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“Prints?” asked Armand, still staring at the cracked but mended cassette.

“We’ve lifted them. They’re being analyzed along with DNA and other material,” said Isabelle.

God bless Reine-Marie, whose parental instincts had told her the father of the archivist who’d died in that crash along with Flossy Fuller might have kept something. Something that would have had his little girl’s voice. Something that could not possibly affect any investigation into the “accident.”

The cassette had been thrown from the car and was found half buried in the mud. It had his daughter’s careful, rounded, writing.

OHII. Oral History Two, Reine-Marie had explained. The one found in the burned-out car said OHIII. The third tape. If that was the third, Reine-Marie reckoned there’d be a second. And she’d found it in the possession of a grieving father.

His treasure. As smashed and broken as he was. Shattered and irreparable.

He’d dug it out, and carefully rubbed it off, and brought it home.

Almost fifty years later, the long-retired cop had let it go, entrusting it to a stranger. To Reine-Marie Gamache. An archivist like his little girl.

“The tape was at the end,” said Jean-Guy. “We’ve rewound it to the beginning.”

While Armand put his phone on the desk and hit record, Jean-Guy placed the tape into the old cassette player and clicked it closed.

They looked at each other. There was no guarantee it would work. And, even if it did, that it was Flossy Fuller and not someone else the archivist had recorded.

“You do the honors,” said the Chief Inspector.

Isabelle Lacoste pressed down on the play paddle.

“What do you mean, ‘And then there was the murder’?”

Solange Péladeau’s voice, now familiar to the Sûreté officers, came out of the tiny speaker.

So young and so near the end of her life. Perhaps just hours.

Armand, Jean-Guy, Isabelle stared down at the machine as they listened.

Flossy laughed. Not full-throated but nervous. “I’m not sure I should say anything. He’s still alive, you know.”

“Who is?”

“Your father’s Captain Péladeau, isn’t he? With the Sûreté.” There was a pause. “I probably should’ve said something at the time, but I was afraid.” Another pause.

Solange was a gifted interviewer, even at her young age. Instead of pushing, she waited. Allowing Flossy to consider.

She would have made a great archivist, thought Armand. Doing the math, he realized Solange could have even become Reine-Marie’s mentor at the National Archives of Québec. Had she not been murdered because of this tape.

Because a murderer had found out, through an article in a local paper, that Flossy was being interviewed for the oral history project for Canada’s Centennial celebration.

He was afraid she’d finally tell all.

The homicide officers were quiet. Not a word spoken, barely a breath taken. As they too waited for Flossy to do just that.

And then the thin voice began again.

“I was his cleaning woman, you know. His ‘bonne,’ as we used to say.”

“Whose?”

“Thomas Morrow’s, of course. The murdered man.”

The three cops lifted their eyes to each other.