Under the Bridge (19 page)

“Kelly's the type who will just tell you to fuck off.”

*

Back in his office sitting under the photographs of vintage planes, John Bond decided this: the Gorge should be searched by helicopter immediately. Even if it was a useless exercise, it, at the very least, would show the girl's parents there was an effort to find their daughter. Unfortunately, all the helicopters were in use. The APEC conference, a meeting of world leaders, was to be held in Vancouver, and the helicopters were required to protect the security of President Clinton and the prime ministers of Canada and Japan.

Because all the police helicopters were unavailable, he called his friend Glen Dychuk at 1:50 in the afternoon. Glen worked for the Coast Guard and told Sergeant Bond he could take him up in the Messerschmitt first thing in the morning.

Sergeant John Bond went under the bridge.

“I bumped into some guys from the Identification Unit. They were already looking for anything suspicious.” The detectives from Ident would report:

“The area under the bridge consists mostly of dirt and gravel with infrequent vegetation. It was noted that there was a myriad of broken glass, cigarette butts, and pop bottle caps indicating frequent use of the area, likely by teenagers. No evidence supporting any untoward activity was obvious to the writer. There were no clear foot impressions observed in the soil. The route from the underside of the bridge going up the stairs to the east of the bridge was examined for any forensic evidence with negative results. The writer searched underneath the bridge on the north side of the waterway. This search was negative in looking for any evidence of a struggle.”

Recanvass
is the term they use. Return to the area of the suspicious circumstances, return to the area where the victim was last seen. The same time, the same place, the same day. “You might come across a paperboy or a milkman,” Sergeant Bond explains. “You find people who have the same pattern of movement.”

The detectives set out for Shoreline Junior Secondary.

Often he went undercover in these bars: the Carlton, the Tudor, the Esquimalt Inn. John Bond could grow a mustache, wear a leather jacket, but these were not the reasons he fit in. Quite simply, he just
didn't seem like a cop. Once he bumped into a convict he'd gone undercover on, living in the same cell, getting the guy to talk about his prostitution ring. Bond had bumped into him in the courthouse just before he was set to testify. He was even wearing a tie, and still the convict had no idea. “What are you doing here?” he asked Bond. “You get busted again?”

But now he wasn't going into a prison or a biker bar. He was going into the world of the youth of View Royal. He was, he knew, likely to be out of place.

At 6:15, John Bond and Krista Hobday headed for the home of Maya Longet.

“Maya acts tough,” Krista warned, “but she's never lied to me. She wants to be liked by other kids, but you can just see underneath it all she's a sweet person.”

She asked Bond if he knew of Maya's past, and he nodded grimly. Maya's father had been brutally murdered ten years before, and six-year-old Maya had been in the house while her father was stomped on and knifed. A drifter named Bob Case and Maya's mother had been arrested but never convicted. Maya had been adopted by her father's sister, Belle Longet.

The two officers parked in Maya's driveway. “If anyone knows what's going on, it will be Maya Longet,” Krista said as they walked toward the door.

At Maya's house, Kelly Ellard was in the kitchen. So were Willow and Eve, two other girls who'd been under the bridge. The girls were preparing for a Friday night dinner, and after dinner they planned to go down to Shoreline, just like they always did, just like everything was the same and ordinary.

To Maya's aunt, John Bond said: “Belle, there's some talk about a teenage girl missing. We're just trying to get it all together, and we think Maya might know something about it. Can we take her to the station and ask her some questions?”

“Sure,” she said, and she wiped her damp hands on her denim apron. “Of course you can. That's no problem at all.”

“Who's she with?”

“Willow, Eve, Kelly….”

“I'd like to bring in one of those girls,” he said.

“Sure, take Kelly,” Belle replied, with a slight laugh. She found Kelly rude and unpleasant, and she had heard that Kelly once slapped her own mother for no reason at all.

“I think we'll take Eve,” Sergeant John Bond said.

“That's fine,” Eve said, but there was “a nervous laugh” from the girl.

