A Better Man
- Автор: Пенни Луиза
- Серия: Chief Inspector Gamache #15
- Год: 2019
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Publishing Group
- ISBN: 9781466873711
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «A Better Man». Краткое содержание книги:
It's Gamache's first day back as head of the homicide department, a job he temporarily shares with his previous second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Floodwaters are rising across the province. In the middle of the turmoil, a father approaches Gamache, pleading for help in finding his daughter.
As crisis piles upon crisis, Gamache tries to hold off the encroaching chaos, and realizes the search for Vivienne Godin should be abandoned. But with a daughter of his own, he finds himself developing a profound, and perhaps unwise, empathy for her distraught father.
Increasingly hounded by the question, how would you feel..., he resumes the search.
As the rivers rise, and the social media onslaught against Gamache becomes crueler, a body is discovered. And in the tumult, mistakes are made.
In the next novel in this constantly surprising series that deepens and darkens as it evolves (The New York Times Book Review), Gamache must face a horrific possibility, and a burning question.
What would you do if your child's killer walked free?
She had to make sure.
“Oh, shit,” she heard herself whisper.
Armand was physically holding Carl Tracey around the abdomen, while the man kicked and squirmed.
Jean-Guy hurried over to help contain him, but just as he arrived, Tracey slowly stopped thrashing, and a moment later he was standing still, clasped against Gamache’s body.
Both men were staring.
“Stop!” This time it was Gamache who was shouting at Billy.
The floodlight on the top of the backhoe was pointing at the bucket of debris Billy had just dropped onto the field, next to the water rushing out of the Bella Bella.
“What’s that?” asked Reine-Marie, taking a step closer.
Beauvoir saw then why Gamache had stopped the digging. Why Tracey had stopped fighting. And why he’d been so hysterical to stop the digging.
“What’s that?” Gabri shouted at Clara and Myrna. He tried to keep the panic out of his voice. “What’re you saying?”
The two women were waving their arms and yelling something about the river. If he had to guess, and it seemed he might have to, whatever they were shouting was not good news.
Billy went to dismount his machine, but Armand waved him to stay where he was. And told Reine-Marie the same thing.
Then he and Jean-Guy slowly approached the trench.
“Armand, Gabri’s saying something. Something’s happened.”
“What?” yelled Billy from the cab of the machine.
“What?” yelled Gabri again, completely forgetting he had Reine-Marie on the line.
“What?” came the tinny voice.
“The water level’s going down!”
Gabri and Reine-Marie heard it at the same moment. Clara’s shout. And then Reine-Marie heard shouts of joy. Even Ruth was cheering. At least she thought that cackling was a cheer.
“The water level’s dropping!” Reine-Marie reported. “It’s worked. It’s dropping.”
Billy gave a whoop. But while both Armand and Jean-Guy looked over, Armand smiling with relief and Jean-Guy nodding, they quickly looked away.
In the harsh beam from Billy’s backhoe, something pink was lying in the muck.
Armand knelt and reached out.
It was a bright pink duffel bag. With a name tag. A single embossed letter.
V.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“What’ve you done with her?” Gamache demanded.
“Nothing. I’ve done nothing. Maybe it isn’t hers.”
“It’s hers,” said Gamache. “It’s Vivienne’s, and you know it.”
Tracey recognized it. But Gamache also recognized something. The look on Carl Tracey’s face. He’d seen it before, when a piece of damning evidence, thought hidden, was found.
It was the unmistakable look of dread.
While he stayed with Tracey and the duffel bag, Beauvoir went to the river and was walking the banks. Shining his flashlight, to see if he could see something else. Someone else.
As he walked, Beauvoir’s heart thudded in his chest, in his wrists, at his temples, and in his throat. His skin tingled. His face, in the cold, was flushed.
He’d spent much of his adult life looking for bodies, at bodies. What was out there didn’t scare him.
