The Nature of the Beast (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #11)

“He was killed here?” Lacoste asked.

“I think so,” said Beauvoir.

He saw her nod, then her own beam swept the ground, making larger and larger arcs, working its way outward. But Inspector Beauvoir saved her time.

The industrial lights they’d brought were just hooked up and he turned one on now, directing it straight ahead.

Isabelle Lacoste instinctively leaned away and even Beauvoir, who knew what was there, felt his heart stutter. Around them the well-choreographed activity of the Scene of Crime team stopped while the hardened agents stared.

Mon Dieu, they heard whispered, the words disappearing into the deadened space.

The gun was even more massive in this huge beam than it had appeared in the smaller light. Now they began to get the scale of the thing.

Agents pointed flashlights at it, like weapons. More floodlights were turned on. Playing over it, but not altogether capturing the enormity of it.

“He was telling the truth,” said Lacoste beneath her breath. “My God, Laurent wasn’t lying after all.”

Before them was a massive gun, a cannon, its long barrel stretching beyond the reach of their lights to disappear into the darkness.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir lowered his light until it hit the base. And there they saw a monster etched onto the metal, twisting, writhing out of the ground. Its wings were extended. Its many serpent heads coiling, entwining like the vines that had hidden it for decades.

“We’re going to need more light,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “And longer ladders.”

CHAPTER 9

The Lepages had parked their truck on the road by the bistro and Gamache walked them back to it.

“I’ll make sure you’re told everything,” he said, leaning into the window as Al started it up.

“So far we haven’t been told anything,” said Evie. “Except that they found Laurent’s stick inside that thing. What was it doing there?”

“We know what it was doing there, Evie,” said Al. “Laurent was killed there, and moved, wasn’t he?”

Gamache nodded. “Chief Inspector Lacoste and her team will know more in a few hours, but it looks that way.”

“But what was Laurent doing there?” asked Evie. “Did he surprise someone? What’s in there? Is that a meth lab or a grow op? Did he stumble into some drug operation? Why did they kill him, Armand?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you do know what’s in there,” said Al. “What Laurent found.”

“I can’t tell you anything more right now,” said Armand.

“You can,” said Al. “You just choose not to. You know you’re making it worse by not telling us.”

“I’m sorry,” said Armand, stepping back as Al hit the gas.

He watched the battered pickup drive around the village green, then up the road out of the village. Then he walked back home, deep in thought.

He did know all those things. But he also knew something else.

As he’d leaned into the open window of the Lepages’ truck he’d seen, scattered on the console between the seats, a pile of cassette tapes.

*   *   *

“Where’s Ruth?” Myrna never thought she’d hear herself asking that question.

“Don’t know,” said Clara, looking around the crowded bistro. “She’s normally here by now.”

It was five thirty, and every chair in the place was taken. They could barely hear themselves think for the hubbub.

Clara saw Monsieur Béliveau at the door connecting Sarah’s boulangerie with the bistro. He was scanning the room.

“I’ll ask him if he’s seen her,” said Clara, getting up and weaving her way gracefully through the room.

As she passed the tables, she caught snippets of conversation. The words were slightly different, the language changing depending on the grouping. But the sense was the same.

“Meurtre,” she heard in hushed tones. “Murder.”

And then, even lower, “Mais qui?”

“But who?”

And then the look, the furtive scan. Taking in friends, acquaintances, neighbors, strangers. Who would suspicion, like an ax, fall on?

Clara had always found comfort in the bistro, never more so than after losing Peter. But while still soothing, the atmosphere was closing in on her. Words she’d worked hard to exorcise from her mind appeared again. Fresh and new and powerful. “Murder,” “blame,” “killing” crowded out the comfort.

Laurent was dead, and there was a good chance one of them did it.