by Joanna Jolly
You’re exactly where we want you, thought O’Donovan, already planning where Styx would go next. Helping dispose of Jenna had cemented Mo, Jay, and Cormier into an alliance that would be very useful for their future plans. From this point on, O’Donovan would work on sucking Cormier further into the criminal organization, deepening his relationship with Mr. Big, and building up to a grand finale in which he would be pressured to tell the truth about Tina. O’Donovan did not yet know exactly how this would happen, but he suspected the end game was not far away. It would be a challenge, but he was confident Styx was moving ever closer to delivering the justice Tina deserved.
13.
WHISTLER
The day after Jenna was attacked, Cormier called Mo’s cell to ask how he was doing.
“Everything’s fine,” said Mo, refusing to be drawn into a conversation. He hinted that he would talk to Cormier when they were face to face.
Later, listening to the audio recording, O’Donovan approved of the conspiratorial tone. The closer the alliance between Mo and Cormier, the more he could exploit it.
For the moment, Cormier was distracted by a visitor. For the first time in a year, his former friend from 22 Carmen, Sarah Holland, appeared on his doorstep and asked if they could talk. Cormier was happy to see her, kicking out another girlfriend so they could spend time alone. Holland wanted him to know that the police had come to her house asking questions about both him and Ernest DeWolfe and that she had been asked to identify an old duvet cover. Listening to her account, Cormier became angry, blaming DeWolfe for bringing the cops to her doorstep and even for murdering Tina. But Holland disagreed. DeWolfe had been a good friend, she said. The couple debated late into the night, lowering their voices to a whisper when they mentioned Tina’s name. When he listened to the conversation, O’Donovan wondered if Holland had gone to the apartment to satisfy her own curiosity about whether Cormier had killed Tina.
A week later, Mo returned to 400 Logan and told Cormier it was time they met with Jay to discuss what had happened to Jenna.
“How is she?” Cormier asked, after he had climbed into Mo’s van. They were driving to an agreed meeting point at a secluded sports field.
Mo said he didn’t know. He had been instructed that if Cormier pressed for an answer he should tell him that Jenna had died of her injuries and Jay had ordered that her body be burned in the animal incinerator used by his dog-fighting friends. For the moment, though, Mo judged it more effective to keep Cormier in the dark about Jenna’s fate.
A chill October wind was stirring up the leaves when the men left Mo’s van and walked to where Jay was standing. At first the chat was casual, but then Jay ordered them to turn off their phones.
“Are you in a bit of a jam?” he asked Cormier.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cormier replied.
“I can deal with issues, but not if you have secrets,” said Jay. He told Cormier that he had been in situations far worse than Cormier could imagine. As long as there were no surprises, there was nothing he couldn’t handle.
But Cormier remained tight-lipped. “I don’t know you from a hole in the ground,” he said when Jay insisted on hearing his account of the night Jenna was hurt.
Listening to the recording, O’Donovan was struck by how much of a lone operator Cormier was and how little he trusted other people. Eventually, it was Mo who persuaded him to open up, by telling Jay how grateful he had been that Cormier had helped get Jenna out of the apartment. Mo had learned that flattery was the fastest route to getting his subject to talk.
“We share a bond now,” Cormier admitted. “As long as we stay solid, we’re good.”
Now that he had some leverage with Jay, Cormier asked him to help him out with some crystal meth dealers who were causing problems. Jay let him know he would do his best.
“Your stock is rising,” Jay said. He handed Cormier a hundred dollars to spend on smartening himself up, saying he wanted to take him out that weekend.
