Glass Houses

CHAPTER 20

“What’re you looking up?” asked Gamache, pausing in the doorway to his study.

“Lord of the Rings,” said Beauvoir.

He closed the search, shutting down the page.

“Flies?” asked Gamache.

“Right, right, Lord of the Flies. I just got to the part where Frodo and Ralph find the magic ring in the pig’s head. But I’m not sure why the pope is on the island.”

“Wikipedia,” muttered Gamache, as he walked toward the front door. “I need to take another look at the root cellar.”

“Why?” asked Beauvoir, following.

“Something Reine-Marie just told me.”

“What?”

Jean-Guy listened as Gamache recounted his conversation. “You’re kidding,” he said, though it was clear Gamache was not. “I’ll come with you.”

“Madame Evans’s sister and parents don’t know what happened, and it would be helpful to take a look at the Evanses’ home in Montréal.”

Beauvoir paused, then gave a curt nod. “I’ll go. You need to stay here with Madame Gamache.”

“Merci, Jean-Guy. We’ll probably need a court order for the home. I suspect Monsieur Evans is still asleep.”

“Don’t you mean passed out?” Beauvoir asked as they put on their field coats. “That was more than one tranquilizer. He was right out of it. Gone.”

“Dr. Harris thinks it was at least two. And it might not have been Ativan.”

“An opioid?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did Lea Roux give him more than he could handle on purpose? Or was it a mistake?” asked Beauvoir.

That, Gamache knew, was the real question.

The two men walked down the front path, turning up their collars against the drizzle and sleet.

“Save me some dinner,” said Jean-Guy.

As he drove toward Montréal, Jean-Guy thought about why he’d lied to Gamache just then about what he was looking at on the computer.

He’d been reading about Lord of the Flies, yes. But that had been earlier. The search he’d hidden from Gamache was for the words the chief had written on the napkin that had fluttered to the floor.

Burn our ships.

Beauvoir now knew what that referred to. But not why the words, the phrase, had so struck Chief Superintendent Gamache that he’d had to write them down. And keep them.

It must’ve been just this past lunch hour. Who did the chief have lunch with?

Toussaint. Madeleine Toussaint. The new head of Serious Crimes.

Burn our ships.

Armand Gamache walked through the late afternoon darkness. The lights from the cottages were made soft by the mist that still hung over the village. Three Pines felt slightly out of focus. Not quite of this world.

He could hear tapping, as water rolled off leaves and hit branches further down. It sounded like rain, but wasn’t. It was a faux rain. Not quite real. Like so much else in this village. Like so much else in this murder. One foot in the here and now, and the other in some other world. Of a Conscience that walked. And killed.

The air smelled earthy and the cold and damp seeped through his canvas coat.

Lights were on in the church and he could see the stained-glass window, illuminated, and the village boys, the doughboys, captured there. Forever moving forward into some battle long ago won. Or lost. Moving so far forward they could never come back.

As Gamache moved forward.

Once in St. Thomas’s, he took the stairs to the basement.

A conference table had been set up at one end of the room, with desks filling in the middle. Technicians were working to install phone lines and computers and other equipment.

Chief Inspector Lacoste and an agent were at the conference table conducting an interview. Gamache caught her eye and she nodded imperceptibly.

“Who’s there?” asked Ruth, turning stiffly in her seat.

The old poet seemed to miss the obvious but catch the imperceptible.

“Oh, it’s only you.”

The agent taking notes stood, and the Sûreté technicians stopped what they were doing to stare, wide-eyed, at the new Chief Superintendent.

“Patron,” a few of the older ones said, nodding to the man.

The younger ones, including the agent who’d escorted Ruth up to the Incident Room, just stared.

The veteran agents knew Gamache from when he’d been head of homicide. From when he’d cleaned out the corruption, at enormous personal cost.

And now he was back, running the whole thing.

There’d been a huge sense of relief when he’d stepped up to take the job.

He could be seen walking down the corridors in Sûreté headquarters, often with people around him, briefing him on the fly between meetings.

There was a sense of urgency, of purpose, that had been missing in those corridors for many years.

But sometimes Chief Superintendent Gamache could be seen in the hallways, or an elevator, or the cafeteria, alone. Deep in some dossier. Like a college professor reading an obscure and fascinating text.

It was an oddly comforting sight, for men and women who’d been immersed in brutality. Who’d worn their guns more proudly than their badges.

Here was a man with a book, not a weapon, and no need to prove his bravery. Or descend into savagery.

It became okay to stop the swaggering, to cease the bullying that was excused as an appropriate way to treat the populace.

They could be human again.

This chief didn’t hide away, plotting and dividing. Chief Superintendent Gamache was in full view, though no one expected to view him in the church basement in this obscure village.

Their GPS had warned them they were literally in the middle of nowhere and the woman’s voice had advised them, in tones their mothers once used, to recalculate.

Gamache nodded to the agents and subtly gestured to them to continue what they were doing. He’d had no intention to disrupt, but he was learning that whenever the boss appeared, disruption was inevitable.

