Hit and Run (10 page)

“Does he? Is he home now? Does he have any idea where you are?”

I didn't answer.

“He's not home a lot of nights, is he?”

“I'm not a kid.”

“You're a minor. A minor in trouble with the law. A judge will want to know that a boy like you is being properly supervised.”

“What do you mean, a boy like me?”

“A boy who steals and covers up for his friends.”

That did it. I started to climb down the slide. Riel blocked my way.

“That's what the judge is going to see, Mike. That, and a guardian who doesn't act much better. The judge could decide that you need a little closer supervision.”

“That won't happen!”

“Won't it? You sure about that?”

“You're just trying to scare me.”

Riel shook his head slowly. “Maybe you should be scared,” he said. “You barely passed any of your subjects last year, and you're not off to a very good start this year. You got yourself arrested, and you've lost the trust of a man who has always considered himself your friend.”

He meant Mr. Scorza.

“You really want to end up like your Uncle Billy, Mike? You think that's what your mother would have wanted for you?”

“Shut up about her!” I yelled the words at him. You should have seen the stunned look on his face. “You talk about my mother like you knew her. But you didn't know her. And you didn't care about her. You didn't even bother to find out who killed her.”

He stepped back a pace to let me down.

“We investigated the case thoroughly,” he said.

“You gave up on it, you mean.”

Riel stiffened. I guess he didn't like being called a quitter.

“Sometimes things don't work out the way you hope,” he said.

“You mean, sometimes it's just not important enough to care about.”

He looked at me blankly.

“Sure, deny it,” I said. “But a couple of weeks after my mother died, those rich old people up in Forest Hill were shot in their driveway. Every cop in the city was on that case for months. They didn't quit until the found the killers.” Billy had told me all about it. “And there was that girl who was murdered in High Park. The cops didn't give up on her, either. But then, her dad was the president of one of the big banks. But my mom gets run over and it's no big deal, right? Because my mom wasn't rich and she didn't have any big-deal relatives. Guess the cops don't care so much about nobodies.”

For a moment Riel was silent. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “I'm sorry if you think that's the way it happened. But it isn't.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Mike—”

But by then I had taken off. I was running across the park, away from him and the memory of my mother and the truth in what he had said. What would she have thought about the way my whole life was going?

I woke up in the middle of the night, bang, just like that.
You were seen with two other boys, but you won't tell the police who they are. That doesn't matter to the police, Mike. They aren't stupid.
Why had Riel told me that? What did he mean, That doesn't matter to the police? If it didn't matter, why had they pressed me for an answer?

It didn't matter because they weren't stupid.

I checked my clock. Three in the morning. Not the time to be calling anyone who didn't have his own phone line. Not the time to be waking up anyone's parents, either, especially not to say you had to talk to their son right now, it's an emergency.

I didn't sleep well, which made it easy for me to get up early. I skipped my shower, dressed, and went straight to Vin's house. When I got there, I hesitated. Should I knock on the door or just wait? There wasn't much chance he had left already—once in a blue moon Vin
got to school before me. His parents were probably still home, not that it was such a big deal. I was Vin's best friend. I was always knocking on his door. True, I didn't usually do it at quarter to eight in the morning. But, hey, I'd done stranger things.

I climbed the front steps and knocked. Vin answered. He didn't look happy to see me, and that didn't make me feel good. Then he looked past me and said, “I thought we were friends.”

What?

I watched his shoulders slump, then I turned and saw what he had seen. A cop car was parked at the end of his walk and two cops were getting out of it. Constables Carlson and Torelli.

“It wasn't me,” I said to Vin.

“Hey, Mike,” Constable Torelli said, smiling as he came up the walk. “How ya doin'?”

“I swear, Vin, it wasn't me.” I wanted to tell him I had come over to warn him, but the two cops were right behind me now, and Constable Carlson was asking Vin if his mother or father was home.

Constable Torelli slapped me on the back. “Shouldn't you be running along to school?” he said.

I went to school because, to be honest, I was afraid not to. I hated to admit it even to myself, but the fact was, Riel had scared me. I thought about going to court. I thought
about the impression Billy would make, even supposing he cleaned himself up and maybe scrounged a jacket and tie from somewhere. He didn't have anything like that hanging in his closet. I thought about my dismal school record and how it would look if I started cutting classes now. So I went and I sat in history and math and science. I blew my saxophone in music and hit a lot of wrong notes. I didn't care. Vin didn't show up in school all day. I looked for Sal, but I didn't see him around, either.

“You okay?” a voice said.

I was sitting on the stairs that led up to the stage in the school auditorium. It seemed safe enough there. At least, it had been until I heard the voice and looked up and saw that it was Riel.

“Yeah, sure. I'm great,” I said. “Vin got busted.”

“First thing I would have done if I was Carlson would be ask around,” Riel said. “Ask the principal, ask the vice principals, maybe ask a few teachers—who does McGill hang around with? Who's he tight with? It's Police Work 101.”

“Maybe. But Vin thinks I gave him up.”

Riel sat down on the steps beside me. “Think it through for half a minute and it seems to me he doesn't have much to complain about. A, you didn't give him up, and, B, he was there, he participated.”

I hadn't expected him to understand, and he hadn't disappointed me.

