All right. Don’t panic. (She put her hands on her head, breathed carefully, and tried to concentrate.) So someone bust the kid out. (Someone who smelled of bad fish, or was she hallucinating that too?)
A couple of implications were beginning to present themselves as she returned to the office and reached for the radio. They didn’t make her feel good. The little community of Alice, British Columbia, might be the back end of nowhere, but it was her first proper assignment, the first place where she’d be doing more than trailing along behind a senior partner, and it was only her second week in the job. The staff sergeant hadn’t been all that welcoming in the first place.
She buzzed Jonas.
“Goose?”
“Jonas. Hey. Where are you?”
“Hardy. Cruising. Got a problem?”
She couldn’t tell him. She knew how stupidly easy it was to lose the guys’ respect. One teenager, plus maybe an accomplice, who couldn’t have had more than a few minutes’ start on her; how hard could it be to deal with? She was absolutely certain she hadn’t heard the sound of a vehicle, not even in the few seconds she was in Traders getting her coffee. One of the strangest things about moving to a microscopic dot on the landscape like Alice was the way everyone in town could hear everything else, all the time, because nothing made any noise, except (sometimes) the rain and (always) the nonstop one-note barking of the crows.
“Maybe. Can you do something for me?”
“Thought you’d never ask, man.”
“This might be important. I need you to get back here. Check out the road as you come over.”
“What?”
“Are you near Thirty?”
“Only a minute or two if I step on it. Hey, it’s siren time!”
“No siren. Just come over. And stop anyone you see coming the other way. Or keep an eye out for someone walking. You’ll know who if you see them.”
“What’s up?”
“I’ll explain when you get here. Might be nothing.”
“You gotta give me more than that.”
Perhaps. But she told herself not to be ridiculous. She could handle it, especially if she didn’t waste time on the radio. They couldn’t have gone far.
• • •
“Ohhh, man.”
Constable Jonas Paul did everything slowly, or, as he liked to put it, unhurriedly. He rolled his shoulders, leaned into the empty cell, and repeated his rueful drawl, stretching it out to make it convey his fateful certainty that something bad was in the offing: “Ohhh, maaan.”
It was widely known that the Mounties lowered their admission standards for First Nations applicants. Goose had fumed when she’d arrived at the Hardy detachment and immediately been assigned to partner Jonas at the outpost in Alice, fifty kilometers away. The one woman and the one native, shoved out to the tiny mill town on the other side of the island where there was nothing to do but tell kids to turn their music down and intervene in the occasional domestic: that was what it looked like. Alice didn’t even have its own bar for fights to break out in (and Goose dearly loved breaking up fights in bars). The mill workers took Highway 30 over the pass to Hardy to drink, and they were all so used to the twists of the mountain road by now—it was the only road in and out of town—that they could make it home safely no matter how far over the limit they were. By all accounts Fitzgerald had been a regular guy and a popular cop and she’d known it would be hard work persuading her detachment colleagues to accept her as his replacement, but she’d at least expected to be given a chance to show them what she could do, rather than being shunted off out of sight with the token native.
Jonas had dismantled her prejudices within a couple of days. He was a lot smarter than she was; he’d been to college. He didn’t talk about how he’d done at the Depot but it was obvious no one had had to make allowances for him. And although it took him three times as long as it took her to do anything—anything, from paperwork to getting out of a car to wiping his nose—he was the best community relations cop she’d ever seen.
“How’d she get out?”
“You think I know that?”
“Just thinking aloud, Goose. Thinking alo-u-ud.”
It had taken him twenty-five minutes to come across to Alice, during which time she’d driven twice around the town and knocked on every door within two blocks of the station. A couple of people had been working in their yards. No one had seen anyone walking anywhere, other than her: they’d all been wondering what she was doing running around like that. “Looked kinda like you lost something,” one walrus-whiskered old joker told her, chuckling as if it was funny. She was too embarrassed to say exactly what she’d lost. Jennifer Knox was still a hot potato. No one was even supposed to know she was being transferred through Hardy. That was why they’d decided to keep her overnight in Alice, out of everyone’s way. Jonas had driven her up that morning in an unmarked car. An unmarked car! They’d had to borrow one from down-island, where police work was presumably more subtle and exciting than up here at the end of the highway.
“Didn’t see a single driver on the road over. So I guess we can rule that out. Where’d she be going, anyway?”
“Search me.”
“Makes no sense. The only reason we’re shipping her off to the mainland in the first place is she got nowhere else to go. Man.”
“I should get on to Cope.”
“Ma-aan.” Jonas shook his head at the mere idea of that conversation.
“Would you mind starting a search before I call him? I don’t want anyone to be watching while he reams me out.”
