by Louise Penny
She and Matheo had been interviewed, while Patrick had slept. They’d been at a loss what to say, so they’d said nothing.
“They’re going to find out eventually.” Lea nodded toward Patrick. “I thought for sure he was going to tell them when they broke the news.”
“I thought so too, but I think he was just too stunned. And then there was the Ativan. That was a good idea.”
“One pill,” she said.
“Of course. Who in their right mind would give him more?”
She could hear the threat in his voice. She wasn’t afraid of him. Not really. Not normally. But none of this was normal.
“So why did you?” he asked.
“I didn’t.”
“I’m not Gamache. I’m not the cops,” said Matheo. “You can’t lie to me. You know what I know. Or,” he leaned closer to her, “do you know more?”
“Don’t. You. Dare,” she whispered. More a hiss.
She was his size. And while she couldn’t take him physically, she could always take him intellectually. Not that Matheo was that dumb, but Lea was that smart. Clever. They all knew it. She knew it.
She had always managed to control him. Mostly, she knew, because unlike Matheo, she could control herself.
Though she felt that slipping now. It was all slipping away. It was as though they were caught in a mudslide, and going under.
They’d all lied to the police. They said they knew nothing when, in fact, they knew everything.
“We’re fucked,” said Matheo.
“Katie’s dead,” said Lea. “And you’re the one who’s fucked? Get your head out of your own ass. Stop thinking about yourself.”
“Oh, and you’re not?”
Lea held his eyes, trying not to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was right. Lea Roux had discovered something about herself that day.
When swept away by a mudslide, all she wanted to do was save herself.
God help me, she thought. She’d always hoped she’d be like the members of the band on the Titanic. Or a German hiding a Jew in the attic.
But now she knew better. When the iceberg struck, she’d toss children out of the lifeboat.
When the knock came, in the middle of the night, she’d point to the hidden doorway.
Yes, she thought. More than Katie had died that day. The cold carcass of the woman Lea thought she was, hoped she was, had also been discovered.
Still, maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe there was still a heartbeat.
She’d had some time now to think.
Matheo had been right about one thing. The first person in had the advantage.
She looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. Just after six. She could smell something delicious coming from the kitchen.
“I think I’ll go for a walk,” she said.
“It’s raining or sleeting or something out,” said Matheo. “Or were you planning a very short walk?”
He tilted his head toward the Gamache home, just across the road from the B&B.
Hearing his tone, she could almost taste the mud.
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Matheo. “And neither am I. We stick together.”
He studied his wife. But he was under no illusions. He’d always known, from the first time they’d met at the Université de Montréal.
She was effective. She was clever and clearheaded. And she was something else.
Lea Roux was ruthless.
But then, so was he. It’s what had gotten them to where they were.
CHAPTER 25
“Myrna just called,” said Reine-Marie. “She’s invited us over for drinks and information.”
“She has information?”
Armand was sitting on the sofa and looked at her over his reading glasses. He was surrounded by dossiers. Each file a précis of a department.
“Well, not exactly. She has the drinks, you have the information, mon beau.”
“Ahh,” he said, smiling.
“She seemed to think it was a fair trade, but I told her we couldn’t. Isabelle and Jean-Guy will be here at some point for dinner.”
Armand looked at his watch. It was past six, though with the sun setting earlier and earlier, it felt later. He’d changed into slacks and a shirt and sweater, and now he was sitting by the fire, making notes.
He took off his glasses and put his binder down.
The notes he was making weren’t about the case. Isabelle and her team were getting a handle on that. They didn’t need him.
His thoughts were about something else entirely.
The napkin sat rumpled on the sofa. It was from lunch earlier that day with Madeleine Toussaint, when they’d discussed the failure of the Sûreté, of all police forces, to control the drug trade. In fact, it seemed the more they tried to control it, the worse it got. Like ties that bound more tightly if you struggled.
But suppose …
He stared into the fire, mesmerized by its motion, almost liquid, certainly fluid. Letting his mind break free.
Suppose you stopped struggling? Suppose you just went with it. What would happen then?
He no longer saw the flames. At least, not those in the hearth.
Then he looked at the napkin again.
It was just too ridiculous. Impossible.
But they’d lost the war. He knew that. And yet, they went on fighting because to give up was even worse. Unthinkable.
But now, Chief Superintendent Gamache thought.
Suppose …
Suppose.
They did. Give up, that is.
He thought of Honoré. Just a few months old. If the cartels were this powerful now, what would it be like by the time he was thirteen? In the schoolyard. In the streets. Gamache would be over seventy by then, retired.
He thought about his granddaughters in Paris. Little Florence and Zora. Now in preschool and kindergarten.
Like some animation on the History Channel, he saw the map of Europe change color as the plague bled toward them. Encroached. Approached. Closing in on his granddaughters.
It was unstoppable. It crossed borders, it knew no boundaries. Not territorial, not of decency. Nothing would stop the opioids hitting the market.
Nothing.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
He was finally in a position to do something. He was the Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec. But there was nothing to be done. Everything had been tried. And everything had failed.
