Kathy Reichs: Monday Mourning

Like Lake and Ng, the Bernardos filmed their little orgies. When the tapes finally surfaced, footage showed bride and groom as equal enthusiasts in the torture and murder. But Karla had already cut her deal.

I was moving on to the next article, when my phone rang again.

“They’re gone.” Ryan sounded like he was calling from Uranus.

“Who’s gone?”

“Anique Pomerleau and Tawny McGee.”

34

“HOW CAN THEY BE GONE?”

“When the day nurse checked, their beds were empty.”

“There was no guard?”

“We told Feldman security wasn’t an issue.”

“Had they been released?”

“No.”

“Were they alone?”

“No one saw them leave.”

“Had they had visitors?” My voice was too loud. “A family member?”

“We’ve yet to locate any of Pomerleau’s relatives. McGee’s sister flew east from Alberta last night. Sandra something. She and the mother are en route from Maniwaki now.”

Adrenaline surge.

“Menard!”

“I floated his description around the floor. No one spotted anyone resembling him.”

“Tawny McGee was hysterical yesterday. These geniuses are now suggesting she and Pomerleau just pulled on their panties and waltzed out?”

“The head nurse thinks they may have split during a shift change. Or during the night.”

“They didn’t have clothes!”

“Two coats and two pair of boots are missing from the staff lounge. Along with seventeen dollars from the coffee fund.”

“Where would two disoriented, homeless women go?”

“Calm down.”

I closed my eyes and willed the adrenaline back to its myriad sources.

“They may not have gone anywhere. General’s a warren of tunnels and crannies, the basement’s some kind of medieval maze. I’m at the hospital now. If they don’t turn up inside, we’ll canvass the neighborhood.”

“And then?”

“When the McGees arrive I’ll find out if Tawny knew anyone in Montreal.”

“Jesus Christ, Ryan. That poor woman loses her child, probably gives her up for dead, then finally gets word her daughter is alive. Now we have to tell her the kid’s missing again?”

“We’ll find her.” Ryan’s voice was tempered steel.

“I’ll call the women’s shelters,” I said.

“Worth a try.”

It was a dead end. No one had seen or admitted any woman fitting either of the descriptions I provided.

I went back to my research, but it was worse than before. I couldn’t sit. Couldn’t read. I was charged with enough energy to blast through granite.

These women had been kidnapped years ago, Angela Robinson in 1985, Anique Pomerleau in 1990, Tawny McGee in 1999. Their abductor was now dead.

So why this growing sense of dread?

Had we blown it? Was Catts the sole abductor? Had Stephen Menard been Neal Wesley Catts’s accomplice in his twisted little game, or vice versa? Was Menard still out there?

Were Pomerleau and McGee again in Menard’s hands? Had he forced them from the hospital? Had the women gone willingly, still under his spell?

Had Catts killed Menard? When? Why?

Catts should have had gunpowder on his hands. LaManche found none. Was it the other way around? Had Menard killed Catts?

I remembered McGee’s pleas to be taken from the hospital.

Had McGee persuaded Pomerleau to leave? Had the women simply fled? Had the unaccustomed environment frightened them into flight? But flight to where?

Why this intense feeling that McGee and Pomerleau were in danger? That I could rescue them if I was just clever enough to sort things out?

Why didn’t Ryan call?

I’d squeezed every detail I could from the bones. I’d gone over and over the MP lists. What else could I do?

The videos.

Shoving back from my desk, I hurried across the hall and unlocked the conference room. The tapes lay where Ryan and I had left them the previous afternoon. I hit PLAY and watched scene after scene of hooded young women with goth-white bodies.

By repeatedly rewinding and replaying in slow motion, I was able to distinguish what I thought were three victims. One woman had larger breasts. One had a mole to the left of her navel. One appeared taller in relation to background objects.

The setting never varied, though props came and went. A whip. An electric prod. A glass vial. Occasionally Catts appeared on camera brutalizing or menacing one victim or another.

I was repulsed and sickened. These girls should have been worrying about algebra, falling in love, picking out china. Not hanging by their wrists in a stench-filled basement. This was Canada, not sixteenth-century Transylvania.

Rarely had I felt such overpowering anger.

Be objective, Brennan. Look for associations. Trends.

I began again with the tape marked “1.” As patterns emerged, I made a list.

The women appeared in sequence. The taller of the three could be seen only on the first half of the first tape. The larger-breasted woman showed up in later scenes on that tape, and continued into the tape marked “2.” By tape “3” the larger-breasted woman had been replaced by the woman with the mole.

No scene included audio.

Each scene started and ended abruptly.

Some scenes were smooth, recorded with the camera in a fixed position. Others were jerky, recorded with the camera moving.

Suddenly it hit me.

Was Catts ever in the frame when the footage was jumpy? If so, who was filming?

I’d been viewing tapes for almost three hours when I spotted the scene I was looking for.

The camera cut on and swept the room with a bobbing motion.

A girl lay stretched on Catts’s table, wrists and ankles bound by leather restraints. Behind her someone had placed a mirror, rectangular, approximately twelve by twenty-four inches.

Catts was in the frame, back to the lens.

My scalp tingled.

Rocketing to my feet, I hit REWIND, then PLAY.

As the lens crossed a point in its arc, I could see a murky figure reflected in the glass.

Menard?

Reversing again, I inched the tape forward in slo-mo, froze the frame.

My hopes plummeted.

“Shit!”

Though grainy and partially eclipsed, the mirror image of the face squinting into the viewfinder across the room was recognizable.

Anique Pomerleau.

“Very effective, you sick bastard.” My voice rang bitter in the empty room. “Force one prisoner to film while you torture another.”

I tried watching more footage, but couldn’t sit still. Like a toddler on a Twinkie high, I kept bounding up, checking my office phone, scanning the corridor.

After twenty minutes I returned to my office, nearly nauseous with anger and anxiety.

I began an article on the Stockholm syndrome, but unbidden images sucked my focus from the page.

Anique Pomerleau scurrying past Neal Catts’s parlor. Tawny McGee begging to be taken from the hospital. Colleen Stan cowering in a coffin under a bed.

I thought about them, sealed in claustrophobic blackness, petrified, naked, alone. Cameron Hooker had hung and stretched Colleen Stan, whipped her, shocked her with electric wires until her skin blistered. Neal Catts had controlled his victims in identical ways, using sensory deprivation, terror, and pain to break them.

I tried to imagine the ordeal these women had endured. Had they lain in the dark listening to the sound of their own breathing? To the hammering of their own hearts? Had they known day from night? Had they felt terror at each rattling of the lock? Had they abandoned hope? Had memories of their former lives slipped from them with time, like fog slowly evaporating into morning air?

Something hardened inside me. I forced myself to concentrate.

As with the tapes, I began taking notes while reading.