Kelly ran out the door as soon as the police left.

“I just didn't clue in,” Belle would later admit. “I had no idea what was going on.”

When the phone rang, Belle's home was empty of teenagers, and she expected and hoped John Bond would say she could come and pick Maya up. She hoped he would say Mayas been very helpful; the missing girl, she's been found. But he said, his voice in the manner of apology, “Well, it looks like Maya's a little more involved. You need to come down here.”

Involved in what,
she wondered, as she gathered her keys and went out to her car. Gray clouds moved over the white shadow of moon as she drove over the bridge. She thought, as she drove, about the murder of her brother long ago. She thought about the doctors saying, “It will probably hit Maya when she's sixteen. That's what usually happens with buried trauma.” Whenever Belle tried to talk to Maya about the murder, “She'd just get this look in her eyes, like she'd gone to some secret place,” Belle recalls. “She just shut down, but I did that too after my brother died. It was the only way I could survive.” Sometimes she'd wander into the basement and find her secret envelope of photos and the newspaper articles. One day, Maya would want to see these:

Almost a decade later, some cruel force seemed to be pulling her back into the places of tragedy.

“The Saanich station was where I went when my brother was murdered,” Belle recalls, “so it was very, very hard for me to go back there.” Still, she went inside, past the trophy cases filled with antique rifles and handcuffs.

•   •   •

In the interview room, John Bond and Krista Hobday asked the sad-faced girl what she knew about a missing girl named Reena.

“I know a Reena at my school,” Maya said. “She's got blonde hair. She's skinny with a weird last name.”

“Do you know an East Indian girl named Reena?” Bond asked, and then showed her a photo of Reena Virk.

“I've never seen her.”

“So where were you last Friday night?”

“I was in Gordon Head all night, at the teen center.”

“Look,” Bond said, raising his voice, “our purpose here is to try to find this girl so we can notify her mom.”

“I haven't seen her,” Maya insisted. (“Maya had this ‘kiss-my-ass' look on her face,” Krista recalls, “and John's giving it all he's got.”)

“Do you want to deal with me now, or do you want to go to court? Let's hear the truth. This isn't about somebody stealing a candy bar. It's murder!”

“She gave it up in bits and pieces,” Krista recalls. “She told us she was under the bridge. She admitted to hitting Reena. That's when we chartered her and warned her.” Bond then went to look for Belle while Krista prepared to take Maya's sworn statement.

“What's going on?” Belle said to John Bond, when he came out of the interview room, his face more worn and worried than when he'd shown up at her house.

“Belle, we've read her her rights. She was more involved….” Something about a missing girl, she heard, something about Maya's friends, and then she followed the detective into the cramped and airless room and saw Maya on the sofa. There was a slightly sullen look on her face, the kind of look she would throw at her mother when asked to do a particularly tedious chore, and she chewed on her lip. The small gesture of defiance bothered Belle, and she spoke to her daughter sternly: “Maya, if someone's child is missing, you're going to tell them everything you know. I don't care if your friends are involved or not. This is someone's life, someone's child.”

She said the word
child
with a force that seemed to rouse Maya, and she nodded; she agreed. “She told them everything she knew,” Belle says. “She told them all she knew.”

“She laid it all out very clearly,” John Bond recalls. She told of the fight under the bridge.

But Maya had seen something else that night.

“Willow's mom picked me and Willow up from the Mac's just after 11:00, I guess it would have been, 'cause that's Willow's curfew. We got in the truck and I was by the window and Willow was in between. We drove over the bridge, toward the schoolhouse. And we saw two people on the bridge, like walking back, away from the schoolhouse. We waved, but they didn't see us.”

“Who was it?” John Bond asked.

Maya told him, and he wrote down the names.

Though she did not know this, Maya had just given the police their first real “break” in the case.

“I shut down the interview,” Sergeant Bond remembers. “I went out and found Downie. I told him straight up, ‘We've got a homicide here.' I gave him my notes. I said, ‘Here are the names of all the players.'”

