by Cara Black
His only bargaining chip was the file in his overalls. No way would he give it up unless he had Marie-Jo. He held the only thing that would keep Marie-Jo alive.
In the Corsican’s duffel bag he found a pair of night-vision goggles, an extra ammo clip, gloves, an alternative lock, cell phone, folded sheets of plastic and even rags to clean up the blood spatter. A pro. Hired to erase all traces. The salaud.
Zacharié shook with anger. Helpless. Why had he believed Jules again? Why didn’t he ever learn?
Groaning came from the floor. Tandou blinked, a death rattle in his chest. “Your daughter … never part of the plan. Believe me …”
A traitor, too? In league with Jules, scheming behind his back?
He knelt down at Tandou’s side. “Why, Tandou? Why betray me? He’s got my baby.”
Blood trickled from Tandou’s lips. “Never meant …”
Zacharié cradled his old friend in his arms. “Where’s Marie-Jo? Where’s he keeping her?”
Tandou’s labored breathing tore his heart.
“Tell me. I’ve got to …”
“Get him.” Tandou’s chest heaved. “Dervier’s bro … broth … in … knows the …”
And his lungs gave out. He’d gone, leaving a wife, three children and another on the way.
Zacharié stuck the Corsican’s cell phone in his front pocket. Goddammit. He’d find his daughter. But he needed help.
What had Tandou been trying to say? Brother? Dervier only had a sister. Think, he had to think. Brother-in-law? Was the sister married? He thought he might have met the man at some holiday meal once; a picture of a chunky man in a turquoise shirt floated through his mind.
The Corsican’s phone kept lighting up with calls from an unknown number.
Jules.
He needed to let Jules stew, let the scenarios play in his head. The Corsican hit man had made two errors—miscalculating their timetable and leaving behind his phone. Now he was trapped in the courtyard until regular business hours. Jules wouldn’t know anything that had gone down, wouldn’t even know Zacharié was alive.
He had to use this advantage. Leverage it to find Marie-Jo.
He’d get that big-eyed pregnant one with the long legs to help him. The minute Zacharié appeared, Jules would send more goons. What better cover than a pregnant woman?
But he was covered in blood. Tandou’s blood. A sob caught in his throat.
No time to mourn this senseless carnage, cry over their betrayal. He needed to save his daughter. His hand shook as he rooted through the Corsican’s bag. He made himself take off his bloody shirt and put on the windbreaker the Corsican had brought for that very purpose.
Along the way he threw his bloodied shirt and overalls in a dumpster behind Monoprix. Sweating, nerves frayed, he battled through the laughing crowds and street musicians clogging the humid streets of Pigalle. It took forever to reach the guitar store on rue Victor Massé.
Rigaud, the long-haired guitarist who let him sleep in his garçonnière, bachelor pad, above the shop, gestured to the télé screen behind the cash register. “Sick, I tell you, sick. Can you believe this happened just a few streets away? During Fête de la Musique?”
Zacharié tensed. Had the Corsican escaped, the flics discovered his friends’ bodies …?
“And right after the fromager’s daughter was murdered by the rapist,” Rigaud went on, tuning his guitar. “What’s the world coming to, I ask you? Shooting a pregnant woman!”
Intent, Zacharié stepped past the Fender amplifiers and closer to the screen to process what he was seeing on the télé: the yellow crime-scene tape on the cobbled street, the flashing red lights. It couldn’t be, it would be too much of a coincidence … Damn. Had she been shot? Had Jules gotten to her first?
Tuesday, 11 P.M.
AIMÉE WOKE UP to the rustle of fabric as the curtains parted. A honey-complected boy with hazel eyes took her hand.
Was she dreaming? Could this be her baby, born and grown? Confused for a second, she squeezed his hand. Warm. Tried to speak but nothing came out. Her tongue was thick, mouth dry like sandpaper.
“Grand-père got a call,” he said. “He’s your emergency contact on your medical card. We got off the train and came back.”
Finally she recognized Marc, Morbier’s half-Moroccan grandson. He had shot up like a wild sprout. Only nine or ten, but he reached his grandfather’s shoulder.
