by Anne Stuart
She couldn’t afford to wait much longer. Marc usually slept late, waking between ten and eleven in the morning. If they left right now, raced through the maze of blocks to Tom’s flat, they would be out of reach before Marc awakened. Nicole was exhausted—Claire’s glance in on her showed a pale, huddled figure curled up in a deep sleep. It would take long, frustrating minutes awakening her, making her pull on clothes and keep completely silent.
Would Nicole fight her? Claire doubted it. Nicole had always distrusted Marc, had always held herself aloof from the man Claire had assumed was her father. Perhaps Claire was crazy, full of paranoid fantasies with no basis in reality. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was escape, safety, breathing space so she could figure out what they could do, should do. Tom would help them find it.
Nicole’s bedroom was dark and chilly when Claire tiptoed back in, her sneakered feet silent on the parquet floor. She touched Nicole’s shoulder, that thin, bony shoulder that was hunched against some imagined terror. Nicole didn’t move.
Claire squatted down beside the bed, keeping her voice low, and shook Nicole harder. “Nicole, wake up.”
Nicole still didn’t move. Her breathing was loud and shallow, her color a sickly white. Claire shook her again, quite hard, rattling the bed in her sudden panic. Nicole rolled over on her back, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, still caught in a deep, unbreakable sleep.
Calm, Claire ordered herself. Be very, very calm. She sat on the bed, pulling Nicole’s limp body into a sitting position, and slapped her. Her sunken eyes didn’t open, her head lolled to one side, and her mouth hung open slackly. Pressing her head against Nicole’s thin chest, Claire listened for a heartbeat. It was there, slow and strong, and her lungs sounded clear. Nicole wasn’t sick. She was drugged.
Claire let her drop back onto the bed. While Nicole’s frail body was birdlike in its delicacy, there was no way Claire could cart her limp form through the streets of Paris. The one time she’d gotten a taxi it had been a nightmare of misunderstanding. No, her only chance was to go for help, and go quickly, before Marc awakened.
If luck were on her side they could be back in time. If Marc were to wake up and find her gone he would assume Nicole was gone also. The child wasn’t going to awaken in the near future—Marc might even forget her existence.
Don’t be an idiot, she stopped herself. Marc wouldn’t forget Nicole’s existence, not if he drugged her in the first place. And if he hadn’t, who could have?
Of course, he might have made a habit of drugging Nicole. Looking back over the past few months, there were any number of times that Nicole had slept unnaturally long hours and awoken pale and sluggish. Maybe Nicole’s current state wasn’t as singular an occurrence as Claire imagined.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was to get help, to get both of them out of there. If she couldn’t drag Nicole’s drugged body out of the apartment, she could at least hide her. Sliding her arms under Nicole’s, she half-tugged, half-dragged the little girl out of the bed.
She hit the floor with a muffled thud, falling on Claire, and the two of them sat there, the woman breathless with fright, the child still unconscious. The apartment was well-soundproofed, protected by thick walls and heavy carpets, but Claire had no idea how deeply Marc slept. He awoke when he wanted to, usually at times she least expected.
For a long moment she didn’t move, waiting for some telltale sound. But the air, the silence, was thick and still, surrounding them like a cocoon. With a whispered murmur of apology, Claire rolled Nicole’s body under the bed, yanking a pillow and a blanket off and making swift, futile attempts at wrapping the drugged child. Then she rose, tugging the bedspread down almost to the floor, so that it covered any sign of Nicole’s hiding place.
She left the scribbled note on the kitchen table beside the pot of coffee that was much stronger than what Marc usually preferred. “Nicole and I have gone to visit Harriette. Meet us over there. C.”
Even if he knew Harriette was dead, he couldn’t be certain they did. If they were due any sort of luck he would go after them without bothering to search the apartment, and once he arrived at the building the police would detain him, ask him all sorts of curious questions. Maybe even that sad-looking Inspector Malgreave would take him in for a statement. At the very least it would give Tom and Claire time to spirit Nicole away.
