But this wasn’t the place for a revelation. She corrected her drift and opened the medicine cabinet door and looked in on the hair products and razors, and on the top shelf there was an array of orange pill bottles. One of the pill vials contained a whole whack of OxyContins. Someone’d had an enthusiastic GP. She looked at the label, but the pills had been transferred from some other bottle: the label on this one was for Tylenol 3. She imagined that Henry Wiest had been no stranger to pain. She was sure there were still at least thirty pills in the bottle, but it was impossible to know when they’d been poured in here. Even so, thirty didn’t sound like a problem. She’d get a month’s worth, easy, every time Pass wrote her a prescription for her back. There was also a tiny ziplock bag of pot behind a can of shaving cream. Four small buds inside, maybe an eighth. More people smoked pot casually than you could imagine and it was less suspicious than the Oxys. Westmuir was overrun with pot, increasingly potent varieties, too, but there was no violence over it and the most harm stoned people ever did was rewatch Jim Carrey movies. If Henry Wiest had wanted pot, he wouldn’t have had to go to Queesik for it, she was pretty sure of that. She looked at the other bottles. There was an unfinished prescription for erythromycin dating to 2002, another vial containing a few Valium, and a fourth bottle that was half-full of the antidepressant citalopram. The prescription was made out to Henry Wiest and the label specified that there were four refills remaining. She studied the vial. The prescription was current. She replaced the bottle and closed the cabinet.

Back in the bird’s room, the cockatoo was still huddled in the corner of its cage. Hazel opened the door to the cage and replaced the water cup. The bird watched her with huge eyes.

This was the room that had been ransacked, although there were those drawers in the bedroom as well. The office had been torn apart. It was hard to imagine how to start to look for what might be missing from the room. The drawers were emptied out and tossed to the sides, whole shelves of books had been pulled down. Hazel crouched and started looking through the papers. These were innocuous files: car ownership papers, telephone bills, warranties. Old banking accounts with wads of elastic-bound cheques bulging out of them. What had the girl been looking for?

She returned to her cruiser and called in. “They had a bird,” she said to Wingate.

“What?”

“There was a bird in a cage. In the office.”

“And what else?”

“A big fucking mess. She was looking for something.”

“Did she find it?”

“I have no idea.”

] 10 [

Thursday, August 11, morning

Radio cars had been out all night sweeping the highways and rural roads of Westmuir, looking for the girl in the sketch artist’s rendering. She had a high forehead and large, intelligent, light-blue eyes. An average mouth, rendered expressionless by the artist, lips closed, and a tapering, rounded chin. Her long brown hair had been parted in the middle, curving tightly against her skull and pulled back. If not for the state of the girl when Cathy Wiest saw her, she would probably have been quite beautiful. In the drawing, she looked eighteen to twenty, and when Hazel saw it, she remarked to herself how the girl looked confident, engaged, and withdrawn all at once. It was not an unusual face for a girl of her age; Hazel imagined she would be able to slip in and out of the world at will. She was going to have to show herself if they were going to catch her.

Detachments in Fort Leonard and Telegraph Heights had been activated and a total of eighteen cars searched until sunrise for signs of a young woman armed with a Taser-like weapon. It had been bold to knock on a door, maybe she would do it again. But there were no sightings of her, and she did not reappear on any doorsteps that would bring her to their attention again.

They kept two cars at each detachment dedicated to the search and put out an APB with a description of the girl and the sketch that had been made of her.

The smoke shack was, so far, the only promising vector in the whole case. Hazel was sure hundreds of people – residents, tourists, workers, summertime renters – went in and out of it. But was it a connection to the girl?

She’d gotten home after midnight the previous night, and she found Wingate sitting on the couch, leaning his head against the wall. The one lamp that was on illuminated his hands in his lap. He woke when the door closed and reached for his cap on the cushion beside him. “I got her here by about ten-thirty. She’s asleep now, I think.”

“How often do I have to wake her up for the concussion checklist?”

“Every couple of hours or so.”

“Poor thing. She can’t even sleep. Anyway, thank you for keeping watch.” She took off her jacket and tossed it over the back of the couch. “Did my mother make any trouble?”

“Didn’t see her at all.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“Is she all right, Hazel?”

“She’s eighty-seven. Eighty-eight this month.”

She’d bade him goodnight and gone to make sure her mother was actually in the house. She was. There was a long, thin bump under her bedcovers.

Hazel woke Cathy, as instructed, about every ninety minutes during the night, but as of five in the morning, she fell asleep herself and didn’t go into the woman’s bedroom until eight. She shook Cathy on the shoulder then and, after looking her over, decided the woman could safely be left alone. She left a note for her mother pinned to the back of her door, and another for Cathy on the kitchen table, telling her there was an officer outside the house and that when she woke, this officer, Eileen Bail, would bring her into the detachment. There were more questions, but she wanted Cathy as rested as possible. As soon as she left the house, she called down to Bail, who was finishing a twelve-to-eight, and asked her to do a couple hours of overtime in her car, outside the house in Pember Lake. She waited ten minutes for the cruiser to arrive and told Bail to bring Cathy in when she was ready.

When she got to the station house, she brought Wingate and Constable Roland Forbes into her office. Forbes was about to take his detective’s exam. She thought it might be good for him to sit in. He dragged his own chair in and the two of them sat on the other side of Hazel’s desk. “This is what I’m thinking. Someone called Henry down there, to the smoke shop in Queesik Bay. And when he got there, he encountered this girl and there was an altercation and she discharged this weapon at him.”

“What’s the chance it was a mugging or something like that?” asked Forbes.

“Why would she go to the house and attack the widow then?”

“I guess not. How did she know where he lived?”

“Well, that goes to the question of their relationship,” Hazel said. “We don’t know enough about it yet.”

“Should we be visiting that smoke shop?” said Wingate.

“I think so. But I’m not sure I should be the one. I met with the police commander on the reserve yesterday and I don’t know if I want to show my face down there right now.”

“Why?”

“She seemed more like a kindergarten art teacher than a skip. And she’s got an angle, only I don’t know what it is. I’d like one of you to go down there and see what the place is like.

“You’re out of here in three hours,” she said to Wingate.

“You need me on this case,” said Wingate.

“Forbes can do it. It’s reconnaissance, you know? Fact-gathering. Just go.”

“I haven’t made detective yet,” Forbes protested. “I don’t know if the other officers –”

“Just go down and buy a pack of cigarettes, would you?”

“Okay,” he said. “I can make some notes. I can write it up if you want.”

“Go forth, Gumshoe.”