Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  Candace had also been preparing her approach, in particular her appearance. She wanted to look convincing as a woman without much money but still appear attractive to Cormier, who she had been told was a ladies’ man. It was almost summer and already warm, so she had assembled a wardrobe of leggings, flip-flops, and tight vest tops that would show cleavage but not reveal the mic taped to the centre of her bra. Her eyes would be lined with heavy black eyeliner, but she would leave her hair curly and unbrushed and was letting its dark roots grow out. The only problem with this look was that it was quite similar to her real appearance, and she worried that Cormier might chance on her travelling to or from her home, where she lived with her husband and children. So she had come up with another disguise to wear into work: a dark wig and a false pregnant belly, which was so convincing that it fooled her co-workers.

  For a final touch of authenticity, Candace asked Mo to pose for a selfie with her outside. The picture showed Mo wearing a red T-shirt and mirrored sunglasses, his hair slicked back and his arm around Candace, also in dark glasses. Candace printed it out and put it into a cheap photo frame decorated with the words “A friend is one of life’s greatest gifts,” which she gave to Mo to display in his apartment.

  * * *

  —

  At 7:30 A.M. on Saturday, June 13, Cormier was released from Milner Ridge Correctional Centre. A surveillance unit followed the correctional van that took him from the prison to a bus station on the eastern fringe of the city. From here, they followed him on and off several buses until he reached McPhillips Street, at the edge of the North End. Officers observed Cormier rifling through dumpsters and filling up a white plastic grocery bag with the items he found. Later, they saw him meet up with friends, one of whom passed him a pair of wire cutters and pliers. They watched as Cormier used these to strip down some wires he had picked up. Then he made calls on a pay phone. To O’Donovan’s relief, it did not look like he was making plans to leave the city.

  On Monday morning, Cormier showed up early for his meeting at the employment assistance office. When his case worker told him he might be eligible for free accommodation, Cormier seemed excited. He was in a chatty mood, telling the worker that he had thought about leaving Winnipeg but had decided to stay to clear his name, because the police believed he was the person who had killed Tina Fontaine. He said he might have been the last person to see her alive.

  On Tuesday morning, at 7:30 A.M., Detective Sergeant Doug Bailey received a call from Cormier on his cell phone.

  “I want to t-t-t-talk about Tina,” Cormier said, stuttering badly.

  He told Bailey that he hadn’t slept since his release on Saturday morning, because he had nowhere to go.

  “I went down to Alexander Docks. I thought it was closed, but I got in,” Cormier said. “I sat by Tina’s memorial.” He was referring to the collection of painted rocks, flowers, and soft toys that had been placed there.

  Cormier told Bailey that he couldn’t leave Winnipeg until he cleared his name and that he would be asking other street people to help find out information on Tina. He said he wanted to meet to talk about the case and that he was willing to undergo hypnosis to see if he could remember any new details about the Robert Plant lookalike he’d seen on the other side of the street when he’d argued with Tina.

  O’Donovan listened to Bailey’s account of the conversation with interest, thinking back to the beginning of the investigation the previous August, when he had scoured the video footage from Tina’s vigil to look for anyone acting suspiciously. Here was Cormier admitting that he spent time at Tina’s memorial, offering to insert himself into the police investigation, and highlighting a different suspect who looked rather like himself. O’Donovan knew these were all details a criminal profiler would focus on, and they all made Cormier look guilty.

  Later that day, Cormier obtained the keys to his new apartment on Logan Avenue. Cormier called Bailey again the next morning, this time to update him with his new address. Once more, he wanted to talk about the Tina Fontaine investigation, asking if any arrests had been made. He said he would be going to the library to research any unsolved deaths in Winnipeg over the last fifteen years and suggested that the police use him as bait for the real killer. And to Bailey’s surprise, he suggested they bug his apartment.

  O’Donovan called a briefing. “I think we can all agree he’s obsessed with Tina,” he told his team.

