by Joanna Jolly
From the start, it was clear that Cormier warmed to Candace. He was kind to her and always made a point of being polite and respectful in her presence. For her part, Candace played the wide-eyed girlfriend who was slightly in awe of the men’s conversation. O’Donovan wanted to try out a scenario in which Mo would assert his dominance over her, signalling to Cormier that he was comfortable using violence against women. A few days later, when Cormier had dropped in for a beer, Candace tapped Mo on his back to get his attention and Mo spun around, raising his hand as if he was going to hit her.
“Don’t you ever do that to me again!” he yelled as Candace backed away from him.
Cormier reacted by trying to calm the situation, moving towards Candace with his hands held out to comfort her.
“Don’t worry, Candace, I’ll get you a bike, I’ll get you a bike,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper.
Over the next week, Mo met Cormier several times to talk about the possibility of going into business. Cormier was excited and mentioned other friends who might also get involved. After one meeting, he conspicuously left his wallet on Mo’s coffee table before heading back to his own apartment.
“Hey, I think this is yours,” Mo said, having immediately walked over to Cormier’s place to return it. Cormier checked to make sure no cash was missing, and Mo felt he had passed an important test.
When Candace wasn’t around, Mo confided to Cormier that he had recently met another girl at a party. Her name was Jenna, and she was much younger than him, only nineteen, and hot. The two of them had spent the weekend in bed together. Cormier egged Mo on, wanting to hear more details, though at the same time scolding him for cheating on Candace, who he thought was worth hanging on to. He promised Mo that his secret was safe with him.
On another occasion, the mics in Cormier’s apartment picked up a conversation in which Cormier and another man were talking to a young girl about drugs. The man said he would give her some as long as she knew when to stop.
Cormier joined in the conversation. “Don’t overdose here ‘cause then your body’s gonna be wrapped up in a fuckin’ carpet and thrown in the river.”
“Really?” asked the girl.
“I’m just joking,” said Cormier.
It was late at night when O’Donovan listened to this exchange. He had got into the habit of shutting himself in the monitoring room twice a day to catch up on the recordings, once in the afternoon and then again after 9 P.M., when everyone had gone home for the night. The evening was his preferred listening time, when the office was empty of distractions and he had the time and mental space to plan his next move. As he listened, he would scribble notes and try to draw connections between any mention of Tina by Cormier and the information he knew about her death. O’Donovan felt his suspect was always skirting around the issue, giving out little hints and details that suggested he knew more than he was willing to admit. It was as if he wanted to unburden his conscience, but every time, at the last second, made sure he held himself back. Project Styx’s challenge was how to coax Cormier into letting his guard down so that he would finally confess everything.
* * *
—
The following morning, O’Donovan met Mo to talk through the next stage of the operation. Mo was to take Cormier with him on a moving job and pay him for his help. The locations for the pickup and drop-off were chosen deliberately far apart to give the men time to chat in the relaxed atmosphere of Mo’s van. O’Donovan felt it was also time to introduce Mo’s gang boss, the “Mr. Big,” into the picture and told the undercover officer to engineer a meeting with him after the drop-off was completed.
After Mo had picked him up from their apartment building and they were on their way, Cormier pointed out the rear view of a young girl crossing the road, saying, “Look at the fuckin’ mover on that.”
The comment gave Mo an excuse to turn the conversation to Jenna.
“You have to see this chick, dude. She’s so fuckin’ pretty and young,” he said. He offered Cormier a smoke and launched into a visceral description of what it was like to have sex with his new teenage girlfriend. Cormier laughed along but seemed concerned about Candace.
“If she ever found out it would crush her, and it would fuckin’ fuck you up too, do you know that?” he said.
Mo shrugged and once more attempted to engage Cormier with an even more graphic account of the kinky sex he had enjoyed with Jenna. Cormier seemed to enjoy hearing the details, chipping in to add his own experiences. But he soon changed the topic to his favourite religious conspiracy theory that Jesus and the devil were actually one and the same, and he stayed on this subject until Mo parked the van and asked him for help loading up heavy boxes. When they were back on the road, Mo pointed out a group of young girls walking along the street.
“Now, those were young,” he said, turning to Cormier with a sly smile.
“Yeah, but some of them are sooo…” Cormier’s voice trailed off, and he was silent for a couple of seconds before saying that’s what had happened with Tina.
“You old enough or what? Do you draw the line at sixteen or do you draw the line at fifteen? Fifteen is illegal. You are going to go to jail for it,” he said.
Mo decided not to push the Tina reference, and Cormier changed the subject to how much he liked taking crystal meth. A few minutes later they pulled up outside a storage unit close to the airport, where an undercover officer posing as a gang member wheeled out a pallet for them to unload the boxes onto. The job done, the men got back in the van.
Once again, Mo steered the conversation to sex.
“Tell me, Raymond, have you fucked a fifteen-year-old?”
“I might have, one or two, yeah,” Cormier replied.
“How does it feel?”
“Same as every other one, except that it’s stretching the boundaries a bit, you know what I mean.”
Mo requested more details, but Cormier wanted to talk about Tina.
