Flights and Falls Read online

  “I’d like to see you do better with Constable Runaround Sue,” Torr snapped back.

  Leith remembered what was bothering him, what Gilmartin had said down by the Quay as they waited for Ident to show up, in what had been to Leith little more than aimless chit-chat at the time. “There was a third person at the scene, a female, who also didn’t have a working phone, right?”

  Torr checked his notes and Urbanski scanned his report. Neither found mention of a third passerby without a phone. She must have been one of the “other people” who had shown up after, Leith thought, and told Urbanski to carry on.

  “Two cruisers, fire, and ambulance show up,” Urbanski said. “Gilmartin gives his statement to the first responders, which is where I got the bulk of this info from. It’s here in the file for your perusal.”

  Leith nodded. “I’m still mind-boggled that neither man had a working phone. Especially Craig, a police officer. His phone is his lifeline, and he should know that.”

  “That’s what I told him,” Torr said. “His excuse was a drained battery. He’d spent time outside while in Whistler, and cold must have drained the battery, and he couldn’t find his charging cable. As for the other guy, who knows? Maybe he’s a luddite.”

  “Hey, dumbasses,” JD said, “Mystery Man took off instead of flagging down cars, Craig says, so I’d bet he’s the one who made the 911 call without leaving his name. So even if he had a cell on him, he had some reason for not using it. Didn’t want to be tracked down, did he?”

  “Good bet,” Leith agreed. He invited discussion about the big question right now: were the car crash, Mystery Man, and either shooting related at all, or were they discrete occurrences? Was the afternoon drive-by shooting a first attempt, with a more successful follow-up, or another coincidence, just one supremely rotten day in the young constable’s life?

  The discussion was as fruitless as he expected. Winding down, he handed out tasks. Paley and Torr would try to track down the man in the steel-grey car, who may or may not have made the 911 call from the pay phone in Horseshoe Bay at 12:16 a.m.

  Leith gave Urbanski the task of checking for stolen white vans and re-canvassing the neighbourhood for witnesses. JD would interview everyone at the Whistler party Gilmartin had left that night, see if there had been any interesting interactions, disagreements, rivalries.

  “Questioning party animals,” JD said. “Just about my favourite thing in the world to do.”

  With the team dispersed, Leith was left with a difficult task. He went to see Mike Bosko and told him of his own bad handling of the situation. Gilmartin had been shot at as he ambled down to the Quay, and rather than take any of the many precautions he should have, Leith had blithely packed the boy off home with only the briefest word to Ken Poole about the drive-by shooting.

  “You know what they say,” Bosko said, cleaning his glasses with a small cloth. Without glasses he looked bare, younger than his forty-two years. Even vulnerable.

  “Yes, I know,” Leith said. “Hindsight. It’s no excuse in this case. It wasn’t a high shot. It was meant to hit the target in the head or chest. If Craig hadn’t ducked —”

  “Now, look …” Bosko said. Eyeglasses back on, he was in control of the world again, a hand flat on the desk as if to keep something from flying away. “I could tell you a few stories about my own lack of foresight. We’ll talk about it sometime. Right now it’s just getting in the way of moving forward. Right?”

  Leith agreed that moving forward was more important than regret. “I’m heading back to Gilmartin’s house with Raj and Kenny. Get them to run through their actions, see if they moved anything, forgot anything. Also I need to get Sophie into the house, have her do a walk-through. If something’s missing or out of place, hopefully she’ll spot it.”

  Bosko nodded. “Good. I’ll look forward to your report.”

  Leith got on with it. He picked up JD and returned to the Cape Cod house on Osborne, with its bloodstains and crime-scene tape. As JD remarked en route, the upside was that a professional would have left a corpse behind, and whoever had done this had not — quite. “Which means they’re new at this, which means they’ll have left a trail, which means we’ll get ’em,” she said with fierce certainty. “No sweat.”

  Eight

  SHOT IN THE DARK

  RAJ SATTAR AND KEN POOLE arrived to look over the scene with Leith and JD. Neither man believed he had shifted the furniture or impacted the scene in any way, aside from administering first aid to the victim. Sattar was adamant. Poole seemed less so, but he agreed: nothing touched, nothing moved.

