Victor kept busy, giving the storm time to pass. The office was coming to life, the worker ants arriving one by one, shedding their outerwear. Sounds of conversation began to fill the room.
Delaney came in wearing headphones. Looking disconsolate, he crossed the detectives’ area without greeting anyone and shut himself in his office. Victor watched him go. The boss didn’t have to say anything for his distress to be apparent. The detective sergeant would check in on him later.
After looking at his emails, he answered a text message from Nadja, sent two hours earlier, asking where he’d gone.
Then he got up and walked over to Jacinthe. Her body language made it clear that she didn’t want to talk, but he stood in front of her desk anyway, wearing his best look of contrition.
“I was going downstairs. Can I treat you to a couple of honey-glazed donuts?”
She gave him a dark glare that gradually brightened. “Manipulative son of a bitch.” She shook her head theatrically to convey her disapproval. “You know I can’t resist when you play on my heartstrings.” Jacinthe stood up, wrapped her massive hands around his throat, and mimed strangling him.
They both laughed, then descended to the Place Versailles food court, where they sat down.
Store employees were rolling back the metal shutters from the storefronts. The regulars were starting to come in — mostly seniors who whiled away their days on the benches of the shopping mall.
“I’m sorry, Jacinthe. I should have called you.”
“Fucking idiot,” she said for form’s sake, but she was smiling.
Victor recounted in detail the circumstances in which Loïc had made contact with Nash, as well as the information the young vagrant had given them.
“Lortie talked to him about the Laporte and Cross kidnappings? How about that …” She was silent for a moment, then she asked, “You sure there isn’t anything you’re forgetting to tell me?”
The detective sergeant held her gaze. Telling her that Loïc had bought heroin for Nash wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but he preferred, if possible, to keep that to himself.
He was about to say something evasive when his face lit up. “Yes! I talked to Berger. Judith Harper had chlamydia.”
Surprise was apparent on Jacinthe’s heavy features. “At her age? That’s pretty weird.”
Victor had to concede that it was unusual, to say the least.
“She wasn’t raped, was she?” Jacinthe asked.
“No, no. Berger’s categorical about that.”
“Good.” She gave him a searching look. “Are you hiding anything else from me?”
“I don’t understand,” he said, shrugging. “Like what, for instance?”
“Like, for instance, what you were doing yesterday with —”
Victor had bent over to pick up a napkin from the floor when the miniature shoes and impeccably creased pantlegs of Gilles Lemaire entered his field of vision.
“I knew I’d find you here,” Lemaire said, cutting Jacinthe off.
The detective sergeant pulled out a chair for him. “Have a seat, Gilles. What’s up?”
“I’d rather stand. For once, I don’t have to crane my neck when I talk to you two.” With Lemaire standing and Victor sitting, Lemaire was indeed the taller of the two, by a slight margin. “I finally managed to get in touch with Will Bennett’s co-workers yesterday.”
“Bennett? Judith Harper’s lover?” Jacinthe asked. “What did you find out?”
“I’d been trying to reach them for two days. I was starting to wonder if they were avoiding me. The first one wouldn’t talk, but I turned up the heat on the second one, and he finally opened up.”
“Come on, Gilles, spit it out,” Jacinthe said impatiently. “Stop beating around the bush.”
“You ready?” The Gnome leaned forward, like he was about to divulge a state secret. “Bennett went AWOL during their business trip.” Lemaire stepped back, as though assessing the effect of his words.
“Long enough to come here, commit the murder, and get back?” Victor asked.
“His co-workers lost track of him for twenty-four hours.”
“Do they know what happened to him?” the detective sergeant asked.
“Bennett offered no explanation, which may be due to the fact that he’s above them on the corporate ladder. Apparently it wasn’t the first time he’d disappeared, but he’d never been gone so long before.”
“They have no idea what he was doing?”
“I didn’t squeeze as hard as I could have, but they say they don’t.”
“This is worth looking into. If he crossed the border, he’ll have left a trail. Did you check with customs?”
“I know he wasn’t on any flights. As for everything else, I’ll need a little time.”
“Did you ask for a financial profile?” Victor asked.
“I should have it this afternoon.”
“It won’t show a thing,” Jacinthe declared. “There’s no way Bennett would be dumb enough to rent a car or buy a train ticket on his credit card,” she said, biting into her donut. “We don’t have time to mess around. We need to go back and question him right away.”
“That’s where things get interesting,” the Gnome said with an enigmatic smile.
“What do you mean?” she asked, her mouth full.
“Bennett is nowhere to be found.”
27
VETERINARIAN
Victor stopped in front of his reflection in the mirror and examined himself for a moment. With his fingertips, he palpated the sagging, purple-tinged flesh encircling his eyes. This whole aging thing was starting to get on his nerves.
For some years now, he’d been working to maximize what nature had given him. He ate vegetarian as often as possible, and strenuous training had enabled him to gain in muscle what he’d lost in flab.