Morbier, in a crumpled seersucker jacket and loosened shirt collar, looked none too pleased to see her. “Careless and downright stupid, Leduc. Getting shot again? Consider your pregnant heels curbed.” He turned to the arriving flic. “Make sure there’s a uniform at her door as soon as she’s moved to a room,” he said, gruff. “Meanwhile I’ll take her statement.”
The flic’s eyes widened. “The Brigade Criminelle chief sent me, but … is that an order, Commissaire?”
“We called it that when I graduated from the Police Academy,” said Morbier. “Has anything changed?”
The flic pulled out his cell phone. “À votre service, Commissaire.”
Morbier palmed some francs into Marc’s hand. “Why don’t you find some chocolate in the cafeteria?”
As Marc left, Morbier sat down with a sigh. Fanned himself with a train ticket. “Another fine mess,” he said. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Leduc? You’ve got a baby to think of.”
She swallowed. Found her voice. “They knocked me out with an injection. Don’t let them give me more drugs.” She pushed herself up on her elbows. “Promise me, Morbier.”
A nurse with flyaway blonde hair loomed at the bedside with a chart. “No drugs?” She snorted. “Does topical antiseptic bother you? I’d call you lucky.”
“Getting shot’s … lucky?”
Morbier stood and moved to the side as the doctor entered.
“Your companion, the other victim, bled out.” The doctor’s bald head shone under the white cubicle lights as he checked her chart. “But good news. We halted your contractions with a shot of Terbutaline. The Kleihauer–Betke blood test showed no fetal blood cells in your circulation. The sonogram shows a healthy heartbeat. Your cervix hasn’t elongated.”
She blinked. “So my baby’s okay?”
A nod. “We’re monitoring you for concussion, shock, fetal disturbance, anything that could affect the baby. We’ll err on the side of caution.”
She shivered, remembering. The gunshots, Mélanie’s mother crumpled on the cobblestones, the blood, the shock. How close to losing the baby she’d been.
“You’re sure my baby’s not injured?”
“We’re going to watch out for pain in your womb, chills, fever, dizziness, fainting, headache, swelling in your fingers, vomiting, bleeding.” The doctor ticked off a checklist. “So far you’re strong as an ox. The baby too. But we still have to remove the bullet, treat your gunshot wound, get you some stitches and prevent infection. You’ll stay here tonight under observation.” He swabbed more gel on her stinging shoulder. “Ready?”
“For what?”
“Breathe.” She felt a sharp poke, digging, then fire erupted in her shoulder. She gritted her teeth, determined not to cry out. But she did.
“Voilà.” The doctor held a bullet between surgical tweezers.
He dropped it in a kidney-shaped metal pan with a ping. With a deft motion, the nurse reswabbed the bullet wound and stitched it closed. “We’ll check on you later.” A whoosh of antiseptic air, padding on their soft, rubber-soled shoes, and they’d left.
Morbier took a latex glove and baggie from his inside jacket pocket. Dropped the bullet inside and examined it. He whistled. “Don’t see many like this anymore.”
“Like what? Explain, Morbier.”
“Nine millimeter. Can’t read the casing number without a magnifier. Vintage, I’d say. A Luger?”
“From the war? You mean a German Luger?”
“So you’re ticking off Nazis again.” Shook his head. “Don’t you ever learn, Leduc?”
“Morbier, get this to Ballistics, priority. And copy Serge at the morgue.”
“Telling me how to do my job?” But he’d gone to the door, had a word with the flic guarding her room. By the time he returned and sat down heavily on the plastic chair, he’d taken off his jacket and dabbed his perspiring brow with a wrinkled handkerchief.
“Why not tell me you were going on leave, Morbier?” she said, that little girl inside her bursting out. Why did she always feel like a child with him, craving his attention? Stupid. “Zut! It worried me,” she said, attempting to recover. “Couldn’t reach you. Why disconnect your phone?”
“There goes my keeping it on the quiet, Leduc,” he said. “I took a week’s leave. Wanted to keep it from the pencil pushers who calculate retirement.”
