But there was other evidence she’d worn a necklace. There was a small dark bruise at the base of her neck, probably made when the leather strap was broken. And the cuts in her hand. He’d sent Agent Lemieux over to the Old Brewery Mission to ask whether anyone remembered Elle wearing a necklace. They did, though none had gotten close enough to be able to say what it was. He’d searched for it in the box of evidence but had found nothing. He’d known then that if he found the necklace he’d find her killer.

Well, he’d found the necklace. In Three Pines, one hundred kilometers away from the frozen Montreal street where Elle was found, and the necklace was taken. How had it ended up here?

Armand Gamache closed his eyes and the events played there, in the movie house of his mind. He could see Elle’s murderer struggling with her. The murderer had grabbed the necklace and broken the cord. Then Elle had grabbed it back, pressing it so violently into her palm as she was strangled that it cut into her hand, like a cookie cutter. Gamache had asked the Sûreté artist to connect the bloody dots and try to recreate what the necklace had looked like.

Now he looked at the drawing. The artist had made a stylized circle, with a bite taken out, and a kind of neck. It hadn’t made sense at the time, but now it did. The bite was the eagle’s mouth, open and screaming. The rest was its head and neck.

So Elle had died grasping her necklace. Why had Elle valued it so much she’d died holding it? And why had the murderer taken the time to pry it from her hand?

And then what? Gamache leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. Any sounds in the room, in the village, in Quebec, receded. He was in his own world now, with the murderer. Just the two of them. What had he done, and why?

He’d taken the pendant from Elle’s dead hand and brought it back home. And he’d put it in the garbage. CC’s garbage. Gamache could feel himself getting close. It was still murky, far from clear, but the headlights were shining bright now, cutting through the night. Before he got to who, Gamache needed to know why. Why hadn’t the murderer just fled? Why take the time to pry this necklace from Elle’s hand?

Because it was a screaming eagle. It was a tarnished, filthy, cheap version of what he’d seen on the screen earlier that evening. The emblem of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the logo for CC de Poitiers and the necklace of the beggar were the same.