Chapter 20 #3
“The poor little shit. Why did they do this to him?”
“Who?”
“You said execution style. I don’t think it was the fellow from the House of Commons food truck, do you?”
“We wondered if you might know.”
“For God’s sake, it’s Moretti again. You know that. But why Frederick?”
“Could he have been working with them?”
“The Montréal mob? Are you kidding?” But then she paused. And finally shook her head. “Non. No way.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was a coward. Great at filing, terrific at keeping my appointments in order. He was an officious little—” She stopped herself, remembering what had happened to him.
“Shit?” suggested Isabelle. “Why did you call him that?”
“That night, in the church in that little village—”
“Three Pines.”
“Whatever. When they murdered my uncle and tried to kill me, Frederick got me meds, but then took off. Didn’t even take me to a hospital. He was a coward.”
“He could’ve driven off when he heard the shots, but he waited to see—”
“If I was dead?”
“If you needed help.”
“Which I did. So why not take me to hospital? Never mind, you don’t know.”
But Lacoste did. At least, she knew what it was to lose your nerve.
It happened to seasoned cops. To hardened veterans in battle.
They suddenly broke. It was too much. They froze, or hid, or ran away.
Not through cowardice. These were brave men and women.
The fault lay in being asked to be superhuman. For far too long.
It happened to the best and the worst. Equally.
“But you’re right. The fact he waited and drove me that far, and didn’t leave me at the church or on some godforsaken back road to bleed to death, proves he wasn’t working for the mob.
They wanted me dead. He saved me, sorta.
He was just some scared little shit in over his head.
He would never align himself with the mob, and the mob wouldn’t want someone so unpredictable. ”
Lacoste wasn’t so sure. “You seemed surprised by the lake.”
“I am. As far as I know, he’d never visited a lake in his life. If he didn’t have asphalt under his feet, he got nervous. His family?”
“Has been told.” Lacoste studied the older woman, who had once held so much power, and was now just another former civil servant living on a pension.
And she made up her mind.
“Chief Inspector Gamache and I went to Ottawa to talk to the Prime Minister. To warn him. Just like you did, when you went there with Charles Langlois not long before he was killed.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Was it supposed to be a secret?”
“No. At least, not now. We needed it to be secret at the time so that Lauzon wouldn’t find out. Even then I had my suspicions.”
“Did you pass them on to the PM?”
“About his Deputy PM? Not in so many words, but he’s a smart man, he probably figured it out. After all, why would the Deputy PM’s Chief of Staff go to him, and not Lauzon himself?”
“And Woodford didn’t ask about Lauzon?”
“No. And even if he had, we had no proof of anything. It was a mutually frustrating meeting.”
Not unlike the one they’d had with the PM, thought Lacoste.
“Still, I think he knew. Woodford’s often underestimated,” Caron was saying. “I think he likes it that way. And I think it’s why the electorate like him. No chaos, no drama. He’s like the college prof you always wanted. Someone who’d round your grade up.”
It was, thought Lacoste, an interesting character study.
What had made Jeanne Caron so effective as the Deputy PM’s Chief of Staff, and chief fixer, was her ability to accurately read people. And, as a result, see their weaknesses, their disappointments, their dreams and fantasies and fragile delusions.
It meant she could manipulate them. And did. And, if necessary, break them. And did. The only one she’d gotten wrong was Gamache, when she thought, more than a decade ago, that she could break him. That mistake, that effort, had repercussions to this day.
“Thank you for telling me in person about Frederick. He was a little shit, but he was my little shit. I liked him.” She nodded, and the stuffing seemed to go out of her.
“That’s not the only reason I asked you here. Why didn’t you tell us about Frederick’s friendship with Charles Langlois?”
“It didn’t seem to matter. And they weren’t really friends. They just met up again recently. Does it matter?”
Lacoste’s phone dinged with a message from the Chief. She glanced down. “Excusez-moi.”
While Caron watched, slightly annoyed by the interruption, Isabelle scrolled through the photos the Chief had sent. Her brows had drawn together, then she shot off a reply. Hesitating for a moment, she decided to close her phone and put it on the table between them.
“You met Charles on one of your official visits to The Mission in Montréal.”
Caron nodded and Isabelle continued.
“With Frederick’s help you recruited him as a biologist, to look into your growing suspicion that your boss, Lauzon, was into something even worse than his normal payoffs and intimidation. Something to do with water security and Montréal.”
