She drove out to the position Forbes had taken when he’d started his surveillance on the smoke shop. It was a good spot, shielded from the road by trees, but with a clear line of sight to the Eagle. She continued to watch people file in and out of the store. It was coming up on five o’clock in the afternoon now, and she realized she could have a long wait in front of her. She had half a Tim’s club sandwich on the seat beside her, having been unable to stop herself from consuming the first half an hour earlier. With any luck, she’d see the sign she was waiting for before she got too hungry and then she’d be really grateful for it when she got to it. Fifteen minutes later, she’d eaten the other half of the sandwich and she was still hungry.

Her instinct every time she reached this juncture, when the temperature of an investigation went up beyond her comfort zone, when she knew time was flowing through her hands like water dashed from a bucket, was to push. Something seemingly immovable would have to be moved. And she had always been like this; she shared this trait with her mother, this inability to wait and see, to let things develop. She wanted to drive back to Eagle Smoke and Souvenir and lean on this Earl/Tate guy. Just come out with it. A guy died in your parking lot a week ago. Something’s going on here. Or not. But you’re going to convince me one way or the other tonight. She saw herself gripping the front of his shirt and yanking him forward over the countertop. This aggression was a good trait to have in her line of work. But if she braced the man who seemed to be in charge in there, she might never find out who Kitty was. And she wanted to know who Kitty was.

At six in the evening, just when she was getting so hungry that she almost left, she saw a man in a quilted, shiny black windbreaker get out of his car and walk into the Eagle. Two minutes later, he left the shop and walked directly to the one taxi that was waiting at the stand. There was something about the way the man walked that struck her. She got her binoculars out to look closer. When the man got into the back seat, he passed something small and shiny to the driver, and the driver looked at it, handed it back, and made a right-hand turn out of the driveway. To the north.

She let the cab get a good three hundred metres down RR26, and then she pulled out of her hiding place and got in behind it.

] 19 [

Early evening

Hazel adjusted her speed to keep a comfortable gap between herself and the taxi. She could just make out a head in the back seat, a wiry nest of black hair. The passenger’s hand kept coming up in front of him and it took Hazel a while to realize he was pushing his glasses up on his nose. A nervous gesture.

She was tempted to pass the cab and look, but by then it was turning off the reserve road and toward Highway 41a. The 41a was one of the county’s prettiest drives: it curved east-west along the north shore of Queesik Bay on its way to Westmuir’s main artery, the 41. But before the cab got to the 41, it turned north again and followed Sideroad 1, which was a road laid down by a surveyor some hundred years ago. This sideroad, and many like it, did nothing more than divide fields into long tracts.

Sideroad 1 was straight and flat, although she was sure the curvature of the earth made it impossible to see farther than a few kilometres ahead. The taxi was driving at a leisurely pace between the deep green of the corn and soy fields, crossing the roads that ran east-west up through there, the “lines” on which the old farmhouses and homesteads had been built with the fields in front and behind. She stayed more than a kilometre behind and watched them pass: Seventeenth Line, Sixteenth Line. At the Ninth Line, the cab turned right again, heading east. This was an epic drive and she made herself fall farther back, to the point where she could no longer see the tires of the taxi. She watched it moving off east along the Ninth Line, and she reached the road herself and made the turn. In the distance, she was sure she saw another car, coming up another sideroad. Then she realized it was stationary, sitting in profile, below the Ninth Line. A long, black Mercedes. She kept up. The cab was still a few kilometres ahead of her. Before it reached the sideroad with the Mercedes parked on it, the black car pulled out and drove in front of the taxi by about fifteen hundred metres. Hazel lengthened her distance again. She passed the sideroad where the car had been waiting and, up ahead, saw it turn down another one, leading the taxi down another sideroad. The fields were lush and high here, mature soy undulating like the surface of a green sea. Less than a hundred metres below the Ninth Line, a stand of trees extended irregularly into the field behind. Judging from the narrowing serpentine of trunks, the copse occupied a dried-up creek that no one had ever cleared. It was a vertical burst of green above the swaying heads of soy. That’s where they were going. Into trees? She decided to watch the rest from a distance; she made the next left-hand turn and stopped the car. Anyone looking behind at her would conclude she was driving away on a road to the north and dismiss her as a danger. The soy wasn’t high enough to hide her, but she felt that her presence pointing the other direction wouldn’t disturb the scene. She got out of the car and stayed low as she came around the back of it. She stilled the binoculars against the bumper.

The black Mercedes had stopped near the trees and the taxi was driving past it a couple of car lengths. Then it stopped and discharged its fare, who got out on the left side of the cab, his back to Hazel. He stepped forward, but she already knew who he was. The man went to the side of the road and stepped down off the shoulder. She could only see him from the waist up. He was walking toward the trees. Then he vanished into them. Nothing happened. Both the cab and the Mercedes remained where they were. Then, a moment later, a man and a woman emerged from the woods. They walked calmly up to the road and got into the taxicab. The black car made a three-point turn and came back out to the Ninth Line. The taxi followed behind it. There was someone with long hair driving the Mercedes. He was wearing a ballcap. Hazel got back into her car and drove up to the Tenth Line. She dialled Wingate’s cell.

“Where are you?”

“I’m driving west along the Tenth Line. You’re not going to believe who I just saw.”

Constable Forbes was standing at the front counter of the detachment when a man he recognized came into the station house.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?” he asked.

“I’m refreshed.”

Forbes looked at his watch. “You’ve been gone for forty-eight hours. I thought you were taking the week off.”

Wingate lifted the counter flap and walked through. “Is she back yet?”

“She is.”

“You come along, okay?”

He knocked on Hazel’s door, and entered on “Come!” and Hazel looked up. She’d been tapping on her keyboard. “I just talked to you.”

“I know. I can’t look at the water anymore. What are we doing?”

“I’m looking up an address on the MTO site.”

“Guys?” said Forbes. “Whose address?”

“I just followed one of the taxicabs, Roland, one of the cabs you brought to my attention. It drove into the fields above Queesik Bay and let a man out in the middle of nowhere, beside a little grove of trees. You know how the forest pops up here and there in those fields?”

“Yes.”

“The cab let Jordie Dunn out. And Dunn walked into the trees and vanished.”

“Well, he lives in Kehoe Glenn, doesn’t he?”

She put her finger against her screen and began writing. “Right at the entrance to town.” She looked up at them.

“Should we inform Superintendent Greene?” Forbes asked.

“Do whatever you need to do,” she replied. “I’m out of here.”