The café was across from the courthouse in Prince George, and Fraser had been eating breakfast in it, he said, for eleven years, at the same table by the window, because from there he could see who was going up the courthouse steps and what kind of face they had on.
“Mostly lawyers,” he said. “Lawyers have one face. It’s the face of a man who’s billing for it.”
It was half past seven on Wednesday morning, raining on Third Avenue, with nobody on the courthouse steps yet. The waitress knew Fraser and did not bring him a menu.
He had given his second statement on Tuesday, four hours in a room at North District with no windows, from Ruth’s kitchen table to the rock above the outlet and then the bottle again. He had initialled every page, and signed the last.
“You’ll do,” Fraser had said, at the door. “Breakfast tomorrow. Seven thirty. I’ll tell you what I can.”
Fraser ate two eggs, hash browns and a piece of toast, in that order, and did not talk until he had finished. Then he put his notebook on the table and did not open it.
“She talked to duty counsel on Monday afternoon,” he said, “on the phone, from the satellite office. Then we flew her down, and she went before a justice by video on Monday night and was remanded. I interviewed her yesterday from nine until twenty past two, with an hour for lunch she didn’t eat.”
“And?”
“And she said she understood her rights, and she said she didn’t wish to say anything, and she said it again every time I asked her a question, very politely, for about four and a half hours. She’s good. She’d been told what to do and she did it.” He turned his cup round on the saucer. “At ten to two I put the trail camera in front of her. Fifteen forty-three. The one from the folder. The figure going up to the bench pad with its arm across its chest.”
Thorsen waited.
“She looked at it for a long time. Then she said, He was going to tell Ellie. Then my father. I only wanted the phone.” Fraser said it without any expression, the way he would read it out in court, every word the same weight. “Then she said she wanted to speak to her lawyer again, and we stopped, and that was that. That’s all she’s said. That’s all she’s going to say, I’d think, until a jury’s sitting.”
“I only wanted the phone.”
“Yes.”
“Did she get it?”
“No. It went into the creek with him and it’s never been found. Nobody’s going to find it now.” Fraser turned his cup. “Paige Dolan asked Marj in May whether it had come back with his things. It hadn’t. It won’t. She wanted it because of what he’d seen from Batt’s window at noon, and had said he’d seen, and because of what she thought was on it. She’d watched him photograph everything all summer. She’d seen him turn her bottle round on a rock. She didn’t know a phone talks to Google every time it finds a satellite. Nobody told her. She went up that creek for something that was already in California.”
“That’s the defence.”
“It’s also the Crown’s case. It’s why it’s manslaughter.” Fraser looked out of the window at the courthouse. “A woman goes up a creek to talk a boy out of something, and grabs for his phone, and he pulls away, and she shoves him, and he goes in. She didn’t go up there to kill him. She didn’t bring anything to do it with. Second-degree was never there. I knew that on Monday and Mandel knew it a week ago. What she did was let him go in and watch him go and walk up the hill and get in a helicopter and go home and write his grandmother a letter.” He stopped. “There’s no charge for the letter.”
The waitress came and filled the cups. Fraser waited until she had gone.
“Mandel approved manslaughter and obstruction on Monday afternoon, from her cabin, two hours after we got her down to the boat. The supplier’s records landed yesterday at noon.”
He gave him the rest the way he had eaten, in order. One order, two years ago: one lot, made up for Harker Environmental and nobody else, with “field matrix spikes for QA” written on the order. The thorium and uranium in it were under any licence limit, so nobody at the supplier had asked. Fraud over five thousand, with the false-information counts on the pile, and Crown opposing bail for a woman who lived in another country. Batt charged with criminal negligence causing bodily harm, for the old pad and the dead box, and Crown looking at Celia for counselling it; Transport Canada would have his licence before Crown had his file. Oakes fired. Caldera had stopped trading yesterday morning and Pallas had walked away this morning, and the EAO had suspended the review, so there would be no decision on the sixteenth, or at all. Gordie Marsh had a CBSA penalty and a seizure notice on his boat, which he could buy back, and a five-thousand-dollar letter from US Customs in Nesvik for the trips he had not reported coming home.
“He said to tell you he’s reporting at the Landing every time from now on,” Fraser said, “and it’s costing him a fortune in phone calls.”
“It’s a free call.”
