by R. J. Jagger
She looked over.
He expected her to ask, “Why?”
She didn’t.
She knew why.
It was in his eyes.
They got to the boat, went below and closed the curtains. Fallon took a long swallow of wine from a bottle and passed it to Teffinger.
He drank, then set it down.
Fallon dropped to her knees, put her hands on top of her head and said, “So what are you going to do with your little sex slave, now that you have me where you want me?”
Teffinger tilted his head.
He’d forgotten about that little bet down by the river.
Well, that wasn’t quite true.
He’d only half forgotten about it.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Whatever I want, huh?”
“Oui, whatever you want.”
He walked around her.
Close.
Playing with her hair.
“Tie me up,” she said.
“Be careful—”
“I want to be in your control,” she said. “Your one hundred percent control.” She stood up, pulled a black duffel bag out of a storage compartment and tossed it on the bed. “That’s my bag of goodies. Find something you like.”
He checked.
Inside were cuffs, rope, blindfolds, feathers, vibrators and other assorted toys. Then she showed him something else, namely eyehooks at the corners of the bed.
HE TIED HER DOWN, spread-eagle on her back, tight, wearing only a thong. She tried to wiggle her hips but could hardly move. He sat on the edge of the bed and ran a finger gently across her lips. “Looks like someone’s stuck,” he said.
“You’re so evil.”
He straddled her stomach and played with her nipples. Then he put his hands on her wrists and lightly ran his fingers down her arms.
Her body tensed.
Teffinger’s fingers passed over her underarms and something happened he didn’t expect.
She laughed.
She tried to stifle it but couldn’t.
It was definitely a laugh.
“Well, it looks like someone’s ticklish,” he said.
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
Teffinger wiggled his fingers in her underarms and got an explosion of laughter.
“That looks like a yes to me,” he said.
TOPSIDE A HALF HOUR LATER, Teffinger scouted the territory to see if the caveman happened to be lurking around to see if the witness was home—the witness behind the page 5 sketch, the witness who needed to die, like Tracy White did. Teffinger didn’t notice anything. He walked over to a man on a bench with a laptop thirty steps north and asked him if he’d seen anything.
He hadn’t.
Teffinger headed back to the boat.
The whole bait scheme was getting more and more worrisome. The man initially made his move quickly, as Teffinger anticipated, but got away. Now he was being more cautious. He might not make a move again until he got convinced that Teffinger was no longer around.
Not good.
What if Teffinger went back to Denver and the man made his move a month from now?
WHEN TEFFINGER GOT BACK to the boat, Fallon was topside and stepping off. “We need to find this guy,” he said.
“Which guy?”
The one who killed Amanda Peterson.
And Tracy White.
And probably Michelle Berri.
And Fallon, next.
“The whole bait thing was a bad idea,” he said. “This guy’s going to bide his time until he’s positive I’m not around and then make his move. We need a Plan B and we need it fast.”
She slipped sunglasses on and they headed for the street.
On the way she flicked a lighter and said, “I lied to you before about something.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
Day Six—July 17
Saturday Morning
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DEJA KNEW THERE WAS NO WAY she could climb up twenty meters of steep rock and was about to tell Alexandra so when something flashed in her head—an image of the looter grabbing his chest.
She had killed a man.
This wasn’t a game.
She looked up the face of the mountain.
“I’m going to fall and die,” she said. “Promise me you won’t leave my body here with the snakes.”
“You’ll be fine,” Alexandra said.
“Promise me anyway.”
“I’ll drag you back to Luxor by the hair if I have to,” Alexandra said. “There? Feel better?”
Deja grunted.
No, not really.
She relieved herself behind a rock cropping, took a tall drink of water, laced her shoes as tight as they would go, put on Alexandra’s backpack and said, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Then she climbed.
She was strong and coordinated but had never done anything like this before, so she went slowly and carefully, getting a feel for the rocks and the limits of her body. Ten meters up she realized that going up was the easy part. The hard part—the dangerous part—would be coming down.
She got up quicker than she thought.
She found no cave or opening.
“Now what?” she shouted down.
“Now you need to start moving the rocks out of the way and make an opening,” Alexandra said. “But here’s the tricky part. Don’t throw the rocks down. We need to keep them up there to plug the hole back up after we leave. So just pile them to one side, if you can.”
“I’m not sure there’s room.”
“Try.”
THAT MADE THINGS HARDER.
A lot harder.
She dropped her share, particularly the heavier ones, but managed to move most of them from the left to the right. Then something happened that she hoped would, but hadn’t really expected.
A hole opened up.
“Got a hole,” she shouted.
“Yeah, baby!”
The working got easier as more and more of her body got off the ledge and inside the opening. Then the hole got big enough for her body to get through. She didn’t go through, though. Instead she took the backpack off, pulled out a flashlight, stuck her head in and looked around.
