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 S?reté 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.
CHAPTER 21
Chief Superintendent Gamache had been on the witness stand all day in what had become, almost literally, a grilling.
In the stifling July heat of the Palais de Justice courtroom, it would be superhuman not to perspire. Gamache was sweating freely and willing himself not to take out his handkerchief and wipe his face. He knew the gesture could make him look nervous. He also knew they were coming to a pivotal point in the testimony.
He couldn’t risk anything that suggested weakness or vulnerability.
But eventually, when the sweat trickled into his eyes, he had no choice. It was either wipe it away or appear to be crying.
He could hear a small fan humming close by, but it was under Judge Corriveau’s desk and pointing uniquely at her. She needed it more than he did. Unless she was naked under her judicial robes, she’d be withering in the heat.
Still, the sound of the fan was a tease, the promise of a breeze just beyond his reach.
A single fly droned around, sluggish in the heavy air.
Spectators were fanning themselves with whatever sheets of paper they could find or borrow. Though they were longing for an ice cold beer in some air-conditioned brasserie, they refused to leave. They were stuck in place by the testimony, and the perspiration on their legs.
Even the jaded reporters listened, alert, sweat dripping onto their tablets as they took notes.
The minutes ticked by, the temperature rose, the fly sputtered along, and still the examination continued.
The guards had been given permission to sit down by the doors, and the jury had been given permission to remove any outer layers of clothes, and get down to just enough clothing to maintain modesty.
The defense attorneys sat motionless in their long black robes.
The Crown Prosecutor, Barry Zalmanowitz, had removed his jacket from beneath his own robes, though Gamache realized it would still be like a sauna under there.
His own jacket and tie remained in place.
It appeared a sort of game, a test, between the Chief Superintendent and the Chief Prosecutor. Who would wither first. The spectators and the jury watched with fascination as these two men melted, but refused to give in to the climate both had helped create.
But it was much more than a game.
Gamache wiped his eyes and brow and took a sip of the ice water, now tepid, that had been offered to him by Judge Corriveau earlier in the afternoon.
And still the examination continued.
Facing him, swaying slightly on his feet, the Crown Prosecutor swatted the fly away and gathered himself.
“The murder weapon was the bat, is that correct?”
“Oui.”
“This?” The Crown picked up a bat from the evidence table and took it to Gamache, who studied it for a moment.
“Oui.”