Lemaire informed the team that he’d just called in Bennett’s two colleagues for further questioning. Despite investigative efforts over the past few days, it wasn’t possible to say for sure whether Bennett had returned from Boston incognito. His bank cards hadn’t been used in any transactions. There had been no car rentals; nor was there any sign that he’d been at the airport.
None of which proved anything, as far as the Gnome was concerned.
Bennett was highly intelligent. He could have paid in cash, or hitchhiked, or caught a ride with a trucker. Crossing the border illegally wasn’t easy, but it could be done, if you were smart. The area to cover was vast, the possibilities endless. Bennett could have slipped through a gap somewhere.
Jacinthe wasn’t buying it. She shook her head.
Why would Bennett have gone to all that trouble to give himself an alibi that wasn’t even solid? His own colleagues had known of his absence and had finally admitted as much to Lemaire.
But the Gnome wasn’t giving up. He clung to the fact that there was a gap in Bennett’s timeline and that, during the period in question, Bennett would have been able to kill Harper and make it back to Boston.
Lemaire argued that Bennett had surely expected his colleagues to stay quiet out of fear of reprisal. Bennett was their superior in the company hierarchy, which meant he could do them harm.
And indeed, Lemaire added, he’d had to grill the subordinates for a long time before one of them finally admitted the truth. Bennett’s suicide attempt was the final piece of evidence confirming that he was right.
“Let’s say he killed Harper,” Jacinthe replied. “And let’s say he went back to his business meetings in Boston afterward. How do you explain the Lawson murder? Huh?”
“Lawson went missing last Friday. According to Berger, he died on Monday. That could suggest someone held him captive during that time. Bennett flew back to town Sunday night. Which means, in theory, he could have killed Lawson. And then there’s your timer theory, which opens up other possibilities.”
Loïc was listening quietly to the discussion, working his jaw muscles while he typed on his BlackBerry.
“What do you think, Lessard?” Jacinthe asked.
Victor, who’d been gazing fixedly at his high-tops, now found himself in the midst of what was starting to feel like a family dispute. He got up. “I don’t know,” he said dismissively. “I’m going for a smoke. And while Bennett’s in the hospital, let’s get him tested for chlamydia.”
Putting on his jacket, he went downstairs and walked through the shopping mall. As he stepped out into the parking lot, a guy with bulging arms and a suntan followed him.
“Hey, jumbo, got a light?” the guy asked. Wearing only a T-shirt, he seemed unaware of the cold. There were tattoos on his arms.
Douchebag, Victor thought, and sparked his lighter.
The guy thanked him and stepped away to smoke in peace.
Victor had answered Jacinthe’s question honestly.
The investigation was frustrating him. He didn’t know what to think anymore. At first, Lortie had seemed like an obvious potential suspect, but the detective sergeant had ruled him out after Berger’s confirmation that Lortie had died before Lawson. Nor did the detective sergeant set any store by Jacinthe’s timer idea.
As for Will Bennett, he didn’t know what to make of his suicide attempt.
The Gnome seemed convinced that Bennett had somehow been involved in the violent death of Judith Harper, but he couldn’t point to any proof, nor any motive, in support of his contention. The absence of evidence didn’t mean Bennett was innocent, but Victor was hesitant. He felt conflicted. He wanted to believe the Gnome’s theory, but his intuition told him that they were barking up the wrong tree, that Bennett had nothing to do with this case.
He took a final drag, filling his lungs with the seventy carcinogenic substances contained in cigarette smoke. His gaze drifted idly for a moment, then he tossed the butt into the soiled snow at his feet.
Chilled, the detective sergeant went back upstairs, sat at his desk, and answered a few emails before returning to the conference room. He found Gilles Lemaire by himself, immersed in André Lortie’s psychiatric file.
Gilles looked up when he heard Victor come in.
“Where are Taillon and Loïc?” the detective sergeant asked, glancing at their empty chairs.
