The Boy Must Die (31 page)

Just after three, a sudden rain shower pelted the car as Butch and Billy drove back to the station. Clive had invited the two of them to the lineup tomorrow. He also finished telling them the details of the beating of Mary Running Rabbit and Woody Keeler’s involvement.

In the station, Billy washed his face with cold water and asked Butch if the officer at the reception desk had any aspirin since his temple and his knee were aching. He also needed to get to a garden store before driving home. He went to the canteen, got a Coke, and swallowed the pills, hoping they would kick in.

Butch drove Billy to the garden store in the North Side Chinook mall. It was 3:30; the sky was clearing, and a soft wet breeze was lifting the plastic flags strung around the parking lot. Over the western horizon, bright sun cut through the black flat-bottomed rain clouds, and huge shafts of rain-soaked light swept southward towards the
Livingston range and the Montana border. Butch opened the gate to the compound where the trees and shrubs were on sale in the Wal-Mart warehouse garden centre.

“Anything wrong?” Butch asked.

“Yes. There is. I’m beginning to ache from head to toe. Wonder if I’m getting a fever?”

“I’ll take you home if you like.”

“I must be getting old, Butch. Letting a head wound get me down.”

“Take heart, buddy.”

“There’s a beauty.”

Billy stopped and pointed to a small fir tree in a stiff brown paper pot casing. He leaned down and inspected the needles, the size of the trunk, and the price tag. A store employee approached wearing a red Wal-Mart apron and a name tag with black letters spelling out the name of Slade.

“Afternoon, Uncle Butch.”

Butch grinned, and Billy stood up slowly, holding his hand on his forehead before focusing on the six-foot young man. His hair had been cut into a buzz with a Samurai-styled ponytail tied back with a swatch of black cloth.

“Billy, meet Slade, Lorraine’s kid brother.”

“Pleasure.” Slade shook Billy’s hand with a sudden tight grip. “You got another blue spruce anywhere, Slade?” Billy asked.

“Over here,” Slade replied. “Small this year. Not a lot of snowfall this past winter where they were harvested.”

Billy looked over the specimen. It was shorter and narrower than the first one he’d seen, but its needles had that blue-green glow that made the tree stand out against the snow of a plains winter. “I need a flowering crabapple, too,” Billy said.

Slade went into the storeroom at the end of the outdoor compound and returned a few minutes later carrying a spindly thing with roots wrapped in burlap sacking. “It’ll be a year before this one takes hold, but she’s a tough little plant,” Slade said.

Billy paid for the two spruces and the crabapple, and then he watched Slade and Butch carefully lay them on their sides in the trunk of the Pontiac.

When he got back into the passenger seat, Billy knew he should get straight home to the ranch and go to bed. That would be the reasonable and wise thing to do. But he told Butch to take him to the regional hospital first, to the emergency ward, where he’d had his wound tended. The nurse recognized Billy immediately and took a quick look at the wound.

“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s clean. Bathe it tonight and try not to sleep on that side.”

Billy then took the elevator up to the psychiatric ward and asked the station nurse if Blayne Morton had been checked out and registered in the detention home attached to the hospital. Butch stood beside him, reading over his shoulder the computer screen in front of the nurse. “Yes, sir,” she answered. “A Sergeant Dodd committed Mr. Morton this afternoon.” Billy thanked the nurse and then enquired after the woman Blayne had attacked. “She’s fine,” the nurse smiled in response. “Her nose wasn’t broken after all.”

Twenty minutes later, Butch was driving the Pontiac west along Highway 3.

Billy laid his head back.

“You feeling sick, buddy?”

“No, just meditating. Cooling down the brain.”

“When did you get into this Zen stuff?”

“About ten years ago. Found it’s a great way to relax and settle the mind.”

“You just hum and trouble goes away, eh?”

“Not quite. The
Rinzai
sect teaches us to think from different angles. There are always paradoxes — like ‘acting through not acting.’ Or like this Riegert case. We know much, yet we know nothing. I like
za-zen
— the meditation. The riddle or
koan
, as our teacher called it, is not an easy thing to analyze through reason.”

“So how do you untie such a riddle?”

“Well, meditation encourages intuitive insight. Flashes, if you like. What you’re after is a sudden illumination. Something your reason hadn’t considered before.”

Butch shook his head. He thought for a moment. “I’d have a hard time sitting still,” he admitted. “Meditation makes me restless.”

