“If there was, she never told me.” A pause, and Pratima’s big, dark eyes glisten. “We think we can keep them safe if we order them what to do, if we control them. We think that if we keep them busy with sports, they can’t get into trouble. But we’re wrong.”
Suddenly I catch a glimpse of a little dark head peeping around the door. Ganesh. The six-year-old’s eyes are wide. He’s watching. Listening. Learning.
His mother spins around to see what I am looking at.
“Ganesh! Out!” She points. “Get out. How can you stand there listening like that?”
The child scurries away down the hall. I hear a door slam. Pratima slumps onto her daughter’s bed and drops her face into her hands. She starts to sob.
As Luke and I walk back through the biting wind to our unmarked cruiser, I feel watched. I glance back at the house. Upstairs in a lit dormer window there’s a small shadow. Ganesh again. Observing us detectives. I stare up at him and feel a bolt of sadness. What must the boy be thinking? What did he hear us say? What does he comprehend about the death of his big sister, and how will this forever change him?
I raise my hand to wave, but he vanishes. And I see Luke regarding me from the other side of the car. I lower my hand and climb into the driver’s seat. Without meeting Luke’s eyes, I put on my seat belt and start the engine. It begins to rain as I drive up the road that will take us to Amy Chan’s house. She’s the girl who reported seeing Leena on Devil’s Bridge around 2:00 a.m. on the morning of November 15.
“We got a call from the lab while you were upstairs,” Luke says. “The journal pages have been dried. The ink is legible. They’re sending copies over to the station.”
I nod. Tense. “Leena stole things,” I say. “Pratima feels the address and poetry books, the makeup, the locket—it all could have been ‘borrowed’ from other kids. She says Leena shoplifted as well.”
“So that’s what Pratima was holding back from her husband downstairs?”
“Looks like.” I turn onto the boulevard that leads up the mountain and into a high-end subdivision. We’re heading for the Smoke Bluffs—a granite ledge upon which the Chan house stands like a columned white wedding cake amid similarly ornate homes. “The locket is a common-enough trinket, right?” I glance at him. “Could belong to anyone.”
“We’ll bring the kids in for questioning again,” he says.
“Do you have any children?”
“Never really got around to it. Then our marriage collapsed, and it was too late.”
I throw him another glance. “You’re divorced?”
“Married to the job. Always have been.” He laughs. “It’s an occupational hazard, especially in homicide. My ex, understandably, grew tired of playing second fiddle. It was a fairly amicable separation in the end, as far as these things can be amicable.”
Rain suddenly begins to drum down heavily. An autumn monsoon. Water runs in a sheet down the steep road, and raindrops squiggle up my windshield as I drive, as though they are racing to rejoin each other in the sky. Normally the incessant fall monsoons are background noise in my life. Today it feels different. The raindrops splatter with an urgency, an insistence, as if they have something to say.
I think of loss. Of the everyday gaps left behind. Leena’s Nike shoe. Her bloodied sock. Her wet backpack and book of poems lost between rocks on the riverbank. The floating pages of a journal. A girl full of dreams. Gone. Her plans silenced.
“This Darsh Rai, do you know him?” Luke asks as I turn into the Chans’ street.
“Yeah. Good-looking guy. About twenty or twenty-one years old. Works at the pulp mill across the water. Never been in trouble with cops. From all accounts a nice person. Smooth dresser. Passion for restoring old sports cars. Girls flock around him.”
“We’ll need to speak to this gift-giving cousin Darsh.” Luke checks his watch. “We should pay him a visit this evening, after we’ve talked to Amy Chan. Before word gets around that Leena drowned.”
As with the rain, there’s a sense of urgency about Luke. I understand. In the early days of a homicide investigation, time is of the essence, and we’ve already lost plenty.
“There’s also something off with the father,” he says. “We need to check into his background.”
Surprise surges through me. “Jaswinder? Off?”
“Hmm.”
I turn into the Chan driveway. “Jaswinder might come across as authoritarian and a bit gruff, but he’s a good man, Luke. And he’s hurting. Hell, I don’t know what I’d do if someone did that to my kid. He works for the local transit company. Drives a regular bus route. Everyone on that route will tell you he’s a nice man. An honorable man.” I bring the vehicle to a stop, and I remember Leena’s bruises. “You can’t think he had something to do with his child’s death?”
He watches my face. Quietly he says, “You know them all, Rachel. Personally. All the players. They’re part of your community. It’s why Chief Doyle wanted me on the team, as an outside eye. It’s tough to be objective when you’ve lived in a town a long time. It’s the reason the RCMP transfers members to new communities every five years—so they don’t become too invested and lose objectivity. And while I’m not thinking Jaswinder Rai is in any way responsible, anything is always possible. Statistically most violence done to women is done by someone they know well. That includes male family members. And something is off there. I can feel it.”
TRINITY
NOW
Thursday, November 11. Present day.
Gio and I sit side by side at the small dining table in the motel room we’ve rented for the duration of our project. The motel stands near where the old Twin Falls police station used to be in 1997, in a more industrial part of town with a view of the granite walls of Chief Mountain. The Chief reminds me of El Capitan in Yosemite, and it’s well known among the international climbing fraternity. Chief Mountain is also the one constant in this story—it looms like an omniscient sentinel over the town. It’s seen everything over the years. But it stands silent. Watchful. Forbidding in the cold light.
The first time I ever saw a picture of the Chief was when I came across an old news photo of Clayton Jay Pelley, smiling in front of the thundering falls.
Gio and I are listening to—and mixing—audio we obtained with police diver Tom Tanaka. Tom now works with the Ontario Provincial Police. He moved east when he married a woman from Toronto.
TOM: After we floated Leena to the shore, Sergeant Rachel Walczak instructed us to go back underwater to see if we could find anything else.
TRINITY: Like what?
TOM: Like the military surplus jacket the victim had last been seen wearing. Or a weapon that could have been used to bludgeon the victim. The trauma to her face was extensive. When we rolled her body over . . . it . . . We were all shocked silent for a few moments.
TRINITY: Can you take us back and describe in detail what you saw underwater that November morning?
I smile to myself as I reach for a slice of pizza. I like the tension in Tom Tanaka’s voice. To be fair, I know it’s ghoulish to ask for a blow-by-blow description of finding a week-old corpse floating under murky water, but this is true crime. The spectacle—the theater of murder—is what listeners come for. And I am still beside myself with excitement that Clayton Pelley claims he is innocent of the crime. I chew on my mouthful of pizza, listening to Tom, thinking about how I felt seeing Clayton in person for the first time, how it changed something inside me as the story shifted focus.