Asylum (4 page)

“A summary,” he said sourly, “of the investigation to date.” He looked at his watch importantly. “As I cannot allow you to leave the premises with these documents,
madame
, and as I myself am very occupied, my assistant will indicate a quiet place where you may go to read these materials.”

I stood up. I couldn’t have asked for anything better; I hadn’t been looking forward to listening to him sigh and tap his watch while I went through the material, and being spared his scowl did a lot to brighten my day. Alone, I could really think about what I was reading, maybe even wrap my brain around exactly what was happening in my city.

Maybe.

I opened the folder in a small airless room procured by a constable who made it clear she had more important things to do than show me around, and flipped through the reports on the latest victim: her autopsy results, crime scene photographs around the park bench where her body was displayed, a notation of drugs found in her body, the first narratives written by the responding officers. My stomach lurched and I swallowed hard, several times, until the bile went back down.

The drugs didn’t mean much to me; I’ve been fortunate in my good health, and perceive medications taken by others as I might a strange custom practiced in a foreign land. Still, it seemed like there were a
lot
of them for someone so young. I scribbled the names down and decided to Google them later.

I steeled myself and looked again at the bench—and felt the nausea again. How could anyone sit on one of those ever again, after seeing this? The lifeless body was naked, and streaked with some dark brown substance I could only interpret as blood; it was curled up on one side of the bench, the head leaning against the back, as though taking a catnap.

I swallowed again, pulling my eyes away from the photograph, and glanced through the rest of the autopsy report. She’d been in good health when she was killed. I struggled to read the minutiae of the descriptions written up by the doctor who’d performed the autopsy, by the crime scene techs. Rape, it said. Mutilation, it said. I swallowed hard.

And then, without really being aware of what I was doing, I pulled out another photograph and came face-to-face with Danielle Leroux, alive and vibrant and far more real than what had been left on that city bench.

No wonder Richard had been attracted to her. She looked younger than her thirty-four years, with dark hair swept up into a barrette on one side, eyes sparkling with humor, and a smile that invited one in return. No one’s idea of a librarian, I thought.

Someone’s idea of a victim.

CHAPTER FOUR

I looked at that photograph for a long time. It seemed inconceivable that this beautiful, vibrant girl had any connection to the chilling autopsy report, inconceivable that those laughing eyes weren’t laughing somewhere anymore. It had to be someone else, the rational part of my brain was insisting.

I sighed, finally, and put it aside. There was little else in the folder to see; we were, after all, still in the first day of the investigation. I knew that there were homicide detectives out there now, interviewing neighbors, contacting family members, piecing together a life that somehow met with a killer on a warm night on the Plateau. One of them would be speaking, soon, with Richard, another piece in the puzzle. I should probably give him some time off.

And I should probably have thought of that before, when he’d first told me.

The next folder was a lot thicker, though it had just as few answers. I flipped quickly through what I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know: rape. Stabbings. Mutilation of the face in particular. My stomach lurched, and I flipped away from those pages.

And flipped to a photograph of Annie Desmarchais alive and well, and even though I had already seen it on the front page of the
Gazette
, I was still taken aback. What little I knew of serial killers had come from the pages of mystery novels and the occasional movie; and that, along with common sense, dictated that victims look similar, that serial killers are attracted to a certain appearance.

Annie Desmarchais had celebrated her sixty-fourth birthday a mere two weeks before she had been murdered, back in the early summer. She was attractive, slightly plump, with a warm smile and exquisite grooming; but she was still, undoubtedly, a woman of a certain age.

I pulled Danielle’s picture out from the first folder, put the two women side by side, and frowned. Aside from the twinkle that managed to penetrate the lens of a camera, there was nothing that I could see that the two had in common. Flipping open the other two folders, I looked at the faces of Isabelle Hubert—one of the most beautiful women I’d seen, and this in a city of extraordinarily beautiful women—and Caroline Richards, who wore glasses and had slightly crooked teeth. Nothing in common, but there had to be something, hadn’t there? Didn’t serial killers run to a type?

What was it that their killer had seen in them that I wasn’t seeing?

