Yes, the map said it all.
She looked up. Heavenward, but not all the way to the heavens. Her thoughts stopped at the second floor of her home. Where a young man, who just that morning had found one of his professors murdered, lay dead to the world.
A thing like that would scar a person. Invade his waking and sleeping mind.
And yet young Nathaniel slept, apparently undisturbed by what had happened.
*
Jacques Laurin’s heart pounded in his chest, his temples, his throat.
The gunmen were dead. And S?reté agents were also dead or wounded. But, incredibly, a few had escaped unhurt. Because of the calm and the tactics, on the fly, of their commander. Who’d led them through the factory and beaten the unbeatable scenario and now lay unconscious on the concrete floor. Paramedics working on him. Blood seeping from his head.
An agent, a woman, knelt beside him, holding his bloody hand.
Cadet Laurin turned off the laptop and pushed away from the desk.
CHAPTER 24
“Café?”
Mayor Florent tipped the carafe toward the two investigators.
Paul Gélinas, out of his RCMP uniform and into civilian clothing, shook his head but Isabelle Lacoste nodded.
The mayor’s office in the town hall was infused with the scent of stale and slightly burnt coffee. She suspected the glass pot, stained with decades of caffeine, sat on the hotplate all day. If nothing else, this man could give his constituents a coffee.
At seven thirty on a cold March morning, it was no mean offering.
He added milk and sugar, at her request, and handed Lacoste the mug.
This was not an office made to impress. Once, perhaps, but not anymore. The laminate wood paneling on the walls was coming loose in spots and there was more than one dark mark on the acoustic tiles of the ceiling. The carpet had seen better days, and God only knew what else it had seen.
And yet, for all that, the room was cheerful, with mismatched fabric on the chairs and a desk recycled from some old convent school, Lacoste suspected. The walls were crammed with photographs of local sports teams, smiling and holding up pennants proclaiming they’d come in third, or second, or fifth in some tournament.
Among the young athletes was the mayor. Beaming proudly from each picture.
Some of the photos were quite faded, and as they progressed around the office walls, the mayor had grown more and more rotund, as his hair had thinned. And grayed.
Many of these girls and boys would have children of their own now.
On Mayor Florent’s desk were smaller framed pictures of his own family. Children, grandchildren. Hugging dogs and cats and a horse.
The mayor took his seat and leaned toward them, a look of concern on his face.
He was not at all what Chief Inspector Lacoste had expected. Given Monsieur Gamache’s description, she was prepared to meet some wiry whip of a man, worn thin by disappointment and worry and the north wind.
But as she looked into those mild, expectant eyes, the eyes of her grandfather, she realized that Monsieur Gamache had never described him physically, but had only said the mayor had a keen sense of right and wrong. And held on to resentments.
She had filled in the rest.
He’d also said he liked the man. And Lacoste could see why. She liked him too. Beside her, the RCMP officer had relaxed and crossed his legs.
Mayor Florent might very well have murdered Serge Leduc, but he did not seem a threat to anyone else.
Isabelle Lacoste decided to take a tack she rarely used.
“Did you kill Serge Leduc, Your Honor?”
Mostly because it was almost never successful.
His bushy gray eyebrows rose in surprise, and Deputy Commissioner Gélinas turned in his seat to stare at her.
Then the mayor laughed. Not long, not loud, but with what seemed genuine amusement.
“Oh my dear, I can understand why you’d think that.”
Not many could get away with calling Chief Inspector Lacoste “my dear,” but she felt absolutely no annoyance with him. It was so obviously said without wanting to belittle her.
“I’d think that too,” he went on. “If I was you. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. You weren’t joking. A man’s been killed, and I should be sad. Upset. But I’m not.”
The mayor interlocked his fingers. His jovial eyes grew sharp.
“I despised Serge Leduc. If I was ever going to commit murder, it would be him. If anyone deserved to be killed, it was him. I go to church every Sunday. Sometimes I go there on weekdays, to pray for a citizen in trouble or distress. And I always pray for Serge Leduc.”
“For his soul,” said Gélinas.
“For his death.”
“You hated him that much?” Lacoste asked.
Mayor Florent leaned back in his chair and was quiet for a moment, and in the silence Isabelle Lacoste thought she heard the distant shouts and happy screams of children at play.
“You’re here because you know the story. Because Commander Gamache has told you what happened with your academy.”
Lacoste was about to say it wasn’t her academy, but decided to let it pass. She understood what he meant.
“I won’t repeat the details then, but I will tell you that this is a small community. We don’t have much. Our wealth is our children. We worked for years to raise money to build them a proper place to play. Where they could have social clubs and do sports all year round. So that they could grow up strong and healthy. And then they’d almost certainly move away. There isn’t much here anymore for young people. But we could give them their childhoods. And send them into the world sturdy and happy. Serge Leduc stole all that. Could I have killed him? Yes. Did I? No.”
But as he spoke, he throbbed. With rage suppressed.
Here was a bomb, Lacoste knew. Wrapped in flesh. Human, certainly. But that only made him more likely to explode.
“I understand Commander Gamache and you have worked out a plan where the local children can use the academy’s facilities,” said Lacoste. “Surely that helps.”
“You think?”
The mayor stared at her with shrewd eyes, and she stared back with an equally penetrating gaze.
“Where were you two nights ago, sir?”
He pulled his agenda toward him and turned back a page.
“I had a Lion’s Club dinner that night. It ended at about nine.” He looked up at them and smiled again. “We’re all getting quite old. Nine is about as late as we can manage.”
Lacoste smiled back, and hoped and prayed she wouldn’t have to arrest this man.
God, she knew, sometimes answered prayers. He had, after all, answered the mayor’s.
“I went home after that. My wife was there with her bridge club. They broke up at the end of that rubber, and we were asleep by ten.”
“How old’s your wife?” Paul Gélinas asked.
The mayor looked at him, surprised by the question but not upset.
“A year younger than me. She’s seventy-two.”
“Does she wear a hearing aid?” Gélinas asked.
“Two. And yes, she takes them out at night.” He looked from one to the other of the agents. “And yes, I suppose it might be possible for me to leave and she’d never know it. I sometimes have trouble sleeping. I go downstairs to the kitchen and do some work. As far as I know, Marie doesn’t notice. I try not to disturb her.”
He was, Chief Inspector Lacoste realized, behaving like a man with nothing to hide. Or nothing to lose.
“You design software,” said Lacoste, and the mayor nodded. “What sort?”
“Programs for insurance companies mostly. Actuarial tables. You’d be surprised how many variables need to be taken into account.”
“Do you do security software?” asked Lacoste.
“No, that’s a specialty.”
“The information you work on for insurance companies would be confidential,” said Gélinas. “Private.”
“Extremely,” agreed Mayor Florent.