  * * *

  —

  Now that they had succeeded in settling Cormier into 400 Logan, the detective was impatient to move forward with the next stage of the plan. It was time for Mo to be introduced.

  The following day at Logan, Cormier found himself riding the elevator with a man who introduced himself as a tenant.

  “Hi, I’m Mohammad, but call me Mo,” the man said, extending his hand to shake Cormier’s.

  “I’m Sebastian,” came the reply.

  Cormier said he’d just moved in, and the two men chatted briefly about what it was like to live in the apartment block before going their separate ways. Listening to Mo’s recording in the monitoring room, O’Donovan concluded that the first encounter had been a success.

  In Cormier’s apartment, the installed mics were beginning to pick up conversations between him and his guests, friends he’d met on the streets or in the hotels and crack houses that dominated the landscape of the North End. The monitoring staff alerted O’Donovan to a suspicious exchange between Cormier and an unknown female that had occurred a few days after he’d bumped into Mo. From the sound of her voice, the female was young. The detective put on headphones to listen to the recording. He heard the girl speak first.

  “Swear to me that…you’ve never done it before. Have you ever hit a woman before…ever?” she asked.

  “I’ve done it before, but it was a drunken…blackout rage,” Cormier replied, before admitting that he had hit a woman twice.

  “You felt remorse?” asked the girl.

  “Never do it again,” he replied.

  The conversation drifted a little, then Cormier’s voice became serious. “There’s something you need to know about me,” he said, and he described how he had been investigated for the Tina Fontaine murder.

  “Okay,” said the girl, slowly and deliberately, taking in the seriousness of the statement. “Why do they think it was you?”

  Cormier mumbled that the cops hadn’t come up with his name out of the blue and there must be something going on. He said he had been taking too many drugs at the time.

  “I just wanted to…tell you this because it’s…it’s…”—he paused and cleared his throat—“it’s something difficult.”

  Perhaps in sympathy, the girl began to tell her own story of how one night she had taken too many drugs herself and had been grabbed by a group of men on the street. They had dragged her into a nearby housing complex.

  “All I remember is being underneath the stairwell and having my underwear…being ripped off…and…me…making it home,” she said. “The cops…they didn’t take my fricking rape report, they didn’t take anything. They made me feel like I was the one who did something wrong. Just because I was a fuckin’ crackhead.” Her voice had become tense and angry.

  Listening, O’Donovan shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “And that’s part of the problem with the city police,” agreed Cormier.

  After a pause, the conversation returned to Tina. Cormier described how he first met the teenager as he was cycling down a street in the middle of the night with a car muffler balanced on his shoulder.

  “I always said that ‘all the gold in Babylon is mine, and I want it all.’ I remember saying that to her, and she misunderstood. She flashed me her tits, eh. And whoa…nice little titties, eh?”

  Cormier said he could see that Tina was young but wasn’t sure how young.

  “She’s gonna tell you of course she’s old enough,” said the girl.

  “Exactly, and that’s what happened, eh. And, uh, uh, four, five
times, five, six times I…” Cormier’s voice trailed away, and the rest of the sentence was inaudible.

  O’Donovan wondered if Cormier was referring to how many times he’d had sex with the teenager, but the meaning wasn’t clear.

  Cormier continued to talk, describing the night Tina had arrived at 22 Carmen after Cody had left for his reserve. He said she had been annoyed because she couldn’t manipulate him anymore.

  “What are you feeling guilty about?” his young friend asked when he had finished his story.

  “My last words to her were ‘Go jump off a bridge,’ ” said Cormier.

  The conversation ended with Cormier’s friend telling him he should ask God for forgiveness, and Cormier saying he was determined to find out who had killed Tina. As the recording clicked off O’Donovan remained in his chair, trying to grasp its significance. He agreed with the girl that Cormier sounded guilty. But what, exactly, was he guilty of?

