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Though Armand did not go to many parties anymore, and the listening part had changed, after what had happened.

Perhaps the biggest reason Armand would never be taken for a homicide cop was what Jean-Guy saw now. The smile. Radiant, it radiated from the corners of his eyes and mouth, cutting across the worry lines.

Here was a clearly happy man despite, or perhaps because of, all that he’d knelt beside. All that he’d seen.

And he’d seen the worst. But Armand Gamache had also seen the best, and insisted his people see it too and not get mired in the all-too-obvious darkness.

“How else are we going to survive,” he told them, “unless we also see the kindness, the courage, the decency in people? There’s more goodness than cruelty in this world.”

And he believed it.

“I smelled coffee and thought it must be you,” Armand explained, his voice only slightly louder than it should have been. He’d become good at modulating it. “Ruth has a whole other smell. Besides, when you and Annie and the children spend the weekend, you always join me here.”

“Upstairs, yes, but not down here.” Jean-Guy spoke slowly, making sure he faced his father-in-law. “Why’re you here?”

The basement, with its low, acoustic-tiled ceiling and florescent lights, wasn’t just gloomy, it was cold. Jean-Guy looked at his untouched mug of warm coffee, then held it out.

“For you.”

“Me? Isn’t it yours?”

“No. I’ve had mine. I brought it for you.”

Armand studied him, then took the mug.

Like Ruth upstairs, Armand held the warm mug in his cold hands for a moment. He knew perfectly well the coffee was Jean-Guy’s. But he also knew to refuse the kind gesture would have been much worse than accepting.

He took a long sip and exhaled. “Merci.” He saw the pleasure on Jean-Guy’s face, then turned and gestured at the wall of the church basement.

“That’s why I’m here.”

Evelyn Tardiff’s breath came out in puffs as she walked through the chilly morning. The streets of north end Montréal were quiet. It was going to be one of those picture-perfect autumn days. Bright and fresh, the air crisp and clean.

As she made her way to the farmers’ market, she wondered how many of the people she passed would be dead now, had the plot to poison the drinking water succeeded. At least half was the official estimate, maybe more. Maybe that child across the street. Probably that elderly couple walking arm in arm toward the bagel place.

Don Moretti blamed her, probably rightly, for Gamache managing to stop the plot. But there was an advantage to what had happened. Or didn’t happen.

Not only were the investigations and postmortems focused elsewhere, but everyone now believed those responsible were behind bars and the water supply safe.

But water security had all sorts of meaning. The danger to it was not simply from pollution or even deliberate poisoning. A whole new threat was emerging globally, and Canada was about to demonstrate to the rest of the world how insecure a water-rich country could be.

It surprised her that no one saw it. It seemed so obvious.

Yes, Moretti and the others were home free as long as no one thought to dig deeper into the notebooks. As long as they were the only things Gamache had found.

As long as Joe Moretti hadn’t seen, hadn’t sensed, the one who was really in charge. Far more powerful than him. Far viler. Vastly more dangerous.

Some malady is coming upon us. We wait. We wait.

And the head of Organized Crime for the Sûreté knew that wait was almost over.

Armand had pinned a creased and marked-up map of the province of Québec to the wall of the church basement and was staring at it. He swayed slightly, in contemplation. Or perhaps exhaustion.

Jean-Guy had seen this map before. In fact, he’d been the one to find it in the monastery on the shores of that remote lake. They’d studied it closely, knowing if the biologist and the Abbot had hidden it, it must be important.

But try as they might, the map had yielded precious little.

When the poison plot had been uncovered and the perpetrators arrested, Armand had rolled up the map and hidden it in a cylinder under his desk at home. Telling no one except his closest confidants about the find. After all, he’d told himself, he wasn’t concealing evidence. The map had nothing to do with the poison plot.