Under the Bridge (24 page)

“Not Reena.”

“Obviously not. I don't even know if she's dead. How should I know?”

“Everybody else thinks she's floating in the Gorge.” Krista leaned forward and tried to present Kelly with the logical path of rage. “Kelly, it's understandable, it's comprehensible that an argument turns into an altercation. A physical altercation turns into a shit kicking. A shit kicking turns into a murder. That's the natural procedure of violence. It goes from verbal to physical to violent to death.”

“But I didn't do it! I'm telling you. The only reason I got brought in is Josephine wanted us to take credit for beating her up. Josephine thinks it's considered cool if you hurt people, and it's not. It makes you seem like a thug. Ladies don't do that kind of stuff.”

“People
don't do that kind of stuff. People don't
murder
a fourteen-year-old girl because she spread a few stories.
My God!”

“Exactly! Why would I? I had no reason to. It was Josephine who had a reason, not me.”

“Why would Josephine have a reason to beat the shit out of somebody? Just 'cause she said some stories?”

“Josephine's got problems. She says weird stuff all the time. She always said she wanted to, like, kill Reena. She said how cool it would be if you, like, chopped her up. I was like, ‘Josephine, you're sick.' I thought she was just kidding. Who knows?”

“So, Reena, according to you, has been abducted by an old man and raped?”

“I was just using the old man and rape as an example. And, obviously, if rumors are flying around, something happened.”

“Do you actually think we'd go out and arrest people for murder based on a rumor?”

“Obviously, you do. You don't have a surveillance camera of me doing it.”

“And if we did have a surveillance camera at the end of that bridge, what would it show?”

“It would show people kicking the crap out of her.”

“And what if there was a surveillance camera down by the schoolhouse? What would that show?”

“I seriously can't tell you.”

C
ONSTABLE
C
HRIS
H
ORSLEY
recalls the Saturday he boarded the Coast Guard helicopter to search for the body of Reena Virk. “It was a gray day. It was perfect for the search. There was no light shining on the water from the sun.”

Together with Constable Ron Huck and the pilot, Gerry, he ascended in the red Messerschmitt, a German helicopter. “We took off and flew right up the Gorge. Ron was looking out the left, and I was looking out the right, starboard.”

The men were not looking through glass, for they had the doors wide open, so they could see more directly.

The water, as he recalls, was “dark, dark, dark.”

Honestly, the men didn't expect to find anything on that Saturday. They were aware it was a “rumor-based file.”

“We were thinking, ‘Is this legit?' Both Ron and myself didn't think we were gonna see anything. But we said, ‘Let's do it.'”

The helicopter passed beyond the police divers purposely. “We didn't want to be a noisy bother. The downdraft of the helicopter would disturb
the water, so we went low, but not so low that we were creating waves. We slowly made our way up the Gorge. We'd just gone over the bridge to the north, about four hundred yards. That's when I saw her. It was surreal.”

Chris Horsley saw a girl only slightly covered with the dark water, her hair floating behind her, and “with the way the light is,” he could see her clearly.

“I've got her!” he said to his partner. “Three o'clock.”

Into his lapel mike, he said on his police radio, “We've got something. Divers make your way to the position.” With the noise of the engine, and the open doors, “We couldn't hear anything. We weren't sure if the divers even heard us.”

The men hovered in one spot, above their terrible discovery. They waited for the divers to come into the waters underneath.

“Geez, can you believe it?” Chris Horsley said to Ron Huck. Both men were surprised that they'd found the girl, discovered her in the dark water so quickly.

•   •   •

The men of the Dive Unit were silent now. The men of the Dive Unit often speak of their discoveries of fallen bodies or stolen property as “odd rewards.” In this case, though the girl had been found, the sight of her brought no sense of resolution or achievement. How far she had floated from the white schoolhouse. She was miles away from the murky waters where they had spent the morning, slowly searching. Most bodies sink to the bottom, but the girl had risen, as if lifted by a stranger's hands, as if kept away from the silt that might have dirtied her bare skin. Lifted her from the animals that might have torn at her flesh. The men, noting details for their report, observed the girl was untouched by animals that lived in the Gorge. But her face was bruised. Black welts under her eyes, a red mark between her eyes. There were bruises on her thighs, and bruises on her back, and blood in her nostrils, and on her hands the skin had started to slip away.

The water was so very still in the bay of recovery. On the silvery gray surface, copper leaves lingered, fresh from their fall.

Quietly, the men moved the body into a black bag, and a knife tore through the bag, letting out a slow hiss of water, so the bag would be
lighter, without the weight of water. In the dark hair of the girl, the men thought they might have seen a glimmer of something gold.