Eight names, eight players, eight teenagers.

“We just carried on working through the night.” Calls were made to the undercovers with the names of the players. There were already detectives at the school, and now they were given permission to do more than investigate. Arrest all of them for murder, Bob Downie said. In this way, the teenagers on the field were now as Reena had been a week before. On the field, unaware of the forces about to descend on them on a Friday night.

O
N THAT
F
RIDAY EVENING
as the detectives received their orders to arrest, Syreeta cashed out at Brady's Fish and Chips. She touched the money, arranged the brightly colored bills in stacks, wrapping them with yellow rubber bands. Tara cleaned the bottles of vinegar; she gathered the shakers of salt and pepper, then picked the paper napkins off the chairs.

There was a new mechanical aspect to their movements. They did not laugh about lecherous customers; all the joy of the week before was absent and yet not eradicated. It seemed to Syreeta as if their former happiness was being held somewhere, suspended, and she hoped the happiness would soon fall over them once more, elate them, so they could enjoy life as they had when they were carefree.

“Are you going to the party?” Tara asked her, and Syreeta nodded. Yes, she would be picked up by her mother and go to Shoreline and meet up with Warren, Marissa, and Dimitri.

After locking the door, the two friends stood in the parking lot. They leaned against the window of the sari shop. Lilac and amber cloth stood in rolls, thin fabric with threads of gold. There was no satellite in the sky, and the moon was not full, but together for some reason, both Syreeta and Tara looked up at the sky. For some reason, Tara took Syreeta's hand, and both friends kept their eyes toward the sky not yet full of stars, and then Syreeta's mother was driving up and they were getting into the car and they were going to the field, where they thought there would be a party.

The nights with all your friends held certain promises. A girl would have her first kiss. A boy would get high for the first time and with his red eyes he would laugh at the sky and say it looked like a lake. Syreeta
rarely got high, and she had no desire to hallucinate, but when a boy would talk to her about the strange mirages, she'd listen patiently. Sometimes it seemed tempting to have the world shimmer and split and shift. Still, even sober, she'd felt shivers of joy on this field. She'd stared at the tall, almost elegant, trees and her friends, knowing they'd all literally grown up on this field, grown larger, as all her friends had moved from childhood and lost their childish bodies. She herself had grown three inches this last year, and she was taller than Warren now, taller than she had been the night of their first kiss.

But now, there were cars at Shoreline, cars she did not recognize. Adults were on the field, and she had never seen so many adults on the field on a Friday night. These adults held notebooks; they looked dorky and uptight to Syreeta, and she thought,
Who are these adults here on this field where they have never been before?

In his unmarked car, Sergeant Poulton watched Syreeta and Tara approach, their purses dangling on their shoulders, their heads bowed. He'd been watching the school for a while, and this was surveillance of a strange sort. The Canadian flag blew in the wind. The kids moved onto the field and embraced, and boys rode by on their bicycles and boys with skateboards under their elbow sauntered by, and one even knocked on his window and grinned. He sat in his car just watching the kids hanging out at the school, and he had to remind himself that these were all suspects in a homicide case. Those two pretty girls who passed him only moments before might be names on the list of those he was now to arrest.

“It was a cold and miserable night and it had an air of surrealism about it,” Sergeant Poulton would later say of this stakeout at Shoreline. “There was a suppressed air of nervousness among the kids.”

Sergeant Poulton got out of his car. He headed for Syreeta and Tara. He walked onto the field, and he could feel his gun, strapped to his waist, colder than it often felt when he felt it there, against his skin.

Syreeta moved across the field, unaware of the man following her. The green field seemed full of intruders. The intruders were adults, and they were moving through the field—a sacred place for kisses and secrets and longings and
just kinda kidding around.
The strangers, the adults, held notebooks in their hands, and they were writing down the names of all her dearest friends. Warren was not yet on the green field, which was not yet covered in dew.