Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  “There was one time he came back with a white couple, and I got mad and threw them out,” Tracey told them, adding she had seen the pictures of Tina in the news and was pretty sure she had never visited the house. Chantelle said she had met Tina with friends several times in late July. Once had been outside the Best Western Charterhouse hotel, when Tina had been really drunk and vomited on the pavement. Another time was in Portage Place. But she told the police she was pretty sure she had never seen Frenchie with Tina in the yard.

  When Stalker called O’Donovan to update him, the head of the Homicide Unit found Frenchie’s interest in fifteen-year-old Chantelle highly suspicious, signalling an unhealthy preoccupation with underage girls. He told his detectives it was urgent they find Sebastian’s full name.

  Following up on information given by Ida, Stalker and Riddell headed to a nearby scrapyard and gave the woman at the front desk a detailed description of the man they were looking for. She nodded her head in recognition.

  “He’s called Raymond Cormier,” she said, adding that people who worked there were well aware of his identity because he had stolen from them a few weeks before.

  Stalker relayed the name straight back to O’Donovan, who ran it through the police database. Seconds later, he was looking at a police headshot of Raymond Joseph Cormier. The photo showed a middle-aged man with messy, shoulder-length greying hair, a moustache, and a goatee. His head was slightly tilted to one side, his eyebrows raised as if caught by surprise, and his eyes dull and unfocused. O’Donovan guessed he had been high on drugs when the photo was taken.

  “That’s the man who ripped us off,” the woman at the desk said when Stalker showed her the mug shot on his phone.

  In the Public Safety Building, O’Donovan found himself exhaling a long sigh of relief.

  * * *

  —

  Raymond Joseph Cormier was born on June 2, 1962, and was of no fixed abode. O’Donovan read that he had been convicted and imprisoned multiple times, often for violent offences, including theft, robbery, breaking and entering, and assault with a weapon, along with numerous failures to comply with court orders, probations, and paroles. Cormier was not a native of Winnipeg. He had been born out east, in Moncton, New Brunswick, the youngest of thirteen children in a French-Canadian family. He had first come to the attention of the police as a teenager and had moved around the country, amassing ninety-two convictions in what had become a predictable pattern of offending and incarceration. You’re a man doing life on the instalment plan, thought the detective when he calculated that Cormier had totalled more than twenty years in jail.

  Cormier had been convicted in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and finally Alberta, where, a few years before, he had been found guilty of car-jacking and aggravated assault in Calgary. That had led to a spell in the federal Stony Mountain Institution, just outside Winnipeg, and then, in 2012, time in a halfway house located in the North End. From there, as far as O’Donovan could see, he had disappeared into the city until May that year, when he had been picked up for drug possession. He had been released on the condition that he stay out of trouble and turn up for his court appearance. But in early July he had broken that promise when he was found in possession of a vehicle with stolen plates. With warrants out for his arrest, he had disappeared.

  To make absolutely sure Raymond Cormier was the same man known as Frenchie or Sebastian, O’Donovan instructed Stalker and Riddell to return to 686 Alexander Avenue to show the occupants a photo lineup in which Cormier was included. When the detectives arrived, only Ida was there. She had no problem picking him out, writing “that’s Frenchie” on the back of the photo.

  Satisfied, Stalker and Riddell left the house and headed to another local scrapyard, where the employees were also able to verify that the man in the photo was the man they knew as Frenchie. Back at the Public Safety Building, O’Donovan asked the Surveillance Unit to stake out the backyard on Alexander Avenue for the next three days. If Cormier returned, their instructions were to follow him, note his habits and where he lived, but not to apprehend him. For the moment, O’Donovan wanted to watch and wait.

  But Cormier remained elusive. A week later, O’Donovan sent Constable Susan Roy-Hageman’s forensic team to Alexander to impound the tent to test it for evidence. He was sure Cormier would show up soon, and he wanted to know as much as he could before that happened.