“They went down to the cafeteria,” the Gnome said. His voice was higher than usual.
Victor saw that Lemaire was agitated. “You okay?”
“I think I’ve found something,” he said.
“Oh yeah? What?”
“This …” The Gnome pointed at the cardboard tab on the first file Victor had consulted. There was writing on it, in pencil. The detective sergeant squinted. He hadn’t noticed the writing while going over the reports.
“Ref. Dr. Ewen Cameron, 1964,” he read, puzzled. “What’s the problem?”
“There are two. First, what do those words mean, exactly? That Lortie was referred by Cameron in 1964? If so, then we have only part of his file.”
“That would surprise me,” Victor said thoughtfully. “The chief of psychiatry at Louis-H. told me Lortie was admitted for the first time in 1969, after being brought in by police.”
Victor leafed through the pages and showed him the relevant passage.
“I’m not denying it,” Lemaire protested. “I’m just asking.”
“I’ll take your word for it. And the second problem?”
“I did a bachelor’s degree in psychology before going to police college. If this is the same Ewen Cameron, we studied some of his experiments. He was well known for his research, and not in a good way.”
“What do you mean?”
“He did experiments at McGill University in the sixties. His work was in behaviour modification through brainwashing. Dozens of patients drawn from the population of Montreal had their minds manipulated, specifically by injection of psychotropic substances.”
“I’ve never heard about this before,” Victor admitted. “You think Lortie might have been one of his patients?”
“Hang on, I haven’t told you the best part,” the Gnome said in an excited voice. “Do you know who was financing Dr. Cameron’s work?”
“I hate guessing games, Gilles.”
“The United States intelligence services. Specifically, the CIA.”
Victor frowned, intrigued.
“And do you know what code name was given to the project?” Lemaire continued.
“No idea.”
“MK-ULTRA.”
The Gnome had clearly expected a strong reaction to this information, but, despite his best efforts, Victor couldn’t see where his colleague was going with this.
“Should that mean something to me, Gilles?”
The Gnome turned and pointed at the cardboard sheet stuck to the big board.
“You’ve found a link to Larry Truman,” Victor persisted. “Is that it?”
“You really don’t see it?” The Gnome sighed, shaking his head in disappointment.
Lemaire read one of the sentences in a loud voice, overenunciating, taking his time with each syllable, in a style one might expect of a teacher addressing a class of halfwits.
“My Ketchup Uncle Larry Truman Relishes Apples.” Silence. “What do you get if you take the first letter of each word and string them together?”
“You get MK-ULTRA,” the detective sergeant said, stunned.
SEPTEMBER 1964
TWO DAYS
Mom hasn’t slept in two days.
Two days in which her spectre has haunted the house. Two days in which, at any moment, her eyes might flicker briefly in the emptiness, then darken once again. Two days in which she’s listened to every tiny noise, in which she’s run to the window at the faintest creak, her gaze losing itself in the infinity of heaven.
Two days in which Léonard, despite his man’s body, has sniffled back his snot and walked in circles, crying like a child w
ho must learn to do hard things.
Two days in which Charlie’s jaw and fist have never unclenched.
Two days in which Dad has been missing.
Charlie gets up decisively, putting on a baseball cap. “I’m going to look for him.”
Mom puts a hand on Charlie’s forearm. “No. You’re staying right here.” She stifles a sob and adds, “We don’t even know where he is.”
At the far end of the room, nestled on the couch, Léonard is staring in wonder at the fuzzy black-and-white images. Charlie, who would normally be delighted to join him, has no desire to watch TV.
Charlie pulls away from Mom, slamming an angry fist onto the table. “We have to call the police.”
Mom bites her lower lip. Her anxiety is palpable. “Out of the question,” she says firmly, but her voice is weak. “That would be the worst thing we could do.”
