The house was dark. The wind was shrieking as Victor moved forward. Drawing nearer to the house, he saw its decrepit condition. The peeling, filthy aluminum siding; the warped clapboards.
The detective sergeant ascended a rotting wooden staircase to the porch. On his right, he saw a glint of glass: a sliding door was visible in the shadows.
Crouching against the wall, pistol raised, he opened the door as softly as he could. It slid along its track without a sound. Holding his breath, he slipped into the house and closed the door behind him. He stopped for a moment so his eyes could adjust to the darkness. The pounding of his heart was a steady roar.
Thinking the space was clear, he stepped forward.
Shards of glass crackled under the soles of his high-tops. Suddenly a light ignited, its beam aimed at him, blinding him. For an instant he considered firing, but not knowing where Jacinthe was, he couldn’t risk hitting her.
A woman’s voice, calm and deep, rose from the darkest corner of the room. “I’ve been waiting for you, Detective Lessard. Put your weapon on the table. You have nothing to fear. My gun is pointed at my own head, not yours.”
The beam swung through the air and, for a fraction of a second, illuminated a steel barrel pressed against a red, white, and blue Expos cap. Then it swung back, blinding him again.
A table stood near the sliding door. On it, he saw a tape recorder and several TDK cassettes, still in their plastic wrapping, as well as a small cardboard box and a pair of binoculars.
With his finger curled tensely around the trigger, still pointing his weapon, he released the safety catch. Without seeing the woman, he knew where she was. One well-aimed shot would end this.
“What do you want?”
“I’m ready to give you a confession, Detective. Everything you need to record it is on the table in front of you.” Silence. “But if you make one wrong move, I’ll blow my brains out. And you’ll never learn anything more than you know already.”
A little voice in Victor’s head, the voice of reason, was urging him to refuse this crazy offer and pull the trigger.
“What about my partner?”
“Don’t worry. She’s in the other room. After Tasering her, I gave her a small injection. She’ll wake up in a couple of hours, feeling fine. At worst, she’ll have a mild headache. It’s your call, Victor. Shoot me now, or put down the gun … You don’t mind if I call you Victor, do you?”
“And Senator Tousignant?” he demanded, ignoring her question. He cocked his head in the direction of the river. “Is it him I saw on the ice?”
“It is. But if you make any effort to rescue him before our conversation is over, you’ll lose on both counts. He’ll be dead before you reach him, and when you get back, I’ll have ended my own life.”
A doubtful frown twisted the detective sergeant’s brow. “How can you kill him from here?”
“You may not know this, but he has a pacemaker. I’ve placed a series of electrodes on either side of his heart. See this little gadget?” A hand slid into the beam of light, holding a black electronic device barely larger than a cellphone. “It’s a wireless electrostimulator. People use these things to build muscles without having to exercise. They’re strongly contraindicated for anyone who wears a pacemaker. With this instrument, I can send out an electric signal strong enough to stop his heart.”
“You sure about that?”
“Fair question. No, I’m not sure. But if you’re ready to risk it,” she said in a bantering tone, “so am I. Shall I push the button?”
The woman didn’t sound like she was bluffing. Without seeing her face, it was impossible to be certain.
“How do I know you won’t hit the button after we talk?”
“That’s a chance you’ll have to take. But I give you my word that when we’re done, Tousignant will be yours. I have no interest in seeing him dead. Open that box on the table.”
Victor lifted the lid and saw several cassettes labelled with dates and numbers.
“I’ve recorded his confession because I want him to face justice for his crimes.”
The detective sergeant’s mind was racing, weighing the available options. Time stood still. The voice of reason in his head pleaded with him to pull the trigger. A well-aimed shot would prevent the woman from pressing the button, and then he could save Tousignant. Even if the man was a ruthless monster, Victor had a duty to protect him. But in that case, Victor would never get a confession. To be sure the woman didn’t activate the electrostimulator, he’d have to shoot to kill.
And then if his aim was off, apart from the fact that the woman would be able to hit the electric signal, there was the possibility that she’d return fire. Still, that danger hardly worried him. Even if he couldn’t see her in the shadows, Victor knew exactly where she was. At this distance, a couple of bullets would be enough to end the threat. The problem was, he tended to follow his instincts rather than listen to the voice of reason.
Victor knew the danger was great. He might be wrong. Even so, he was convinced that the woman posed no threat to him. He decided to take the chance.
The silence was broken by the click of the safety as it slid back into place on his pistol. He laid the gun on the table, taking care to leave it where he could seize it and fire in an instant if the need arose.
“You put the heretic’s fork on Tousignant?” he asked.
“You’ve done your homework, Victor. Pick up the binoculars and see for yourself.”
The detective sergeant did as he was told and located the figure on the ice; he was visible from behind. The senator was in a standing position, his hands bound behind his back with restraints attached to a heavy chain. The other end of the chain was bolted to the floor of the shack, making escape impossible.
