But now he was nervously claiming that he couldn’t talk to the detectives because he was at the beach with his wife. He didn’t realize it, but that was the worst thing he could have said. Jacinthe, who knew no other way to communicate than by blunt force, lit into him.
“Your wife? Great. She should be in on the conversation. Tell me, Horowitz, how does your wife feel about that bitch you gave your key to? You know, the one you were fucking in the warehouse.”
A long silence, followed by some throat-clearing and vague mumbling, made it plain that Jacinthe had scored a direct hit.
“Uh … hang on a second.”
They heard whispering at the other end of the line. Horowitz was putting some distance between himself and his wife so he could speak more freely. There was a period of silence during which the cops thought the connection might have been cut. But then they heard the sound of footsteps, followed by a door being slammed.
“I’ve been married for forty years, Detective. I’ve never done anything like this before, I swear to you!”
Victor whispered to Jacinthe that the last thing they needed was for the guy’s heart to act up again.
“Relax, Mr. Horowitz,” he said in a sympathetic voice. “We’re going to get the whole thing sorted out.”
“This is the first time it’s ever happened. You have to believe me!”
“We do believe you, Mr. Horowitz.”
“We don’t believe you for a second, you fucking slimeball!” Jacinthe declared, bringing her fist down on the table.
“It just happened the one time. I couldn’t believe there was any connection.” Horowitz’s voice rose in a desperate cry.
“Give us her name and address and we’ll leave you alone,” Jacinthe said coldly.
“I don’t know it.”
“Or maybe you’d rather we had a chat with your wife,” Jacinthe hissed. The veins in her neck were bulging.
“I don’t know her name! I swear to you!”
Horowitz explained that the woman had introduced herself as a visual artist. She had come to the warehouse one morning in October to buy some scrap metal, saying she intended to incorporate it into a piece she was working on. He had met her that one time. She’d never mentioned her name. One thing had led to another, and they’d ended up on the couch, where they … where they …
“Fucked, Horowitz!” Jacinthe bellowed. “That’s the word you’re looking for. Fucked. Is that when you gave her the key?”
Humiliated, the man began to cry.
Jacinthe rolled her eyes.
“I …”
“You thought you’d see her again, is that it?” Victor prompted.
“I … I showed her where the key was. In case she …” A few words were swallowed up in sobs.
“You showed her where the key was, in case she wanted to see you again,” Victor said.
“Yes.” He wept quietly. “I was an idiot … But it was the first time in twenty years anyone had shown an interest me.”
“This woman,” Jacinthe growled, “what did she look like?”
Horowitz described full lips and the most beautiful body he’d ever seen, a woman of medium height, in her forties, with dark hair and green eyes.
“Do you have access to a computer?” Victor asked. “We’ll need you to make yourself available. A police artist will be contacting you in the next few minutes to create a sketch of the woman. And you may end up having to cut short your vacation and come back to Montreal.”
“Will I go to prison for this?”
Overwhelmed by events, Horowitz sounded like a man who’d just taken a kick to his private parts.
“One thing at a time,” Victor said. “For now, our priority is to find this woman, and you’re going to help us. After that, we’ll see.”
“What am I supposed to tell my wife?”
“That’s your problem, Horowitz,” Jacinthe snapped. “As far as I’m concerned, you deserve to be tarred and feathered. You need to start making decisions with your head instead of your —”
“Mr. Horowitz,” Victor cut in, glaring at his partner, “close your eyes and think back. Any detail you can remember may help us save lives.”
“She put her bag and keys on the desk. I saw her key ring. There was a little plastic keepsake with a name on it.”
“What was the name?”
“Charlie.”
Jacinthe hit the mute button and turned to her partner. “Your new lady friend, Tousignant’s daughter … she has full lips, dark hair, and green eyes, doesn’t she?”
This time, Victor didn’t bristle. The idea had already crossed his mind. Horowitz’s description of the woman had shaken him. And he couldn’t help but recall Virginie’s erratic behaviour on the day of her father’s disappearance.
“First of all, she’s not my new lady friend. And her name is Virginie, not Charlie.”
“But she has a middle initial … C, right?”
In his mind’s eye, Victor saw the framed dust jacket on the wall at the senator’s house. Obviously, Jacinthe had noticed it, too.
“You’re right. Her name is Virginie C. Tousignant.” Victor looked her in the eye. “And she wrote a book about Charlie Chaplin.”
86
SHOULD HAVE BEEN A BOY
Through the window of the Café Van Houtte, Victor watched the pedestrians moving along the snowy sidewalk on Notre-Dame near the courthouse. He lifted his cup and sipped the scalding organic decaf he’d just ordered. His phone lay on the table in front of him. There were a handful of customers in the place.
For the fiftieth time, he wiped his damp hands on his jeans. His blood pressure was rising. His eyes felt too big for their sockets. His heart was slamming around inside his rib cage. Anticipation, the period that preceded imminent activity, had always been more difficult for him to bear than the onset of action itself. Every centimetre of his skin itched.