“Did Carlson ask you?” I said. Riel used to be a cop. He knew Carlson. I was in his history class. Wouldn't
Carlson have asked him if he knew who I hung out with? Wasn't that Police Work 101, too? And wouldn't Riel have answered?

“Yeah,” Riel said. “He asked.”

“And?”

“I'm new around here, Mike,” Riel said. “There's—what?—fifteen hundred kids in this school? For someone as new to the job as me, this early in the year, it seems like they've all passed through my classroom at least once. It's hard to keep all the faces straight, let alone know who's hanging with who.” He sounded like he meant it. I wondered if Carlson had believed him. “Mike, I want to talk to you about something.”

“What?”

“Your mother.”

He looked even more serious than he usually did in class. I waited.

“You were just a kid the last time I saw you, but you're not a kid anymore,” he said. “I want to explain something to you.”

He waited a moment and then went on. “I was in charge of investigating the accident,” he said.

Tell me something I don't know.

“There's a standard procedure we follow in Traffic Services when there's been a hit-and-run.”

“Traffic Services? I thought you were Homicide,” I said.

“I transferred,” he said. “Then I was in the Detective Office in Traffic Services.”

Traffic Services. It sounded like parking tickets and traffic jams—nothing important.

“The first thing we do in a case like this,” Riel said, “is try to locate any witnesses and see if they can give us a description of the suspect vehicle, or a description of the driver, or anyone else who might have been in the car or can tell us what direction it was traveling in. Then, the way it's supposed to work, whatever information we get, we pass along to the dispatcher and they alert patrol cars in the area.”

The way it's
supposed
to work—which meant that wasn't the way it had actually worked.

“Problem number one,” Riel said, “nobody saw anything. The guy who called it in, he lived right across from where it happened. He said he heard something, but what he heard didn't lead him to think that anything unusual had happened.” I noticed he didn't tell me what exactly the guy said he had heard. I didn't ask. I didn't think I could stand knowing what it was. “He only called us because when he went to the door to let his cat in, he saw something lying in the street.”

Something
. He meant
someone
. Mom.

“When we did a canvass of the neighborhood later, a couple of other people said they had heard something, but nothing that had alarmed them. They also told us that they hadn't heard any car brakes squeal. They hadn't heard anything that you'd associate with a traffic accident. Nobody saw the car, let alone the driver. No one reported any cars speeding away in the area around
the time it happened. None of the patrol cars in the area caught or even saw any speeders, either. So instead of starting out with a few useful leads, things that might have got us working on finding the person right away, we started with nothing.”

I wanted to hear what he was saying, but at the same time I didn't want to hear it. I also wanted to know something: “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I don't want you to think we did nothing.” He leaned forward a little, like the closer he got to me, the better the chances were that I'd believe him. “It wasn't that we didn't care,” he said. “It wasn't like that at all.”

I still didn't get it. Why did it matter to him what I thought?

“We cared. We always care.” He looked directly at me. “I'm sorry for how things turned out for you.”

Sure. Whatever.

“Next step was the Ident guys,” he said.

“Ident?”

“Forensic identification officers. The guys who come in and search the scene for evidence—you know, fingerprints, footprints, hair, and fibers. They document the crime scene and collect everything that might be useful. They checked for skid marks or tread marks that might show if the car had tried to stop suddenly or swerve out of the way—or if it hadn't. They didn't find any.”

“What does that mean?”

Riel shrugged. “It could mean that whoever was
driving didn't see anyone on the street. Maybe the driver was impaired, you know, maybe they'd been drinking or taking drugs. Maybe the driver fell asleep at the wheel. Then the Ident officers started looking for anything that might help them identify the suspect car. There would have been quite an impact when a vehicle made contact, even if it was only going at the posted speed, which on your street is twenty-five miles per hour. The vehicle itself would have sustained some damage—a broken headlight, maybe—when it hit something.”

That word again—
something
—when what he was talking about was my mother. Still, I guess he was trying to be nice, trying to spare my feelings by using some words instead of others.

“Sometimes it's the smallest things that can give us a clue. A piece of plastic from a headlight. Paint chips from the vehicle itself. Maybe the car drives through some mud that you can only find in a specific place and some of that mud gets transferred onto whatever the car hit. The Ident officers collected whatever they could and turned it all over to the forensic guys to see if they could help us narrow down the kind of car that was involved.”

“But they couldn't, right?”

“Actually, they could. The chemistry section at the Centre of Forensic Sciences did a paint analysis. The way it works, the layers of paint on vehicles are often used on just a few models that were produced during a specific period of time. The manufacturers keep pretty good records and have samples of all the paints they use.
They make those available to the CFS. Plus, the CFS has its own reference collection of paints. They were able to tell us that the car was a General Motors Impala and the year it was manufactured. We knew what color it was, too. Hunter green. From that, we could check on all the cars registered in the area, then in the city, that were the same model, year, and color.”

“And you didn't find anything, right?”

He sighed.

“We did a check on all the hunter green Impalas of the right age in the city—they were all accounted for, no damage, nothing. We put out an appeal to the public. We did a CrimeStoppers announcement asking anyone who had seen anything to come forward and tell us. Still nothing.” He shook his head. “It's pretty rare to get absolutely no information. Sometimes someone who knows someone who owns a car that's the same make and model as a car that's been involved in a hit-and-run will contact us—maybe the person has been acting strangely. Or maybe a neighbor noticed something, or the guy's girlfriend or ex-girlfriend.