The Blood Promise: A Hugo Marston Novel

by Pryor, Mark

  Lerens grunted acknowledgment, then glanced at her wingmen. She held down the call button and said, “Two suspects in the target vehicle. We’re going now.”

  She dropped the handset and pressed a button on the overhead panel, the car’s siren beginning its insistent wail, joined immediately by those either side.

  The brake lights on the Golf flared red for a second and the car jigged left, as if the driver had twitched involuntarily. Hugo could see the two people in the front of the car turning to look behind, then ahead again.

  “Looks like she cut her hair,” Hugo said, though it was hard to be sure. The rear window had a dark tint to it and it may just have been a hat or even a pony tail changing her profile.

  “I would, too,” Lerens said, “but then I’d also ditch my phone and use someone else’s car. Maybe she didn’t have time for all three.” They both stiffened as the car signaled an intent to pull to the shoulder on the right. “Here we go.”

  All four vehicles slowed in unison, the VW sliding to the hard shoulder.

  “They’re planning to run,” Hugo said. Lerens glanced at him, inviting an explanation. “They undid their seat belts already,” he explained.

  Hugo looked left and right, gauging the terrain. Open fields lay to both sides, so either they’d come to their senses or he was in for a long, muddy run. As the cars came to a halt, Lerens killed the siren and the two either side of them did the same. The steady beat of the police helicopter was audible, now, and getting louder. Hugo leaned forward and looked up. The chopper swung overhead, no more than a hundred feet from the ground, wheeling in the air so its nose pointed down at them like a bird of prey waiting to swoop down on its meal. Hugo hoped its sudden appearance would be added deterrence for Alexie and her partner, the final assurance that running would be futile.

  Lieutenant Lerens flipped the gear into park. She and Hugo pulled their weapons as they stepped out, shielding themselves behind the open car doors as their colleagues, two in each car, did the same on their flanks.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “My guys will back us up, they know what to do.”

  “OK, but be careful. We’ve seen how far she’s willing to go,” Hugo said. He licked his lips, his heart hammering in his chest as he fought to control his breathing. He kept his gun leveled at the figure in the passenger seat and started forward. They moved, one careful step at a time toward the little black car while, flanking them, the uniformed officers sighted their standard issue SIG SP handguns toward the front windows, just in case.

  Lerens reached the back of the car. She slowed and her left hand came away from her gun for long enough to touch the trunk of the VW. It was an instinctual movement, one drilled into officers during training and practiced daily on the streets, an officer leaving behind fingerprints and maybe DNA in case the traffic stop went wrong.

  She moved forward and on opposite sides of the car they drew level with the back windows, still unable to see the occupants clearly. Lerens rapped her gun butt on the glass and shouted, “Windows down and hands out. Now.”

  Slowly, agonizingly, Hugo watched the windows on his side scroll down and a pair of small hands poked out. A woman, he assumed, and so the question flashed through his mind: If this is Alexie, who’s driving? Hugo drew level with his suspect and crouched to look into the car, at the exact moment that Lieutenant Lerens did the same thing. They both stared at the occupants for a moment, then their eyes met.

  “Not exactly what I was expecting,” Hugo said.

  “Me neither,” Lerens agreed. She yanked open the driver’s door and Hugo opened the passenger side.

  “Both of you,” Lerens ordered, “out now.”

  The little boy on Hugo’s side didn’t move. Tears rolled down his face and his eyes were glued to the end of Hugo’s gun. Hugo put it back in his holster and reached in for the boy, pulling him out gently but firmly. Lerens did the same with the teenage boy who’d been driving, and they met at the back of the VW. Two of the officers stepped forward with handcuffs and secured the kids’ hands behind their backs.

  “Where’s your phone?” Lerens asked the trembling boys.

  They looked at her for a second, then each other, and they shook their heads in unison. “We don’t have a phone,” the driver said. He was the braver of the two, and looked slightly older. “We were just taking a trip.”

  “A trip?” Hugo asked. “You have a license?”