“I know. I think it was a joke.”
Thorsen looked at the rain on the window.
“What about the other thing? At the lake?”
“He was right to.” Fraser nodded. “Defence will fight it. They’ll say she was in custody, she’d been cautioned, she was in shock, she was talking to a dog. We’ll have a voir dire on it and they’ll have their day.” He shrugged. “She said it before anybody asked her anything. It’ll come in.”
“Will it matter?”
“Not much. It’s a woman saying a dog had a reason. Mandel doesn’t need it.” Fraser looked at him. “Ident got eleven pages out of the back of that stove, half burnt, and they match the photographs line for line. She’s got it all now. She didn’t a week ago.” He tapped the notebook. “Her lawyer’s found the notice on the post office board. Friday night, the valley given back. He’s calling it bait.”
“Was it?”
“Of course it was. It’s not an offence to open a door.” He drank some coffee. “He’ll make a lot of her letters, too. The ninth of June. A consultant who begged the RCMP to look in her own coolers. He’ll call it the act of an honest woman.” He put the cup down. “I’d rather have the letters than not. She told you the camp did it, in writing, with her field notes attached, and Ellie’s meter and Rainy’s manifests say the notes are made up. A jury understands a woman who lies to a man on a porch.”
Bernie Lavoie had been let go by the agency, for the book. She was going home to Chicoutimi, Fraser said, to open a restaurant and never feed another geologist as long as she lived, and when he had told her good for her she had told him she did not need a policeman’s opinion. He almost smiled. It went away again.
They sat. A man in a good grey suit went up the courthouse steps with a briefcase and a face that was billing for it, and Fraser watched him go in.
“I got your father’s message,” Fraser said. “Dhillon passed it on. The doctor in California.”
“He wanted to thank you.”
“He did. He took eleven minutes about it. He wanted to know what the water temperature had been.” Fraser picked up the bill. “I told him I didn’t know. He said I should find out, in case. He said it nicely.” He looked at the bill and took out his wallet. “You’ll be back for the trial. A year, a year and a half. It’ll be here, probably. I’ll call you.”
“I’ll come.”
“Good.” Fraser put money on the table, then took the bill back and folded it and put it in his notebook. “Coffee for a witness. They’ll query it. I like to give them something to query.” He stood up and put on his jacket. “And don’t bring the dog.”
“He’s not a witness.”
“No. That’s why.” Fraser looked down at him. “The dog didn’t find her. You did. Ingrid Eiksund did, and Ellie Bourque, and a twelve-year-old with a hard drive in a sock. The dog knew all along and never told anybody, because he’s a dog. I’m not having twelve jurors in Prince George going home thinking a dog solved a manslaughter. They’d acquit just to spite him.”
He went out into the rain without looking back, and crossed the street to the courthouse, and went up the steps two at a time, with no expression on his face at all.
He got back to Nesvik on the Thursday evening jet, by way of Vancouver and Seattle.
Rainy had flown the dog down on Monday evening, alone in the back of the Beaver with his paperwork in an envelope, and walked him up the hill to Marj’s door on a length of rope, and gone home without coming in. Claire brought the dog to meet the jet, and he came across the tarmac at a dead run with the lead trailing and nearly took Thorsen over.
He did not go to Ed’s that night. He thought about it, standing on Marj’s porch at ten o’clock with the light going long and gold across the harbour and the dog against his legs, and he did not go, and he knew that it was too late already, and that it had been too late since Wednesday at six in the morning.
Ed Harker was on the Kittiwake on Friday morning at eight, in the south harbour, with the engine hatch up.
Thorsen came down the float slowly, on the stick, with the dog at heel. The tide was low and the float lay a long way down the pilings, and the ramp was steep, and the boat lay at the end of the finger with her cabin door open and a radio playing inside it, very low. Ed was kneeling on the deck with his head and both arms down the hatch. Below him the engine was white and blue and bright steel, and it was the only new thing on the boat.
“Ed.”
Ed did not take his head out of the hatch. His hands went on doing something down there, with a wrench.
“I heard it on the radio,” he said. “Wednesday. Six o’clock news. They read it between the tide table and the cannery hours. A forty-six-year-old Nesvik woman.” The wrench went round. “I knew which one before they said the rest. There’s only the one.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You ate at my table.”