Billy closed his eyes. Butch drove down the concession road and over the Texas gate and parked by the side of the ranchhouse. Reaching into the back seat for his beat-up briefcase, he pulled from it a box of peanut brittle with his wife Lorraine’s initials on the homemade cover.

“Here’s a thank-you from Lorraine, for helping her out.”

Billy took the box of candy.

“You always drive around with one of these in your briefcase?”

“It doesn’t hurt to have a box with me,” Butch said with a smile. “Like now, for instance. Or when a lawyer asks me to come to his office in an official duty, takes me for a pricey lunch at the Lodge. I thank him with candy. It’s a touch no one expects from a gruff chief of police. I’m a small-town guy, Billy. I work with small-town people.”

“Thanks, Butch. Tell Lorraine she’s more than welcome. I haven’t had her brittle in years.”

“We got anything else on our agenda for tomorrow, other than the lineup with Clive and the horsemen?”

“Marilyn Black.”

“You’re not going to mess around with social services are you? They can be pretty territorial.”

“How much do you think she can tell me?”

“Maybe lots. Maybe zero. Sheree Lynn Bird is straight. At least that’s what I found out when I spoke to Miss Black last winter. Bird was downsized, the agency was cutting back. Zero.”

“We’re still left with a mutilated teenager who may or may not have been murdered. And we’re still not sure what happened to Darren’s clothes. I asked Johnson to go back to Satan House and do a thorough search of the basement and attic. She called and said she’d found nothing.”

The two men had a quick supper before Butch called Dodd to come to the ranch and pick him up. By the time Dodd and Butch had reached the end of the concession road and were on their way home, Billy was undressed and ready to climb into bed. He lay back carefully on the pillow, the wind gently whispering through the open window. Billy wondered when he and Butch would find the answer to the Riegert case. Almost a week had passed. The station was already busy with new cases — assault, petty theft — and Butch was eager to assign new duties to both Dodd and Johnson. Key evidence was not forthcoming. Billy worried, too, that his nemesis — insomnia — would cut into his life and make his days long and more anxious. He reached down and massaged his knee.
Pull yourself together.
From his side table, he took out a bottle of Tylenol and gulped back a couple of pills.

“You’ll find an answer,” he said out loud. But he wasn’t certain he believed himself.

By the time Billy had reached the
RCMP
barracks in Lethbridge, the domed clock tower showed 10:00 a.m. Billy crossed the parking lot, then took the cracking wooden stairs to the second floor, where the lineup chamber was located. It was a small, stuffy room with a long glass window separating it from an adjacent narrow room with a platform and a series of overhead spots. The spots lit up a gleaming white wall, and each standee held a number in front of his chest. Woody Keeler was number six; Perry Hill, looking pale and weak, held up number four. Lilian Running Rabbit was leaning against the wall of the lineup chamber, opposite the viewing window, when Billy silently opened the door and stepped in. Beside her stood a muscular but thin Peigan teenager wearing traditional pigtails and blue rodeo show boots. A sweat-stained Stetson dangled from his left hand. His right grasped Lilian’s small shoulders. Lilian was in her late forties, Billy guessed. She was wearing a buckskin vest with beadwork, a long plain grey skirt, and a red bandanna. Sunglasses, thick-rimmed and black, shaded her eyes.

“Inspector Yamamoto,” said Butch to the assembled group. Neither Lilian nor the teenager acknowledged his sudden presence. Clive Erdmann sat on a low stool, large sweat patches darkening his khaki shirt. Another man with traditional pigtails and a large scar over his upper lip moved from the wall. Clive asked the man to identify Woody Keeler and Perry Hill. The man hesitated. Clive spoke slowly but with a firm, loud voice.

“Steve, I’m asking you as a favour. I don’t hold you responsible for these two fellas’ wrongdoings. But you can help Lilian and Wilson by telling us the truth.”

The man pointed first to number six. “He’s Keeler.” Steve Little Plume straightened. Blackfoot words then came from his mouth in a half whisper. Lilian Running Rabbit nodded. Then Steve stepped back: “And number four, he’s Hill.”

“We are positive now, are we?” Clive said, his voice still firm yet betraying no annoyance or impatience.

Steve Little Plume wiped his mouth. Wilson Running Rabbit blurted, “It’s them for sure. The guy with number four, he has the Chevy.” A silence overtook the room.