Mom finally gets them to bed, despite their protests. In their shared bedroom, Léonard quickly falls asleep. Charlie waits to hear the change in Léonard’s breathing before throwing back the covers and getting out of bed. After crawling along the floor, Charlie takes up position at the top of the stairs. From that vantage point, it’s possible to observe everything that happens down below. Some evenings, Charlie has seen ill-tempered discussions between Mom and Dad. On other occasions, certain happenings have prompted Charlie to return to bed with a funny smile.
This time, head lowered, Charlie feels the pain of an anguished heart.
Mom is curled up on the living room carpet, weeping, moaning, begging heaven to return her husband safe and sound, repeating over and over again that something’s happened to him, that he must surely be dead.
That noise …
Charlie wakes with a start, sore necked as a result of the hours spent leaning headfirst against the railing. Charlie gets up and rushes to the window. In the country, at night, depending on the speed and direction of the wind, sound travels fast and far. The engine’s growl has been audible for several seconds by the time the headlight beams swing into view.
Charlie is motionless for an instant, then breaks into a run.
“Mom! Mom! A car!”
On the road, a ’57 Chevy slows down but doesn’t stop. A door opens. A body rolls out onto the gravel.
Out of breath, the three of them reach the road at the same time. Dad is alive. He doesn’t appear to be seriously injured. But he seems weak, confused, disoriented. He murmurs a stream of garbled words.
“What have they done to you?” Mom keeps repeating, rocking him in her arms. “What have they done to you, my love?”
Léonard emits little yelps, crying into his legs.
With a dark expression, and holding a large rock, Charlie watches the Chevy speed away until the two bobbing yellow eyes vanish into the night.
Two days. Enough time to turn their lives upside down.
41
CO-AUTHORS
Victor had stood up and was pacing the room, constantly running his fingers through his hair. Wearing a slight smile, the Gnome was watching him struggle to get his thoughts in order. Having returned from their break, Loïc and Jacinthe had joined the conversation. If it hadn’t been for the sound of Jacinthe’s munching, they might almost have heard the detective sergeant’s mind at work.
“Is the hamster wheel turning?” Lemaire asked jokingly.
Victor stopped pacing, put his hands on the table, and leaned toward his fellow cop. “If I’m understanding you, Gilles, you’re saying Lortie was used as a guinea pig in a secret CIA research project — a series of psychiatric experiments carried out at McGill in the 1960s. Is that it?”
Lemaire nodded.
While Victor searched feverishly through a stack of papers, Jacinthe put another handful of Smarties into her mouth.
“I would have liked to have memories,” the detective sergeant quoted at last, holding up the report on the homeless man’s suicide, which contained a verbatim account of his exchange with the police officers.
He looked around at his colleagues. “That’s what Lortie said to the two patrol cops before jumping to his death.”
Those seemingly harmless words now took on a new significance.
Loïc stopped blowing bubbles for a moment to consider the Gnome’s idea. “If that’s the case,” he said at last, “and Lortie was lucid enough to write a coded sentence to identify a super-secret project, then maybe he wasn’t so delusional after all.”
“Oh, come on, kid,” Jacinthe blurted out. “The CIA? Get real. Gilles learned about this secret project, MK-whatever, in school. Can we agree that it stopped being secret a long time ago? Lortie probably heard it mentioned somewhere and began having delusions about it, like he did about everything else. Whether he wrote sentences or drew pictures, that doesn’t get us any further than if he was knitting granny slippers. And it all just proves what I’ve been saying since the beginning: the guy was a fucking whack job!”
The conversation turned into an argument. Loïc suggested that the treatments Lortie had undergone might have affected his memory, and that he wrote on the cardboard sheets to preserve information about his past — information he didn’t want to forget.
The Gnome had his doubts, wondering why Lortie would have needed to code the information, but he conceded that a more detailed analysis of the writing might be helpful.
Her colleagues’ theories cracked like so many roaches under Jacinthe’s heel. She accused her fellow cops of jumping to conclusions. For starters, they had no proof that Lortie had been used as a guinea pig in the MK-ULTRA program. All they had was a note on a file tab.
