Chapter 19 #2
"My research suggests the restraints were applied in a specific sequence," I say. "Wrists first, then the secondary anchor points, with the restriction element added last. A bottom-up configuration. Is that consistent with what you saw?"
The sequence I just described is wrong. Luc's reconstruction shows a top-down configuration. The restriction element applied first, anchored to the overhead point, secondary restraints added afterward to create the appearance of a progressive scene.
The difference matters. A bottom-up configuration is standard for the type of scene Claire and étienne practiced.
A top-down configuration is unusual and suggests someone who was staging an outcome rather than conducting a scene.
Only two categories of people would know the actual sequence: investigators who read the full technical analysis, and whoever put Claire in those restraints.
Gaudet tilts his head. The gesture is small. A fraction of a degree. His eyes stay warm. His posture stays open. But the tilt is the first time I've seen him react before speaking.
He's processing my question against what he knows, and what he knows is more than what the report contains.
"I believe so," he says. "Though my memory of the specifics is imperfect after so many years."
He's lying. I can feel it the way you feel a current shift in water. The warmth is still there, but something underneath it just recalibrated.
In my ear, Luc's breathing changes. Sebastien says something I can't make out, muffled, directed at Luc rather than me. His voice, even clipped and distant through the earpiece, lands low in my belly. Involuntary. Infuriating.
I push further. This is the moment Sebastien's observations told me to push. Gaudet's ego is the crack. His belief in his own precision is the thing he can't tolerate having questioned.
I need to describe his work as sloppy, and I need to do it while looking like I'm just a researcher who got the details wrong.
"The impression from the records is that the staging was somewhat haphazard," I say. "Opportunistic. As if whoever was in the room didn't fully understand the equipment and improvised with what was available."
There it is.
The warmth doesn't vanish. It thins. Like a cloud passing across the sun, the light shifts and what's behind it is briefly visible. His jaw tightens by a millimeter. His fingers, folded on the table, press together with slightly more force.
"I believe that's an inaccurate characterization," he says.
"How so?"
"The configuration was deliberate. The overhead anchor was the primary point, not the wrists.
The restriction element was integrated first because it's structurally necessary.
You don't build from the extremities inward.
You build from the load-bearing point down.
" His voice is patient. Corrective. A teacher explaining something to a student who doesn't quite understand.
"Whoever arranged that room understood exactly what they were doing. "
My pen stops moving. In my ear, absolute silence. Then Luc, very quietly: "Got it."
Perpetrator knowledge. The thing Andy said would build a case. Gaudet just handed it to me while correcting my homework.
I should stop. I should close my notebook, thank him for his time, and walk out of here with the recording that will end him.
That would be the smart play. That's what Sebastien's read on Gaudet says to do at this stage. Gaudet has given me enough without realizing he's given me anything.
But I'm Claire's sister. The man who killed her just explained her murder to me like I'd gotten a book report wrong. The discipline that has kept me functional for years cracks. Not visibly. Not in a way that shows on my face. But I ask one more question.
"That level of knowledge is impressive," I say. "For someone who arrived after the fact."
The silence between us changes texture.
Gaudet's eyes lock on mine, and the man looking back at me isn't the mentor, the mediator, the community pillar. It's assessment. Cold, rapid, thorough.
He's calculating.
"You're not writing a book," he says.
"I am writing a book." My voice stays level. My hands stay still. Every cell in my body is screaming to stand up and walk toward the door. The door is behind me. Moving toward it means turning my back. "It's just not the book you expected."
Gaudet stands. The chair doesn't scrape. He rises with a control that makes the movement feel inevitable rather than sudden.
His gaze sweeps the room. The windows, the exits, the ceiling tiles. He's reading the space like Sebastien reads a room. The comparison turns my stomach because the skill is identical even if the purpose is opposite.
"You're wired," he says. Not a question.
"Prosper."
"Stand up."
The earpiece crackles. "Natalie, we're moving." Luc's voice is tight and urgent. "Hold on."
