Glass Houses (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #13)(63)

And the Conscience was no different. It joined forces with the person’s own imagination, and together they brewed dread. And if they were very successful, they took it one notch up, to terror.

“It wasn’t enough to kill her,” Ruth said quietly. “He had to torment her first. Let her know he knew. That he’d come for her.”

“And she couldn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t ask for help,” said Lacoste. “If what you say is true, this is a secret she’d kept for a very long time.”

“One that had literally come back to haunt her,” said Ruth.

Gamache listened and realized, with slight amusement, that Lacoste was treating Ruth as she would a colleague. As though the demented old poet was sitting in for Beauvoir.

Jean-Guy and Ruth were much alike actually, though he’d never, ever tell his son-in-law that he resembled a drunken old woman.

Despite the apparent antagonism, there was understanding there. Affection, and perhaps even love. Certainly an odd and old kinship neither could admit to, or escape.

Gamache wondered if Ruth and Jean-Guy had also been connected, through the ages, over lifetimes. As mother and son. Father and daughter.

Ducks in the same formation.

Isabelle Lacoste rose, as did Gamache, and thanked Ruth, who looked put out that she was being kicked out. Clutching Rosa to her pilled sweater, she marched across the church basement, the agents, rookies and veterans alike scattering before her.

Lacoste and Gamache sat back down. The young agent was dispatched to get the next person on the list while the senior officers considered.

“If the cobrador was here for her, why didn’t Madame Evans just leave?” asked Lacoste.

“Maybe she thought that would bring attention to herself,” said Gamache. “And maybe she knew that if the Conscience could find her here, he’d find her anywhere.”

“How did he find her here?”

“He must’ve followed her.”

“That must be it.” Lacoste thought for a moment. “How did he lure her to the church?”

“Suppose he didn’t lure her,” said Gamache. “Maybe he followed her.”

“Go on.”

“Suppose she came to the church for some peace,” said Gamache. “Thinking she was safe.”

“There is another possibility. Another reason Katie Evans might’ve come here.”

“Oui?”

He waited, as Lacoste’s eyes narrowed and she tried to see what the woman, at the end of her tether, might have done that night. Last night.

“Maybe she arranged to meet him here,” said Lacoste, seeing the thing in her mind.

The frightened woman, worn and frazzled. Realizing that someone knew her secret.

“Suppose she invited him here. Someplace private, where she knew they wouldn’t be disturbed. What was it Monsieur Evans said? No one goes into a church anymore. Maybe she wanted to talk to him. Maybe even to make amends. To get him to back off, go away.”

“And failing that,” said Gamache, following her thinking, “she’d have a plan B.”

A bat.

Lacoste leaned back in her chair and tapped a pen against her lips. Then she sat forward.

“So in this scenario, Katie Evans arranges a rendezvous here, in the church basement, last night. She hopes to give the cobrador what it wants. A full apology. And then he’d go away. But if that doesn’t work, she brings along a bat. But he gets it from her, and kills her with it. Then he takes off.”

“Why did he put her in his costume?” asked Gamache.

It came back to that.

The costume. Why wear it himself, and why in the world would the killer put his victim in it?

“There’s something else,” said Gamache. “I didn’t come here to listen in on your interviews. Madame Gamache told me something just now and you need to know.”

“What?”

“She says there was no bat in the root cellar when she found the body.”

Chief Inspector Lacoste absorbed that information, then she called over the photographer.

“Can you find us the pictures and video you took of the crime scene?”

“Oui, patron,” he said, and went to a laptop.

“Could she have just missed it?” Lacoste asked.

“It’s possible,” admitted Gamache.

“But unlikely?”

“If she knelt down to make sure Katie Evans was dead, I suspect she’d have also seen the bloody bat too. Don’t you? It’s not a large room.”

“Here you go,” said the photographer, returning to the conference table with a laptop.

The images were clear.

Reine-Marie Gamache could not have missed the bat leaning against the wall. It looked like a bloody exclamation mark.

And yet—

And yet, Madame Gamache could not remember seeing it there.

“Which means,” said Lacoste, “it probably wasn’t there when she found the body.”

The “probably” was not lost on Gamache, but he understood the hesitation.

“It was there when Jean-Guy and I arrived an hour and a half later.”

“Madame Gamache locked the church,” said Lacoste. “And there’s only one way in and out. The front door. Someone else must have a key.”