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Her tongue stud clicked out, Fuck me, while her mind worked fast. She had to get a message to Gamache. He thought that the caretaker was Fleming. The coroner had told them that. But clearly that was wrong. It was Godin, and he was still out there.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she muttered.

Finding the phone icon, she went to hit it, but her hands were trembling so badly she dropped the phone into the dead leaves. Falling to her knees, she scooped it up and, taking a deep breath, she steadied herself.

“You’ve seen worse, you’ve seen worse, you’ve seen worse,” she muttered to herself. Harriet wondered if that could possibly be true. It was also a strange, though oddly comforting, mantra. One she knew she could use for the rest of her life.

Nothing could ever be worse than this.

Though she was wrong.

Amelia hit the icon for the Chief Inspector’s number.

Nothing. Nothing.

“Fuck.” No signal. They were too deep into the woods.

She composed a text and hit send in the hopes that as soon as even a weak signal appeared, it would go.

“Come on,” she said, checking her compass. “We have to get out of here.”

“You think?” said Harriet, clutching the club and racing after her.

Armand stood in front of The Paston Treasure.

John Fleming was everywhere in this painting, a world not of curiosities but of grotesque bits and pieces of a madman’s mind.

Here were the carved faces of John Fleming’s seven victims. The Beast of Babylon.

Here was the reference to the Québec Bridge, the tragedy that formed and informed the engineer’s ring.

Here was the sheet music. “By the Waters of Babylon.” The song John Fleming used to hum.

And there was more. Things he hadn’t noted before. The small unicorn stickers, like Fiona had had as a child. Like those used in the terrible ledger. There was the model. Like the ones he’d mistakenly thought were Sam’s, but again were Fiona’s.

Were they put there not just to point him to Fiona, but to taunt him with earlier mistakes?

The clocks worried him. They were all set to the same time.

Eleven thirty. And the clock sent to the Mongeau home the day Sylvie died, and left at the Old Train Station by Boisfranc. It was also set to half past eleven.

He looked at his watch. It was ten past eleven.

Then his eyes went back to the painting. And the face, bright, almost illuminated, of the little girl. She looked familiar, but Armand didn’t know if it was just because he’d been staring at the painting for three days now.

Then he had it. He stepped back, as though shoved. The face was Reine-Marie, as a child. From the photograph taken at her first communion. She never looked at it, but he did, sometimes. Marveling at the resemblance between his wife and their granddaughters.

Then, like a building collapsing, everything fell. But instead of falling apart, it fell into place.

Les Puces. Lac Manitou. Mountweazel. The DNA. Sylvie. The God-fearing man. The Fallen Angel. The book. The blood, so much blood. The timing. Three years. The time.

Eleven thirty.

“Ohhh, no,” he whispered.

He dashed off a three-word text to his entire team. Just as he hit send, he heard the Incident Room door open. And a hum. A hymn.

“Armand?”