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And yet the young biologist and the elderly Abbot had taken great pains to hide it. Which was another reason Armand suspected there was more coming.
This was the first time since the arrests that the map had seen the light of day.
It was a risk. But all they had left was risk.
CHAPTER 3
“Merci.” Myrna accepted the bowl of café au lait just as Gabri threw himself into the armchair beside the hearth.
“So how’s the painting going?” asked Gabri.
Clara moaned.
“Let’s talk about something more cheerful,” said Myrna. “Like the frost warning.”
“Why did I call it Just before something happens?” Clara asked. “How do you paint nothing? Why didn’t I call it Something happened?”
“Or Just as something happens,” suggested Gabri. Which was not helpful.
“But isn’t that life?” Myrna asked, moving her pain au chocolat away from Gabri’s reach. “We’re sitting here calmly. But I’m sure something’s about to happen. It always is. For instance, Gabri was about to take my pastry.”
“Oh, dear God,” muttered Clara. “I really am fucked.”
“Or,” said Gabri, “are you about to be fucked?”
Jean-Guy stepped closer until his nose was practically pressed against the map. Then he turned to Armand.
“We still don’t know why Charles visited this specific lake. There’re hundreds to choose from. Why this one? There’s nothing there.”
The two men stared, willing the map to cough up one, just one more, of its secrets.
Jean-Guy was right, and yet wrong. There was nothing at the lake itself. They’d looked. But something had been written on the lake. Numbers and symbols. In Charles’s hand. There were also numbers scrawled on other lakes, but they’d realized those were dossier numbers. Approvals for the illegal sale of primary industries to foreign investors, given by Marcus Lauzon, the former Deputy Prime Minister, in exchange for massive payoffs.
Though illegal, it had nothing to do with the poisoning plot.
So what did those other numbers mean, on that one lake. The last one Charles Langlois visited before he was murdered. But stare as they might, the figures still held on to their secret.
Jean-Guy now pointed to the bottom of the paper. “It looks like he crossed into Vermont, but there’re no lakes or rivers marked up.”
Eager to make his point, he forgot to turn toward Armand, and now had to repeat himself.
“True.” Armand looked at the faint line the biologist had drawn leading from Canada into the States.
“What is it?” Jean-Guy asked.
Armand’s expression had become dissatisfied, even frustrated. “We still haven’t found Charles’s laptop. It’s possible the conspirators didn’t know about it and the map. I was only asked about the notebooks.”
“Asked”? thought Jean-Guy. Could putting a gun to Armand’s head really be called “asking”? The deputy commissioner of the RCMP was beyond being questioned. He’d been killed in the water-treatment plant. The fact the second most powerful Mountie was involved in the plot had caused a national scandal and all but paralyzed the RCMP. They were still sorting out the mess.
“We need to find that laptop,” said Armand.
“Agreed. We’re trying. But if it was that important, wouldn’t Charles have told you where to find it? We found his map in the monastery and the notebooks where he hid them with his family. But no laptop. We’ve looked everywhere.” Beauvoir hesitated, hating to say what he suspected. “Is it possible, patron, that they found the laptop and destroyed it? Maybe that’s why they didn’t ask.”
Armand was quiet. That was a disconcerting thought.
He’d stared at Jean-Guy as the younger man spoke, but like most people talking to the deaf, Jean-Guy had started off slowly, clearly, then picked up speed, so that lip-reading became more and more difficult.
But the truth was, Armand only picked up a fraction of what was said that way. The rest he read in the raised brow, the slightly furrowed forehead, the narrowed eyes. The uncontrollable blush or pallor. The hands. The smile. Their body language spoke volumes.
