by Cara Black
But she had to keep trying. “Benoît’s report is exactly what the Bank officials would use as an excuse to cut—”
He reached under her scarf and, in a quick movement, caught her grigri, the juju amulet, and yanked it free. A sad smile crossed his face. “Some things never change, Léonie.” He tossed the amulet to one of the men, who caught it and held it to the light. Inside, there was a slip of paper. The man read out the series of numbers written on it, the combination to the safe.
She struggled to speak, but only muffled sounds came out. Her heart thumped in her chest. The grass stalk fell from her pocket onto the floor. She heard a metallic click as the safe door opened. And then a tightness gripped her chest like a vise clamping her lungs shut.
Monday Night
AIMÉE GUNNED HER scooter down rue Buffon, feeling every pothole. The car following her gained speed. Too late, she noticed the traffic light and a truck crossing the intersection, headed right at her, horn blaring.
She panicked. To escape, she’d driven the wrong way down the narrow one-way street. There was no way out.
She squeezed the brake levers and, at the last minute, swerved left through the open Jardin des Plantes gate and into the botanical gardens. The scooter’s wheels spit gravel and lost traction. She heard the grinding of a hydraulic digger working inside as it shuddered to a halt, and she saw halogen beams trained on upturned earth and lawn.
“Attention! The garden’s closed. You can’t come in here,” yelled a GDF—Gaz de France—worker in a hard hat. An emergency GDF repair vehicle stood parked on the lawn. “There’s a ruptured gas line.”
She looked back. The driver following her had pulled onto the pavement. The car’s doors slammed shut. Her heart raced. They were after her.
“Stop!” The hard hat ran after her. “It’s dangerous.”
She ignored him and sped over the gravel path under manicured plane trees, eerie in the moonlight, heading for the fountain. Shouts came from behind her. Lights bobbed over the plane tree branches.
She panicked. The gardens were locked at night. She’d have to find some way out.
Veering to the right, she passed the spouting fountain, the old glass-roofed hothouse, and headed across the garden to the back gates. Roars and cries came from somewhere ahead as she drove down a path. Branches scraped her legs. Musky animal smells assailed her. The zoo . . . of course; it had been founded to house the animal menagerie from Versailles. She skirted the zoo fence, riding by the reptile gallery, careening through dark maze-like paths, hearing the screeching of the ostriches. Somehow she had to find another exit, a way out. Then a scream of alarm sounded from the monkey house.
Her weak bobbing headlight illuminated the tail of a huge beast: the concrete dinosaur of a children’s climbing structure. Shouts came from the distance. It would only be minutes until security, alerted by the alarms, appeared.
She gunned by the Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée offices, desperately looking for a way out. Then saw a passage-way between the buildings and the crumbling storehouses. She downshifted into the passageway and stopped. As she wiped her damp forehead, she faced a bolted wooden gate. Trapped.
On her left were the lighted windows of the caretaker’s lodge. She saw a man inside, sitting at a desk, leaning back on his chair. Last year’s calendar showed a blonde, topless on white sand. No video monitors were visible. But a control console above him displayed alarm lights blinking red.
Bunches of keys hung from hooks on the wall. He held a wine bottle, his eyes closed, his head swaying to and fro. No wonder, she thought, noticing the CD player. He was wearing headphones.
She cut the engine, leaned the Vespa against the wall, and opened one of the lodge’s water-stained double doors. The place reeked of wine. Sawdust sprinkled the floor. She had no idea which of the keys opened the gate. And any minute now he’d notice the blinking alarm lights. She reached for the nearest bunch of keys and stole away, carrying a ring of large greasy old-fashioned keys. Her hands trembled as she tried several in the old-fashioned brass lock in the dark. None fit.
She turned to the lock in the smaller door. One of the keys went in. She turned it, but nothing happened.
Panting now, she shoved and jiggled the key. Then she heard the mechanism tumble. A ray of light fell at a slant onto the packed earth. The guard had come out to investigate.
She looked up and saw his leering face, his eyes glazed and unfocused. He was a tall stocky gorilla of a man. The alarm from the zoo shrieked.