  Meanwhile, Mo’s relationship with Cormier was developing. The men had crossed paths several times and had smoked cigarettes together outside by the bins. Mo told Cormier that he ran a small removal company with his girlfriend and casually asked if Cormier would help him move boxes from his van to his apartment. Cormier agreed, and Mo gave him ten dollars for his trouble.

  Small as the amount was, O’Donovan felt Cormier was probably grateful for the easy cash. From the surveillance reports, he could see that Cormier had gone back to supporting himself by scavenging through dumpsters, collecting cans, and stealing. He would spend all night out, searching for scrap and breaking into poorly secured basements with his screwdriver, his “keys to the city.” His apartment was beginning to fill up with the bicycles he and his crew had lifted around town. Cormier would dismantle them, swapping one part with another so their owners wouldn’t recognize them back on the streets. His place was a hive of activity, with people coming and going at all hours and a growing collection of bicycle parts and wires scattered over the floor.

  Cormier’s energy came from crystal meth, or “jib,” which, at ten dollars a hit, was easy to score and fast becoming the drug of choice in the city. He confided to Mo how he had been introduced to the drug while staying in Winnipeg’s Salvation Army hostel, as he wandered outside one morning in the early hours. He had been surprised to see two men injecting it. Cormier hadn’t realized you could do that, and asked to try it himself. As soon as the needle was in his arm, he had felt the rush.

  But now he had quit injecting. He still smoked meth, and it kept him wide awake, paranoid, and constantly on the move. If he wasn’t out scavenging, he would throw his energy into cleaning: bleaching the bathroom or mopping the hallway. He confided that meth intensified his sexual pleasure, and he liked to share his drugs with teenage Indigenous girls from the streets, who he would invite over to hang out on his sofa. Often, in exchange for a fix, they’d have sex with him. When his friends stayed too long, Cormier would lose his temper and scream at them to get out. He would get violent, scattering their belongings out of windows and slamming the door behind them. But they seemed to be used to his mood swings and would never go far, usually drifting back to the apartment within a matter of hours.

  A few days after Cormier first helped him, Mo approached him with another job. He said he was expecting a load of boxes from Calgary and offered to pay Cormier a hundred dollars to help move them. Cormier said he would and, as an aside, told Mo his real name.

  “What happened to Sebastian?” Mo joked.

  “No, it’s Raymond,” Cormier said, his voice sounding serious.

  Later, over beers and cigarettes in Mo’s apartment, Cormier asked Mo about his background. He seemed fascinated to find out that Mohammad was a Shiite Muslim from Iran who had fled the country during the 1979 revolution. Cormier wanted to talk about religion. He had read the Quran and the Bible, which he was fond of quoting. Although he had left school without much of an education, he had used his time in prison to read and was particularly fond of the theological works of the English writer C.S. Lewis. Mo was surprised. He found Cormier to be the most articulate, hard-working, and well-read criminal he had ever worked with.

  Soon, the monitoring team brought O’Donovan’s attention to another conversation recorded in the apartment in which Cormier was talking to a young woman. He had told her he was being investigated for a murder.

  “You would never do something like that, never, ever, ever,” the girl said, her voice confident and trusting.

  “Fifteen-year-old girl. Fuck. I drew the line and that’s why she got killed,” Cormier replied. “She got killed because we found out…I found out she was fifteen years old,” he continued. “And when she found out I knew that, then the jig’s up, eh? She don’t have her surrogate dad anymore.”

  The girl guessed he was talking about Tina Fontaine.

  “She was fifteen years old. I didn’t know that. When I found out, that was it. Said I’m not gonna bang her no more. I don’t want nothing to do with you that way,” Cormier said.

  To O’Donovan, this was a definite confession that Cormier had had a sexual relationship with Tina. Although Ernest DeWolfe had told the police that Cormier said he’d slept with Tina, this was the first time O’Donovan heard Cormier appear to say it himself. After months of dedicated labour and costly financial investment, the detective felt they were finally making progress. But the statement, if true, only confirmed Cormier’s sexual relationship with Tina and was far from evidence of guilt in her murder.

