The Sketcher's Mark (Lara McBride Thrillers Book 1)

by Chris O'Neill

  He stepped over to Beth and leaned over her face. Her eyes locked on to his and her breathing came faster from beneath the oxygen mask. She tried to move but the straps securing her to the stretcher had been locked down tight.

  “Now don’t go anywhere; I’ll just be a moment,” he said and moved out of her sightline, heading for the driver’s cab.

  A few minutes later, Guillotine was in the driver’s seat, the window down and the driver’s body on the floor of the ambulance between him and the passenger seat. He had made it quick and pulled the man from the seat and away from the steering wheel to avoid a crash. With the window open and the cold rain falling from the sky, Guillotine enjoyed feeling it sweep in through the window, his face caressed by the night itself. What had looked to be an untenable situation earlier, he decided that his master work was, indeed, finally going to be unleashed. Some elemental force beyond his control was watching out for him, despite his Aunts’ best attempts to stop him. He wanted to believe that he was that force. That he had beaten the Fates and his Aunts. He glanced in the rearview and saw them back there, standing over Beth at the gurney. He wondered if she could see them. He looked away, back to the streets, in a sublime feeling of bliss. Then he felt his Aunts standing behind him, blocking the path back to Beth, they had somehow moved to him in the blink of an eye.

  “You lost. You failed! I am triumphant!”

  Beth felt the ambulance speed up and, when he turned off the siren, she could hear voices up front. She hadn’t seen anyone else get in the vehicle with them but it sounded like he was talking to someone up there in the cab. The voices sounded female. Older women, who rasped and didn’t so much as speak but spat out their words. She couldn’t understand what they were saying, it sounded as though they were berating him. They stopped talking and moments later she heard him screaming, a high pitched wail, his fists slamming against the dashboard in a frenzied rage.

  She was the most terrified when she felt the vehicle pull over and the engine and the siren were turned off. Now, there was only the sound of the rain spattering on the roof above her and the low hiss of the oxygen coming through the mask. She heard the women whispering again and then they fell silent. She heard the man climb out of the cab and close the driver’s side door shut behind him. The rain spattered incessantly on the roof of the ambulance above her. The anticipation of what would happen next was unbearable. She wanted to break free but every time she moved, pain shot through her body. The rear doors opened, the rain got louder and then there he was, his scarred face floating directly directly above her. He was smiling tenderly.

  “I told you the fall wouldn’t kill you.”

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Brouchard walked back to the lobby and saw the motorcycle cop walking Lara McBride in to the hotel with her hands cuffed behind her back. That simply would not do and he hoped the news cameras had not caught it. After all, they knew who she was and this would raise questions. He didn’t have time for a press conference.

  “Take those off her immediately,” he ordered the Officer.

  “Inspector, she was firing a gun in the theatre,” the cop protested.

  Brouchard leaned in close, using all his considerable weight- physical and official.

  “Now,” he commanded and the cop did as he was told. Once the cuffs were off, Lara squeezed her wrists back to life and remained quiet, viewing the media circus outside and seeing the hotel staff all gathered by the front desk not having the first clue what to do.

  “You will put in your report that you assisted me in pursuit of the murder suspect and that you were acting as back up to Detective McBride here,” Brouchard explained firmly. He saw in the man’s face that he had no idea who he had arrested. Suddenly, the motorcycle cop’s entire demeanor changed and the blood drained from his face.

  “I’m sorry, Inspector, I had no idea. I saw a woman with a gun and-”

  Brouchard cut him off.

  “Do you have the weapon?”

  The cop reached in to his jacket and produced the pistol he had taken from her, now secured in a plastic evidence bag. He handed it to Brouchard.

  “Thank you,” Brouchard said and motioned for Lara to follow him. He didn’t look back at the motorcycle cop, who quickly left the building hoping he would still have a job tomorrow.

  “This is not good,” Brouchard said as they crossed the lobby to the private meeting rooms in the back. She followed him down a long carpeted hallway and through a solid oak door. Mahogany furniture, deep carpet and gold gildings. She was impressed. It might have been the nicest room she could remember ever having been in. It beat the meeting rooms at the airport hotels she was used to.

  “None of this is good,” Lara retorted. “I had him. If Super Cop back there hadn’t shown up it’d be me walking our man in here in handcuffs.”

  “Shit,” Brouchard exhaled.

  “How’s Beth? Is she alive?”

  She saw Jason was sat waiting impatiently at the polished wooden table that dominated the middle of the room. He looked exhausted and pissed off and she couldn’t blame him for either. The hotel staff had brought him a bottle of scotch, there were glasses by the bottled waters in the middle of the table and he had a bucket of ice in front of him. The setting was far too elegant for the horror that had brought them here.

  “Inspector,” Jason said, not lifting his eyes from his glass. “Shouldn’t you be out there looking for him instead of sitting in here talking to us?” Now he looked up, his eyes filled with accusation and more than a little alcohol.