She didn’t see any snakes but did see something else—death; bones and skulls, lots of them, human, right in front of her.
SHE PULLED OUT AS FAST AS SHE COULD. Then she wiped sweat off her face and shouted down to Alexandra, “Got a bunch of dead skeletons piled up just inside the entrance. Looks like six or seven of them.”
“Do you see a mummy’s casket?”
“Not from where I am,” Deja said. “The cave angles to the right.”
“Well, get in there and look. Be careful not to disturb anything.”
Deja exhaled and wiped sweat out of her eyes.
She brushed the bones and skulls to the side, pushed the backpack through the hole and then followed, barely able to slither through.
Inside, the air was cool.
It should have felt nice but didn’t.
It felt like death.
She stood up.
Something moved on her back.
Something alive.
Something big.
And she screamed.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Day Six—July 17
Saturday Afternoon
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DURAND HEADED OVER TO THE HOUSEBOAT to see what was going on. It was empty, so he took a seat on a bench in the shade thirty meters north, fired up his laptop and went through the caveman’s files.
A half hour later something weird happened.
Very weird.
Two people stepped off the houseboat onto the walkway; the tattoo woman and a strong looking man.
They just had sex.
It was still on their faces.
So the boat hadn’t been empty after all.
&
nbsp; The woman ducked back into the cabin, apparently forgetting something, while the man surveyed the cityscape as if looking for something. Durand pointed his face at the laptop when the man’s head turned his way.
Then something unexpected happened.
The man walked over to him.
“Do you speak English?”
Durand nodded.
“Oui.”
“You been here long?”
Durand shrugged and looked at his watch. “I don’t know, an hour or so, I guess.”
“Did you notice anyone around here paying unnecessary attention to that boat over there, as if they were staking it out or something?”
Durand shook his head.
“I’ve been working,” he said. “Why? You had some robberies or something?”
The man turned and said over his shoulder, “No, I was just curious. Have a good one.”
“You too.”
AS THE MAN WALKED BACK TO THE BOAT, Durand suppressed his natural instinct, which was to close the laptop and walk away as fast as he could. Instead he forced himself to sit there and continue staring at the screen as if nothing was wrong. When the woman stepped off the boat, however, Durand pulled his hand to his face as if scratching.
The man and woman headed to the street.
As far as Durand could tell, the woman never looked his way.
He waited for ten minutes, keeping his face in the computer.
Then he closed it, stood up, stretched, and nonchalantly looked around to see if the man and woman had positioned themselves somewhere to follow him. It they had, he didn’t see them. Just to be safe, however, he zigzagged through a number of streets and took a ride on the Metro before heading home.
The man must have been the one who dived at Durand the other night.
Good thing he escaped.
The guy would have crushed him.
ALL THE RISK OF BREAKING INTO Anton Fornier’s apartment had been for nothing, other than the opportunity to meet a cat. The man’s computer files didn’t shed any light on whether or not he was the one who pumped three bullets into the skull of Luc Trickett, the boxer.
Maybe he was.
Maybe he wasn’t.
Same with respect to the Cairo brother, Serge.
Dead end.
Now what?
HE CALLED A MAN and made a request. “That’s a weird one, even for you,” the man said. “Let me see what I can do.” Fifteen minutes later the man called back and said, “I can get you two, if you’re really serious.”
“I’m serious,” Durand said.
“Stop over in an hour,” the man said. “Bring cash.”
“Always.”
An hour later, Durand walked down stone stairs to a basement hideaway in an edgy neighborhood on the east fringes of the city. He knocked on a wooden door that had seen better days. A man named Jim Travenfield opened it, looking the same as always—dangerous and shifty. Durand stepped in, gave him a quick hug and asked, “You got ’em?”
The man narrowed his eyes.
Bloodshot eyes.
“Of course I got ’em,” Travenfield said. “If I say I’m going to have something, I’m going to have that something. I’m not going to say I have something, and then not have that something. That’s not the way I work. You know that better than anyone.”
True.
“Whether I got ’em isn’t the question,” Travenfield said. “The question is, what the hell are you going to do with them?”
Durand shifted his feet.
“Train them to sing,” he said.
“Yeah, right, you do that.”
Suddenly rattling filled the air.
Durand looked that way and saw a burlap sack with a cord cinched at one end.
“That them?”
Travenfield nodded.
“That’s them. Handle with care, my friend.”
Durand gave the man an envelope, threw the burlap bag in the trunk of his car, pointed the front end west and flicked the radio stations, stopping on a Beatles song, “Love Me Do,” which he cranked up.
