn’t it? You’ve got ideas about you and her. Fantasies.”

      Rourke straightened in indignation. “Fantasies? Me? I’m old enough to be her grandfather.”

      “Ever heard the term ‘dirty old man’?”

      “Ever heard the term libel action? Because, sir, I’m just itchin’ —”

      “All I asked you,” Leith pointed out, “is if you’ve ever heard the term. What were you doing Saturday?”

       “Nothing. I worked on my projects. Fixing things.”

      “Anybody with you?”

      “A friend.”

      “Name.”

      “Evangeline Doyle.”

      “Contact information?”

      “She lives with me, so get it from your file.”

      Leith gave Dion a nod to flag the name. “Anything else?”

      “When I heard about Kiera, I went up the mountain and searched it high and low, doing your guys’s job for you, which is just plain hair-brained, ’cause that mountain should have been turned inside out on that first night, not by a bunch of amateurs, but by a bunch of cops who could have maybe found a clue or two before it got destroyed, because guess what, there’s a murderer at large. But no, I guess you got your protocols to follow….”

      He had plenty more, and Leith argued with him for a while, but mostly he let the man rant. He didn’t like Rourke, a man with a bad criminal record, but for now all he had against him was his own, sorely biased contempt. He watched Rourke’s mobile and badly scarred face, the rolled-up sleeves, the scrappy hands, oil-blackened and rough, and the muscled arms flexing with every angry word. There was a rhythm to his words, a drumbeat that was saying more than it was saying. The missing girl wasn’t his only grievance, or the shortcomings of the police service. It was something bigger and meaner, and it was wounded, and just as Leith was getting a sense of what it might be, Rourke seemed to short out, tossed his hands one last time, and said he was bloody done here.

      Leith said, “Glad to hear it. Thank you, sir, for your time. And do yourself a favour, lose the feather. Next cop you meet might not be so nice.”

      “I got Mohawk in my blood.”

      “Good for you.”

      He watched Rourke leave and then smiled briefly at Dion, who was already clearing up to leave. “Got all that?”

      Leith wasn’t a great smiler, never had been, but he thought he’d give the rookie a chance. If he could make contact, find something of value, some tiny glimmer of intelligence, he could maybe start on the road to positive mentoring.

      In the next instant, he wished he hadn’t bothered, as Dion nearly stumbled in his haste to rise and said sharply, “No, I didn’t get all that.” He didn’t look well, his pale face flushed, his hair sweaty and spiked, dark rings under his flashing, angry eyes, and for the first time he had plenty to say. “Nobody could get all that. You let your witness off the leash, throw sticks and watch him run, just for the fun of it, and you expect me to get all that?” He removed a tatty duty notebook from his pocket and flipped it across the desk at Leith, who was still staring at him in dumb surprise. “Read it, if you want, circle all the mistakes, and send me to hell, if you want. Frankly, I don’t give a shit.”

      He strode out, leaving behind the little spiral notebook in its leather case.

      * * *

      “Hell,” Dion said again, hands linked behind his neck as if to save himself from toppling backward. From his second-floor motel room window he could see a volcano -like mountain rising up, a dark mass in the night sky, its peaks glowing a paler blue, a two thousand and seventy metre-high rock called Hagwilget Peak, according to the tourist brochure he’d read front to back this morning over coffee.

      The motel was right next to the highway, and even through the thick glass he could hear the grunts of trucks decelerating and the occasional noisy exhaust of an older car barrelling by. There were muffled screams and gun blasts from the TV in the room next to his, too. But mostly there was silence, immense and smothering.

      He was

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