Asylum Read online

  We’d all been through it, our first few days and weeks and months there: food stolen, blankets stolen, and no one to complain to. There was more gratuitous violence, as well: bare toes stepped upon, hair pulled, arms twisted. Later, there was even more, darker things, deeper pain, and even though I understand that people do what they feel they must do to survive, I found some of what happened difficult to forgive. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that we’d have had the sense to all band together against our common enemy, the sisters and the orderlies and the doctors; but we did not, and what we did to each other was in its own way as bad as what they did to us.

  Back from the farm and working in communications, I listened to Régine and learned from her, and I obediently took the elevator when I was sent to Sister Lise. If you didn’t know where someone was, there was a chart in Sister Marguerite’s office; but since I couldn’t read it, I had to ask her for help.

  “Sister Lise,” Sister Béatrice said, and looked sharply at me. “That’s down in the basement. Have you been there?”

  “No, Sister.”

  “All right then,” she said. “You have to take the elevator in the east wing; that staircase doesn’t go down to Sister Lise’s department.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  “There will probably be an orderly around when you step off the elevator. If there isn’t, then just stand there and wait by the desk. Under no circumstances do you go anywhere in the basement alone, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  “Very well. Off you go.”

  And off I went, down the creaking and shuddering elevator and into the basement. I felt a wave of relief when the elevator stopped and I could wrestle the two screeching metal gates open and step out of the infernal machine.

  There was no one in the basement to greet me, and I heeded Sister’s words, staying precisely where I was. The elevator opened into a lobby of sorts, an ill-lit one with a particularly low ceiling; there was a desk and chair and lamp, and three of the walls held closed doors.

  At first, nothing happened. I stood and waited. The electric clock on the wall ticked loudly.

  One of the doors burst open, thrown against the wall and with a loud thud, bounced back—it was made of steel, so it suffered no ill effects. An orderly, wearing the white shirt and trousers of his profession, his hair cut short close to the skull, came through and yanked a drawer completely out of the desk, grabbing something inside. A pair of handcuff restraints.

  I moved then, and caught his eye. “Yeah?”

  “I’m here with a message for Sister Lise,” I said, trying to look anywhere but at the restraints. More than two years since I’d last been in them, and there were still scars on my wrists. Automatically, I tugged at my cuffs to cover the marks.

  “Stay here,” he said, and went back through the door, pulling it closed behind him. A moment later I heard a scream, horrible in its intensity, long and drawn out, a sound no human should make.

  The door opened again, more gently this time. A nun came through, briskly, pushing the door shut behind her. “You have something for me?”

  It was as though nothing had happened. As though we were conversing on a normal day, in a normal set of circumstances. “Yes, Sister.”

  No mention of what I’d heard. No mention of the blood I’d seen on the sleeve of her habit. I wrestled with the accordion doors on the elevator, desperate to put as much space as possible between myself and that place.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The McGill corridor wasn’t so different from the ones I remembered from my own days at university—long, dusty, with professors’ offices lined up on either side. This wasn’t where the labs were, I noted, reviewing my campus map; just where offices and classrooms were located, where academic discussions took place.

  Well, I was up for one of those.

  The afternoon sun slanted in through the two windows at the end of the hallway, making dust motes dance in the air; and, taking my cue from the few students around, I sat down cross-legged on the floor and pretended to study my notebook. I was still wearing the jeans from my unfortunate interview with Violette Sobel; with any luck, I, too, could look like a postdoc student. Or so I fervently hoped.

  From the tone of the voices within, it sounded like Dr. MacDougal and his current student were winding down. I thrust my notebook into my bag and stretched, ready to spring when the door opened. It did at last, two long shadows casting themselves across the corridor, and I clambered ungracefully to my feet. The student was speaking. “Thanks, I’ll get back to you with those results.”

  “Best of luck with them.”

  I waited until the younger man had departed and turned to the professor. MacDougal was tall, with red hair and freckles and a puzzled look about him. “Hello? Can I help you?”

  I stuck out my hand for him to shake. “Professor, my name is Martine LeDuc. I work for the city’s tourism board.”

  He shook my hand, bemused. “Pleased to meet you, madame. What can I do for the tourism board?” He was not, I noticed, inviting me in.

  “I was told you were the best person to talk to about some of the experiments that were going on at Ravenscrag in the 1970s,” I said.

  “Really? You were told that?” He looked vaguely amused. “Do I look old enough to have been a faculty member in 1970?”

  “You look old enough to try to deflect my questions.”

  This time the smile was condescending. “Well, Martine LeDuc, you should probably make an appointment. Why don’t you leave me a card?” He waited while I fished one out of my purse. “It will be interesting to understand precisely why the tourism board wants to talk about old history.”

  “It’s an old city,” I said.

  “With some old stories that are best left buried,” the professor warned. “Good day, Martine LeDuc.”

  I could almost hear my husband’s voice. That went well …

  * * *

  Ivan was working late at the casino so I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and curled up with a novel. Maybe a connection would come to me unconsciously if I didn’t concentrate so hard.

  Or maybe I just wanted to get my mind off the investigation.

