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“Yes.”
“… he did.”
“Oui.”
She looked at him. “You did too.”
“Oui.”
It was a small club. With a horrific entrance requirement. Armand quickly patted his pockets. The photos from the file. He’d put them in his jacket. The one he’d used to staunch Robert’s wound. It was still upstairs.
He’d have to go back up and get them before anyone else joined the club.
Gamache sent the DNA results from Fiona’s and Godin’s files to Dr. Harris, then he called Jean-Guy and told him about Mongeau.
“I can’t find the caretaker,” said Gamache.
“And I can’t find Godin. Fleming can’t be both of them. He’s fucking with us. What do you want to bet he’s killed one of them, and just wants us to waste time and effort looking for both. Who do you think is Fleming, Godin or Boisfranc?”
“Look, at this stage I think I might be Fleming.”
Beauvoir laughed. “I’ll organize another search for Boisfranc and send out an alert. Can we get Boisfranc’s DNA?”
“I have it. Dr. Harris is doing a swab now. We just need to get Fleming’s real DNA results to compare.”
“I’ve pushed the prosecutor’s office, but they just laughed when I told them Fleming might’ve escaped. I’ve sent them the warden’s confession. I’ll call the head prosecutor. Why would Fleming want to kill the minister? Why then and not when he killed Sylvie?”
“I questioned Robert this afternoon about Boisfranc. Maybe Robert decided to give Boisfranc a chance to explain. If the caretaker is Fleming, Robert would’ve inadvertently warned him.”
It was like the minister to do that. And he’d led Robert right into it.
And yet, even that didn’t ring quite true. As Beauvoir had said, why not kill both the Mongeaus? Fleming had never been squeamish about a body count.
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss / There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.
There was, Gamache knew, a reason for this. But he’d have to go deeper into the cave to find it. And the wicked secret.
“I’m going back up to Emergency. I left Ruth there.”
“Ruth? Jesus. Like those people aren’t suffering enough. I’ll continue the search for Godin. It’ll be too dark in the woods soon, and we’ll have to call it off ’til morning.”
Armand was just leaving when Dr. Harris called him over.
“I have the results, but there’s a problem. Look.”
He leaned into the microscope. As head of homicide, he’d studied innumerable DNA results and had a practiced eye. “Which is which?”
“The one on the left is Godin. The middle slide is the woman’s DNA profile. On the right is, well, the men.”
He turned his head from the slides to look at her. “Men?”
“Yes. The scraper thing was contaminated. There were two sets of DNA. Both male. Maybe yours. Maybe someone else’s. Someone else handled the scraper.”
“Damn,” he said, and went back to the microscope. “Looks like Fiona and Godin aren’t related.”
“Agreed, but I need to look more closely. There are similarities between hers and the contaminated one. But with the cross contamination, it’s impossible to tell. I will say, just my guess, that the person who handled it last is probably the relative.”
And that, Gamache knew, was the caretaker. Claude Boisfranc.
