LITMIR.BIZ

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once again.

      Leith put it to Frank that he and Kiera were no longer a couple, and watched the response with interest. It was odd. Frank yanked his mouth out of shape, blushed, and said, “What? That’s bullshit.”

      Yet he wasn’t completely surprised by the allegation. It wasn’t news to him at all. So, was it true? Maybe, maybe not. Leith followed up on a new suspicion. “Your band is on hold for now, I know that, but do you guys still hang out, you and Stella and Chad?”

      “Not much.”

      But some, and some was enough. “It’s Stella’s idea, isn’t it? She told you to tell us that you and Kiera have broken up. Right? Why would she do that?”

      Frank remained pink-cheeked with anger. “She never told me to say that.”

      “Maybe to throw us off what really happened, d’you think?”

      Frank pulled in a breath and then inclined his upper body forward to give thrust to his question, loud, bitter, and sarcastic: “And what really happened, d’you think?”

      The last thing Leith wanted to do was rile the man up. The interview was being videotaped, and he knew what defence counsel would do with footage of an interrogation that started to climb the walls. There would be endless app-

      lications and voir dires and nasty cross-examination, and he didn’t need another lawyer in his face any more than he needed another ulcer. He backed off and changed subjects, asking Frank instead about that brief call to Scott Rourke.

      “Oh, that,” Frank said, sullen now, the heat seeping away from his cheeks. “I thought I’d call him up after practice shut down early, see if he wanted to go for a beer. Got his answering machine. Didn’t bother leaving a message.”

      Leith looked at the phone records. “Thirty-two seconds. You waited through his recorded spiel, did you?”

      “In case he was screening calls. Said ‘pick up, asshole, it’s me.’ But he didn’t.”

      “He screens his calls? Why?”

      “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”

      Leith closed the interview.

      Chad Oman was brought in for a third round of questioning and said he didn’t know anything about the breakup or another man in Kiera’s life. He seemed genuinely surprised at the very idea.

      Nobody the investigators spoke to over the course of the day, friends and family, Kiera’s parents and her sister Grace, knew anything about it. In the late afternoon, after a long and tiresome day, Leith told his colleagues that frankly, in his opinion, the whole thing was a fiction in Stella Marshall’s head, and she should be charged with mischief in the first degree.

      In the late afternoon he chanced to run into Constable Dion in the detachment hallway that led to the rear exit and staff washrooms, and at the time it struck Leith as a good time to chat about that man’s certain weak-kneed questioning of Stella Marshall last night, a witness who’d been apparently eager to talk and might well have had something important to divulge, even if it was an elaboration on a lie. “It’s just one damn good example of when you should have pressed a witness for more information and didn’t,” he finished.

      Dion listened through the advice, wide-eyed, and when Leith was done he gave a short yessir that sounded more like fuck you, and tried to trade places in the narrow hall and move on toward the men’s.

      But Leith wasn’t done. He called after him, “If you hate this job so much, why don’t you do yourself a favour and quit?”

      “I love this job.”

      “You could fool me.”

      “I noticed.”

      “What?”

      “Excuse me. Need to use the washroom.”

      Leith returned to Giroux’s office with a scowl, just in time to hear her new theory, which was just a rehashing of an old theory, that maybe there was another man in the picture, and that his sin wasn’t that he was married but that he was somebody too close for comfort. Namely, Frank’s older brother. “Look at it,” she said, standing by the large Google Earth printout they were using for a map, posted up on the wall and marked with points of interest. She moved her finger between points. “The Matax is halfway up the mountain, not far from Rob’s worksite. What if Rob and Kiera agreed to meet halfway?”

      “There’s no calls between them in the phone records,” Bosko said.

      Giroux had an answer for that too. “Phone records are notoriously easy to check these days, so they thought they’d better set up their meetings the old-fashioned way.”

      “Smoke signals?” Leith said.

      “Ha-ha,” she said. “No. With good old-fashioned words. Set up in advance. They’re both at the house often enough. Brush by each other in the kitchen, pretend to talk about the weather, but they’re actually setting up a time and place. Saturday at 1:00 p.m. at the Matax trailhead, wink wink, slap on the ass. And next thing you know they’re up there, sitting in his truck, whispering sweet nothings and managing to get their rocks off across the console.”

      Leith doubted it. He recalled getting his rocks offs with girls in vehicles — or one girl, one vehicle, one time — in his early twenties. It was an uncomfortable memory, in every sense of the word. But whatever was happening between Kiera and Rob, if anything, wasn’t necessarily lewd. That was just Giroux, who had a way with words. Maybe the two were just talking, figuring out how to break it to Frank. Maybe they argued. Maybe one of them was putting some kind of pressure on the other. Maybe things went terribly wrong.

      Aloud, he said, “Rob is alibied all Saturday, but that aside, you have to consider this. He’s got access to a few acres of ripped ground and a backhoe. The ground’s frozen, but if he banged at it long enough, found a soft spot, he could bury her so deep she’d never surface.”

      They all stood looking at the map and talking over Rob Law’s alibi for Saturday in the hours of Kiera’s disappearance. Six employees with a clear line of sight on him, or at least on his office trailer and his pickup, made for one solid alibi. If he’d gone anywhere that day, those six would have known it.

      Leith said, “What about this one hour he had after his crew left at 6:00 p.m. and before he headed down the mountain at seven?”

      “Doesn’t work,” Giroux said. “He’d have travelled down, stopped at her truck to call her name, and was home half an hour later. All that time would be taken in travel. Not enough time to deal with the body. And of course, soon after that the search began.”

      She was probably right; it didn’t work. So it was earlier in the day or not at all.

      Leith brought in the file box, and they looked through statements and evidence. There were loading slips that Rob had signed when rigs were loaded up and left the site, and there were times on those slips, and in all the scribbles the only window of opportunity emerged, a block of time when Rob Law had signed nothing and supposedly been in his trailer. Bosko wrote that window of opportunity on the whiteboard. One fifty-seven to two fifty-two, just under one hour, and all that time his truck had remained in place alongside all the others.

      “So much for that,” Leith said.

      Giroux said, “Unless he walked.”

      Leith laughed aloud, but Giroux was once again running her finger along the map, not along the lengthy switchbacks of the Bell 3, but skimming over the pines as the crow flies. And suddenly it was not 12.7 kilometres between the cut block and the Matax trailhead, but perhaps three.

      Leith was still smiling, arms crossed, but Bosko had his specs fixed on the new path she’d etched. “You think there’s a way through, Renee?”

      “Who knows,” Giroux said. “Deer make paths. Winter brings those paths out nicely. Maybe it’s a trail he’s used before. The guy practically lives up there.

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