Read Chapter 4: Suspects and Shadows

The rain had stopped sometime before dawn, leaving the camp in a gray, dripping half-light that seemed to press down on everything. Moreau stood outside his tent with a stub of charcoal and a sheet of paper ripped from his ledger, the suspect list forming beneath his hand in tight, deliberate strokes.

*Clerk Aubin.* The man who handled the payroll manifests, who knew the shipment dates, who had access to the quartermaster's office at all hours. A weasel of a man with quick fingers and a quicker mouth, always volunteering for night duty in the records tent where no one could see what he was doing.

*Captain Delacroix, 3rd Cavalry.* A gambler and a spendthrift whose debts had become camp legend. He had been on rear-guard escort duty for the pay wagons twice in the last year. He knew the routes, the timings, the weak points.

*Sergeant Lefebvre.* The name was already on that scorched list, for what that was worth. Renard had vouched for the man's seventeen years of service, but seventeen years meant nothing when a man owed the wrong people the wrong amount of money.

Moreau studied the three names, then added a fourth, smaller, at the bottom: *Desmoulins.* The forger was still missing, still possibly a victim rather than a villain, but he'd placed the man on the list for completeness. A man who handled pay vouchers could also handle the truth of who signed them.

He heard footsteps squelching through the mud before the voice arrived.

"Captain." Sergeant Lefebvre saluted at the tent's opening, his face a careful mask of soldierly deference. "You wanted to see me."

Moreau folded the paper and tucked it into his coat. "Come in. Close the flap."

Lefebvre did as ordered, stepping into the cramped space where Moreau's cot and field desk occupied most of the floor. The man smelled of rain and stale tobacco, and there was something careful in the way he held himself, shoulders squared just a touch too rigidly.

"I understand you've been the subject of some talk this morning," Moreau said, keeping his voice level. He poured two measures of brandy from his private flask—the last of it, from Brussels. He pushed one cup toward the sergeant. "Drink."

Lefebvre hesitated only a fraction of a second before accepting. "Sir, if this is about the rumors regarding the pay chest, I want to state plainly that I had nothing to do with—"

"Did I say it was about the pay chest?"

The sergeant's mouth closed. He took a sip of the brandy, his eyes tracking Moreau's face the way a man watches a snake he suspects may strike.

"I asked you here because I want to discuss your finances," Moreau said. He let the words hang there, watching.

Lefebvre's cup stopped halfway to his lips. "My finances."

"Yes. Specifically, the rather substantial sum of money you were seen flashing at the gambling tables in Genappe last week. Two hundred francs, I'm told. Perhaps three." Moreau sat on the edge of his cot, folding his hands. "That's a great deal of money for a sergeant to have, given the army hasn't paid any of us in six weeks."

For a moment, Lefebvre's mask slipped, and Moreau saw something ugly flash behind the man's eyes—fear, or anger, or both. Then it was gone, replaced by a sheepish grin that looked rehearsed.

"Cards, sir. I had a good run at the tables in the village. Three nights running, I cleaned out a couple of junior officers from the 95th who didn't know a full house from a broken leg." He shrugged, spreading his hands. "Begging your pardon, but a man's luck shouldn't make him a suspect in a crime."

"Luck." Moreau repeated the word like he was testing its weight. "You've served under me for two years, Sergeant. In all that time, I've never known you to gamble more than a few francs at a time. You're a cautious man. A prudent man. The sort of man who saves his wages against the day he leaves the service and buys a farm." He tilted his head. "And yet you were seen betting fifty francs on a single hand."

Lefebvre's jaw tightened. "A man can change."

"A man can. But that's a strange change to make on the eve of a major battle, when the army's pay chest has just gone empty." Moreau stood, stepping closer to the sergeant. "Let me ask you something else. The night before last, where were you between midnight and two in the morning?"

"Sleeping in my tent."

"Can anyone confirm that?"

"I share a tent with three men, as you well know. Whether any of them noticed me in the night, I couldn't say. They sleep like the dead after a march."

Like the dead. Moreau filed that phrasing away. "And the paper found in the pay chest, the one with your name on it—do you have any knowledge of how that might have gotten there?"

Lefebvre's face went pale, then red. "I have no knowledge of any paper, sir. And whoever put my name on it, if it's not a forgery, is either a liar or an enemy of mine."

"A forgery." Moreau let the word roll off his tongue. "Interesting that you should think of that possibility before I mentioned the paper. In fact, I didn't say anything about what was written on it. Just that your name was on it."

The silence stretched between them, thick and ugly.

Lefebvre's hands were at his sides, and Moreau noticed the man's left thumb was rubbing against his forefinger—a compulsive gesture, fast and rhythmic. The tell of a man who was running calculations behind his eyes, trying to find the path through a lie that had just collapsed under him.

"Sir, I'm telling you the truth." The sergeant's voice had taken on a pleading edge. "I won that money fairly, in a game of vingt-et-un. Ask anyone who was there."

"I plan to." Moreau moved back toward his desk, deliberately turning his back on the sergeant—a calculated risk, a small cruelty meant to test the man's nerve. "You're dismissed for now. Don't leave camp without my permission. And Sergeant—if you have any thoughts, any recollections at all about what happened to that gold, you'd be wise to bring them to me before I come to you again."

Lefebvre saluted, something stiff and angry in the gesture, and pushed his way out through the tent flap.

Moreau waited until the footsteps faded, then let out a slow breath. He didn't believe the card game story. That much was certain. The gambling debts, the flash of money, the too-quick lies—Lefebvre was hiding something substantial.

But there was a nagging doubt at the back of his mind. A man who wanted to steal three hundred thousand francs in gold didn't stop to win three hundred in a card game first. That was the behavior of a man trying to explain away a fortune he already had—or a man planting the seeds of an alibi for money he was about to receive.

The answer was in Lefebvre's tent, perhaps. Or in his ledger. Or in the mud of the camp where a man might have hidden something beneath his cot.

Moreau pulled open his field desk and withdrew the scorched paper once more, running his finger down the list of twelve names. Eleven he knew. The twelfth, the one he'd recognized but not named to Renard, was Captain Delacroix.

A cavalry captain with an expensive mistress, a gambling problem, and a suspicious run of luck that exactly matched the arrival of the payroll shipment.

Two men on his list were connected to the card tables. That wasn't a coincidence. And a card game was the perfect place for a thief to launder gold—turn stolen coin into legitimate winnings, if you had someone on the inside willing to sit across the table and lose to you.

Moreau folded the paper and tucked it into his boot. He needed to see Delacroix's gambling partners. He needed to know who was winning and who was losing in the camp's underground card circles.

And most of all, he needed to know whether the gold was still buried somewhere beneath this rain-soaked field, waiting for the thief to retrieve it—or whether it was already gone, spent across the card tables of Belgium, one marked coin at a time through an accomplice's hands.

The bugle for morning muster sounded across the camp. Moreau straightened his coat, checked his pistol, and stepped out into the gray, dripping morning.

Every man in this camp was a suspect now. But the one he planned to visit next had a name he already knew from the scorched paper, and his tent stood at the edge of the east perimeter, exactly where the sentry gap had been.

Captain Delacroix was about to find himself in the middle of a very unpleasant conversation.