Anarchy (2 page)

4

—
h
ell?”

Marie-Archange Séverine Gaucelin-Maculloch held the upturned collar of her uniform jacket over her nose and mouth and stared into the empty cell.

It wasn't the kind of space you could lose something in. It was just walls and floor and ceiling, fold-down bed and barred window. There was absolutely nothing else.

Specifically, and inexplicably, there was no teenage girl.

She looked in the other two cells, in case she'd somehow forgotten, over the course of the ten minutes it had taken her to walk to Traders and back, which one the girl had been locked in. Then she ran outside, not least because the smell of rotting fish inside the station was nigh on intolerable.

She looked up the street. (Houses, parked vehicles, the wet forest sloping up above the town, the miserable sky.) She looked down the street. (Houses, parked vehicles, boats on trailers, the landing, a wide stripe of flat water, the same wet forest and the same miserable sky.) She jogged a little way in each direction, to the corner, to check the cross-streets. It being the middle of the day, and early in March, and the town being little more than a dormitory at the best of times—which these weren't—no one was about.

She returned to the station, by now persuaded that the disappearance of the girl she'd been talking with (okay, talking at) just a few minutes earlier was obviously a hallucination. The smell had faded quite a bit, or maybe hadn't ever been as bad as she'd imagined. She went through to the back corridor where the row of cells was. The door to the third one was still open, and the space beyond still empty.

She must have left the cell door propped open. She'd wedged it open to talk to the kid, and then forgotten, and gone for her coffee without locking up, and the kid had just walked out. Right?

The only thing was, she didn't do things like that. Ever. Even at the age when all her friends were shambolic teenage airheads who could barely be trusted to put their shoes on the correct feet, she hadn't done things like that. Why else would it have felt so obvious that she was destined to join the police? (
Que tu es fiable, Séverine,
her mother always used to sigh, as if her reliability was a disappointment.) The truth was that she'd let the door slam shut. She had a clear picture of the sequence of events.
Nice to meet you,
she said, but was actually thinking,
Oh well, at least I tried
, and then she swung the door closed and put away the key. In fact, she specifically remembered hearing the clunk of the bolt and thinking,
Poor kid.
Imagine what that sounds like from the inside. Bang.

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 between 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.”