Guilty Wives

by James Patterson

  Oh, and now I’d have to explain that I dyed my hair blond in Bordeaux just for the fun of it, which is why I looked different from my brunette passport photo.

  I stood at the door to the terminal and paused. I let a couple with a small child pass me, watching them stroll in with the carefree whimsy of people on holiday, about to embark on an adventure.

  Christien had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure I was able to make it through customs with a good cover story, if I were asked. He’d given me a convincing passport and a credit card and cash. Why would he do all that, if he weren’t trying to help me?

  “Okay, Christien,” I said to myself. “I guess I’m going to have to trust you.”

  I took a breath and entered the terminal.

  Five minutes later, a man standing near the door of the terminal entrance broke from an embrace with his female companion. He opened his cell phone and dialed the number.

  “She just arrived,” he said.

  CHAPTER 123

  I MADE IT THROUGH security at Bordeaux-Mérignac and sat at the gate for my departing flight, which was scheduled to take off at 1:50 p.m. Around me, a few female American students were talking about a boy one of them had met here in Bordeaux. I enjoyed a brief moment of peace, of hope, as I pondered something that once seemed impossible: a new life.

  All told, my journey would take me more than twenty-four hours. One day. And then I would be Allison Larson, American expatriate, or someone else Christien invented for me. If, that is, I could trust him.

  I closed my eyes as the flight attendant’s voice came over the loudspeaker, first in French, then English. We were now boarding. Starting with first-class passengers and elite members of the airline’s loyalty program.

  Now boarding for a new life. A life with fresh air and blue skies and the sweet intoxication of freedom.

  I hadn’t won, exactly. I hadn’t solved the puzzle or corrected the injustice. I was close, I thought, but I remembered what Christien had said to me in Onzain: even if I were right, I couldn’t prove anything.

  He might be right. I didn’t know for sure. But if I was taken back into custody, I’d never know for sure.

  Get away, I told myself. Escape.

  Then maybe you can come up with the answer. Surely you’ll think of something, Abbie. But get away first.

  The overhead loudspeaker called for the back rows of coach class, including the row I was in, to board.

  I took a breath, got up, and got in line.

  CHAPTER 124

  CHRISTIEN WALKED ALONG the Left Bank of the Seine, squinting into the sun and feeling the light wind through the open collar of his shirt. He passed a small playground, where a woman was helping her toddler down the slide with some effort. He thought of his own children, and what they’d been through. He thought of his wife, and what she went through.

  He checked his watch. It was twenty past one. Abbie’s flight would be boarding now. “Off you go, then,” he said.

  He felt the vibration of his phone in his pants pocket.

  He fished out the phone. The number was blocked, which meant it was his contact at Bordeaux-Mérignac. Christien had asked him to call when Abbie got on board.

  He took a look around him and then answered his cell.

  “She left,” said his contact over the phone.

  Christien sighed. “Right, then.”

  “No, mate, I mean—she left. She was at the bleedin’ gate as they were boarding and she just turned around and hightailed it out of the airport.”

  Christien took a second to contain his reaction. He rolled his neck and clenched and unclenched his jaw.

  He’d given her a chance. And he’d given her a warning. She’d made her decision understanding the consequences.

  “You made your bed, love,” he mumbled to himself. He watched the children on the playground for another moment before he moved on.

  CHAPTER 125

  I MADE IT TO Paris a little after seven in the evening. The sun was low in the west but hadn’t yet set. For all practical purposes, as I maneuvered through the streets, it was dusk, a hazy darkness.

  It might have been the biggest mistake of my life, not getting on that plane. But in the end, it came down to three words: Serena, Bryah, and Winnie. I was their only chance, and even if I couldn’t bring Winnie back, I could clear her name along with ours. Sure, I could tell myself that I could try to figure everything out from the comfort of a South American beach, but the truth was the best place was right here in France. Where a nationwide manhunt for me was currently under way.

  I didn’t really know where I was going. I knew I wanted to be on the Left Bank and close to the Seine. When Jeffrey and I had been in Paris years ago, we stayed at some hotel on the Rue Dauphine. Even if the hotel was still there, and I could remember its name, I’d never stay there now, having learned my lesson in Onzain. The French government could probably go back that far in their records and figure—as Christien did—that I might return to a familiar haunt.

  I kept driving and turned, somewhat randomly, onto Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, a narrow street on which I found a hotel bearing the emblem HôTEL COMéDIE. It looked fine to me. I found a public parking garage about three blocks away for the Audi.

  I walked back. On a lamppost, pasted on top of several other makeshift advertisements for rock bands or movies, was a square poster with a picture of me on it. There was one on the window of a restaurant I passed, too. A newsstand displayed a copy of today’s Le Monde, which also had a prominent photo of me above the fold.

  I felt incredibly conspicuous. I pulled down the hat I was wearing and lowered my chin—the kind of thing someone not wanting to be seen would do. Was I better off pretending I didn’t have a care in the world? I had no idea. I was in a city of millions, but I felt as though I were wearing a sandwich board that said FUGITIVE.

