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.”