“I did it again!” She smacked her forehead and forced a smile. “Silly me. Sorry to bother you.”
“Did what?” His footsteps crunched across the gravel, unsteadily. “Hold on.”
“Trust me to set the alarm off. I’ll just—”
“Why the hurry, chérie?”
With final desperate urgency, she used her knee to shove the door open.
He grabbed her scooter. “Not so fast. I’ve never seen you before. What are you doing here?”
“I’m new. This exit’s so much closer to where I work,” she said, making it up as she went along.
“New? Since when?”
“You weren’t on duty that night.” She said the first thing that came to mind. “When’s your shift finished?”
“Eh?”
“Don’t pretend.” She licked her lips and jerked her thumb toward the mineralogy building. “I work late and I’ve watched you.”
His eyes narrowed. “What are you doing with those keys?”
“The keys were in the door.” She licked her lips again. “Such a good-looking mec. Why don’t we have a drink? You could come to my place after work.”
His hand relaxed. Confusion and interest battled for supremacy.
“You look like my type,” she added.
His chest puffed out. “Think so? There’s only one way to find out.” He edged closer.
She kicked him in the knee.
“Salope!” He stumbled against the wall, clutching his leg.
She wrested the scooter from him and with her other hand turned on the ignition. She stepped on the pedal. The engine rumbled to life. She revved into first and shot over the cobble-stoned street, grazing a parked truck’s bumper. A car alarm blared and she took off.
She heard the man’s shouts. He half-ran, half-limped after her. An apartment window creaked open. “I’m trying to sleep,” yelled a man, shaking his fist.
The scooter’s engine sputtered. Sirens sounded behind her. A late-night bus crossed the road and she veered behind it, then shot ahead onto the pavement abreast of the bus. She kept pace, hoping no pedestrians would appear, then turned with the bus onto Pont de Sully.
The Seine gurgled below, dark and sluggish; the plane trees lining the bank filigreed the pavement with shadows. The dark hulk of Place Bayre on Ile St. Louis loomed on the right, the park’s horse chestnut trees nodding in the breeze. And then more sirens sounded. Flashing lights peppered the stone-walled quai.
She braked, took a sharp left onto the sidewalk of rue Saint Louis-en-l’isle, cut the engine, and coasted under the stone portico of Hotel de Bretonvilliers, a seventeenth-century hôtel particulier in the midst of renovation. Shaking, she shoved the Vespa between the dumpster and the crumbling stone wall and ran.
Tuesday Morning
IN AIMÉE’S DREAM, it was the freezing December after her mother left them. Papa was working at home, his piles of paperwork on the kitchen table. Her ninth birthday approached, and deep snow resembling glistening sugar carpeted the Jardin du Luxembourg.
“Get my mitten, Aimée,” came a plaintive child’s voice.
Icicles sparkled like shiny teeth from the garden’s gold-spike-topped gate. A blue mitten lay in the snow; the chill air reddened the little girl’s honey-colored cheeks.
The girl had Mireille’s face.
“Help your sister, Aimée,” her Papa was saying. But it was so cold, so wet. She wanted to take her Papa’s hand, leave behind this demanding strang
er with the runny nose. Go away. As she reached out, the mitten turned into a dark severed ear. Blood droplets spattered the pristine snow.
Aimée blinked awake on cold smooth sheets; she must have kicked her duvet onto the floor. A miasma of guilt engulfed her. She reached for the duvet and for Miles Davis, her bichon frisé, a bundle of fur asleep near her pillow. His little breaths warmed her arm. Pale apricot rays of dawn glowed through her window.
Since Mireille had walked into her life, asking for help, Aimée had discovered a corpse and been chased. Assailed by doubt, she wondered again if Mireille really was her sister. Or if she’d been set up.
She rubbed her eyes, unable to clear the images of the man’s severed ear and that circle of salt from her mind. At her laptop on the bedside table, the screen blinked with an e-mail from her partner, René, marked urgent. “Aimée, can you meet the contractor at the office? Aèrospatiale’s interested in our proposal . . . I’m at La Défense meetings all day.”