  “Non.”

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “I’m thirteen,” said the driver, then nodded at his companion. “He is eleven.” The passenger glanced at Hugo and nodded his head.

  “Why are you driving this car?” Lerens demanded.

  “I found it.” The driver was defiant.

  “Found it? Explain that to me.”

  “The windows were down and the key was in it. What was I supposed to do?”

  “How about wait until you get a license, and then buy your own,” Lerens snapped. “Where was it?”

  “Bois de Boulogne,” the kid said sulkily.

  “Did you see who left it?”

  “Non. I watched for a while before I got in. I didn’t see anyone.”

  “So you just took it and picked your friend up?”

  “He’s not my friend. He’s my brother.” The boy’s eyes softened as he looked at his slumped and wet-eyed sibling. “It’s his birthday and I wanted to see him. We’re in foster care, but they didn’t put us together. I just wanted to see him, take a trip somewhere with him.”

  “OK.” Lerens tone softened. “Go with these officers, wait by my car while I talk to my colleague for a moment.” She gestured for the uniforms to take the boys to the back of the police cars.

  “If you’re going to leave a car to be stolen, the Bois is as good place as any,” Hugo said. Over the years, authorities had worked hard to clean up the Bois de Boulogne, Paris’s second largest park. They’d mostly succeeded, but after dusk it could be a hair-raising, and sometimes actively dangerous, place to be. The nearby drug dealers and prostitutes who lay low in the daytime would abandon their lairs and drift through the park’s many lanes and secluded spaces looking for customers. Sometimes they’d look for each other, and the next morning police or an unlucky jogger would find the remains. Parking a car there was a bad idea, walking away from it even worse. And, as Hugo and the young car thief both recognized, leaving it unlocked with the keys inside was an invitation.

  Lerens nodded. “Agreed. And I assume this means her phone’s in here somewhere.”

  “Check inside, I’ll look in the trunk.”

  “Bien.”

  He peered into the rear window of the hatchback but the parcel shelf obscured any view. “Pop the release for me, will you?” Hugo said as Lerens opened the driver’s door.

  “Want me to cover you while you open it?”

  Hugo gave her a wry smile. “You think she’s hiding inside?”

  “You never know.”

  Lerens chuckled and popped the trunk release. Hugo put his fingers under the metal rim and swung it open, his gun ready just in case.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark interior of the trunk, but when they did he saw a huddled shape that turned his blood to ice. He opened his mouth to tell the lieutenant, but at first no words would come out. Then the adrenaline kicked in and he called out.

  “Camille!”

  She heard the urgency in his voice and backed out of the front seat. “What is it?”

  “I was wrong.” Hugo nodded to the open trunk. “She’s here after all.”

  “Seriously?” Lerens moved slowly to Hugo’s side, her gun back in her hand.

  “Yes, but you won’t need that.” He reached in to double check her pulse, but Hugo had seen enough bodies to know the difference between unconscious and dead, and her battered face wore the plastic gray pallor of forever-gone.

  “Those boys didn’t kill her,” Lerens said. “Not for a car.”

  “No, I’m betting
they’d faint if they knew she was in there. They didn’t do this.”

  “Then who?” Lerens ran a hand over her face. “Pute! There’s someone else out there killing people?”

  “Looks like it,” Hugo said. He shook his head sadly. “I was afraid this would happen but I didn’t think . . . I really didn’t think . . .”

  “Attends. Hugo, are you saying you know who did this?” Lerens looked incredulous, and her eyes flashed with anger. “I want to know what’s going on, and I want to know now.”

  “Of course. Call your crime scene people, get them here as quickly as possible. To be sure I’m right we’ll need to know how she died—as best they can tell us out here, anyway. Call them and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  As Lerens got busy, Hugo took out his phone and dialed Tom, but again had to leave a message.

  “It’s me. This just turned ugly and our little lady is dead. Do whatever you have to do to secure Senator Lake, Tom, I don’t care what strings you have to pull but get to him as soon as you can. If you have to evacuate that boat by calling in a hoax bomb threat then do it, because I’m not kidding when I say this is a matter of life and death. And, yes, I mean his.”