  “You think you are the only ones who are pissed off?” Brouchard balked.

  “He killed my best friend and threw a girl off a rooftop. Yes, I’m pissed off. I want to find him and rip his fucking throat out.”

  “Jason, you should probably go home,” Lara said, walking over to the table, where she took the cloth from beneath the ice bucket, dropped a handful of ice cubes in to it and placed it to the back of her sore head.

  “You do this for a living,” Jason said to her. “How do you deal with it?”

  “You’ve got the right idea,” Lara stated, taking his glass and downing the rest of the scotch. Jason handed her the bottle. She wasn’t entirely lying, there were some nights she would reach for a bottle of hard liquor. It never helped, but never hurt, except the morning after.

  “There are other considerations in play now, Detective,” Brouchard said, focusing on Lara.

  “What bloody considerations? ” Jason asked, exasperated with the never ending complications. Lara knew what the Inspector meant already and had been waiting for this to happen.

  “The brass must be leaning on you pretty hard now, Inspector. What do they want? Me on the next plane out of here because they can’t control the man we’re after but they can swat me away with a plane ticket? Is that the brilliant idea the powers that be have come up with because I’ve seen it before and it’s always wrong.”

  “There is, apparently, a war meeting going on right now to decide what is to be done with the both of us. They acknowledge that there is a killer on the streets of Paris who has murdered two American businesswomen.”

  “That’s very gracious of them,” Lara said.

  “As for your sister and any other missing women, they have informed me that the evidence is not very compelling. They are, however, concerned about your presence and the fact we have another American woman en route to intensive care.”

  “When can we go see Beth in the hospital?” Jason asked.

  “I will let you know as soon as I know,” Brouchard offered. Lara handed Jason the glass and he refilled it with more scotch and ice.

  “Who knows about the PhotoFit?” Lara asked.

  “So far, just us. But in light of what has happened here, they will want to release it.”

  “Then don’t give it to them. What I said before about him going to ground still stands.”

  “Convince me.”

  Lara ran the angles in her mind, the possible out
comes of putting the man’s face on the news, the internet. Inciting a citywide manhunt. If he was still in Paris, with a face as distinctive as his, they would probably have him in custody by morning. But once they had him, would he talk? How much time would he burn playing games and bargaining? During that time, Janelle and whomever else he might have taken could end up dead. She’d seen that before on other cases- abductors making requests in return for giving up hostages or locations, who were out there, dying. She refused to play that game this time. Not with Janelle involved.

  “He’s getting bolder. He’s escalating. First the Metro and now look what he did here. A man who’s kept himself invisible for who knows how long is now executing people in public. He’ll expect to be on the news. When he sees he isn’t, he’s not going to know what to think. That’ll confuse him, maybe make him come back after me. We set that up, we’ve got him.”

  Brouchard walked over and took the glass from Jason, slugged down the scotch, enjoying the rich burn and handed it back to the Englishman. Jason reached for a fresh glass and intended to have this shot himself.

  “Detective,” Brouchard began, “if you tell me that all your experience- and whatever gift it is inside you that enables you to find these people- is telling you that what you’re suggesting is right, then I’ll stand by you. But you have to be sure. Any doubt and I am releasing the picture.”

  Lara let out a long deep sigh and wiped her eyes, considering, trying to empty her mind. She didn’t doubt herself. If he didn’t see his picture on the news and the announcement of a manhunt, he wouldn’t know what was going on. They would have the upper hand. They would have control.

  “Let him run scared. Whatever he’s been building to, I think he’s near the end of it. Let him think he has a Get Out Of Jail Free card, let’s see what he does with it. At this point, it’s the only thing we can do to keep him in play. Brenner said he probably lives out in the sticks and we don’t want him to leave the city. Once he’s out there, what are we gonna do? House to house calls at every country house in France? No, we let him think he’s still safe here.”

  “You would rather do this than potentially have him in custody by tomorrow night?”

  “Yes. Jason, you should go home and get some sleep,” Lara said, looking over at him. He turned to her and she saw the exhaustion in his eyes.

  “Whatever you’re planning to do, don’t leave me out of it,” he said with conviction.

  “Go home,” she told him and he got up and headed slowly for the door. He turned back and scooped up the bottle of Scotch.

  “One for the road,” he said and walked out. She sat in silence for a few moments, the only sound was the low hum of the air conditioning. She got up and went to the window, drew back the long thick drapes and stared out at the response vehicles and media crews outside. She counted at least six news cameras rolling with various reporters giving their updates on the scene.

  Brouchard’s cellphone rang. He saw the name on the screen said “Foche”, a homicide detective. Not a man he particularly cared for and a call from Homicide was never good news. Brouchard answered, not sure what to expect.

  “Yes, Foche?”

  “We found the ambulance.”

