The Paris Librarian

by Mark Pryor

  “And he didn’t have much time to make that decision.”

  “Right, I’m sure it occurred to him and he had only a little while, minutes, maybe an hour or two, to weigh the pros and cons. He probably thought that we’d eventually eliminate Benoît for some reason or another so, yeah, I can see why he did it.”

  “But it narrowed the list of suspects.”

  “Definitely.”

  “So then, how did Harmuth even end up on it?”

  “Like I said.” Hugo wiped his hands on a napkin. “A whole bunch of little things. Imagine a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors, and at some point they start to come together.”

  “For example?”

  “Well, some things struck me as odd or interesting at the time, but they didn’t mean much until I thought about them later. Like his pronunciation of the French word atelier.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He told me he didn’t speak much French at all. And that’s a simple-enough word when you see it written down, but it’s actually quite hard to pronounce perfectly. Yet he was able to. It didn’t click at the time, I was just impressed. But later, when I started to wonder if he was who he said he was, it seemed like maybe it meant something.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, he claimed to be big into security at the library. Remember, he was the one who had the security cameras installed. And yet, when Paul’s keys were stolen not only was he unsure whether his library key had been returned, but he also didn’t know who else had keys. Whether Michelle Juneau or even Nicole Anisse did. Again, a small thing that didn’t resonate much at the time.”

  “Wait, I’m not getting that. Why did he care about security?”

  “He didn’t. He cared about the cameras. He planned the murder carefully, laid the groundwork for his alibi by putting them exactly where he needed them.”

  “OK, two big questions,” Claudia said. “How and why?”

  “Short answer, because Paul and Michael, or Michel, were brothers.”

  Claudia’s eyes widened. “What? Are you serious?”

  “Paul never knew, of course.”

  “That story wasn’t true? He survived the crash?”

  “There was no crash. Well,” Hugo corrected himself, “there was a crash with an empty car.”

  “But a part of her was found in it!”

  “Yes, and one of the things I did up here was look at the original crime-scene photos. The leg had been severed cleanly at the knee. Not only that, but they had good pictures of where the car went into the ocean. It wasn’t a cliff, nothing steep enough to cause that kind of injury. No, he staged the whole thing to look like an accident.”

  “Why didn’t the police figure that out back then?”

  “It looked cut and dried, you can’t blame them. The press was reporting it as this Romeo and Juliet story, as if it was some sort of romantic tragedy.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Yes, but that’s how it was reported, and that’s what the police believed.” Hugo thought of Georges Bazin. Most of them.

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “I’m pretty sure that Michael Harmuth, or Michel Rogers, killed his girlfriend at his mother’s apartment. Together they buried her body in the backyard and engineered his escape.”

  “Oh my God, that’s awful.”

  “Hence the digging tomorrow,” Hugo said. “They’ll get a warrant and do it by daylight. It’s a small space, it won’t take long.”

  “So, Harmuth killed Paul Rogers because he knew something?”

  “No. He did it to protect his secret. Paul and Sarah were planning to build onto the apartment, and to do that they would have taken up part of the garden. The chances were better than good that they’d uncover the body, and that would be that. A few years ago, Harmuth might have gotten away with it, but with DNA they’d almost certainly figure out who she was, which would mean his story about an accident would crumble.”

  “The police wouldn’t just be looking for him, they’d have to arrest Claire Rogers.” Claudia shook her head sadly. “How did she live with a secret like that for so many years?”

  “Because she had to. Michael, or Michel as he was, was her son, and most mothers will do pretty much anything to protect their children. She’s most mothers.”

  “But how did you know?”

  Hugo smiled. “As a matter of fact, she actually said it at one point, I didn’t even pay attention. When we were at her apartment, she almost called him her son, or so it seemed to me. I put it down to the dementia, and he played it very cool, I must say.”

  “You told me she was protective of her garden. It wasn’t the flowers at all, was it?”

  “No, she was in on it, no question.”

  “All those years, and they didn’t try to move the body.”

  “I can see why,” Hugo said. “Harmuth had to stay away as long as possible in case someone recognized him, and it’s so much easier for Claire Rogers to just leave the body there. Why take the risk if you don’t have to?”

  “And then she started to get ill.”

  “Which sped up the clock for Harmuth. He had to come back and figure a way to keep their secret buried. He probably thought he’d done it with his plan to move in to his mother’s apartment, but at some point he realized that Claire and Paul had agreed to switch, move Paul and Sarah into the ground-floor apartment and give Harmuth the floor above.”

  “And with the extension they were going to build . . .”

  “Yeah, that sealed the deal, I’m sure.”

  “So that’s the why,” Claudia said. “What I don’t understand is, how? Paul was in that room alone; he was fine when he went in, and he had no contact with anyone before he died. So how in the world did Harmuth manage to poison him? And how the hell did you figure it out?”

  “As to how I figured it out.” Hugo smiled and pointed at their food. “This.”

  “Pizza?”

