The Nature of the Beast

CHAPTER 10

The Sûreté Incident Room had once again been set up in what had been the railway station, before it was abandoned and put to other use. The long, low brick building across the Rivière Bella Bella from the village was the home of the Three Pines Volunteer Fire Brigade, of which Ruth Zardo was the chief, being familiar, everyone figured, with hellfire.

And now it was being put to an even more dire use.

The old railway station was alive with activity as technicians and agents set up the equipment necessary to investigate a modern murder. Desks, computers, printers, scanners. Telephone lines. Lots of those. Since the village was so deep in the valley, no high-speed Internet, or even satellite signal, reached it. They had to resort to dial-up.

It was infuriating, frustrating, grindingly slow. But it was better than nothing.

Armand Gamache had just arrived and was standing in the disarray. In his late fifties now, he’d started at the Sûreté when there weren’t even faxes, just teletype machines.

Isabelle Lacoste watched him and remembered being with Gamache on one of her first murder investigations. They found themselves in a hunting camp, with a body and fingerprints, and no way to transmit the information.

Chief Inspector Gamache had taken the old telephone receiver off its cradle, unscrewed the lower section, removed the voice disc, and hooked directly into the line.

“You hot-wired the phone?” she’d asked.

“Kind of,” he’d said. And then he’d taught her how to do it.

“It must’ve been tough back then,” she’d said. “When this was all you had.”

“It gave us more time to think,” he’d explained.

And then they’d sat by the woodstove, and they’d thought. And by the time the information had chugged its way back down the phone line, they’d all but solved the case.

And now she was the Chief Inspector. And she looked at all the technology being installed, in the absolute certainty it was crucial to solving the case.

But she knew differently. And Jean-Guy Beauvoir knew differently.

And the man who’d just arrived knew differently.

“Thank you for coming, sir,” she said, walking with them through the boxes and wires.

“Anytime,” said Gamache. “How can I help?”

She indicated the conference table, set up at the far end of the old railway station.

“It’s time for a think,” she said, and saw him smile.

She hesitated by the chair at the head of the conference table. This was awkward. Every other time they’d sat there, Chief Inspector Gamache had assumed that seat.

This time, though, he walked right by it and sat to her left. Leaving Inspector Beauvoir to sit on her right-hand side.

Armand Gamache knew his place. Had, in fact, chosen it.

“So, this is what we know,” said Lacoste. “We have a massive gun hidden in the forest and a boy who was killed there and then his body moved. You knew Laurent better than we did,” Lacoste said to Gamache. “What do you think happened?”

“Well, he obviously found the gun,” said Gamache. “It looks like someone wanted to stop him from telling anyone about it.”

“But he’d already told lots of people,” said Jean-Guy. “All of us, for a start. Everyone in the bistro that afternoon heard him.”

“Maybe the murderer didn’t realize that,” said Gamache. “Maybe he wasn’t in the bistro when Laurent came running in.”

“So you think after he left us, he told someone else?” asked Lacoste. “Someone who killed him to keep him quiet.”

Gamache nodded. “It’s also possible he went back there on his own and interrupted someone. Though the site seems abandoned.”

“We’ll know more when forensics is done,” said Lacoste. “But that was my impression too.”

“So where does that leave us?” asked Beauvoir.

“I think whoever killed Laurent didn’t know him well,” said Gamache.

“Why do you say that?” asked Jean-Guy.

“Well, for one thing, he believed Laurent. He was a great boy but he was a fantasist. Everyone knew he made up stories, and this one was as far-fetched as all the rest. A giant gun in the woods, bigger than any house.”

“With a monster on it,” said Lacoste.

The boy, like a specter, appeared. Skinny. Covered in mud and leaves and urgency. Eyes bright. His arms stretched as wide as he could make them. Reciting his tall tale. Too tall for any of them to climb.

But someone had heard the story. And believed it.

“The killer must’ve known Laurent was finally telling the truth,” said Beauvoir.

“Exactement,” said Gamache, nodding.

“You think someone knew about the gun and kept it secret for years? Decades?” asked Lacoste.

“Might’ve even been guarding it,” said Beauvoir, warming to the theory. “And then Laurent finds it. Disaster. He had to silence the boy and the only way to do that was to kill him.”

“So who knew it was there?” asked Lacoste.

“Whoever put it there in the first place,” said Gamache.

“You think whoever built that gun is still around?” asked Lacoste.

“Maybe,” said Gamache, leaning forward in his chair.