In the car, he and Jacinthe had winnowed down their ideas until they’d arrived at a hypothesis of astonishing simplicity: the children of André Lortie and Daniel Tousignant, two of the prime movers behind the killings in 1964, had teamed up to eliminate all traces of their fathers’ barbaric acts.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was all they had to go on.
Lacking the time for a file examination at the Register of Civil Status, they had called the office and asked what the C in Virginie’s name stood for. The search had turned up nothing.
Victor had no trouble convincing Jacinthe to let him talk to Virginie alone.
Having failed to keep his promise to treat her to lunch, he’d given Jacinthe a twenty-dollar bill, and she’d gone to the McDonald’s at the corner.
Victor had said nothing to Virginie over the phone about his reasons for wanting to meet. He had simply said that she needed to come straight over to the Café Van Houtte a few blocks from the editorial offices of the newspaper where she worked. It was the only way to be sure she’d come in a hurry, and to be able to gauge her reaction.
Any attempt to flee would be revealing.
Jacinthe would take up a support position near the building’s entrance and follow Virginie discreetly, able to intercept her if the need arose. Obviously, if the young woman had nothing to hide, she’d be overcome with anxiety as she walked into the café, wondering whether her father’s body had been found.
Both detectives preferred this approach to a confrontation in the newspaper offices, which they were eager to avoid.
In the end, there were no confrontations or escape attempts. Victor watched Virginie come up Saint-Laurent less than ten minutes later. Her beauty was undiminished, but her features, drawn with fatigue, plainly showed intense worry.
Walking in, she drew near to kiss Victor on the cheek.
Needing to preserve some distance between them for the questions he was about to ask, Victor simulated a bad cough. Virginie retreated.
“Is everything okay? Your call seemed urgent … My God, what happened to your face?”
The
detective sergeant put his fingertips to his injured eye. The swelling was almost gone, but the bruise was still sensitive to the touch. Through the window, he saw Jacinthe get into the Crown Victoria, which she’d parked across the street. She was holding a McDonald’s bag.
Victor avoided Virginie’s gaze and smiled politely. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just stumbled into a chest of drawers. Sorry for the sudden phone call, I know it must have worried you. So let me set your mind at ease — I have no bad news about your father. In fact, I have no news, period. We’re still searching. How are you holding up?”
“I’ve been trying not to think about it,” Virginie answered. Victor’s reassurances seemed to have eased her anxiety. “Working helps. If I had nothing to do but stay home and dwell on this, I’d lose my mind.” She frowned. “Are you sure everything’s okay? You look strange … Is it because of what happened last time?”
Victor shook his head. “No, that has nothing to do with it. Can I get you something?”
Virginie declined the offer. For the first time since she’d walked in, Victor looked her in the eye. “I have some questions to ask. All by the book, but it won’t be agreeable.”
The young woman’s expression darkened. She took a deep breath and brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. “This is the stage of the investigation where everyone’s a suspect, including the missing man’s daughter, is that it?”
“Something like that.” Silence. “What does your middle initial stand for?”
Virginie’s reaction wavered between surprise and amusement. “It’s from my days as a master’s student. There was a girl in some of my classes who had the same name as me. I added the C so professors wouldn’t get us mixed up.”
“So the middle name on your birth certificate starts with C?”
Her lip wrinkled disdainfully. “No. The middle name on my birth certificate is Marguerite. I found it lame. I chose the C for sentimental reasons.”
“Meaning?”
“You won’t find this very original. It was in honour of Charlie Chaplin.”
“The Charlie part or the Chaplin?” Victor asked in a hard voice.
Virginie snatched up her purse from the floor and opened it. On edge, the detective sergeant slipped his hand under his jacket and wrapped his fingers around his Glock. Not seeming to notice, Virginie took out an elastic and tied her hair back.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “What’s the difference?”
Her hand advanced along the table toward Victor’s elbow, her fingers scuttling like the legs of a spider.
“Answer the question!” Victor said sharply, grabbing her wrist. “Is the C for Charlie or Chaplin?”
“Ow! You’re hurting me, Victor. What’s gotten into you?” Her eyes were full of reproach.
He loosened his grip. “Can I see your driver’s licence and your key ring?”
Angrily, Virginie dumped the contents of her purse onto the table. A man sitting nearby stared.
“Help yourself. I have tampons, too.”
Ignoring the remark, Victor checked her cards. The initial appeared nowhere.
“Where were you on December 15th? It was a Thursday.”
That was the evening Judith Harper had been killed. Even if Virginie had an alibi, it wouldn’t rule out the possibility that she was Duca’s accomplice — they’d have to look into his movements that day — but it would be a start.
Virginie tapped briefly on her iPhone, then answered, “I was in Vermont, at a ski chalet.”
“Alone?”
“No, with my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, another couple, and … and my husband.” The young woman lowered her eyes, hesitating, as though it was hard for her to speak of her husband. “Do you want their phone numbers?”
“Yes, please.”
“Oh, I forgot,” Virginie added with cold irony, “the couple’s daughter was there. She’s thirteen, totally butch. Should have been a boy. But who knows, maybe she’s the killer you’re looking for. You want her cell number, too?”