  “Yes,” Hugo said. “More specifically, the crust.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The following morning, Hugo went to the station early to give his statement. He didn’t enjoy climbing out of bed, but he was eager to get back to Paris and wanted to get the formality over with. Georges Bazin was one of the detectives there in the interview room, and he shared Hugo’s eagerness to complete the statement and see what would be found in Claire Rogers’s flower garden.

  They shook hands on the steps of the police station as Claudia pulled up in a rental car. She stayed in the driver’s seat; Hugo had a phone call to return to Camille Lerens, who had many of the same questions that Claudia had the night before.

  “I want to know why you suspected Harmuth,” Lerens said, echoing Claudia.

  “A couple of days ago, Alain Benoît said something that I thought about a few times afterward. It was a throw-away remark, about how Michelle Juneau looked a little like Madame Rogers.”

  “Wait, Juneau has something to do with this?” Lerens asked.

  “No, no, nothing like that. It just got me thinking about people not being who they appear to be, and so I started thinking about people who’d come into this little circle recently. And whether people were presenting themselves accurately. As I said to Claudia, there was no one moment that it all came together, just a few things that made me look more closely at Harmuth.”

  “His recent arrival at the library. What else?”

  “A couple of obvious things that we all saw or heard, but paid no attention to.”

  “Except you.”

  “Better late than never,” he said. “First, his name. Michel and Michael. As you probably know, people like to hang onto their names, even when they change them they often keep the same initials.”

  “True,” Lerens said. “He didn’t do that, he kept his first name and changed his last name.”

  “Right. Obvious clue number two was when Claire Rogers almost called him her son, of course. And that same day, when we asked him to co
me to Sarah and Paul’s apartment, he suddenly appeared, knocked on the door, remember? That meant he didn’t need to be buzzed in, he had a key. I assume now that he got it from his mother. I eventually put all these things together and figured that I should look into him, and that accident.”

  “So what prompted the flight to Dieppe, exactly?”

  “Yeah, I decided that was necessary after seeing Harmuth’s checkout history.”

  “His what?”

  “The books he checked out of the library.”

  “Sounds exciting, but I’m not following you,” Lerens said.

  “The book that Paul was using, the guide to firearms. Before he checked it out, Michael Harmuth had it.”

  Lerens was quiet for a moment, and Hugo could almost hear her putting it together. Finally she said, “He had to make sure it was there when Paul wanted it. But I’m not clear on why.”

  “Ah. That comes down to the way he killed Paul.”

  “Yeah, I was getting to that,” she said, humor in her voice. “The curare. Do you know how he administered it?”

  “I think you’ll find that he used dimethyl sulfoxide.”

  “Means nothing to me.”

  “It’s a chemical compound; it was in the news a while back. A lot of people were selling it as a cure for cancer, a homeopathic remedy. Miki referred to it, but she just called it the wrong thing.”

  “D’accord,” Lerens said. “But I thought we established that curare was the poison, and that you were safe if you just ingested or touched it.”

  “Right, it has to go straight into the blood stream. And it did. Dimethyl sulfoxide was the delivery mechanism, which I realized when we were having pizza the other night.”

  “Pizza,” Lerens said. “Are you serious?”

  “I am. Merlyn asked something like, How is it that a pizza’s crust looks dry, but you can’t eat it without getting grease on your fingers?”

  “And the answer?”

  Hugo smiled as Claudia looked over at him. She’d heard this story the previous evening. “He mixed the curare with dimethyl sulfoxide, which is able to penetrate the skin and basically carry another substance with it. That’s one of its primary qualities. All Harmuth had to do was put the mixture on a nonporous substance and wait for Paul to touch it. Curare is so deadly, it didn’t take much.”

  “And he had access to Paul’s computer to make it look like it was Paul searching for and ordering it.”

  “Right, except none of his Internet history showed anything being ordered. Plus, Paul did all his research at home in the evening so he’d be ready to write the next day.”

  “How would Harmuth know about the other substance?” Lerens asked. “The dimethyl whatever it is.”

  “Dimethyl sulfoxide. Because he was big into homeopathic remedies. Even if he’d never had cause to use it, he’d have known about the controversy surrounding it as a cancer cure, which means he’d have read about the substance’s real uses.”

  “Makes perfect sense. Do you know how he got it onto Rogers’s skin?”

  “It had to be a nonporous surface, so I’d guess the door handle, on the inside. That’s why he knocked on the door an hour or so into Paul’s writing time, to get him to come to the door, touch the inside handle. And you remember on the video, Harmuth leaned back into the room? Supposedly because he was having trouble believing Paul was dead, but I bet that handkerchief we found on the floor was what he used to wipe off any residue. He’d need to do that to make sure no one else got poisoned.” A thought struck Hugo and his stomach dropped. “Wait, Camille, get everyone out of the library. Do it now!”

  “Why?”

  “Get off the phone, get the library cleared, and call me right back when it’s done. No one is to touch any of the books, please hurry.”

  The phone clicked and Claudia shot him a look as they slowed behind a truck in the outside lane. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “I think Harmuth had a backup way to make sure Rogers touched the poison. He used that book, the one he dropped off outside the atelier. It had a plastic cover and I’d bet that he smeared some of the mixture on it. I’m almost certain that Laurent Tilly, the janitor, touched it when he was helping to reshelve books.”

