Asylum (17 page)

“Maybe he’s a researcher with a conscience,” I said idly. “Elodie, the only way to find out is to pinpoint who they were getting close to.”

“They?”

“The murder victims,” I reminded her. “That’s where it all started, isn’t it?”

“No,” she said grimly. “It started a long time ago, Martine. And it’s not over yet.”

*   *   *

“We’ll talk as we walk,” Julian said, meeting me down on the riverfront.

“You getting paranoid?” I certainly knew that
I
was. Tired from the trip out to Ottawa, and feeling like we were getting close but without a clear direction to take. “They’re arraigning the guy they’ve arrested,” I said in frustration.

“I know. Come on, let’s go to the pier and look at the boats.”

I peered at him. “Are you all right?”

He nodded, resting his arms on the rail, looking down at the high-end yachts clustered around the dock. Directly below us was a yacht larger than my house with a tremendous hot tub on the fantail. Every inch of it was sparkling in the sunlight.

“Nice,” I commented, more out of awe than appreciation.

“
Nouveau-riche
,” said Julian, who came from the not-so-
nouveau
rich part of town.

A woman in dark glasses, jeans, and a Himalayan jacket strolled over and paused at the railing on the other side of Julian, looking down at the yacht. “A little overdone,” she commented to no one in particular; but she said it in English. Julian glanced at her and then looked back at the boat himself. “Francine?”

I gaped, then leaned in to listen as well as I could. Behind us, a group of Japanese tourists had been decanted from a tour bus, their voices high and excited and, for my purposes, far too loud. Who the hell was Francine?

She shook Julian’s hand, though she did so furtively. “You will see that no one knows?” she asked.

“I’ll make it part of the routine,” he said soothingly. “Just to ask them questions. Not as suspects, just part of the fabric of the investigation. I told you. I don’t care about anything else. I’m not connected to Vice in any way.”

I was starting to get a good idea of who this Francine was. I reached past Julian. “
Bonjour
,” I interrupted. “I’m Martine LeDuc.”

She looked flustered, but took my hand gracefully enough. Julian cleared his throat. “This is Francine Lescaut,” he said to me. “She is—she was—Isabelle Hubert’s employer.”

The madam. I should have realized that Julian would find her. I smiled encouragingly. “You were saying?”

She glanced over her shoulder, but there was nothing to see but Japanese tourists taking a tremendous interest in the yacht and ignoring us altogether. “I don’t want any trouble for my clients,” Francine said, her voice anxious, leaning closer to Julian and me.

“There won’t be any,” he assured her. “You have my word.”

She looked from him to me, compressing her lips, and then nodded. Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a thumb drive. “Here,” she said. “For Isabelle.”

Julian took the drive and slid it into his pocket in one smooth motion. “For Isabelle,” he agreed. “You won’t regret it.”

She nodded again, then turned and shouldered her way past the tourists clustered around us, disappearing almost immediately into the flow of people walking along the waterfront. I jabbed Julian with my elbow. “Clients?”

He nodded. “Let’s walk.” We moved away from the railing, and the Japanese visitors crowded eagerly to take our place, cameras clicking and whirring.

“It occurred to me,” Julian explained, “to think about how Isabelle got involved in all of this. She didn’t just start thinking about her mother out of the blue. She didn’t do whatever it was that scared somebody without
something
starting her down that road. Something, or someone.” He took my arm to steady me as a couple of overenthusiastic Rollerbladers swept by. “And who did she know? Remember, she wasn’t one of the girls up on Sainte-Catherine, cruising the losers.”

“She was expensive.”

“She had clients,” Julian said carefully, “at the tops of their professions. All sorts of professions.”

My stomach gave a sudden lurch. “Politicians?”

He shrugged lightly, and touched his jacket. “Let’s find out.”

Three hours later, I was ready to jump out the window. We were sitting in my office, and I’d long since replaced the coffee Chantal had brought us with the bottle of single-malt Scotch I kept in the cupboard under the TV. Nearly everyone had left the building, and the periodic footsteps in the corridor echoed eerily.