Since when did Morbier, a senior commissaire divisionaire, take leave on the sly? Didn’t add up. She sensed there was more to the story. Hadn’t he moaned about the roadblocks in his ongoing investigation last week, the upper echelon’s pressure to shelve it?
“Did this sudden trip stem from your corruption investigation? Things got too hot?”
Morbier gave a start in the plastic chair. She could have sworn guilt and something like fear crossed his furrowed brow. Then it disappeared. His sagging jowls, the day-old beard gave him a haggard look.
“Not for you to worry about, Leduc. Not in your condition.”
But his pinhole pupils were sharp in those brown basset-hound eyes.
“Mais alors, you got into a shootout,” he said, “in your condition.”
As if it were her fault? “A shootout is a mutual armed exchange,” she said, fuming. “Not an innocent woman gunned down in the rue as she is getting into her car. Get your facts straight.”
“Ever thought the shooter might have been aiming at you instead of this Madame …”
“Vasseur? The mother of Zazie’s friend, the rape victim?” Aimée shook her head. But could Morbier be right? Her spine prickled. Was she responsible for Madame Vasseur’s death?
“Your face plastered all over the télé didn’t help, Leduc,” said Morbier. “Why would you get mixed up with that gutter-press sensationalist who calls herself a télé-journalist? Unleashed a can of crazies. Typical. You act before you think.”
Morbier had a point. A uniform guarding the hospital room gave her some comfort.
“But this means the rapist’s cornered, desperate. That’s the whole point, Morbier. Force him out in the open so we can find Zazie.”
Poor Mélanie, first attacked and institutionalized, now motherless, left with a widowed father who had complained his high-powered wife put her law career before her daughter. Now even more than before, Mélanie was in his hands.
Guilt stung her. Mélanie’s mother had tried to help. Where was her phone?
A smiling medical attendant with a mustache appeared with a new clipboard.
“Commissaire, we’re moving the patient to the Obstetrics ward.”
“I’ll join you.” Morbier shuffled to his feet. Nodded. “After I stop in at the cafeteria.”
UPSTAIRS IN A room redolent with bleach and disinfectant, Aimée rubbed her stomach. She hated the hospital smell. Her open window overlooked darkened rails glistening in a night rain shower.
Marc lay curled asleep on an adjoining hospital bed, the covers pulled under his neck. Morbier took a bite of céleri rémoulade from her green tray. “Not bad, Leduc. Try some.”
“Hospital food?”
But hunger clawed, and the Bump needed to eat.
“Open wide …”
She almost batted the plastic spoon of glistening celery slivers back at him. “Quit treating me like an invalid.”
She finished the whole plate, and a second.
“Ready for my statement, Morbier?”
Wednesday, 8 A.M.
MADAME PELLETIER STARED at the files on her desk. They went back five years, but what she was looking for wasn’t here. That incident niggled in her mind.
She pushed her cup of steaming tilleul, lime-blossom tisane, to the side of her desk. Her vacances put on hold thanks to the backlog of cases and now the rapist terrorizing the ninth. She’d come in early this morning to catch up. Quiet for once—at least she could concentrate.
What if that Leduc had been right? Not that she was happy about the media pressure, how the woman had painted the police as inefficient. Leduc’s scenario—that her missing young friend, the thirteen-year-old redhead, had something to do with the rapist—hadn’t sounded realistic to her. Yet now the girl’s story bothered her. Madame Pelletier’s own daughter had run away when she was thirteen. Had she been projecting her own experience on the distraught parents—something she’d been trained not to do?
After the divorce, her daughter had decided to live with her father. Almost relieved, Madame Pelletier had agreed. She didn’t miss the yelling matches—you’re never home, it’s not like you’d miss me.
Now her daughter lived in the Cévennes, raised sheep, chopped firewood in the bitter winters. Never mind that she’d married a man who was the mental equivalent of a barn post. They grew what they ate and slaughtered their own meat, and they were expecting … Her daughter, now happier than she’d ever been, begged her all the time to visit.
