Asylum Read Online Free PDF Page B

behind all his movements. “Okay. Do you really want to sit and read all about it, or shall I show you?”
    “Show me?”
    He nodded, standing up, already helping me out of my chair. “The director assigned me to you, but he doesn’t have to know that we didn’t spend the day poring over records. Let’s take a ride, Martine LeDuc,” he said easily. “Put the ladies in context.”
    “Okay,” I said, bemused, trailing after him. “It’s kind of you to take the time. You know I shouldn’t be doing this at all.” I grimaced. “I appear to be the only department head who doesn’t have what the mayor considers important things to do, hence my availability to be the messenger girl between him and the director.”
    “Never mind,” Julian said encouragingly. “All the better. You may see things we don’t. And I get to boss you around. I don’t get that very often in my job. It’s win-win, you ask me.”
    We went out to where his car, an Audi TT that he certainly had not bought on a policeman’s salary, was illegally parked in a resident-only space. Julian kept talking even as he slid behind the wheel and eased us out into Montréal’s moderately terrifying traffic. “So, Isabelle Hubert,” he said, maneuvering in front of a truck with millimeters to spare. I checked my seatbelt to make sure it wasn’t going to give out on me. “Victim number one. Pretty. Young—twenty-three. Blonde, but that wasn’t what nature had intended.” He glanced at me. “Prostitute, but not one of the girls working the corners down on Sainte-Catherine. She worked for an escort service. Higher class clients, lower risk environment.”
    “Not low enough,” I commented. I remembered what the papers had said when Isabelle Hubert’s body was found, also on a park bench; in her case, stretched out across it, lying down as though asleep. Everyone seemed to think that violence was an acceptable risk and a foregone conclusion for prostitutes, call girls and streetwalkers alike. There was almost an air of, well, what did she expect? What did she expect, indeed? To be allowed to live?
    Even Ivan had said so. Not one of our better moments together.
    “Yep, so you might think,” Julian replied now, noncommittal. We were driving north, into the Little Italy section of town. Julian pulled off Rue St.-Denis onto a side street and pointed to the third building, solidly built of gray stone, the trademark curving outdoor staircase—in this case painted a gay and charming purple—going up to the second floor where Isabelle Hubert had lived. “Nice place,” he said, ignoring the horns of motorists who were trying to squeeze by us on the narrow street. “A piano, though it’s hard to figure out how she got it in there. Copper cooking pots hanging from the ceiling. Lots of plants, lots of books, a cat.”
    “What happened to the cat?” I swear it felt like a logical question.
    Julian didn’t know. “Point is, she had a life. She worked evenings, and during the day she wrote poetry, she went for walks, she hung out at a little café back on St.-Denis. She was taking an art class, doing some genealogical research.”
    Julian was still looking at the shuttered windows, as if they might yet tell him something about their former occupant. “She saw a client at eight,” he said. “That’s what these girls call them, clients. We talked to the guy, he was one of her regulars, saw her every week. We looked at him hard as a suspect, at first, but it wasn’t him. He was more broken up than if it had been his wife. He left the apartment where they’d met at the same time Isabelle did, went and played racquetball with a regular partner, was still having an after-workout glass of red wine with the guy when they found her body. Hey, did you hear about that? They’re saying that’s good for you now, red wine after a workout.”
    I ignored him. I found my eyes drifting to the windows just as his had. She had written poetry. She had played the