When Saturday evening rolled around, Cormier had tied back his hair and put on clean clothes in anticipation of an evening out at Jay’s expense. He was in a chatty mood as Mo drove him to the upmarket steakhouse the Styx team had chosen to impress him. Jay greeted Cormier warmly and told him to order whatever he wanted, because the night was all about showing his appreciation. Chris, the undercover cop who Cormier had seemed in awe of, chatted to him in French like an old friend. The officers’ brief was to give their suspect centre stage and make him feel as if he had been granted access to their inner circle. They listened intently when Cormier confided how he was planning to steal a car, strip it down, and sell it for parts. They smiled when he detailed his sexual conquests and talked at length about his growing attraction to Danielle. When he wanted to know how they managed to stay in shape, they laughed and told him it was stress that was keeping them slim.
Just before paying for the meal in cash, in a gesture that deeply impressed Cormier, Jay took him outside for a cigarette. He whispered that he had a deal coming up in Vancouver that could make them all rich if he managed to pull it off.
On the ride home, Cormier wanted to know if Mo had enjoyed the evening as much as he had. When Mo confessed he had just learnt that Jenna had died from her injuries and he’d been too worried about whether the cops would come after him to relax, Cormier laughed and told him to pray to God to absolve him.
“The only way it isn’t over is if you won’t let it,” he said. He reasoned that if they had taken Jenna to a hospital, there might have been a different outcome. But Jay had dealt with it his way, and if it had been up to Cormier, he would have done the same thing.
* * *
—
The Project Styx team were now firmly focused on drawing Cormier ever closer to Mo and Jay. They wanted to show Cormier how good life could be if he stayed loyal to his Mr. Big believing the tighter the bond between the men, the more chance there was that Cormier would eventually confess. The team discussed scenarios in which Cormier could be paid for carrying out small tasks, knowing these would ingratiate him further with the gang. They could see their target was easily bored, so they tried to inject an element of danger. A few days after the dinner, Mo was instructed to sound Cormier out about a high-risk job that needed to be done under the cover of darkness.
The following evening, Mo drove Cormier one hundred kilometres south to a rural property close to the US border where Jay was waiting with bags of dog food. When Cormier looked confused, Jay opened one up to reveal handguns still in their packaging hidden inside. Cormier wanted to know how they performed, so Jay took him outside, unpacked a gun, and fired rounds into a hay bale fifteen metres away. When the muzzle flashes blazed in the dark, Cormier laughed and rubbed his hands together. He listened intently when Jay instructed him to drive slowly back to the city and stash the bags in a storage locker and was delighted with the $1,000 cash payment he received for his work. The amount marked a financial escalation for the project, but O’Donovan was confident that they could afford it. Even with overtime costs, they were operating within their $120,000 budget, and the detective saw no reason to scale things down.
A more immediate threat to Styx’s success came from Cormier’s own behaviour. The other tenants of 400 Logan were becoming angry about the constant commotion from his apartment, complaining about noise and what they suspected were drug deals on the premises. Concerned that Cormier might be arrested by local patrol officers, O’Donovan was forced to tell them about the operation and ask them to sign non-disclosure agreements to make sure it remained a secret. The decision worked in his favour. The officers were able to act as extra surveillance, keeping an eye on who was coming and going from the building and turning away some of the more unsavoury characters who tended to drift towards there late at night.
There was also the problem of Cormier’s predilection for young women. His fondness for Danielle had not deterred him from having sex with other girls, and the team identified a doze
n who would come to his apartment on a regular basis. Cormier seemed to have an insatiable sexual appetite and would confide in Mo about the opportunities he was hoping to exploit. He knew a woman who was pimping out her fourteen-year-old daughter, and though he had not taken up the offer, he had noticed that the girl had a lisp and was “cute.” Cormier was aware that the young women he slept with were often frightened of his temper. Having observed Cormier’s behaviour close up, O’Donovan was also concerned. Several times he discussed how the team would intervene or halt the project if they sensed a girl was in immediate danger.
* * *
—
On October 19, the federal Liberal Party candidate, Justin Trudeau, was elected Canada’s new prime minister. Reacting to the public outrage that had followed Tina Fontaine’s death, Trudeau had campaigned on a promise to launch a national public inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women as soon as he was in office. In Winnipeg, O’Donovan watched the election results with a sense of detachment. He was relieved to see the problem finally addressed at a national level, but within the intense secretive world of Project Styx, Trudeau’s pledge seemed an irrelevant distraction.