  * * *

  —

  By now it was the end of August, and a sticky prairie heat was hanging over the city, burning up the sidewalks and showing no sign of lifting. Inside the Public Safety Building, O’Donovan’s team was struggling to stay focused in the sporadic bursts of cool air pumped out by the ailing air-conditioning system. As usual, the summer homicide rate was high, and they found themselves juggling several cases at once, painfully aware of how they seemed to be failing in the eyes of the press.

  In his early-morning briefings, O’Donovan attempted to boost morale. Drawing on his days long ago as a jockey, he told his detectives to view their work as a four-horse race. There were the two black men on Furby, who still needed to be located and put under surveillance. There was Raymond Cormier, who was also at large somewhere in the city. And there was the fourth possibility of a still-unknown suspect. O’Donovan stressed that there was much they didn’t yet know. Not one of these suspects was to be given prominence over the others until a clear front-runner emerged.

  As the hot days dragged on, calls continued to come in to the Tina Fontaine tip line. One witness reported having seen Tina asking to bum a cigarette on a street corner in the West End. Another said the teenager had been among some street girls who were given bad drugs. There was a report that Tina had been killed by a drug dealer, another that she had been raped and suffocated by two Filipinos and an Indigenous man, who had wrapped her in plastic and thrown her in the Red. O’Donovan was grateful he had held back information about the duvet cover, making it easier to sift the fantastical from the useful.

  There were other tips that seemed to give matching details. A witness called in to say she had overheard two black men talking about how they had killed a girl and needed to be careful not to say anything about it. An anonymous email told a similar story. But detectives couldn’t confirm either account. O’Donovan added them to his growing file on the Kenyan and Nigerian, judging it was time to send the forensic team to their rooming house to search for traces of Tina’s DNA.

  Then, suddenly, there was a breakthrough. In the very early days of the investigation, O’Donovan had given a junior constable the task of scrutinizing the security camera footage from the Mere Hotel. From everything he had learned about body float times and river currents, O’Donovan was convinced that Tina’s body had been dumped into the water at the dock and that some sort of transport would have been needed to bring her there. The discovery of Tina’s 911 phone call about Sebastian having stolen a truck “earlier today” had imbued this idea with extra significance.

  After weeks of spooling through the grainy pictures of cars entering and leaving the hotel parking lot, the constable announced he had found something of interest. The footage was of poor quality, but he pointed out what appeared to be a dark four-wheel-drive truck driving into the lot and parking. Its lights were turned off and the driver appeared to sit in the dark for some time. O’Donovan thought he could make out a faint light inside the truck, as if a flashlight was being waved around. For thirty minutes nothing happened, then there was movement around the front passenger side. After this, the truck’s headlights came on and the truck accelerated away at speed, ploughing straight over the sidewalk and the grass verge that separated the lot from the road. It seemed that whoever was driving wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  O’Donovan calculated the timing. The footage had been recorded in the early hours of August 10. Tina had been seen regularly around the North End and West End up to midday on Saturday, August 9. The fact that no one had seen her after that time, and that she was found w
earing the same clothes, indicated that Saturday was her last day alive. Being dumped in the river in the early hours of Sunday, August 10, would match with the pathologist’s and search-and-recovery team’s estimations of time of death.

  A few weeks earlier, after hearing Tina’s 911 call, O’Donovan had put out an alert for blue trucks stolen in the city. A landscape gardener had contacted police to say his dark blue 2008 Ford F-150 truck had been stolen on August 6 with gardening equipment in the back. Believing this was the truck stolen by Sebastian, O’Donovan had asked to be personally notified if it was located. He didn’t have to wait long. On September 17, the detective received a call from a patrol officer who said the stolen truck had been found abandoned near Portage Avenue. The driver’s window had been smashed in, and a man with blood on his hands was seen wandering near it. O’Donovan instructed his team to interview the man and ordered the truck to be towed to the Public Safety Building for forensic analysis. If it was the same one mentioned by Tina, he wanted to know if any trace of her could be found inside.