  The phone rang at nine: Julian, my partner in crime. “What are you doing right now?”

  “You sound like an obscene phone caller,” I said. “Next you’ll ask what I’m wearing. I’m enriching my mind, that’s what I’m doing. What’s up?”

  “Checking in on your visit to the corridors of academia.” He listened to my narrative of my oh-so-brief encounter at McGill. “Bullshit,” he said. “I’ll take his picture over to UQAM, I’ll bet you anything that’s the guy your deputy saw.”

  “Where did you get his picture?” I asked, curious. Police procedures still baffled me.

  “He’s published articles, his face has got to be somewhere. I don’t know all that much about it but I’ll have someone do a search through our databases. If that fails, there’s always Google. Maybe you can show it to Mr. Rousseau, too. But in the meantime, let’s assume that he’s the guy we need.”

  “I think that’s reasonable,” I conceded.

  “He’s clearly scared, otherwise he wouldn’t have fobbed you off like that. Maybe you need someone with a little more pull to get him to talk.”

  “Not my boss,” I said immediately. “If this is a real lead, Julian, then the mayor is in over his head. He postures nicely, but the reality is that McGill has clout, and not just in the city or the province, and he knows that: he’s not going to do anything to alienate them. We need somebody bigger than McGill if we want to put pressure on them.”

  “Right,” said Julian. “I know what we need. We need entrée into the federal government. That’s what we need. Someone in Ottawa.”

  I smiled; I couldn’t help but smile. I hadn’t thought of going that way; but now that Julian had pointed it out, the next step was obvious. “I know just the person,” I told him.

  As soon as we hung up, I call
ed the capital; and thirteen hours later I was in our Volvo, driving west and aware of a growing sense of dread in the pit of my stomach.

  Julian called before I was even out of the province. “It’s MacDougal,” he confirmed. “He and Danielle working together, they were the ones doing the research. Wow. McGill and UQAM working together, who would’ve thought? Talk about sleeping with the enemy!”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I reminded him. But part of me wished I could see where this all was going.

  Because it was going higher than any of us had ever imagined.

  * * *

  I’d met Elodie Maréchal in graduate school. She was my closest friend back then; we went on the occasional vacation together, drank coffee daily, and told each other everything. After we each got our degrees, though, we’d gone our separate ways: I to city government—or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof—in Montréal, Elodie to join the big cheeses in Ottawa.

  We’d both gotten married; I had an instant family with Lukas and Claudia while Elodie decided to have her child the old-fashioned way, with her husband taking time off for paternity leave while Elodie continued to work. I can’t imagine him ever considering doing anything else: one simply doesn’t say no to Elodie.

  She worked for the Deputy Minister of National Defense; I wasn’t sure exactly what it was that she did, but she had whole departments reporting to her at the National Defense Headquarters in the Major-General George R. Pearkes Building on Colonel By Drive; even the names echoed with stiff military bearing.

  Elodie wasn’t in the military herself but that didn’t seem to matter much; she had the authority she deserved and didn’t much care what people thought about her beyond that.

  I asked for her at the front desk, where security was a major concern; but as it turned out I hadn’t needed to as she was already in the lobby. I saw her long before she saw me, across the foyer, talking with some animation to a cluster of men in dark suits around her, gesturing dramatically as she always did. Elodie had started out as the government’s nod to the French speakers of Québec and now practically ran the place, her short dark hair framing a pixie face that belied her true spitfire nature. I smiled.

  She caught sight of me as the group broke up, doing a rapid scan of the room, like an admiral checking to see that no armada was creeping up on her. “Martine!”

  I smiled and gave her the requisite French kisses on each cheek. “Thought I might take you to lunch, chérie.”

  She stared at me. “You came all the way to Ottawa to take me to lunch,” she said flatly. “Bon. You want something. What exactly is it?”

  I shrugged. “Conversation. Some ideas,” I said.

  She started walking toward the entrance and I kept close. A young man came up with a clipboard; she scanned it and put her initials at the bottom without breaking stride. “Montréal is already the third most popular tourist destination in Canada,” she said cheerfully. “Don’t know how to move you up farther on the list, Martine.”

  “It’s not about tourists.”

  Something in my tone must have gotten to her, because she stopped altogether and looked at me. “Bon,” she said again, still staring, but in an abstracted way as if she were doing sums in her head. “Let’s eat.”

  We went to one of the pubs at the nearby ByWard Market and made small talk as we ordered. Elodie barely waited until the waiter had left the table; she’d always been direct. “You’re involved in something,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  I flushed. “I feel as if I’m going in circles,” I admitted. “Maybe I need someone to give me perspective.”

  There was a twinkle in her pixie face. “Oh, I can do that, all right,” she said. “Remember our Government and the Family course?”

  “I can’t believe you brought that up,” I said stiffly, mock-serious. “I told you, I was missing two pages of the assignment.”

  “Uh-huh. And if I hadn’t read your final paper you’d have been laughed off campus. Talk about perspective.” She leaned forward. “Alors, what is it, Martine? Is it Ivan?”