Bon, she had to get to the office early. Would she find Mireille waiting with an explanation? Some scenario that would make this nightmare disappear?
Not likely.
In the kitchen she made coffee, then scooped the horse-meat from the butcher’s waxed paper into Miles Davis’s chipped Limoges bowl.
“Breakfast, Furball.”
In the night, it had rained. Clear drops glistened on the window. Lingering pearly puffs of clouds hovered over the blue-gray rooftops across the Seine. She opened the window and inhaled the rain-freshened air suffused with the dense foliage smell from the trees lining the quai below.
And then she saw them. Two men sat in the front seat of a dented Peugeot parked in front of her building. Acrid puffs of cigarette smoke drifted from the car’s open window. Her fin-gers tensed on the cup handle. She stepped back, afraid they might be watching her apartment.
Flics used dented Peugeots for stakeouts. But it was after 6 A.M., the time when flics had the legal right to come to her door and question her.
One of the men emerged from the car. He wore a brown leather bomber jacket and sunglasses. He flicked a cigarette butt onto the quai and leaned on the stone wall. Alarms rang in her head. He’d broken the first rule of police surveillance: never make your presence known.
If they weren’t flics, she wondered who they might be. Her mind returned to the previous night and the car that had fol-lowed her. Nervous, she ran to her room, opened her armoire, and grabbed the first thing at hand, a dry cleaner’s plastic bag containing a vintage black Lanvin dress, her denim jacket, and black patent leather heels.
She stuck the laptop in her bag and locked her front door. As she ran down the building’s worn marble steps, she swiped Chanel Red across her lips, then hurried over the black-and-white diamond-shaped foyer tiles. She wanted to avoid Madame Cachou, her inquisitive concierge.
INSTEAD OF LEAVING by the front doors, Aimée passed through the old carriage house to the rear courtyard. She walked over damp magnolia leaves into the next courtyard and exited via a smaller door cut into the main one. Now she stood on crowded rue Saint Louis-en-l’isle among parents taking their children to the école maternelle around the corner. She saw a taxi and, instead of dealing with her scooter, waved it down.
In the taxi she took advantage of the moment and went to work on her face, taming a rogue eyebrow, outlining her eyes with kohl. A few blocks later she turned to look through the rear window. The dented Peugeot was two cars behind.
“Try the less direct route,” she told the taxi driver, a small man wearing a rain cap.
“What do you have in mind, Mademoiselle?”
She thrust fifty francs over the top of the front seat. “Get creative.”
A HALF HOUR later, after the taxi had circled the block twice, Aimée reached her office. She stared out the window of Leduc Detective. Below, on rue du Louvre, the usual snarl of traffic crawled and horns blared, punctuated by the ringing of bicycle bells.
No dented Peugeot in sight.
But no Mireille waiting for her with an explanation.
Instead she’d found Cloutier, the contractor, gesturing to her from the rear of the office. She shoved down her worry, tried to clear her mind and focus on the work at hand.
Cloutier, a large-boned Breton with a wide brow and thick mustache, looked like he’d be more at home at sea than in the cluttered interiors of buildings. He had a nice array of crow-bars and steel hammers which would be handy for protection, in case. But he didn’t know that.
“Desolé, Mademoiselle, the truck-driver strike held up my supplies,” he told Aimée. He took a notepad from the pocket in his overalls. “I took measurements according to the specifications of your partner, Monsieur Friant, and ordered the lumber and structural braces.”
Aimée scanned the blueprint Cloutier spread over the top of the fax machine. An opening in the adjoining wall, a partition to be erected. A straightforward job to merge the next-door office with Leduc Detective. Nothing could be more simple, she thought.
“So, when can you start?” Aimée asked.
Cloutier grinned, rocking back on his workboot heels. “My supplier guaranteed delivery tomorrow morning. We’ll start early.”
The radiator groaned, emitting heat. In typical fashion, as René often pointed out, it functioned full bore in warm weather while giving out only dribbles in the bone-chilling days of December. Once construction started, the office would be a mess; she’d work at home. But if Mireille showed up and didn’t find her . . . she’d have to figure that out.
