at birth. While Oog had fallen into something else.
Gamache now smiled to himself. Humbled, yet again, by a mistake. How often had he warned agents against making assumptions? Leaping to conclusions.
And here he was, having done exactly that.
It never occurred to Gamache that this rough-hewn man might be a wealth manager, looking after tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.
A phone call would have to be made.
But that was far down the list of things that occurred to the Chief Superintendent at that moment. Another question was forming, just as Beauvoir appeared down the hallway and caught his eye.
“A word?” Beauvoir mouthed.
Gamache was torn. He wanted, needed, to ask the question, but he also knew that Beauvoir would never interrupt unless it was important.
“Excusez-moi,” said the Chief. He got up and nodded to Dufresne to continue.
* * *
“Find something?” Gamache asked as he accompanied Beauvoir down the hallway.
“I’ll let Agent Cloutier explain.”
Beauvoir’s voice, while low, was excited.
Gamache turned the corner into the study and came face-to-face with maniacal Ruth. His brows rose, and then his gaze continued on, to the woman sitting at the desk.
She turned and immediately got up upon seeing Gamache.
“Patron.”
“Agent Cloutier.” Gamache nodded. “Tell me what you have.”
She was a fairly recent transfer from the financial division of the Sûreté. A bookkeeper. A bureaucrat. Not a field agent. Indeed, her accounting wasn’t even forensic. She worked on the Sûreté’s own budget.
But Chief Superintendent Gamache had been impressed with her, and after discussions with Chief Inspector Lacoste he’d arranged a temporary transfer to homicide. To see if it was a fit.
There was a whole division for financial crimes, but money, hidden or otherwise, was so often the motive for murder that Gamache felt it would help to have someone with financial expertise specifically assigned to homicide. And Lacoste had agreed.
Isabelle had been happy with Cloutier. Cloutier, though, had a very different reaction. Being called to a murder scene, or even being assigned to search a victim’s home, was not simply foreign to her. She felt, at the age of forty-eight, as though she were experiencing an alien abduction.
She was not happy.
And even less so at this moment, as she faced the big boss. The head alien. Though he didn’t look alien at all. But then, her whirring mind said, they so rarely did.
She had been grief-stricken, horrified by the raid that had so badly wounded her boss, Chief Inspector Lacoste.
She’d also been terrified at the thought that these things happened. That she herself could have been on that raid. Not realizing they’d have ordered the headquarters cat to arm up before they got to her.
But still. It was brought into stark relief that the Sûreté wasn’t figures on a ledger. A matter of funding, or cutting, this department or that.
Lives were at stake. Lives were lost.
And she wanted nothing to do with taking or, worse still, giving a life.
She’d never met Chief Superintendent Gamache and had no idea he’d been behind her transfer and had been watching her progress, or lack thereof.
Gamache himself had had to admit that the transfer had not been a great success. It was clear she was unhappy, and a discontented agent never did her best work. Cloutier had been on the verge of being transferred back to the accounts department when the raid happened. And everything changed while, at the same time, staying the same.
The great Sûreté du Québec was in stasis until the leadership issue was resolved. For the moment Agent Cloutier was stuck. And Acting Chief Inspector Beauvoir was stuck with an agent who’d gnaw off her own arm if it would get her out of homicide and back into accounts.
But for now she was theirs. And there. In Baumgartner’s home. Staring at the Chief Superintendent. Almost mute. But, sadly for her, not quite. A slight babbling was escaping her, an excruciatingly slow leak of lunacy.
Chief Superintendent Gamache saw this and tried to help, by guiding her.
“What did you find, Agent Cloutier? Was it in those papers?”
He pointed to the pile on the desk.
“Those and these.” She pointed to the same stack of papers, confusing Gamache and herself. “Well, these are those, of course. Ha. Yes, well. Definitely something, but not definitive.”
Inspector Beauvoir, watching this, sighed.
What he didn’t know was that not that long ago Gamache himself had sounded almost exactly like Agent Cloutier, while on the phone to Vienna.
He might’ve sounded like an idiot, but Gamache knew he wasn’t one. Just as he knew that Agent Cloutier wasn’t.
“Is