Page 35 of The Grey Wolf
“Absolutely.”
“Are you sure you were not the target, Armand?”
He saw once again the face, the eyes, of the driver. Locking on him for an instant. Before shifting to Charles. “Absolutely sure.”
“You need to tell me everything you know, Chief Inspector. I’ll be in my office.”
“Understood.”
What he understood was that he was in for a dressing-down.
Chief Superintendent Toussaint was younger than him by tenyears. She’d come up through Cybercrimes and the Anti-Terror unit. While some grumbled that she’d been appointed simply because she was a Black woman, Gamache knew different. He’d been one of her professors at the academy, back in the day. And several years ago, after he was demoted, he’d put her name forward to replace him as Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec, though that was confidential, and he doubted she knew.
It was, after all, irrelevant.
The Chief Superintendent had earned her place at the top. And, Gamache knew, he’d earned whatever consequences were coming his way. For not foreseeing what would happen. For not preventing it.
“I’m on my way to speak to the dead man’s family.”
“Get here as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting,” she snapped. Then her voice softened. “Are you sure you’re all right, Armand?”
“I’m fine, Madeleine.Merci.”
As he hung up, he could feel the doubt, planted by Charles, spreading. Could he really trust Toussaint? He’d helped put her in place, but things happened to people in power. And she had more power than most.
As they drove to Charles’s home, Gamache tucked in his shirt and tried to at least clean up his hands and face and smooth his hair so that he was more presentable. When the body had been removed, he’d taken back his suit jacket and put it on, to cover the all-too-obvious blood on his white shirt. Now he wondered if that had been a mistake. The jacket was torn, and there was blood on it too.
Leave it on, or take it off? What would be less horrific for Charles’s family?
There seemed no good choice. Just degrees of bad.
Beauvoir drove, silent in the car, trying to find the words to apologize.
As they stopped at a traffic light, Armand turned to his son-in-law. Knowing what he was thinking. Feeling.
“The vehicle was electric. It made no sound. You were focused on the café, and rightly so. I saw it parked there and said nothing. I could have signaled you, Jean-Guy, but didn’t.”
“Because you trusted me to have checked it out.” Jean-Guy’s hands were tight on the wheel. His eyes forward.
He wondered how long it would be before he stopped seeing the Chief’s face, and the streak of black.
“I should have.”
“And I should have understood the danger sooner. And Charles Langlois should have met me in my office and not a public place.”
Armand wondered how long it would be before he stopped seeing Charles’s face, when he knew he was dying. He was twenty-seven years old and lying broken on the road. Some stranger holding his sticky hand.
“There’s enough blame to go around, Jean-Guy, there always is. We need to set that aside and figure out who did this and why.”
And what was going to happen next. Because there was a next. Something was about to happen.
“Oui.”
Both were lost in their own thoughts for the rest of the journey.
“You’re that cop.” The downstairs neighbor had come out onto her landing when she heard the knocking on her neighbor’s door. She eyed the larger, the older, of the two men, bloody and disheveled. “From the video.”
Gamache sighed. Were they too late to get to the family?
