in the costume killed her because of something she did?” asked Lacoste.
“It’d be ridiculous not to think that. He’s gone and she’s dead. Which would mean she did something so horrific she had to pay for it with her life. And he was here to collect. Now, whether she really had done something that bad or he was just crazy is another matter. I have to think someone who puts on a costume like that might not be all there.”
With great effort, Lacoste stopped herself from pointing out that Ruth might not be the best judge of “there.”
“If Madame Evans was the target all along, why not just kill her?” Lacoste asked. “Why the costume?”
“Have you never watched a horror film?” asked Ruth. “Halloween, for instance?”
“Have you?” she asked.
“Well, no,” she admitted. “Once Vincent Price died, the fun went out of them. But I know what they’re like.”
“Well, I’ve been investigating murders for years,” said Isabelle Lacoste. “I’ve never, in real life, seen a killer actually put on a costume, draw attention to himself, and then commit the murder. Have you?”
She turned to Gamache, who shook his head.
“Maybe the idea, at first, wasn’t to kill her,” said Ruth. “What’s a getup like that supposed to do? What’s its purpose?”
“To humiliate,” said Lacoste.
Ruth shook her head. “No, you’re thinking of the modern cobrador. The debt collector. He humiliates. But the old one? The original? What did he do?”
Lacoste thought back to what she’d been told about the dark men from those dark days. Following their tormentors.
“They terrify,” she said.
Ruth nodded.
Terror.
The cops and even the poet, and probably the duck, knew that terror wasn’t the act, it was the threat. The anticipation.
The closed door. The noise in the night. The shadowy figure half seen.
The actual act of terror created horror, pain, sorrow, rage, revenge. But the terror itself came from wondering what was going to happen next.
To watch, to wait, to wonder. To anticipate. To imagine. And always the worst.
Terrorists fed off threats more than actual acts. Their weapon of choice was fear. Sometimes they were lone wolves, sometimes organized cells. Sometimes the terror came from governments.
And the Conscience was no different. It joined forces with the person’s own imagination, and together they brewed dread. And if they were very successful, they took it one notch up, to terror.
“It wasn’t enough to kill her,” Ruth said quietly. “He had to torment her first. Let her know he knew. That he’d come for her.”
“And she couldn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t ask for help,” said Lacoste. “If what you say is true, this is a secret she’d kept for a very long time.”
“One that had literally come back to haunt her,” said Ruth.
Gamache listened and realized, with slight amusement, that Lacoste was treating Ruth as she would a colleague. As though the demented old poet was sitting in for Beauvoir.
Jean-Guy and Ruth were much alike actually, though he’d never, ever tell his son-in-law that he resembled a drunken old woman.
Despite the apparent antagonism, there was understanding there. Affection, and perhaps even love. Certainly an odd and old kinship neither could admit to, or escape.
Gamache wondered if Ruth and Jean-Guy had also been connected, through the ages, over lifetimes. As mother and son. Father and daughter.
Ducks in the same formation.
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.