Glass Houses (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #13)(45)

“Who is Katie Evans?” Lacoste asked.

“She’s a visitor,” said Gamache. “From Montréal. An architect. Staying at the B&B with her husband and two friends.”

Lacoste took no notes. They’d get official statements later. Now she just listened. Very closely.

“And the mask and cloak she’s wearing? You called it a—”

“Cobrador,” said Gamache.

He and Beauvoir looked at each other. How to explain this?

“It’s Spanish. A debt collector of sorts,” said Gamache.

“We just found the body,” said Lacoste. “How do you know this?”

“Because the cobrador has been here for a while,” he said.

“A while? How long?”

“A few days.”

“You’re going to have to explain this to me,” said Lacoste. “This Katie Evans was a debt collector? And she wore a costume?”

Again, Gamache and Beauvoir looked at each other. This was going to be more difficult than they thought. Mostly because they themselves had no idea what was going on.

“No,” said Gamache. “She wasn’t a debt collector. She was an architect.”

“Then why is she in the costume?”

The men shook their heads.

Lacoste stared at them, momentarily at a loss. “Okay, let’s go back. Walk me through this.”

“The cobrador showed up the night after Halloween,” said Gamache. “At the annual costume party here in Three Pines. We didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. No one knew who he was, or what he was supposed to be. There was a general feeling of unease, but nothing more. Until the next morning, when we woke up to find him on the village green.”

“Passed out?” asked Lacoste. “Drunk?”

Gamache shook his head and reached into his pocket for his iPhone. As he brought it out, something fell to the linoleum floor.

The napkin from lunch that day.

He and Beauvoir both bent for it, Jean-Guy getting there first and handing it to Gamache. But not before noticing some words in the chief’s distinctive handwriting.

“Merci,” said Gamache, taking the napkin. He carefully refolded and replaced it in his pocket. Then he scrolled through his iPhone.

“I took this picture Saturday morning and sent it to Jean-Guy, asking him to see what he could find out.”

He showed it to Lacoste.

She was trained not to react to sights, sounds, words. To take things in, but give nothing away. Most people watching her would not see any noticeable change as she studied the image.

But Gamache did, as did Beauvoir, being so close to her.

The very, very slight widening of her eyes. The very, very slight compression of her lips.

For a highly trained homicide investigator, it was the equivalent of a yell.

She raised her eyes from the iPhone and looked from Gamache to Beauvoir and back again.

“It looks like Death,” she said, her voice neutral, almost matter-of-fact.

“Oui,” said Gamache. “That’s what we thought too.”

The figure in the photograph was powerful, threatening. But there was also something almost majestic about it. There was a calm, a certainty. An inevitability about it.

A stark contrast to the rumpled mound in the root cellar. One looked like Death. The other actually was.

“What did you do?” Lacoste asked.

Gamache shifted slightly on the hard chair. It was the first time he’d have to officially answer that question, though he suspected it was far from the final. And he could already sense the expectation that the Chief Superintendent of the S?reté should have done something. Anything. To prevent this.

“I spoke to him. Asked who he was and what he wanted. But he didn’t answer. He just continued standing there. Staring.”

“At what?”

“At the shops. I wasn’t sure which one.”

“And then what happened?”

“Nothing. It just stood there.”

“For two days,” said Beauvoir.

“Pardon?” asked Lacoste.

“It stood there for two days,” said Beauvoir.

“Dressed like that?”

“Well, not the whole time,” said Gamache. “I stayed up that first evening, to watch. Sometime in the night it disappeared, but it was too dark to see it go. I went to bed and in the morning it was back.”

Lacoste took a deep breath, then looked behind her at the misshapen lump on the floor of the root cellar, and the coroner kneeling beside it. Him. Her.

It looked pathetic now, drained of all life and any menace it once had. Like an animal curled in a corner to die.

But there was nothing natural about this ruined creature.

“You called it a cobrador,” she said. “I’ve never heard of it. Spanish, you say?” Gamache told her about the cobrador del frac. The Spanish debt collector, who followed and shamed people into paying their debts.

As Lacoste listened, her brows drew together in concern.

When he’d finished, she said, “So the cobrador was here to shame someone into paying a debt?”

“Not exactly,” said Gamache. “The modern cobrador does that. But what we had here was older. The ancestor. The original.”

“And what was that?”