“Suppose she invited him here. Someplace private, where she knew they wouldn’t be disturbed. What was it Monsieur Evans said? No one goes into a church anymore. Maybe she wanted to talk to him. Maybe even to make amends. To get him to back off, go away.”
“And failing that,” said Gamache, following her thinking, “she’d have a plan B.”
A bat.
Lacoste leaned back in her chair and tapped a pen against her lips. Then she sat forward.
“So in this scenario, Katie Evans arranges a rendezvous here, in the church basement, last night. She hopes to give the cobrador what it wants. A full apology. And then he’d go away. But if that doesn’t work, she brings along a bat. But he gets it from her, and kills her with it. Then he takes off.”
“Why did he put her in his costume?” asked Gamache.
It came back to that.
The costume. Why wear it himself, and why in the world would the killer put his victim in it?
“There’s something else,” said Gamache. “I didn’t come here to listen in on your interviews. Madame Gamache told me something just now and you need to know.”
“What?”
“She says there was no bat in the root cellar when she found the body.”
Chief Inspector Lacoste absorbed that information, then she called over the photographer.
“Can you find us the pictures and video you took of the crime scene?”
“Oui, patron,” he said, and went to a laptop.
“Could she have just missed it?” Lacoste asked.
“It’s possible,” admitted Gamache.
“But unlikely?”
“If she knelt down to make sure Katie Evans was dead, I suspect she’d have also seen the bloody bat too. Don’t you? It’s not a large room.”
“Here you go,” said the photographer, returning to the conference table with a laptop.
The images were clear.
Reine-Marie Gamache could not have missed the bat leaning against the wall. It looked like a bloody exclamation mark.
And yet—
And yet, Madame Gamache could not remember seeing it there.
“Which means,” said Lacoste, “it probably wasn’t there when she found the body.”
The “probably” was not lost on Gamache, but he understood the hesitation.
“It was there when Jean-Guy and I arrived an hour and a half later.”
“Madame Gamache locked the church,” said Lacoste. “And there’s only one way in and out. The front door. Someone else must have a key.”
“I’m sure there’re lots of keys floating around,” said Gamache. “But no one went into or out of that church. Myrna stood on our porch, making sure of that, until the local Sûreté arrived.”
“But there was a small window of time,” Lacoste pointed out. “Of what? Ten minutes? Between when Madame Gamache locked the door and went home to call you, and when Myrna stood on the porch.”
“True. But it was broad daylight. For someone to walk a bloody murder weapon through the village, to replace it. Well, that would take—”
“A lot of balls?”
“And a pretty big bat,” said Gamache.
CHAPTER 21
Chief Superintendent Gamache had been on the witness stand all day in what had become, almost literally, a grilling.
In the stifling July heat of the Palais de Justice courtroom, it would be superhuman not to perspire. Gamache was sweating freely and willing himself not to take out his handkerchief and wipe his face. He knew the gesture could make him look nervous. He also knew they were coming to a pivotal point in the testimony.
He couldn’t risk anything that suggested weakness or vulnerability.
But eventually, when the sweat trickled into his eyes, he had no choice. It was either wipe it away or appear to be crying.
He could hear a small fan humming close by, but it was under Judge Corriveau’s desk and pointing uniquely at her. She needed it more than he did. Unless she was naked under her judicial robes, she’d be withering in the heat.
Still, the sound of the fan was a tease, the promise of a breeze just beyond his reach.
A single fly droned around, sluggish in the heavy air.
Spectators were fanning themselves with whatever sheets of paper they could find or borrow. Though they were longing for an ice cold beer in some air-conditioned brasserie, they refused to leave. They were stuck in place by the testimony, and the perspiration on their legs.
Even the jaded reporters listened, alert, sweat dripping onto their tablets as they took notes.
The minutes ticked by, the temperature rose, the fly sputtered along, and still the examination continued.
The guards had been given permission to sit down by the doors, and the jury had been given permission to remove any outer layers