After Cloutier left, she stared at the papers on her desk. Again she repressed unease; after all, the taxi had lost the Peugeot. Work faced her: surveillance to monitor, client calls to follow up, and bills to pay. A business to run.
But those men obviously knew where she lived. Would they know the location of her office?
Needing information, she punched in the number for Morbier, her godfather and a Police Commissaire. She heard a series of clicks, then a low buzz. She’d called on his direct line at the Commissariat.
“Group R,” answered a disembodied voice.
She didn’t like this. Morbier worked one day a week in Group R at the Brigade Criminelle. He’d never explained what he did there.
“Commissaire Morbier?”
“Unavailable. You have a message?”
She hung up before the system could trace the call. At least she hoped the tracer still needed fifteen seconds. Not smart, considering that she’d fled a murder scene. Talking to Morbier person to person was one thing, leaving a message that could raise questions another.
She debated calling her father’s former police colleague, Nenert, in the robbery detail. Nenert liked to talk over a glass of wine; after several he grew voluble and disregarded regulations and confidentiality. If he didn’t know an answer, he’d find out.
“Nenert’s retired,” said a woman’s voice, too pert for this time of the morning. “What’s this regarding?”
She thought quickly. “A robbery on rue Buffon,” she said, “but this morning someone said a murder had occurred. . . .”
“You have information, Mademoiselle?”
”The murder alarmed me, I live nearby,” she said. “Who—?”
“The Brigade Criminelle handles homicide.”
She knew that. And no one in the Brigade would reveal a word.
She hung up and scanned this morning’s Le Parisien. The continuing investigation into Diana’s death filled most of the front section, along with the annual article warning mush-room hunters taking to the forests this season to beware of the poisonous varieties. The sidebar listed the past ten years’ statistics as to deaths due to poisoned mushrooms, proving that few paid attention.
She locked the office door, sat down to work, and slipped off her heels. Every time the phone rang, she’d answer at the first ring, anticipating Mireille’s call. She looked up from her desk whenever she heard footsteps on the landing and went to check outside. It never was Mireille.
After an hour, her client calls all returned and several monitoring systems reviewed on René’s terminal, she pulled out her checkbook. Leduc Detective barely broke even, in part due to clients who paid them for their service, like other independent firms, last. But this month, at least, they were not in the red. And if René’s meeting at La Défense netted a contract. . . .
A sense of hollowness pervaded her. Mireille had been scared. So scared, according to Zazie, that she’d run out of the café. What if Mireille had discovered the man’s body and run away before Aimée arrived?
She wouldn’t learn about Mireille’s connection to the murder by sitting here. Or uncover the victim’s identity. Time mattered in an investigation her father always said. Witnesses forgot, leads grew stale. She glanced at her watch, shouldered her bag, and locked the office door.
IN THE BRIGHT daylight, Osteologique Anatomie Comparée at Number 61 appeared even more dilapidated than it had last night. Cracks fissured the crumbling soot-stained wall, weeds sprouted in the gravel of the courtyard. This ungentrified slice of the quartier opposite the Jardin des Plantes consisted of a maze of passages leading to eighteenth-century buildings.
Beyond the building’s open portal, blue-uniformed flics stood in the courtyard. Yellow crime-scene tape fluttered in the warm air.
It brought back the image of the man’s bloodied temple, his matted hair and severed ear. That circle of salt on the wooden floor. She shuddered.
She saw no place from which to observe without calling attention to herself. She leaned down, as if to wipe something off her shoe. From the corner of her eye she saw a figure in a doorway a few meters away. A man pressed numbered buttons on the digicode keypad. Several minutes passed. There was no answering buzz. He stood, unmoving. He was watching the gatehouse.
An older man, wearing a guard’s blue work coat and smoking a cigarette, shuffled through the gate. He headed up the street, flicked his cigarette into the gutter, and entered a café. If he worked at the gatehouse, he would know something. She waited a few minutes before following him into the café. But, inside, she saw no one except the café owner behind the counter. The scent of fresh-pulped oranges came from the juicer, the gurgling steamer frothed milk; where had the old guard disappeared to?