  Hugo rang off and watched the lieutenant as she worked. She was on her car radio and he listened as she had the dispatcher get the crime scene team rolling. Then she requested extra units to help with traffic because their stop had blocked one of the busiest motorways leading out of Paris, and if they didn’t set up a diversion soon there’d be a riot. France’s motorists were accustomed to being inconvenienced by striking farmers and their roaming flocks of sheep, but everyone involved in this operation knew those same motorists wouldn’t tolerate a mere crime scene blocking their southward escape from the city.

  Orders issued, Lerens escorted each boy to a separate police car, helping them into the back seat and lingering a moment to talk to them. Then Lerens turned to the uniformed officers and told them to put on gloves and find Tourville’s phone, with minimal disturbance to the body’s position. Good idea, Hugo thought, it may contain recorded or photographed information related to her crimes or, of more immediate interest, evidence of her killer.

  Hugo almost jumped when his phone buzzed and he saw it was a text from Tom.

  Took your advice. On a helicopter. Got your VM but can’t talk. Obviously.

  Hugo smiled and wondered just how close Tom was to the ship, whether it had set sail and if so, how far it had gotten.

  Lieutenant Lerens caught him smiling at the phone. “Something funny at last?”

  “Tom. Always funny, even when he shouldn’t be.”

  “Ah. So, you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Sure,” said Hugo. “But let’s sit in the car, this could take a while.”

  “Bien sûr.” They settled into their seats in her car and Lerens half-turned and looked at him. “Now go.”

  “D’accord. But I’d ask you to remember that some of this is fact, and some is . . . well, let’s call it deduction. Or guesswork, if you prefer. I think we can prove most of it, eventually, but for now—”

  “Hugo,” she interrupted. “Just tell me.”

  “Right, sorry. I’ll start with Alexandra Tourville. Obviously we all know about her past. I think that all of this has happened because she was trying to resurrect her career. Not so much make a name for herself—that door closed a while back—but I think she was seeking enough money to become independent from her brother and maybe grab a little power to go with it.”

  “What kind of power?”

  “Political. The power thing may have been an afterthought, but I think she stumbled across her chance and decided to take it. If I had to bet, I think she started down a path without knowing exactly where it would end up, or how, and it all snowballed. Became one of those things that once you start, you can’t stop or back out of.”

  “Well,” Lerens said, “I’d know a little something about that, wouldn’t I?”

  Hugo laughed softly. “I suppose you would. Anyway, she’d started her genealogy business. She was working for a client in the United States, she told us that. My friend in England, she’s tapped into that community and found out who. A political rival of our good Senator Charles Lake.”

  “Why would a political rival hire a genealogist?”

  Hugo shrugged. “These days rivals will dig up any dirt they can. Maybe they were hoping to link him to a mobster, a child molester, Adolf Hitler. Don’t ask me to explain the devious mind of a politician. Point is, she dug into Lake’s background and obviously found something. I’m willing to bet that she found a dead end.”

  “What do you mean, ‘dead end’?”

  “That his family tree was stunted. No more information.” Hugo held up a finger. “That would have told her to check immigration records. Merlyn said that’s the obvious move when a trail dies, especially if it’s between 1800 and 1900. She also told me that a lot of those records have long since been lost, but a lot still remain.”

  “So she found out Lake’s family were immigrants, big deal.”

  “Correct, on both counts. Everyone in America is an immigrant, right? But Alexie Tourville had a few suspicions, given her knowledge of history, the timing of the immigration, and the names on the immigration paperwork.”

  “Suspicions? About what?”

  “I’m not sure, not entirely. I’m coming at this from the opposite end, unraveling what she created so it’s hard for me to know what she knew, and when. But at some point she figured out what I did at Père Lachaise today.”

  “Which is?”