Though, as it turned out, Staff Sergeant Cope was surprisingly terse on the radio. Dangerously terse, Goose thought, as she signed off, wiping her palms on her uniform pants. Perhaps it was a good thing she’d hardly unpacked yet. She tracked down Jonas and passed on the instruction to keep looking while they waited for Cope to arrive, not that either of them would have done any different anyway. Jonas had set up by the roadside at the entrance to town, right next to the wooden welcome to alice, b.c. sign with its leaping salmon. It was what she should have done right away, she saw. The steep slope that rose out of the inlet came closest to the shore here, effectively making a bottleneck at the mouth of the town. The road lifted a little to squeeze over the slope, so you could sit on top of the rise and see pretty much the whole of Alice ahead, a tidy cleared space strung along the bottom of the slope at the edge of the water. The fumes and heavy workings of the mill were discreetly out of sight, a couple of kilometers farther up the inlet, but there was no need to watch in that direction. The mill was the very end of the road and, as befitted an industrial site, had its own security. The only other way out of town was by water, but Jonas had that covered too. His spot was high enough to overlook the breadth of the inlet.
“Only possibility is she holed up in someone’s house. In which case all we do is wait. Neighbors’ll know about it soon enough. You know how it is.”
“Want me to knock on some more doors?”
“Nah. Best if I do it. Gotta give them a bit of time, though.”
Only Jonas Paul could convince you that sitting in a patrol car doing nothing was the best way to handle a missing person investigation, Goose thought. Her own policing gifts were very different, essentially amounting to the advantage of surprise: the surprise being that someone with her face and general demeanor should have her capacity for enthusiastic and effective violence. She recognized that her ability to rough people up at the drop of a hat was, in the immediate circumstances, entirely useless. She sighed and got into the car next to Jonas.
“Cope’s on his way.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m in it deep, aren’t I?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe I’ll blame you.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I need to think of a story.” She held her head be
tween her hands. “I don’t get it. I don’t see what could have happened. There was that . . .”
“Hmm?”
That smell. But it was gone by the time Jonas had arrived, and now it sounded stupid. The officer noted a powerful odor of marine decay. No source for this odor was observed. Mentioning it wasn’t going to help. Nothing was going to help except finding Jennifer Knox, who’d briefly been the most famous person on Vancouver Island, if not in the whole of the mighty province of British Columbia, at least until the mysterious virus stuff had started creeping into Canada’s virtual space and the news cycle had moved on.
“Jonas?”
“Hmm?”
“When you were driving her up this morning. Did she . . . you know.” Jonas Paul wasn’t the type to finish your sentences for you, either. It was hard enough work waiting for him to finish his own. “Say anything?”
He just chuckled.
“I went to say hi. In the cell.”
“That’s good. Sure you didn’t invite her out for a walk?”
She thought about punching him and found that, untypically, she wasn’t in the mood for it.
“You know what it’s like? It’s like a cat. You ever have a cat?”
“No.” His mellow drawl stretched the syllable into a little song. “Never wanted to share the fish.”
“I grew up with cats. If you stare at one for long enough, and it’s staring back, it gets weird. I mean, you can see it looking at you, but there’s like no one there, you know? It’s just a cat. Nothing behind the eyes. She was kinda like that. Looking right at me, but it didn’t matter what I was saying.”
“I bet you get that a lot.”
“I’m serious, Jonas.”
He did his slow-motion shrug, too lazy to qualify as a stretch; it reminded Goose of the old Chinese guys doing tai chi in the park in Victoria. “Messed-up kid,” he said.
She watched the crows hopping from pole to pole, quacking at one another. It was like they had Tourette’s. They hopped around and spat out monosyllabic gargles every few seconds. Hop, merde! Hop, fuck! Hop, pute!
“Do you think she did it?”
“Did what?”
“Killed her brother. Tossed him down the stairs.”
“Man. Who knows.”
“She does. Maybe the mother too. The younger kid was in the house, right? He’s got to know something.”
Jonas was exhaling, a slow deep puff like his mouth was a blowhole. “Cody don’t talk sense, and nor does the mom after six p.m. I’ve known that family a little while. Might as well ask the baby. Sometimes you just got to let things go.”
“Seems a shame she’s going to end up in an institution. I’ve met some of the kids who go to those places.”
“Just one of those things.” Tho-ose: the word was lengthened out to embrace the whole universe of happenstance Jonas was content to leave uninvestigated.
“I don’t know. She wasn’t much like your usual native teenager in a cell. No offense.”
“So, Goose, here’s the thing.” He turned to look at her, his broad face showing no more animation than usual; he always seemed half asleep. “Don’t talk it up too much with Cope, okay? He’s not that wild about the whole business. I think as far as the sarge’s concerned, it’s”—he made a smoothing motion—“case closed.” His hand swiped back through the air, brushing away doubts. “We get her over to the mainland, we’re done.”
“If we can find her.”
“I’ll find her,” he said peaceably, and made it sound so inevitable that she felt better at once.
• • •
Staff Sergeant Cope left Jonas to begin the process of asking around town while he called Goose into the station. She braced herself for a bawling. At first, though, he hardly said anything at all. He looked at the cell, and the door, and (she handed them to him) the keys. He shone a flashlight at them as if she’d missed something. He asked all the obvious questions, leaving long, thoughtful gaps between them. He rubbed his bald patch. She stood very straight with her hands behind her back and called him “sir” in every sentence; right from when she’d arrived at the detachment she’d pegged him for the type who liked old-fashioned discipline. When he’d finished doing all the obvious things he went and stood in the entrance to the station, blocking the door, squinting up at the perpetually low sky.
