*****
The gods must be holding their sides was all Maggie could think as she stared at the flickering battery indicator on her phone. It looked like fate was going to ensure she didn’t break down and accept one of Laurent’s calls.
Or anybody else’s.
The taxi driver gave Maggie an impatient toot on his horn. Maggie glared at him as she hurried in his direction. Can’t he see I’m coming?
“Un moment!” she shouted. It had taken a few precious moments to power her phone back up and, in her excitement, she’d dropped it in the dirt, costing her more time before she could punch in the call-back function to Burton’s line.
“Sorry, Ma’am,” the voice crackled over the telephone line to her. “Detective Burton isn’t answering his page either.”
Maggie shifted her phone to her other ear as she reached the cab and slipped into the backseat.
“I’ve got to talk to him.” She closed her eyes in agony.
“You’ll have to leave a message.” The impersonal drone of the sergeant’s voice made her want to scream. She took a deep breath and looked out the window as the taxi began to move.
“Look, tell Detective Burton or Detective Kazmaroff that Maggie Newberry called again, okay?” She paused until she was sure the man was writing this all down. “Tell them, please, that I know who killed my sister. And Deirdre Potts, too. Tell them that. And...and to page me at the Paris airport, okay? I’ll be there in about thirty minutes and then for about an hour once I’m there. Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Okay?”
I must be mad to think that redneck cop is going to call the airport in Paris, France.
Maggie watched her phone die in her hands, the screen going slowly to black. She sank back into the stained and lumpy backseat.
Thirty minutes later, she took a place at the back of the line that wrapped around the Information Desk at Charles de Gaulle Airport and glanced at the large clock over the desk. She had a full hour before she needed to go through security and find her gate, and still no word from Atlanta.
Why wasn’t he paging her? My God! I said I’ve discovered the identity of the killer. Is that not strong enough?
Maggie eyed the woman manning the information booth and hoped she spoke English. Should she have left a message naming the killer? Was it safe to do that? She looked at the clock again. It was late afternoon back home. Where were they?
An uncomfortable image came to her mind of Burton crumpling up her message and tossing it away. “Not that Newberry woman again! Why doesn’t she give it a rest? ‘Found the killer,’ she says! Brother!”
A garbled message in French came over the public address system, and Maggie strained to catch some semblance of her name being mentioned. She finally approached the counter. “My name is Margaret Newberry,” she said breathlessly. “I am expecting a page.”
“There have been no pages for you.”
Maggie turned away from the counter, frustrated and defeated. She walked toward a wall of telephones that lined the long corridor leading to Security. She jammed a euro coin into one of the machines and dialed Burton’s number again.
She had been crazy to withhold the name of the killer in her earlier message. She was so sure that Burton would doubt her word that she had wanted to tell him herself so she could outline her evidence.
But apparently not saying the name only seemed to ensure that Burton disregarded her messages. She just had to tell him what she knew and pray he would take it from there.
When the same bored Fulton County desk sergeant came on the line, Maggie was brief. “Look, this is Margaret Newberry again—”
“Detectives Burton and Kazmaroff are not in, Miss Newberry. They have not seen your messages—”
“Look, forget it. I have a new message.”
There was an audible sigh on the other line. “Shoot.”
“Tell Detective Burton this.” Maggie licked her lips and watched the airport’s travelers parade by her. “Tell him the key is Gary Parker. You got that?” Maggie turned away from the stream of airport travelers and faced the phone box. “The murders are all connected to him.”
Murder in the South of France, Book 1 of the Maggie Newberry Mysteries Page 41