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.”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose it was here to torment someone else? Its whole purpose was as a conscience, right? Not a killer. But someone took this as a chance to murder Katie Evans—”
“And blame it on the cobrador,” said Beauvoir. “But that would mean whoever was in the costume is also dead.”
“Dead, or frightened away,” said Lacoste. “Knowing he’d be blamed.”
“Or next. When do you expect the analysis of the costume?”
“I’ve put a priority on it, but it only arrived at the lab a couple hours ago.”
Beauvoir nodded. They’d asked for DNA swabs from everyone they interviewed, and no one had refused. The samples could tell them a lot. Or could tell them nothing. What he really wanted to know was who had been in the costume before it was placed on Madame Evans. Though that person might be long gone, from the village, and perhaps from this earth.
“I’ve been going back over the interviews the team conducted this afternoon,” said Lacoste. “I can’t see anything helpful. Most of the villagers didn’t know her, and those who did, like Lea Roux and Matheo Bissonette, couldn’t come up with anything she might have wanted hidden.”
“They could be lying,” said Beauvoir.
“You think?” said Lacoste, with mock shock. “Her sister told you about an abortion, but I can’t see someone killing her over that. Can you?”
“There’re a lot of crazies,” said Beauvoir. “But no. So far we haven’t found anything she’d done in the past that might’ve attracted the cobrador.”
“So maybe he wasn’t here for her,” Lacoste repeated. “It’s possible he came for someone else. There’re two people new to the village. Anton Lebrun. He’s a dishwasher at the bistro. And Jacqueline Marcoux.”
“The baker,” said Beauvoir.
It did not surprise Isabelle that the man with the growing “intuition” would know the woman who supplied the éclairs.
“As we know, they worked together before coming here. For a private family.”
“So how did they go from that to a dishwasher and an assistant in a bakery? Were they fired?”
“The family moved,” said Lacoste, reviewing the notes. “What’s interesting is that both Anton and Jacqueline refused to answer questions about their former employer. Said they’d signed a confidentiality agreement and couldn’t. They seemed quite intimidated by their former boss. Afraid of lawsuits. I had to impress on them that a murder investigation takes priority over a confidentiality agreement. And that I wasn’t asking what the family ate, or who they slept with. I just needed their name, to confirm everything.”
“They were that reluctant?” asked Beauvoir. “Seems to go beyond worry to actual fear. Intimidation. Who was the family?”
Lacoste scrolled down the page. “Ruiz. His name is Antonio and she’s Maria Celeste.”
Beauvoir had grown very still. Like a hunter who’d heard the snap of a twig.
Antonio and Maria Celeste Ruiz.
“You say they moved,” said Beauvoir. “Where to?”
“They were transferred home. To Spain.”
He opened his mouth, slowly, and out came a “Huh.”
“Barcelona,” she said, watching his reaction.
“It could be a coincidence,” he said. “It must be. I can’t see how the two connect.”
But he continued to be still, and quiet. Letting the skittish thing come to him.
Spain. The birthplace of the cobrador. Where they were most plentiful. The top-hatted modern version. But lately, there had been more and more sightings of the original. The Conscience.