Ed took his head out of the hatch then and sat back on his heels on the deck and looked up at him. He was seventy-eight years old and he had not shaved, and his eyes were red at the rims, and his hands were black to the wrist with grease, and he held the wrench in one of them across his knee as if he had forgotten it was there.
“You sat at my table at Bev’s, and you came out on the flats with me on the opener and ate my sandwiches, and I stood in that wheelhouse and showed you my engine. Proud of it. Never said who paid for it. Not to you. I told half the Landing instead. And then you found out. Up there. Sandoval says you were up there on Monday when they put the cuffs on her. And by the afternoon they’d charged her, and nobody came. I heard it off the radio. In my kitchen. With my coffee in my hand.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what it cost. I wanted you to know what it cost.”
“I know.”
“And on the Saturday. At Bev’s. I put my hand on that counter and asked you, and you said you didn’t know anything about numbers.” He looked at the wrench. “You knew.”
In June Celia had sat on Marj’s top step and asked him not to tell her father, and he had kept that for her too.
“Yes,” Thorsen said. “I knew, and I said that, and it wasn’t true. And I should have come on Tuesday night. I was in Prince George and I could have called you, and I didn’t, because I didn’t know what to say to you, and I thought I’d say it better to your face. That was wrong. It was for me, not you.”
Ed looked at him. Then he looked down at the wrench in his hand.
“Well,” he said. “At least you’re not going to tell me you couldn’t.”
“No.”
“Sandoval came Wednesday at nine. He’d heard the radio too. He stood on the porch with his hat in his hand and said he was sorry I’d heard it like that, it should have been him, and he’d had a call from Canada at two in the morning and they asked him not to till it was public, and he should have come anyway. Then he went away. Ollie came in the evening and sat in my kitchen and told me what he had, and said the Herald wouldn’t print her name till Thursday. He came and told me first. Kid’s twenty-seven.” Ed turned the wrench over. “Everybody’s sorry. Bev’s sorry. The pastor came. Jim Kehoe sent a card, God help me. Kehoe.” He breathed out. “I’ve lost my daughter and my side of the argument in one morning, and the whole town’s bringing me casseroles.”
He put the wrench down on the hatch coaming.
“I’m selling this,” he said. “The engine. Back to the dealer in Wrangell, if he’ll take it. She co-signed. It’s going to the bank either way, and I’d rather it went from me.”
The radio inside the cabin said something about the weather. Westerly, fifteen knots, rain at times. The dog lay down on the float with his chin on the edge of the boat and looked at Ed.
Ed looked at the dog.
“That’s his,” he said. “The boy’s.”
“Yes.”
“He sat at the end of our table at Bev’s. A year ago May. Two weeks, every morning, before he went up. Asking about sockeye. He was studying fish, over there in Norway. He wanted to know everything. How they found the river. What the silt did. Whether they’d come back if the mine went in.” Ed’s mouth moved. “I told him no. I told him they’d never come back, not to that lake, not if it went in. He wrote it down. He had a notebook, like you.”
He put one black hand flat on the gunwale, and pushed himself up off his heels, and stood, slowly, one knee and then the other, the way old men stand in boats, and looked at Thorsen on the float, eye to eye, the boat and the tide making them the same height for once.
“Did he suffer?” Ed said.
Thorsen had been asked it before. He had been asked it in kitchens in Boyle Heights and on porches in the Valley and in the corridor outside the coroner’s on Mission Road, by mothers and fathers and once by a boy of nine, and he had learned a long time ago that there were things you could say. That it was quick. That the cold takes the breath first and then the mind. That he would not have known much. He had said them, some of them, when he did not know whether they were true, because the person asking needed something to carry home, and he had told himself it was kindness. He had said one of them to Rune Eiksund ten days ago, from a bed, and had meant it, and did not know if it was true.
He looked at the old man in the boat.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody saw him go in but her. The river was in flood, and it was glacier water, and it was very fast. I don’t know how long he was in it, or what he knew. I’m sorry, Ed. I don’t know.”
Ed stood there with his hand on the gunwale.
Then he nodded. Once, slowly, as if somebody had told him the price of something and it was more than he had thought and he was going to pay it.
“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”
He got down on his knees again on the deck, and picked up the wrench, and put his head and his arms back down the hatch.