by Cara Black
Now she knew she needed more backup for the future. Zazie, contingency plan number three, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the couple who owned the café below Leduc Detective, had a summer class and wouldn’t be available until the next day.
Benoît had left to teach an Asian studies summer session at the University in Grenoble; his sister—Gabrielle’s mother—and her husband had arranged to have their vacation in Ibiza coincide with Babette’s.
Weren’t people supposed to stagger their holidays in July or August? The boulangeries were mandated to do so by law, so there would always be a place to buy bread. Why was everyone now a juilletiste as opposed to an aoûtien?
“We’ll have baguettes at least, Chloé. That’s a good thing,” Aimée said. She lifted Chloé’s pudgy hand to make her wave bye-bye as Babette took off.
Aimée ran through her other options. Saj had a client meeting this evening. Her go-to dog-sitting standbys, Viard, the police forensic expert, and his partner, Michou, who loved Chloé to death, were in Martinique. Martine was covering a story in Fontainebleau. Even Aimée’s cousin Sebastien and his wife and new baby were on vacation at her parents’ house in Switzerland.
Toute Paris had disappeared, and it wasn’t even August.
Aimée had a lucrative contract to honor, more business than Leduc Detective could handle, and Suzanne on her back.
The police were looking for a female suspect involved in Erich Kayser’s death. They were looking for her. The hairs prickled on the back of her neck.
What had she gotten herself into?
Get a grip. She’d work from home. Go low profile. Better stuff down her anxiety and get to work.
Chloé’s little eyelashes fluttered, battling sleep. Nap time.
Upstairs, she settled Chloé into her crib under the butterfly mobile, fed Miles Davis the last of the horsemeat from the white-paper package, and made a mental note to stop at the butcher’s. One more thing to remember.
She emailed Suzanne Jean-Marie’s address, which she found in his medical file. Done, she logged on to her laptop, pulled up the École des Beaux-Arts database, and got back to monitoring.
Her landline rang.
René?
“Aimée, it’s me,” said Melac.
Of all times.
“I’m at the door, Aimée. Let’s talk.”
“What? Not with your mother again?”
“Only me. Please.”
Panic set in. A former flic, Melac still had connections.
What if he’d seen the police bulletin about Erich Kayser, somehow put things together?
“We’ve got nothing to discuss, Melac.”
“But we do.”
She heard knocking. “Shhh, Chloé’s asleep. You’ll wake her up.”
“Then we’ll whisper.” More knocking.
Finally, she showed him to the balcony. Clenched her fingers on the wrought-iron railing so she wouldn’t hit something.
“I know you’re in a bind without a babysitter,” he said. “Your concierge told me.”
She masked her surprise.
“Can I help?”
Like he’d ever offered before. He’d never even seen his daughter until she was six months old and he decided to pop up at her christening. With his new wife.
But now he’d crouched to examine the baby gate, still in the package, by the balcony door. He took out the instructions.
She wanted to hit him. She couldn’t deal with it. Not now. She’d show him the door, get work done while she could.
“There’s nothing to discuss, Melac.”
Just then, her phone rang from her bag.
“Your whole place needs serious babyproofing,” he said. “Not just the kitchen. Look at that exposed outlet. Sharp edges everywhere. Chloé’s already crawling and pulling herself up.”
“Like I haven’t noticed, Melac?” Another thing to do. Chloé’s fascination with electrical outlets and the apartment’s archaic fuses presented a problem.
Her phone was still ringing. She turned to answer.
Sybille’s usually calm voice had gone up a register. “Where are you, Aimée? I checked the library, the terminals, everywhere.”
“Didn’t you see the note I left, Sybille? I explained—”
“Just grab a taxi. How fast can you get here?”
“Sybille, I’m monitoring your system remotely via—”
“Mademoiselle Leduc, you’re under contract.” Sybille’s voice was coated in frost. “I need you here, not remotely. That’s what I’m paying you for.”
