“You were talking about Lucian … how did you meet him?”
“Each time he was discharged from Louis-H., Lortie lived on the streets or in a seedy apartment. Earlier in his life, he’d had several mistresses. When he needed money, he’d make the rounds, showing up on their doorsteps late in the evening. A lot of the time, he’d be chased away by a new boyfriend. Once in a while, he’d receive a little sympathy and a few dollars. Silvia Duca, Lucian’s mother, was one of those mistresses. She had taken pity on him now and then, putting him up for a few nights. Lucian was a young boy at the time. Silvia had never told Lortie or Lucian that they were father and son, but Lortie figured it out. At one point, during a delusional episode, he told Lucian that he was his father and opened up about his past. Lortie described the mistreatment he’d suffered at the hands of Judith Harper and McNeil. He talked about his participation in FLQ operations, and about his involvement in the plot to kill President Kennedy. Lucian remembered that during previous visits, Lortie had concealed documents and photographs behind the bathroom tiles. Documents that Lortie himself seemed to have forgotten about, but corroborated his accounts.”
Victor recalled his conversation with the retired CIA agent. Cleveland Willis had spoken about those documents, which Lortie had held up at the time as a threat. On impulse, Victor said, “Those documents also described the torture of your father and his fellow employees by Judith Harper, and their subsequent execution by Lortie.”
“You’re right,” Charlie said. “That was part of it. Lortie hadn’t only concealed papers relating to the missions he’d carried out for Tousignant and Lawson. He was also in possession of documents proving he’d spent time with Oswald.”
Victor’s gaze strayed as his brain assimilated the information that Charlie Couture had just given him. She went on.
“When Lucian became aware of all this, he was devastated. He never talked much about his feelings, and I don’t know a lot about that period of his life, but I can imagine his reaction. In the space of a few weeks, he had learned not only his father’s identity, but also that the man was a killer, capable of the most atrocious crimes.”
“So Lucian confronted his father?”
“Lortie denied all of it. He claimed he couldn’t remember a thing. When Lucian pressed him, holding up the documents as proof, Lortie said it wasn’t his fault. He claimed that he’d been brainwashed, that he wasn’t responsible for his actions. The file contained papers relating to his treatment under MK-ULTRA. Those papers cited certain sentences that he kept repeating until they were erased from his mind by Judith Harper. One of those sentences had been spoken by Lee Oswald at the time of his arrest.”
“I didn’t shoot anybody, no sir,” Victor quoted.
“Exactly. But Lucian was no fool. The papers established clearly that Lortie had undergone the treatments in 1969 and 1970, long after the murders in 1964. Lucian broke off relations, and Lortie fell off the radar.”
The conversation was giving Victor an ever-clearer picture of the case.
“Then, using the information in Lortie’s file, Lucian tracked you down …”
“It was in 2007. One evening, Lucian showed up at my door and started giving me this information. He was insistent, saying I was the first person he’d talked to about these things, telling me I had a right to know, and that he had documents to back up everything he was saying. At first, I couldn’t understand. I thought he was crazy. I threw him out, not wanting to hear another word. But in the days that followed, Lucian refused to give up. He kept calling and knocking on my door. Finally, I gave in. I thought about the things he was saying. In the end, I was completely overwhelmed. And revolted.”
“You’d believed until then that your father and brother were killed in a hunting accident?”
“No. I knew Dad and Lennie had been murdered. I’d seen the killer myself on the forest path, though I had no idea who Lortie was at the time. But when I told Mom what I’d seen, she made me swear not to go to the police, because if I did, we’d both be killed, too. I never found out how much she knew about what had happened. Until her dying day, she refused to talk about it.” Silence. “I know she did it to protect me. As time went by, I put my life back together. I tried to forget, to put it all behind me. Do you understand?”
Victor still couldn’t see the woman’s face, but he could hear the emotion in her voice. She paused for a long time before continuing.
