Isabelle Lacoste shook her head. “No luck tracing that review. It was so long ago now, more than twenty years. I’ve sent an agent along to the archives at La Presse. We’ll have to go through the microfiche one at a time.”
“Bon.” Inspector Beauvoir nodded his approval.
Lacoste tore her warm and flaky croissant in half. “I looked into Lillian Dyson’s sponsor, as you asked, Chief,” she said, then took a bite of her croissant before putting it down and picking up the dossier. “Suzanne Coates, age sixty-two. She’s a waitress over at Nick’s on Greene Avenue. Do you know it?”
Beauvoir shook his head, but Gamache nodded. “A Westmount institution.”
“As is Suzanne, apparently. I called this morning before coming here. Spoke to one of the other waitresses. A Lorraine. She confirmed that Suzanne had worked there for twenty years. But she got a little cagey when I asked what her hours were. Finally this Lorraine admitted they all cover for each other when they pick up extra cash working private parties. Suzanne’s supposed to be on the lunch shift, but wasn’t in Saturday. She worked yesterday, though, as usual. Her shift starts at eleven.”
“By ‘working private parties,’ that doesn’t mean—?” asked Beauvoir.
“Prostitution?” asked Lacoste. “The woman’s sixty-two. Though she was in the profession years ago. Two arrests for prostitution and one for break and enter. This was back in the early eighties. She was also charged with theft.”
Both Gamache and Beauvoir raised their brows. Still, it was a long time ago and a long way from those crimes to murder.
“I also found her tax information. Her declared income last year was twenty-three thousand dollars. But she’s heavily in debt. Credit card. She has three of them, all maxed out. She seems to consider it not so much a credit limit as a goal. Like most people in debt she’s juggling creditors, but it’s all about to come crashing down.”
“Does she realize it?” Gamache asked.
“Hard not to, unless she’s completely delusional.”
“You haven’t met her,” said Beauvoir. “Delusional is one of her better qualities.”
* * *
André Castonguay could smell the coffee.
He lay in bed, on the comfortable mattress, under the 600-thread-count sheets and goose down duvet. And he wished he was dead.
He felt like he’d been dropped from a great height. And somehow survived, but was bruised and flattened. Reaching out a shaky hand for the glass of water he gulped down what was left. That felt better.
Slowly he sat up, letting himself adjust to each new position. Finally he stood and pulled the bathrobe around his soft body. Never again, he said as he trudged to the bathroom and stared at his reflection. Never again.
But he’d said that yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.
* * *
The Sûreté team spent the morning in the Incident Room, set up in the Canadian National Railway station. The low brick building, a century old, sat across the Rivière Bella Bella from Three Pines. The building was abandoned, the trains having simply stopped stopping there decades earlier. No explanation.
For a while the trains still chugged by, winding through the valley and between the mountains. And disappearing around a bend.
And then, one day, even they stopped. No twelve o’clock express. No three P.M. milk run into Vermont.
Nothing for the villagers to set their clocks by.
And so both the trains and time stopped in Three Pines.
The station sat empty until one day Ruth Zardo had a thought that didn’t include olives or ice cubes. The Three Pines Volunteer Fire Department would take over the space. And so, with Ruth in the vanguard, they’d descended on the lovely old brick building and made themselves at home.
As the homicide team did now. In one half of the open room sat firefighting equipment, axes, hoses, helmets. A truck. In the other half were desks, computers, printers, scanners. The walls held posters with fire safety tips, detailed maps of the region, photos of past winners of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, including Ruth, and several large boards with headings like: Suspects, Evidence, Victim, and Questions.
There were a lot of questions, and the team spent the morning trying to answer them. The detailed coroner’s report came in and Inspector Beauvoir handled that, as well as the forensic evidence. He was looking into how she died while Agent Lacoste tried to figure out how she’d lived. Her time in New York City, her marriage, any friends, any colleagues. What she did, what she thought. What others thought of her.