  Meanwhile, Raymond Cormier was still at large. O’Donovan, convinced he was still in Winnipeg, added Cormier’s name to a “Crime Stoppers’ Most Wanted” feature that the police sent regularly to the Winnipeg Sun newspaper. He was vague about why Cormier was wanted, mentioning only that the man had breached the conditions of his parole. Not wanting his suspect to go to ground, O’Donovan was careful not to connect Cormier’s name with Tina Fontaine. The detective knew the chances were slim that the notice would help, but he was willing to try anything.

  8.

  22 CARMEN

  As the warm weather continued into the end of September, the impromptu memorial to Tina that had sprung up at the Alexander Docks continued to grow in size. Well-wishers left flowers and soft toys and pebbles painted with the words love and strength. Tina’s death had triggered nationwide anger, amplifying the calls for a government inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women. Among those was the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which urged that Tina’s case not disappear into the statistics. “We have a duty to ensure she leaves a legacy, and that her legacy is to bring an end to the chronic cycle of violence that rips Aboriginal women and girls from the fabric of family and community at this alarming rate,” it said in a statement. “This is not acceptable in a country like Canada.”

  In the Homicide Unit office, O’Donovan checked the unit’s answering machine, realizing no one had done so for a while. He discovered that for several days a message had been sitting there from a guard at the Milner Ridge Correctional Centre, a prison to the northeast of the city. “There’s an inmate here who says he has details of a homicide. He’s requested to talk to an officer face to face,” the voice said.

  O’Donovan guessed at once that the call was about Tina Fontaine. His natural inclination was to be wary; in high-profile cases, it wasn’t unusual for inmates to come forward with “crucial” information. Mostly, these jailhouse informants wanted something in return: a reduction of their sentence, a cash reward, a special favour, or something that would look good on their record. And their testimony, sometimes convincing and sensational, had been known to contribute to miscarriages of justice.

  But the guard assured the unit that this prisoner wanted nothing more than to help and to get his information “off his chest.” So, shortly after 9 A.M. on October 1, O’Donovan assigned the team of Detective Sergeants Jeff Stalker and Myles Riddell to make the hour’s drive to speak to him in person.

  Ernest DeWolfe, or Ernie, was a tall, slim man with a face lined and hardened by alcohol and drugs. His deep, thick voice betrayed a lifelong habit of chain smoking. The forty-eight-year-old had been in Milner Ridge since August on a charge for theft. Over the years he had served time for a string of offences, including sexual assault, assault causing bodily harm, and armed robbery. When he wasn’t in prison, he made a living working on construction sites as a carpenter, bricklayer, or general labourer.

  Without knowing Raymond Cormier was already a suspect, DeWolfe told the detectives that his information was about Cormier. DeWolfe was also a native of New Brunswick, and it was this shared background that had brought the two convicts together when they were both serving time in Stony Mountain prison. They had struck up an uneasy friendship that had continued into their release to the same halfway house in Winnipeg. DeWolfe had once considered Cormier a potential business partner until Cormier had failed to pay back a loan and the pair had fallen out and drifted apart. They had reconnected earlier that summer, before Tina was killed.

  “What makes you think he’s connected to Tina’s murder?” Riddell asked, impatient to get to the point.

  “He told me he had sex with her,” DeWolfe replied.

  The detectives looked at each other.

  “And you think this was true?”

  DeWolfe explained that he had seen Cormier and Tina together several times at an address in the Winnipeg suburb of Glenelm where Cormier used to hang out with his friends Sarah Holland and Tyrell Morrison. He knew Cormier was sexually interested in Tina and found out that the two of them had got into a fight over a stolen truck. Shortly after that, he heard that Tina’s body had been pulled from the river. The coincidence of the events had worried him.