Except. He glanced once more into the fire.
Burn our ships.
Putting his glasses back on, he started to write again. He wrote, and wrote.
Ten minutes later, he looked up and saw Reine-Marie sitting beside him, her hand resting on the open book on her lap. But instead of reading, she was staring straight ahead. And he knew what she was thinking. What she was feeling. What she was seeing.
The dark thing, in the root cellar.
He took her hand. It was cold to the touch.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be working.”
“Of course you should. I’m all right.”
“Even F.I.N.E.?”
She laughed. “Especially that.”
Fucked-up. Insecure. Neurotic. Egotistical.
Their neighbor Ruth had named her latest book of verse I’m FINE. It had sold about fifty copies, mostly to friends who recognized the brilliance, and the truth.
Ruth was indeed FINE. And so were they.
“I’ll call Myrna,” he said, getting up to go to the phone in his study, “and see if the invitation is still open. We could both use that drink, and the company.”
“What about Jean-Guy and Isabelle?” she asked.
“We’ll leave them a note.”
Once in the study, Armand placed the napkin and the notebook in his desk drawer and locked it. Not against Reine-Marie or Jean-Guy, or Isabelle. But he was a cautious man, who had learned the hard way that the unexpected happened. And it would be a disaster if anyone who shouldn’t
saw what he’d written. Saw what he was thinking.
Before closing the drawer, he tapped the top of the notebook a couple of times. As though gently rousing something. Tapping a strange, possibly grotesque idea on the shoulder to see if it turned around. And if it did, what would it look like?
A monster? A savior? Both?
Then he closed and locked the drawer, and placed the call.
“All set,” said Armand, taking her coat off the pegs by the door.
The heavy mist had turned to drizzle, which had turned to sleet, and now was snow.
It was an ever-evolving world, thought Gamache. Adapt or die.
*
Jean-Guy threw himself back in the chair, took off his glasses, and stared at the screen.
After returning from Montréal, he told Lacoste about his interview with Katie’s sister, and his search of the home.
“Found nothing, but I did bring this back.”
He showed her the photo.
“This other guy’s Edouard?” said Lacoste. “The one who died?”
“Oui.”
He looked impossibly young. Blond. A huge smile and bright eyes. His slender, tanned arm was around Katie’s shoulders.
The others also smiled. Young. Powerful. Though none shone quite as brightly as Edouard.
“A shame,” said Lacoste quietly. Then paused for a moment, studying the picture more closely. “I wonder how Patrick felt.”
“What do you mean?”
“That Katie should keep this picture of them. It’s clearly from the time when she and Edouard were still close.”
That much was obvious. Even in the old photo the connection was clear.
“Well, Patrick won,” said Beauvoir. “Maybe this reminded him. Maybe he’s the one who kept it.”
“Maybe.”
They’d retreated to their desks in the Incident Room, where Beauvoir pounded another search into the keyboard.
Then he sat back and waited for the answer to appear.
Around him, other agents were tapping at keyboards, talking on phones.
Isabelle Lacoste was at her desk at the center, the hub, of the Incident Room, her feet up, legs crossed at the ankles, sucking on a pen and reading notes from the interrogations.
The agent had returned from Knowlton, reporting that it had been steak-frites night at the restaurant and the waitress was so overwhelmed she wouldn’t know if her own mother was there for dinner the night before, never mind Patrick and Katie.
There was no credit card receipt, so if they were there, they paid cash. Which was curious, thought Beauvoir. He couldn’t remember the last time he paid cash for a meal.
He turned back to his computer. Beauvoir knew he should have asked Lacoste’s permission before claiming one of the desks. It wasn’t, after all, his investigation. He had to get used to that fact. He was no longer second-in-command in the homicide division. Now he was the second-in-command in the whole Sûreté.
Jean-Guy had decided to take that as meaning while he belonged to no specific division, he actually belonged to all of them. It was, he was realistic enough to admit, a perception shared by almost no one else in the Sûreté. Including Gamache.
Still, until she kicked him out, he was staying. And helping. Whether Lacoste wanted it or not.
And so, he’d claimed this territory for himself and had settled in.
His laptop was plugged into the Internet. No Wi-Fi here. But a satellite dish had been put on the church steeple, and the signal boosted by the Sûreté technicians.
Beauvoir, no longer able to just sit and watch, threw his glasses on the desk, got up and began circling the room. Thinking, thinking.
As he paced, he placed one hand in the other, behind his back. And with each step, his head bobbed slightly. A walking meditation, though Jean-Guy Beauvoir would have recoiled at the description, no matter how apt.
There was a lot about the murder of Katie Evans that was bothersome. The cobrador. The motive. Where the killer had gone.
Had the cobrador done it, or was he another victim? Was the killer still in the village? Enjoying a beer or a hot chocolate by a cheerful fireplace. Finally warm. His job done.
Those were the big questions, but to get to the answers they had to first go through a pile of smaller questions.
Like what happened to the bat?
Jean-Guy still harbored the suspicion that Madame Gamache, in her understandable shock, had simply not seen it.