  There was the hint of a chill in the night air and the city was buzzing with diners at the outdoor cafés. I stopped at a boutique on the Rue de Buci that was open late and bought a black cocktail dress, heels, a purse, panty hose, and simple jewelry. Down the street, I grabbed a baguette and a bottle of water. At both the boutique and the café, I kept up the theme I began in Onzain, playing a Spaniard. The same reasoning applied now: I wanted someone’s first memory of me to be that I was Spanish, not American. The saleswoman at the boutique was under the impression that I couldn’t speak a word of French, much less English, though pointing and handing over cash were internationally recognized modes of communication.

  I stuffed all my purchases into my gym bag. By the time I made it back to the Hôtel Comédie, I had acquired a fresh coat of perspiration for my troubles. In a span of three city blocks, I had seen my face staring back at me on posters and newspapers no less than eight times.

  I walked into the hotel, trying not to look like number one on France’s Most Wanted list. A pimply teenage boy was sitting behind the desk. He took one look at me and said, “Hello,” meaning he had sized me up as American.

  Instead of saying hello back, I said, “Buenas tardes. ¿Habla usted español?”

  “Ah…sí.” He answered tentatively.

  “You prefer…English?” I asked. “Ees okay. I speak…leetle English.”

  I was proud of myself, using broken English, just as a Spaniard would if she didn’t know the language well.

  “You would like a room?” the boy asked.

  “Sí. Yes.”

  “Passport?” he said, sticking with the relevant noun and avoiding verbs where possible. Communication with a Foreigner 101.

  “¿Quieres mi pasaporte?” I fished in my bag, still patting myself on the back for my cleverness with the Spanish thing.

  Until, that is, I handed Pimple Boy my passport.

  Which identified me as Allison Larson, American.

  Shit. Just what I’d feared. Tired + strung out = stupid mistakes.

  “Êtes-vous une Américaine?” he asked me, introducing a third language into our convers
ation. Maybe I should respond in Russian.

  “Yes, I’m American,” I said, throwing in an embarrassed laugh. “I’m learning Spanish and trying to practice it as much as I can.”

  Good thing for me that Pimple Boy wasn’t the cerebral type. He spent approximately one second thinking about what I’d said before he realized that he couldn’t care less. He seemed far more interested in the movie he was watching on his iPhone or whatever it was. I requested a high floor and he gave me a room on the sixth. I paid in cash. He processed my passport and had me fill out a form and handed me a key for room 606.

  God, I thought as I took the elevator up, exhaling relief. That was close. Not a bad recovery on my part, but what a stupid slipup. A Spaniard with a U.S. passport. Nice one, Abbie.

  Room 606 was decent. Red wallpaper with pictures of hot-air balloons. A window overlooking the street. Thick blue carpet, a queen-size bed, a small but clean bathroom with a detachable spray nozzle in the shower.

  I walked out of the room and strolled up and down the hall. There was a staircase on one end that led all the way to the ground floor, or maybe a basement. The other end of the hallway was a dead end.

  I went back into my room, stripped off my clothes, and took the hottest shower I’d ever taken in my life. I moaned with relief as I scrubbed off the sweat and grime and let hot water rush over my face and in my eyes and down my neck.

  Stupid, stupid, the Spanish thing. And no matter how well I may have recovered, I’d done the one thing, above all, that I hadn’t wanted to do.

  I’d made myself memorable to the clerk.

  I wasn’t thinking clearly. My brain was getting foggy. I needed to sleep, to really sleep tonight.

  Colonel Durand’s eyes lifted from the documents Abbie Elliot’s lawyer had filed in court. He’d been studying them relentlessly, sure that they held the clue to where she would be hiding.

  But he looked up when his lieutenant, a woman named Verose, burst through his office door. “The Hôtel Comédie,” she said to Durand. “She checked in an hour ago.”

  Durand shot out of his chair with an adrenaline boost. “Make sure every exit is blocked until we get there,” he said.

  “Already done, sir.”

  Durand came around the desk and broke into a jog. “Let’s go,” he said.

  CHAPTER 126

  AT TWENTY-THREE MINUTES after 9:00 p.m., a man wearing a business suit walked into the hotel and looked around the small reception and parlor area. He nodded to a man and a woman seated on a couch, posing as a couple; they were undercover officers of the Paris police force. They all made eye contact but nobody spoke.

  The man said something to the pimple-faced teenager behind the counter, who at this point was fully aware of what was transpiring. It was not twenty minutes ago that a French police officer had stopped in to see whether an American named Allison Larson had checked into the hotel. Since then, officers had waited at the two exits—the front door and the rear staircase—while they waited for undercover agents, and the DCRI, to respond.

  The man pushed the button for the elevator in the lobby. When it opened, it was empty. The man reached in and hit the kill switch, turning it off.

  The man said something into his collar. Then he went through a door at the rear of the lobby, which led to the back staircase running throughout the hotel. Another undercover officer nodded in recognition. The man took the stairs down to the basement and pushed open the outside door. Coming down the ramp from the street level to meet him was a team of ten agents of the French RAID squad, dressed in black combat gear and carrying Beretta pistols.

  He held the door for them and they streamed in. They took the staircase, moving in a standard formation upward until they reached the sixth floor.

