Murder in the Marais (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 1)

by Cara Black

  Saturday Afternoon

  "WHERE IS SARAH?" AIMÉE asked into her cell phone.

  "You haven't found her?" Hartmuth said.

  From the second floor of her cousin Sebastian's cluttered antique poster store on rue St. Paul in the Marais, she surveyed the narrow alley wedged below her. Sarah, not realizing the danger from her son, had gone with Thierry. Or maybe he had forced her.

  Aimee pushed that thought from her mind. She had to get to a computer with municipal on-line capability and find Sarah.

  Sebastian, in black leather pants, jacket, and matching black bushy beard, was helping outfit Rene. She'd rescued Sebastian once, her cousin by marriage and a former junkie. As he often said, he owed her for at least one lifetime.

  Rene emerged from the upstairs loft, his arm hanging in a sling, wearing a fisherman's vest customized with flashlights Velcroed in all the pockets. Sebastian gently lifted him up and down into thigh-high rubber fishing boots.

  "What's the salamander?" Aimee said into the phone.

  Hartmuth let out a ripple of breath. "The marble arms of Francois the First."

  Loud rumbling noises from below reached her ears. Sounds of distant thunder came from the direction of Bastille.

  "Skip the history lesson," she said, frustrated that she might be too late. "What does it mean?"

  "The salamander is a sculpture, carved in the arch of the seventeenth century building she'd lived in, opposite the catacombs."

  Below her on narrow, medieval rue St. Paul, the street slowly filled with a line of khaki light utility tanks. Sleek and streamlined Humvees rolled over the cobblestones, straddling the stone bouches d'egout that led to the sewers. Aimee hadn't seen tanks in Paris since the riots of 1968 by the Sorbonne. Parked cars stymied the tanks' progress and they emitted clouds of diesel exhaust in the chill November afternoon.

  "Has there been a bombing?" Aimee said.

  "Radicals versus rightists," Hartmuth said. "I'm afraid I have something to do with it."

  "What do you mean?"

  Hartmuth's voice sounded tired. "My failure to vote. The EU was unable to ratify the trade agreement with its exclusionary policies."

  "Thierry took Sarah to the catacombs," she said. "How does he know about them?"

  "I showed him the old exit," Hartmuth sighed. "Hidden in the Square Georges-Cain."

  "Meet me there," Aime said. She clicked off.

  "We won't get through on any surface route, Aimee," Rene said as he walked over to her. "Checkpoints all over, armed militia is sealing the Marais."

  She kissed him on both cheeks. "I cracked Soli Hecht's locked file with 'Checkmate.'"

  Rene smiled. "Ditto."

  "Great minds think alike, eh?" she said. "That's why we're going underground."

  "The catacombs don't extend this side of the rue St. Antoine," he said.

  "But the sewers do, Rene."

  He rolled his eyes. "You know I don't do well with. . ."

  "Rodents, me neither, but Sebastian's got something to help us with that," she said. "Did you bring the laptop?"

  "Talk about addicted to computers!" he said. "Making a wounded man just out of the hospital borrow pirated software from friends!" He growled but his eyes shone. "I love it! What is the plan?"

  "Hook the laptop to the municipal system and access FRAPOL 1 incognito," she said.

  "Why?" Rene winced as he slung the backpack over his good shoulder.

  "So I can identify that bloody fingerprint and find out who owns the building in the Marais," she said. "I'll nail the killer in dot matrix or laser gray scale." She quickly changed behind a 1930s poster that proclaimed "Ski the Alpes Maritimes" with parka-clad figures cavorting stiffly among old-fashioned ski lifts.

  "Unload here or outside?" Sebastian asked, his beard muffling his voice. He had arranged everything she asked for.

  She nodded to the rear door, which opened on a rain-soaked alley. He bundled up the bulky materials, then crouched under the eaves of his shop, his black leather pants glistening with raindrops.

  "Thanks." She sidled near him in her dark vinyl hooded jumpsuit.

  She gripped the handle of a small gray box, while Sebastian lugged a large backpack. They trudged in the light rain along the cobbled alley to the Quai des Celestins, a block away. Rene kept up the rear.