“I asked Lucian why he had come to me instead of going to the police. He didn’t know, exactly, and couldn’t answer. I decided to go to the police myself, but each time I got in the car to do it, I ended up turning back. Who would believe me? I sat in the car in front of the house for hours at a time, crying. During the first few weeks, I saw Lucian every day. I needed to talk to him, to understand. Little by little, a relationship developed between us, and we became lovers. It seemed unreal that he was interested in me. I hadn’t had a man in my life in a long time. And the age difference was substantial. But the relationship did me good. I tried to convince myself that the best thing I could do was live in the present and forget the past.”
“Yet you were unable to do that …”
“If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the past always catches up with us. When Lucian came into my life and I learned the truth, my wound, which had scarred over, burst open again. Something broke, and this time it was irreparable.”
Victor found himself nodding in agreement. Charlie’s observations about the past had a particular resonance with his own experience.
“So you and Lucian set about planning your revenge …”
“It didn’t happen the way you might suppose. You don’t get up one morning and say, ‘Let’s get payback.’ It isn’t even something you discuss. But a day comes when you open your eyes and it’s there in front of you, and you accept it without question. Time had gone by. I’d started to monitor the movements of Tousignant, Harper, and Lawson. I was sickened by their professional and financial success, but above all, I was disgusted by the fact that they’d been able to keep moving forward, to live their lives with impunity, never facing any consequences for their crimes. A plan had begun to take shape in my mind. But I didn’t mention it to Lucian. Then, sometime in 2008, I think, I walked past a homeless man begging in the street. When I refused to give him money, he grumbled, ‘Goddamn shitty life,’ and spat on the ground. It was Lortie, I was sure of it. In my entire existence, I’d only ever heard one person say those words. I told Lucian about the encounter when I got home.” Silence. “I didn’t know it, but he spent the next several days searching for his father in the city’s homeless shelters. A week later, he gave me a list of the places that his father frequented. That was when I shared my plan with him for the very first time. Lortie was often admitted to Louis-H. I already had nurse’s training, which meant it was easy for me to get a job as an orderly. One by one, things fell into place. When Lortie was readmitted to Louis-H. in 2010, I was ready. The final phase of my operation began.”
Victor could well imagine that Charlie had acted out of a complicated mix of overlapping motives, but he still decided to ask the question directly: “You were driven by more than a simple desire for retribution … weren’t you?”
“I know people will only talk about revenge when they analyze my crimes. Because atrocities are so hard to understand, there’s a tendency to latch onto simplistic notions of good and evil, to place those two things in separate, watertight moral compartments.” Silence. “But you’re right, Victor. The deepest motive for my actions wasn’t a desire for vengeance. In Dad’s eyes, honour was to be prized above all else. It was the value he instilled in me with the greatest passion and conviction. I did what I did to honour his memory. I wanted to show him that I remembered.” A long silence. “Revenge came second. A distant second. It came when I saw the terrible fear and pain on the faces of my victims. When the sight of their suffering gave me pleasure.”
Victor nodded. Hearing Charlie talk a
bout the blackness of her soul plunged him into a profound despondency, but, knowing what she had lived through, he couldn’t help feeling a kind of empathy for her.
“Was it to honour your father’s memory that you needed to get Tousignant’s confession? The documents that Lucian had brought you weren’t enough?” He paused. “Wouldn’t it have been possible to avoid all these deaths?”
“The documents implicated Tousignant as the man in charge, but only in a roundabout way that might not have guaranteed his conviction. I had to make sure there was no possible ambiguity. Tousignant is a man of means. I wanted to be certain that he wouldn’t be able to hide behind a battery of lawyers. In order to get past all his lines of defence, to make him confess, I needed the others to be dead. Tousignant had to know that I’d stop at nothing, that I was prepared to kill him if he didn’t comply. I needed him to be convinced that he had no choice.”