  “I’m not a shining example of a pillar of the community, but I do have morals,” he told the detectives. “I’ve never ratted on anyone before, but it’s been on my mind that I needed to tell someone.” Once again, he stressed he didn’t want anything in return.

  * * *

  —

  It was shortly after 1 P.M. when Riddell and Stalker radioed their boss to relay DeWolfe’s information. As O’Donovan listened, he felt his pulse begin to quicken. Everything DeWolfe said seemed to fit the investigation. Glenelm was the suburb Cody had visited with Tina and Cormier to meet the older couple. The stolen truck could be the same one taken from the gardener on August 6, the one Tina called police about later that evening. It might even be the truck seen in the grainy Mere Hotel security camera footage. And DeWolfe’s reference to the fight between Tina and Cormier matched the story told by the former bank robber Robert Sango about meeting a distraught-looking Tina at the bus stop.

  O’Donovan instructed the detectives to bring DeWolfe to Winnipeg, where he could personally monitor his statement as he gave it. Then he walked into the unit office and motioned to two of his most senior team members, Detective Sergeants Wade McDonald and Scott Taylor, and told them to head to the Glenelm address DeWolfe had given to pick up Sarah Holland and Tyrell Morrison.

  Twenty-two Carmen Avenue was exactly as Cody had described: the last in a row of four plain-looking townhouses, each with a slightly raised front and back door reached by sets of wooden steps. The detectives parked their unmarked SUV slightly out of sight in a laneway and walked up to the front door.

  A slim woman in her thirties answered and confirmed she was Sarah Holland. She looked tired and pale and was dressed in pyjamas even though it was now the afternoon. When the detectives informed her they were from the city’s Homicide Unit and were investigating the murder of Tina Fontaine, she nodded calmly. She didn’t seem surprised to see them.

  “I need a few minutes to get dressed,” she said, indicating that she would be happy to go to the station. The detectives asked if Tyrell Morrison was at home, but Holland told them he no longer lived there.

  McDonald and Taylor headed back to their car to wait for Holland to join them. A few minutes later, she emerged and mentioned that she had left a friend inside the house. It was a detail the detectives did not at first register as significant. But as Holland was getting into the car, they noticed a man opening the back door to put out bags of garbage. He looked straight at them, making eye contact for a moment, and as he did they both realized they were looking directly into the face of their chief suspect, Raymond Cormier.

  “Oh my God, that’s him!” shouted Taylor.

  It took Cormier a split second to register that the well-built men w
ith buzz cuts were police officers in an unmarked car. He hurried back inside the house, and the detectives radioed O’Donovan for instructions.

  “Bring him in,” came the order.

  McDonald ran to the back of the house and Taylor to the front, where he collided with Cormier, who was trying to escape on a bicycle. Cormier threw the bike straight at him and headed back into the house.

  “You won’t get me on any chickenshit charges,” he yelled as the detective struggled to follow him through the hallway.

  At the rear of the house, McDonald had reached the steps to the back door when it burst open and Cormier made a flying leap from the top. He began sprinting down an alley with McDonald and Taylor both in pursuit, yelling for him to stop. With the detectives closing in, Cormier lunged for the top of a six-foot-tall backyard fence. As he tried to pull himself over, McDonald made a grab for his ankle and the two men fell down hard, one on top of the other.

  “What are you arresting me for?” Cormier shouted when McDonald had pinned him to the ground.

  McDonald realized that he wasn’t sure, so Taylor radioed O’Donovan for clarity, asking whether they should reference Cormier’s outstanding warrants or Tina Fontaine.

  “Tell him you’re arresting him on the warrants, but caution him he may be charged with the murder of Tina Fontaine,” O’Donovan replied.

  Hearing this, Cormier shouted that he had important information about Tina and would tell them if they let him go. McDonald told him to save it. As Cormier lay in the dirt, McDonald read him his rights. Once Cormier had been subdued and handcuffed, the detectives put him in the back of their SUV, transferring Holland to a patrol car, which had arrived on the scene to help.