“Bien sûr.” She could hear René saying, Always humor the client, especially our high-ticket contracts.
Damn René—where was he when she needed him?
Melac rose. “Go. I’ll watch Chloé.”
She tried to turn away, but he caught her hand, pointed to his watch.
Her laptop screen showed an error. Merde. A system malfunction that hadn’t been there twenty minutes ago.
Merde again. How could she trust Melac to watch Chloé? They’d hardly interacted or spent time together. But he’d raised another daughter, Nathalie, who had died after a bus accident. He’d been heartbroken, left the force to be by her bedside while she was in a coma. Aimée knew he was a devoted father.
It would be only a few hours.
Zut! What else could she do?
“Fifteen minutes, Sybille.” Hung up.
She grabbed the emergency list, with numbers for the doctor, poison control, from under the bébé swim schedule and tacked it on the wall. Pointed out the blackboard where Babette had chalked Chloé’s food likes. There was a new discovery: compote de cerises au yoghourt.
Miles Davis, his ears perked up, sniffed Melac’s jeans as Aimée slipped into her sandals. “Just in case there’s a—”
Melac rolled his eyes. “Think I can handle this. Just point me to the tools.” His eyebrows rose. “You do have a tool kit?”
“Bottom kitchen drawer.”
“Bon. While she naps, I’ll properly babyproof this archaic pit.”
After a few more hurried instructions, she flew down the worn marble stairs, jumped on her scooter, and revved it onto the quai.
Gunning her scooter, helmet on and her phone earbuds in, she wove past a bus on quai de Conti, listening to Saj’s take on the system malfunction. He’d discovered malware that had been downloaded through a supposedly legitimate email. They saw this kind of thing all the time. All it took was one careless click. He suggested a system reboot. She prayed that worked.
Ten minutes later at École des Beaux-Arts, she’d donned her IT outfit, flown up the rear building’s metal stairs, taken over a terminal, and gotten to work checking the system. It was clear. Saj had installed the antivirus download on his end by then.
“All backed up,” Saj said in her earpiece. “Okay, reboot.”
She shut down the system. Counted to three and rebooted.
The log-in appeared.
“What’s the new password, Saj?”
“4-midable, with a dash and the number ‘four.’” She heard him clicking on his keyboard. “Couldn’t get so original on short notice.”
“Least it’s not rata-2-e.” She logged in. Breathed a sigh of relief as the normal display appeared on her screen. “Think we’re good. No system errors.”
“There won’t be any more. I found the firewall breach courtesy of that error. The hacker screwed up, Aimée.”
“The hacker screwed up? I thought it was that you’re such a genius, you discovered the problem.”
“Milk this to your employer. Stress the need for employee password privacy education. Someone got stupid. The password hadn’t been changed in six months. Lazy. Think of this breach as a good thing. I’m on him now. He’s running, but can’t hide that sloppy technique.”
&
nbsp; Sloppy technique—that reminded her of Suzanne’s description of Mirko.
Bette, Sybille’s assistant, whom Aimée privately thought of as Sybille’s lapdog, tapped a pencil on Aimée’s screen. She was a fuchsia-haired former art student who thought punk was still a fashion statement.
“La directrice needs you, immédiatement.” Her voice was self-important and tinged with reverence.
In her office Sybille peered over her terminal. Her normally flawless makeup was smudged. “Merci, Bette.”
Bette bobbed her head. “À votre service, Madame la Directrice,” she said. Aimée could have sworn she almost curtsied.
“All’s good,” Aimée said. “We’ve discovered and dealt with the hacker. Sealed the firewall. Your system’s back on track.”
“Quoi?” Sybille was staring at her computer screen. She picked at a loose button on her silk sleeve, distracted. Her composure was ruffled.
“But we’ve changed the password, so I’ll need to educate the staff on—”
“I need you next door,” Sybille interrupted. “Follow me.”