“If Sarah wouldn’t have found out, I would have fucked Tina,” he said. He confided that he was trying to find out who had actually killed her; he had a few good leads to follow up on. But Mo could not get him to admit he’d had sex with the teenager.
The excursion ended with Mo introducing Cormier to his boss, Jay, who was played by a well-built officer dressed casually in jeans and a button-down shirt. Mo introduced Cormier as a neighbour who was helping out from time to time. Jay appeared happy to meet him, paying Cormier for his trouble and hinting that there might be more work in the future. Cormier seemed impressed.
At least that part worked out, thought O’Donovan later as he listened to the recording from Mo’s wire. It was frustrating that Mo hadn’t been able to get more out of Cormier. O’Donovan couldn’t fault Mo for trying, but Cormier seemed too clever to be tripped up that easily.
By now it was late at night. O’Donovan left the monitoring room to walk down the corridor to his office, where he shut the door behind him. The street lights outside cast a faint orange glow across his desk, but otherwise the room was dark, and it was quiet, still enough to focus his mind.
Project Styx had started well, but Cormier was proving himself to be too good at keeping his secrets. Although Mo and Cormier had clearly bonded, it seemed unlikely that they would learn more from their friendship alone. O’Donovan considered introducing an element of stress to provoke his suspect into breaking his silence. Over the past few days the team had been brainstorming ideas about Mo’s teenage bit on the side, Jenna, suggesting ways in which she could be brought into the scenarios. The detective wondered if Jenna could be the key to getting Cormier to talk. But first, he needed to find a suitable candidate to play her.
12.
JENNA
A few days later, a twenty-eight-year-old officer who had only just completed the Winnipeg Police Service’s undercover training course received a message on her cell phone from Project Styx’s undercover coordinator.
“Can you come in? We have a potential role w
e think you fit, demographically and appearance-wise.”
Intrigued, the officer made her way to the Homicide Unit. Like most of the staff working in the Public Safety Building, she had no knowledge of Project Styx and its objectives. When she arrived, O’Donovan steered her towards a meeting room and motioned for his other team members to join them.
“We want to tell you what’s going on and see if you’re up for what we have in mind,” he explained, before giving her a very brief overview of the project and the character of Jenna. “We need you to look young. Could you pull off nineteen?”
The officer nodded. She thought she could. She was a slight, athletic young woman from a small town in the Prairies, where she’d grown up playing hockey and hanging out with boys. People often commented that she looked younger than her age. With the right clothes, she said, becoming Jenna would not be a problem.
“You’re going to be a vulnerable girl who we’ll put in close proximity to a man we think might be a dangerous sex murderer,” said O’Donovan, asking her if she felt okay with that.
“I understand,” she said calmly, carefully holding her expression steady so as not to betray a growing sense of excitement.
This was the opportunity she had longed for since qualifying. After graduating with a degree in criminology, she had almost chosen a career in law but had found office work too dull and far removed from the action of real life. She knew how rare it was to be included in a project this important, especially in a city as small as Winnipeg. And this case was personal. Jenna had been deeply shocked by the discovery of Tina’s body and, now that she had the opportunity, she was determined to do everything she could to help solve the crime. “Ultimately, Tina deserves justice, so I’m thankful to be part of it,” she told O’Donovan.
O’Donovan told Jenna to prepare to be introduced to Cormier by Mo at 400 Logan. Jenna chose a simple outfit of jeans and a low-cut T-shirt. She bought a hat with a small peak, into which she scrunched up her long blond hair, hoping it would take years off her appearance.
Once at the apartment building, she and Mo took the elevator to the fifth floor. Jenna was nervous, but Mo reassured her that it would be a straightforward meeting. When they approached the door to Cormier’s apartment, Mo took her hand firmly in his before knocking.
“Hey, bud, how is it?” he asked when Cormier opened the door.
“Who is this?” Cormier replied, looking Jenna up and down.
“This is my young party friend, Jenna,” Mo said, and Jenna smiled in acknowledgment.
Cormier smiled back and nudged Mo as if to say well done. He invited them in, but Mo said no, he and Jenna were going to hang out in his apartment. Before they left, Mo asked Cormier to stay on the lookout for Candace in case she turned up by surprise. The meeting was over in a matter of minutes, and O’Donovan considered it a successful start.
* * *
—
While the Styx team planned Jenna’s next appearance, O’Donovan instructed Mo to take Cormier on another bag drop and mention that Jenna was beginning to cause him trouble to see how Cormier would react.
Cormier arrived looking distracted. He had been out all night scavenging for wire and had returned home to find too many people crashing at his place and a pair of his shoes missing. He was angry; he wanted a beer; he wanted to tell Mo what he’d picked up last night and show him exactly where to find the best copper wires in the city. His mind was whirring with thoughts about religion, the Illuminati, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Most of all, he was tired and wanted out of his current existence. He was thinking about settling down with his new girl, Danielle.
Mo listened for a while, then casually brought the conversation around to Jenna. She was being a pain by calling and texting him constantly, pestering him to spend more time with her, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it.
“She’s just a fling, buddy. Candace is the keeper,” Cormier said. He told Mo that Jenna was becoming crazy like most of the young girls he knew, and he was stupid for bringing her back to his home.
