LITMIR.BIZ

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He imagined snow coming down thick, coating the roads, concealing the ice. It would send him into a tailspin, another crash, another coma. How many comas could one brain take?

      The knot tightened. He told Penny as she rejoined him that he needed to get home, get some sleep; he had work tomorrow.

      On the gravel road to the upper parking lot they joined other fairgoers walking slowly out into the dark. Holding his hand, Penny said, “It was the best, though, wasn’t it?” The colourful fairground lights reflected in her eyes as she looked back, still spinning away in the distance. “Seeing them play?”

      “Seeing what?” he asked.

      “Them play.”

      As always, the dots didn’t quite connect. “Who?”

      “Fling.” She’d lost patience, probably for the first time since they’d met, maybe the beginning of the end. “Fling, the whole point of this day, remember?”

      They walked in silence toward the vast muddy field that had been turned into a jam-packed parking lot for this fall fair weekend, no longer holding hands, and he kept an eye out for the native girl and the man who followed her, both long gone, leaving nothing to chase but a really bad feeling.

      One

      February Callout

      DAVID LEITH BROUGHT the phone to his ear, standing in his living room by the big picture window, looking out at the winter scenery. Not his personal phone but his work phone, the police-issue BlackBerry, and that meant this Sunday, his day off, was probably shot.

      “Leith,” he answered. And sighed, and listened, and continued to watch the falling snow.

      He liked snow — maybe even loved it. As a boy he had skated through it, slid on it, built with it. He’d grown up and joined the RCMP and been bumped west from Saskatchewan to Alberta’s Slave Lake, then farther west to B.C.’s Fort St. John, and finally all the way to the coast, to this rugged little city of Prince Rupert. He’d got married, settled down, and until this year had continued to be one with the snow. Till now it represented fun to him, and beauty, one spoke in the great wheel of life. There was nothing like standing out there first thing in the morning, dazzled by a world cleansed in white, and feeling one with nature.

      “Be there in ten,” he said, and disconnected.

      Snow in Prince Rupert didn’t hit hard, as it did inland, this being the oceanic climate, and usually melted as it hit the ground, but now and then there was a great dump of the stuff, and it stuck. This last dump was sticking, and it was no longer fun or beautiful to Leith. These days each new snowfall just pissed him off, the way it found its way into his boots and behind his collar and brought him crashing to the ground from time to time as he forged to work and forged out on investigations and forged out to the supermarket and forged home again. Snow tracked into the home with all the other stresses of the day and dirtied the carpet and made Alison bitchy.

      No, that wasn’t fair. She was never bitchy, no matter how dirty the carpet got or how low their spirits fell. She would go mute, though, which only made him louder. They had never argued in the Februaries of their younger years, and it worried him that something had gone so badly off the rails — and how bad exactly would it get? Maybe having a child too late in life had upset the balance. Leith was forty-four, Alison thirty-eight, and Izzy was just turning two, and had morphed not into cuteness but into a tiny, blond-ringletted monster with powerful lungs. Ear-splitting lungs. Alison blamed it on the Terrible Twos. Leith blamed it on the species and dreaded the next twenty years.

      So this call from the office at midday on this, his first day off in a while, didn’t bother him as much as he made out it did. He cursed aloud and told Alison he had to go out. She didn’t seem disappointed. He pulled on soft-shell, then outer jacket, then sat on the foyer bench to lace up the waterproof boots. “Bye-bye-bye,” he said and stooped toward Isabelle where she stood staring up at him on the dirty grey stretch of hallway carpet. She raised a threatening fist and spoke in tongues. Alison gathered the child up and didn’t bother to see him off on the doorstep where she used to stand smiling, back when they were in love.

      At noon, Prince Rupert seemed steeped in dusk. He drove to the station, parked underground, walked up into the stuffy over-lit main, and on down to Phil Prentice’s office, where he found his boss on his feet, speaking to a stranger. The stranger wore glasses, a black suit, white shirt, no tie. He was bigger than the average cop, and bulky, kind of bear-shaped, head ducked down as if he was self-conscious about his height. He looked to be about Leith’s age, maybe a year or two younger.

      He was vaguely familiar, too, like Leith had seen him somewhere recently. Maybe on TV? A journalist? Prentice made introductions. “Mike, this is my main man, Constable Dave Leith. A real get-it-done guy.”

      The stranger looked pleased, shook Leith’s hand, and said, “Sergeant Mike Bosko, up from North Van for the border security conference. How ya doin’?”

      “Good, thanks,” Leith said. A big man himself, he stood nearly eye-to-eye with the stranger, who he now in fact recognized. Couple nights ago Mike Bosko had been up at the podium at the Highliner Inn, talking fluidly about something important. Exactly what, Leith couldn’t say, even after taking notes. “Heard your talk, sir. Amazing stuff.”

      “Amazing what we got accomplished in three days,” Bosko said with a smile. Too smart, too self-possessed, and thankfully soon to be gone, Leith thought. He turned to Prentice to ask why the call-in on his day off.

      “Yes, sorry about that,” Prentice said. “Another girl’s gone missing, inland.”

      “Hell, no. Where and when? Same place?”

      “The Hazeltons. Reported missing last night.”

      The Hazeltons lay in the colder, snowier interior of the province, northeast of Rupert by a good four hours’ drive. As Leith understood it, the Hazeltons were composed of Old Hazelton, New Hazelton, and South Hazelton, and the smaller offshoots of Kispiox and Two Mile. Of course that four-hour drive could stretch into eight in a blizzard. He took the bulletin Prentice had thrust at him and looked it over, a photo of a young woman with all the stats typed up below, which he now scanned. “It’s out of his range,” he said, and already felt the ice receding from his veins. The killer he’d been hunting for two years had centred his hits around the Terrace area, so far, which sat midway on the highway between Rupert and the Hazeltons.

      “Sure, but what’s a few miles for a man with a truck?” Prentice said. “Thing is, her vehicle was located up on a logging road, Dave.”

      A logging road in the winter was bad at best. Linked to the MO of a serial killer, it was dismal. Leith looked at the bulletin again, photograph of a young woman with a dazzling smile, warm eyes, a tumble of glossy brown hair. The image was professionally lit, more a publicity head shot than something out of a family album. The stats said she was twenty-two. The name, Kiera Rilkoff, rang a distant bell. “She’s a bit of a celebrity? A singer?”

      Prentice nodded and said for Bosko’s benefit, “She’s quite the talent, too. Our local pride and joy. My daughters are huge fans. Country and western stuff, I think.”

      Leith had learned not to take many of Prentice’s adjectives at face value. Like huge. If asked, those daughters would probably agree that, yeah, Kiera’s pretty good, why?

      “Oh, sure, the Rockabilly Princess,” Bosko said, snapping his fingers. “There was a piece on grassroots music on CBC Radio just before Christmas. She gave a short, man-on-the-street type interview, and they played a track from her first CD. Self-produced, I think. She seemed excited about the future of the band, and they had a second CD coming out. Did it ever happen?”

      “No, I think it got nixed for some reason.”

      Bosko didn’t look surprised, Leith noticed, and then it clicked that he’d actually seen the singer play, which was one better than hearing her on the radio. “I caught her act at last summer’s Seafest,” he said. The event filled his mind, the sunshine and crowds,

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