Page 7 of The Grey Wolf
CHAPTER4
The strange things began happening the next morning when Armand arrived at work.
The evening before, when he and Reine-Marie were heading out to Leméac, it had begun to rain. He looked for his light summer coat, then realized he must have left it in Three Pines, though he couldn’t remember seeing it there.
The LaPierres were already at the restaurant, and the couples spent an enjoyable evening catching up on family, on careers, on this and that. Vivienne was heading to the Arctic, to check out the polar ice melt. Marcel was going with her this time. They invited the Gamaches, who were sorely tempted and talked about it all the way home.
By the time they left Leméac, the drizzle had stopped, and Armand and Reine-Marie strolled arm in arm, pausing to look in shop windows along avenue Laurier. Turning up the side street, they glanced into lit windows of apartments, converted from what were once mansions.
They finally arrived at their own small walk-up with its flight of outside stairs, high ceilings, intricate moldings, and ornamental fireplace.
This place reminded them of their first home together, though that one was even tinier, and rented. Buying a place had seemed an impossibility. Armand was just starting out at the Sûreté, and Reine-Mariewas a young librarian dreaming of one day working for the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. Never thinking that one day she would be the senior archivist and Armand would be head of homicide.
Je me souviens, thought Armand as he climbed the stairs. I remember. The motto of Québec was not wrong.
Thankfully the faulty sensor did not play up again that night, and their phones remained silent. All seemed right with the world. Until the next morning, when the package arrived.
The day started predictably enough.
After coffee and croissants in the kitchen together, Reine-Marie went off to the archives to do some research, while Armand headed into his office at Sûreté headquarters. It was Monday morning, and there was the weekly meeting with his boss and other department heads to go over the cases still active, those concluded, and those about to go to trial.
He’d already met informally with his counterpart, Evelyn Tardiff, in Organized Crime. He wanted her thoughts on two murders his team was investigating, what he believed were mob-related executions. One in the Saguenay region, and another on the windswept Les Îles de la Madeleine.
Organized crime in Québec went back generations, to Prohibition, when the mob ran booze across the border. And still did. But now it also ran billions of dollars in drugs and arms. It had, in the intervening years, grown into a monster with connections to the East Coast mafia, the Big Five families. So deep were the mafia’s roots in construction, trucking, garbage collection, even the cheese industry, all sorts of “legitimate” businesses, that the Sûreté had formed a special unit to investigate it.
What troubled Gamache about the cases in both regions outside Montréal was that the victims had no apparent connection to the drug trade, or prostitution, or, or, or. The woman in the Saguenay had worked for Canada Post. The man on the Magdalen Islands wasa teacher on the cusp of retirement. Both appeared to be leading perfectly ordinary, peaceful lives.
Until they were trussed up and shot in the back of the head. Within a day of each other.
“What do you think, Evelyn?”
She removed her glasses and reached for her mug of coffee. “They must have seen something that got them killed.”
“Both of them? One day apart?”
Tardiff studied her counterpart in homicide. “Are you suggesting the two are related? They’re thousands of kilometers apart, have no connection to each other and no record of criminal activity.”
“True. And yet…”
“And yet you think the killings aren’t just related,” said Tardiff, looking at the photographs, “but mob-related.” To give her credit, thought Gamache, her tone held no sarcasm or even cynicism.
“They look like executions to me,” he said. “Hits. Don’t they to you?” He waited for her response, but when none came, he said, “Something must be stirring. Have you heard anything?”
She shook her head. “It’s been quiet since old man Moretti died and the son took over the family. We were expecting a war, but the transition has been smooth. This new generation of mobster is more polished. Less interested in violence and more interested in profit. A turf war benefits no one.”
Except the winner, thought Gamache. But even then, so much damage was done to everyone involved it took years to recover.
While what Chief Inspector Tardiff said was true, they both were old enough and experienced enough to know that “polish” was superficial. This new generation of mobster might appear more refined, but underneath? They were at least as ruthless, literally cutthroat, as their fathers and grandfathers.
These were not, as his granddaughter Florence would say in typical understatement, nice people.
Gamache knew something else. There was an informant high up in the Montréal mafia. A very “not nice” person. A necessary evil.
Very few knew this person’s identity. Armand was not one of them, but the woman across from him was. What he did know was that this was not a brave individual, quietly working to bring down the Moretti organization. No, this was a scheming, manipulative, detestable opportunist. Working to his or her own ends.
So far, the information had proven valuable, but one day, Gamache knew, it would not. One day, when it suited them, this person would lead them into a trap.
When he’d knelt beside the recently executed woman and man, who’d had absolutely no reason to be murdered that he could see, Armand had had a prickling sense that day was approaching.
