Rath nodded, feeling no need to tell Hubert that he, Rath, was technically a detective.
“Entrez. S’il vous plait,” Hubert said and powered down the hall away from Rath, Inspector Champine at his side.
Plaques of officers and Mounties in full dress decorated one wall. Another wall dedicated itself to photos of hot air balloons in flight. Hubert dropped his file on the table. “Lucille Forte,” he said and sucked air between the slight gap in his upper front teeth. “Quinze ans. Fifteen. A solid family. Stable house, father a sociology professor at McGill. Her mother is a manager at one of the more reputable diamond merchants in Montreal.”
“More reputable?” Rath said.
“Diamonds are dirty. Many connections to organized crime, heroine, trafficking. But the mother she is retail, not wholesale, where the dirt is. See. She probably thinks it’s just the same as working at IKEA. We now have Forte’s photo across the region. Asking for witnesses who see her last. That we know, she was not the kind to be in the area she was dumped. It is off a desolate road, Nord-est of here.”
“Dumped?” Rath said. “I thought she was hanged.” He caught Champine’s eye, who nodded for Hubert to continue.
“Oui,” Hubert said. “She was.”
“I was made to believe she was hanged in the woods.”
“Non,” Hubert said.
“Then our girls are not that similar,” Rath said, trying to conceal his anger.
“They are same,” Hubert said. “Hanged slowly. This is what counts. Tortured. With that snare. Your girl, same, this is what Gerard said. No sex assault. She did have sex recently. But not forced. We have taken DNA from semen inside her. But not forced. Just torture by the hanging. That is not common up here. To have girls tortured but the sex left alone? Is it common in Vermont?”
“Of course it’s not common,” Rath said. Hubert had a point. Indoors or outdoors, the snare was a lock for the same perp.
“Ours, maybe she is done inside out of it being convenient. Maybe the woods are convenient in Vermont,” Hubert said.
“We have a feather that shows she was tortured inside,” Champine said.
“Feather?” Rath said.
“Goose down. From a pillow. Or duvet. Bed covering,” Hubert clarified.
“Why not from a jacket? A sleeping bag?” Rath said. “Or a wild bird?”
“Our lab says non,” Hubert said, put off. “They will check all. They say now it is pillow or duvet. There is difference I am told. They will do more. Get exact. Brand. Manufacturer. Store sold. They are like magic these days. No one can hide. No one can get away with anything for long.”
“What else tells you she was killed indoors?” Rath asked.
“The side of body that was against the earth in the ditch is muddy and has debris of the woods, fields. But not her side that was up. She was shampooed, skin washed with a scented soap. We will find out about this soap and shampoo, too. We will. Our team. She had been dead for twelve hours but her body had not been exposed to the elements more than three or four hours before she was discovered. It did get cold that night and snow some. There was not enough snow on top of her yet. For one. And her skin did not show the signs of exposure. That was clear.”
“Who discovered her?” Rath said.
“Snowplow driver. Salting the road. This is another sign. He’d been through two hours earlier, and there was no sign of the salt from his previous trip being scattered on her as it would have been.”
“And you had two strangulations from the nineties you think are linked? Inspector Champine said you’d explain the link, even though the MO was different.”
“We know they are linked,” Hubert said.
“How?”
“Fingerprints.” Hubert smiled.
“You have fingerprints?” Rath said. Did these inspectors not believe in full disclosure up front? They seemed to enjoy teasing out critical information.
“Partials,” Hubert said. “Enough.”
“How many points matched?” Rath knew that with each passing day forensics techniques previously seen as infallible were being questioned. Bite marks in flesh, fingerprints, even DNA, or the processing of it, in some cases, were all being viewed as far from indisputable. Some techniques were no more reliable than eyewitness accounts, which had long been known as dubious. As with any science, forensics evolved, changed, learned from mistakes. Mistakes that put innocent people in jail and allowed the guilty to escape. Many scientists in other fields did not see forensic science as science at all.
“Je ne sais pas,” Hubert said. “We leave it to lab to tell us: match or non. They know.”
“How did you get fingerprints?”
“One from a broken piece of a victim’s eyeglasses. Valerie Lancaume. From nineteen ninety-one. The new one from Lucille Forte’s brass belt buckle. Same.”
Rath licked his dry lips. Fingerprints? This was a revelation.
“Do you get an ID match in a database?”
“Non. Just between the two.” Inspector Hubert said grimly. “If he was in database, we’d have arrest. Or know who we are looking for. Non?”
“I’d like the prints. Electronically.”
“Do you have prints for your hanged girl?”
“No. But we can run them against our own database. Maybe he has a record in the States.”
“Bon. Maybe we get him then.”
“I’d like nothing more,” Rath said. If it was Preacher, they had him.
“The border. It is nothing. It is easy to hide one side from the other. On purpose. With Lucille Forte there is no sign of struggle. She is at her after-school activities with friends, as normal the day she disappeared. No one sees her with anyone strange. She does not act odd or show worry. She seems her excited self. Excited for it almost being the weekend. She maybe was ‘selected’ only for how she looked. Like much girls. We do not know. But. She was hanged, slowly. Given air, then choked. Over and over. Gruesome. She is fifteen. Your girl, she is fifteen. Is she from what kind of family?”
