Dixon surprises him with a fairly concise answer: “Drugs, oh, for sure.” She closes her notebook, rubs her nose, and says in the casual way of shutting down, “Get any good sunrise shots?”
Just being polite, but the question galls Blaine, pulling him out of his reverie. He straightens. “No sunrise shots, no. They’re kind of done.”
“Done to death,” Dixon murmurs.
It’s an echo of his own words and it startles him. Now she’s the one doing the flirting, a twinkle in her eye. She says, “Take any pictures of the dead man?”
Blaine hesitates.
“It’s just, I see you don’t have your telephoto on.” She’s pointing at the Nikon. “Not much distance with those 50 mils, is there? I take it you switched lenses, sometime between the overpass and now.”
Her stare is piercing into him, and for the first time he’s afraid.
“You got me,” he admits with a boyish shrug. “While I was waiting, I got a shot or two. Hope that’s okay.”
He won’t tell her it’s going in a book. He doesn’t know the legalities at this point, and doesn’t want her to shut him down before he can talk it over with his copyright people. He’s also having second thoughts about putting her on the second book’s cover. Sometimes ugliness reaches a certain bar...
She has extended a palm, and at first he thinks she wants to shake, but it’s a demand. “I’ll need to take the card.”
He stares. “What? No. Why?”
“You’ll get it back safe and sound, Mr. Burrows. You want to give it to me now, or do I get a warrant?”
Scowling, Blaine hands over the SD card from his camera, with its shots of the golden God-seeking eyes. “I get to keep the images, right? There’s a whole week of work on there.”
“Long as there’s nothing incriminating on it.” She gestures impatiently. “Let me see the camera too.”
He hands over the Nikon, still sulking about the chip. Of course there’s nothing incriminating on it. Ghoulish, maybe the cops would think — they wouldn’t recognize art if it waltzed up and spat in their faces — but hardly criminal. And disrespectful, but respect for what? As un-PC as it might be, cops have their priorities. They know what’s what and care accordingly. This dead man’s true name to them is One Less Drug-Dealing Shithead.
Dixon has studied the camera’s settings and made a note, and she hands it back. She deals with the paperwork of the seized chip, then both she and Blaine are on their feet. She’s so tall that they’re eye to eye. She says, “Got anything else you want to tell me, Mr. Burrows? Now’s the time.”
He doesn’t. He hoists camera bag to shoulder and stalks out.
Dixon stands looking at the blackberry bushes and the dead man. He has been eased free from his cradle of prickles and laid out on a stretcher, eyes now closed. The coroner has told Dixon how skin-of-the-teeth close they were, that the Lang kid just missed the train. Lost too much blood. “Betcha five minutes sooner, we’d have kept him here in this mortal coil.”
Five minutes.
Dixon bows her head, studying the area around the body. No weapon found, that would be too obvious, but all the proof she’ll need is here somewhere. Between trace evidence and autopsy table, the evidence will point unerringly to the killer: Harrison, a fifty-three-year-old hard-nosed pile of shit, known to police for his temper. His weapon of choice is the butterfly knife, fairly rare in Canada, being illegal, and therefore the perfect signature. It’ll be found on or near him, crudded with the dead man’s DNA. Harrison, Dixon knows, is somewhere in the city. His body will surface in a day or so, stuffed in some back-alley grotto, and both cases will be neatly shut.
Or will they? She grimaces at the unexpected complication. Five minutes. Who the fuck recruited Harrison, who for all his talk couldn’t leave a man properly dispatched? Those murders he’d claimed ownership of, were they nothing but hot air? Had he ever actually used that fancy knife for anything besides yo-yo tricks to impress his drinking buddies?
The team continues at their tasks, mostly silent now. Clouds have blotted out the sun and a light rain is starting to fall.
“Okay, Dix?” someone asks.
She waves her fingers like the pope. She watches as the body is enclosed in poly, zipped up, hoisted into the back of the removal van. The vehicle’s doors bang shut, and she reflects that the dead man, Andy Lang, is — was — a windbag just like Blaine Burrows. Burrows’s fixation is art, while Andy’s — when he wasn’t busy blowing whistles and ratting out his partners — was forensics. Infrared-this or 3D-that, technology as investigative tool. Trouble is, distracted by magic, young Detective Lang forgot that he’s only human, and that like any human, he bleeds.
“Didn’t I say so,” Dixon tells him as the van begins to roll. “All the high-tech foofaraw in the world won’t be worth a nickel if you come face to face with a real-life bullet.” Or blade, in this case.
The ambulance is gone. Another VPD SUV rolls in and idles. Inside are colleagues, Detectives Khan and Purley. Dixon heads over and stands by the lowered driver’s window. She doesn’t speak right away, but her shrug says it all — things are not good.
Khan in the passenger seat looks like he’s been crying. Purley is grim. Both men are staring at her. Purley says, “What’s happened?”
The SD card in its small exhibit bag, not signed, sealed, or logged, is clutched in Dixon’s fist, fist jammed in pocket. She’s thinking about Andy Lang lying there, possibly alive, while Burrows pulls off his artsy shots. The chip’s time stamps — she’s already confirmed them on her laptop — establish opportunity. The photos themselves — not bad, actually — have told her Lang was indeed alive. She could see it in his eyes. Cognition. And he was looking right at the photographer, like they were engaged in conversation. About what? The weather?
Probably nothing, but it left enough of a doubt to foul her day.
If Burrows wasn’t such a fuckhole, she wouldn’t worry. But he’s complicated, his mind ticking away behind weasel eyes as he babbles about his dead father or some scrapbook project he’s working on. It’s a nervous babble, like verbal thumb-twiddling. What was he thinking about, staring at her, smiling like a third-rate actor? Whatever he had to say, he kept it close to his chest.
Why not share the victim’s last words with the cop who’s questioning him? Because those last words had spelled out loud and clear to Mr. Burrows that not every cop can be trusted, that’s why.
The day is in full swing around Dixon, the port noisy with commerce. Trucks roar by under darkening skies, and the cranes are shifting containers like there’s no tomorrow. She imagines the happy snapper back in his apartment, looking at his phone, wondering, If you can’t trust the law, who can you trust? Sooner or later he’ll make a decision.
Meaning time is of the essence.
She hands Purley a piece of paper, name and address. Blaine Burrows.
“Soon as fucking possible,” she tells him.
Purley takes the piece of paper, looks at Khan, looks at Detective Dixon. The window rolls up and the SUV pulls out. Dixon gets a final glimpse of Khan in the passenger seat. He’s staring back at her, and he looks scared shitless.
And so he should. He’s here on the threshold, after all.
About the Contributors
Carleigh Baker is a Cree-Métis/Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays and The Journey Prize Anthology. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings, was published in 2017.