The Grey Wolf

Three Pines was not on any map and was only ever found by people who had lost their way. They’d crest the hill and stop, looking in wonderment across the top of the forest, to the Green Mountains of Vermont beyond the borders of Québec. Then, dropping their eyes, they would see something even more unexpected.

There, in the middle of nowhere, fieldstone and clapboard homes and rose-brick shops circled a village green. People would be out walking their dogs, or working in their gardens, or sitting on the bench on the green. Chatting. In at least one case, to herself.

In the center, three immense pine trees towered skyward. Like a beacon. A signal.

A sign.

You are home and you are safe.

Those who chose to stay—and not everyone did, though all were welcome—soon realized that the village was not impervious to the passage of time, or tragedy, any more than any community.

It was a haven, not a hiding place.

What Three Pines offered was comfort in an ever-changing world. It offered a place at the table, it offered company and acceptance. And croissants.

It offered a hand to hold.

Three Pines was where the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec and his librarian wife had chosen to live. To make a home. Not to escape from the horrors of the world, but to heal from them.

But the world had found them, that Sunday morning. As the Gamaches sat peacefully in their back garden. The ringing, ringing, ringing had begun again. And again Armand ignored it.

The peal now mixed in, perversely, with the ringing of the church bell.

St. Thomas’s was calling the faithful.

And something else entirely was calling Armand Gamache.

“Answer the fucking phone!” A handful of compost, or dirt, or … was lobbed over the fence.

And still the phone rang. Then abruptly stopped mid-ring. Making the sudden silence almost as jarring as the sound.

When, a few minutes later, it rang for the third time, Reine-Marie lowered the weekend paper completely and looked first at the phone, then at her husband.

“For God’s sake, Armand, who is it? Is it work?” Though she knew it could not be. He’d have answered.

After a brief hesitation, he held the phone up for her to see. There was no name, but she recognized the first few digits. A government number. Federal, not provincial. Though she had no idea whose number it was, it was clear that her husband knew who was calling. And calling. Knew who he was ignoring.

“Do you want me to answer?”

“Non.” He drew the phone to him, as though to protect her from it. He felt the vibration against his chest and moved it away.

The caller was already in his head, he sure didn’t want them burrowing into his heart.

At that moment the ringing stopped, and he replaced the phone on the table.

The peace of their Sunday lay in shards around them. Even the quiet wasn’t calming. It seemed merely a prelude to what they both knew was coming.

A few minutes later, it arrived, and when it did, Armand’s patience broke. Grabbing the phone, he gave the screen a vicious swipe and stood up.

He listened for a few moments before saying, “Go to hell.”

Then, as Reine-Marie stared in shock, he hung up. She’d never heard him speak to anyone like that. She was sure in his professional life it was sometimes necessary, but here? In their backyard?

“Tell me,” she said when he turned back to her, his knuckles white where he gripped the phone.

And he did.

Reine-Marie listened, then let out a long exhale. Now she understood why he’d refused to answer the calls.

“What did she want?”

“To meet.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“I can’t believe she’d contact you,” said Reine-Marie. “After what happened last time.”

They waited for another call, but none came. The next hour was spent apparently at ease, but their shoulders had inched up, and Reine- Marie had had to read the same book review several times before finally giving up.

“Let’s go to the bistro,” she said, hauling herself out of the chair. “We need a distraction.”

“You might need a distraction,” he said, getting up too. “I need a pain au chocolat.”

She laughed and saw him smile. But the creases that appeared were from worry, not amusement.

CHAPTER 2

“What was that about?” asked Ruth, joining them on the back patio of the bistro, in the shade of the tall maples.

“What do you mean?” asked Myrna.

“The phone calls.” The old poet jabbed a crooked finger at the Gamaches. “The racket went on all morning. I almost called the cops.”

“You do know that Armand is the police,” said Clara, brushing a hand through her wild hair and looking surprised when a licorice allsort fell out.

No one else was surprised.

She ate it.

