After donning latex gloves, Victor examined the photos. The album contained carefully organized newspaper clippings spanning four decades. The oldest one was from 1951, the most recent from December 1992. Victor skimmed through the clippings and quickly found a common theme: they were all related to the disappearances and murders of children in Montreal.
A stack of utility bills and invoices landed on the table. Victor looked up at his partner.
“I found those on the corkboard. Apparently, the tenant’s name is Arthur Zourek.”
“You checked with Central to see if he has a record?”
Robitaille nodded. “No record, but he was interrogated in relation to a murder in 1959. No charges made, though.”
Victor frowned. “You have any more details?”
“Files from before 1980 haven’t been computerized. They’re digging through the archives.”
Robitaille came up behind his partner and started to read over his shoulder.
The most recent newspaper clipping cited the disappearance of an eight-year-old girl in a park in Côte-des-Neiges.
“The last disappearance happened three weeks ago,” Victor said softly. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“That we’re just around the corner from Jean-Brillant Park?”
The two policemen looked at each other.
“We should call major crimes,” said Robitaille.
Even though his partner had more seniority, Victor had gained a kind of authority over him. So Robitaille did not take offense when Victor said, “Call Ted Rutherford. Tell him you’re my partner and that we need his help.”
“You know Ted Rutherford? He’s a legend.”
Victor almost explained that Rutherford was the first officer to arrive at the scene of his family’s massacre, that the star investigator had been his inspiration to pursue police work. But instead, he bit his lip.
As Robitaille headed for the wall phone, Victor continued examining the newspaper clippings. He found the oldest ones and read them carefully, wondering what it all meant. Then his gaze fell on one of the bills that Robitaille had left on the table. An idea crossed his mind. And then it clicked.
Victor shot out of his chair and headed for the door. Robitaille, who’d been on hold the past few minutes, asked where he was going.
“Hang up. We’re leaving.”
Robitaille cupped his hand over the phone. “Why? Where are we going?”
Moving quickly, Victor answered without turning around: “Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery.”
The old man cradles the body against his coat, and screams over the roar of the wind. Flurries of snow swirl around the headstone. “You see what you’ve done, you little bastard? Leave us, now!”
Jérôme opens his mouth to reply, then thinks better of it. The two stare at each other for a long moment. The young man eventually winces, turns on his heels, and walks away. Before he vanishes into the snowdrift, the old man notices that the back of Jérôme’s head is covered in blood. And through his shattered cranium, brain matter glistens.
Arthur Zourek closes his eyes.
Bathed in the glare of revolving headlights, the policemen sat motionless in a contemplative silence. They’d easily found the spot and parked the patrol car a block away.
When they arrived at the cemetery, the snow on the ground was perfectly smooth; the wind had swept away any footprints around the headstone. An open suitcase lay a few meters from the grave. An empty bottle of pills, a girl’s clothing, and toys stained with blood were scattered in the snow like bizarre offerings.
Robitaille spoke after a long moment: “How’d you know about the cemetery?”
Lost in his thoughts, Victor took a moment to reply. “One of the bills you found was a statement from the cemetery, for the maintenance of Florence and Rosalie Zourek’s graves.”
Robitaille shook his head. “I mean, how’d you know he would come here?”
“I read the oldest newspaper clippings, the ones about the unsolved murder of little Rosalie Zourek, six years old.”
“The daughter of Arthur and Florence Zourek...”
Staring into the distance, Victor nodded. “Then I remembered the words together for eternity written next to the pool of blood. It made sense when I saw the bill. It was intuition, really.”
“And the pedophile who had his skull bashed in by a hammer in 1959? You think the old man killed him? Zourek was the only witness interrogated by the investigators.”
On their way to the cemetery, Central had given them the information from the archives about the murder of Jérôme Gaudreau, a thirty-five-year-old repeat offender convicted of sexual violence against minors. At the beginning of 1953, Gaudreau had been suspected of committing a series of child abductions. But he’d been released a few days later, after he was cleared due to insufficient evidence.
Victor shrugged his shoulders. “The abductions apparently continued after Gaudreau’s death.”
“Poor old man. To end like that...”
Victor nodded, choked up with emotion. His head was full of grisly images, disfigured by time, and he stared at Arthur Zourek’s frozen body, partially covering the headstone.
In his arms, the old man clutched a disemboweled cat. He held it as one holds a child. As he would have held his little Rosalie more than forty years earlier.
About the Contributors
Samuel Archibald is the author of the short story collection Arvida, which was short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. He lives, writes, and teaches genre fiction and creative writing in Montreal. He is also a playwright, screenwriter, baseball coach, and avid fly fisherman.
Katie Shireen Assef is a writer and translator of French. Her first book-length translation was Akashic’s Brussels Noir, and her translation of Valérie Mréjen’s novel Black Forest is forthcoming from Phoneme Media. Her work has been featured in journals such as Drunken Boat, FENCE, Epiphany, Joyland, PANK, and Sakura Review. She lives in Los Angeles.
Michel Basilières was born and raised in Montreal’s Milton Park neighborhood. His first novel, Black Bird, won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was short-listed for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. His second novel is A Free Man, and he currently teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.
Arjun Basu is the author of Squishy, a collection of short stories short-listed for Canada’s ReLit Award. Waiting for the Man, a novel, was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2014. Born and raised in Montreal, he lives in the Mile End neighborhood, where he has never seen a single horse. He is currently at work on his next novel, and the one after that.
Jacques Filippi started his career as a journalist and has now been a bookseller, translator, sales representative, and editor for almost twenty years. He started his blog, The House of Crime and Mystery, in 2011, and cofounded the QuébeCrime Writers Festival a few years later. His blog is now a website where you can read his reviews, interviews, and other views. He is also hard at work on a trilogy of crime novels.
Tess Fragoulis’s first book, Stories to Hide from Your Mother, was nominated for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Best First Book Award. In 2003, her novel Ariadne’s Dream was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and received an honorable mention for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her latest novel, The Goodtime Girl, was published in 2012. Fragoulis lives, writes, and teaches in Montreal.