Gamache now smiled to himself. Humbled, yet again, by a mistake. How often had he warned agents against making assumptions? Leaping to conclusions.
And here he was, having done exactly that.
It never occurred to Gamache that this rough-hewn man might be a wealth manager, looking after tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.
A phone call would have to be made.
But that was far down the list of things that occurred to the Chief Superintendent at that moment. Another question was forming, just as Beauvoir appeared down the hallway and caught his eye.
“A word?” Beauvoir mouthed.
Gamache was torn. He wanted, needed, to ask the question, but he also knew that Beauvoir would never interrupt unless it was important.
“Excusez-moi,” said the Chief. He got up and nodded to Dufresne to continue.
“Find something?” Gamache asked as he accompanied Beauvoir down the hallway.
“I’ll let Agent Cloutier explain.”
Beauvoir’s voice, while low, was excited.
Gamache turned the corner into the study and came face-to-face with maniacal Ruth. His brows rose, and then his gaze continued on, to the woman sitting at the desk.
She turned and immediately got up upon seeing Gamache.
“Patron.”
“Agent Cloutier.” Gamache nodded. “Tell me what you have.”
She was a fairly recent transfer from the financial division of the Sûreté. A bookkeeper. A bureaucrat. Not a field agent. Indeed, her accounting wasn’t even forensic. She worked on the Sûreté’s own budget.
But Chief Superintendent Gamache had been impressed with her, and after discussions with Chief Inspector Lacoste he’d arranged a temporary transfer to homicide. To see if it was a fit.
There was a whole division for financial crimes, but money, hidden or otherwise, was so often the motive for murder that Gamache felt it would help to have someone with financial expertise specifically assigned to homicide. And Lacoste had agreed.
Isabelle had been happy with Cloutier. Cloutier, though, had a very different reaction. Being called to a murder scene, or even being assigned to search a victim’s home, was not simply foreign to her. She felt, at the age of forty-eight, as though she were experiencing an alien abduction.
She was not happy.
And even less so at this moment, as she faced the big boss. The head alien. Though he didn’t look alien at all. But then, her whirring mind said, they so rarely did.
She had been grief-stricken, horrified by the raid that had so badly wounded her boss, Chief Inspector Lacoste.
She’d also been terrified at the thought that these things happened. That she herself could have been on that raid. Not realizing they’d have ordered the headquarters cat to arm up before they got to her.
But still. It was brought into stark relief that the Sûreté wasn’t figures on a ledger. A matter of funding, or cutting, this department or that.
Lives were at stake. Lives were lost.
And she wanted nothing to do with taking or, worse still, giving a life.
She’d never met Chief Superintendent Gamache and had no idea he’d been behind her transfer and had been watching her progress, or lack thereof.
Gamache himself had had to admit that the transfer had not been a great success. It was clear she was unhappy, and a discontented agent never did her best work. Cloutier had been on the verge of being transferred back to the accounts department when the raid happened. And everything changed while, at the same time, staying the same.
The great Sûreté du Québec was in stasis until the leadership issue was resolved. For the moment Agent Cloutier was stuck. And Acting Chief Inspector Beauvoir was stuck with an agent who’d gnaw off her own arm if it would get her out of homicide and back into accounts.
But for now she was theirs. And there. In Baumgartner’s home. Staring at the Chief Superintendent. Almost mute. But, sadly for her, not quite. A slight babbling was escaping her, an excruciatingly slow leak of lunacy.
Chief Superintendent Gamache saw this and tried to help, by guiding her.
“What did you find, Agent Cloutier? Was it in those papers?”
He pointed to the pile on the desk.
“Those and these.” She pointed to the same stack of papers, confusing Gamache and herself. “Well, these are those, of course. Ha. Yes, well. Definitely something, but not definitive.”
Inspector Beauvoir, watching this, sighed.
What he didn’t know was that not that long ago Gamache himself had sounded almost exactly like Agent Cloutier, while on the phone to Vienna.
He might’ve sounded like an idiot, but Gamache knew he wasn’t one. Just as he knew that Agent Cloutier wasn’t.
“Is it to do with Anthony Baumgartner’s personal finances?” Gamache threw her a lifeline.
He could see that the papers contained a lot of figures.
“Yes. No. I don’t really know.”
Now they all stared at one another, and Beauvoir thought maybe he should take away her gun. Not that she was likely to shoot anyone. Not on purpose. Really. Maybe.
Gamache smiled. “Let’s sit.”
He waved her to the comfortable chair behind the desk and dragged up two others for himself and Beauvoir.
“Now, Agent Cloutier, tell us what first caught your eye?”
“This.” She picked up one of the papers before the laptop. “These look like financial statements, from Taylor and Ogilvy.” Her voice was growing more confident. “I take it he worked for them?”
“Oui.”
“It’s unusual, even unethical, for a money manager to bring home private and confidential papers,” she said. “It’s one thing to have them on a computer, which is protected by codes, but a printout? That anyone could read? I’m presuming Monsieur Baumgartner was senior enough to know that.”
“Then why would he?” asked Gamache.
“I don’t know for sure, of course,” she said. “But there’re two possible reasons. He was behind in his work and figured no one would notice or care. Or he was up to something.”
“That something being…?”
“Before I go into that, there’s something else odd,” she said. “About the papers.”
She paused, letting her two patrons think about it.
“They’re papers,” said Beauvoir, getting there first. Getting it. “Wouldn’t he be working directly on the laptop? On an electronic file?”
“You’d think so, yes. Assembling statements. Writing cover letters. Not working on hard copies.”
“But I get my statements by mail,” said Gamache. “Not emailed.”
“Yes, for security most are still mailed out,” she said. “Email can be hacked. But the mailing’s the last step, normally done by an assistant. There’s no reason for Monsieur Baumgartner to have the actual printouts. And certainly not at home. They’re of no use to him.”
“No legitimate use,” said Beauvoir.
“Exactly.”
“So what’s the illegitimate use?” Gamache asked.
“He’d have these statements here at home”—she looked toward the tidy pile on the desk beside the laptop—“because he didn’t want anyone else to see them. And certainly not his assistant, who’d know immediately that something was up.”
“And what was ‘up’?” Beauvoir asked.
“Until I can get into his computer, I won’t know for sure. But it’s easy enough to see that they’re addressed to different people and show portfolios in the millions. Transactions were done. Stocks bought and sold. These look like legitimate statements.”
“But aren’t?” said Gamache.
“They might be,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”
Chief Superintendent Gamache nodded. Financial crimes came under the Sûreté jurisdiction. Every year they uncovered a number of offenses. Some petty and downright stupid. Some close, but not quite crossing a line. A line Gamache had privately told the Premier should be changed.
Others, though, didn’t so much cross the line as tunnel under it. Deep. Dark. Long-standing.