Clive dismissed the group and asked for another man to come in. “What about you, Ned?” asked Clive.

Billy hadn’t noticed this other man, who had been waiting in the hall. He wore a new black Stetson, a pair of clean pressed jeans, and a green plaid shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons. Ned Wolds cleared his throat. His words came out clipped and short: “That one with the ponytail. Same one hitchin’ a ride I picked up on Number 3 Saturday morning.”

Half an hour later, Clive Erdmann had booked Woody Keeler and Perry Hill on assault charges. Butch took Billy to the
RCMP
barracks canteen and bought him a coffee and a toasted butter horn pastry. Hot white icing dribbled down Butch’s chin as he spoke: “Woody was talkative this morning. Yelling for legal counsel. Clive and I had a polite chat with him. He denied everything until Clive pulled the red baseball hat out of a paper bag and asked Keeler if he’d stuck the crow feather on it himself. Perry Hill admitted to the drunken fight, but he said he couldn’t remember too much of what went on in the bed of the truck. Maybe he had sex with Miss Mary, but he said he had to sleep off the whiskey for a while before driving into town. All of it a haze. Woody Keeler wasn’t too cooperative walking up to the lineup chamber. He’s now looking at another assault charge, for hitting
RCMP
personnel, dumb bastard. I also asked him how he enjoyed his visit to Sheree Lynn’s house last Saturday night. His break-and-enter spree. Woody denied it, of course, but he had on him, in his wallet, a credit card — defunct it turns out — belonging to Miss Bird. The night clerk itemizing Woody’s possessions had put it on the list.”

Billy drank his coffee and made some notes in his notebook. “So, for now, we in the city force can only hold Woody for break and enter. He and Perry Hill have solid alibis for Friday night. Which means we don’t need the blood sample on the blanket, and we’re back to square one. We don’t have a firm lead as to who was in that room with Darren.”

“Afraid so.”

Billy remained silent for a long time. “Okay,” he then said. “I’m going to take a ride over to the north side today and call on social services. We need to jump-start this case.”

Butch nodded in agreement. He paid at the register and walked beside Billy through the narrow halls of the
RCMP
building. Outside, he said, “I’ve got paper pushing to do, so we’ll check in with each other later.” Billy watched Butch stroll to his cruiser. Was it his own fatigue and frustration that made him aware of Butch’s stooped walk?

Driving east of city hall, Billy turned left onto Cutbill and headed north, passing under the railway shunt line that led to the loading docks of the giant grain elevator. It had been a long time since Billy had visited this section of town, once virgin prairie. In his childhood, he’d come here with Granpa Naughton and was shown the sacred burial tree of the last great Blood warrior, Red Crow. He noted now the strip malls and car lots.

The bright yellow social services building resembled a Lego construction. Marilyn Black, the assistant director of the Lethbridge family counselling unit, proved to be elusive and difficult to reach. Her secretary tried phoning her home number again. “It’s the same, it’s her answering machine. Let me try. . . .”

“Here’s my card,” Billy said. “Have her call me at headquarters. The sooner, the better.”

Billy spent the next few hours driving around suburban crescents and past domed hockey rinks and new public schools. He sat for a while by the edge of town and meditated, his eyes gazing deep into the vast flatness of the primal land. The case was slipping away from him, and it was little comfort to admit that his ruminations had brought no new revelations.

By 6:30, he was parked at a strip mall finishing a Coke. He tossed the empty into the garbage. The sun was still bright enough to turn the shade of the cottonwoods an inky black. He was restless and couldn’t concentrate any further, and he began to drive again, soon finding himself on Ashmead, pulling up in front of Satan House. Why? He suspected its very shape might reveal the truth. He locked his car door and walked over the dirt by the tumbled garage and into the backyard. The grass lay brown and uncut. The shingles on the sloping roof over the kitchen and the upper gables curled with age and decay.

Billy went to the back door and looked at the wooden steps, the door with its padlock, and the yellow police tape.
The boy entered here.
He stepped back. The garden was full of large stones. Wandering around the north side of the house, he watched the evening sun dapple the boughs of the fir with yellow. A light came on in a side room. A figure lifted and moved things. Sheree Lynn Bird. The light went out. Billy returned to the front yard. He ducked under the police tape, went up the steps to the screen door, rang the door chime, and waited. Sheree Lynn said, “Come in.” He pulled open the screen and discovered the inner door slightly ajar.