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Patience Knox’s evidence about what she’d heard from the barricaded bedroom began to change. Right from the start this had been a minor but irritating weakness in the case: her description of the so-called commotion hadn’t really made it sound like someone suffering an assault, sexual or otherwise. According to Fitzgerald, her exact words had been that the girl was “up there screaming nonsense . . . crazy shit.” Later in the night she’d given a more sober statement to the sarge, in which she said, “First Jennifer called out to me and then she started shouting stuff, I don’t know what it was, she’d gone crazy. I thought she was crazy.” Three days later she was telling the police what they’d like to have heard all along: that Jennifer had been shouting for help and asking her to call the cops. She wasn’t able to explain the contradiction.
    The Kwakiutl Band got involved. There was the documentation, on shakily photocopied headed paper, signed by their community liaison officer, a round, bespectacled woman whom Goose had already met. Up at this end of Vancouver Island the police spent a lot of time talking with First Nations community liaison officers of one sort or another, because 90 percent of the young men they had to lock up overnight were First Nations kids. The Band had their own procedures—“traditional justice” was the official phrase—and they requested that Jennifer be put in their care for a few days, even though no one had accused her of anything. They weren’t required to tell the police exactly what happened, but Goose understood it involved taking the kids off somewhere and having them live in supervised isolation. Plus some ceremonies. That kind of thing. By that stage the sarge was only too happy to try anything.
    Jennifer went away wherever they took her and came back, still without saying anything at all to anyone.
    She attended her brother’s funeral. That was when the media got interested.
    It was a single photo that kicked off the whole circus. The shot showed the grieving family, the mother crying, holding the fragile-looking younger boy by the hand, and Jennifer off to the side, looking utterly blank, hard, cold, but also, unfortunately, pretty. Just pretty enough to catch everyone’s interest, once you factored in the piquant detail that whatever happened to her had struck her mute.
    Goose remembered her first contact with the story. She was in Victoria. She’d come home after a cold wet day inspecting illegal fishing catches, turned on the news, and there it was: The Girl Who Won’t Talk.
    Now the case became a medium-sized event. There was serious pressure to make an arrest. An inspector came from down-island. He tried to interview Jennifer. The documentation was on one of the disks; the file name was almost longer than the content of the file. His report read, in full: Subject unable or unwilling to cooperate. Full psychiatric evaluation recommended . The girl was sent to a bigger hospital. Meanwhile, Cope was getting nowhere, and there was a TV crew camped in the Hardy Motor Inn.
    Goose tried her best to read the psychiatrist’s report, but it made her eyes swim. She looked up from the bed at the boxes she’d trucked up from Victoria, and for the first time that week considered whether starting to unpack properly would be less boring than the alternative. She hadn’t even peeled the tape off a couple of them, the ones containing the pictures (no hammer or pins to hang them with) and the kitchen stuff (too busy to cook, or so she’d told herself). The apartment smelled of microwaved MSG already, though not strongly enough to mask the undertone of whatever cleaning product it had been soused with before she moved in. It looked discouragingly temporary. Clothes on the floor, stuff lying sideways on the one shelf. She wondered whether it might be better to leave it like that. Not