Ruth.
But. But. There. In her eyes. Was a glint, a gleam.
With all the brushstrokes. All the detail. All the color, the painting, finally came down to one tiny dot.
Ruth as the Virgin Mary saw something in the distance. Barely visible. Hardly there. More a suggestion.
In a bitter old woman’s near-blind eyes, Clara Morrow had painted hope.
Beauvoir knew that most people who looked at the painting saw the despair. It was hard to miss. But what they did miss was the whole point of the painting. That one dot.
The few who got it, though, never forgot it. Dealers and collectors then went back and discovered more treasures in Clara’s odd, sometimes fantastical, sometimes deceptively conventional portraits.
But it was Ruth who’d made her reputation and career. Ruth and a dot of light.
Beauvoir nodded to the portrait and heard the old poet snarl, “Numbnuts.”
“You old hag,” he murmured.
The agents, working in the study, looked at him, but he just gave them a curt nod to continue.
Chief Inspector Beauvoir walked around the room, trying not to get in anyone’s way. He paused at the mantel, to look at the photographs.
Baumgartner with friends. With politicians. At business banquets. More photos of his children. One of Baumgartner and his now ex-wife. They looked good together. A confident and attractive couple. Then Jean-Guy picked up a small picture in a silver frame. It was black and white. This must have been his parents.
The father was slender, handsome, unsmiling. Severe. A tough man to please, Beauvoir guessed.
And his son took after him, at least in looks. In personality too? It didn’t seem so, from the pictures. He was almost always smiling in them.
But then Anthony Baumgartner was good at hiding what he was really feeling. That much had been proven.
Beauvoir’s attention shifted to the other person in the photograph. The Baroness.
She was, by just about any measure, ugly. No way around that. With a round body and sagging spaniel eyes and a complexion that even in the old photo looked blotched.
But she was smiling and had a look of near-permanent amusement about her. There was a gleam in her eyes too. And Beauvoir found himself smiling back.
The Baroness, despite all appearances, was far more attractive than her husband.
Though there was also a slight haughtiness, a suggestion of cunning, in that face.
Hugo Baumgartner obviously took after her.
And Caroline Baumgartner? More the father than the mother, though the Baroness’s haughtiness was there. But what passed for cunning in the mother came out as cruelty in the daughter.
The photographs were interesting—revealing, even, in some ways—but what he was really interested in was on the desk. Baumgartner’s laptop.
“Finished?” he asked the agent who’d been sitting at the desk, going over the papers.
“Oui, patron.”
He got up and relinquished the chair to the boss.
Beauvoir sat in front of the blank screen.
There were papers to the left of the computer. With numbers. And a few letters.
They weren’t to Baumgartner but from him. Signed by him. Ready to be mailed out, presumably.
Beauvoir read one. It seemed a fairly standard explanation of investments and the state of the market.
The other papers looked like financial statements.
He opened the desk drawers. More paper. Stuffed in there.
“You’ve been over these?”
“Oui.”
Beauvoir pulled the papers out and began going through them. The mess in the drawers was in contrast to the neat desktop. Many people’s lives were like that. The neat room and the messy closet. The well-ordered counters and the chaos in the cabinets.
But he also knew that, as homicide detectives, what they were looking for often lived in that gap, between the public and the private.
As they went through Baumgartner’s life, that cavern, between public and private, would begin to narrow. Squeezing out whatever lived inside.
Now Beauvoir scanned each piece of paper, smoothing out the wrinkled ones and placing them to the right of the laptop.
He was looking for one specific thing.
When he’d finished, he turned to the laptop and considered it.
Baumgartner, like most people, almost certainly protected his devices with a security code. His iPhone had been found that afternoon in the wreckage of his mother’s home. Smashed. But there were hopes some information could still be retrieved.
Beauvoir knew that almost everyone did four things, when faced with modern technology. First they created passwords. Then they forgot them.
Then, on being forced to create new ones, they simplified and went with only one, which opened everything. And then they wrote it down. And hid that paper somewhere.
That way they only had to remember the place, not the password.
Beauvoir grunted as he got onto his knees, then lay on the carpet, staring at the underside of the desk. Nothing. Rolling over, he got to his feet.
“Did you find anything that might be a code for the laptop?” he asked the team.
“Nothing,” the lead agent said.
“Well,” said another, “there was one thing. There’s a piece of paper behind the painting of the crazy old lady.”
Beauvoir felt his heart speed up as he walked over to take a look. Sure enough, there was a piece of paper Scotch-taped back there. With a number. And the words “Virgin Mary.”
“Merde,” he whispered.
Beauvoir had learned enough about paintings, and the art world, to know this was a numbered print of the Virgin Mary. And that was the number.
Sitting back down at the desk, his eyes settled once again on the papers Baumgartner had left beside his laptop.
Getting up, he walked down the hall to the master bedroom.
“Agent Cloutier? Would you join me, please?”
“D’accord, patron.”
The woman, in her late forties, looked both relieved and worried to be called away by Chief Inspector Beauvoir.
“Hugo?” said Gamache.
“Yes?”
“You’re being very quiet.”
“I have nothing to add. My sister’s doing a good job, as is Adrienne. I can’t think of anyone who’d want to hurt Tony.”
“What do you do for a living, monsieur?” Inspector Dufresne asked.
They’d already established that Caroline was a real-estate agent. Successful, she said. In the top five percent.
They’d later learn that was true. After a fashion. Top five percent in her company, in her area. Who specialized in condos. For young families.
Which put her in the bottom five percent of agents in Québec.
“I’m an investment dealer,” said Hugo.
“The same as your brother?” Dufresne asked.
“Yes.”
But Gamache had noticed the very slight hesitation and tucked it away.
“You worked together?”
“No. Different firms. I work for Horowitz Investments.”
Gamache’s expression didn’t change, but he took this in.
This was the same firm he and Reine-Marie used for their investments. While Montréal based and founded by Monsieur Horowitz decades ago, it was now global, with offices in New York and Paris.
“And what do you do there, sir?” asked Dufresne.
“I’m a senior vice president. I have a portfolio of clients whose wealth I manage.”
Hugo smiled, which, perversely, made him look even uglier. Like a jack-o’-lantern.
Without consciously realizing it, Gamache had put Hugo Baumgartner down as a bit of a rustic. If he worked at Horowitz Investments, it was in some support role, doing it affably, if somewhat lackadaisically.
Without ambition. Though perhaps not without resentment against a brother who’d fallen into a bucket of good luck at birth. While Oog had fallen into something else.