I stand. I pick up my bag. The front door is behind me and I take the first step toward it.
Gaudet's hand closes around my upper arm. The grip is calibrated, just enough force to stop my forward motion without leaving a mark. He knows how hands leave evidence.
"This way," he says, and steers me toward the far wall.
The joint in the wall doesn't register until his free hand presses it and a panel shifts inward. Behind it, a narrow corridor runs into darkness.
The old architecture. Before the renovation. A service passage that vanished from the blueprints when the property was converted.
Gaudet knew it was here because he knows this building from before. Cole's walk-through found every exit on the blueprints. This one isn't on them.
He pushes me through. The panel closes behind us.
My earpiece goes dead. No static. No Luc. Just silence, thick and close, and the corridor is narrow enough that the walls feel like they're pressing inward. Emergency lighting throws a yellow wash across concrete that predates the renovation by decades.
Gaudet releases my arm and positions himself between me and the panel. Between me and the only way back to the room where my recording was running and my team was listening.
"Give me your phone," he says.
I don't move.
"Natalie." His voice has changed. The warmth is gone, and what replaces it isn't rage or cruelty. It's competence. The same focused, methodical precision that made him beloved in a community built on trust. He turns that precision toward control with surgical focus. "Your phone. Now."
I hand it over. He drops it. His heel comes down once, deliberate. The screen spiders and goes dark.
Then his hands find the transmitter. He knows where to look. Wires go in predictable places, and someone who has spent his life reading bodies knows where to search. He peels it free and crushes it between his fingers. The components snap with a sound like small bones breaking.
"There," he says. "Now it's just us."
Except it isn't. And his believing it is might be the first genuinely stupid thing Gaudet has done in years.
The second recorder is still running, nestled in a place Ezra chose specifically because a pat-down wouldn't find it.
And everything the first transmitter captured before Gaudet crushed it was broadcasting live to the van.
Rapier already has it. Gaudet searched for what he expected.
He found what he expected. And his confidence in having neutralized the evidence is the thing that will destroy him.
I know what he's doing. I've studied his methodology for years. Isolate the target. Control the environment. Remove witnesses. Construct a plausible alternative explanation.
With Claire, the equipment provided the cover. With me, the building itself provides it. A fall in an old service corridor. An accident in a space no one knew existed. A researcher who wandered into an unsafe area of a renovated property.
Claire would appreciate the irony. Her sister, the true-crime author, becoming a chapter in someone else's book.
I know his pattern, and the knowing is what keeps me standing instead of screaming.
"Claire figured you out," I say. My voice doesn't shake. I don't know how. "She saw what you did to Cécile, and she started asking the right questions."
"Claire was a child playing detective," Gaudet says.
He's moving me deeper into the corridor, one slow step at a time.
I let him. Every step is another second.
Every second is time for the people in the van to solve a problem they didn't know existed.
"She had no idea what she'd stumbled into.
She believed the community would protect her if she raised concerns through proper channels. "
"And you sat on the committee that handled those channels."
"I built those channels." The correction is automatic. Reflexive. The ego I'm counting on, surfacing through a crack in his control. "The mediation process was my design. The reporting structure, the incident reviews, the follow-up protocols. All of it. Elysium's safety infrastructure was my work."
"And you used your own system to identify vulnerable members and isolate them from the community's protection."
His jaw flexes. "Cécile was troubled. She needed guidance."
"Cécile needed someone who wasn't using the support structure to groom her."
Another step deeper into the corridor. Another second. I've lost count of how long we've been down here. The conversation has been running long enough that the adrenaline has shifted from spike to sustained burn, and my legs are starting to feel it.
Above us, somewhere beyond the concrete and the old brick, a team of very competent people is trying to find the door that doesn't appear on any blueprint.
Cole walked this building. He measured rooms. If the interior dimensions don't match the exterior footprint, he'll find the gap.
They'll find it. I believe this like I believe in gravity. Functionally and without negotiation.