Though he sometimes tried to convince himself otherwise, the age difference with Nadja troubled him. Feeling mildly downcast, he walked away from his image and continued his search of Nathan Lawson’s bedroom, opening drawers, picking up items, examining a pile of old invoices. From the living room, he heard Taillon’s voice as she grilled Wu.
When they’d returned to the office after their break, they received confirmation that Wu’s visa had expired. Since his status was now illegal, they had decided to use that fact as the basis for talking to him. In the car, they’d worked out their strategy. With her usual talent for subtlety, Jacinthe would threaten Wu with deportation if he refused to talk, while Victor promised to leave him alone if he collaborated.
Just before their departure, Lemaire had informed them that database searches of Larry Truman and the other phrases highlighted by the documents expert had yielded nothing so far, except for the meeting with a certain Mr. McGregor.
On that subject, Lemaire had confirmed what Victor already suspected: “Federated Laymen of Quebec” was a reference to the FLQ. Lemaire had discovered that on May 1st, 1965, the FLQ had detonated a bomb in front of the U.S. consulate on McGregor Street.
Victor had also received an update from Loïc on the subject of Eugène Corriveau, a.k.a. Nash. His intuition had been right: the young man had several convictions to his name, including one for possession of narcotics, but overall it was small-time stuff. In addition, the kid’s digging had revealed that Nash had lied to them about one detail: he was no longer a Ph.D. student in mathematics at the University of Montreal. The department chair had confirmed to Loïc that Nash had been expelled from the math program the previous year, after failing repeatedly to complete the required coursework, despite several warnings. In addition, his thesis adviser had noted that Corriveau’s drug problem was a matter of public knowledge, and that he’d made use of the counselling services that were available to students.
So, the question remained: could they trust Nash’s word when he declared that Lortie had been in his company between Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning?
Loïc had also pointed out to Victor, s
ignificantly, that the distance between the railway bridge where the two men had spent the night and the warehouse where Judith Harper’s body had been found could be covered on foot in less than an hour along the bicycle path, which was still quite passable despite the snow. It was thus conceivable that Lortie had made the trip without Nash’s knowledge, while Nash was out cold after a heroin fix.
Victor was about to search under Lawson’s bed when Taillon came in. From the look on her face, it was clear that her conversation with Wu hadn’t yielded the results she was hoping for.
“The guy’s only been in Quebec for a few months. I don’t think he knows Lawson very well, but he did finally admit that they met at a sauna in the gay village a couple of months ago. Lawson had been putting him up since then, in return for sexual favours. Otherwise, he’s sticking with the story he gave us the other day. He repeated to me that on the night he went missing, Lawson called and told him to put some clothes and his passport in an overnight bag. Wu went down to the front desk and gave the bag to the doorman, as Lawson asked.”
“That’s it?”
Jacinthe took the question as a criticism. “Feel free to talk to him yourself, smart guy.” A sadistic smile appeared on her lips. “Unless you’d like me to …”
“No! I’ll handle it.”
With Jacinthe at his heels, Victor walked to the couch where Wu was sitting. Looking wary, clasping his hands, his head sunk down between his shoulders, Wu was clearly afraid. Even without the use of force, Jacinthe was an intimidating presence, and her threats of deportation had clearly had an effect.
Victor felt immediate sympathy for the young man, who seemed lost in a world whose rituals he was unfamiliar with.
“Hello, Wu. I have a few questions for you as well. Then we’ll leave you in peace, I promise.” As he spoke, he crouched down to put himself at the young man’s level.
Wu raised frightened black eyes and nodded.
“From what I understand, you didn’t see Mr. Lawson on the evening he went missing. Is that right?”
“That right,” the young man murmured.
“Okay. Now take your time before answering. Try to remember. When he asked for his passport, did he tell you where he was going?”
“No,” Wu replied without hesitation.
“Repeat to me in your own words what he said.”
“He say he going away for a few days, and I can stay here.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“He say nothing else.”
“How did he sound over the phone?”
The young man frowned as he thought about it. “He upset. Very upset, yes.”
Behind Victor, Taillon was becoming impatient, rocking from one leg to the other. Knowing that she might blow up at any moment, and that her presence was making it hard to create an atmosphere of trust with the young man, the detective sergeant asked her to go search Lawson’s office. She walked to the far end of the apartment, unleashing a torrent of profanity.
Turning back to Wu, Victor saw relief on his face.
“During the last few weeks, had you and Mr. Lawson talked about a vacation, a trip, someplace he wanted to take you?”
The young man shook his head. “I think no.”
“Do you have any idea where he’s gone, Wu? Can you think of any place you and he went together?”
The young man thought it over, then shook his head, but just as Victor was about to ask another question, he saw a light in Wu’s eyes.
“Did you just remember something?”
Nathan Lawson’s companion reddened. “He take me one night for sex. To a house.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know city so good. Can’t say. It happen at night. Big house, two floors. Nobody inside, just Nathan and me.”
Victor made a face. They were groping in the dark. “Did you go by car?”
“Yes. Maybe twenty minutes.”
So Lawson and the young man had stayed in town. That was a start.
“Close your eyes, Wu. Describe the house, what was around it, what you saw through the windows.”