  They quickly moved down the hallway and surrounded the door that was the third on the right, room 606. One of the officers slipped a key card into the door. It made the familiar whiny, automated sound of a latch opening and they burst into the room.

  It was empty.

  The overhead light was off, but the bathroom light was on. A wet towel hung from a bar in the bathroom and a glass had been used by the sink. The fruity smells of shampoo and soap filled the room. She hadn’t left anything behind—not clothes or a bag, nothing. Not two hours after checking in, she was gone, and it sure looked like she wasn’t coming back.

  I jumped at the burst of new light appearing through the window. I counted the number of windows from the end to make doubly sure that, yes, it was indeed my hotel room I was seeing. Someone had turned on the overhead light in room 606. The police, I assumed, or Durand’s people with French intelligence.

  It could have been the hotel clerk who made me, after I botched that whole encounter. But I didn’t think so. Pimple Boy didn’t strike me as the discerning type.

  It was Christien. Christien had given me up.

  He’d handed me a chance to escape and somehow knew that I hadn’t taken it. Now all bets were off. If he ever had been on my side, he sure wasn’t any longer. “Go to Brazil and give yourself a chance,” he’d said. “Or stay in France and die.”

  I lowered my binoculars and dropped them in my gym bag. So much for Allison Larson. And now Durand knew I was in Paris. This area was going to be crawling with law enforcement any minute.

  Time to move.

  CHAPTER 127

  DURAND STOOD WITH his forehead against the window, looking out onto the street from room 606. His lieutenant, Verose, walked up to him.

  “She must have gone down the rear staircase before we talked to the clerk,” she said. “Which means she must have taken a quick shower and left within an hour of checking in. Lucky her.”

  Durand peered down at the street below, where a throng of young people was heading toward the party scene on the Rue de Buci.

  “I’m not sure I’d call it lucky,” he said. “I think she suspected her alias wouldn’t hold up. She wanted a shower, probably a change of clothes, but she didn’t want to stick around.” He looked at Verose. “Tell me again about the tip.”

  Verose wasn’t surprised. Durand always did this, always asked for the story to be repeated over and over again, trying to find new nuggets of information. “A man handed an envelope to a police captain leaving work on the Quai des Orfèvres. The captain says the man was so smooth, he didn’t catch a glimpse of him before he was gone. The note inside the envelope said that Abbie Elliot was traveling with an American passport under the name of Allison Larson and was heading to Paris.”

  Durand put his palms flat against the window. It wasn’t adding up. “And what is the status of her cell mate’s fiancé?” he asked. “The car thief?”

  “Giorgio Ambrezzi? We still haven’t found him, sir,” she said. “Neither of his employers has heard from him and he hasn’t returned to his apartment. It stands to reason that he stole a car for her and left it for her at the Limoges train station, but we don’t know that for certain. And even if he did help her, that doesn’t mean he knows where she is.”

  “Or what she’s planning.” Durand moaned. Abbie Elliot was giving him indigestion. “And the plane ticket?” he asked.

  “Sir, it was purchased yesterday in Paris. There is a bona fide Visa card issued in the name of Allison Larson. And as far as we can tell, there was a real Allison Larson who lived in the United States, outside Chicago, until her death last month.”

  “Hmph. And this Giorgio person—the car thief? Is he capable of this type of fraud?”

  “It’s not in his background, sir. But it’s certainly possible. Why, are you thinking it might be someone else?”

  Durand thought about that. “Maybe,” he said. “So Allison Larson had a boarding pass for a flight out of France and was on her way to Brazil,” he said. “She’d gotten out. She was gone. She’d won. But instead, she changes her mind and drives back to Paris. She’s coming right back to us, Verose. Why?”

  Verose shrugged. “Maybe Brazil is an unknown to her. She might not make it through cust
oms, for all she knows. And Paris? If you’re going to hide, a city of more than two million people isn’t a bad place.”

  “Is that what she’s doing? Hiding?” Durand shook his head. He thought for a second and made a decision. “You still have that friend at Le Monde, Verose?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” He nodded to himself. “I want a story leaked tonight. We believe that she’s made it across the Spanish border.”

  Verose understood. The DCRI routinely used the press for its own purposes. “You want her to feel comfortable here in Paris,” she ventured.

  “I want her guard down, yes,” Durand said. “Tomorrow morning, I want her to read in the papers that we think she’s in Barcelona.”

  CHAPTER 128

  I WALKED ALONG the Seine, trying to enjoy the brisk air and the subdued energy of a Paris evening. I crossed the bridge at the Place de la Concorde, just at the west end of the Jardin des Tuileries, the beautiful garden that runs between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre, at the garden’s eastern end. When I was an ordinary citizen, this had been my favorite part of Paris for a daytime stroll. But it wasn’t daytime, I wasn’t out for a stroll, and I was no ordinary citizen.

  I turned onto the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and walked west, toward the Arc de Triomphe. No, I was no ordinary citizen. I was a fugitive, the most wanted person in all Europe. At any point as I walked, people could catch a glimpse of my face and wonder. They could mention it to a police officer. They could make a phone call.