Victor’s gaze had begun to drift. He wasn’t listening anymore; something had clicked in his mind. Virginie noticed. In an instant, curiosity extinguished her resentment.
“What?” she asked. “What’s wrong? What did I say?”
Chair legs squealed on the floor as Victor rose abruptly to his feet.
“I’ve got to go!”
87
CHARLIE
“I’m looking for Dr. McNeil’s secretary.”
“Speaking.”
“This is Detective Lessard of the Montreal Police.”
“I recognized your voice, Detective. What can I do for you?”
“During our first visit to Louis-H., you introduced us to a woman, an orderly who’d spent a lot of time caring for André Lortie …”
“I remember.”
“What’s her name?”
“Charlie Couture. Why?”
88
THE END OF THE SHOW
Daniel Tousignant pressed the STOP button on the cassette recorder. The red light went off and the counter stopped turning. When the senator rested his hand on the tabletop, the chains jingled against the wood. Looped through shackles on his wrists and ankles, they were firmly attached to a metal ring bolted to the floor. Tousignant had tested the strength of the contraption; there was no way to free himself.
The woman came in, holding a water jug and a plate of melon wedges. She placed the items on the table. “Good evening, Senator. I came to find out how things are going.”
Tousignant was silent for a moment, showing no sign of sadness or panic. Though perhaps not resigned to his fate, he seemed at peace with it. “Good evening, Charlie. We’re coming to the end of the show, aren’t we?”
The woman nodded. Her expression was unsmiling, empty of emotion.
The old man looked up at her. Despite the severe bun in which she had bound her hair, despite the lack of makeup, despite the hardness that life had etched on her features, Charlie was still a beautiful woman. Her full, round lips were striking; her green eyes shone; and her masculine clothes couldn’t entirely mask the sensuous outline of her body.
The senator smiled. Charlie noticed. “Why are you smiling?”
“I was just thinking, as I looked at you, that on the day you kidnapped me, I never would have opened the door if you hadn’t been a woman.”
Charlie nodded and returned his smile. She knew how to simulate empathy, but she felt none. Tousignant hadn’t noticed, but she was holding an odd sort of collar in her hands.
89
THE ASSAULT
Knee deep in snow, Victor moved quickly through the trees, emerging from the stand of conifers on the shoreline. With his senses on high alert, he stopped and listened. The cars on Route 138, winding through the countryside far behind him, were barely audible.
Holding his Glock in firing position, his breath sending puffs of vapour into the cold air, he took a few cautious steps along the hard, crusted snow.
The blackness of the night enveloped him, making his approach easier. A few flakes drifted in front of him.
He kept moving, glancing left at the immense curve of the river, white and frozen beyond the firs. Higher up and to his right, the isolated house was partially concealed by the rising ground and the trees.
Squinting, he thought he could make out a weak, flickering light through the branches, out on the water. His pulse was pounding in his temples.
The Crown Victoria had been racing along Sherbrooke Street toward Louis-H. when Jacinthe executed a hard U-turn. Over the phone, McNeil’s secretary had just given Victor Charlie Couture’s home address, downriver from Montreal between the towns of Lavaltrie and Lanoraie. Couture had been on sick leave since the 26th, the day of Lucian Duca’s death.
Route 138 was more than a kilometre from the shoreline at the junction where they had turned onto the secondary road. Moving through farmland, they’d driven without headlights so as not to be seen, leaving the Crown Vic two hundr
ed metres from the house.
Loïc and the Gnome were also speeding toward the location, but they were still forty-five minutes away: Loïc had been forced to make a detour to pick up Lemaire, who was back at home by then.
“We should wait for them,” Victor had suggested as the car stopped.
Jacinthe had winked and smiled. “She saw us pull up and tried to escape. We had no choice but to go in.”
And, unspoken, but audible in the tone of her voice: Are you scared, Lessard?
As he got out of the vehicle and unholstered his pistol, Victor remarked that she clearly hadn’t learned her lesson from the King of Flies case.
“Come on, Lessard! It’s just one woman.”
Before splitting up, the two detectives had agreed on a plan: Victor would go left, around the house, and approach from the river side. Jacinthe would wait in the car for five minutes, then she’d move in along the path that led straight through the open field to the back door of the house.
It took Victor a moment to realize that the light on the water was coming from the window of an ice-fishing shack about a hundred metres from shore. The glow was yellowish, flickering like a lantern flame, creating an illuminated rectangle that reflected diagonally off the ice. The shack’s entrance seemed to face the far shore. All that was visible from this side, as far as Victor could tell, was part of the structure’s rear and right walls.
Looking at his watch, he saw that five minutes had elapsed. Jacinthe would be on the move. The time had come for him to turn and climb the rising ground before closing in on the house.
Instead, he took a few steps onto the ice and stopped. Something had moved out there, briefly entering the yellow light.
Peering into the darkness, he finally understood what he was seeing: there was a human figure on the ice, standing up straight, hands bound behind his back.
Victor began to walk toward the light.
“Lessard!”
Jacinthe’s voice. Desperate. Heart-stopping.
The detective sergeant didn’t hesitate for an instant. Turning away from the shack, he retraced his steps, running hard. His partner was in trouble.
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