That fall, as the temperature dropped and snow began to fall, the detective grew more concerned about keeping Cormier under control. One evening the monitoring staff made a panicked call directly to him to say they had heard Cormier offering chocolate chip cookies to two young Indigenous women in exchange for sex. Because the girls had been wearing thick coats when they passed beneath the hallway surveillance camera, the staff couldn’t judge whether they were old enough to consent. O’Donovan immediately dispatched two uniformed officers to knock on Cormier’s door and ask for IDs, pretending they were responding to a noise complaint. Satisfied that the girls were over eighteen and not in distress, the officers left. Cormier later told friends he suspected the police had given a bogus excuse to get into his place because they wanted to spy on him.
O’Donovan took the opportunity to exploit Cormier’s paranoia to his advantage, sending two officers to his apartment to say they were investigating a missing persons report about Jenna. The first time they knocked on his door, Cormier refused to open it. But they returned the following day and managed to get inside to show Jenna’s photo. Cormier looked at it for several seconds but did not say a word.
The tactic worked. A day later, Cormier arranged to meet Mo at a car wash to tell him that the cops had been sniffing around. He reassured Mo that the chances of him being caught were slight, as Jenna was still listed as a missing person, not as a homicide. When Mo told him Jenna’s body would not be found because it had been incinerated, he relaxed even more.
“Get a good lawyer,” Cormier advised. “But fucking don’t tell him anything either. Your lawyer is obligated to act on what you tell them, so keep your mouth shut.”
Towards the end of October, the monitoring staff alerted O’Donovan to a conversation recorded between Cormier and a young female friend who occasionally spent time in the apartment. Cormier was talking about Tina.
“We had sex and we fuck. Sure enough…fuck. Tina finds a knife…She got angry and…get the fuck away from me…Blah, blah, blah…” he continued.
The mention of the knife was new to O’Donovan, and it sounded like Cormier was talking about a different argument from the one he and Tina had had outside 22 Carmen on August 6. If Tina had been angry and had brandished a knife, it could explain why Cormier might have harmed her. But Cormier’s speech was rambling and incoherent, too vague for the detective to be sure of its meaning.
“I’m into this…dark side I guess. The dark side starts looking at the dark side,” Cormier told his friend. “By sunset she died,” he continued. “That’s why I don’t joke: I’ve seen a lot of shit.”
The Project Styx team could see that Cormier’s crystal meth addiction was deepening, and his behaviour becoming more unpredictable. In early November Cormier learned that his older brother had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. He reacted by smashing up his phone and lashing out at the people around him. His initial resolve to keep Jenna’s murder a secret was weakening, and he hinted to two friends that someone had been killed in the apartment building and made them promise to keep their mouths shut. He accused other friends of stealing and Danielle of only caring about him because he gave her dope. He continued to talk obsessively about Tina, saying he was conducting his own investigation into her death and he believed that dirty cops had been involved. Between his drug-induced highs Cormier’s moods fluctuated. Aggression and mania flooded through him on waves of nervous energy.
The Styx team continued to present Jay as the man who could make Cormier’s problems disappear. Mo let Cormier know that business was going so well for his boss that Jay was going to buy him and Candace a new condo, and there was a suggestion that later he might do the same for Cormier. Jay said he was closing in on his big Vancouver deal and there would be more than enough work to go around. Meanwhile, Mo and Cormier were ordered to conduct surveillance on a man who had flown in from the West Coast. Cormier’s criminal instinct was so attuned that he quickly picked out the real undercover team that was tailing Mo’s van. This impressed O’Donovan but also made him nervous. He knew they had to push on with the project before Cormier realized what was really going on.
