by Cara Black
She sat up, startled by the ringing of the burner phone under her leg.
Suzanne sounded breathless.
“You have information about Erich Kayser? I queried him about NATO corroborating Mirko’s DNA, but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”
And he wouldn’t.
“Did he mention anything else to you in his most recent email, Suzanne?”
“Said he was busy. Delivering a report at le Sénat.”
Aimée was staring at the report notes at that moment. Figures and more figures. “I’m so sorry, Suzanne.”
Aimée told her what had happened: Isabelle in the morgue and Erich Kayser’s fall.
“They got to him,” said Suzanne, her voice breaking. “I know.”
“Who got to him?”
“First Isabelle and now Erich.”
“Alors, Isabelle’s autopsy revealed a fatal allergic reaction to beestings. Her EpiPen set was in her bag, lost in flight, that turned up today at Charlotte’s. I saw it with my own eyes, Suzanne. Visited the morgue, verified the cause of death with the medical examiner. Her death was an accident.”
“So it’s a coincidence that Erich, who emailed me this afternoon, just falls out a window changing a lightbulb?”
Aimée shuddered, chilled. Pulled the duvet up to her shoulders. “Was there anything else at all in his email?”
“Answer me. You can’t think it’s a coincidence. He was pushed.”
“I got there too late, Suzanne.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“Odd noises,” she admitted. “But it was probably a mouse, the building creaking, or my imagination on overdrive.”
“Trust your instinct, Aimée.”
“Alors, even putting the events together, it’s a stretch. Who would want Isabelle and Erich dead? Why would what they saw and did in Bosnia matter now?”
“I saw it, too.”
Aimée didn’t want to admit doubt had crept in. What if Suzanne was in danger?
“Erich is reporting . . . was reporting to a commission at le Sénat on the Bosnian cases. That’s all he said.”
Suzanne was in Lyon, over four hours away, meeting with Interpol. Out of trouble. Aimée sipped the diablo-menthe, thinking about how to craft her words.
“Suzanne, you of all people know that when you’re running an investigation, you have to identify a motive, access, and who benefits. According to those files you gave me, Mirko and his gang were career criminals, paramilitary types. Who’d give him the order to go to Paris? He’s not a polished type, sophisticated enough to evade border checks and set up intricate murders in a foreign city where he doesn’t speak the language. Never mind making them appear to be accidents—that would take a high-level chain of command. That’s what bothers me, Suzanne. You’re afraid of Mirko, but the Mirko you showed me couldn’t have committed Isabelle’s and Erich’s murders—if they even were murders.”
Aimée paused to let this sink in. “Mirko ran into a tunnel, got blown up. Even if somehow he survived, what resources would he have access to? Didn’t you yourself refer to his sloppy technique? Didn’t you call him a ‘thug’?”
A loud sucking in of breath. “Go see Jean-Marie.”
“Who?”
“He was on our team, too. He was in Foča with me and Isabelle and Erich. But he hasn’t returned my emails or calls, Aimée.”
“Zut!” she said, frustrated. Suzanne wasn’t even listening to her. “Why would he respond to me?”
“Tell Jean-Marie what’s happened. He lost his leg near Foča, but he’s out of the hospital, from what I hear.”
“Shouldn’t you visit him when you’re back from Lyon, Suzanne?”
“I don’t know where he lives,” she said, sounding desperate. “I’ve tried to reach him but he’s military and they don’t share information like that. Find out for me, and I’ll visit him tomorrow night.”
Or did they refuse to give the information because of her paranoid behavior?
Pause. “Didn’t you watch the CCTV? There’s no man resembling Mirko going in or out of the café tabac, Suzanne.”
“Do this last thing for me. Please, Aimée.”
Why couldn’t Suzanne understand?
“My babysitter’s going on vacation,” said Aimée. “I’m scrambling right now. This is not a good time.”
Pause. A car door and shouts in the background.
