I glanced at the other two, recalling how I’d told Gail that the governor’s optimism might have been premature. From their neutral expressions, I guessed they’d already been briefed. “I can’t say I’m surprised,” I said. “What’s been going on?”
“I think the crown prosecutor is starting to buy Marcel’s line that he wasn’t in Vermont in ’47, didn’t kill his father, and honestly thought some rival had done him in.”
“Based on what?”
“The video of Marcel’s interrogation,” she explained. “Canadian law demands that all police interrogations be videotaped. After Marcel’s session, Lacombe and company began kicking around how credible he seemed. My counterpart, Boulle, decided he wanted an expert opinion, so he sent the tape to a behavioral science team in Montreal-apparently that’s an option they use now and then. It would drive me nuts.”
Guillaume Boulle was the Sherbrooke crown prosecutor Lacombe kept invoking, and the same man who’d accompanied us the night we’d raided Marcel’s house. I’d heard his and Kathy’s styles were beginning to clash, she being more type-A, and he having a barely veiled contempt for assertive women. This latest glitch wasn’t going to help.
“The report come back yet?” I asked.
She didn’t look happy. “That’s why you’re here. They say he sounds truthful. That he has the right personality for a leader of a bunch of cutthroats, but that he didn’t do this one.”
“And you don’t buy that,” I guessed.
“It’s too fine a line for me. How the hell can you tell if a guy sounds like he either killed or didn’t kill his father half a century ago, especially if he’s ordered hits in the meantime? I think it’s a psycho-babble crock they’ve chosen over hard evidence. Why I don’t know, unless somebody’s playing footsie under the table.”
In the silence following that comment, I could hear the hard drive of her portable computer humming on her desk.
“Kathy,” I said cautiously, “are you blowing off steam, or do you really believe that? ’Cause if you do, you’ve got to act on it.”
She gave me a rueful smile. “I’m a fish out of water here. It pisses me off.”
I didn’t say anything. I could feel the other two looking from one of us to the other, like spectators at a tennis match.
“All right,” she relented. “I don’t really believe there’s any corruption going on. At least I don’t have proof of it. But these guys are so mellow, I’d like to strangle them. I know goddamn well if I had Marcel in the U.S., I could find five shrinks to say those Canadian profilers are full of it. I don’t understand why they’re bending over backward to tank such a strong case.”
I had my own doubts about that strength, which made me duck the debate entirely. “What’re they going to do?” I asked instead.
“They’ve asked him to take a lie detector test.”
Gary Smith laughed. “The head of a crime family? What the hell do they expect?”
“That he might accept,” Kathy explained grimly. “Problem is, if he does-and passes-it means we’re in shit up to our necks.”
Smith’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding. I thought polygraphs weren’t acceptable in court.”
“We’re not talking about court, Gary. We’re talking about the crown prosecutor not pursuing the case because he doesn’t believe the guy’s guilty.”
Gary thought back a moment. “What about all those weapons they found behind the wall-the murder museum? Can’t they make a connection between any of those and Marcel?”
“They’ve been trying,” she told him, “but they’re mostly old hat. The bear trap’s a perfect example-it had traces of human blood on it, but there’s no record of a trap being used in an unsolved crime. The ice pick’s a minor miracle as it is. Marcel’s fingerprints would have decayed by now, but the handle was silver and became permanently etched by the skin oil-pure dumb luck, along with DNA matching being invented in the meantime to pin the blood to Jean Deschamps. Without that, we wouldn’t have gotten this far.”
“How ’bout the lawyer, Picard?” Gary continued. “He was in Stowe two days before they found Deschamps. What’s he say about that?”
I could tell from Kathy’s expression where that was headed. “Sorry,” she said. “He claims he was taking in the sights. A little day trip. ‘People do it all the time,’ to quote him. And in case you were going to ask,” she added, “it’s a no-go putting Marcel in Stowe in 1947-or Picard or Guidry for that matter. They can’t find anyone who’ll admit to knowing where any of them were when Jean was killed.”
I stood up to stop a discussion I knew had no happy outcome, especially if my personal misgivings were going to be called into play. “Then it’s wait and watch time. I take it Marcel’s people haven’t responded to the polygraph offer yet?”
“Right.”
Gary was looking confused. “What does happen if he passes? Don’t we get a shot at him? I thought this was an American case.”
Kathy frowned. “It is, but only if we can extradite him, and that won’t be easy. They’re already muttering about the age of the crime, the lack of witnesses, the suspect’s failing health, and their own lack of enthusiasm as legal stumbling blocks.”
“So what do we do?”
“We keep digging,” I said from the door, “and hope we can turn things around.”
I ran into André Rousseau of the RCMP outside in the hallway a few minutes later.
“You’re back,” he said smoothly. “Good trip?”
“Mostly just reporting to twitchy superiors. They’re nervous about making a good impression.”
“The debut of the VBI? There must be a lot of people hoping you’ll fail.”
I was getting tired of hearing that. “A few. I hear Marcel sounded credible to your behavioral scientists.”
He shook his head. “Not mine-the SQ’s. All very chummy.”
I looked at him sharply. “Meaning?” I asked, Kathy’s similar implication still fresh in my mind.
“Nothing,” Rousseau answered vaguely. “We have a file on Marcel Deschamps that goes back to when he took over-bribery, assault, intimidation, jury tampering, homicide-you name it. He’s been connected to all of it one way or another, although never close enough to put him in jail. And yet he lives here comfortably in a big house, expecting to die of old age. It makes you wonder how that came to be, assuming the local police were on their toes.”
“We have a lot of crooks living like that back home,” I said carefully. “Doesn’t necessarily mean the locals are on the take.”
Rousseau looked at me with feigned shock. “Did I say that?”
He laughed and walked away, leaving me with an unpleasant taste in my mouth. As he’d demonstrated before, he was the foreign element here-the federal outsider from the big city. But I couldn’t in all honesty entirely dismiss what he’d said. It had been known to happen.
The phone jarred me awake, filling me instantly with dread. I opened my eyes, focused on the motel room’s dusky ceiling, and hesitated answering, knowing that midnight calls never bore good news, and that for someone to reach me this far from home boded twice as ill.
“Hello?”
“You are Gunther, of the United States?” The voice was male, low, and barely spoke English.
“Yes.”
“You investigate the Deschamps?”
“Who wants to know?”
He ignored the question, as I thought he might. “Hell’s Angels did not kill Tessier.”
“Who did, then?”
“We meet.”
“What good would that do? I’m just an observer in this country. You need to talk to the police.”
He laughed scornfully. “Then I die. How you think Deschamps get rich in Sherbrooke without the police help?”
That was the third such statement I’d heard in two days. “What if I refuse to meet with you?”
“More people die. Tessier was number one. Now he gone, now the Deschamps bulldog is gone. People have protection no more. We want no more killing.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind here and now and get it over with?”
“I have proof. Otherwise, this is talk only.”