“I take full responsibility, sir.” She addressed his pudgy back.
“Damn straight.”
“Sir?”
“Damn straight you do.”
That was when she began to suspect things weren’t going as well as she’d dared to think.
“I can find her, sir. Someone must have seen the accomplice. Jonas—”
“There’s no accomplice.”
From behind, he looked remarkably like a tackle bag. She gripped her hands more firmly behind her back and told herself to stay calm. “With respect—”
“Just shut up, Maculloch.” The bag rearranged itself at the top end: a sigh. He came back in and closed the door. “That kid hasn’t got any friends. You think she’d be here if she had anyone? There’s no damn accomplice. I wish there was. They could have her. Anyone else can have her, far as I’m concerned. Long as I never have to deal with that kid ever again.” His radio coughed at him; he snatched it and yelled, “Not now!” Only then did she see he was turning red around the collar.
“We can find her soon, sir. Jonas’ll get a lead. Once we do I promise she won’t go out of my sight until I hand her over to the officers in Prince Rupe.”
Cope sat on the edge of a desk. It creaked under the weight.
“You know what? I hope we don’t.”
This felt like the beginning of the bawling at last, so she simply stood to attention, fixing her eyes on a spot on the wall, which happened to be the knot of the prime minister’s tie in the standard-issue photo.
“I hope to God she’s just gone. Ran off into the woods and a bear ate her. That’d be damn perfect. No more Jennifer Knox. How sweet that sounds. You have no damn idea how much I’m dealing with already today.”
The very worst thing about being posted up here was having no one to take things out on anymore. Back down in Victoria there’d been full-contact training twice a week, an hour of dumping bigger girls on their asses, or, if she was lucky, guys. The best she’d been able to find in Hardy was a martial arts studio in an empty room above a supermarket, and the only other people who went were kids; too easy. Maybe she’d take the kayak out later, she thought, and smack the water till she couldn’t see for sweat.
“All I want from my officers is that they don’t screw up too bad. That’s it. I don’t expect anything complicated. Fitzgerald’s a dumbass, but that was okay. He showed up, he drove around, he didn’t mess up. That was fine. That was good. He may be a dumbass, but he didn’t leave cells unlocked.”
“Sir—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
There was a long silence. She contemplated the shiny purple hideousness of the prime minister’s tie.
“Am I dismissed, sir?”
The desk squealed again as Staff Sergeant Cope levered himself off it. “Here’s what you’re going to do.” He tried to stare authoritatively, but the effect was weakened by the obvious fact that he was minding his next words. His unspoken, forbidden thought was as plain as his uniform: Damn female officers. Why’d they have to send me a damn female. If she could get him to say that aloud it would be him who got demoted, not her, but she knew he wouldn’t, and she hated all that minority crap anyway. “You get the kid. I mean you.” He stabbed a finger at her, stopping just short of touching. “You’ve got”—he looked at his watch to make the point, though there was a big clock on the wall right behind her—“twenty-nine hours till the ferry goes. And Jonas doesn’t do any extra time today. I’ll go tell him that myself, right now.”
She stayed at attention, waiting for the rest.
Cope squinted at her. “Something not clear?”
She was careful to repress a dubious frown. “Just me, sir?”
“Just you. You screwed up, you fix it. And don’t go shouting about what you’re doing either, you understand me? Last thing I want is the Jennifer Knox circus coming back to town. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that’s my number one priority.”
She had to look at him now, to be certain she was understanding him correctly. “You don’t want me to submit a report?”
“No, Maculloch, I don’t want you to submit a damn report. I’m not reopening this case, and neither are you. You’re just going to . . .” He tried to do an authoritative version of a vague gesture; the overall effect wasn’t impressive. “Tidy it up.”
“What if we . . . What if I don’t?”
“Don’t what?”
“What if I don’t find her, sir?”
“Wouldn’t that be great?” She thought it best not to say anything. She could see him gathering a head of steam again. He hooked his thumbs in his belt. “You know what this is? It’s what they call a win-win situation. If you find her you find her, if you don’t then we all pray she’s gone for good, and if someone asks what happened there’s only one person whose fault it is.” The redness reached his cheeks. “That’s you, Maculloch. In case you’re wondering.” His radio gargled again. “What is it?”
A voice Goose recognized as belonging to one of the Hardy station support staff began something about a tree down on the road. He cut it off. “Give me a minute. I’m almost done here.” She met his eye, imagining the tackle: low and hard, the air oofing out of the bag. Perhaps he saw something of it; he took a step back and fiddled with his collar.
“Okay. Dismissed. You can start hunting around. Quietly, you understand? Think of it as a favor. No one else has to know what you did.”
She shifted on her feet. “They’ll be expecting her up in George.”
He glared. “Then maybe you’d better track her down. ’Cause I’m damn well not going to, nor are any of my other officers. We’ve got better things to do than cover your ass.” He opened the door again. Pute, a crow snapped from the roof. “Nothing personal.” He paused in the doorway. “You got anything else you want to say?”
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