GEMMA VALE WORE a dark blue cocktail dress and an oversized cardigan that didn’t seem to match. She sat crumpled at the table, staring dull-eyed at its surface and sucking in too much air. She didn’t look up as Leith took the chair across from her. He nodded at Dion to join them and keep notes, then did his best to calm the woman before she hyperventilated. “Mrs. Vale,” he said. “It’s okay. We’ll find your daughter.”
It was the kind of empty promise he’d become good at delivering, though in truth nothing was okay, and there existed the stark potential the daughter would never be found. But he had to say something, anything, to keep her present, to get from her what she knew, and move forward.
Gemma must have registered his promise. He could see her forcing herself to slow her breathing. He told her he was recording the conversation, and unsurprisingly she appeared not to give a damn. But she did sit straighter with a nod of understanding.
She was between thirty and forty, he guessed — some years younger than her grey-haired husband. Her chestnut-brown hair was shiny, and her skin was smooth and slightly tanned. On an ordinary day she would be pretty.
“Tell me what happened tonight, Gemma,” he said. “I know you’ve already told Constable Temple, but once more, please.”
She examined the tissue she was holding, wild-eyed and blind. She lifted her face and spoke in a controlled whisper. “We were having a nice dinner. I had put Luna to bed. He came over.”
“Who came over?” Leith cut in. Though he knew. The stress of hatred she put on the pronoun said it all.
“Zach. He came over to make my life hell because of some stupid thing, and insisted he go downstairs and say good night to her. To Luna. I let him do it. Then he and I went outside to talk it over, or fight, more like, while our guests listened, which was embarrassing for me, and worse for Perry. Zach took off, not without using some very foul fucking language, and he must have unlocked the window or sliding door when I wasn’t looking — earlier, I mean — and he came back while we were eating dinner and took her.”
Leith had seen a framed photo of the child, Luna. Lovely girl with soft ginger hair swirling over her brow, smiling her blue-eyed squint at the camera and showing off her first miniature teeth. Luna had just learned to walk, one of the guests had mentioned.
He wondered if Luna was as thrilled as Izzy had been on first discovering the joys of perambulation. Within the space of two weeks his daughter had gone from wobbly tottering to pounding back and forth like a crazed robot on overdrive. But in Luna’s case, the ability to open doors and run away would still be a few years down the road.
He waited as the stricken mother vented a string of Oh my gods, then asked her to tell him more about Zachary Garland and why she thought he was responsible.
She crossed her arms and let out a shuddery breath. “He’s petitioned the court to be allowed to move to P.E.I. and take Luna with him. Can you imagine even thinking for one fraction of a second of taking a one-year-old six thousand kilometres from her mother? He won’t win, and he knows it, but he just wants to make my life as miserable as he possibly can till his funds run out. He wants to kill me with ulcers. That fucker.”
She was starting to gulp in air again. There was a fiery glow in her cheeks, and her eyes shone with an emotion that Leith saw as somewhat removed from the situation. She was distancing herself, refusing to believe the worst. She was in shock. He said, “Gemma, Zachary’s right here. He says he didn’t take Luna, and we’d better focus on other possibilities right now. Okay?”
Her voice lifted and soared. “The other possibility is he called his bimbo, Chelsea Fuck-Me-Standing Romanov, to come and get Luna, and they’re halfway to Mexico by now, which I’ve told you people fifty fucking times, and nobody seems to be checking it out.”
Dion said, “That’s being followed up right now, Mrs. Vale.”
She stared at him, distracted. She seemed to mellow. She managed a weak smile before bursting into a flood of apologies. “I know you’re working hard, all of you,” she finished, staring at Leith. “But I just don’t understand why you can’t find her.”
She whimpered and appeared to zone out. Eyes closed, she whispered the name of her missing child under her breath, as if she was there in her arms.
Leith wondered if Gemma had self-medicated somewhere between calling the police and now, and if the meds were kicking in. He prompted her gently. “You were having a party. What’s the occasion?”
She seemed to swim out of her haze to explain. “Perry’s birthday. My husband. Just a quiet dinner get-together. They’re Perry’s friends, not mine. We’ve only been married three months, and I’m just getting to know his circle.” She gestured widely toward her new husband, and Leith looked across the room to give Perry Vale another study.
