In a parking lot in Rivière-du-Loup, two lives ended and questions began.

In Rivière-du-Loup, a town where the St. Lawrence widens and the nights settle early in October, a parking lot beside a restaurant became the setting for a violence that words struggle to soften. On Thursday evening at approximately 10:45 p.m., witnesses heard what they believed to be gunshots near the corner of Cartier Boulevard and Plourde Street. When Sûreté du Québec officers arrived, they found two women inside a vehicle, both seriously injured, both apparently shot. One died at the scene. The other died a short time later in the hospital .

The Sûreté du Québec's Major Crimes Unit has taken responsibility for the investigation, treating the deaths as a double homicide. As of Friday morning, no arrests had been made. Police were still working to formally identify the victims and said it was too early to discuss the circumstances surrounding the crime . The vehicle remained, the parking lot remained, and the question of who fired the shots and why remained unanswered.

Guy Jr. Lapointe, newly sworn in as Quebec's Domestic Security Minister on Wednesday, offered condolences to the families of the two women. "Violence claims too many victims in Quebec, and beyond each tragedy, it is the public's sense of security that suffers every time," he wrote on social media. He said he was "determined to combat violence and ensure that every Quebecer can feel safe" .

His words arrived less than forty-eight hours into his tenure, a reminder that the portfolio he inherited is not defined by policy papers but by the ordinary evenings that turn into scenes of investigation. Rivière-du-Loup is not a large city. It is a town in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region, a place where people know the parking lots they park in and the restaurants they leave at ten in the evening. The violence that arrived there on Thursday did not announce itself. It simply happened, and two women did not leave.

The investigation is in its earliest hours. Police have not released the names of the victims, nor any description of a suspect or vehicle. They have asked anyone with information to come forward. In the meantime, the parking lot has been examined, the witnesses have been interviewed, and the work of reconstructing what happened in those few moments is underway.

There is a particular ache that follows a shooting in a small place. In a city, such an event can be absorbed into the vast machinery of urban life, filed away as one more incident among thousands. In a town, it lingers. The restaurant where the women were found will reopen. The parking lot will fill again. But the knowledge of what happened there will remain, carried by the people who heard the shots and the officers who arrived to find what they found.

The Sûreté du Québec continues its investigation. No arrests have been made. The two women are dead, and the reason why is a question that the coming days and weeks will have to answer, slowly and with care.

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Sources: The Canadian Press, CityNews Montreal, CTV News, The Spec