Glass Houses (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #13)(78)

“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 S?reté.

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 S?reté. 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 S?reté 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.”