The man stood by the damask curtains with head bowed. Maybe he was crying. Maybe crying over Luna. He was somewhere in his late fifties, lean but with a paunch, neat grey hair shorn close and thinning on top. Constable Shiomi stood near Perry, tasked with watching over him.
“What does Perry do for a living?” Leith asked Gemma.
“He’s an engineer. He makes sure bridges don’t fall down.”
“And yourself?”
“These days I’m a stay-at-home mom.”
“And on other days?”
“In my past, you mean? Before I met Perry? I was a hostess.”
The person who greets people entering a restaurant, Leith supposed. He asked the stay-at-home mom to recount her day, and she did her best. She didn’t have Luna last night, she told him. Because Zachary had her. It was his weekend, which he got twice a month. In the baby’s absence, Gemma had served a light breakfast. After breakfast Perry left for a few hours to see a sick friend in West Van. Meanwhile, Gemma had done a grocery run, then got busy with dinner prep and cleaning, delivered the kids around —
“Kids?” Leith interrupted.
“Our other children, Viviani and Tiago. Well, Vivi and Tia, we call them. They’re Zach’s kids, really. Actually, his brother’s kids, but that’s a long story. I’ve known them since they were little, though, so they’re like my own.” She glanced at Leith as if he might challenge the assertion. Which he didn’t. “They’re with us this week,” she went on. “But since we were having an adult dinner party, they were spending the night with friends down the road. That’s where they are now. Vivi’s nine. She’s having a sleepover at Alexa’s on Bow Crescent. Tia’s fifteen. He’s staying with Oliver down the road here, just before Grantham.”
Leith hoped the cast of characters wasn’t going to get a whole lot more complicated. He had written the main points in his notebook. A nine-year-old and a fifteen-year-old. The latter especially could be interesting. “Have you called Vivi and Tia? Maybe one of them dropped by this evening and took Luna.”
Gemma stared at him. “Why would they do that?”
“Decided to take her out to play, maybe? Or as a prank?”
She shook her head. “That’s insane. Neither of them would do any such thing.”
He nodded at her to go on. It took her a moment to get back on track after his ridiculous question. “Like I said, Zachary gets Luna every other weekend. Picks her up Saturday morning, brings her back on Sunday at two. Which he did today.”
“He brought her over at two this afternoon?”
“More or less.”
“Any trouble with the handover?”
“No more than usual.”
“What’s usual?”
“We tend to discuss what we could do better next time. That’s all. Little things.”
She sounded stiff now. The armour was back on. She frowned, maybe recollecting the little things she and her ex tended to discuss, before carrying on. The Latimers had arrived punctually at 6:00 p.m., she told Leith. The Becks about fifteen minutes later. Everyone admired Luna, and around 6:30 Gemma had taken the child down to bed, as Luna seemed tired out by all the excitement and was getting cranky.
“Normal cranky?” Leith asked.
“Yes, normal cranky,” Gemma said. “Then,” she went on, through clenched teeth, “the incident.”
“Incident?”
“Just when I was serving dinner at seven, as I’ve told you, Zach came back.” She had marinated the name in loathing. “He insisted on going down to kiss Luna good night. Which is not in the interim order, coming over to kiss Luna whenever he damn well feels like it. But I’m not going to make a scene, not in front of Perry’s friends, am I?”
Leith was starting to withhold his sympathetic mm-hmms. Sympathy only fortified her anger, and he needed her to move away from accusations and get on with the facts. “Did you go downstairs with Zach when he went to kiss Luna good night?”
“Of course I did. This is my house, so my rules.”
“Of course.”
“I finally got rid of him, though like I said, we had words in the driveway, which everybody on the planet must have heard, and then he apparently drove off. Things calmed down after that. Perry was good about it, as always. He’s my rock. He gave me a hug and put on some nice music, got the conversation rolling. I served dinner. Must have been about quarter after seven by then. I went to check on Luna about eight, between the main course and dessert. She was sound asleep. After dinner, about nine, we moved to the living room. The Latimers were hanging around a while longer, but the Becks had to leave. Mary Beck wanted to see Luna once more, so we went down, and that’s when we found her missing.”
Gone. She sagged. Maybe the unthinkable was starting to seep through the cracks in her ramparts, and she was arriving at the possibility that Zach might not be responsible. Her palms clamped over her face as if to block out the alternate theory, and behind those palms, Leith knew, the tears she had been staving off were welling into rivers.
