Glass Houses (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #13)(68)

It had started, as these things did, naturally enough. As steps in the grieving process.

But where the final step should have been toward acceptance, the person had veered off. Stepped away from the path and walked deeper and deeper into sorrow and rage. Fueled by guilt. Until they’d gotten themselves all turned around. And when they were well and truly lost, they’d found refuge. In revenge.

Comforting, consoling. They’d warmed themselves by that fire, for years.

Justifiable anger had shot right past rage, and become wrath, that became revenge. And made them do something unjustifiable. And led them all to where they were now. In this hellhole of a courtroom, trying Katie Evans’s murderer.

But there was more to it than that. Gamache knew it. The melting Crown Prosecutor knew it.

Gamache looked out at the crowd. He hoped and prayed that no one in the courtroom figured out what the police had discovered. In that church basement.

And what Chief Superintendent Gamache had just done.

Though he knew that someone was listening very, very closely to his every word. And reporting back.

*

“We need to talk,” said Inspector Beauvoir, standing in the doorway of the office at S?reté headquarters.

“Bon,” said Superintendent Toussaint, rising from her chair. Everyone else in the room also got up. “The meeting is over.”

“But—”

“We can discuss this later, Fran?ois,” she said, nodding toward her tablet and putting a sympathetic hand on his arm.

“I have your word?” he asked, then dropped his voice. “We’ll do something?”

“You have my word.”

She walked her agents to the door as Beauvoir stepped back to let them through.

“Patron,” they said to Beauvoir, examining him closely as they filed past for any hint as to why he was there. And why their own boss had abruptly ended their meeting to meet with him.

They knew Jean-Guy Beauvoir was second-in-command at the S?reté. And they knew he was a formidable investigator in his own right. Not simply an adjunct to Chief Superintendent Gamache.

Inspector Beauvoir had been offered the promotion to chief inspector when he’d taken the job, but refused, saying inspector was fine with him. He was proud to be one of the troops.

All the agents and inspectors in the S?reté, upon hearing that, turned their respect for the man into near adoration. And he became patron.

Though he didn’t feel like one now.

These men and women, his peers, had no idea what he’d just done. And what he’d just failed to do. As each of them walked past him and said, “Patron,” it felt like a shot to the gut.

“Patron,” said the last of the inspectors.

And Beauvoir closed the door.

“Court’s adjourned already?” asked Toussaint, glancing at the clock. It wasn’t yet four o’clock. When Beauvoir didn’t answer, she motioned to a chair. “How’s it going?”

Beauvoir sat but still didn’t say anything.

“That bad?” she asked, and took a deep breath. Not so much a sigh as a sign of exhaustion. “How’s he holding up?”

“He’s doing what needs to be done.”

Toussaint dropped her eyes, not wishing to meet Beauvoir’s.

Giving a curt nod, she tapped her tablet and turned it around for him to read.

“I had a report on that shipment we talked about.”

“The big one.”

“Yes. My informant says it has crossed into the States. Eighty kilos of fentanyl.”

“I see.” He felt the now perpetual knot in his stomach grow and tighten. “Where we expected?”

“Yes.” Her voice was hard, almost bitter. “Exactly where we expected. We watched the goddamned thing.” She opened her eyes wide, with anger. “Yes, everything was as we expected. Except, unexpectedly, we did nothing. I don’t know who was more surprised. The traffickers, that it was so easy, or our informant, that we had the largest-known haul of fentanyl in our sights. In our grasp. And we did nothing. Just”—she grimaced and waved—“let it cross into the States.”

Even as she said it, she could barely believe it was true.

Beauvoir held her eyes, his gaze steady and noncommittal.

This was what they’d hoped and feared would happen. A huge shipment had made it across the border, with the S?reté apparently none the wiser. Because, had they known, surely they’d have stopped it.

If the S?reté, under its new commander, was laying a trap for the cartel by simply pretending to be incompetent, this would flush them out. No police force could ignore a shipment of opioids this massive.

It was a test.

And the S?reté, under well-meaning but burned-out Chief Superintendent Gamache, had failed.

The Québec cartel could drag a container of heroin down rue St.-Catherine in Montréal, and the idiots at the S?reté would still miss it.

Gamache, Beauvoir, Toussaint and the rest of the inner circle at the S?reté had waited a long time for this. But it didn’t feel like a victory. There was no celebration on the part of the senior officers. They all felt sick.

No, there was no joy in that room.

“Are you tracking it?”

“Non. Chief Superintendent Gamache ordered us not to, remember?”