“A good one,” Rath said.
“Two parents, you mean?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Rath said. He’d grown up in a house with both parents until he was ten, and his mother had finally put his father out for his infidelity. The house had been far more calm afterward. And, he hoped, he’d done a fair job raising Rachel in a stable and nurturing home, by himself, just the two of them. “But, yes, both parents. Present. Involved. No financial hardship. Successfully employed. Active in the community.”
“An only child?”
“She is,” Rath said.
“As ours. A good family, active in community. And an only child.”
Curious, Rath thought. Was someone purposely targeting only children, from good families? Was that a reason? “Your two girls from the nineties. They were strangled, but not hanged.”
“Oui,” Hubert said. “Not quite the same modus. But the fingerprints connect them, no doubt. Let us trade files, all info, oui?” Hubert said.
“Is your file in French?” Rath said, “because—”
“The original, oui. Mais, we have it translated just for you. Let us each dig into what the other has. See what is what. What is not what.” Hubert handed the files to Rath. “You brought your file, oui?”
Rath reached into his bag and brought out copies of the file on Jamie Drake, set them on the table. There were certain protocols that needed to be followed in an international exchange of information. Protocols that took time. Far too much time. Ignoring these protocols would not damage the case, but it would damage Rath’s detective career. Fortunately, he did not have or want one.
“Let us meet again or speak on the phone. If we feel we are closer,” Hubert said.
“Let’s hope we are,” Rath said.
As Rath waited behind a line of cars to cross back into the States his phone buzzed. Grout. Shit. He picked up. “You stood me up, you Sally,” Grout said.
“I’m in Quebec, working something
hard.”
“A pole dancer.”
“Tomorrow.” Rath was too tired to hear about Grout’s wanting back on the force. He wanted no part of it, really, getting between Test and Grout. But he could at least hear out a man he’d once mentored as a green patrol officer straight out of the academy.
“Tomorrow,” Grout said. “Eight? Gives me time to get in for nine. And don’t stand me up for a Frenchie stripper with bad teeth.”
55
At home, ready to collapse from the excruciating drive in the rain and fog, Rath spread the contents of the Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu police file out on his kitchen table.
Outside in the dark night, coyotes yowled.
Rath scoured Lucille Forte’s short file and biography. A decent student, the U.S. equivalent of a B- average. No siblings. Parents made comfortable money. A four-bedroom home at the end of a cul-de-sac. No friends or teachers witnessed or sensed anything amiss the day of her disappearance and death. She had gone to after-school tryouts until 4 p.m., then headed for the bus stop to catch a bus to bring her a few blocks from her home. A CCTV camera picked her image up when she got off the bus at her stop. It captured no one else. After that, she was out of CCTV range. She seemed to be a social, upbeat teen, active in sports. Friends said, in part: “She was her usual bubbly self at tryouts. She looked forward to the dance Friday, and more tryouts Saturday and Sunday.”
Rath made a note to find out what sports she played. Being November, it might be basketball or skiing. Perhaps a girls’ hockey team. Whatever it was, sports meant travel to other schools. Opportunity for predators.
He picked up the file photo of her. She was, or had been, a cute girl, in a plain way. Curly black hair, feathered with bangs that reminded Rath of the ’80s. Her skin pale, her smile gargantuan, an irrepressible shine to her brown eyes. The translator had neglected to change the metric system to the U.S. system and had the girl down as weighing 45 kilos and standing at 152 centimeters. Rath figured the conversion. The girl stood about five feet even and weighed a hair under a hundred pounds. Petite. Perhaps her sport was gymnastics, or figure skating. Canadians cherished their ice skating.
Rath returned to the same question. Why would a killer risk going over the border, ensuring that a vehicle’s make and license plate number were caught clearly on camera? Of course it was only a risk if the murders were put together. Those odds were slim. Perhaps Quebec provided new hunting grounds, close to home, but off the radar of law enforcement and media.
He could not get his head around it. He needed another perspective. Test’s. He’d put off looping her in on the Quebec lead long enough.
Rath phoned her work cell.
“Hey,” Test said upon answering.
“I have a lead, in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. There’s another—”
“Wait, what?”
“A Quebecois inspector approached me, so I ventured up to see if—”
“You went to Canada without saying a single word to me?”
“I wanted to see if anything was there before I wasted your time. They have a murdered girl. Hanged. Tortured. The MO is exact except their girl was killed indoors.”
“What’s her name?”
“Lucille Forte. I wonder if she knew our girl down here, somehow. But I can’t figure how.”
“Social media. Facebook. Instagram. Mutual friends.”
Rath knew as much about social media as he did about needlepoint.
“The Quebecois girl. She’s into sports. Maybe our hanged girl was too, as well as acting. Look into it. Quebec has prints from her murder and from a victim from the nineties. They match. No match to a database though.”
“There are other victims? From the nineties? Are we talking the CRVK? How the hell am I just hearing this?”
“Because I just got back from a long, long day and was processing before bringing you in on it tomorrow. Saint-Jean sent the prints electronically, and I had Larkin log them into IAFIS to see if we get a hit for priors down here. Should hear back soon.”