The woman needed a break.
He called JD over to keep Gemma company, and went downstairs with Dion to look at the empty crib, and then the patio leading out into a wicked cold night.
* * *
The sliding door was being dusted for prints, and the child’s bedroom was occupied with Ident officers. Dion absorbed what he could in a visual check, the layout of the place and where the exit stood relative to the nursery. While Leith continued to look around and talk to Ident, a bellow of rage vibrated down through the floorboards.
Heading upstairs, Dion found Zachary Garland skirmishing with JD and Ken Poole in the front foyer. The father no longer wanted to go downstairs to look for his baby, it seemed, but was determined to go out into the wind and rain and join the police search. JD was trying to reason with him, Constable Ken Poole was physically restraining him, and Constable Niko Shiomi was standing by, looking ready to draw her firearm.
Dion raised his voice to compete with Garland’s and asked him what the problem was.
“The problem is we’re in here, not out there, looking for Luna,” Garland shouted. He had launched himself at Dion in a threatening move, but Poole dragged him back. Garland shook free of Poole’s grip and pointed at the door. “We should be out there, not fucking around chatting like this is some kind of goddamn tea party. My daughter’s missing. My wife — my ex-wife — has let her wander off, obviously, and there’s a river down there, and it’s fast, and I gotta get down there, like, now.”
“I told you, the river is the first place that was checked,” JD told him. “There are a dozen searchers down there. It’s not possible that she wandered off by herself. Right? So the search is going wide and fast. And you can help us out best right now by sitting down and answering some questions. Okay?”
Deaf to reason, Garland turned to project his voice at the breakfast nook where his ex-wife still sat. “Bitch,” he shouted. “You fucking bitch.” And he, too, was crying. He was alarmingly red, Dion noted. Beet red, heart-attack red, snot running, choking on his words. Best to separate this guy from the others and interview him in the peace and quiet of the SUV, he decided.
He told Garland to cool it, and the man must have heard the warning in his voice, as he gave a nod of understanding. Dion shared his plan with JD, then with a reassuring pat on Garland’s back, he guided him outside, past the overcrowded parking lot that the Vale driveway had become, down the road to where his police Suburban sat parked.
The fresh air from their brief walk seemed to slap some sense into Garland. He heaved himself into the passenger seat and swabbed his face with tissues from a pack Dion pulled from the glove box. With the engine started for a blast of warmth, Dion got his digital recorder out, checking its buttons in the dim console light.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” Garland said. “I don’t know how she did it, but that bitch hid her away from me, probably hired one of Perry’s rich buddies to take her over the border.”
“You have a rich buddy in mind?”
“No, I don’t have anyone in particular in mind. I’m just thinking.”
Dion held his recorder up. “It’s just for accuracy.”
“Of course, go ahead. I’ll co-operate a hundred percent,” Garland said. “Bet she’s blaming me, right? Bet she’s saying I took Luna. Well, look at me.” He slammed his own chest, challenging Dion to not only look at him but pat him down. “Did I take her? Does it look like I took her? Go to my place. Toss it all you want. Talk to my buddies. Talk to Chelsea. I was home all evening. There’s my truck right there. Go search it.”
“We did.”
“Search it again. I didn’t take Luna.”
“I’m not saying you did,” Dion said. He added a snap to the words, as Garland was the kind of witness who needed boundaries laid down. “And I’m sure Gemma isn’t responsible either. So let’s not waste time on this. Do you have any idea who else might have taken her?”
Garland sighed. He looked at the road ahead. Then he burst into tears.
Dion waited. Visible in the near distance was the dead-end turnaround, and from there trails rayed out into the forest and trekked up into the mountains. One trail crossed the river that supplied North Vancouver its water, the Seymour coursing along below, dam-fed and tamed, but still famous for its beauty. A vision came to him of a baby floating away, carried along on a raft of fir boughs. He was almost sure that the parents were distracted by the blame game, that what had happened to Luna Mae Garland was far more serious, that the little girl wouldn’t be coming home alive. Not that he’d say so to anyone. Certainly not to Zachary Garland.
The interview had taken him nowhere. He found the button to stop recording and looked at Garland’s distorted profile, ugly in grief. This was no act. And what do you say to a grown man who’s crying like a child? What would Leith say?
