Max - Bey Deckard Page 0,51

time.”

“Look. I want to believe you,” said Frank Greene, his appointed lawyer. “But this evidence is… Well, it’s a lot. I’m only trying to figure out the best approach to this case.” Frank sat back and folded his fingers over his belly. He reminded Crane a bit of the actor Bob Hoskins, but with a thick brown mustache—funny, he and Max had just watched Brazil together a few weeks back.

Maybe this really is all a dream. Maybe someone will come through the door and say there’s been a mistake and all I need to do is submit a 27B-6 and all this will go away.

If only.

Over the past few days, all the details of his crimes had been put in order, painting him as a stalker, sexual predator, kidnapper, rapist, and murderer. According to the authorities, after meeting with Édouard Duvernay at the clinic for the first time, Crane had started to stalk him. It had eventually escalated to kidnapping the same day that Guillaume Bertrand had gone missing. They believed Bertrand had witnessed something and Crane had killed him to cover it up. Then Crane buried the body under the dirt floor of a small room off the parking garage of the waterfront condo building, a part of the structure that was still largely unfinished. It was in this room that Crane had kept Duvernay imprisoned, subjecting him daily to all sorts of depraved sexual torture, from August thirteenth until Duvernay had managed to escape in the early hours of November fourteenth. A woman coming home had found him cowering behind a car in the parking garage. They had arrested Crane less than an hour later.

The evidence backing all these claims was extensive… But it was all fabricated. There had to be a way of proving that Max was behind it.

“Listen, Dr. Crane… Dennis, I don’t know what to say. We could try for a plea of insanity, but…” Frank shook his head wearily. “I don’t know. I could talk to prosecution and see if I can get a reduced sentence but… Christ, with Marc Ouimet bankrolling. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“It’s all fake. I’m telling you it’s fake.”

“So you keep saying, but what about your phone records? There are over a hundred messages between you and Duvernay.” He picked up a sheet and read out loud. “Crane—I think you and I have something special. Duvernay—Dr. Crane, please stop messaging me. Crane—Come back for one more session so we can at least say goodbye in person. Then he blocked you. He disappeared the next day.”

“I never sent any of those messages. He installed some kind of Talis backdoor code on my phone. He could have planted them.”

“But there are no records of these other, er… consensual messages between you and the victim you keep mentioning. Even if someone really did install this ‘backdoor Talis code’, it says here that you changed your phone provider from Roget Mobility to Talis Wireless on August twentieth. Explain to me why all the incriminating text messages date from when you were with Roget Mobility.”

“I didn’t change my provider. He did,” Crane said through clenched teeth. “But Max… Édouard unlocked my phone before that. Our first weekend together. He used my phone to text my wife. He could have done something then. Or maybe he has friends at Roget too. They could have put those messages on my phone. And maybe he had to switch me to Talis so he could put those… videos on it.”

Crane’s phone had been found full of pictures and videos of Max. The room off the parking garage had been painted and done up to look like a child’s room, and when Max wasn’t completely naked in the images, he was wearing pyjamas covered in teddy bears or balloons. Crane had been sick again watching a few of them. In the videos, Max was in tears, bruised and battered, begging to be released. The voice behind the camera, instructing Max to strip and use objects to penetrate himself, was unmistakably Crane’s.

“How do you explain your voice on the videos, then?”

“You’re supposed to be defending me.” Crane cradled his face in his hands, thoroughly exhausted by the questions. They’d been through this before at least twice.

“I’m supposed to be getting you ready for all the questions that Ouimet’s team of lawyers are going to put to you. So, explain your voice on the recordings.”

“He could have been recording me in the condo… Where we lived together and had