  "What about the inhabitants below?" Rene said. "The ones with long greasy tails?"

  She pointed to the box. "Sonic disturbance. They hate it. At least that's what the advertisement promised."

  "It's high tech all the way with you, Aimee," Rene puffed.

  "You're the one who's bothered by the rats, remember? Didn't you mention the epidemic proportions of rabies among the rodent population as recently as last week?" She tried not to sound out of breath. "This is the best I can do on such short notice."

  Sebastian smiled out of his beard and Rene just glared.

  "The back door to my place is always open, Aimee; just jiggle the hinges and slip in the bolt," he said.

  "Sounds obscene," Rene muttered.

  Sebastian grinned and was gone.

  Aimee slid a thin metal rod out of her sleeve and hooked it under a sewer lid. Using a quick twist and thrust, she hauled the lid up and onto the pavement with a loud scrape. As inconspicuously as possible—on a quai overlooking the Seine with a dwarf at twilight—she gestured elegantly.

  "After you," she said.

  She hefted the backpack, then gripped the box as she climbed down the slippery rungs. Finally, she pulled the heavy, scraping lid back on top of them and it clanged shut.

  A rotten mix of vegetables, feces, and clay and the smell of the sewers wafted through the damp tunnel. Dripping concrete arches oozed shiny patterns as if a giant snail had slimed over them.

  Whenever Rene moved, the flashlight beams bobbed and bounced off the subterranean sewer walls. Splashes came from down the passage, and when he turned, pairs of beady red eyes were locked into the flashlight beams. It was no time to be squeamish but hordes of squealing rats were hard to ignore. She opened the box and switched the sonic meter on. The arrow wavered, dipped to zero, then shot up to five hundred decibels. Flat buzzing was emitted from the box, echoing off the dripping sewer walls.

  "It's a good thing this frequency is only audible to animal ears," she said.

  Rene looked dubious. "Do they get hypnotized like deer?" he asked as the rats remained staring at them.

  "I doubt it," she said and shivered. These rats were the size of rabbits.

  She wedged the sonic box into a pocket in the backpack, then secured it with Velcro holding straps. She had neglected to mention that the range had been shown effective at about two meters to repel penned canines. No studies had been done in wet underground conditions with rodents.

  She also pushed aside the thought that they could be rabid. Rene turned slowly, his beams illuminating clumps of glistening brown fur and hairless tails, littered down the long sewer.

  She consulted her sewer map. The brown stained concrete wall had a white indicator number with an arrow painted on it. "Let's go," she said.

  As they trudged along in the continuous sludgy stream, Aimee pulled her ventilation mask over her mouth and adjusted Rene's for him. The smell wasn't so bad if they did that. Their footfalls echoed with the continuous drip from the clay pipes draining from the streets above. Behind them scurried an army of rats, their tails slapping the walls, maybe two meters behind them. They covered three blocks in five minutes, but the rats were gaining on them.

  "Even with you driving, Rene," she said. "We couldn't get this far so fast."

  Up ahead, the wet brown walls dripped with rivulets of rusty slime from a ten-foot-diameter netted pipe.

  Aimee pulled out her wire cutters from inside her jumpsuit and started cutting. Loud squealing sounded nearby.

  "No way am I going to crawl in there," Rene protested. "I go through enough shit in a day as it is."

  "It's not exactly what you think it is, Rene," she said,
cutting through the thick wire. "It's not a toilet drain."

  "Well, the smell could fool me," he said. "What is it?"

  "The waste-station chute and the only way into the morgue," she said, helping him slide into the gaping hole she'd cut.

  "Oddest break-in I've ever done," he muttered.

  "Maybe a little blood or fluids that have been hosed down from the embalming tables might find their way down here," she said. "But it's all diluted."

  "Makes me glad I haven't eaten today," Rene said, slowly climbing up the wet steel rungs, using his good arm.

  Aimee pressed a button and the waste chute's hinged metal cover swung open. She pulled Rene up and realized they had climbed into a large storage closet. Mops, vacuums, and industrial cleansers took up most of the space. Several blue lab coats, worn by maintenance, were hanging from hooks along with plastic hair nets and rubber gloves. She stripped to her black leotard, donned the lab attire, and put her jumpsuit in the trash. She pulled Rene's boots off. He slipped on sneakers.