“I see mountain through window!” he exclaimed. “Mountain covered in snow.”
Mount Royal. The house overlooked Mount Royal!
“Would you know the place if I brought you there?”
“Yes.”
Victor went down to the lobby and spoke to the doorman on duty. It was the same man who had given Lawson the overnight bag prepared by Wu. The doorman said Lawson had insisted that the handover take place in the adjacent alley, and he hadn’t gotten out of the car, which suggested that he was nervous. Besides that, the detective sergeant learned nothing new, except that Lawson was disagreeable and haughty, that he rarely spoke to the building staff, and that when he did, it was always to complain about the quality of their service.
Victor stepped outside to smoke a cigarette on the sidewalk.
They knew Lawson hadn’t used his passport. The more Victor thought about it, the more convinced he became that the lawyer had been trying to cover his tracks; that he’d never intended to leave the country. But he’d wanted someone to think he intended to leave. He was hidden away someplace close. Victor was prepared to bet on it.
Could he be at the house Wu had mentioned? If the house was on the mountain, that limited the number of possibilities, but not enough to waste precious time roaming the streets of Westmount and Outremont with Wu, hoping for a flash of recognition.
The gathering darkness signalled the end of the afternoon. The wind had risen. Snow was falling. According to news reports, the impending snowstorm would bury Quebec.
The detective sergeant shivered as he puffed on his cigarette; he had stepped out without his jacket.
His phone vibrated. For the first time all day, a smile lit up his face. It was Nadja:
thinking of you xxx
Although Victor wasn’t overly worried about having left Wu with Taillon, he didn’t linger outside. When he returned to the apartment, he noticed that Jacinthe had found a bag of chips in Lawson’s pantry. She was sprawled on the living room couch with her feet up on a glass table. From the satisfied look on her face, Victor knew immediately that she’d found something.
“Did Lawson have any pets?” she asked, bringing the bag to her lips and tilting her head back to scarf down the last crumbs.
“No idea. Did you ask Wu?”
“He says he didn’t.”
The detective sergeant looked around, seeking the young man.
“Don’t worry. He went to lie down in his bedroom. I didn’t touch him.”
“Why ask the question if you already know the answer?” he said, sinking into an armchair.
Wearing an enigmatic expression, she held out a sheet of paper. Victor leaned forward to take it.
“A vet’s bill,” he said, after glancing at it.
It was dated the previous month. Jacinthe had found it among Lawson’s papers.
“Kind of strange for a guy who doesn’t own a pet, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Did you call?”
“Pfff. Do I look like a maid to you?” She was clearly pleased with her discovery. “You can do the honours, my friend.”
After being placed on hold for several minutes while the receptionist checked the files, the detective sergeant learned that the bill in question related to a dog that had been euthanized.
“Mr. Lawson’s dog?”
“No, it belonged to a friend of his. Mr. Lawson brought the animal in to be put down a few days after the owner died.”
Victor’s heart started to race. “Do you know the friend’s name?”
“Yes, it’s Frost. Peter Frost.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have his address on file, would you?”
28
SUMMIT WOODS
“Look out!” Taillon yelled.
Jaw clenched, muscles tensed to the breaking point, Victor wrenched the steering wheel. The Crown Victoria’s rear slid and the car fishtailed, threa
tening to skid off the road, but the detective sergeant hit the accelerator and managed to straighten the car out at the last moment. They were racing along Summit Circle. Snow was falling hard through the headlight beams; they couldn’t see a metre in front of them. Nestled into the flank of the mountain, Peter Frost’s house appeared as they emerged from a hairpin turn.
“There it is … Stop. Stop!”
They left the car in front of the driveway with the doors open and the emergency lights on.
Victor made a mental note of the FOR SALE sign near the entrance.
“It’s unlocked,” Jacinthe said, panting.
The detective sergeant pushed the door with his metal flashlight.
“We’re going in,” he murmured, unholstering his Glock.
The flashlight beam swept over a living room stuffed with Victorian furniture and thick, red-velvet drapes, then a dining room with a crystal chandelier and a table that could seat fourteen. Victor hit the light switch. Nothing. There was no power. Next, they discovered a kitchen, its walls lined with solid oak cupboards, and a cluttered office.
The two partners moved silently, methodically, each securing a position before the other advanced. Victor signalled to Taillon, pointing to the upper floor. Several stairs creaked under Jacinthe’s weight. The detective sergeant felt an oppressive mix of fear and adrenalin gripping him. Cold sweat ran down his temples. They found five bedrooms with outdated furnishings and wallpaper. In one of the rooms, the bed was unmade. Victor touched the rumpled sheet with his fingertips: it was cold.
They went through every room. No signs of a struggle. Nobody.
In the basement, ceramic recesses containing hundreds of wine bottles covered an entire wall. Old furniture was piled in a corner next to skis and a golf bag with fuzzy yellow covers on the clubs. The other side of the space was occupied by shelves laden with items Frost hadn’t been able to get rid of over the years. Moving forward, the detectives entered a workshop with tools neatly arranged on the wall.
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