“Don’t tell me you believe that bullshit?” said Ruth. “Like Clouseau here could possibly be a senior officer with the Sûreté. Next you’ll be saying the library is a bookstore, and these two are married.” She pointed to Olivier and Gabri. “Like that’s even possible.”

“Hag,” muttered Gabri, putting a pain au chocolat in front of Armand and dragging a chair over to join them.

“Fag,” muttered Ruth, sliding the plate over and sticking a bony finger into the middle of the pastry, as though it were a country and her finger a flag.

Armand sighed, then smiled when Olivier placed a second pastry in front of him. “Merci, patron.”

Then noticed Ruth was staring at him, expecting an answer.

Ruth Zardo. The poet. The laureate. Who from her ramshackle home in this little lost village managed to see things others did not.

Now here’s a good one:

you’re lying on your deathbed.

You have one hour to live.

Who is it, exactly, you have needed

all these years to forgive?

She was one of Armand’s favorite poets, if not favorite people. Though he had to admit, she was close there too.

“So who was on the phone?”

“It was no one.”

Myrna Landers, the owner of the bookshop, sat beside her best friend, the painter Clara Morrow. Olivier and Gabri, the owners of the bistro, had joined them.

“Jesus, you must really hate it when no one calls,” said Ruth. “Four times in a row. The way you shouted.” She looked knowingly at the others. “At no one.”

Now they all, as though choreographed, tilted their heads and looked at him.

Really? Myrna thought. Armand was shouting?

Like everyone else, she’d seen him on the news being hammered by reporters, fielding accusations of incompetence, corruption. One blogger in particular, a young woman, really had it in for him.

But Chief Inspector Gamache kept his head, his answers measured and thoughtful.

She could not image Armand actually shouting.

What would provoke that? Who would provoke that?

Myrna Landers knew the Gamaches well. They’d often wander into her bookstore to browse, pulling new and used books from the shelves and glancing through them until something caught their interest. But sometimes Armand would come by on his own. On snowy winter days they’d sit by the woodstove, sip strong tea, and share confidences.

He’d tell her what it was like to crawl into sick minds, moving ever deeper into dark caverns until he had the answers he needed. Until he had a killer.

And she’d tell him what it had been like to be Dr. Landers, a senior psychologist specializing in criminal behavior. Until one day she’d wandered too deep into a mind, into a cave, and gotten lost. She needed to find her way back to the sunshine. To a world where goodness existed.

She’d quit her job, packed up her small car, and left the city, without a particular destination in mind. Just, away.

Stopping in the unexpected village for a break, she went into the bistro, had a café and a croissant, discovered the shop next door was for rent, as was the loft above, and Myrna Landers never left.

She had found her quiet place in the bright sunshine. And Dr. Landers became Myrna.

Then one day the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec and his wife bought the rambling old home across the village green. He’d wandered into her shop, sat down, and Chief Inspector Gamache became Armand.

The only difference, and she knew it was huge, was that while she was out of those caves, he was still in them.

Who had been on the other end of the phone that morning? And what had that person said, what had they wanted, that pushed this steady man so far off balance he found himself shouting in his peaceful garden on a bright Sunday morning?

For his part, Armand knew he’d let his rage overpower his reason. It didn’t happen often; he’d worked hard to disarm those triggers, ones that could, in his job, have catastrophic consequences. He’d seen it often enough with colleagues.

Unresolved rage and a loaded gun were a very bad combination.

He got angry more often than most knew. You could not look at the body of a murdered child and not be enraged. But anger clouded judgment. It became another problem, not a solution.

Though Armand Gamache was honest enough with himself to know that he had his own caverns, his own sinkholes. One in particular. And he’d fallen into it that morning. Pushed over the edge by a reasonable voice many, many miles away, with a simple request.

To meet.

To steady himself now, he took a bite of the soft, still-warm pastry, oozing dark chocolate. As a further balm, he looked across the patio to the Rivière Bella Bella, its fresh mountain water rushing by, catching the sun and gleaming golden. It was calming. Meditative.

His heart slowed and his shoulders dropped.

Was it a mistake to answer that call?