Jay told Cormier that his long-term plan was to fly him to Vancouver to work for him there. O’Donovan calculated that this would both impress Cormier and convince him that Jay was a serious player with a criminal network throughout the country. While Cormier waited for a fake ID, Jay introduced him to the “dirty cop” on this team, an undercover officer named Brad. Jay said he had been concerned because Brad had told him that the police were investigating Jenna’s disappearance and had security camera footage of the hatchback car that had driven her away. But Brad reassured him that detectives were still searching for answers and definitely did not have any footage from inside the apartment building. Everyone agreed that there was no immediate cause for alarm.
* * *
—
O’Donovan felt it was time to remind Cormier how rewarding life could be if he pledged his full allegiance to Jay. Following a well-honed Mr. Big strategy, he planned an ostentatious party. The location was a newly built luxury penthouse in Winnipeg’s fashionable Osborne Village, which Jay would pass off as one of his many properties. The team rented a top-of-the-line Cadillac SUV, packed the fridge full of alcohol, including Cormier’s favourite fruit beers, and hired caterers to wander around with trays of canapés. Thirty undercover officers were invited to be guests and told to dress up for a big night out. Most already knew about Styx. The ones who didn’t were instructed to drink, look happy, and keep their conversation light. O’Donovan estimated he would be spending more than $5,000 on this one evening, but he calculated it was worth it if it lured Cormier closer.
With the stage set for an exciting event, the only person who seemed unimpressed was Cormier himself. When Jay arrived to pick him up in his Cadillac, he found him in a depressed mood. Cormier said he had just ended his relationship with Danielle and was already regretting his decision. He had made an effort to smarten up, slicking back his hair, pulling on clean jeans, and buying a bottle of whisky so he wouldn’t be seen as a “schmuck.” But the party wasn’t really his scene, and he told Jay he might not last the evening.
His spirits lifted a little when he realized the event was being held in a building from which he’d stolen copper pipes when it was under construction. Reassured to be on somewhat familiar ground, Cormier tried to forget his romantic troubles and socialize with the other guests. Candace made a point of taking him under her wing, introducing him to her friends and praising him as a fantastic guy. Everyone feigned delight to meet him. Jay casually mentioned he had been so impressed with Cormier’s work that he was considering buying another penthouse and installing Cormier in it while it was being renovated. He, Cormier, and an undercover officer posing as a corrupt mortgage broker fell into a d
eep conversation about property fraud while Candace rallied the guests into singing along to “American Pie,” which she had turned to full volume in the kitchen. When Mo and Candace offered to drive him home at 4 A.M., Cormier told them he had never had such good friends.
“I love you both,” he said from the back seat of their car.
“We love you too,” replied Candace.
O’Donovan listened to the exchange with a sense of satisfaction. His goal of switching Cormier’s dependence away from his street friends and onto Jay and Mo seemed to be working. As Cormier’s life continued to spiral downwards, O’Donovan hoped he would come to rely on them even more. He felt it was only a matter of time before Cormier finally cracked.
* * *
—
The storm came quickly. A week after the party, Mo received a call from an agitated Cormier, who was speaking so fast that Mo barely understood him. Heading to his apartment, Mo found Cormier shouting that he needed to leave Winnipeg immediately, saying it was urgent that he visit his brother in New Brunswick before he died from his brain tumour. Cormier insisted he would cycle the three thousand kilometres to get there, even though it was mid-November and the ground was thick with snow. The catalyst for his anger had been Danielle, who he accused of having had sex with someone else.
“I didn’t kill her, I just punched her right in the mouth for that,” he told Mo.
Cormier asked Mo to draw him a map to the highway so that he could return to his childhood home and sit by his mother’s grave to talk to her. He said he also had things he needed to say about Tina.
Listening to the conversation live in the audio monitoring room, O’Donovan sensed that they might have reached the point at which Cormier would confess. His suspect was spitting out details about how he had been arrested for Tina’s murder, swearing that he had only run away from the cops because he thought they were dirty and trying to set him up.