“Both sides of the border,” Test said. “Nearly twenty years apart.”
“Check social media for Lucille Forte. See if there is any link, however slight, to our girl, or to Vermont.” Rath’s phone buzzed. “That’s Saint-Jean. I’ll call you back.” He killed the call with Test and took the call from Inspector Hubert.
“Bonjour,” Rath said, feeling foolish for using one of about nine French words he knew offhand.
“Hello,” the inspector said. “I am calling to see if you have run our prints in your FBI’s fingerprint system.” He sounded anxious.
“I should know any time. I haven’t gotten into the files as deep as I want yet. I have a question. What kind of sports was Forte into?”
“Sports? Non. She does not participate into the sports.”
“Her file says she was at tryouts, practice.”
Rath heard a shuffling of papers. “Mais non. Tryouts. This means for us, uh, rehearsal. For a play. She was in the plays. Very good at it. A very good young actress.”
“I need to make a call.” Rath hung up and phoned Test.
“She was an actress. Lucille Forte.”
“That’s not coincidence. Not a third girl. Maybe there’s a production they were all in, or an international program for theater, like with sports, the Burlington International Games. Something to bring kids from Canada and the States together. I’ll ask the Drakes.”
“The acting ties them together. But how does Preacher tie in? How does he know Drake was hanged? And the time? He had to have something to do with it. Except how would he get into Canada as a felon?”
“The state police are scouring Jamie Drake’s computer and phone. I’ll get a full report on her texts and e-mails, social media. If Forte is in there, I’ll find out.”
“If you still have those lists from the Double Black Diamond Resort, sign-ups for the acting auditions, look into them, I was talking to Grout and—”
“Grout? Why?”
“I was telling him your theory about Land and Drake and Wilks and the acting connection. Grout reminded me of the list of names for wannabe actors who attended the auditions at the resort.”
“You shouldn’t be talking to a civilian about open murder cases.”
“He’s hardly a civilian. And we talk to civilians all the time.”
“Not about tenuous links or information not made public.”
Rath wasn’t going to debate how he got information. “It’s your lead, the acting angle. Grout gave it merit.”
“It had merit before.”
“It gives you something concrete to search,” Rath said. “Check it.”
“Soon as this call ends,” Test said and ended it.
56
Test dug the Mandy Wilks file from her backpack, set it on the kitchen island. She respected Rath, even liked him personally, to a degree, but to have to report to him and have him conferring with Grout behind her back, it was hard to stomach. She didn’t appreciate Grout nosing in her case. He’d chosen to be a mall cop, let him be a mall cop. She especially didn’t need her old superior getting the idea he could strut back into his old post as if his resigning were a temporary distraction.
As a superior, Grout had been dismissive and haranguing, not respectful of her work. Personal and philosophical differences were one thing. Test did not have to be chummy and have barbecues with other cops’ families to work well together; but there did need to be respect for the work.
If Grout ever cajoled Barrons into rehiring him, Test did not know what she’d do. She was not a quitter, but she would not brook such disrespect.
Test opened the file.
From the living room, Elizabeth shrieked, “Get up off me!”
“Then tell me where you hid my car!” George shouted.
“You two stop it in there,” Sonja said, wondering where Claude had gone off to in the house that he wasn’t hearing the kids. She needed him to referee so she could work.
“Then te
ll her to stop hiding my cars!” George shouted.
“Don’t shout at me,” Test said.
“He has a hundred cars!” Elizabeth shrieked. “I only took one.”
“And quit shrieking,” Test said.
“She took my favorite!” George shouted.
Of course Elizabeth took his favorite. It was his favorite because she took it. If she’d taken a different one, that one would have been George’s favorite. It never ended.
“Where’s your father?” Test said.
“I don’t know, upstairs,” Elizabeth said.
“You two need to go upstairs in five and tell your father to start your bath,” Test said, returning to her work.
At the back of the file, she discovered the list of attendees for Keep at It Casting’s auditions held at the Double Black Diamond.
There were eleven sign-up sheets. Forty names per sheet. Nearly 450 names. No, twice that. The sheets were double sided.
Test took an apple from the bowl on the island and took a bite. It was one of the last apples from those she and the family had picked in September. It had gone soft and mealy. She was tempted to toss it, but was too hungry.
“Ow!” Elizabeth shrieked.
Jesus, Test thought. How was she supposed to get any work done? Where was Claude? If he couldn’t help out when she needed him to, so she could find a balance, she’d have to take all her work to the station.
“Tell me where it is!” George shouted.
“Enough! There is no shouting in this house!” Test shouted, cringing as she said it.
“You just shouted!” Elizabeth shouted.
“I’m allowed, believe me,” Test said.
“What’s going on in here?” Claude said.
“Where’ve you been?” Test said.
“Upstairs, in the bathroom.”
“Didn’t you hear them?”
“Of course I heard. It wasn’t going to do any good to shout from upstairs when I couldn’t back it up.” Claude pointed at the kids. “Upstairs, both of you. Let’s go. Bath time.”
“But she hid my car,” George said.
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