by Diane Capri
Sam focused, trying to untwist her accent, and when he finally understood her, he spoke up. “Your boss? You can ask your boss?”
She nodded, her plain face lighting up at the moment of successful communication.
“That would be great. We’d really appreciate it.” He nodded, gave her a thumb’s up and a big smile.
She smiled and nodded in return. “He is lunch right now. One hour?”
“Perfect.” Sam nodded. He plucked the paper up, and he added his cell number for her. A few more smiles, nods, and he was able to break away. He took a few paces and lowered his head close to Jess. “So what do we do for the next hour?”
“The tours are open,” Jess looked toward a sign hanging above the desk.
“We can walk through on our own.”
Jess frowned. “I’d rather see where you found the body without a tour guide watching us, too.”
“Two options. These tunnels snake through the whole of the city, but they’re off limits. It’s illegal to explore them without a licensed tour guide. We can go to the street near where the body was found and look for an entrance. If we get caught, it’s slap on the wrist and a hundred-dollar fine. I’m told people make a hobby of it here.” He paused.
Jess raised her eyebrows.
“Or, if you’d rather avoid any possibility of arrest, we can go to one of the authorized sections and explore without a guide. But we won’t be able to see the spot you’re looking for.”
“Can you locate the exact location without a map or a guide?”
Sam thought hard. “Near Rue du Rouge?”
“That’s not far. We passed it on the way here.” Jess had chewed her lower lip before she nodded decisively. “Let’s get to work.”
They power walked to the cobblestoned street. For the next thirty minutes, they scoured the buildings and alleys, searching for an entrance to the catacombs below. No luck.
“We might have to rethink,” Sam said, wiping a thin sheen of perspiration from his upper lip.
“Keep a lookout.” Jess jerked her head to the right. “One last look.”
She stalked over to the corner of a bakery, squatted down, and stretched her neck to peek into the little window beneath the building’s front stoop.
“Well?” Sam asked, glancing back and forth to be sure no curious onlookers were watching.
“We’re in luck.”
He gaped. “Seriously?”
“This is an entrance.” Without another word, Jess pulled the strap of her purse over her head and across her body. She opened the window and shimmied into the little space.
Sam glanced around again. No one seemed to notice the disappearance of a full-grown woman through the window. When her purse slipped through the dark hole behind her, Sam rushed under the stoop and stared into the darkness.
A moment later, Jess turned on the light of her phone. In the gleam, he saw her standing in a small puddle of water surrounded by smooth, graffitied stone walls.
“Come on, time’s ticking,” she said.
He looked around up top one last time, took a deep breath, and slid down to join her. He winced as his shoulders momentarily caught on the close walls of the space. He sucked in a calming breath through his nose and pushed through, letting out a relieved sigh when his feet hit the ground. Water splashed up from the stone floor and dampened his shoes.
“Look familiar?” Jess asked.
“No. And yes. All of these tunnels look the same. That’s how people get lost down here.” But then he heard something low and distant. Perhaps it was the sound of echoing feet and muffled voices.
He put a finger across his lips. “I think we’re close. I can hear the tour.”
He motioned for her to follow him. He moved toward the noises. He whispered, “We’re looking for a sort of carved-out section. That’s where I found the body.”
The tour group sounds were louder now, and a new light poured into the darkness from nearby. They were getting closer to the group. The light grew brighter. Jess moved to slide her phone into her pocket and in the jerk of her arm, he saw it.
“Wait, hold that out again, to the left. Your phone.”
Jess did as he asked. They both saw it immediately—the metal door and the little alcove where he’d found Melinda McAllister’s mutilated body. Except now the body had been removed and, in the same place, he saw a puddle of dark, reddish liquid.
“Is that blood?” Jess whispered.
Another noise sounded, and they turned. This wasn’t the distant shuffling of feet or the droning of a tour guide, either. Someone was much closer.
Sam’s adrenaline spiked. “Hello?”
No response.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sam grappled in his back pocket for his phone and pulled it out. There were no signal bars in the corner of the screen.
He looked up at Jess just as another loud clanging sounded in the distance.
“Hello?” he called again. Still no response. The noises stopped abruptly, which increased his unease.
“Do you have cell service?” he asked as they both stepped toward the puddle, which looked like a mix of blood and water.
Jess glanced at her phone and shook her head. “We ought to call the police, though. There’s no telling what’s down here.”
Or who.
The unspoken words hung in the air between them. He stared at her, knowing she was right. Unwilling to do what she asked.
Not that he didn’t trust the Police Nationale. Just the opposite. They’d handled the initial situation professionally enough. But he’d been a cop for most of his life. He knew how things went. By the time the police arrived, the evidence could be gone and the perpetrator right along with it. Other lives were at risk, too. Sam would be the one directly responsible if he failed to act when he had the chance.
Gnawing the inside of his cheek, he fought back a stab of guilt he still suffered from all the times he’d failed to follow his gut. When he waited for the evidence and the warrants. Every time, more innocent people like Melinda McAllister paid the price.