While the others argued, Victor was tapping on his keyboard. “Anyway, the two of them knew each other. They co-authored a couple of papers.”
Everyone looked at him.
“Who?” Taillon asked.
“Ewen Cameron and Judith Harper.”
The detective sergeant turned his screen around so they could see. On the website of McGill’s psychiatry department, he’d found a page devoted to Judith Harper’s research. There, in her list of publications, two titles had caught his attention:
CAMERON, E., and J. HARPER, “The Use of Electroconvulsive Therapy and Sleep Deprivation Drugs to Eliminate Past Behavioural Habits,” North American Journal of Psychiatry, McGill University, Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, 1960.
CAMERON, E., and J. HARPER, “A Case Study on Depatterning to Eliminate Past Behavioural Habits,” North American Journal of Psychiatry, McGill University, Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, 1961.
“There’s our connection,” Loïc said eagerly. “Judith Harper was a psychiatrist, too. Let’s assume Lortie was treated by Cameron and Harper. He could have killed her in revenge for the mistreatment he went through.”
“You’re way out in left field, kid,” Jacinthe proclaimed. “Think for a second. We’ve got two murders committed with the same weapon, which means a single killer. Lortie was already dead when Lawson was killed. Burgers confirmed as much. For the Harper murder, he had an alibi. What else do you want? You gonna tell us Lawson was Lortie’s attorney and the whack job decided to get back at him for overbilling?”
Loïc hung his head.
“Jacinthe, please,” Victor intervened. “Weren’t you talking about a timer not so long ago?”
The argument continued, with all the cops vigorously defending their viewpoints.
The chair of McGill’s psychiatry department, Richard Blaikie, had white hair and a goatee, and wore a bow tie and browline glasses. For a moment, Victor searched his memory — Blaikie vaguely reminded him of someone. But who? An immense oil portrait, its surface finely fissured, hung on the wall behind him.
In the portrait, an austere man with a regal head and scornful lips contemplated the horizon. The detective sergeant tried unsuccessfully to read the name on the brass plate. It was surely one of Blaikie’s predecessors, perhaps even the department’s first head.
Jacinthe, caring little about decorum, was drumming
her fingers on her armrest. Despite the fact that it was nearly 5:00 p.m., Blaikie had agreed to see them right away after a brief phone conversation in which Victor explained that they were investigating the murder of Judith Harper.
Blaikie had begun by expressing his sincere sadness at the death of his former colleague, saying he preserved excellent memories of her.
But when they began to discuss details, his attitude changed markedly.
Victor saw irritation on the department head’s face when he was told that the detectives had obtained access to the psychiatric file of a certain André Lortie and were trying to determine whether he had been one of Ewen Cameron’s patients. When Victor mentioned the MK-ULTRA program, Blaikie’s irritation turned into outright annoyance.
“Listen, I have no way of checking whether this man was treated under the program. While it’s true that the MK-ULTRA experiments were carried out at McGill, they were never under the authority of this institution.”
“There must be files somewhere,” Victor suggested.
“It’s been more than forty-five years! I wasn’t in the psychiatry department back then. In any case, the files were kept by Cameron. If I remember correctly, they were destroyed during the 1970s on the orders of the CIA director at the time.”
Blaikie’s assistant, who had been in a corner of the room preparing beverages on a metal trolley, now placed a steaming cup in front of her boss. She poured glasses of water for the police officers and left the pitcher on a tray close at hand.
“Since they co-wrote papers, is it possible that Judith Harper participated in Cameron’s experiments?” Victor asked.
Blaikie dismissed the suggestion out of hand.
“You’re going up a blind alley. Judith was a researcher, not a practitioner. She co-wrote those papers at the start of her career. She later dissociated herself from the work when she realized the true nature of Cameron’s clinical experiments.”
Never Forget Page 19