Why hadn’t he turned off the phone after the first ring? Why hadn’t he moved the phone into the study and shut the doors between it and them?

He knew why. Because he always had intended to answer. Because he had to know.

Because knowledge really was power. Where some cops thought of their guns as their weapon, Chief Inspector Gamache knew the only real weapon, and protection, was knowledge.

And yet, and yet …

And yet he’d stopped short of getting all the information. He’d run away. Refused to meet. Refused to find out what the person wanted. He’d hung up not because he was angry, but because he was afraid.

Just then, his phone rang again.

CHAPTER 3

At the first ring, Reine-Marie’s hand jerked and the blue-and-white plate she was holding fell, shattering on the fieldstone terrace.

Then her own phone began ringing too. She looked at Armand, and Armand looked at her.

Was it possible, he thought, his mind racing. Had the caller, infuriated by his response, decided to change tactics and go after Reine-Marie?

He half expected all their phones to start ringing. A cacophony, a scream. An attack.

He had to stop this. He had to answer.

As he swiped accept, he stood up and walked to the grassy verge of the river. Reine-Marie’s phone stopped ringing. She too had answered.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

“Chief Inspector Gamache?”

“Oui.”

“This is the alarm company. A sensor has gone off at your home in Montréal. Would you like me to send a car?”

Armand felt a wave of relief, and a slight hysteria bubble up. “Un instant, s’il vous plaît.” He turned to Reine-Marie. “The alarm?”

“Oui.” She too was relieved. “It’s the front door?” she said into her phone. “It’s faulty. This has happened before.”

“Have the motion sensors been activated?” Armand asked, returning to his call.

“Non. Nothing. No one actually entered your home. It appears to be another false alarm. I’m guessing you’re not there.”

“No. Don’t bother sending a car. I’ll have someone drop by and check.”

“If you’re sure, Chief Inspector.”

“I am, merci.”

“I’ll turn off the alarm,” said the young man. “But you really should have it fixed.”

“Are you kidding me?” the familiar voice said. “Again?”

“We all need a hobby, mon vieux,” said Armand.

He was talking to Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his second-in-command and son-in-law.

Annie and Jean-Guy lived close to the Gamaches’ pied-à-terre in the Outremont quartier of Montréal. Though the young couple and their two children lived in the less swanky Mile End neighborhood.

“I’ll walk over with Honoré, but I should warn you, Armand, whoever broke in might’ve stolen all your cookies.”

“What cookies?”

A few minutes later Jean-Guy called from their apartment.

“All clear. No break-in. But can you please get it fixed?”

He was standing at the open doorway to the Gamaches’ small apartment, the one they’d bought when they’d sold the family home and moved to Three Pines. This was a pied-à-terre, for when they had to stay in the city for work, or just a nice weekend in Montréal.

Over the years Chief Inspector Gamache had, inadvertently, become the public face of Québec’s provincial police. The Sûreté. Whose motto was Service, Intégrité, Justice.

But a motto and reality were two different things. Gamache knew that the vast majority of the agents and inspectors, the chief inspectors and detachment commanders, did believe in service, integrity, and justice. But there remained pockets of corruption. And not just in the Sûreté.

With that thought came the memory of the phone call that morning.

From a government number. From a person he knew to be corrupt, though he could not prove it. Someone whose power and influence had only grown over the years and was now almost limitless.

“Armand?”

Jean-Guy’s voice on the phone brought him back to the matter at hand. The annoying false alarms.

“Désolé,” said Armand. “I was distracted.” Which was true. He was now staring at Rosa. The duck had planted her beak in his pain au chocolat.

“I must warn you, I think the mice have gotten into your stash of chocolate chips you hide from Reine-Marie.”

“I do nothing of the sort.”

“Oh, good. Then you won’t miss them.”

“Terrible man,” Armand mumbled, and heard Jean-Guy laugh as he hung up. Then, turning to Reine-Marie, he said, “Want to go into Montréal? Spend the night. Maybe see if Vivienne and Marcel can join us for dinner.”