  They were now gone, and Sophie was on her way over to go through the same exercise, with the additional task of touring the house to see if she could detect anything missing, added, rearranged, or simply odd.

  While they waited for Sophie to arrive, Leith and JD stood in the living room, looking down the broad hallway where Gilmartin had fallen. They looked at the bloodstains and evidence markers and tried to imagine what had taken place that night. It seemed clear enough that Gilmartin had been ambushed. The forensic report was still pending, the one that would give bullet trajectory and, hopefully, point of firing. Until then it was a lot of guesswork. Possibly the attacker had come to the door with a ruse, rang the bell. Maybe he was let in or maybe he had barged in, and Gilmartin, defenceless, saw the gun and turned to run.

  If so, he didn’t make it far.

  Leith looked at the bulky sweater Gilmartin had been wearing last evening, when they had gone together to look at the pockmark on the concrete wall down by the Quay. The garment seemed to have been tossed haphazardly at a standing coat rack in the foyer, and now hung crooked and forlorn. He looked at the foyer’s ceiling fixture. “The bulb’s missing. Maybe the shooter got here ahead of Gilmartin and removed the light to create a diversion?”

  JD looked doubtful. “Why would he remove it? He could just twist it, break the connection.”

  “Because he’s thorough. Wanted to be dead sure it wouldn’t reconnect.”

  “Then where is it? I don’t see a bulb lying around. So he took it with him? Seems kind of unlikely, carrying around a light bulb. Why not just toss it aside? Fear of leaving fingerprints behind, you’re thinking? Get real. Even a newbie assassin would be wearing gloves.”

  “You know, I resent your habit of second-guessing me.”

  Worse was her habit of second-guessing him correctly. All the same, he followed up with the light bulb theory, and imagined the man with the gun sitting in the dark. Somewhere in that nook, possibly. He imagined a flashlight beam flicking on, aimed at the victim, disorienting him, putting the target clearly in the shooter’s sights. Aim, and pow. “Wasn’t much of a hit man, though,” he said, echoing JD’s earlier remark. “To leave him alive.”

  JD looked at the doorway and at the place where Gilmartin had been found sprawled. “If you’re right, and the ambusher was waiting inside, then Ken Poole would be dead, too, if he had followed Gilmartin in. Then we’d have two bodies to bury instead of one.”

  Leith reminded her that Craig Gilmartin wasn’t a body yet, though even as he said it, he knew it was just a matter of time. The last report from the hospital had been grim.

  JD, who outranked Leith when it came to pessimism, said nothing.

  “At least Bosko seems to think there’s a chance he’ll pull through,” Leith told her.

  “You don’t sound like you believe him.”

  “Bosko’s probably the smartest guy I know, but …” He lowered his voice, as if the walls had ears. “Have you noticed how all his guesses end up wrong?”

  JD gave him one of her rare, slight grins.

  Leith looked glumly toward the front door. “As for Kenny Poole and whether he’d have been killed, too, that depends. He had his Kevlar on, but if the shooter had a semi-auto, no guarantees. But at least he’d have returned fire. I should have laid it out for Ken, JD. I should have sent him in. It would have been a different story.”

  “You rea
lly want to blame yourself for all this, don’t you?” JD exclaimed. “Hey, I know what to get you for Christmas. A hair shirt. You’re a size forty-six, I’m guessing.”

  Leith wondered if Kenny Poole, a normally chummy uniformed cop in his fifties who had shepherded dozens of rookies through their baby steps, including Craig Gilmartin, felt as guilty as he did. Kenny could have taken the initiative, after all. Could have decided to check out the house as a precaution.

  Make that two hair shirts.

  He continued to cast his eyes about, searching for something to get a grip on. Markers on the floor showed where Gilmartin had landed and where he had moved or been moved to. The bloodstain pattern analyst had been and gone. Her analysis would soon paint a fuller story, but for now, the drag marks were whispering their tale, Gilmartin’s attempt to crawl down the corridor toward the rear of the house.

  JD was studying the empty ceiling-light socket in the foyer. “If he was shot in the dark, the killer must have known the place pretty good, right? Must have known Gilmartin enough to recognize him in the dark, too.”