“Get her to fall in love with another guy,” he suggested. “I’ll do that for you. Get her to fall in love with me, then I’ll tell her to fuck off.”
Except, he said, he wouldn’t do that, because he was falling in love with Danielle, who reminded him so much of Tina.
Mo nodded in sympathy. Young flesh was the best, and now that he’d slept with Jenna, he was keen to find someone even younger.
Cormier disagreed. Mo was taking too big a risk and should know where to draw the line.
“But you said you fucked Tina,” said Mo, sounding surprised.
Cormier’s reply was firm. “No, I wanted to fuck Tina, but there was something weird there, man.”
Mo changed the subject to Jay and the bags they were picking up for him. Cormier asked what was in them, but Mo said it wasn’t necessary to know. They had to remain loyal, and if Cormier wanted to work for Jay, he needed to be prepared to go all the way. If it came to it, he might even have to kill. Mo wanted to know if Cormier would be prepared to do that. Years ago, he said, when he was a teenager fleeing Iran, he had killed a man who threatened to harm his father. It was a confession that Mo had talked through with the Styx team, aimed at deepening the intimacy between the two men.
“You did what you had to do,” said Cormier, reassuring Mo that he would keep his secrets.
Just before the men parted, Mo paid Cormier forty dollars and brought up the subject of Jenna again. He wasn’t sure what to do.
“You’ve got a storm coming,” laughed Cormier as he climbed out of the van and nodded a goodbye.
As O’Donovan listened in the monitoring room, he felt his ideas about how to use Jenna were taking shape. If Cormier thought she was crazy, they would give him crazy. He had lost his temper when Tina became emotional, so it would be interesting to see whether a distraught Jenna might provoke the same reaction.
Meanwhile, the Project Styx team had thought of another lead to pursue. Mo was instructed to bring Cormier to a storage locker to help move bags of dry dog food. The cover story was that Jay was heavily involved in dog fighting. One of the bags was fixed so that when Cormier lifted it, it would rip open and spill its contents over the floor. Mo would be distracted by a phone call, leaving Cormier to clean the mess up. O’Donovan procured a duvet cover from the same Chloe Green Costco range that Tina had been found in, though in a different colour and pattern. He arranged for it to be left lying on the floor so that Cormier would think of using it as a makeshift bag. The point was to see if the knot he tied when he gathered up the food was the same as the knot tied in the duvet cover found with Tina.
Everything went according to plan. The bag burst as it was supposed to, and Cormier quickly found the duvet cover. He laid it out on the floor and piled the dog food into the middle, pulling up the corners to tie them together when he’d finished. As soon as he and Mo left, officers from the Forensic Identification Unit arrived to take photographs, which they sent to a forensic knot expert in Ontario.
O’Donovan was hoping for an unequivocal match. But when the expert replied a few days later, the results were disappointing. The corners had been joined together with a combination of commonly used knots, and it was impossible to say with any certainty whether they had been tied by the same hand.
* * *
—
Jenna was called to the Homicide Unit to be briefed for her next appearance. This time, she would be working alone. She was to go to Mo’s apartment and knock on his door, screaming at him to answer and threatening to tell Candace about their affair. The point was to remind Cormier that Jenna was still very much in Mo’s life and getting angrier by the day. O’Donovan reassured Jenna that although it was possible Cormier might come out of his apartment to see what the noise was about, it was unlikely he would engage with her directly.
When the elevator door opened onto the fifth floor of 400 Logan, Jenna took a deep breath and steadied herself. Her mind was racing. She felt e
xposed without Mo and was terrified of making a mistake and banging on the wrong door, even though she had rehearsed the scenario over and over in her mind. She had smeared mascara down her cheeks to look like she had been crying. But she had decided not to wear her hat, as she thought it unlikely that Cormier would get close enough to take a good look at her face.
Jenna started to pound on Mo’s door. “Mohammad, open up, it’s Jenna, open the fuckin’ door. Where the fuck are you? Mohammad, what the fuck, you asshole, answer the fuckin’ door.”
Within a few seconds, Cormier was by her side. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m trying to get a hold of Mohammad. He won’t fuckin’ call me back,” cried Jenna, pounding even harder.
In the Public Safety Building, the Styx team were watching the drama unfold on a live feed from the camera in the apartment hallway. They hadn’t expected Cormier to become so involved and were exchanging looks of concern. Each of them silently willed Jenna to hold her nerve.
“I’m gonna fuckin’ tell Candace. That’s what I’m going to do!” Jenna was screaming. “I’m losing my fuckin’ mind. He’s not calling me back. Do you know where he is?”
“Can you lower your voice?” asked Cormier, moving in closer so that he could get a good view of her face. “Take a time out just for a second. Take a deep breath in and out.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her towards him, telling her to match her breathing with his.
“Look at me, please look at me. How old are you?” he asked.
“N-n-nineteen,” replied Jenna, who was now crying for real as the adrenaline surged through her body.
“Okay, I’m eighteen,” said Cormier, and for a second Jenna wondered if he’d seen through her act.