“You won’t see any similarities,” a voice said from behind me, making me jump. “There aren’t any.” The chair next to me was pulled out and a young man sat down. “Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” I said, hoping he couldn’t hear my heart pounding. Maybe it was just because I was new to this murder stuff, but having someone creep up on you when you’re looking at pictures of dead people is enough to make you seriously come apart at the seams.

The young man looking at me was clearly and unabashedly Anglophone, a rarity in a police department run by an ardent card-carrying member of the
Parti Québecois
, the political party advocating endlessly and repetitively for secession from Canada. “I’m Julian,” he said, almost apologetically. “Julian Fletcher.”

“Martine LeDuc,” I said automatically, putting out my hand to shake his. “You’re not in public relations, are you?”

He snorted. “Public relations? Not if the chief has anything to do with it. I’m kept strictly under wraps. Not politically correct enough.” He grinned vividly. “In fact, he’d probably get rid of me altogether if I wasn’t so good at what I do.”

“Which is…?”

“Detective,” he said. “
Détective-lieutenant
, actually. There are still enclaves in this city where speaking English isn’t regarded as heresy, and I know everybody in them.”

A light was dawning. “Oh, my God. Fletcher…”

He nodded. “Yep.
That
Fletcher. One of the
Westmount Fletchers
.” He sketched quotation marks around the name with his fingers. Westmount was the oldest and wealthiest—and most Anglophone—section of Montréal. “I’m the proverbial black sheep in the famous family. Silly boy who chose public service over commerce. Never to be spoken of again in the hallowed halls of the family mansion on the hill.” He grinned suddenly, vividly, and I found myself smiling back. “The name comes in useful, though, and no one in this building has ever discarded anything that might be remotely useful.” His tone was brisk, suggesting that he didn’t altogether mind being a black sheep. “So,” he went on, nodding at the papers spread out in front of me, “what is it you want to know?”

I gestured helplessly. “Everything. I’m not seeing a connection, and I’m only on the second folder.”

Julian sat back in his chair. “You’re taking it in the wrong order,” he said, frankly. “You should start at the beginning. That’s where
he
started.”

“You’re sure it’s a he?”

He shrugged. “Even if all the odds weren’t with it being a he—and almost all serial killers are male, so there are your odds—there was a sexual component to all of them. Didn’t you know?” He slanted a look and saw my face. “They were all raped,” he said gently. “I’m sorry. I guess no one’s been talking about that part.”

I swallowed. “I guess not.”

He sighed, drummed his fingers on the edge of the table for a moment. I had the impression of a great deal of energy pulsing behind all his movements. “Okay. Do you really want to sit and read all about it, or shall I show you?”

“Show me?”

He nodded, standing up, already helping me out of my chair. “The director assigned me to you, but he doesn’t have to know that we didn’t spend the day poring over records. Let’s take a ride, Martine LeDuc,” he said easily. “Put the ladies in context.”

“Okay,” I said, bemused, trailing after him. “It’s kind of you to take the time. You know I shouldn’t be doing this at all.” I grimaced. “I appear to be the only department head who doesn’t have what the mayor considers important things to do, hence my availability to be the messenger girl between him and the director.”

“Never mind,” Julian said encouragingly. “All the better. You may see things we don’t. And I get to boss you around. I don’t get that very often in my job. It’s win-win, you ask me.”

We went out to where his car, an Audi TT that he certainly had not bought on a policeman’s salary, was illegally parked in a resident-only space. Julian kept talking even as he slid behind the wheel and eased us out into Montréal’s moderately terrifying traffic. “So, Isabelle Hubert,” he said, maneuvering in front of a truck with millimeters to spare. I checked my seatbelt to make sure it wasn’t going to give out on me. “Victim number one. Pretty. Young—twenty-three. Blonde, but that wasn’t what nature had intended.” He glanced at me. “Prostitute, but not one of the girls working the corners down on Sainte-Catherine. She worked for an escort service. Higher class clients, lower risk environment.”

