“I think,” said Gamache, turning to face them, “that we should keep what we found tonight to ourselves. In fact, I know we should. We tell no one about the hidden door. Not even other members of the team.”
“Pardon?” they both asked at once. It was unprecedented, to keep a valuable piece of evidence from their own investigation team.
“Just for now,” said Gamache. “Give me tonight. I need time.”
“I’m going to put a camera up in the corner of the room,” said Beauvoir. “If anyone does come in, we’ll at least see who it is.”
While he did that, Lacoste checked her messages.
“The lab says we won’t get results from the cobrador costume until tomorrow morning. There’re multiple DNA samples on it.”
“Probably rented,” came Beauvoir’s voice from the root cellar. “God knows when it was last cleaned.” His voice carried all the disgust of a well-groomed man.
“But,” said Lacoste, reading further down the report, “we do have the results from the bat.”
She spoke slowly, reading as she went.
Gamache stood behind her, his expert eyes finding the pertinent lines buried in among the scientific jargon.
Lacoste swung around in her chair and looked up at him.
“What do you make of that?” she asked.
“What?” asked Jean-Guy, striding across the Incident Room to join them.
He read in silence, then he too straightened up, his brows deeply furrowed.
“It’s not enough to make an arrest,” said Lacoste. “Not yet. But at least now we know who handled the murder weapon, and who almost certainly killed Katie Evans.”
“But what do you make of that?” asked Gamache, pointing to another line on the report.
“That’s just a trace,” said Lacoste. “The lab says that it’s probably incidental.”
“It’s slightly more than a trace,” said Gamache. Though not much more. And Lacoste was right, the technicians, expert in the field, concluded it was a bit of DNA that had probably fallen from the murderer, but did not belong to the killer.
The other two results were clear. One belonged to Katie Evans. The other to her killer.
And yet.
“Why was the bat removed from the scene?” he asked. “And then replaced? At great risk.”
It was a question that had plagued them.
There were a few reasons the murderer might do that. He was panicked. Or distracted. The way people sometimes walked out of a shop with an unpaid article in their hands. By mistake.
And when the murderer realized what he’d done, how very incriminating the bat was, he’d returned it.
That was the most likely reason.
But still, why not just burn it? Why risk returning it?
And that brought them to the other reason. The killer wanted the bat to be found.
“To manipulate the results,” said Beauvoir. “To plant DNA evidence.”
“Maybe,” said Gamache. “And if that’s what’s happened, it might be helpful to let the real murderer think he’s fooled us.”
“More incompetence, patron?” asked Beauvoir. He smiled.
And yet Beauvoir felt a creeping concern that they weren’t simply pretending to be incompetent, but that they actually were. That these decisions would lead them in the wrong direction and a killer would go free.
“We need more evidence,” he said.
Gamache was nodding. It wasn’t enough to find out who’d murdered Katie Evans. They had to be able to prove it.
“Been a long day,” he said. “We need to eat.”
There was no challenging that last statement at least.
* * *
Anton hadn’t been lying about his skills as a chef.
The beef casserole, with hints of herbs, and wild garlic and succulent mushrooms he’d gathered in the fall and dried, was unlike anything they’d ever tasted.
“Does Olivier know what he has in Anton?” Reine-Marie asked.
She’d been trying to put on a cheerful face, though she was clearly exhausted, wrung out by the events of the day.
“I don’t think so,” said Armand, clearing the table while Jean-Guy got out the dessert.
“Panna cotta with raspberry coulis,” Beauvoir read from the note attached to the ramekins. “Anton told me he learned how to cook in treatment. Clearly I went into the wrong treatment program.”
“Never,” said Gamache. “We love our macramé plant hangers.”
“That’s good, because Christmas is coming up.”
“Come on,” Armand said to Reine-Marie, who had dark circles under her eyes and was fading fast. “Time for bed. We’ll save a dessert for you.”
“I’m all right,” she said.
“I know you are.”
He helped her up, and when Isabelle and Jean-Guy had said their good-nights, he walked with her upstairs, but not before taking Jean-Guy and Isabelle aside.
“Call Myrna and Ruth. See who else they told about the Prohibition story. And see what you can