“Last thing, Aimée. Please. I promise when you find Jean-Marie, I’ll handle everything else. Put it to rest. But I have to talk to him.”
Aimée sighed. Took down his full name and the last hospital Suzanne knew he’d been in.
After she clicked off, she remembered she needed René’s help with babysitting.
Stupid—in all the panic, she’d forgotten to ask him. And she’d left her damn scooter by Jardin du Luxembourg. Useless, temperamental thing—of course, it was Italian.
Thursday, Midmorning
Of course, the flics were on the lookout after the previous night.
All morning Aimée had felt a tingling down her neck, her nerves on edge. She was worried that the man in the window across from Erich Kayser’s could somehow identify her.
She’d worn another brown wig today, with longer hair, had pinned it up in another style. She’d packed several pairs of glasses and an extra pair of heeled sandals in her bag, replenished her scarves.
It was the second day of the fundraising photo shoot at École des Beaux-Arts. The thyme and garlic scents tormented her. How could anyone stay slim in the catering business? But the catering staff all looked like toothpicks. Starving—she hadn’t even had time for a brioche that morning—she contemplated popping several silicon-and-dye-injected radishes in her mouth. Her burner phone vibrated. Merde. Suzanne pestering her again. She’d been working all morning—hadn’t had a moment to look up Jean-Marie.
“I’m at work. Call me back in thirty minutes.” Aimée clicked off. Out the window, which overlooked a sun-drenched street, she spied a patisserie.
Clutching a paper bag of macaroons, she walked into a quiet courtyard off the rue Jacob. Stood between beds of purple hollyhocks and bit into a mint-pistachio confection.
Heaven. The phone again. Suzanne. She’d said half an hour! She answered with her mouth full.
“Oui?” Green crumbs trickled onto her lap, crème filling on her lip.
“Can you talk now?” Suzanne said. “Any progress on finding Jean-Marie?”
Progress? A pang of guilt hit Aimée. With the million things she had to do, she hadn’t felt compelled to carve out the time yet.
“On it,” she said.
Suzanne expelled air. “You haven’t even looked, have you?”
“Suzanne, first, I do have paying clients I need to service.” Time to get firm. “Second, you’ve seen the CCTV feed I sent you.”
“But what about Erich? You got there too late.”
Aimée dropped a raspberry macaroon on the gravel. Picked it up and brushed off a pigeon feather.
“And you’d better watch out,” said Suzanne. “The police are looking for a woman in connection with Erich’s death. There’s a message à toutes les patrouilles.”
An all-points bulletin. The crumbs stuck in Aimée’s throat. Her worst fears realized. She couldn’t count on her disguise if they got close. Or if they got to Suzanne.
“How do you know?” Aimée asked.
“Read the paper.”
She was involved now.
“Please find Jean-Marie. He’s in danger. Just get his address. Warn him.”
“Warn a man I’ve never met . . . ?” About a hallucination? But she didn’t say that.
“Mirko’s a killer, Aimée. If he’s in Paris, it’s for a reason. He moonlighted as a hit man for his brother.”
A hit man? Suzanne had only menti
oned what he’d done to little girls. But it was beside the point.
“Attends une petite seconde, Suzanne. Did you see any proof of Mirko being in that café on the CCTV footage?”
“I’m back tonight. Please, Aimée, you promised me.”
Aimée sighed, angry and afraid. “D’accord. After that, c’est fini.”
Suzanne hung up. Aimée heard a siren echo on the next street.
In the afternoon lull, she’d find Jean-Marie. She wrote out a note for Sybille, letting her know where she was with the computer surveillance and that she’d be monitoring things remotely later. She left the note on the desk in Sybille’s whitewashed parquet-floored office.
Aimée wished her place could look like that. With a splash of paint and some floor buffing, it could. More pressing, though, was her need to babyproof the whole flat now that Chloé was crawling.