“Not low enough,” I commented. I remembered what the papers had said when Isabelle Hubert’s body was found, also on a park bench; in her case, stretched out across it, lying down as though asleep. Everyone seemed to think that violence was an acceptable risk and a foregone conclusion for prostitutes, call girls and streetwalkers alike. There was almost an air of, well, what did she expect? What did she expect, indeed? To be allowed to live?

Even Ivan had said so. Not one of our better moments together.

“Yep, so you might think,” Julian replied now, noncommittal. We were driving north, into the Little Italy section of town. Julian pulled off Rue St.-Denis onto a side street and pointed to the third building, solidly built of gray stone, the trademark curving outdoor staircase—in this case painted a gay and charming purple—going up to the second floor where Isabelle Hubert had lived. “Nice place,” he said, ignoring the horns of motorists who were trying to squeeze by us on the narrow street. “A piano, though it’s hard to figure out how she got it in there. Copper cooking pots hanging from the ceiling. Lots of plants, lots of books, a cat.”

“What happened to the cat?” I swear it felt like a logical question.

Julian didn’t know. “Point is, she had a life. She worked evenings, and during the day she wrote poetry, she went for walks, she hung out at a little café back on St.-Denis. She was taking an art class, doing some genealogical research.”

Julian was still looking at the shuttered windows, as if they might yet tell him something about their former occupant. “She saw a client at eight,” he said. “That’s what these girls call them, clients. We talked to the guy, he was one of her regulars, saw her every week. We looked at him hard as a suspect, at first, but it wasn’t him. He was more broken up than if it had been his wife. He left the apartment where they’d met at the same time Isabelle did, went and played racquetball with a regular partner, was still having an after-workout glass of red wine with the guy when they found her body. Hey, did you hear about that? They’re saying that’s good for you now, red wine after a workout.”

I ignored him. I found my eyes drifting to the windows just as his had. She had written poetry. She had played the piano. She had loved her cat.

I was still wondering what happened to that cat.

Julian put the car in gear and drove off without, as far as I could tell, either signaling his intention or looking in any of his rearview mirrors. “She didn’t have anyone else scheduled that night,” he said. “We checked with her madam. She was supposed to be on call—she had a cell phone, and if a client asked for her, the madam would call her and tell her where to go.”

We were driving south, down the rue Guy, toward the center of the city. “She didn’t keep an appointment book or have a smartphone or anything helpful like that,” Julian said. “There was a calendar on her wall at home but nothing was scheduled for that night after the client. So we don’t know what her plans were.”

I closed my eyes. Maybe if I didn’t
see
how aggressively he was driving, my stomach would stop twitching. “It was beautiful weather,” I said, my eyes still shut, remembering what I’d heard when the city had learned of Isabelle’s murder back in May. The kids had spent the weekend with us, one of our scheduled times with them, and it had been fantastic. We’d taken them to la Ronde, the amusement park, all of us getting delightfully sick on twirling rides and junk food. Spring is greeted with open arms in a city entombed in snow and ice throughout the winter, forced to go underground.

“She may have just wanted to walk,” I said. I could imagine her, blonde and pretty, her jacket open to the soft air, the lights of restaurants and shops spilling out around her, highlighting the glitter of her jewelry as she passed.

“The client,” Julian said, “lived on the Plateau, too. Or at least that’s where he keeps the apartment he saw Isabelle in; his wife and kids live somewhere else, somewhere off Sherbrooke. Isabelle walked down to the Latin Quarter. We think she had some sort of purpose, somewhere specific to go, someone to see. If she were just enjoying the night, why not go to a café, a bar, sit outside with a drink?”

It was a good question. “That’s close to UQAM,” I said suddenly, sitting up straighter, opening my eyes despite my better instincts. “Danielle Leroux worked at the University of Québec.”

“Good girl,” Julian said, approving. “We’ll make a detective out of you yet. Unfortunately, while that thought did occur to us, too, we couldn’t find the connection.” He pulled over at Berri-UQAM and indicated the Métro stop, the bushes, the one lone bench. “Isabelle was left on that bench sometime after midnight. She wasn’t killed here, she’d just been dumped for someone to find. Just lying stretched out on the bench. No clothes on her, and not a lot of trace evidence, either.”