All around View Royal, the machinery of discovery was observed. The red helicopter hovering over the Gorge. The men in black suits emerging from their descent. The sirens and the media satellite trucks disturbing the usual placid Saturday afternoon. Surely everyone noticed the yellow crime scene tape now spread like a banner across the clean white boards of the Victorian era schoolhouse. Would the townspeople take notice now of the life of the girl they might have passed by in the convenience store, unaware of her yearning for an absent boy named Colin Jones? Would the young people who'd heard stories now believe the stories were not “some kind of fantasy”? There was yellow crime scene tape on the bridge that the townspeople crossed daily on their way to work and homes, a place illuminated and built for safe passage. The discovery would soon be theirs to try to understand: a girl floating, in their midst, a young girl whom they might have harmed or might have saved.

Certainly one woman in Gorge Park on that Saturday afternoon was not indifferent to the activity, and her perceptions soon turned to a kind of tragic telepathy.

She stood on the green banks where her niece had once been photographed in a navy sailor suit in front of a cluster of white lilies. A photographer from the local paper, the
Times-Colonist,
aimed his lens toward the crime scene. The woman, named Amarijit, she stood in her lilac sari, her left hand holding her sons soccer ball. A memory, an image, flickered in her mind, like the light that shimmered suddenly under the dark waters. She saw Reena, her niece, laughing as she used to laugh, when she spoke of how she wanted to have “a ton of babies.” The last time she'd seen her niece, she'd noticed the word on the young girl's hand. The word was written in black marker, and her niece was fourteen, and giddy. “It's a secret,” Reena had said when Amarijit asked her why she'd written the word on her hand.
Crip.
Reena blushed then, so in contrast with the word from Los Angeles, the word of faraway violence and thuggery.

Amarijit knew the photographer because her husband was the circulation manager at the
Times-Colonist.
As she approached him, a coldness
fell through her suddenly, and she realized she was clutching the soccer ball to her heart. “Ian,” she said, “what's going on?”

“They found an East Indian girl in the water.”

Even before she had heard this, she had known the girl in the water was Reena. Grabbing her son, she rushed home, past the cameramen and gathering crowd. She phoned her husband, without the heart to tell him of the “East Indian girl in the water.”

Instead, she begged him to call Suman.

“Why?” he asked, hearing the panic in her voice.

Still clutching her son's soccer ball, Amarijit tried to still the panic in her voice, her heart. “Just call her,” she pleaded. “Just see if Reena's okay.”

I
SHOULD TELL YOU
right now: Reena's body has been found and she's dead,” Bruce Brown said to Warren. “You're nodding your head … like, you know that.”

“I know,” Warren said, very softly, staring at the table as if it could absorb him forever.

“I feel bad any time someone's dead, especially a fourteen-year-old girl. It eats at me,” Bond said. “Last night, I couldn't sleep because I felt sad for the girl. And I thought, there's only one thing that I can do now. I can talk to her mom and dad and say, ‘This is what happened to your daughter.' So when they go the funeral, they'll understand, at least. They'll understand what happened to their daughter.”

“You've had some time to think about this,” Bruce Brown said. “You've had time to talk to your dad. You've had time to talk to Grace. You've had time to talk to a lawyer. I want to know right now if you want to tell us what happened. This would be for the record so there would be no confusion about what Warren Glowatski saw and did.”

“I want my lawyer sitting beside me,” Warren said.

“You want your lawyer sitting beside you?” Bruce Brown said. “Right
now, we have a whole pile of people out there giving us information about what you did.”

“I'll deal with you straight up on this, whether you have a lawyer in this room or not,” Bond said. He often was so successful at interrogations because, as he explains, “I let the suspect know that their situation is not going to get any better. If they think they're having a shitty time now, I let them know its only going to get worse.”

Bond shifted in his chair, scratched his shorn scalp, stared down at the frail boy with the gold curls. “The bottom line is this: the girl who was killed is a big woman. The girl that's lined up for it—Kelly—is an average-sized woman. People put the two of you on the other side of the bridge with a big woman, and what they're gonna say is—this big girl, at fourteen, gets taken down. Now if that big girl and Kelly went toe to toe, it would probably be an even fight. When two people of equal size fight, very rarely does someone end up dead.”

“I know what I saw that night.”

“Oh I know, Bond said, “but we've got the body now. They're going to be doing forensic tests. You've heard about DNA? When they start checking and comparing, if they can show that you dragged her in the water, this is the time you want to be dealing with that.”

“I know.”

“The other problem you've got, Warren, is that her panties are missing. So people are going to start thinking that maybe you sexually assaulted her or raped her.”

“I'm not—”

“Listen to me, Warren,” Bruce Brown commanded. “Kelly wouldn't have done that because she's a girl. You're the
guy
that's there. So people are going to start saying, ‘Well, geez, maybe he went over there to rape her.' You knocked her unconscious.
You
raped her when she was unconscious, or even dead, for that matter. There's just the mere appearance of what it looks like—there's a guy and a girl there and a dead girl. Her pants and panties are missing. What are people going to say, Warren? What are people going to say?”

“Girls don't steal other girls' underpants,” John Bond added.

“And we now have people saying they saw you kick her on the other side of the bridge. They saw you participate in the assault. It's no big leap of faith to suggest that you also assaulted her on the other side. You have serious trouble. You have a
serious
problem.”