The root cellar was dark. And the discovery of a body would have blown everything else off the radar.
That seemed to him a much more plausible explanation than that the murder weapon had disappeared, then reappeared, after the body was found.
His rational mind, always in control, told him that was ridiculous.
But his gut, which was growing, and a matter of some distress for Jean-Guy, made him wonder.
In his experience, Reine-Marie Gamache, who had been a chief archivist for the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, missed almost nothing. She was calm. She was shrewd. And she was kind enough to keep most of what she noticed to herself.
His gut told him if there had been a bat in the root cellar, she’d have seen it.
Between his rational brain and his intuitive self, a lump was forming. In his throat.
He stopped his circuit and walked over to the root cellar. He stood at the crime scene tape and stared into the small, dark room.
Why hadn’t the murderer, if he took the bat, simply chopped it up and burned it? In the city, not so easy perhaps. But in the country? Everyone had a fireplace. Most had woodstoves that would reduce the murder weapon to ash in minutes.
Why return it?
“What’re you thinking about?”
Jean-Guy almost jumped out of his skin. “Holy shit, Isabelle.” He brought his hand to his chest and glared at her. “You almost killed me.”
“I’ve always told you,” she said, leaning closer so that no one else could hear, “that words are worse than bullets.”
Beauvoir, who had no intention of being killed by a word, however well aimed, glared at her.
“I asked Madame Evans’s sister about the cobrador. It was obviously a word she’d never heard before.”
“I think Matheo Bissonette’s in the middle of this. He’s the only one who came here knowing what a cobrador was. Without Bissonette, it would just be a silly man in an old Halloween costume. Darth Vadar on the village green.”
“But still,” said Beauvoir. “I don’t get it. What killer, outside of comic books, actually dresses up then walks around in public? Public,” he emphasized. “To draw attention to themselves. And then kills their victim?”
“But that’s what he did,” said Lacoste. “Unless the cobrador had nothing to do with the murder.”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose it was here to torment someone else? Its whole purpose was as a conscience, right? Not a killer. But someone took this as a chance to murder Katie Evans—”
“And blame it on the cobrador,” said Beauvoir. “But that would mean whoever was in the costume is also dead.”
“Dead, or frightened away,” said Lacoste. “Knowing he’d be blamed.”
“Or next. When do you expect the analysis of the costume?”
“I’ve put a priority on it, but it only arrived at the lab a couple hours ago.”
Beauvoir nodded. They’d asked for DNA swabs from everyone they interviewed, and no one had refused. The samples could tell them a lot. Or could tell them nothing. What he really wanted to know was who had been in the costume before it was placed on Madame Evans. Though that person might be long gone, from the village, and perhaps from this earth.
“I’ve been going back over the interviews the team conducted this afternoon,” said Lacoste. “I can’t see anything helpful. Most of the villagers didn’t know her, and those who did, like Lea Roux and Matheo Bissonette, couldn’t come up with anything she might have wanted hidden.”
&nb
sp; “They could be lying,” said Beauvoir.
“You think?” said Lacoste, with mock shock. “Her sister told you about an abortion, but I can’t see someone killing her over that. Can you?”
“There’re a lot of crazies,” said Beauvoir. “But no. So far we haven’t found anything she’d done in the past that might’ve attracted the cobrador.”
“So maybe he wasn’t here for her,” Lacoste repeated. “It’s possible he came for someone else. There’re two people new to the village. Anton Lebrun. He’s a dishwasher at the bistro. And Jacqueline Marcoux.”
“The baker,” said Beauvoir.
It did not surprise Isabelle that the man with the growing “intuition” would know the woman who supplied the éclairs.
“As we know, they worked together before coming here. For a private family.”
“So how did they go from that to a dishwasher and an assistant in a bakery? Were they fired?”
“The family moved,” said Lacoste, reviewing the notes. “What’s interesting is that both Anton and Jacqueline refused to answer questions about their former employer. Said they’d signed a confidentiality agreement and couldn’t. They seemed quite intimidated by their former boss. Afraid of lawsuits. I had to impress on them that a murder investigation takes priority over a confidentiality agreement. And that I wasn’t asking what the family ate, or who they slept with. I just needed their name, to confirm everything.”
“They were that reluctant?” asked Beauvoir. “Seems to go beyond worry to actual fear. Intimidation. Who was the family?”
Lacoste scrolled down the page. “Ruiz. His name is Antonio and she’s Maria Celeste.”
Beauvoir had grown very still. Like a hunter who’d heard the snap of a twig.
Antonio and Maria Celeste Ruiz.
“You say they moved,” said Beauvoir. “Where to?”
“They were transferred home. To Spain.”
He opened his mouth, slowly, and out came a “Huh.”
“Barcelona,” she said, watching his reaction.
“It could be a coincidence,” he said. “It must be. I can’t see how the two connect.”
But he continued to be still, and quiet. Letting the skittish thing come to him.
Spain. The birthplace of the cobrador. Where they were most plentiful. The top-hatted modern version. But lately, there had been more and more sightings of the original. The Conscience.