“It’s okay,” he told the grieving father. “We’ll find your daughter.”
* * *
Following her interview of Perry Vale, which seemed to confirm his wife’s statement — nothing to add, nothing to take away — JD was doing her best to get the story from the dinner guests.
They were two couples in their mid- to late forties. Muddy, but otherwise clean-cut and, by all appearances, upstanding. Their names were Mary and Andy Beck and Gayle and Brodie Latimer. She was questioning them separately, and being assisted by Niko Shiomi, who was in charge of recording the conversation in both digital and written form.
JD didn’t like Shiomi, and not because of Shiomi’s body, which was smaller than average but perfectly sculpted, even in uniform, or her silky black hair that wisped about her heart-shaped face with the artistic simplicity of Japanese brush strokes, or the natural flush in her cheeks or shine in her onyx eyes that promised she was full of zip and sensuality. Couldn’t blame a person for being born like that. No, it was her personality, and JD had trouble putting her finger on the exact problem. Probably had something to do with Niko’s manner of eye contact, which was both penetrating and circular, like she was registering the cut of your clothes and all your facial flaws instead of your spirit or intellect, and since JD’s most notable physical feature was a facial flaw — a cleft-lip surgery scar, no less — this kind of unwelcome analysis drew out the lingering residues of teenaged angst in her soul.
But constables came and went, as would Niko Shiomi, and what mattered was the case at hand. “Andy and I were at Gem and Perry’s wedding back in November,” Mary Beck was saying. “A small affair, just ten guests, but ooh, the venue. It was in Hawaii.” She paused and apologized; this was hardly the time or place to chat about Hawaii. “I’ve known Perry forever,” she went on. “But Gemma not so well. I wasn’t even aware of her divorce until her ex showed up here today and made all that racket. I’m talking about when he came by earlier in the evening, before the baby disappeared …”
Following Mary, Andrew Beck’s story was much the same. “… This Zachary guy bangs on the door and wants to go say good night to his daughter, though it wasn’t his visitation day, and you could see that Gem didn’t want him barging in like this, but neither did she wish to make things worse and embarrass Perry, so she escorted the fellow downstairs …”
Gayle Latimer agreed. “You could hear them through the floor, arguing. Then they both came upstairs and went outside, and you could hear them out there going at it hammer and tongs. Poor girl. He took off, but she wasn’t the same after that. It just totally trashed her night.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“Well, you know, you try not to eavesdrop. We got busy making conversation.”
Brodie Latimer was the most helpful of the bunch, JD discovered. Like the two other men at this party, Perry and Andrew, Brodie was also an engineer. Maybe it was his specialization, the development of surgical equipment, which made him so fabulously precise. Better yet, he was fastidious — or anal, as Niko later said. And snoopy. Seemed he had opted out of making conversation with the rest of the party and had instead perked his ear to the distant argument between Gemma and Zachary, trying to catch every word.
Brodie’s snoopiness and attention to detail made him the ideal witness. He seemed able to repeat almost verbatim what he’d heard, though with the bad habit of tacking on “pardon me” whenever a blasphemy arose. Which happened a lot.
“Seriously,” JD told him, on the fifth pardon me. “I’ve heard every word in the Urban Dictionary, okay? Don’t worry about my ears.”
“Sorry,” he said. The argument he then unrolled for her was about custody orders. It was about tardiness and unreasonable conditions. He had heard “gun to the head” mentioned, but that was clearly just a metaphor. There were harsh words about showing up without warning, outside of visitation hours, money, fucking lawyers, pardon me, and such.
The fight lasted no more than seven minutes, then the ex left. Brodie had heard the departing squeal of tires before Gem returned. She had looked flustered but had done her best to compose herself.
“And then?” JD asked.
“And then a little while later, the baby disappeared,” Brodie said.
“Which happened at nine, right?” Going by Gemma’s statement.
“Between seven forty-two, give or take, when Gem last checked on her, and approximately nine oh five, when she and Mary went down,” Brodie said. “That would be the window of opportunity.”
“And how do you remember these times so well?” JD asked. “Like, why do you remember Gemma returning from checking on Luna at seven forty-two?”
“Nervous habit,” he said, and grimaced. “I watch the clock a lot.”
He did so now. The time was twelve minutes past midnight.