  “If so, and if curare is so lethal, why didn’t he die?”

  “Because the poison doesn’t kill, it just paralyzes you so that you suffocate. Tilly didn’t die because he was given mouth-to-mouth, and when the poison wore off—which it does quite quickly—he was able to breathe on his own.”

  “Didn’t Harmuth help save him?”

  “Yes. I think he realized what was happening and didn’t need another death on his conscience.”

  Claudia snorted. “As if that man has a conscience.”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s easy to think of all murderers as monsters,” Hugo said. “But he could’ve killed me, and he didn’t.”

  She took a hand off the steering wheel and squeezed his leg. “Thank heavens for that.”

  “I really think he killed those people because he felt he had too. I’m sure he’s telling himself that right now, it allows him to see himself as a decent human being still.”

  “He really planned this out, didn’t he?”

  “Very carefully, yes. Hard to keep all those lies straight, though.”

  “You caught him in one?”

  “I called the library right before getting tickets,” Hugo said. “I got Harmuth’s checkout history but also found out that he was the one who’d arranged the funeral. Specifically, cremation. He’d told me Michelle Juneau was doing it, which was a lie.”

  “Cremation. Charming.”

  “I know.” Hugo’s phone rang and he answered. “Camille, is the library empty?”

  “Yes, you want to tell me why?”

  Hugo explained his theory about the curare on the book, and the potential risk of someone touching it.

  “How long is that stuff dangerous?” Lerens asked.

  “I don’t know. Contact your hazard-materials experts; I’m sure you have them. They’ll know, and be able to tell you how to make sure the place is safe.”

  “I’ll do that right now. When will you be in Paris?”

  “A couple of hours, depending on traffic.”

  “All right. I’m going to let Miki Harrison know she’s free to leave town, and get the library safe,” Lerens said. “Go straight to Claire Rogers’s apartment. We’ll probably have started the dig.”

  “I texted you about Paul Rogers’s keys likely being dropped in the library somewhere,” Hugo began.

  “We have them. Left on a shelf in the stacks, as you predicted,” Lerens said. “But I have about fifty more questions rolling around in my head, so hurry back.”

  Hugo laughed. “Be there as quick as we can.”

  The body lay ten feet from the house, an intact but incomplete skeleton sewn into to the earth by the roots of a still-blooming rose bush, right where the extension would have ended.

  They’d hoped Harmuth would save them some time and give up his girlfriend’s final resting place, but he wasn’t talking, not to anyone. Claire Rogers had also been taken into custody, based on her estranged son’s admissions to Hugo, and after her small garden was excavated foot by foot until the shallow grave was found. A tent was quickly erected, and the pace of work slowed to glacial as every piece of evidence was found and preserved.

  Doctor Sprengelmeyer had set up in the old woman’s living room, the furniture moved out and a large table erected to make an initial study of, and to catalogue, the bones. When the poor girl’s skull was brought in, Sprengelmeyer paid it special attention, using a magnifying glass to inspect every part of its surface.

  Hugo and Camille Lerens watched from the doorway, both silent and captivated by the slow but precise dance playing out before them. They straightened as Sprengelmeyer gently put the skull down and walked over to them.

  “Well, she’s definitely dead,” he said. When neither Hugo nor Lerens smiled at his
dark humor, he shrugged. “Has a crack in her skull. Big one. I’m guessing that’s what killed her, and if experience is any guide, at this point you’re just wanting guesses.”

  “I prefer to call them opinions,” Lerens said.

  “Bon, so far no lower left leg, as Monsieur Marston here surmised. I’ll bring in a colleague to help me look over the entire skeleton at the hospital, she’s an expert in forensic anthropology.” He looked at Hugo. “From your part of the world, as it happens.”

  “Jen Winkler?” Hugo asked.

  “That’s the one. You’ve worked with her?”

  “The best,” Hugo nodded. “I’m glad she’ll be helping out.”

  Lerens looked around the apartment, her brow creasing. “Being here reminds me: What was the deal with the missing wills?”

  “A question for Harmuth, I’m afraid,” Hugo said. “If I had to guess, I’d say he didn’t know about the central registry and stole the copies thinking they were originals. I expect he just wanted to remove any and all obstacles to him getting this apartment, and the chances were high that the wills addressed that issue, Paul’s and his mother’s. Having spent most of his adult life in America, he’d have no reason to know about the registry.”

  “If he decides to talk, I’ll ask him,” Lerens said.

  Hugo ran a hand over his face, suddenly exhausted. “If you don’t need me, Camille, I may take off. Grab some sleep and then touch base with you later.”

  “Bien sûr, that’s fine. I’ll have Jameson drive you.”

  “You should let that guy get some sleep, too.”

  “He’s a Scotsman. They don’t need sleep, they take walking naps. Or in his case, driving naps.”

  “Very encouraging,” Hugo said.

  Lerens took out her phone and made the call. “He’s outside, waiting. Talk to you later.”

  “No doubt about it.”

  He turned to go, but her voice stopped him. “Hugo, one quick question.”