Next door turned out to be across the street and down a back passage off narrow rue Visconti. Aimée followed Sybille toward a small townhouse with blue shutters, up a set of steps winding under an arch, past a kitchen garden with trellised bean runners, and along mossy stone walkways. Another world here in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés—what remained of the ancient village and abbey outside Paris’s twelfth-century walls.
Sybille knocked at a tall double wooden door, then entered. Aimée found herself in a salon with windows overlooking the garden they’d passed. Jules Dechard sat shirtless on a chair, a doctor with a stethoscope listening to his chest. An intravenous drip was attached to a needle in a vein in his arm. He looked so different from just the day before, his face ashen—the man looked like death. She noticed his concave chest, the visible outlines of his ribs. Shocked, Aimée realized his layered clothing had hidden total emaciation. Bandages were taped to his neck, and she saw dried blood on his temple.
“You’ve stabilized, Jules,” said the doctor, packing his bag. “But I want to admit you to the clinic.”
“Like that will happen.”
“Stubborn, eh, Jules? Comme d’habitude,” said the doctor, shaking his head.
“What’s the matter?” Aimée asked. “An accident?”
Jules bristled. “Why did you bring her?”
She wondered about this man who blew hot and cold.
“You know why, Jules,” said Sybille. She sat down next to him, took his hand. “Now shut up and listen to Dr. Pivot.”
A heated argument ensued while Sybille held Jules’s shaking hands in her own. Aimée gathered that Jules Dechard suffered a terminal illness, that his condition had deteriorated. And the man was in denial.
She also intuited Jules had kept the appointment with his email blackmailer, confronted him, and gotten beaten up.
But this wasn’t her business. She didn’t know why Sybille had insisted she come. At least it seemed to confirm Sybille wasn’t going to accuse her of a professional indiscretion for taking Jules’s cash contract. Was she?
Uncomfortable, Aimée turned to follow the doctor out. Sybille shot out of her chair and ran to stop her.
“Désolée, but I must return to work,” said Aimée.
“Please, stay. My brother-in-law needs your help.”
“I don’t understand what this is about,” she said, “and I don’t think it’s my business.”
A muscle in Sybille’s cheek twitched. “May I remind you you’re under contract?”
Doubt it covers this, Aimée thought.
“It seems to me Professor Dechard has a personal problem,” Aimée said carefully, remembering her promise to him to be discret. “If he is the victim of criminal violence or blackmail, that is a matter for the police, not for the school’s IT security advisor.”
“Non, wait,” Sybille said. “It is a school matter—they are attacking the École des Beaux-Arts’s reputation.”
“I don’t understand,” Aimée said.
“He’s being framed.”
“Framed? For what? Framed by whom?”
Jules sighed. “I don’t know.”
Of course he knew. “Please report this to the flics. Talk to your lawyer. Not me.”
Sybille glanced at her phone. “The lawyer’s en route.”
“Listen,” said Dechard. “This is what happened. I was supposed to meet someone at Galerie Tournon about . . . about a private matter.” Dechard’s voice quivered. “When I got there, I found my contact slumped over in the garden. He was . . . he looked dead.”
A shiver traveled up Aimée’s arm.
“Then I got hit from behind.”
“You were attacked? By whom?”
He grimaced. “I don’t know. Someone knocked me unconscious. When I came to, the security guard had called the police. They were loading the other man in an ambulance—they questioned me, wanted to take me to the hospital. I . . . I didn’t . . . I told them I felt fine; I wanted to see my own doctor. I wasn’t under arrest, so they had to let me go, but they took down my information. I know the flics are going to come for me. Whoever attacked me set me up. Now it looks like I killed that man.”
Could she believe him? Or had he confronted his blackmailer, who’d fought back?
“He’s being framed,” said Sybille, running her red-lacquered nails through her hair. “That’s why he needs your help. We want you to investigate, Aimée.”