  Leith gave her his flashlight theory.

  “Or that,” she agreed. “Creepy.”

  Where did the assassin wait? Leith wondered. On that boot-removal bench next to the door, cradling his .45, the calibre the bullet had turned out to be? Lights out, the killer just sitting there, waiting. It did smack of a hit man, in a way, except for the, well, frankly, poor shot, and moreover the lack of a finishing-off bullet. So who stood to gain? The parents, who had some insurance policies on the kid? Bosko had interviewed them and didn’t think they had a place up on the board. Their love for their son and barely contained grief knocked them right off the suspect list, was how Bosko put it.

  Having met them himself, Leith agreed — the parents were not behind this. Craig seemed like a grounded young man, and grounded young men usually come from loving homes. Maybe Sophie had done it after all. Shot him, departed, got rid of the gun, came back and made the call, crying onion tears.

  Except no way were those onion tears he’d seen spurting from her eyes. And that hyperventilation was real. Regret was another possibility, of course. Or madness.

  As he considered and reconsidered Sophie, the girl herself arrived with an escort, Constable Lil Hart. Sophie didn’t disintegrate at having to revisit the scene, as Leith had feared she would. Her eyes were red and puffy, but she had pulled herself together, was even smiling. “They say there’s a chance he’ll live,” she reported.

  She had placed a brighter inflection on the word chance than Leith had.

  Seemed she described what she saw when she had come in that night. It was dark, and she had made her way toward the living room carefully, calling out Craig’s name. Didn’t see him till she was midway across the room, saw him lying at the entrance to the hallway. Screamed.

  “Why didn’t you turn on the hall light when you stepped inside?” Leith asked, testing her.

  She gazed at him, transitioning from her godawful memories to his trite question. “Oh, there is no hall light,” she said sadly. “He meant to put one in, but he’s incredibly lazy.”

  There. Either a mystery solved or an amazingly cool liar.

  She went with Leith and JD around the house, looking for discrepancies. In the master bedroom an Ident officer stood with graph paper and an electronic measuring device, setting the dimensions of the room to paper. The room was a riot of clothes and magazines, books and dirty dishes. The Ident man glanced at Leith. “It’s not been tossed, if that’s what you’re thinking. Just a real fuckin’ mess.” Too late, he saw Sophie, and his grimace mirrored Leith’s. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” Sophie said, staring around at the mess. “I’ve said the same thing myself.”

  Leith looked at the large abstract painting that covered one wall — scribbles of dark blue and crimson with speckles of gold.

  “Craig did that,” Sophie said. “He’s quite talented.”

  Leith nodded. “I’ve seen his studio.” And the easel with the work-in-progress that might never be completed. “He’s good.”

  The rest of the house showcased Gilmartin’s creative spirit in haphazard fashion. By the end of their walk-through, Sophie had found nothing missing and nothing amiss, and Leith was no wiser about what had happened.

  Sophie left with her escort, and Leith and JD stood on the porch, watching her go.

  “She’s definitely off my list,” Leith said.

  “Hmm,” JD said.

  He frowned at her. “What d’you mean, hmm?”

  “I’m just not so sure now.”

  “Seriously?”

  She sighed. “No, not seriously. I just don’t like empty lists.”

  Leith got it. An empty list was a super bad start to their first forty-eight.

  Nine

  THE MAN WITH FLIES

  THE DAY’S ASSIGNMENT took Dion out in the field and onto a boat with Corporal Chris Wallace, investigating a spousal assault in Deep Cove. The inlet air glancing off the yacht’s deck was sharp and cold, but every so often the sun would find a hole in the cloud cover and come beating down, warming Dion’s head and shoulders. He listed injuries and loss of property as relayed to him by Wallace, who was crouched down beside the victim, a man in his late eighties who whispered his complaints as he lay on his deck recliner. The worst injury seemed to be an abrasion on the forehead, and the biggest loss was a lobster — from Safeway, not cheap — that had bounced off the victim’s head and fallen into the waves.