It turned out that the question wasn’t so much about who was on the list, but who
wasn’t
.

I pulled gently on my hair. “This is going nowhere.”

Julian sighed, rubbing his eyes. “It’s here, somewhere,” he said, frustration in his voice. “I know it is.”

“It
isn’t
!” I sounded petulant and I knew it. “Julian, we’ve been looking at these names for hours. We don’t even know for sure which ones were Isabelle’s.” Francine had asterisked the names of Isabelle’s regular clients, put question marks next to the ones she thought Isabelle might have seen. It wasn’t so much that the list was long, it was that we had to stop, go online, and look up every name that we couldn’t immediately identify. There had been a number of very long searches.

I was tired and cranky and more than a little scared. It occurred to me that for all we knew, there could be a fifth person out there who was still at risk. And unless we figured this out soon, we could have another death on our hands.

I wish I never had to go to the basement again, I wish that no one ever had to go to the basement again.

“Did you know?” I asked Régine. “Have you been down there?”

She was having none of it. “Hush! Can’t you see, we can’t speak of that!”

Marie-Rose knew about it, too, but she wasn’t talking, as if articulating something made it more real. “Don’t talk about it, Gabrielle,” she urged me when I asked her what she knew. “Just don’t talk about it.”

“But the doctors—”

She looked scared. “They hurt people,” she said softly. “That’s all I know. The other kids say that they hurt people down there.”

I heard her say it, but I didn’t want to believe it. Oh, not because I thought everyone at the asylum was too kind to hurt anybody—far from it. After all, the sisters hurt people, too. They put us in restraints. They hit us when we were impertinent, or too slow, or too loud. What could go on downstairs that was worse than the howls I’d heard my first night in restraints?

I finally gathered up my courage one day and put my question to Sister Lise. By then I was more confident in my position at the asylum: Sister Marguerite had begun remarking on how responsible I was, how quick, how discreet.

“Sister, what do you do down here?”

“It’s not so mysterious,” Sister Lise said briskly, as though telling me something perfectly ordinary. “Down here, we try to make people better.”

One of the doors to the anteroom opened and a boy stood there. It took me a moment to recognize him: he was taller and stronger than he’d been before.

Bobby.

“Sister,” he said, “Dr. Desmarchais is asking for you.” He saw me then, and smiled. “Hey,
salut
, Gabrielle.”

“
Salut
,” I responded, not knowing if I should answer or not. If it was allowed.

Sister Lise didn’t seem to mind. “Tell him I’ll be right there,” she said to Bobby, and turned back to me. “It’s all for the good of humanity, everything we do is for the greater good. And you’re helping, you see, you’re all helping to make progress. Now off you go. Sister Marguerite will be needing you.”

All for the greater good. I looked at Robert before I left, but all I saw in his eyes was that same dark light that had started the day he stole the cake for me.

I ran into him from time to time after that in the basement. He was impressively smart; he could read and do arithmetic and sometimes he’d grab my hand and drag me outside with him where he produced a packet of cigarettes.

The first time I saw Bobby smoking, I was terrified. “What are you doing?” I breathed in horror. “You’ll get in trouble for sure!”

“Not me,” he said with a casual smile, putting the cigarette in his mouth, lighting a match and holding it to the end until there was a faint orange glow. He sucked in, then expelled the smoke in one long controlled breath. “Who d’you think gave them to me, anyway?”

“I don’t know.” All I knew was that my heart was pounding with fear. And excitement.

“The sisters and the doctors,” Robert said carelessly.

My eyes widened. “Why?”

He held it out to me. “Want to try?”

I shook my head. “Sister’ll know for sure,” I said, fighting an impulse to bless myself at the thought. It didn’t even matter which sister: one of them would know, and then I’d be in trouble.

“Won’t happen. The doctors like me. I help them out,” he said carelessly but with a quick glance at me to make sure I was suitably impressed. “I’m their best assistant.”