“Yes, yes. I told you that at the time, and it came out in the trials.”
“But without consulting you, Charles decided to volunteer at a nonprofit environmental group in Montréal, Action Québec Bleu, whose mandate is water security. Why didn’t he tell you about that?”
“I guess because it was just a personal interest. That little group had nothing to do with the attacks. Why’re you asking now? That’s all in the past.”
“As part of his work with AQB, he visited some remote lakes and took water samples.”
“So?” But Jeanne Caron’s clever mind did not let her down.
“Lakes? One in particular?” When Lacoste was silent, she took the next leap.
“Was that where Frederick’s body was found?
He was murdered at a lake Charles Langlois had visited?
” It was said almost to herself. “So there must be something important about that lake.”
“Your boss was paid tens of millions by major American corporations,” said Lacoste, “to give them controlling interest in some Canadian primary industries. Logging. Mining. It was illegal. You helped with the deals and to launder that money.”
“Some, true. But I didn’t know about the biggest payoffs. The bribes I helped with came from Canadian companies to get lucrative government contracts. I knew nothing about the American ones. Those were worth billions, not millions.”
Caron sounded annoyed at being cut out of the big payoffs.
There was, in fact, nothing that connected her to those huge bribes to her boss. What they didn’t know at the time of the poisoning plot, had only just discovered, was that those massive payoffs had been laundered through a small, insignificant, easily overlooked, struggling nonprofit.
Action Québec Bleu.
And now there was one more thing that linked AQB to the poison attack and what might be happening next.
Chief Inspector Gamache had just stuffed a twenty-dollar bill into the offering box at the door to Marie-Reine-du-Monde when the message from Isabelle Lacoste arrived.
Woman with Moretti is Margaux Chalifoux, head of AQB.
It wasn’t easy to surprise the head of homicide, but this message did just that. He stared at the message from Lacoste, then fired off a reply.
Ask Agent Fontaine to call me, please. Then pick me up at the basilica when you’re finished with Caron.
He took a seat in the quiet cathedral, breathing in the musky, slightly cloying fragrance of a century’s worth of incense. It smelled of guilt and sin and a promise of forgiveness and a place in heaven, if you ate fish on Fridays.
When the call came in, he gave Agent Fontaine her instructions.
Jeanne Caron put on her coat.
“You said that Frederick was shot in the back of the head. So, it would’ve been quick. He wouldn’t have suffered.”
“He didn’t suffer.”
Caron nodded, reached for the door handle, then turned back. “Thank you for that.”
“For what?”
“The lie. I don’t know why I even asked. We both know that while his death might’ve been instant and painless, the lead-up to the shot must have been … harrowing. I know. I saw it.”
For a split second Isabelle thought she was confessing that she’d been at Frederick’s execution, then she realized Caron was referring to Gamache’s.
Both men would have been kneeling. Hands tied behind their backs. Defenseless. Waiting. Praying perhaps. Heads pushed forward, the guns pressed to the base of their skulls. They’d have been in shock that it should have come to this …
It would have been … harrowing.
“I could save one,” said Caron. “But not the other. Poor little shit.”
Minutes later, Isabelle pulled the vehicle to the side of the busy street and Gamache jumped in, waving apologies to the drivers honking and gesturing.
“Where to?” she asked.
“Back home. You realizing it’s Chalifoux with Moretti is huge,” said the Chief. “I’ve sent Agent Fontaine to volunteer at Action Québec Bleu, undercover.”
“Good idea. She’s young and new, no one knows her yet. What about Shona Dorion? She’s volunteering there too.”
“I’ve sent a message to her to get out of there. It’s too dangerous now that we know AQB isn’t just implicated in the government bribes, but that the head of the organization is involved with the mob.”
He looked down at his phone.
Still no reply from Shona. He shifted uneasily in the passenger’s seat. Worried now. She hadn’t replied to his earlier message either, about not needing to pursue the other series of numbers on Charles’s map, as they now knew it was the password to get into his files.
He wrote a message to Agent Fontaine: Find Shona Dorion at AQB. Do nothing, just report to me.
As soon as they arrived home, they were met at the door by Jean-Guy.
“You need to see what we’ve found.” He dragged the two of them into the study before they’d had time to take off their boots and coats. “I didn’t want to risk writing or calling.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Nichol, equally excited.
Gamache took Jean-Guy’s seat. “What am I looking at?”