Outside, continuing the conversation with LeJeune in her mind, she forgot she’d brought the unmarked and it took her five minutes to find it in the parking lot. She was giving LeJeune a piece of her mind, and the commander was really feeling the heat, holding her hands up, apologizing. You may be under the illusion that everything is always as it seems, but out here in the REAL world, we know it rarely is. LeJeune looked horrified, and then the phone on Hazel’s hip rang. “WHAT!” she shouted into it.

“Skip?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Roland … I’m sitting in your car on Queesik Bay Road? Drinking cold coffee out of a cracked Thermos.”

“Sorry, Roland.”

“Where are you?”

“Walking to my car about six kilometres away from you.” “You’re on the reserve?”

“I am. But I can’t talk. Has anything come up?”

“Not really.”

“Keep up the good work,” she said. She hung up on him and called Constable Costamides. Hazel had sent her down to the Wiest store that afternoon. “What’s the news?”

“I don’t think I found anything. His manager, Janis Hoogstraat, was in the store and she said Henry had taken the account books home.”

“Was that normal?”

“Actually, she sounded surprised when she couldn’t find them. Then she remembered he’d taken them home.”

Hazel thought about the ransacked office. “I’ll see you back at HQ,” she said.

] 14 [

Evening

She had an idea where those ledgers were. They were, or had been, somewhere in the mess of Henry Wiest’s destroyed office. But could the girl with the stun gun have been looking for ledgers? Who would Taser a stranger in her own home and then tear the place apart looking for paperwork? No, the girl’s presence in the house had nothing to do with ledgers or cheques. Maybe Henry had brought his accounts home in order to hide an unusual transaction, like those hundreds in that envelope.

Was the girl a dealer? Maybe she’d dismissed the weed in the medicine cabinet too quickly. Was it possible what she saw there was for personal use, but the rest of it was going out the door? And he’d hooked up with a charming urchin at the casino. God, that felt like a long shot. But you could always filter the proceeds of a minor operation like that through a small business.

She still had Cathy’s keys and she let herself into the house, hoping that if she heard the bird, it wouldn’t terrify her this time, or vice versa. “Helll-ooo, birdie … it’s Hazel. Don’t be scared, birdie …”

There were no sounds from the office, and she pushed the door open to find the birdcage was gone. For the second time in this house, she removed her sidearm. So someone had been here between the attack and now and taken the bird. Or it was on the lam.

She was beginning to feel exhausted.

She set aside the mystery of the cockatoo and stepped into the destroyed room. A ledger. That’s what she was looking for now, one of those big, hard-covered books with black tape down the spine. Something like that, or else one of those cerlox thingies. She found a yellow file folder that said Cafe on its label. She righted the desk chair and sat in it. These were bank statements from the café. Hazel settled in and began to read. She’d never had any idea how much it cost to run a restaurant, or if it was hard to make a living from one. Judging from the statements, it was possible to make money, but there was a lot of overhead, too. It looked like Cathy took in about six thousand dollars a month over her costs. Not a fortune but enough to live on. Some months, it appeared as if she was doing better, but the bottom line didn’t change much: on months where she made more money, she also had more expenses. This was to be expected: if you sold more coconut cream pie, you had to buy more coconuts.

She stopped and listened for a moment. Every creak in this house was making her heart race. None of the other papers pertaining to the café seemed to point anywhere. She kept flipping through stapled, paper-clipped, perforated, and folded paper that had been strewn everywhere. A folder full of stale-dated income tax forms. These she flipped through as well, to get an idea of the household’s income. For the last five years, it seemed that Cathy was bringing down just about what Hazel thought she would be: ninety thousand, some years closer to a hundred. Running a restaurant was a tough business, but Cathy’s had been around for ten years now and she knew how to do it. Henry’s returns were here as well, and the store contributed the lion’s share of the household income and there was a lot of it. The Wiest name had been good for eighty years. Generations of families had shopped there. It looked like Henry was bringing in over a quarter of a million every year. That was his profit, after supplies, personnel, and other costs. He owned the building. That was an excellent living; it would have kept them both in style and she didn’t have to work. But she did, and they lived modestly, and as far as she could tell, they respected, but did not admire, money. Henry had already endowed a countywide hockey trophy. It was top prize in each division of girls’ hockey in the region. It was called The Wiest Westmuir Trophy.

There was nothing in this room and there was no way of knowing if there had been anything of interest when the girl went through it.

Hazel went down the hallway to the bedroom and flipped the lights. No other forms of life. The two open dresser drawers were the ones she’d spied last time, both pulled all the way out, the top one concealing the lower. A bloom of clothing burst from the top drawer. She went through the top two drawers, found nothing, and closed them. The bottom one was closed. Hazel opened it and lying almost centred on top of a folded Hudson’s Bay blanket was a ledger book. She grabbed it greedily.

She opened the ledger. It was hard to make out what all the cheques might be for; there were so many company names that could have been his suppliers. She ran her finger up the columns, scanning the recent entries. She flipped pages back and forth, comparing dates, checking monthlies, looking for easy patterns. There were many. But just two weeks ago, there had been a cheque made out to cash for ten thousand dollars. July 31, five days before his body had shown up in the Eagle’s rear parking lot. Cashable by anyone, but it looked as if he’d cashed the cheque himself. He hadn’t wanted to categorize the expense; probably thought he would be able to cancel the debit out and explain it away if his accountant – or the government – ever asked. So what was the ten thousand for? He seemed to have spent forty-five hundred. And then the girl had helped herself to twenty-five hundred. Was this about money or not? What was this bloody girl looking for?

Roland Forbes was starving. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. But he’d be home in time for supper: he’d seen something a few hours back, and then he’d seen it again. Now he was sure. He pushed himself up to his knees and stretched his stiffened back. Sometimes police work was almost comical: you committed to actions that made you look and feel ridiculous. But then, sometimes you got to have this feeling of a job well done. Milled out of the dailiness and normality of the world sometimes you could make out patterns and resonances. He sat behind the wheel moving his head around on his neck in little circles and looked at his tick marks again.

The people who arrived at the Eagle alone, on foot, or in vehicles of their own, were both men and women.

The people who arrived alone on foot or in vehicles of their own and who left with bags were both men and women. Of the men and women who had arrived on foot, and who clearly made purchases, some left in taxis. Some did not.

The people who arrived alone on foot and who left without bags were men and women.