She looked up the hospital name Suzanne had given her in Les Pages Jaunes. Called and, posing as a cousin, discovered Jean-Marie had been discharged a week before and directed to a rehab clinic in his arrondissement.
Upstairs during the library staff’s lunchtime, Aimée installed a surveillance program on their vacant terminals. This way, if she’d set it up right, she could monitor activity from home, and René could back up the feed from the office.
Armed with a new spark plug for her Vespa, she sanded the points, got it started. She checked the side-view mirror every block for someone following her. Only the bus.
At a traffic light, she punched in Leduc Detective’s number on her phone. “René?” she said without waiting for him to say hello. “Please tell me that program I installed at the École des Beaux-Arts library popped up on—”
“Hold on,” said Saj. “I’ll check René’s computer.”
Where was René?
“Et voilà, I see it,” said Saj. “Glad you alerted me. I’ll manage these in my new program. René’s teaching today.”
Another thing she’d forgotten. Like she’d forgotten to ask him about babysitting Chloé.
She parked her scooter at the clinique near a treelined square. Blinked at the muscled physique of the smiling physiotherapist, a tawny blond-haired man, even taller than her, who caused her to re-think her aversion to exercise. What wasn’t there to like about working out?
But Suzanne’s former colleague had a different mind-set.
“Jean-Marie Plove?” said the physiotherapist. “He stopped coming to rehab, dropped out of our program.”
Pause.
“You’re his cousin, you said?”
A story she’d made up. She nodded. “My aunt’s concerned, you know. We want to support him.”
He gestured her toward the weight room, empty except for the machines and the tang of recent workouts. “I met him for a drink after he checked out. Nice mec, but he’s depressed.”
And Aimée realized her gaydar had been turned off. So Monsieur Muscle went the other way—Jean-Marie, too. Not her business.
“Did he suffer PTSD?” she asked.
“That’s a catchall term. But there’s all kinds of emotional psychosocial displacement caused by an amputation. Physical and mental trauma . . .”
“We had no idea.” She hoped her expression showed concern.
“Jean-Marie wants to do this all on his own,” the physiotherapist said sadly. “Frankly, amputees need all the support they can get.”
A few minutes of conversation revealed that Franck, Monsieur Muscle, had really cared about Jean-Marie, gone beyond his job to try to help. He’d set up a parcours so Jean-Marie could train in the square near his place. But after their first meeting, Jean-Marie had failed to show up.
“We keep his file in case he returns. Tell him he’s welcome anytime.” Franck noticed her hopeful look. “Medical confidentiality precludes me from saying any more. I’m sorry.”
A real family member would know Jean-Marie’s address. How could she tease it out of Franck?
“Jean-Marie doesn’t answer his phone. Our letters have been returned. We think he moved.”
“Moved? He said he grew up around there, didn’t want to go far away. That’s why he agreed to meet me in that square. It’s close.”
Great.
“We heard he moved after his return from the Balkans,” she said. “I came because we’re more than concerned. He’d mentioned . . . well . . . he seemed so depressed. We’re worried about suicide.”
A rap on the glass door. “I’ve got another patient, désolé.”
“Can you just ask the office to let me in so I can check? Please?”
“They’ve tightened medical record confidentiality. Again, I’m sorry, but I suggest you try his health liaison at the army. Bonne chance.”
Good luck? She’d need more than that with the military. Like they would share medical history or contact info even within their own branches, much less with her.
The waiting room was crowded, and the receptionist was arguing on the phone. Aimée knocked on the counter to get her attention. “Toilettes, s’il vous plaît?”
The receptionist pointed to the hall door. Buzzed Aimée into the back corridor. As in her own doctor’s office, the patient files lined the walls for easy accessibility for the busy staff.
In the bathroom, she touched up the smudged kohl around her eyes, reapplied Chanel red, and blotted her lips with a café napkin from her bag. Stepped out.