“So who else did Laurent tell?” asked Lacoste. “Where did he go after he left us?”

“Home,” said Beauvoir, looking at Gamache. “You drove him home.”

“I did. May I?”

Gamache indicated the evidence they’d collected. It was bagged and sitting on the table.

“Oui,” said Lacoste. “It’s been swabbed and fingerprinted.”

Gamache picked up the cassette tape. The Very Best of Pete Seeger.

Gamache read the song list. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” “Wimoweh.” He smiled. That had been Annie’s favorite song as a baby. He too was a Pete Seeger fan. Or had been until he’d spent the first year of her life listening to “the lion sleeps tonight.” All day and all night.

He scanned the rest of the songs. All classic folk tunes, including “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Gamache had forgotten Seeger had written that song, based on Ecclesiastes.

“To everything there is a season,” he said.

“Pardon?” said Lacoste. “What did you say?”

“Al Lepage has cassette tapes in his pickup truck.”

He handed her the cassette and wondered if, in driving Laurent home, he’d delivered the boy into the hands of his murderer.

“General Langelier? This is Chief Inspector Lacoste, with the Sûreté du Québec.”

“Good evening, Chief Inspector.”

There was slight censure in his voice. Clearly a late call to the armed forces base was not to his liking. She could almost see him looking at his watch and thinking that the United States had better be invading, or this call was not warranted.

It was past eight in the evening and she was alone in the Incident Room. They’d had sandwiches and drinks brought over from the bistro, and worked through dinner.

She’d sent Jean-Guy off to organize their rooms at the B and B, and was just getting the paperwork done. How often had she left Chief Inspector Gamache alone in some far-flung incident room, in a shed, a barn, an abandoned factory? A single light burning late into the night.

And now it was night. And it was her light.

Sitting back in her chair, she’d stared at the photos on her computer. Then she’d looked up a number and made the call to Canadian Forces Base Valcartier.

It was only by some bullying and veiled threats that she got through to the base commander at his home.

“How can I help you, Chief Inspector?”

“I’m investigating a homicide and need your help.”

There was a pause before the clipped voice returned.

“Is there a link to the base here in Valcartier? Is one of my soldiers involved?”

“No, sir, not that we know of. It happened in the Eastern Townships, not far from the Vermont border.”

“Then why are you calling me? I’m sure you know we’re a long way from there.”

“Yes, sir. Your base is just outside Quebec City, but we’ve found something you might be interested in.”

“What?”

She could hear his anxiety lower and his curiosity rise.

“A huge missile launcher. I’ve done some research and I can’t find anything even remotely like it.”

“A missile launcher? In the Townships?” General Langelier was clearly perplexed. “We don’t have an armed forces base there. Never have. What’s it doing there?”

She almost laughed, but didn’t. “That’s why I’m calling you. We don’t know. And this is no ordinary missile launcher. As I said, it’s massive.”

“Well, yes, they are,” he said. “Are you sure that’s what it is? Maybe it’s some farm tool, or logging equipment.”

“I can send you a few pictures of it.”

“If you’d like.” His interest was waning.

He gave her his secure email and she knew when they’d arrived by the whispered “Merde” down the phone line.

There was silence as he examined them.

“Is that a person standing next to it?” Langelier asked, when he’d regained polite speech.

“Oui.”

“Tabernac,” he swore. “Are you sure?”

“I took the photograph myself this afternoon. It is a missile launcher, non? Not a milking machine?”

“Oui.” He sounded distracted, lost in thought. “I don’t know what to tell you, Chief Inspector. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before. Frankly, while it’s huge, it looks like an antique, something that might’ve been used in the Second World War.”

“Could it be from then? Maybe something put there for defense and abandoned?”

“We don’t just leave weapons scattered about in the woods,” he said. “And the defenses were out to sea, not pointing inland. Does it work?”

“We don’t know that either. That’s why I’m calling you. We need help assessing this.”

“Are there missiles with it?” he asked. “Is the weapon armed?”

“We haven’t found anything, but we’re looking. So far it seems to be just the launcher itself. Do you have someone you can send?”

There was a sigh down the line and she could almost imagine him scratching his head.

“Honestly, our current ballistics and heavy weaponry specialists all deal with modern weapons. ICBMs. Sophisticated systems. This looks like a dinosaur.”

Lacoste looked at the photograph on her screen. He was right. It was the literal truth. It looked like they’d unearthed some behemoth.

But why was it hidden? And who in the world had built it? What was it for?

And why was Laurent murdered to keep it secret?

“Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you,” he said.

“This is, of course, confidential,” she said.

“I understand. I’ll do what I can.”

She thanked him and hung up. She hadn’t told him about the other thing. The etching on the base.

She steadied herself, wishing it wasn’t quite so dark and quiet and solitary in the old railway station, then she put up another photo and looked at the winged monster. Even in a picture, even at a distance, it was striking. And what it struck was terror.

She stared at it and wondered why she hadn’t told the Commander of CFB Valcartier about the monster with the seven serpent heads. Perhaps because she remembered the boy running into the bistro. With the tale of the huge gun.

As Gamache had said, had Laurent left it at that, they might, just might, have believed him. But then he took it that next, impossible, step too far. Into the unbelievable.

Lacoste knew that General Langelier almost certainly did not fully appreciate the size of the weapon. No picture could capture it, even with the agent there for scale. She suspected he thought she was exaggerating. And she suspected the winged monster would not have helped her credibility.

Isabelle Lacoste stared at the etching. It was, she had to admit, unbelievable.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir finished unpacking his satchel, hanging shirts and slacks in the closet of the B and B, folding garments in the pine dresser, and putting toiletries in the spacious en suite.

He’d made arrangements with Gabri for Lacoste and him to stay at the B and B for as long as necessary. Gabri had put him in the room he normally had with the large bed and crisp linens and warm duvet. The wide-plank pine floors and oriental throw rugs.

He pulled the curtain back and saw the light in the window of the old train station.

The Incident Room had been sorted out. The evidence sent to the lab in Montréal. The local Sûreté detachment had agreed to provide protection for the huge gun, though no one had been very taken with the quality of agent they’d sent.

“Fresh out of the academy,” Isabelle Lacoste had remarked. “They’ll learn.”

“Perhaps.”

“We were like that once.”

“We were never like that,” Beauvoir had said. “It’s not hard to do the math, Isabelle. The Sûreté Academy has them for three years. That means these two, and everyone in their class, were recruited at the height of the corruption.”

“You think they’re corrupt?”

“I think they were looking for different qualities in recruits at that time,” he’d said.

And now there’s a whole class of them, he thought, opening the window and feeling the cool breeze. Several classes of them. Scattered throughout the Sûreté. Scattered through the forest.

That monstrosity was being guarded by, at best, incompetents and, at worst, agents chosen because they could be easily corrupted.

He picked up the Bible he’d found in the bookcase of his room, and flipping through it he found Ecclesiastes. He was curious about the lyrics of that Pete Seeger song.

Out the window he saw lights on at the Gamache home and imagined them sitting by the fireplace, reading.

To everything there is a season, he read.

And across the village green, at Clara’s place, there was a single light.

A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

He saw the three tall spires of the pines swaying slightly in the autumn breeze. He saw two dark figures leave the bistro.

One was tall, stooped. The other had a cane and was cradling something to her chest.

The two walked slowly across the village green, past the bench, past the pond, past the trees.

As he watched, Jean-Guy saw Monsieur Béliveau accompany Ruth up to her front door. But then the grocer did something almost unheard of. He went inside.

It was getting late, but Beauvoir wasn’t tired.

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

He called home and spoke to Annie. They discussed buying a home, someplace with a backyard, close to schools and a park. And then they just chatted about their day. He lay on the familiar bed in the B and B and knew she was lying on their bed, her feet up.

He could hear sleep in her voice and, reluctantly, he wished her bonne nuit, and hung up.

A time to be born, and a time to die.

His hand lingered on the receiver, and he thought about Laurent. And the Lepages. And what it must be like to have a child and then lose that child.

Putting on his dressing gown, he went downstairs and plugged his laptop into the phone lines.

He was still there when the lights went out at the bistro. He was still there when Olivier and Gabri arrived back. He was still there when every other home in Three Pines went dark, and every other person was asleep.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir was there, his face bathed in the light from his laptop, until he found what he was looking for. Only then did he lean back, stiff and weary, to stare at the name his search had run to ground.

He placed a phone call, left a message, and then climbed the stairs and crawled under the eiderdown. And slept. Curled around the little stuffed lion he took with him whenever he knew he’d be away from home.

A time of war, and a time of peace.

“Bed and Breakfast,” the singsong voice answered the phone.

“Bonjour. My name’s Rosenblatt. Michael Rosenblatt.”

“Is it about a reservation?”

“No, you called me. Something about missiles.”

Rosenblatt heard laughter down the line.