It didn’t matter what anyone said. Sam knew the truth. If he’d followed his gut, more often than not, he’d have saved the innocents whose haunted faces still plagued his nightmares. But he’d had a badge to lose and a job to keep. Now, he was a free agent. He wouldn’t err on the side of caution. Not again.
“We’re unarmed, Sam. I didn’t have time to get the paperwork for my gun. We need firepower. Let’s go back up and get the cops.” Jess put her hand on his arm to get his attention.
Sam shook his head. “You go. I’m going to push forward. This red stuff is probably fresh blood. Somebody could be hurt.”
“We don’t know what’s going on down there.” She turned her phone to the winding tunnels around them. “We don’t even know exactly where to look.”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take. Someone is in trouble here. Don’t you feel it?”
Jess blinked, then sucked in her bottom lip. She nodded. “Trouble is, I do.”
“So I’m going in deeper. See what I can see.”
“Okay. I’m not letting you go in there alone.” Jess cocked her head for a moment then gave a curt nod. “But I’d feel a lot better if we were armed.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” Sam’s grin was a little sickly. “How are you at hand-to-hand combat?”
“Not bad,” she replied. “You?”
“Been a while since I had to find out.” He shrugged and moved ahead. Jess followed.
They pushed forward, navigating the twists and turns, stopping every few yards to listen. They passed rows of stacked boulders until they came upon a pile of rocks that looked different from the rest. Oddly out of place. Some sort of shrine made of mounded, crumbling stones and topped with a skull.
Sam checked for fresh blood on the shrine, but saw none. He looked at Jess, and she shook her head. He made a mental note to mention the shrine to the police when they returned topside. His entire body hummed with the certa
inty that a much more urgent matter was ahead.
As he pushed forward, his cell phone flashlight caught a crack in the wall behind the odd shrine. Sam peered around the stones. The crack widened into a small tunnel back there. The shrine’s placement was a marker to another part of the tunnels.
“I can crawl through that opening. It’ll be tight.” He turned to look at Jess, and she shook her head as another sound—this one almost like the rattle of chains—echoed from the space. He shook off the fanciful idea that there were malevolent ghosts behind the pile of stones.
“It’s too low, Sam. You’ll be crouched, closed in, with no way to protect yourself.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go get the police.”
Sam remembered all the times he’d waited and wished he hadn’t.
“It probably opens up, farther along.” He shook his head. “I’ll keep moving. You go up and call them. Bring them back with you.”
“Sam, it’s not safe. You could—”
“Nothing you say is going to stop me, Jess. Make the call. Please.”
Jess opened her mouth to argue again, but before she got the chance he ducked and crawled inside the small, dark opening.
He wriggled through the dirty, crumbling tunnel until he saw a dim light shining at the end. A whoosh of newfound anxiety passed through him. He crawled faster, careful to be as quiet as possible, focused on listening for sounds ahead.
He heard nothing more.
When he reached the end of the tunnel, the light fell on something new.
Half a second later, his brain caught up with what he saw.
The twisted, mangled body of a young man. Long dark hair covered his face save for his gaping, opened mouth. From his throat, dark blood had leaked to the ground, staining his shirt and jeans before it mixed with the water on the bottom of the tunnel.
Sam’s breath caught. He scrambled backward, but it was too late.
A bright light shone into his eyes, temporarily blinding him.
A hand grabbed his hair and pulled him off his feet and heaved him into the pool of watered blood beside the bloody body.
“Why can’t people leave us alone?” A deep angry voice said.
Sam squinted into the light, trying to make out the man’s face. He was wearing a miner’s hat with a spotlight on top. The light was so bright it pierced Sam’s eyes and went straight to the pain centers in his brain.
The man was thin. Smaller than Sam. With the right leverage, Sam could overpower him.
“People ought to leave things as they are,” the man growled, still angry.
The voice seemed oddly familiar. Sam tried to place it.
He tried to crab walk backward, away from his attacker. Keep him talking. “The police are on the way.”
“I didn’t want to kill you.” He loomed closer.
Sam jumped to his feet. He lunged for the opening in the wall.
But the man was faster.
A quicksilver flash. Sharp, biting pain exploded on Sam’s right side. Warm blood began to flow down his torso.
Sam slapped his left palm over the gash. At the same time, his right hand shot up toward the light on the man’s head and knocked the miner’s hat askew.
Sam caught a quick glimpse of his face and a flash of red hair.
Shock rocketed through him, ramping his already pumping adrenaline higher.
He knew that face. Even with his features twisted into a mask of rage, Sam recognized the tour guide, Pierre.
Sam pressed his left hand to stabilize the knife in his side while his right arm shoved Pierre’s head with all his might.
Pierre went crashing into the wall.
But that was all Sam could manage. He slumped back against the stone wall, breathing in shallow spurts.
Hot, wet blood gushed down his side, sticking his clothes to his body. His vision blackened around the edges, darkness closing fast.
Pierre rose to his feet.
“They deserved to die. This is not a playground.” Pierre loomed closer. In the deflected light from the helmet, Sam saw his wild eyes…the hot spots of color on his pale cheeks.
Sam tried to stay calm, sure that his pounding heart would force blood to ooze faster from his body.
“Sam!”
Distant but distinct. He sucked in a breath and managed a grunt in return.
