Anarchy (3 page)

“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?”

“I didn't leave the cell open, sir.”

His shoulders sagged. “You know what? I don't care.” He lowered his voice. “One way or another, she's not going to be my problem.”

“Sir.”

He raised sausagey fingers and ticked off two alternatives with a thumb. “You catch up with her, put her back in a cell, nothing happened, it's nobody's problem. Or she shows up somewhere, you were the duty officer, it's your problem. That's how it's going to be.”

“Sir.”

“Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Twenty-nine hours.”

“Plenty of time,” she said, suddenly tired of being dutiful. “Sir.”

He frowned. Her being spunky wasn't in the script. “Yeah,” he said, groping for a rejoinder he wasn't quick-witted enough to find. “Let's hope it is.” But he closed the door on her quickly, as if he wanted to escape before she could answer back.

• • •

No one had seen anything. If Alice had been a different kind of town she might have suspected that people were holding back, closing ranks against an outsider. But the conversations generally went like this:

“Good morning, ma'am. I'm sorry to trouble you at home. I'm Constable Maculloch with the RCMP. Would it be all right if I asked you a couple of questions?”

“Oh, you're the new Mountie!”

“That's right, ma'am. I—”

“Hey! How d'you like it up here?”

“It's good. Could—”

“Quiet, eh? Heh heh.”

“Sure is.”

“So they sent a girl up, eh? We never had a girl Mountie before. Can I offer you a coffee?”

“Thank you, ma'am, but I'm just making some inquiries—”

“Something going on? That makes a change. Heh heh. Sure about that coffee? I made hotcakes.”

“Can you tell me if you've been outside in the last hour, ma'am? Or even looking outside?”

“You mean like in the yard? What's going on? I didn't hear anything.”

“It's just a routine inquiry, ma'am.”

“Well, you certainly have nice manners. Bit of an accent there, eh? You sound like a French girl. Yeah, I probably looked outside once or twice. Think I saw the other side of the street. Heh heh.”

And so on. She gave up after a while and left the door-to-doors to Jonas, but by that time word had gotten out that the police were looking for someone and she couldn't get out of the patrol car without people zeroing in on her to ask about it. By the time she drove up to the mill the security guy had already heard there was a dangerous vagabond on the loose. He stared down the road, narrowed his eyes like Clint Eastwood, and nodded to himself as he reassured her. “Yep. If he comes this way I'll get him.” It was his hour of need. He tucked his shirt in accordingly.

She thought about the possibilities. It was less and less plausible that the kid was hiding out in town somewhere. But where else could she have gone? And this bugged her the more she thought about it, why?

“She ever try to escape before?”

“Man, I dunno. Not that I ever heard.”

“She wasn't in custody all along, was she? I heard they sent her home for a while, right? And there was that deal with the First Nations band, they were going to put her on an island or something. Like tribal justice.”

“Yeah. They tried that.” Jonas was back in the patrol car, at the bottleneck, coffee on the dashboard, windows rolled up to deter the curious.

“So it wasn't exactly maximum security.”

“Girl's never been convicted of anything.”

“What I'm saying is, if she wanted to run for it, she could have. Any time.”

“Nowhere to go, man. Nowhere to go.”

“That's what I mean. So where's she gone now?”

Jonas wasn't the sort to waste his carefully hoarded thinking energy on hypotheticals. He didn't even bother to shrug. Goose understood why he loved fishing so much. Waiting, waiting, until the fish took the bait all by itself.

“Cope kind of implied my job's on the line.”

“Aw. He can't do that. Can't be discharged for a mistake.”

“I didn't make a mistake.”

He cocked a finger and shot her with it. “You betcha.”

“I didn't, Jonas. You know it's not possible anyway. You know how security works in the back. I'd have had to hold the door open while she walked out. Like, After you.”

“Yep.”

“You think that's what I did?”

“Nope.”

A truck chugged up. Jonas flagged it down, asked a few questions, shot the breeze. The guy knew him, of course, and had heard there was a drug dealer from down-island on the run (of course). He'd kept his eyes open. He hadn't seen anything.

“She's got to have run off into the woods somewhere,” Goose said, as her colleague settled himself back into place behind the wheel. “Unless the accomplice got her in a car and got away. In which case they're long gone by now.”

“Possibilities.” Jonas sighed. He could have been agreeing or disagreeing.

“The thing is, she's got to end up somewhere, right? So where else can we look? Can I look.”

“I'm gonna help you out.”

“Cope told you not to, didn't he.”

“Hey.” Jonas was unperturbed. “Using my own initiative. It's good policing.”

“I appreciate it. I'm thinking you should stay here anyway, though. If anyone comes up with anything in town, they're going to tell you right away. I'm not getting anywhere by knocking on doors. I need to figure out where she's headed.”

Jonas waved at the view ahead, the twenty or so arcing and intersecting streets in their small bowl at the edge of the inlet, hemmed in by steep forested mountains. Stripes of cloud in varying grey lay snugly over them like a quilt. It was midafternoon, not that there was much of a change in the light above or the activity below. School was out; the brief afternoon migration of strollers to and from Alice Elementary was already complete. There were about twenty-four hours before the ferry that was supposed to carry her and Jennifer up to the remote north would steam out of Hardy.

“Big island,” he said.

“Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure thing.”

“Can you get me her file?”

“Oh, man.”

“Please, Jonas?”

“It's like two boxes.”

“I'm not asking you to carry it over Thirty by foot. Come on. You can stick it in the back of the car. How hard is that?”

“I dunno, Goose.”

“I'm serious. I can't go over to Hardy—Cope'll freak if he finds out. No one would bother you over there. Later on. Please? I want to see if there's something in there. Might give me a handle on what she's up to.”

“Goose. They had a hundred doctors and lawyers trying to figure out what she's up to. It was on TV.”

“Come on, Jonas. This could be my career, you know?”

“What, you're afraid they're gonna post you somewhere less important than this?”

“Could be worse. Could be Manitoba.”

He did his version of a chuckle, a slow soundless bobbing of the head.