“I’m sorry,” said the man. “You must have the wrong number. This is a bed and breakfast. No missiles here. Not even a missus.”

That much Michael Rosenblatt had figured out.

“Désolé,” he said. “I must’ve taken the number down wrong.”

He hung up and checked the number, shook his head and went back to preparing his breakfast. The call that morning from his former department at McGill University had been garbled. Something about a message left at the department the night before, and old missiles.

When the phone rang half an hour later, he picked it up and heard an unfamiliar voice.

“Is this Professor Rosenblatt?” the man asked in English with a Québécois accent.

“Yes.”

“My name’s Jean-Guy Beauvoir. I’m an inspector with the Sûreté du Québec. McGill University gave me your home number. I hope you don’t mind.”

“The Sûreté?” he asked.

“Yes.” Beauvoir decided not to tell him he was with homicide. The professor already sounded rattled. And elderly. He didn’t want another death on his hands.

“Are you the one who left the message at McGill?” Rosenblatt asked. “I tried to call you back but the man who answered said it was a bed and breakfast.”

Beauvoir apologized.

He sounds nice, Rosenblatt thought. Disarming.

But the professor emeritus knew what that meant. The most dangerous people he knew were disarming. He immediately put up his defenses.

“My cell phone won’t work where I am,” Inspector Beauvoir said. “So I had to leave the main number. I’m at a B and B, investigating a crime. We’ve come across something in the woods. Something we can’t explain.”

“Really?” Rosenblatt felt his curiosity swarming over his defenses. “What?”

“It seems to be a big gun.”

His curiosity skidded to a halt.

“I don’t deal with guns,” said Rosenblatt. “My field is, was, physics.”

“Yes, I know. I read your paper on climate change and trajectory.”

The professor leaned forward at his kitchen table.

“Really.”

Beauvoir chose not to tell him that “stared at” might have been a better description than “read.” Still, his Internet search the night before had yielded Rosenblatt’s name, and this article, and Beauvoir had understood enough to know that this was a man who specialized in great big guns.

And he had one.

“I doubt I can help you,” said Professor Rosenblatt. “That paper was written twenty years ago. I’m retired. If it’s a gun you’ve found, you might want to get in touch with a gun club.”

He heard soft laughter down the line.

“I’m afraid I haven’t described it well,” Beauvoir said. “I don’t have the vocabulary, especially in English. Or in French, for that matter. I’m not talking about a shotgun or a handgun. This seems like a sort of missile launcher, but of a design I’ve never seen before. It’s in the middle of the forest, in the Eastern Townships.”

Professor Rosenblatt leaned back, as though shoved. “In the Townships?”

“Oui. It was hidden under camouflage netting and overgrown. It seems to be old,” Beauvoir went on. “Probably been there for decades. Professor?”

The silence down the line made Jean-Guy Beauvoir wonder if it had gone dead. Or Rosenblatt had.

“I’m still here. Go on.”

Beauvoir took a deep breath, then plunged ahead. “It’s huge. Bigger than any weapon I’ve ever seen. Ten times, a hundred times bigger. We needed ladders to get onto it, and even they aren’t long enough.”

And again, the line appeared to go dead.

“Professor?”

Beauvoir did not expect an answer. What he did expect to hear was a dial tone.

“I’m here,” said Rosenblatt. “Is there anything on it at all that might identify it?”

“Not a serial number or a name,” Beauvoir said. “Though it’s possible we missed something. It’ll take a while to go over every inch.”

Rosenblatt made a humming sound, like his brain was whirring.

“There is one thing,” Jean-Guy said.

“Yes?”

“It’s not exactly an identifying mark, but it is unusual. It’s a design.”

Michael Rosenblatt stood up at his kitchen table, spilling his coffee over that morning’s Montréal Gazette.

“An etching?” he asked.

“Oui,” said Beauvoir, standing up slowly at his desk in the Incident Room.

“At the base?”

“Oui,” said Beauvoir, caution creeping into his voice.

“Is it a beast?” Rosenblatt asked, finding it difficult to breathe.

“A beast?”

“Un monstre.” His French wasn’t very good, but it was good enough for that.

“Oui. A monster.”

“With seven heads.”

“Oui,” said Inspector Beauvoir. He sat back down at his desk in the Incident Room.

Professor Rosenblatt sat back down at his kitchen table.

“How did you know?” Beauvoir asked.

“It’s a myth,” said Rosenblatt. “At least, that’s what we thought.”

“We need your help,” said Inspector Beauvoir.

“Yes, you do.”