  Wallace was nearly as old as the interviewee. Decrepit. He’ll probably need help uncrouching, Dion thought. He yawned. His iPhone buzzed. He excused himself from the interview and walked along the deck toward the boat’s stern, to talk out of the wind. A minute later he returned to tell Wallace of the latest North Shore crisis. “Sir, we’ve got a girl in a tree.”

  “A cat?” Wallace said. He had managed to straighten up on his own, gripping the railing and glaring at Dion. Not really a glare, but his default expression.

  “A girl.”

  “In a tree?”

  “She won’t come down.”

  “They should call the fire brigade.”

  “The firefighters can’t get to her. She’s in the forest. At Maplewood. They’re carrying ladders in, but they want a police presence.”

  “It’s not a police matter, is it?”

  “It might be.”

  “Surely there’s a patrol close by who can take it.”

  Wallace was in one of his moods, brittle, shell-shocked, unyielding. Dion wasn’t eager to attend the girl-in-the-tree emergency, but he did look forward to leaving the yacht behind. “Everyone’s pretty much occupied with the shooting,” he said. “We’re done here, just about, so we might swing by. It’s on our way. Couldn’t hurt.”

  The man Wallace was interviewing had fallen asleep in his deck chair while they argued. He wore a winterized jogging outfit and a lap blanket. His wounds were neatly bandaged, his wife had been taken away for questioning, and the only thing endangering his life right now was age.

  Wallace woke the victim to advise him of their departure and they returned to the car. Dion drove out of the marina and southbound on the Dollarton, to the parking lot of the Maplewood Conservation Area, past the gates and onto the service road. An ambulance sat with two paramedics on standby, and a fire truck, now empty, had squeezed in the small turnabout at the end of the road. Dion pulled his unmarked sedan in behind it. Two children were trying to climb the sides of the fire truck. Wallace shouted at them to get off while Dion radioed for directions to the girl-in-the-tree’s location. He was told to head over the footbridge and take the upper trail toward the bigger of the two ponds. Did he know the way? He did. It wasn’t a huge forest reserve, but getting there would take a few minutes. Orange pylons set out by the crew would tell him where to go from that point.

  He passed the news on to an unexcited Wallace, and added, “I can go alone, if you want. You can wait in the car. It�
�s not far, but your shoes —”

  “No. Let’s get this over with.”

  They walked down the entrance pathway, strait waters glittering at its end. A footbridge took them onto the pleasant, earthy trail leading through the woods, still green in December, and already Wallace was complaining. “Though why they need us … we can’t climb trees any better than them. Firefighters climb. Why can’t they get her?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re not sure why she climbed the tree. It struck them as odd. They thought we might be needed.”

  Maplewood was a micro refuge from the city, locally famous for its wildness. The park sat ocean side, fringed with narrow beaches and thronged with birds in summer. Even in the chill, Dion could see birds flitting about. The path began to incline, and he spotted water through the trees, the flash and flicker of the Burrard Inlet, which made him think of his ex-girlfriend, Kate, and the time they had come here to explore and ended up bushwhacking down to canoodle on a patch of sand amongst the rocks.

  Seemed like a lifetime ago. He stopped and watched Wallace catching up, the man looking older than his age as he climbed the path, looking sucked dry, like a strong gust might send him airborne.

  “I can see a pylon,” Dion told him.

  They carried on, and the hint of orange ahead became the marker he was looking for. He and Wallace left the trail and made their way to a small gathering: three firefighters in insulated pants and jackets, the fire chief, and finally a middle-aged civilian couple with worried faces. A ladder stood propped against a rangy tree, a deciduous of some kind bristling with thin branches — not an easy climb, by the looks of it.

  Dion peered up into the shadows of the tree, but could see no girl through the foliage. Wallace peered too, shading his eyes and saying something about his damned neck.

  “Where is she?” Dion asked. “I don’t see her up there.”

  A firefighter pointed. “She just went higher. Soon as we put the ladder up, she started climbing.”

  Dion saw her now. He looked around. The fire people were telling Wallace that the civilians here were the girl’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Trask. Mrs. Trask looked wind-whipped and frightened. She edged closer to the group and said, “She’s special needs, you know. Fifteen, but mental development of a four-year-old. We’re her foster parents. I don’t know what’s gotten into her. She’s never done this before.”