There she went again. Projecting.
Quiet as they kept it, with the Brigade’s huge log of investigations—infant- and child-abuse cases, incest, child pornography—missing thirteen-year-olds like Zazie went to the bottom of the priority list.
Before the unit meeting, she’d pull up a few more years of files. She had to scratch that itch, make up for …
What was that name?
“Need you,” her commander barked from the doorway.
“But I came in early to work on that case.”
“Now, Pelletier. There’s been a sighting of the rapist and two missing girls. We had a false one last night, but this looks real.”
“Where?” she said, reaching for her cell phone.
“A warehouse. On the outskirts of Ivry.”
A tough industrial suburb, more than an hour away in morning traffic. She grabbed her jacket.
Wednesday, 9 A.M.
MILES DAVIS LICKED Aimée’s ankles at the concierge-loge door. Madame Cachou’s lips turned down in disapproval as she handed Aimée a shopping bag labeled “maternity” that had been left for her by Martine. Hand-me-downs from her fertile sisters who, according to Martine, had populated a good sixteenth of France.
Thank God. And designer goodies, too. She’d outgrown most of her armoire.
“Careful, I just waxed the foyer.”
Madame Cachou had always had a soft spot for Miles Davis—not so for Aimée. But since Aimée’s pregnancy the concierge had thawed, almost to lukewarm. She’d bring up the mail, slip in an article on prenatal nutrition or tips on bébé’s first months.
“Left another package for you upstairs by your door.”
“Merci, Madame.”
Aimée leaned forward to take off Miles Davis’s leash, and Morbier’s borrowed jacket flapped open. Madame Cachou’s gaze caught on her yesterday’s worn clothes, stiff with blood. The bandage.
“What happened this time?” Shock mingled with concern in her tone. She wagged her finger. “An accident on that scooter? A woman in your condition …”
Quit sounding like my mother, she almost said. But her mother hadn’t said that, because her mother wasn’t there.
“I saw you on the télé in the appeal for that young girl.”
Her and the rest of the world. The rapist, too.
Apart from getting herself shot at and Mélanie’s mother murdered, where had the news appeal got her? Zazie was still missing. The “nice man” rang no bells with the owner of the NeoCancan, and no girls were held captive in his cellar, according to Beto’
s message. No brioches this morning, either, because of his double shift. No word from Zacharié’s parole officer. And neither Madame Pelletier at the Brigade des Mineurs or Madame de Langlet had answered her calls.
“My baby’s fine.”
“Always in trouble, and now with a little life inside you …”
And the shooter still out there. Where was the police protection Morbier had promised her?
“No one’s heard from Zazie in two days. There’s a rapist on the loose.” Her shoulder stung.
“And why is that your business?”
“A little girl I’ve known since she first started talking? I can’t rest until I find her.” She looked the concierge in the eye. “Could you?”
And with that she left an openmouthed Madame Cachou. Mounting the worn marble stairs more slowly than usual, she pulled out her cell phone and called Virginie again.
“I’m sorry, Aimée,” said a breathless Virginie. “So many tips have been called in.”
Aimée leaned on the scrolled metal filigreed banister, rooting for her keys. “Anything concrete?”
“Every tip’s being checked out. The flics promised.”
About time.
“Got to go, Aimée.”
Not even a “how are you feeling?”… but then Virginie wouldn’t know about what had happened last night. Or would she? And the flics had warned her against contact. She couldn’t worry about that.
She checked her messages as Miles Davis scampered up the stairs. A missed call. Serge, her friend at the morgue. So Morbier had come through and asked for a ballistics report.
She hit callback. “Allô, Serge?”
He cleared his throat. “We’re awaiting the final report, but the bullet’s a match for the victim, Commissaire.”
One of the staff had to be in the morgue with him.
“That’s all, Serge? Didn’t you notice anything out of the ordinary for a nine millimeter? The casing grooves? A magnifier would show.”
“Commissaire, you’re referring to the ballistic prelim?” said Serge. “It showed the bullet’s from a Luger. A 1942 German standard issue for the Wehrmacht.”