  I stared at her. “Oh, lord, no.” But she was right to ask: it had been about Ivan for the first two years of our marriage, when I struggled with the complexities, the sheer unfairness, the difficulties, the expectations of being a stepmother. There had been a lot of late-night phone calls to Elodie back then. A lot of electronic wailing. Me sitting on the telephone and drinking too many glasses of red wine and, yes, complaining because my neat little life was getting messed up by someone else’s children. Of course that’s what she would remember. “No, not Ivan,” I said. “It’s sort of about work.”

  “Sort of?” The dark eyebrows rose gracefully. “Speak, Martine,” she commanded.

  I took a deep breath. “Okay. There have been four murders this summer in Montréal,” I said. “Two in July, one in August, one last week. All women. There was a sexual component in each case. The bodies were all left in public places, on benches located in different parts of the city.”

  She was listening. “I’ve read about it,” she commented, nodding.

  “The police think it’s a serial sex killer. They think the victims have been chosen either randomly or through some psychosexual pattern that the profilers haven’t figured out yet. They have someone in custody—a homeless man who was in the area and who was found with clothing that belonged to two of the women.”

  “Very circumstantial,” observed Elodie, who is married to a lawyer. “Very convenient.”

  The waiter arrived with drinks and an appetizer. I waited until he departed before continuing. “One of the detectives assigned to the case and I, we’ve been working on a different theory,” I said. “All of the women were connected in some way to the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu asylum. One of them actually lived there back in the day herself. One’s mother lived there. One was doing research on some medical experiments being performed at the asylum, and another was a reporter who was writing about the whole Duplessis orphans scandal.”

  Elodie took a swallow of her diet cola and gestured. “Go on.”

  “So,” I said, “we wondered if that might be the connection. At first, I thought it was because of the crimes-against-humanity issue. That maybe, either individually or together, they might have been threatening someone who doesn’t want to be connected to the past, threatening to take it to trial.”

  “No one’s taking it to trial,” she said briskly. Elodie knew all about the orphans. “There’s enough evidence against the Church, but the Church isn’t going to do anything. They’re still talking about ‘isolated individual events,’ the morons. And the Québec government already paid restitution to the Duplessis gang, back in 2002. Ten thousand dollars per person, and an additional one thousand for every year they were in the asylum; came out to about twenty-five thousand dollars for every orphan involved in the settlement.” I didn’t ask how she had that information at her mental fingertips; Elodie always seems to know everything. “That wasn’t enough, of course, but they were all getting older, and that was the way it was shaking out; so they took the money. At this point it’s old news, Martine. No one’s going to trial.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Or maybe.”

  The dark eyes were sharp. She put down the glass. “Tell me what you think,” she said.

  What did I think? It had all seemed so clear, back at McGill. How was I going to make the case to the one person who might be able to help me? I swallowed. “Elodie, I don’t think it’s about the misappropriation of federal funds or the classification of orphans as mentally ill or even about burying them in unmarked graves, though God knows that’s all bad enough.” I took a deep breath. “I think it’s about the drugs,” I said.

  She put her elbows on the table and took a deep breath. “The drugs?”

  I nodded. “Part of the experiments at the asylum had to do with drugs. Some didn’t, the lobotomies and all that—that was different. But they were experimenting with drugs, too, and where there a
re drugs, there’s money.”

  She was frowning. “Martine,” she said, “it’s horrifying, I know, we all know, but it’s over, it was over a long time ago, most of the people involved are dead, and no one’s going to come after—”

  “They were working for the CIA,” I said flatly. “The experiments were connected to McGill, to the Allan Institute. They had permission to do what they were doing. They had permission from the highest levels of the government. And” —I paused—“this year’s an election year.”

  She stared at me, aghast. “And you think that after all this time—”

  “I do,” I confirmed. “It’s been a busy year for the archives. At least two of the murdered women signed in to them this spring. And we think that a scientist at McGill’s been looking into it—discreetly, by using a researcher at UQAM. No one would ever suspect she was working for him: UQAM and McGill are like chalk and cheese. The researcher’s one of the victims. The reporter—another one of the victims—has been burning up the lines to the States, getting old classified documents through the Freedom of Information Act.” I hesitated. “The only reason I have the researcher’s notes is because the killer couldn’t get into her system in time. Two of the other victims had computers. Julian told me their hard drives had been wiped. Someone went in and did that, someone who wasn’t a serial sex killer.” A shiver of fear traveled up my spine. “Elodie, no one could do that unless they weren’t working alone. I think MacDougal’s involved, but—”

  “MacDougal?” she interrupted. “Christopher MacDougal?”

  “Yes,” I said, surprised. “He’s the scientist I just mentioned, the one at McGill.”

  “Merde, alors,” she muttered, gesturing for the waiter, who came right over. “Your sandwiches will be right up,” he assured her. “Never mind,” Elodie said briskly, standing up, tossing money on the table. “We have to go.”

  I was staring at her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “We have a problem,” she said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Elodie’s office overlooked the Rideau Canal. I know, because I stood at her window for a very long time looking at it while she was closeted with some highly placed government official in the next room over. I heard the occasional bit of conversation when they raised their voices at each other, Elodie’s voice in a higher register than the man’s, but just as emphatic.