  Chapter Forty Eight

  The ambulance had been abandoned on a cobbled street off the main Boulevard. The vehicle was on fire, the light flickering off the cold stone walls of the surrounding buildings. Firefighters had arrived only a short time ago and were just now setting up the hoses, spraying the vehicle down and sending smoke belching up in to the night air. Brouchard got out of his car and was met almost immediately by a man in his forties who always seemed to be eating. He was dressed warm in a long overcoat over a cheap suit, which Brouchard recalled he had always seen him wearing. The same suit. Always eating. The man’s jowly, unshaved face drooped down to his collar and his cocked smile remained fastened there like a graffiti tag on a city wall. His name was Foche and he was enjoying a sandwich while the firefighters were struggling to get the flames out behind him.

  “No witnesses, nothing to go on,” Foche reported between bites of his supper. “The Paramedics are probably dead. One of them’s in the front seat, he’s cooking up quite nicely. I suspect the other one is in the back with the girl. Of course, this is just a theory, but I’m a very good detective.”

  Lara McBride got out of Brouchard’s car and took in the scene. Foche looked at her with a raised eyebrow. He had seen her on the news but in person, she was very fetching. Stunning, in fact. He straightened himself up and sucked in his gut. He did not put the sandwich away.

  “We can’t get in there to look to be sure. I put a request in for extra manpower- given the situation.”

  Mayonnaise dripped on his tie and Brouchard looked away in silent disgust. The rain was a mist now and a low fog had taken hold of the area, making it impossible to tell where the smoke ended and the fog began. This was going to make it harder for the search teams.

  Lara was looking at the buildings around them. Brouchard watched with curiousity as she turned her back to the fire and her eyes took in every brick, every cobble, every shadow, every flicker of light. She was filtering everything, blocking out the impurities and distractions of the response personnel and separating out all the things that did not matter. Her eyes were sharp and focused but somehow there was no life behind them when he saw her do this, as though she had disappeared inside her own mind. She had become a conduit to something Brouchard knew he could never understand or experience for himself. And he was glad he couldn’t. Brouchard felt chills and turned away from her, suddenly feeling like he was watching her in a vulnerable situation.

  “Everything he does is deliberate,” she said aloud. “Why did he burn the ambulance? Why did he bring it here to this specific alley?”

  “Nobody can see this place from the street and there are multiple exit routes. It’s a good spot,” Foche commented, hoping to impress her.

  “You’re right. It is a perfect spot. But how did he know that? Paris is a big city and we’re not that far from the hotel. I don’t know every alley in Los Angeles. Point being, he knows this place. He came here on purpose.”

  Foche leaned in close to Brouchard and spoke in a low tone so only the Inspector could hear him.

  “I thought she was being deported?” Foche asked.

  “As you can see, she is still very much here and in action. So, perhaps, we should listen to what she has to say. And where did you hear she was being deported?”

  “Like I said, I’m a very good detective.”

  Lara walked over to the storage garages. She saw the sign with the phone number hanging on the side of the building. The garages looked large enough, two of them on the ground floor, the only two the building had to offer. Some kind of old factory maybe that had been converted in to a storage unit. A specialty kind of storage unit judging by their size. These weren’t the kind of units one would rent just to throw a few pieces of furniture in. One would need a lot of items or something big. Vehicles.

  “Anybody checked out these units?” she asked. Now, Foche was ready to come in to his own and show the American how gifted he was. He pulled out his notepad from his jacket pocket, still had it on the same page from when he’d written on it in the car when he was making his calls not too long ago.

  “The building is owned by a property management company called Terril. One man rents both these units and has done so for the last three years. No problem with him as a tenant and no criminal record came back when I ran the name.”

  “What’s his name?” she asked flatly.

  “Jacques-Louis David,” Foche said, reading the deliberate handwriting off his notepad. He was always careful with the spelling of names. He’d seen people slip through the cracks because of a simple misspelling.

  “It’s an alias,” Brouchard said.

  “How’s that?” Foche asked, trying to figure out how he could have overlooked something that had been staring him right in the face.

&
nbsp; “That’s the name of a painter. He has several works in the Louvre.”

  “When did you become an art expert?” Foche scoffed.

  “He was my wife’s favorite painter. We used to go every month.”

  Foche went quiet. He had met Brouchard’s wife a couple of times at the station over the years. Beautiful woman. Smart, too. Amazing smile and always quick to laugh, so different from her uptight husband. He had been sorry when he heard she passed away and he had noticed the change in Brouchard. It had made him retreat further in to himself, become less sociable, but at the same time it had also softened him. Foche felt uncomfortable, not sure what to say.

  “I should get a search warrant,” he offered.

  “Excellent idea. You really are a good detective, Foche.” Brouchard patted him on the shoulder and followed Lara over to the front door of the first storage garage.

  Chapter Forty Nine