Tousignant was encased in a broad-brimmed metal yoke. A gap in its centre exposed the back of his neck. Two metal rods connected the edges of the yoke to a little black box between the shoulder blades. A single rod linked the box to the manacles around the wrists. The result was a Y-shaped assembly behind the senator’s back. Above this assembly, a kind of metal spider stood poised over his head, its legs attached to the rods connecting the collar to the black box. A black dart about fifteen centimetres long projected lethally from the spider, pointing straight at the gap in the yoke, through which it could strike the neck.
With the senator’s back to him, Victor didn’t see the metal points piercing his chin and chest, but the positioning of the man’s head, tilted back at an extreme angle, left no doubt as to their presence.
Iron bars duct-taped to Tousignant’s ankles and thighs prevented him from bending his legs or sitting down. Looking through the binoculars, Victor now had the answers to two questions that had dogged him. First of all, he knew the origin of the adhesive residue that had been found on Harper and Lawson. Second, he understood why there was no physical evidence of their having been suspended above the ground: the bars had made that unnecessary.
A wooden log lay on the ice in front of the senator.
“The key is on the log?”
From the other side of the room, the woman answered in a cool voice. “Very clever, Victor. If I’d said yes, you would have known I had no intention of letting the man live. The key is on the table, under the cassette recorder.”
The detective sergeant checked and found a key.
“I didn’t arm the mechanism. The pain and discomfort are intense, but his life is in no immediate danger.”
As long as his heart doesn’t fail, Victor thought.
“How long has he been out there?” he asked.
“About an hour.”
“You were expecting us, Ms. Couture?”
“It would be more accurate to say I was hoping you’d come,” the woman answered, seemingly unaffected by the fact that the detective sergeant knew her name.
“Don’t play games with me,” Victor said in a calm but uncompromising voice. “How did you know we were coming? Did McNeil’s secretary warn you?�
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“Audrey is a colleague. We often took our lunch breaks together at the hospital. You mustn’t be angry at her. She was shaken by your call and wanted to do the right thing by warning me that the police were interested in me.” Silence. “There’s tea on the stove behind you. Would you mind pouring two cups?”
Victor hesitated, then retreated a few steps. He found cups on the counter, took the teapot off the stove, and poured out the steaming liquid. Holding the two cups, he came forward again, toward the table. The beam of light swung down to the floor in front of him.
He took the opportunity to look around and memorize as many physical details of the space as possible.
“Put my cup on the floor, in the light, then sit down at the table,” the woman ordered.
Victor obeyed.
A veined hand came out of the darkness and took the cup. “Thank you. I’ll let you handle the situation if your fellow officers are waiting for a signal to move in. As I warned you, if I so much as hear a strange noise, I’ll put a bullet in my head, and you’ll learn nothing more.”
The detective sergeant looked at his watch. It would be another twenty minutes before Loïc and the Gnome arrived. “Should I start recording?” he asked.
“Yes. There’s already a cassette in the machine.”
The beam of light moved again. The woman reoriented it so that it no longer blinded Victor, but she herself was still enveloped in shadow. By squinting, he could make out her silhouette, but he couldn’t see her face.
“You know my name. But do you know who I am?”
The police officer shrugged. “During the drive out here, I racked my brain trying to recall where I’d seen your surname before. Then it came to me. The name was in the Evergreen file that you left in the garbage bags at Senator Tousignant’s house. Unless I’m mistaken, you’re Gilbert Couture’s daughter. One of my colleagues is looking into it as we speak. Your father was an auditor employed by the accounting firm of Bélanger, Monette and Associates in Joliette. He and two other employees were killed by André Lortie in 1964, on the orders of Daniel Tousignant.”
“Your colleague needn’t have bothered, Victor. You’ve got it right. They also murdered my brother, Lennie, but we’ll come back to that. Before continuing, may I ask what it was that gave me away?”
“One detail … a trivial detail … Earlier today, someone was talking to me about a couple she knew whose teenage daughter should have been a boy. At that moment, I realized that the woman who slipped me the matchbook at Le Confessionnal wasn’t disguised to look like a man. She had a masculine appearance in everyday life. Then you came into my mind, and I remembered what you’d said to me at the hospital when I commented that it took incredible strength to do your job.”
“I said my father always wished I’d been a boy.”
“Exactly. I remembered that conversation by chance. But it was only a matter of time. Our research into your father’s life would have turned up your name.” Victor sipped his tea.
Charlie went on. “As you surely realize, parents who are dissatisfied with the gender of their child can exert a powerful influence, even if it’s unintentional, on the child’s development. My brother was intellectually handicapped. My father never accepted his limitations. And he always treated me like a boy. So much so that I ended up dressing and behaving like one.”
The little voice in Victor’s head spoke up again: why was he sitting here, drinking tea and making quiet conversation with this woman as though she were an old friend, when he should be grabbing his gun and putting an end to the charade?
But the voice evaporated when he realized he was lying to himself. He knew perfectly well why he was sitting here. The woman was giving him a chance to fill in the remaining holes in the story, to satisfy his curiosity, while still retaining the ability to save Tousignant.
Suddenly, an obvious fact occurred to him: her desire to make her confession here, rather than in a police interrogation room, was revealing.
Charlie Couture had no intention of facing trial or going to prison.
