A Trick of the Light

He knew that. Knew the reason suspects and even colleagues, while frustrating and maddening, hadn’t brought him this close to physical violence was because they couldn’t hurt him deeply.

But someone he cared about could. And did.

You’re no better than the hacker.

Was that true?

Of course it wasn’t, thought Gamache, impatiently. That was just Beauvoir lashing out.

But that didn’t make him wrong.

Gamache sighed again, feeling as though he couldn’t quite get enough air.

Perhaps he should tell Beauvoir he was in fact investigating the leak. Should trust him. But it wasn’t an issue of trust. It was one of protection. He wouldn’t expose Beauvoir to this. If he’d ever been tempted, the events of the last quarter hour cured Gamache of that. Beauvoir was too vulnerable, too wounded still. Whoever had leaked the video was both powerful and vindictive. And Beauvoir, in his weakened condition, was no match for that.

No, this was a task for those who were expendable. In their careers and otherwise.

Gamache got up and went to turn the computer off. The video had restarted and before the Chief could turn it off he saw again Jean Guy Beauvoir gunned down. Falling. Hitting the concrete floor.

Until this moment Chief Inspector Gamache hadn’t realized that Jean Guy Beauvoir never really got up.

TWENTY-FOUR

Chief Inspector Gamache made himself a pot of coffee and settled in.

It was no use trying to get back to sleep now. He looked at the clock on his desk. Four forty-three. Not all that long until he’d get up anyway. Really.

Placing his mug on a stack of paper he tapped the keyboard. Waited for the information to come up, then tapped some more. He clicked and scrolled. Read. And read some more.

The glasses had proved useful after all. He wondered what he might have done had he had a gun. But that didn’t bear thinking of.

Gamache tapped and read. And read some more.

It had proven easy to get the broad strokes of Chief Justice Thierry Pineault’s life. Canadians enjoyed an open society. Trumpeted it. Reveled in being the very model of transparency, where decisions were made in full view. Where public and powerful figures were accountable and their lives open to examination.

Such was the conceit.

And, like most open societies, few bothered to test the limits, to see where and when open became closed. But there was always a limit. Chief Inspector Gamache had found it a few minutes earlier.

Gamache had examined the public records of Chief Justice Pineault’s professional life. His rise as a prosecutor, his term as professor of law at the Université Laval. His ascent to the bench. And then to Chief Justice.

He was widowed with three children and four grandchildren. Three surviving. One not.

Gamache knew the story. Superintendent Brunel had told him. How the child had been killed by a drunk driver. Gamache wanted to find out who that driver was, and whether it was, as he suspected, Pineault himself.

What else could have shattered the man so much he’d hit bottom? Stopped drinking? Turned his life around. Had the dead grandchild given Thierry Pineault a second chance at life?

That could also explain the strange connection between the Chief Justice and young Brian. Both knew what it felt like to hear the soft thud. The hesitation of the car.

And to know what it was.

Gamache sat at his desk and tried to imagine what that would be like. Tried to imagine being behind the wheel of his Volvo, knowing what had just happened. Getting out.

But his mind stopped there. Some things were beyond imagining.

To clear his mind, Gamache went back to the keyboard and renewed the search for information on the accident. But there was none.

The door of the open society had slowly swung shut. And locked.

But in the quiet Incident Room, in the first glow of a new day, Chief Inspector Gamache slipped below the surface of the public face of Québec. The public face of the Chief Justice. Into the place secrets were kept. Or at least, confidences were kept. The private files of public people.

There he found information about Thierry Pineault’s drinking, his at times erratic behavior, his run-ins with other justices. And then a gap. A three-month leave.

And his return.

The private files also showed that systematically, over the past two years, Thierry Pineault had been calling up all his judgments from the bench. And at least one case had been officially reviewed. And reversed.

And there was another case. Not a Supreme Court case, not one he’d attended, at least not as a judge. But one Chief Justice Pineault had gone back to, over and over and over again. The file described an open-and-shut case, of a child killed by a drunk driver.

But there was no more information. The file had been locked away, in an area even Gamache couldn’t get to.

He sat back in his chair and took his glasses off, tapping them rhythmically on his knee.

*   *   *

Agent Isabelle Lacoste wondered if anyone had ever actually died of boredom, or if she would be the first.