The LaPierres were the Gamaches’ best friends in Montréal. Had been since the day Daniel broke his leg, and Dr. LaPierre had run across avenue Querbes to help the screaming child and the distraught parents.

That had been twenty-five years earlier.

“I’ll call, see if they can meet us at Leméac,” said Reine-Marie.

The restaurant was around the corner from their home. She could already taste her truffle oil salmon tartare, while Armand and Marcel would have their usual moules frites.

Vivienne, a marine biologist, preferred the creamy mushroom risotto, with slabs of aged Parmesan. She and Reine-Marie would have Pinot Noir while the men would order beers.

The decision was easy, the calls made, the dinner arranged.

Before leaving, they stopped at Monsieur Béliveau’s General Store. For cookies.

As they walked to their car, they passed a man heading toward the bistro. A stranger. Slender, elderly. In a suit that didn’t quite fit, and a tie too wide for the fashion of the day.

A few paces on, Armand glanced back and saw the man had also paused, to look at him. Their eyes met, briefly, before both turned away.

The man seemed vaguely familiar. He must, Armand thought, be staying at the B&B. Reaching for the handle of the car door, he looked back again, but the man had already entered the bistro.

The slightly odd thing, thought Armand as they drove out of the village, was that he had a warm feeling about the man. If he did know him, it was a pleasant memory.

CHAPTER 4

The strange things began happening the next morning when Armand arrived at work.

The evening before, when he and Reine-Marie were heading out to Leméac, it had begun to rain. He looked for his light summer coat, then realized he must have left it in Three Pines, though he couldn’t remember seeing it there.

The LaPierres were already at the restaurant, and the couples spent an enjoyable evening catching up on family, on careers, on this and that. Vivienne was heading to the Arctic, to check out the polar ice melt. Marcel was going with her this time. They invited the Gamaches, who were sorely tempted and talked about it all the way home.

By the time they left Leméac, the drizzle had stopped, and Armand and Reine-Marie strolled arm in arm, pausing to look in shop windows along avenue Laurier. Turning up the side street, they glanced into lit windows of apartments, converted from what were once mansions.

They finally arrived at their own small walk-up with its flight of outside stairs, high ceilings, intricate moldings, and ornamental fireplace.

This place reminded them of their first home together, though that one was even tinier, and rented. Buying a place had seemed an impossibility. Armand was just starting out at the Sûreté, and Reine-Marie was a young librarian dreaming of one day working for the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. Never thinking that one day she would be the senior archivist and Armand would be head of homicide.

Je me souviens, thought Armand as he climbed the stairs. I remember. The motto of Québec was not wrong.

Thankfully the faulty sensor did not play up again that night, and their phones remained silent. All seemed right with the world. Until the next morning, when the package arrived.

The day started predictably enough.

After coffee and croissants in the kitchen together, Reine-Marie went off to the archives to do some research, while Armand headed into his office at Sûreté headquarters. It was Monday morning, and there was the weekly meeting with his boss and other department heads to go over the cases still active, those concluded, and those about to go to trial.

He’d already met informally with his counterpart, Evelyn Tardiff, in Organized Crime. He wanted her thoughts on two murders his team was investigating, what he believed were mob-related executions. One in the Saguenay region, and another on the windswept Les Îles de la Madeleine.

Organized crime in Québec went back generations, to Prohibition, when the mob ran booze across the border. And still did. But now it also ran billions of dollars in drugs and arms. It had, in the intervening years, grown into a monster with connections to the East Coast mafia, the Big Five families. So deep were the mafia’s roots in construction, trucking, garbage collection, even the cheese industry, all sorts of “legitimate” businesses, that the Sûreté had formed a special unit to investigate it.

What troubled Gamache about the cases in both regions outside Montréal was that the victims had no apparent connection to the drug trade, or prostitution, or, or, or. The woman in the Saguenay had worked for Canada Post. The man on the Magdalen Islands was a teacher on the cusp of retirement. Both appeared to be leading perfectly ordinary, peaceful lives.

Until they were trussed up and shot in the back of the head. Within a day of each other.

“What do you think, Evelyn?”

