Asylum (16 page)

*   *   *

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 are 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.

I stared across the canal. This was making less and less sense to me.

It was another twenty minutes before the door opened and she stormed into the room, slamming it behind her. “Morons,” she said, slapping her desk for emphasis. “This administration is staffed by morons.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, turning away from the view that was by now imprinted on my retinas. “You have to tell me, Elodie. We’ve got people dying. We’ve got the wrong person locked up. You
have
to tell me.”

“Not if
that
moron has his say, I don’t,” she said, tossing her head in the direction of the next office. She rummaged around in her desk drawer until she located a package of cigarettes and a lighter. She took one out, lit it, threw the lighter down on the desk with some force, and did a rapid inhale-exhale. “Okay. You’re right, the premier is up for reelection. Happy happy joy joy. But his campaign chest isn’t what it should be. His campaign chest isn’t what it could be. So this past year he’s been going after deeper pockets. Corporations.”

I sat down on the closest chair. “Drug companies,” I said.

She nodded, puffed again on the cigarette. “Specifically, Lansbury Pharmaceuticals.”

I could feel a headache building. “They synthesize chlorpromazine,” I said, remembering from reading Danielle’s research.

She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Even if they did, they’re probably on to more lucrative and cutting-edge drugs now. But you can bet that they were underwriting some of the work done at the Allan Institute, and they knew what was going on in the asylums.”

Yep: the headache was there. “What does Dr. MacDougal have to do with it? I don’t understand. What’s the problem, Elodie?”

“Who do you think finances his work? Gives him grants?” She went over to the television, a flat-screen mounted on the wall. People in public relations
always
have televisions in their offices. Hers, I noted, was far nicer than mine.

Elodie had a tablet computer and was sliding her way through several screens; when she finally found what she was looking for and put it up on the big monitor, I was thinking that it was a very good thing that tablets are virtually indestructible. “A campaign spot,” she said tersely, standing back and touching the tablet.

The scene was some city hospital, where parents hovered anxiously over a child in a hospital bed. A doctor came in, peered at a chart, and checked the child’s chest with a stethoscope, before turning, beaming, to the parents. “She’s going to be just fine,” he said, and they burst into cries of delight. He patted the patient reassuringly, stood, and the camera backed up, filming as he walked out the door. “Two years ago, that little girl would have died,” he said, looking directly into the lens. “Today, she’s going to live, thanks to Lansbury Pharmaceuticals.”

He looked off camera to the right, and was joined by the Canadian premier. “It is the government of Jean Callas that has enabled companies such as ours to develop medications that save lives. A vote for Callas is a vote for progress, a vote for life.” Appropriate music closed the scene as the two men, beaming at each other, shook hands. The background ran blue.

Elodie clicked it off. “
That
’s the problem,” she said. I saw just what she meant.

The “doctor” on the tape was Christopher MacDougal.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s think about this. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The premier of Canada has
not
been creeping around Montréal killing off researchers.”

Elodie slumped back in her desk chair and rubbed her forehead. “He’s got nothing to do with it,” she said tiredly. “He probably doesn’t even know about it.”

I was less sure of that than she was but I let it slide. “Who, then?”

“You’re kidding, right? It could be anybody.” She frowned. “I don’t get it, Martine. This was a political ad financed by Lansbury that used a spokesman from McGill to give it gravitas. That’s all, at least, that’s all I thought it was. But—I still don’t get it. If Christopher MacDougal is working with the government, then why would he be stirring up the past? You know that if the ad works, there will be lucrative returns for both Lansbury and McGill, government grants, subsidies, the whole nine yards. Shouldn’t he just be letting things lie?”