“Sam,” Jess yelled again. “We’re coming!”
Pierre glanced from Sam to the crawl space between them and the open passage to the tunnels. He paused. A frown collapsed his thick eyebrows. He snarled and swore and sprinted away in the opposite direction through another tunnel Sam hadn’t noticed before.
Sam closed his eyes. The gooey mess between his fingers was warm and flowed with each heartbeat. The sounds of scuffling feet came closer.
A policeman paused at the entrance, crouched on all fours, gun drawn. “Are you alone?” he asked.
“He ran that way.” Sam managed to point.
The officer scuttled through the small opening and stood as Jess appeared behind him. She gasped as she looked from the dead man to Sam.
“Medic!” she screamed.
“Madame, please. You need to go back,” the police officer said as he squatted to the ground and felt the young man’s carotid pulse. The action was purely reflex. The boy was long dead.
Sam pointed to the dark, meeting Jess’s gaze as she dropped to her knees beside him. “He went that way. It was Pierre, my tour guide from the day we found Melinda.”
A medic ducked into the opening from the crawl space.
Jess took Sam’s hand and squeezed.
Her mouth was moving, but her words seemed slurred, and his vision flickered. When the medic tugged his hand away from the knife in his side, agony tore through him again.
Sam glanced at the body of the young man a few feet away once more as he slipped into oblivion.
Too little, too late…again.
CHAPTER FIVE
Four days later
Sam sat alone at the table and took a long sip from his cup, savoring the aroma and the taste of the exquisite French press coffee. He would miss his new morning ritual. Watching people in the morning at his favorite patisserie as he tucked away a couple of croissants.
He took a hearty bite of his flaky, still-warm pastry.
“You know how much butter is in those?”
He looked up to see Jess Kimball coming his way. She walked with purpose like she had somewhere to be. He used to walk like that. Before he retired.
“Glad you’re up and around again, Sam. But you keep eating those, you’re going to drop dead of a heart attack before you hit sixty.” She hefted her shoulder bag onto the tiny cafe table and sat.
“I figure I’ve used around six of my nine lives. That leaves me three more. I can sacrifice one for these little clouds of heaven. Besides, the doc released me.”
“That so?”
He nodded. “I’ve got a recheck in a couple of weeks, but otherwise, nothing but a bit of soreness and an ugly scar to impress the women I date. I’m good.”
He took another bite and grinned as the flaky pastry practically melted in his mouth. It seemed like they tasted even better today. From experience, he knew the sharpened pleasure would fade once the almost giddy high of being alive disappeared.
That feeling, the one that made the sky seem almost painfully blue, relishing the sun on his face, inhaling the subtle scent of cherry blossoms in the air, was far too fleeting. If someone could bottle the sheer intoxication of being alive after a near miss like he’d suffered, they’d make a mint.
Soon enough, he’d notice the clouds on the horizon, remember that the sun causes skin cancer, and curse his allergy to flowers of all kinds.
Such was life. For now, he’d revel in the euphoria as long as it lasted. And he’d keep being grateful that the knife Pierre stabbed him with had missed all his vital organs and wasn’t contaminated with some deadly disease.
“Seriously, Sam, you were lucky. Don’t
take that luck for granted. You’re not bulletproof, you know.” Jess tugged a thick file folder from her bag and placed it on the table between them. “I spoke to the Inspector this morning. Seems like it’s all locked up. The guy gave a full confession.”
The waiter came and took Jess’s order. Sam grinned when she ordered a basket of croissants and her own pot of French Press coffee with cream.
“When in France,” she said with a wink, before opening the file folder and handing him a sheaf of papers. “So get this. Your tour guide, Pierre? Turns out he’s not your average homicidal maniac. He’s a cataphile.”
“I’m hoping that isn’t what it sounds like.” Sam frowned and scanned the documents in his hand absently. It was a copy of the police report, but it was all in French. “He, uh, likes sex with cats?”
She let out a short laugh and shook her head. “No. Cataphile refers to a whole group of urban explorers. They delve into the mines of Paris tunnels, including the catacombs. Even the ones that are technically off limits. They’re a passionate bunch. They’ve got a set of unwritten rules about revering the tunnels. Some of them, like Pierre, are more than a little obsessive about it, as you noticed during the tour you took. Apparently, Melinda broke one of their rules when she went on the tour. She wanted to leave her mark on Paris, so she tagged one of the walls with her first name.”
Sam shook his head, handing the papers back to Jess. “He killed her because she spray-painted her name on an old stone wall?”
He wasn’t a fan of littering or of people who treated historical artifacts with disrespect, but Melinda was little more than a kid. It was a prank. Nothing she deserved to die for.
A chill washed over him. “Did he catch her in the act?”
They paused as the waiter came to deliver Jess’s breakfast.
“That’s the thing. He didn’t see her. He wasn’t working that day or the next. But Melinda was unlucky. Pierre was exploring the catacombs, though, which I guess he did daily. He saw the tag. He was outraged and removed it immediately.” She paused as she pawed through her pastries and chose one. “When he went back to work, he typed her first name from the tag, into the computer. She was registered as a visitor. He tracked her down.”