  "We'll leave out the back door after I do a fingerprint match, OK?" Aimee whispered and looked at her watch. "With your help, it should take fifteen minutes."

  "Why couldn't we have come in the back?" Rene said.

  "Police guard," she said. "I wanted to time it for a shift change but that got complicated. We're in and out and no one knows the difference."

  "Why the morgue?" he said.

  "After we finish, I count on finding Sarah in the catacombs right behind the morgue wall."

  Inside the morgue, only one of the fluorescent strips of light flickered in the hallway, the rest had burned out. The abattoir green tiled walls echoed with their footsteps. She pulled open a stainless-steel-handled door labeled PERSONNEL ONLY.

  The vaulted room reeked of formaldehyde and was frosty cold. Gray-sheeted bodies were laid on wooden plank platforms, only their toes visible, each with a numbered yellow plastic tag. The scene reminded her of some fifteenth century medical print. The only things missing were the leeches and incisions permitting evil vapors to leave the body.

  Aimee pushed open another swing door. The scales used to weigh organs hung suspended from the ceiling on metal chains. A corpse lay on a stainless-steel table, angled over the floor drain: a female, young, with long brown hair and discolored needle tracks along her hands and arms. She'd been slit from chest to pubic bone and sewed back together with black thread, harshly outlined against her chalk white skin. The top flap of her skull had been sewn back on but her hairline was too close to her temples. Sad, Aimee thought, and a pretty bad job. They usually tried for the parents. Maybe there weren't any.

  She made her tone businesslike. "The medical examiner's computer should be through there." She popped Nicorette gum into her mouth and pointed down the dim hallway.

  "Breaking and entering used to be more fun than this," Rene said and stopped. The hallway plunged into darkness.

  "Where's the light timer?" She groped along the rough wall for the switch. Finally she found it and flipped it on. Ahead of her on the medical examiner's door was the biggest lock she'd ever seen.

  Early Saturday Evening

  THIERRY PUSHED SARAH PAST the bushes bordering the Square Georges-Cain into the dark hole obscured by the decaying pillar. He shoved her forward, forcing her to climb down half-rotten timbers. Inside a bone-pocked cavern, smelling of mold and decay, he motioned for her to sit down.

  "Remember this?" he said. He shone the flashlight beam over the crumbling catacomb walls. Cistern water dripped down into black, oily puddles.

  Her body shook. "How do you know about this place?"

  Thierry held the fax he'd stolen from Aimee's office with Sarah's picture: her tar swastika, her shaved skull, and him as a baby in her arms. Sarah's face fell.

  "Nom de Dieu!" she said. "Where did you find that?"

  He remained silent, lit a candle, and pulled out a strip of silver duct tape.

  "What's going on?" she asked uneasily. She started to get up, but he pushed her down in the wet dirt. "What do you want?"

  "Your undivided attention," he said, binding her ankles with the tape. "Admit it," he said, sitting cross-legged across from her on a jagged marble slab. "Wasn't I a cute baby? Did you croon nursery rhymes to me here?" In a cloying falsetto he sang, "Frère Jacques, dormez vous?" He kicked at the dirt.

  Sarah's black wig hung off her ear and the scar showed plainly in the candlelight. Damp air filled the cavern. "Why are you doing this?"

  "You see, you should be proud of that." Thierry stood up and traced his finger over the raised swastika on her forehead.

  Sarah trembled.

  "You earned the Führer's seal, as few Jews could," Thierry said. "But you're still a kike. Tainted."

  "Oui. Une Juive," she said. She stopped shaking. "But I don't live in fear because of it. Not anymore."

  "But you have to pay," he said.

  "Pay?" Her eyes widened. "I haven't paid already? My family taken by Gestapo, giving you up. . .isn't that more than enough?"