What frightened him was what was in there. Inside himself. What dark thing had been aroused, awoken, when he realized he was in the presence of someone who’d almost certainly thrown his wife and unborn child into a freezing river. To die.
It was all Jean-Guy Beauvoir could do not to turn around. March back to Tracey. Tell Armand and Reine-Marie and Billy to look away while he forced Tracey to a kneeling position, took out his gun. Placed it at the base of the monster’s skull. And fired.
Jean-Guy paced. Pointing the flashlight this way and that. Trying to settle his mind and focus on the job at hand.
What he saw were shards of ice, rocks, roots uprooted. Debris. Rushing water. But no Vivienne.
At Beauvoir’s request, Billy had turned his backhoe so that its light faced the river.
From the cab, Billy Williams watched Jean-Guy pace. He knew torment when he saw it.
Then he looked over at Armand. Standing right up against Carl Tracey. Not side by side but facing him, in an act of extreme and ghastly intimacy.
Billy Williams knew that what he was witnessing was also an act of love. Not for Tracey, of course, but for Jean-Guy.
Armand had sent the younger man away to, on the surface, do the worst job. To look for the body of a young woman and her unborn child. But in reality, Armand was saving Jean-Guy. From himself.
Gamache was standing that close to Carl Tracey so that Beauvoir didn’t have to.
When Tracey backed up, Gamache moved forward. Not letting the weaselly man step away. Get away. Gamache was at least two inches taller, twenty pounds heavier, and twenty-five years older than Tracey.
He had the advantage of height, weight, control, and sobriety.
But Tracey had the greater advantage of knowledge. He knew where Vivienne was.
Gamache’s boots thucked in the mud as he stepped even closer to Tracey.
“Tell us,” Gamache repeated, his eyes not leaving Tracey’s. “Where’s Vivienne?”
“I don’t know. She went away,” said Tracey. “Ran away with some guy she was—”
“Enough,” said Gamache. “What did you do with her?” Then he modulated his tone. Corralling, with difficulty, his anger. His voice, when he spoke again, was unnaturally reasonable. Coaxing a brute to do one decent thing. “Tell us, Carl. Let us give her some rest.”
Behind them, the Bella Bella ran off into the mucky field. The night air was crackling with cold and outrage.
“I have no idea where she is. Maybe she got drunk and fell into the river. Or maybe whoever got her pregnant tossed her in.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Armand saw Reine-Marie take a step closer. Her hand gripped the phone, as though it were a baseball bat.
Somehow this vile man had managed to stir up in Reine-Marie an outrage that bordered on violence.
Gamache’s own breath, through his nostrils, came out in long, warm puffs. Like a bull longing to charge.
He barely registered that behind him, Billy Williams was speaking.
“There’s no sign of her,” called Beauvoir. “Billy says he thinks the duffel bag came from farther upriver.”
“There’s an old logging road about a kilometer from here.” Billy waved behind him. “A bridge goes over the Bella Bella. It’s been closed for a while now, but hunters sometimes use it in the fall.”
Jean-Guy translated what was said.
Gamache turned and looked at the .22 leaning against the backhoe. A hunting rifle.
“Can you show us?” he asked.
“Yurz.”
“What about the bag?” Reine-Marie asked.
“We’ll take it with us,” said Gamache.
“You can’t,” said Tracey.
“Then we’ll open it here,” said Beauvoir.
Gamache asked Reine-Marie to use her phone to record the search of Vivienne’s bag while Billy took his place beside Tracey.
“No,” said Tracey. “Stop. It doesn’t belong to you. It’s on my property. It belongs to me.”
“It belongs to your wife,” said Beauvoir, unzipping it.
The duffel bag contained all the things you’d expect someone to pack who was going away for a few days. T-shirts, a pair of jeans. Some shorts. Pajamas. Underwear. Toiletries.
“What are these?” Gamache held up a bottle of pills and read off the label, “Mifegymiso.”
When the others shook their heads, Gamache held them out for Tracey to see.
“How should I know? Probably some street drug she picked up, the—”