“You could have stopped when you got your hands on the files that Lawson put together on Evergreen. They clearly incriminate the senator.”
“There was no way of knowing that Lawson had the files in his possession. It’s true, those documents answered a lot of questions. But by then it was too late to turn back.”
“Why did Tousignant open up to you? He couldn’t be sure you’d let him live after he confessed. The proof is, he’s out on the ice right now. And I promise you, he thinks he’s going to die.”
“That’s true. But we’re all the same when the end is staring us in the face. We’re willing to do a lot to postpone it, even by a few seconds. The senator chose to talk in the hope that he might live, rather than shut his mouth in the certain knowledge that he would die.”
The detective sergeant nodded. He was aware that the woman in the shadows was watching him, sizing him up. “Confessions obtained under duress are worthless in court,” he said.
“I’ll trust the judges to do their duty.” Silence. “You should have seen the fear that came over Harper and Lawson every time they got close to the red line.”
In response to Victor’s question, Charlie Couture explained what she was talking about: the length of red duct tape that ran along the floor in front of the surface that the key was lying on.
“They perceived the red line as a threat, a sign of imminent danger. You can’t imagine the joy on their faces when, having thought they’d die as soon as they crossed the line, they took the key in their hands and imagined they were saved.” Charlie laughed: a demented, chilling laugh. “But instead of liberating them as they’d hoped, the key triggered the mechanism that condemned them.”
The detective sergeant realized at that moment that she had watched her victims die. The red line, the key releasing the lethal dart — she had seen it all. Had she gone so far as to capture the horror on video? She was insane. Brilliant. Psychopathic.
“Why did you choose that weapon?”
“It was a kind of homage. Mom was a historian, a medievalist. Her doctoral thesis was on the use of the heretic’s fork, but she never finished it. Dad’s death shattered her life. She died of cancer afterward.”
“How did you get it?”
“The fork? Lucian made it. Before being hired at Baker Lawson Watkins, he’d worked in a foundry. He was very good with his hands.”
“And he created the mechanism that shot the dart through the victims’ necks?”
“When the system is armed, the dart is released by the victim turning the key to unlock the manacles. I used to joke with Lucian that he should patent his invention.” Silence. A quiet cough. “As it turned out, I felt no satisfaction after Judith Harper’s death. It was too fast. She was resigned to dying and picked up the key after a very short time. It was all over in a few hours.”
“Was Lucian with you?”
“Not for the kidnapping. After paralyzing her with a Taser and injecting her with anaesthetic, I put her in a wheelchair to get her out of the building. Then I put her in my car. It was easy. She was small and thin.”
Victor remembered watching at Louis-H. as Charlie had helped an obese patient to roll over on his bed. She was accustomed to such manoeuvres.
“You brought her to the warehouse. You had seduced Horowitz, so you knew the company’s business hours.”
“The warehouse is closed on Fridays. Horowitz explained to me that they’d been doing things that way for twenty years.” She laughed. “Seducing the old pig wasn’t very hard.”
“You wore a dark wig, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Charlie murmured.
“In the case of Nathan Lawson, you held him captive for a few days before killing him …”
“I was ready to take some chances with Lawson, even if that meant he might escape. It turned into a game. I wanted to give him time to be frightened, but I also wanted him to hope he might get away. I followed him at a distance by car after he left the office. I knew he wouldn’t call the police. As a last resort, I’d have intervened with the Taser if I thought he was going to escape. At one point, I drove past him in my car, and I saw the relief on his face as he watched me go by. Just a harmless woman …” Silence. “When he stopped off at a business centre and then drove to the cemetery, I started to worry, but Lucian had let me know that he’d helped Lawson put a file in the trunk of his car. While I was following Lawson, Lucian made sure the file really was hidden in the cemetery. I knew Peter Frost’s house. I’d already followed Lawson when he took the young man there to have sex a few weeks before. When I realized that the house was Lawson’s hiding place, I knew I had all the time in the world.”