  At the apartment building, Mo dropped in to visit Cormier.

  “Whoa, buddy, what’s all this you’ve got here?” he asked when he saw the piles of wires and scrap metal littered on the floor.

  “I can make a fortune from this,” Cormier said, waving his arms over the dirty mess, his words jumbling together with excitement. He had plans to sell the scrap and wanted to know if Mo would go into business with him. But, he warned his new friend, he was a suspect in the Tina Fontaine investigation and Mo might want to consider what that meant before becoming too involved. Mo was ready for the comment having discussed how he would react with the Project Styx team. His strategy was to remain non-judgmental and allow Cormier to talk without leading him on. He shrugged as if to say he didn’t care. There might be a point when he would ask Cormier directly about Tina, but, wary of how volatile Cormier could be, Mo knew he would have to choose that moment wisely.

  That same day, Cormier attended an appointment at the city employment assistance office in which he appeared paranoid and said he wanted to talk about Tina. He said he was being investigated for her murder and suspected the police had put undercover officers into the employment assistance office to spy on him. He was emotional, at once crying about Tina, his own children whom he hadn’t seen since birth, and the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child when he was sent to reform school.

  After the meeting was over, the intake officer contacted the Styx team to say she’d gotten the impression that Cormier had been trying to deflect suspicion for Tina’s killing away from himself. He had made a series of odd comments. In particular, he said he had only recently found out that the police had chanced on Tina’s body when they were searching for Faron Hall, the homeless hero. In Cormier’s mind, this was a game changer.

  Why do you care how Tina was found? wondered O’Donovan.

  * * *

  —

  Project Styx had been underway for more than a month, and O’Donovan, keen to assess its progress, gathered his team to review what they had achieved. Public interest in Tina’s case had not diminished, but the pressure the team was working under was largely self-imposed. They were constantly second-guessing their strategies. Were they setting up the right scenarios? Should they be more daring? For the moment, everyone seemed satisfied with how organically Mo’s connection with Cormier was growing. The team discussed deepening it by putting Mo and Cormier into business together. They also felt it was time to introduce Candace, who had been mentioned frequently but had not ye
t appeared in person. The original idea had been to use Candace to gauge how Cormier behaved around women, but as most of Cormier’s girlfriends appeared to be teenagers, O’Donovan suspected he might find Candace too old to relate to as a potential sexual partner. So he discussed introducing another, younger undercover female officer who could act as a second girlfriend to Mo and give him the excuse to bring up the subject of sex with teenagers. Mo was instructed to introduce this idea into his conversations.

  A day later, Cormier made another unscheduled visit to the employment assistance office.

  “You need to move me,” he told the same intake officer he had spoken to before. “There are too many dealers and users in this place.” He described how it was hard for him to stay away from drugs at 400 Logan if they were around.

  The officer said she would look into it but instead informed the Homicide Unit. Before doing anything, O’Donovan checked with the monitoring team to find out if Cormier had mentioned wanting to move in any of his conversations. They said no, but he did seem to be having trouble with people staying over who did not respect his belongings. O’Donovan thought it might be a good idea to put some distance between Cormier and Mo. Cormier increasingly wanted to spend time with his new friend, and the Styx team was finding it difficult to come up with excuses as to why Mo was so frequently absent. But Manitoba Housing told the detective no other suitable accommodation could be offered to house Cormier at that moment.

  A few days later, Mo invited Cormier over for a beer. His guest arrived looking flustered but pleased with himself, saying his own place was a mess because he’d had a girl over the previous night. She was Indigenous, named Danielle, and he really liked her, but at twenty-four, she was half his age. Mo laughed at him for thinking that was a problem.

  Mo brought Cormier into the living room, where his own girlfriend, Candace, was watching TV.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Cormier when Candace looked up from the sofa. He bowed his head and shook her fingers daintily in an exaggerated imitation of an old-fashioned gentleman. When she smiled back, he offered to sell her a stolen bike and promised to give her an excellent deal.