“Bobby,” I said, frowning, “everyone knows that they’re hurting people down there. How can you do that? How can you help them?”

He took my arm, and I shook his hand off. “Listen, Gabrielle,” he said, his voice low and intense. “Do you really want to be nobody for the rest of your life? Nobody, like we were back at the orphanage?”

“Of course not, but sometimes,” I stammered, “sometimes parents came to adopt someone. Those kids became somebody.”

“Not me,” Bobby said. “They never came to adopt me. Or you, Gabrielle.” He paused. “Listen, the way to survive here, it’s to be useful. I learned that, I learned how to play the game, it’s not that hard. And it works. They know my name: all the doctors know my name. They talk to me. They ask me how I am, they ask what I think about things, they want to know my opinion, can you believe that? One of them was talking about sending me to school, he said I’m that smart.”

“Good for you.”

“It could be good for you, too,” and his voice was persuasive again. “Gabrielle, everyone knows you’re smart. Sister Lise said so to Dr. Maginot, I heard her. You could have a better life.”

“By staying in the basement all the time?”

“By working with them.” His eyes were filled with clouds. “When one of the kids is sent down here, I know what to say, I know how to calm them down. And I know a lot of the kids, I can tell the doctors all about them. They appreciate that. You could do that too, Gabrielle.”

“I won’t.” I turned to face him. “I think that maybe if you do something bad all the time, you turn a little bit bad yourself.” I pushed myself off the building where I’d been leaning. “I have to go.”

Nearly every time I went downstairs after that I saw Bobby, living out his choice, his voice filled with honey and respect as he said, “yes, Doctor,” and “no, Doctor,” and I wondered if they really were going to send him to school, give him another life, or if they were using him the way they used us all. When I saw him in the basement, we smiled and nodded to each other, him because he could and me because I was starting to get a little scared of him; but inside I just felt cold.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Julian went home armed with the thumb drive and prepared to continue the search. I kicked off my shoes and stayed in the office, not ready to face the Métro, not willing to call Ivan and have him pick me up. There was something pricking the back of my brain; a little time alone doing mechanical tasks like answering the e-mails that were piling up might, I thought, be able to jar it loose.

After about half an hour, I slipped my office key in my pocket and padded down the back corridor to use the restroom. I washed my hands and dampened my cheeks, repositioning my chignon, which had slipped a little, blotting a place where my mascara had smudged. On my way back to the office I heard a door shut, somewhere close.

Curious, when it was clear that everybody—on my floor at least—was out of the building. Probably a security guard, I decided. Yes: it had to be a security guard.

As I put the key in my office door, the hallway lights went out.

My pulse started racing. I got the key to turn, slipped in, and closed the door, locking it behind me faster than I’d ever done before. The lights were still on in my office; everything was the way I’d left it. There was a logical explanation for this, there must be.

But it was on tiptoe that I made my way across to the other door, the one that connected with Chantal’s office and the main entrance to our suite. I opened it slowly, just a crack; the lights were turned off out there, too.

Had they been on when Julian left?

I couldn’t remember. I closed the door again, silently, and forced myself to take several deep breaths. I am fervently anti-handgun so obviously that wasn’t an option. The closest thing I had to a weapon was the hairspray I kept in my desk drawer.

I remembered the police reports describing the women who had been killed, how they’d been raped, how they’d been mutilated. My mouth went dry.

I padded back across to my desk, reaching for the telephone. I heard some footsteps in the hallway and the door handle turned.

I screamed. I’ll admit it. I am no Nancy Drew; I’m not accustomed to anything more frightening than the child support checks in my life. Screaming is probably not the best response to an emergency situation. I can’t say I ran through a whole lot of other options in my mind before I did it.

There was a pause, then someone rapped on the door. “Mrs. LeDuc! Are you all right?”

I froze. Deer-in-the-headlights time. I think I had my hand over my own mouth to keep myself from screaming again.

“Mrs. LeDuc? Please open the door. I know you’re there. I don’t wish you any harm.” This time, I recognized the voice.