90
THE RED LINE
Victor would remember these moments until his dying day, until his last breath.
Four walls. The scent of tea. The floorboards creaking under his chair. The sliding door, through which the river was visible; and, out there on its frozen surface, a human silhouette framed in a yellow glow. Two people, a man and a woman. A police officer and a murderess. A conversation forever altering the arc of time. And, all the while, life flowing away like water in the kitchen sink, drop by drop, second by second.
“Lucian Duca gained proximity to one of the victims by getting a job at Baker Lawson Watkins. You did the same thing by working at Louis-H., where you were able to watch McNeil and Lortie. Am I right?”
“Yes. I was hired as an orderly at Louis-H. in 2008, then I got myself assigned to the ward where André Lortie was an occasional in-patient.”
“You wanted to pin the Harper and Lawson murders on him.”
“Above all, I wanted to tip him into complete madness.”
“Or even steer him toward suicide.”
“It was hard to know whether he’d go that far, but after I’d spent some time observing him, I knew which buttons to push, which switches to throw to unbalance his mind.”
“As I recall, during our conversation at the hospital, you told us about his having woken up from a blackout in possession of wallets, with bloodstains on his clothes.”
“Lortie never had my father’s wallet or those of the other victims. Those were suggestions that I planted in his head during his delusional phases, and that finally took root among his other fixations. I used to talk about the subject each day, during his periods of hospitalization. And each day, I’d murmur the words that drove him deeper into psychosis.”
“You were getting him ready for what would come next …”
“I was preparing the ground so that, when he found the wallets of Harper and Lawson among his possessions, he’d be convinced that he was falling back into the same nightmare a second time, and that would amplify his instability. He was utterly taken in. Lucian paid a young homeless man to hide the wallets among Lortie’s things. When Lortie found them, he was convinced that he’d killed Lawson and Harper.”
Victor frowned. He remembered Constable Gonthier’s report. Before jumping, Lortie had said, “It’s starting again. I’m sick of it.” Then Nash’s face appeared in Victor’s memory. Was he the young homeless man Charlie had just referred to? She answered that she didn’t know.
“But then, why did you tell us about the wallets, if you were the one who’d planted the suggestions in his mind? Were you trying to send us down the wrong track?”
“The information was in his file. I gave you the clinical facts. That’s what any of my colleagues would have done. Otherwise, you might have suspected me.”
“As for McNeil, your job allowed you to be in contact with him, too …”
“To be honest, my real intention was to get close to Lortie. I didn’t realize at the time how deeply involved McNeil had been in the abuses that Judith Harper inflicted on my father. I also didn’t know that McNeil had continued to practise a form of surveillance on Lortie. I hadn’t planned to kill him at first.”
An idea came to Victor. It meant interrupting her, but he decided to speak.
“When the opportunity presented itself, you took the number magnets from McNeil’s refrigerator. And you called him from Judith Harper’s home phone on the day you killed her.”
Charlie blew on her hot tea and took a sip. Then she nodded.
“I hung up as soon as he answered. I had taken the magnets some time ago, during a party that McNeil had hosted for the employees of the ward. I just wanted to make him a suspect, to cause trouble for him. Not to kill him. Not until he realized that I had falsified Lortie’s medical file.”
Victor remembered the handwritten note on the tab of the homeless man’s psychiatric file. “The reference
to Dr. Cameron …”
“Yes. I wanted to point you subtly in the direction of Project MK-ULTRA. Since I was the last person who’d handled the file, McNeil confronted me. But then, to my great surprise, he proposed a financial arrangement in return for his silence. He said he’d taken precautions in case something happened to him. He was bluffing. I set up a meeting with him in Parc Maisonneuve. I think he wasn’t worried because I was a woman and he knew me. What he didn’t know was that Lucian was concealed nearby, with his bow.” Silence. “I’m not sure whether he understood that I was Gilbert Couture’s daughter. He was so obsessed with money … I guess you know the rest.”
Victor remembered seeing, in McNeil’s office, something in the psychiatrist’s expression when he’d mentioned the handwritten note. Without meaning to, the detective sergeant might have been the one who had tipped him off.
“What about the number magnets on the fridge? I know they had symbolic importance for you — the date of your father’s death. But how were they significant to Judith Harper?”
“The night Dad was killed, Tousignant and Harper had dinner to celebrate his elimination. Lortie was there. He took pictures.” Silence. “Lucian showed them to me.”
Victor committed the information to memory, then asked for permission to check the messages on his phone, which had just rung.
Charlie Couture granted it.
The Gnome had sent a text: he and Loïc had been delayed and wouldn’t arrive for another twenty-five minutes. Though Victor didn’t like to admit it to himself, this was good news for him. He was totally absorbed by the conversation.
Wondering whether he should reply, he decided at first to do nothing. Then he changed his mind, typed a quick OK, and put the phone down.
Every minute he spent with the murderess was increasing his store of knowledge. He also wanted to avoid wasting precious time bringing the Gnome and Loïc up to speed on the situation. Charlie Couture wasn’t asking for status reports. She had given him fair warning. He must act accordingly.
Never Forget Page 44