“S’il vous plaît.” Isabelle Lacoste gestured to an empty chair, a hint of desperation in her voice. “Join us. You’re just in time.”

“Hello, Clouseau,” said Ruth, loudly enough for all the agents in the room to hear. “I was telling her that I didn’t kill that woman.” Then she lowered her voice and leaned toward the Sûreté officers. She spoke out of one side of her mouth like a gangster. “But I can’t vouch for the duck.”

She leaned back in her chair and gave them a meaningful look. Rosa glanced from one to the other with her beady little eyes.

They knew that, if need be, Rosa would take the fall for Ruth. Though surely Ruth didn’t have that much further to fall.

“You were here this morning, I understand,” said Lacoste. Ruth nodded. “Did you come down here?”

“No.”

“Did you notice anything different about the church?” asked Lacoste.

Ruth thought. Then slowly shook her head. “No. Everything seemed normal. The church was unlocked, like it always is. I turned on the lights, then I sat in the pew by the boys.”

They all knew which bright, brittle boys she meant.

“No strange noises?” asked Lacoste, and braced for the caustic, sarcastic reply.

Like a murder happening downstairs?

But none came. The elderly woman just thought some more, and shook her head again.

“It was quiet. As always.”

She brought her elbows to the table and her hands to her face, and held Isabelle Lacoste’s steady eyes.

“She was down here then, wasn’t she? Already dead.”

Lacoste nodded. “We think so. Did you know about the root cellar?”

“Of course. I’m one of the church wardens. It was once used by rum runners, you know. During Prohibition. To get booze across the border.”

Gamache didn’t know that about the church, but it did explain why Ruth considered it an exceptionally sacred place.

Ruth looked over at the small room with the dirt floor and the crime scene tape. “It’s a terrible thing, to take another life. And somehow, it seems even worse to do it in a church. I wonder why that is?”

Her wizened face was open, genuinely seeking an answer.

“Because we feel safe here,” said Lacoste. “We feel God, or decency, will protect us.”

“I think you’re right,” said Ruth. “And maybe He did.”

“He didn’t protect Katie Evans,” said Lacoste.

“No, but maybe He protected us from her.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Look, I didn’t know her, but that conscience thing was here for a reason.”

“You mean the cobrador?” asked Lacoste. “You think the reason was Madame Evans?”

“I do. And so do you.”

Her gaze shifted to Gamache. The Chief Superintendent simply held those sharp eyes, without nodding. Imperceptibly or otherwise.

“You think the fellow in the costume killed her because of something she did?” asked Lacoste.

“It’d be ridiculous not to think that. He’s gone and she’s dead. Which would mean she did something so horrific she had to pay for it with her life. And he was here to collect. Now, whether she really had done something that bad or he was just crazy is another matter. I have to think someone who puts on a costume like that might not be all there.”

With great effort, Lacoste stopped herself from pointing out that Ruth might not be the best judge of “there.”

“If Madame Evans was the target all along, why not just kill her?” Lacoste asked. “Why the costume?”

“Have you never watched a horror film?” asked Ruth. “Halloween, for instance?”

“Have you?” she asked.

“Well, no,” she admitted. “Once Vincent Price died, the fun went out of them. But I know what they’re like.”

“Well, I’ve been investigating murders for years,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “I’ve never, in real life, seen a killer actually put on a costume, draw attention to himself, and then commit the murder. Have you?”

She turned to Gamache, who shook his head.

“Maybe the idea, at first, wasn’t to kill her,” said Ruth. “What’s a getup like that supposed to do? What’s its purpose?”

“To humiliate,” said Lacoste.

Ruth shook her head. “No, you’re thinking of the modern cobrador. The debt collector. He humiliates. But the old one? The original? What did he do?”

Lacoste thought back to what she’d been told about the dark men from those dark days. Following their tormentors.

“They terrify,” she said.

Ruth nodded.

Terror.

The cops and even the poet, and probably the duck, knew that terror wasn’t the act, it was the threat. The anticipation.

The closed door. The noise in the night. The shadowy figure half seen.

The actual act of terror created horror, pain, sorrow, rage, revenge. But the terror itself came from wondering what was going to happen next.

To watch, to wait, to wonder. To anticipate. To imagine. And always the worst.

Terrorists fed off threats more than actual acts. Their weapon of choice was fear. Sometimes they were lone wolves, sometimes organized cells. Sometimes the terror came from governments.

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.”

“I’m sure there’re lots of keys floating around,” said Gamache. “But no one went into or out of that church. Myrna stood on our porch, making sure of that, until the local Sûreté arrived.”

“But there was a small window of time,” Lacoste pointed out. “Of what? Ten minutes? Between when Madame Gamache locked the door and went home to call you, and when Myrna stood on the porch.”

“True. But it was broad daylight. For someone to walk a bloody murder weapon through the village, to replace it. Well, that would take—”

“A lot of balls?”

“And a pretty big bat,” said Gamache.