A HALF HOUR LATER, he scouted out the houseboat from across the river and saw no signs of life. He crossed the bridge, untied the cord, strolled down the walkway and nonchalantly tossed the bag into the back of the boat.
Ten steps later, Prarie jumped into his thoughts.
He’d take her somewhere nice tonight.
He’d show her more of the Paris she’d never seen, then screw her like a rock star.
Yeah, baby.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Day Six—July 17
Saturday Afternoon
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FALLON WANTED TO RUN DOWN Remy Lafayette’s niece—Deja Lafayette—to confirm that the mysterious Egyptian file they found under the floater’s couch actually came from the dead archeologist’s house. Teffinger, however, talked her into sticking with the caveman case instead, on the remote possibility that Michelle Berri was still alive, so they ended up where the missing woman worked.
The Louvre.
Teffinger had always pictured the world-famous museum as something that actually looked like a museum. In America, you could usually tell when something was a museum and when it wasn’t. Not so in Paris. The Louvre ended up looking more like an ornate palace, and not a little one, either—one that would take two days to circle without even stopping to look at art.
Fallon must have read Teffinger’s thoughts because she said, “It’s huge.”
Teffinger chuckled and said, “I’m sorry, is my zipper down again?”
She rolled her eyes and punched him on the arm.
“You wish.”
They walked over to something that looked like an Egyptian pyramid, except instead of stone it was a contemporary see-through structure made entirely of black tube framing and glass.
“That’s the entrance,” Fallon said.
THEY ENDED UP MEETING with a frail, scholarly-looking, white-haired man named Guillaume, who was the head of the preservation department where Michelle Berri worked.
“Tell me about her,” Teffinger said.
Guillaume collected his thoughts.
“She was a highly-gifted and dependable worker with a love of everything old. She was well liked and had no enemies,” he said. “She was a nice woman. I ate lunch with her two or three times a week. If anything strange had been going on in her life, I’m not sure she would necessarily have confided in me about it, but I have a pretty high confidence level that I would have at least detected it. As far as I know, everything was normal in her life and going according to plans. Then—poof!—she was gone.”
Teffinger nodded.
Right.
Poof.
Good way to put it.
“Who took her? I don’t have a clue,” Guillaume added. “Maybe one of her archeological friends would know.”
Archeological?
Teffinger and Fallon looked at each other, shocked at the word.
“Tell me about her archeological friends,” Teffinger said.
The man shook his frail white head with uncertainty. “I don’t know anything about them, other than she had them and was interested in archeology.”
“Did she ever take an archeology class at the university?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she know an archeologist named Remy Lafayette?”
“I don’t know, maybe, but she never mentioned him if she did.”
They asked more questions but got no more answers.
AS TEFFINGER AND FALLON were at the door on their way out, Guillaume said, “I don’t know if this means anything or not, but she was getting ready to leave her job here. Did you know that?”
Teffinger stopped and turned.
No.
He didn’t know that.
“Leaving to go where?”
“Actually, to run an art gallery over in La Defense,” he said. “That was a step down, in my opinion, and I told her so—but she wanted a change of sc
enery, something that got her more in contact with people. Our work here is detailed and solitary. In some ways, it’s not that much different than creating the initial work in the first place.”
Teffinger raked his hair with his fingers.
It immediately flopped back down.
“That reminds me,” he said. “One of the theories I’ve been kicking around is that someone took Michelle as a way to get into the museum to steal art. How does that strike you?”
The man shook his head.
“Ridiculous,” he said. “No offense. As far as the pieces that are being worked on down here in this department, it might be possible for someone to figure out a way to get them out of the building. But, they’d have to be at work to do it, not kidnapped and someplace else.”
OUTSIDE, Teffinger told Fallon, “I’m starting to get the feeling that all these different murders are connected. Just don’t ask me how.”
“How?”
“I just told you, don’t ask me that.”
“How?”
Teffinger rolled his eyes.
“I’m being a bad girl,” Fallon said. “I wouldn’t blame you a bit if you made me be your sex slave again. Plus, I lied to you.”
She had but the lie wasn’t that big.
She’d told him before that she hadn’t been with another woman before Sheila. That was a lie, actually she had. Not a lot, but she was occasionally attracted to women, if it was the right one and all the stars were in alignment. She didn’t want to tell him before, because she didn’t know if he’d hold it against her.
“Rest assured, the bag of goodies will be out again,” Teffinger said. “In the meantime, let’s run down Remy Lafayette’s niece. What’s her name again?”
“Deja Lafayette.”
“Right, her,” Teffinger said. “With any luck, she’ll verify that the documents under the floater’s couch came from Remy’s files. With even more luck, she’ll be able to tell us that Remy was one of Michelle Berri’s archeological friends. Then we’ll have our connection.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Day Six—July 17
Saturday Morning
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