She removed her glasses and reached for her mug of coffee. “They must have seen something that got them killed.”

“Both of them? One day apart?”

Tardiff studied her counterpart in homicide. “Are you suggesting the two are related? They’re thousands of kilometers apart, have no connection to each other and no record of criminal activity.”

“True. And yet…”

“And yet you think the killings aren’t just related,” said Tardiff, looking at the photographs, “but mob-related.” To give her credit, thought Gamache, her tone held no sarcasm or even cynicism.

“They look like executions to me,” he said. “Hits. Don’t they to you?” He waited for her response, but when none came, he said, “Something must be stirring. Have you heard anything?”

She shook her head. “It’s been quiet since old man Moretti died and the son took over the family. We were expecting a war, but the transition has been smooth. This new generation of mobster is more polished. Less interested in violence and more interested in profit. A turf war benefits no one.”

Except the winner, thought Gamache. But even then, so much damage was done to everyone involved it took years to recover.

While what Chief Inspector Tardiff said was true, they both were old enough and experienced enough to know that “polish” was superficial. This new generation of mobster might appear more refined, but underneath? They were at least as ruthless, literally cutthroat, as their fathers and grandfathers.

These were not, as his granddaughter Florence would say in typical understatement, nice people.

Gamache knew something else. There was an informant high up in the Montréal mafia. A very “not nice” person. A necessary evil.

Very few knew this person’s identity. Armand was not one of them, but the woman across from him was. What he did know was that this was not a brave individual, quietly working to bring down the Moretti organization. No, this was a scheming, manipulative, detestable opportunist. Working to his or her own ends.

So far, the information had proven valuable, but one day, Gamache knew, it would not. One day, when it suited them, this person would lead them into a trap.

When he’d knelt beside the recently executed woman and man, who’d had absolutely no reason to be murdered that he could see, Armand had had a prickling sense that day was approaching.

Tardiff was right, though. Things were relatively quiet. But far from feeling that a monster had gone to sleep, it felt to Armand like it was resting, watching, gathering strength. The silence wasn’t slumber, it was a deep breath. Held.

And those murders he was investigating? They were the prelude, the short, sharp gasps before the scream.

Evelyn Tardiff tapped the dossiers with her glasses. “You really believe these were hits, Armand?” At his nod, she sat back, crossed her legs, and looked out the window at the skyline of Montréal. Then her gaze returned to her colleague. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Bon, merci.”

It occurred to him that these executions might not be news to Evelyn Tardiff. Like him, she had her secrets. Closely guarded and dangerous if allowed to escape.

One day soon it would be a good idea to sit down quietly together and bring those secrets out into the relative open. But that carried risks. While he trusted Tardiff, he knew that there were elements within the Sûreté. Old ones, planted years ago. Who bided their time.

The quid to their pro quo informant. The mafia’s own, mafia-owned, senior Sûreté officers. And they wouldn’t be alone.

There’d be prosecutors and judges, politicians and lobbyists. Journalists.

Gamache had no proof of this, it was just common sense. The mob had untold wealth, weapons, no conscience, a thirst for power, and a need for protection. They could buy almost anyone they wanted, and did.

Were those executions the first putrid whiff of the storm to come?

But if so, it still begged the question, why were those two victims the harbinger? Why would anyone, never mind the mob, need them dead?

He checked his watch and got up. “We’re going to be late.”

“Oh, no,” said Chief Inspector Tardiff, and Gamache gave a grunt of amusement and commiseration.

These Monday morning meetings of department heads could be tedious, especially when Chief Inspector Goudreau of the Highways division felt slighted and decided to take up more time than was allotted him.

Which was most Monday mornings.

Armand sat at the long table, his dossier closed in front of him, and listened. Where others looked bored, or glanced out the window, or surreptitiously checked their phones, he forced himself to pay attention. Though he struggled to pay close attention, or any, to the head of the Highways division. He found his mind wandering to Goudreau’s tie. It was a warm orange. Was “amber” more the word? He liked it and thought he might go to Ogilvy’s later and see …