Several of the staff were working with patients in the back room, judging by the sounds of grunts and conversation over a midafternoon radio newscast. The receptionist, back to Aimée, was involved in a heated discussion.
Parfait. Time to grab Jean-Marie’s info for Suzanne and get the hell out.
In the rear hallway, out of the line of sight from the rehab rooms, Aimée tiptoed past the shelves, scanning the files. At P she looked for plove, jean-marie. Spotted it.
“That’s all I can say, monsieur!” The receptionist was shouting. “If you don’t like it . . .”
Aimée tugged. The file stuck.
Footsteps.
She tugged again.
“Mademoiselle? What’s your business back there? Weren’t you in the toilet?”
In a deft move, she pulled the file free and hid it behind her back as she turned to see the receptionist.
“Warn me next time,” said Aimée. “There’s only scalding hot water from the tap. You should alert people. I burned myself.”
File under the back of her blouse, she hitched her bag on her shoulder to disguise the bulge and hurried through the busy clinique lobby, making sure to rub her hands.
Fleeing a scene where a man plunged to his death, stealing medical files to get an address—she could hear René asking what law she would break next.
Thursday, Midafternoon
Jules Dechard perspired with nerves as he passed the manicured lawn and entered the hôtel particulier’s ground-floor foyer. Upstairs the seventeenth-century mansion had been divided into office suites and apartments with million-franc views overlooking the Seine. This whole area had once been Queen Marie de Médici’s personal garden.
The art gallery door was unlocked.
He followed the instructions he’d been left. Told himself he wouldn’t let this ruin him.
The salon was boiseried and gilt festooned, the walls lined with paintings. This early in the afternoon there were no clients. Jules made himself walk to the office, go through tall glass-paned back doors leading to a resto kitchen. His hand shook—he needed to take his pills.
The stainless steel kitchen was full of light from the tall windows to the garden but empty of busboys, kitchen crew. Like all staff, they took an after-lunch siesta until preparations for the evening shift.
His contact was nowhere to be found. The envelope dampened under his arm. He needed to get back to École des Beaux-Arts.
“Allô?”
No answer—only steam rising from something simmering in the copper pot on the stove. A stock with marrowbones, garlic cloves, a pinch of rosemary, and floating bay leaves.
Jules’s hand tremored as he poured himself a cup of water from a pitcher on the counter. He threw his pills in his mouth and drank.
Where the hell was this mystery contact?
He took out his cell and called the number he’d been given, heard the faint answering ringing from behind the building. He followed the sound through the kitchen and out the back door, his feet crunching over gravel to the delivery bay in the side courtyard. The security guard at the back entrance was turned away from him, talking loudly on his cell phone. Jules felt his apprehension increase.
The hedge-bordered garden was full of blooming peonies. There was his contact, sitting by the remodeled old stables and outhouses. His fear mounted. It must be his contact, non? Jules gripped the envelope he’d been about to hand over. The man’s back was to Jules. His head rested against a trellis. Bees droned by the honeysuckle.
Something felt wrong. Very wrong. Just then he heard gravel crunch. Felt a blow to his head before the green hedge melted into black.
Thursday, Midafternoon
Standing on the quai, Aimée held Chloé on her hip so Babette could kiss Chloé goodbye. The plane trees rustled in the weak, warm breeze. Lazy clouds hovered and drifted gauzelike over the right bank of the Seine.
“Hate leaving you in a bind. Désolée, Aimée,” said Babette.
“Bonne vacances. See you in a few weeks,” Aimée said, wondering what on earth she’d do as Babette piled into the taxi. If only Madame Cachou’s sister had not had to go to the hospital.
Selfish. She’d rearrange her schedule, figure it out somehow.
Chloé mewled and bit Aimée’s finger. Ouch. She had new teeth. Contingency plan number two: René, who’d volunteered, non, insisted on taking Chloé whenever Aimée needed him, hadn’t answered his phone. She’d left him another voice mail. The second that day.