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He ejected one of the bullets. It was not standard issue.

Hollow point? Illegal, brutal. Effective, if the effect you wanted was to blow a hole clean through another human being.

No. This was something else entirely.

He stared at the bullet for a moment, his mind whirring.

Replacing it, he looked around. Someone had broken into their apartment between the time he and Reine-Marie had stopped there that afternoon on their way to the Louvre, and now. Was anything else changed? Added? Taken? Without a thorough search, he couldn’t tell. And he didn’t have time for that.

Who’d done this? Claude Dussault? Irena Fontaine? Thierry Girard?

Xavier Loiselle?

And why? He looked at the firearm in his hand. What was the purpose?

The water stopped running, and he knew he had moments to decide what to do.

He slipped the gun into his coat pocket and bent over the box once again. Then, he hesitated. And changed his mind.

Walking quickly over to the bookcase, he pulled a few books out of a high shelf and hid the gun there.

When Séverine Arbour reappeared, she found Gamache going through the box.

“What’s that?” she asked, joining him.

“These are the things Stephen had on his desk, and what the hospital gave us after he was hit by the truck. The investigators have kept his laptop and phone, but everything else is here.”

“What’re you looking for?”

She’d been a bit surprised by the apartment. It was smaller than she’d expected. Most powerful people, men in particular, liked homes that reflected what they saw as their place on the ladder. Which was, in reality, a few rungs lower than their egos believed.

This place was petite, beamed, with bookcases and a fireplace. The floors were parquet, in the classic herringbone pattern.

An old oak dining table shared space with a comfortable sofa and armchairs. The kitchen, through an archway, was compact and dated.

But it was calm, peaceful even. It smelled of coffee and wood. And felt like home.

“Neodymium,” he said.

As she watched, he dug into his pocket and dropped a handful of coins into the box.

It was such a bizarre thing to do, for a moment she wondered about his sanity.

But he looked completely, intensely sane.

Stirring the contents with his hand, he picked up the coins along with some screws and the Allen wrench.

“Nothing.”

And she understood. If something in there was made of neodymium, it would pull metal to it. And magnetize what it touched.

He sat back in the chair and stared at her. “So what magnetized the nickels?”

“Nickels?”

“Stephen had two Canadian nickels that were stuck together. We thought they were glued, the seal was that strong, but when I saw that video about neodymium, I realized they might’ve been magnetized.”

“Which would mean your friend had a sample of the neodymium,” she said. “That’s what had magnetized the coins. Is that what you thought was in the box? The neodymium itself?”