The woman took a deep breath. She was speaking freely now. She needed no prompting from Victor. Was she unburdening her conscience as she talked, setting her mind at ease? The detective sergeant had no way of knowing.
“After Lawson hid the documents, Lucian and I looked through them. Then I had him put them back. I knew they were Lawson’s insurance policy, his tradeable asset, and that someone would come for them with the intention of contacting Tousignant and threatening to make them public. As far as Lawson was concerned, the calculation was simple: he was convinced that the senator wanted him dead. I kept Lawson on a sedative drip while I waited to see how things developed. Logically, it could only be Rivard who would come for the file. Lawson trusted no one else. When I saw Rivard speak to the media after the press conference, I understood.”
“Rivard was sending a message to Tousignant, saying he had what the senator was looking for.”
“At that moment, I knew Rivard had betrayed Lawson and decided to sell the file to the highest bidder. Which, of course, was Tousignant. Lucian started following Rivard. The day after the press conference, Rivard went to the cemetery to recover the file. In Tousignant’s confession, he describes the methods he and Rivard used to communicate.”
“Then Lucian killed Rivard to prevent the file from falling into Tousignant’s hands?”
“Lucian and Rivard worked in the same office. Rivard was arrogant and heartless with support staff. Lucian already hated him. When Rivard came for the file …” Silence. “Lucian was a competitive cross-country skier and an experienced bowhunter. Rivard never had a chance.”
Flashes of insight were lighting up and fading out in Victor’s brain. He would need to play back the recordings to be sure he had explored every corner of the labyrinth.
91
STRUCK DOWN
The words carried by Charlie Couture’s voice were dissolving, the phrases melting, the thoughts cracking open, giving way, in Victor’s head, to images of pain and death, but also to glimpses of love and nostalgia.
A sudden click startled him, rousing him from his absorption in the narrative. The tape had run out on the A side of the cassette. The detective sergeant ejected it, turned it over, and resumed recording. Charlie Couture had been talking for half an hour.
“How long until your fellow officers get here?” she asked.
Victor looked at his watch. “Ten minutes.”
He and Charlie looked at each
other, not needing to say a word.
“There’s something else I’d like to know,” he began. “Since the outset, you’ve left clues in your wake. The fridge numbers, the CD in Lawson’s car, the handwritten reference to Cameron on Lortie’s psychiatric file, the matchbook at Le Confessionnal, the Evergreen files in the garbage bags, and Tousignant’s wallet, which you sent me. You’ve repeatedly taken chances so as to point us in the right direction. Consciously or not, you wanted us to catch you. Am I wrong?”
“The CD was a mistake, an oversight. Lucian was on his way to recover it when you spotted him in Summit Woods. As for the other items, I’ll say this: my long-term goal was to have the conversation that we’re having right now. But I had hoped that Lucian …”
Charlie didn’t finish the sentence. A fraught silence hung in the room. Victor took a long pause before continuing.
“Though I won’t say I agree with your motives, I think I understand them. But what were Lucian’s?”
“Would you be able to accept being the son of a monster?”
The question hit Victor like a slap in the face. The woman could have no idea of the effect her words had on him.
“Life is full of contradictions … Lucian carried terrible violence within him. He became convinced that this violence was his genetic inheritance from Lortie, and that he was doomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. Faced with what he thought was an inevitable end, he chose to dedicate his life to what he believed was a just cause.” Silence. “And you know,” she said, her voice trembling, “we loved each other.”
Victor heard her sobs and felt his own throat tighten. After a moment, the woman spoke again.
“I’m sorry.” Silence. “I was glad it was you who led the investigation. I’d seen you on television in the past. I knew I could trust your judgment and integrity.”
“You used me. You knew that as I investigated the murders you and Lucian had committed, I’d eventually become interested in the killings that occurred in 1964. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it? For me to reassemble the picture, in a way.”
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