This was fou—crazy. What was there to investigate? Jules Dechard knew what was going on and should just come clean so he could get the help he needed.
Aimée’s eye caught on two blue uniforms in the garden below, a plainclothes flic pointing to the window. Her heart jumped. Looking for her?
A dragonfly hovered on sapphire wings between the flics, then suddenly took flight. One of the flics jumped and swatted.
“You’ve got guests,” she said, ready to bolt. “Brigade criminelle. I’ll see myself out the back.”
Terror filled Dechard’s eyes.
Sybille grabbed Aimée’s hand. “It’s a plot to ruin our reputation, the credibility of the school. Look, Aimée, this would sabotage us. The whole school would implode.”
“Sabotage? What are you talking about? Your professor has been attacked—that’s criminal assault. You should report it to the police.”
Sybille wouldn’t release her iron grip.
“They’re accusing me of plagiarism,” Jules blurted out. “So long ago. Ancient history. They could taint my Légion d’honneur. Endanger my chair endowment.”
“The whole department would come under fire,” Sybille said. “The whole school—our reputation is on the line.”
“Who says you plagiarized, Professor?” Aimée saw him wince at the word, but he didn’t respond. “What do they accuse you of plagiarizing?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said sharply. “It’s all . . . They’re framing me. Trying to ruin me to hide their . . . It’s . . .” He trailed off.
“To hide what?” Aimée asked.
He flapped a sagging hand, waving her off. “It doesn’t matter.”
Poor Dechard. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. But how could she help him if he wouldn’t even answer her questions?
“Mon Dieu, Aimée,” said Sybille. “Find out who’s trying to destroy us.”
Footsteps sounded on the landing. A brisk knock. Sybille let go of Aimée and fluffed her hair.
Dechard reached for Aimée’s arm with his bony fingers. “I’m being set up.” He squeezed so hard it hurt. “We’d worked out a deal. That’s what I don’t understand. I don’t know who hit me. He never even took the . . . what I’d promised to bring him.”
The door opened, revealing the flics in conversation w
ith a short man who was stuffing his lawyer’s robe in his briefcase. Good timing on the part of Dechard’s attorney.
She needed to get out of there. But it was too late—a woman stepped into the room, and Aimée was smacked in the face with a familiar wave of old-fashioned bergamot Lanvin fragrance and tobacco. Her stomach dropped a thousand feet.
“Mademoiselle Leduc, we meet again.”
That gravel-toned voice, those high heels and that steel gaze—the last person she’d share air with by choice. Edith Mesnard, la Procureure de la République.
“Just like you to poke your nose in this. New glasses?”
She’d rather chew tin foil than deal with Madame la Proc, the investigating magistrate who was known for her brains and her will of iron. After Morbier’s shooting and the closed-door hearing, la Proc had had it in for Aimée big-time. The upshot of the hearing was that Morbier would receive retirement, honorable discharge, the full whitewash. Not that he’d benefit for long. Yet unlike his cohorts, he was alive.
The police union rep had attacked and threatened Aimée at the hearing, petitioning for her PI license to be revoked. Even la Proc, known for fairness, had admonished Aimée in chambers.
“I’m contracted to École des Beaux-Arts on a corporate security matter, Madame la Proc,” said Aimée. “Bad timing on my part that I came to deliver a report when Professor Dechard’s doctor was here.” She shouldered her bag. “If you’ll excuse me, Madame la Proc.”
She made it out the door ignoring the whispered “see you in hell” that one of the brigade criminelle inspectors spat at her as she passed. She hurried down the stone walkways, conscious of a coffee grinder in the distance, shutters casting diagonals of light and shadow on the paving stones.
She glanced at her phone. A message from Saj. Another message on the burner phone. Suzanne’s muffled voice. “Mistakes were made.” An intake of breath. “Jean-Marie . . . in danger . . . Tell him . . .” That was all she could make out. Then an earsplitting crackling as if the phone had been dropped.