  “That when people want to hide their past, when they want to bury some part of themselves, one of the first things they do is change their name. Oscar Wilde did it: he even had business cards made up with his new name of Sebastian Melmoth. But, like Oscar Wilde and pretty much everyone else who changes their name, they hang on to some variant of their old one. In Wilde’s case, he picked the names Sebastian and Melmoth after Saint Sebastian and the titular character of Melmoth the Wanderer; a Gothic novel by his great-uncle. But it’s the same for everyone, Martin Smith will call himself Mark Simons. Julie-Ann Jones will call herself Anne Johnson. I’ve seen it time and again.” He smiled. “Look at you, Christophe became Camille.”

  “That’s true.” She nodded slowly. “But I still don’t get it. Who changed their name?”

  “That’s where Merlyn worked her magic. She told me that a family called Fontaine moved to America a couple of hundred years ago. In 1796, I think she said.”

  “So?”

  “Think about the names,” Hugo said.

  Lerens rolled her eyes. “Tom said you did this. Fine, the names. Fontaine, Tourville—”

  “Forget Tourville. The other players.”

  “Fontaine,” Lerens tried again, “Bassin, and . . . oh my goodness, Lake.”

  “Wrong order but otherwise right. A ‘bassin’ can be an ornamental pond, right?”

  “Yes, of course . . .”

  “Pond, Fountain, and Lake. Same family from start to finish, from then until now.”

  “So . . . Senator Lake is descended from the Bassin family?” She thought for a moment. “You know, that would be pretty embarrassing for him. I mean, the man hates foreigners, especially the French.”

  “True, although like I said, pretty much everyone in America is descended from somewhere in Europe. But yes, he’d look a little silly if someone proved he was of French descent.”

  “Someone like . . . Alexie Tourville.”

  “Right.”

  “She was blackmailing him?”

  “Not about that. Not just about that, anyway. But along those lines, because that first night at the chateau she was pressing Lake about his rich donors, asking what would happen if they suddenly didn’t like him anymore. I thought at the time she was referencing her own past, but I think she was testing him, consciously or not she was showing her hand or obliquely pointing to the writing on the wall.”

&n
bsp; “Which said what?”

  “That there might come a point where his wealthy isolationist friends would turn their backs on him. And I think that’s where the robbery at the Bassin house comes in.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “I can’t,” Hugo said apologetically. “Not entirely, anyway. And without proof, my little theory is going to sound . . . far-fetched. But it has to do with the lock of hair we found in the chest.”

  “Hugo, this whole thing is far-fetched. Every step of it has been insane, so try me. And how many times do I have to point out that life has taught me to be a little more open-minded than some people?”

  “I keep forgetting, sorry. But since you insist, Merlyn used the family tree and the notes I sent her and saw that one branch of the Bassin family left that house around the time we’re talking about, and some others moved in. Siblings, cousins, I don’t know. But Georges Bassin had mentioned something similar. My theory is that whoever moved out headed to Marseilles where they changed their names to Fontaine, and then moved to America where they, like so many who came, changed their name again. A twofold attempt to cover their tracks. The husband, wife, and their son. I also think they weren’t so much emigrating as escaping.”

  “Explain that.”

  “Because they didn’t need to emigrate. These were people with a big house, money, and who lived far enough from Paris and politics that the craziness of the revolution had passed them by.”

  “The revolution?”

  “Yes. Bear with me. Merlyn knows plenty about that period and she said it didn’t take much digging to find out that the Bassin family were friends with some powerful people, people who wanted to end the bloodshed and put France back on an even keel.”

  “You’re all over the map, Hugo. The historical map.”

  “Yes. But I’m trying to connect what was in the chest with Senator Lake, and make sense of it. You remember at the Tourville place, the stranger in his room?”

  “The imagined stranger.”

  “No, it was real. I realized that he’d been telling the truth when he insisted he’d not been drinking much. And yet he was totally out of it. I think Alexie slipped something into his drink—I do remember that she brought us glasses of champagne right before we sat down. Easy to do.”