  She shook her head. "As soon as I got back to Paris, I stood outside the Rambuteaus', watching you go in their door." She wiped her eyes with her dirty raincoat sleeve. "Right where I'd kissed you goodbye as a baby. You know what I did? I fell on my knees, in a puddle on the sidewalk, thanking the God I've despised for years that you were alive. Alive, walking, and breathing, a grown man." She struggled to continue. "I went to the temple, where I'd gone with my parents, and begged God's forgiveness for my hatred of him. You're healthy, you had loving parents."

  Thierry snorted. "Loving parents? Nathalie Rambuteau loved the bottle."

  "I'm sorry. So sorry."

  "No matter how she promised," he said, "when I came home from school, she'd be drunk and passed out, stuck to the floor in her own vomit." He slammed his fist into the caked dirt wall. "That was on a good day. I thought it was because I was adopted."

  "Adopted?" Sarah picked at the duct tape. "Did she tell you. . .?"

  He interrupted, stooping down to bind her wrists with strips of duct tape, "To make my bed and clean behind my ears?" He grinned. "'Maternal' doesn't describe Nathalie."

  "You survived!" she said.

  He took her arm, peering at her as if she were a laboratory specimen.

  "You show no pronounced Semitic features." His eyes narrowed. "Must be some ancestor raped by Aryan invaders back in the steppes and you carried the recessive genes."

  "Killing me won't make you less Jewish." She raked her taped hand like a claw in the dirt. "Or change that I'm your mother."

  "Proven inferiority." He pulled out a Gestapo dagger, which gleamed dully in the candlelight. "We've talked enough."

  Saturday Evening

  AFTER TEN MINUTE S, AIMÉE still hadn't picked the Zeitz lock on the medical examiner's office door. Her hand ached.

  "This is taking too long," she said.

  Rene crouched near her on the scuffed linoleum and pulled out a Glock automatic.

  "Not a finesse approach," he said. "But it will save time."

  She hesitated, but kept winching the tumbler. A minute later, the huge metal lock clicked, then dropped open with a metallic sigh. Aimee rubbed her wrist as Rene reached on tiptoes to remove the lock and open the door.

  "After you," he said.

  Settling into an alcove office desk, he quickly plugged his code breaker into a surge protector under the reception desk, then hooked it to his laptop.

  Aimee knew she hadn't wasted her money as she pulled the yellow stop-smoking gum out of her mouth. Even though she'd kill for a cigarette. She stuck two wads on opposite sides of the inner door jamb, then affixed the cheap alarm sensor Sebastian had purchased at the hobby store. The medical examiner's office area, painted institutional green like the rest of the morgue, lay quiet except for the sound of Rene's fingers clicking on a keyboard.

  "Spooky," Rene said, accessing Soli Hecht's disk. "I know the clientele won't bother us but I'd feel better with the door closed."


  "Air needs to circulate." She nodded towards the broken air vent in the wall. "Otherwise the formaldehyde reeks. Besides, if anyone trips my alarm sensor, we'll hear."

  Aimee tried to hide the doubt in her voice. She plopped into the ME's chair.

  "Bingo!" Rene said.

  "That's his access word?"

  "Take a guess what the ME's code is." Rene rolled his eyes.

  Aimee looked at the framed photo on the desk: a paunchy, middle-aged man, tufts of gray hair poking out from a beret, cocked a hunting rifle under one arm and held a limp-necked goose in the other.

  "1Stud," Rene said.

  "He's a legend-in-his-own-eyes type." Aimee shook her head. "After opening bodies all day, how could he want to kill any living thing?"

  Working in a morgue would make her want to celebrate life—not hunt it down and shoot it. France's obsession with la chasse had always offended her. But was she doing that? Doubt nagged briefly. No, hunting down a killer and bringing a murderer to justice wasn't sport, like bagging an innocent creature.

  She refocused and typed in 1Stud, which immediately accessed the system. Once inside, she tapped into EDF, Électricite de France, which connected to Greater Paris municipal branches. She navigated on-line to the 4th arrondissement.

  Once inside the utility system, she pulled up the listing for the meters of number 23 rue du Plâtre, Laurent's old address. Extra energy points had been awarded to the building due to moderate use and conservation of energy. Nothing more. Another dead end. Disappointed, she logged into FRAPOL 1 and requested the bloody fingerprint found with the Luminol at rue des Rosiers.