She let herself out the back door, closing it with a silent click. She sped down the back stairs and out into the sunny streets without a backward glance, her sneakered feet flying over the pavement as she raced down the broad sidewalks toward Tom Parkhurst’s romantic garret. And as she ran she prayed.
“The mime.” Malgreave was alone in his office. It was late morning, he’d smoked half a pack of cigarettes, eaten two brioches, and was in the midst of his fifth cup of very strong coffee. All morning he had sat there, staring at the walls in his windowless office as his brain chased around that one elusive memory. Josef had gone to Marie-le-Croix; Vidal and the others had come and gone in respectful silence, knowing Malgreave’s expression of old. It had taken a long time, longer than usual, but in the end he had come up with the missing piece. He stubbed out his cigarette, sat back in his chair, and grinned, a savage, hunter’s look that Marie had never seen.
“The goddamned mime,” he said again. “His picture on the old lady’s dresser. Him and his American girlfriend in the park just after the other murder. I do not believe in coincidence.”
“Did you say something, sir?” Vidal poked his head inside the door.
“See if you can track down Josef,” he ordered, leaning forward again and shuffling papers that were beginning to make sense. “If you have to, send someone down after him.”
“I’ll go myself.”
Malgreave had expected that response, and was pleased with it. “Do that. Have him ask particularly about a boy who might have lived in the orphanage just before it burned back in the fifties. A boy named Marc Bonnard.”
“The mime?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“He’s well-known if you like that sort of thing. My girlfriend does.” He made a disparaging gesture with his shoulders.
“Do yourself a favor, Vidal. Don’t marry her.”
Vidal grinned. “No, sir. I’ll call in as soon as I find Summer.”
“Bon.” Malgreave watched him leave. It was a visceral thing, this excitement when things finally began to fall together. The Grandmother Murders had gone on longer than most, and been more baffling, more frustrating. In the end, it would be his greatest triumph. And the perfect swan song. Let Summer deal with Vidal and all the other hounds at his heels. It would soon be time to rest.
Rocco wasn’t a man to believe in premonitions. He believed in facts, in flesh and blood and pain and death. He’d heard the preliminary reports of the old lady’s murder and emptied a bottle of red wine to celebrate. But his sleep had been troubled, and even reading the newspaper accounts the next morning, the typical vagueness of the police reports, hadn’t soothed his worries. It was almost noon now, he was well into a cheaper bottle of Beaujolais, and the bright sunny day was casting shadows into his soul.
He was sitting outside at his favorite café, his shiny black boots propped up on a chair, the newspaper open on the table in front of him. He had nothing to do, no jobs to complete. Nothing until next week, when he promised Hubert he’d oversee a transfer of boxes trucked in from Spain. He had a fairly good idea what was inside those boxes, but he didn’t care. The one person he would never dare mess with was Hubert. His reach was long, endless, and Rocco always knew which side to favor.
Marc must be celebrating. Would he have gone back into seclusion, or would he be with that tight-assed Américaine? He wouldn’t have minded having a piece of her himself. He liked the Américaines, with their love of excitement and their lack of Catholic scruples. They were particularly fascinated with him, with his air of danger and amorality. Part of the perfect college vacation—see the Notre Dame, the Lo
uvre, and the bed of a French criminal. He liked to hurt them first, just a little bit. Not enough to scare them away, just enough so that they’d know they were in for something different.
But maybe Marc shouldn’t be celebrating. Rocco hadn’t liked the expression on Malgreave’s face when he’d stormed out yesterday afternoon. And it was getting dangerous, when you picked someone you knew. It wasn’t wise to underestimate Malgreave. He would have made a great criminal, Hubert had always said so. He knew how to think along gutter lines, he knew the inside of madness when he dared to look. No, Malgreave was a definite threat, and more than once Rocco had considered wasting him.
He’d always changed his mind. The murder of little old ladies could be overlooked. None of them had much family to bother about them, and they would have died soon enough anyway. And no one cared about drug dealers found floating in the Seine, apart from those damned environmentalists who didn’t care for pollution messing up their beloved river.
But a chief inspector was a different matter. Cop-killers were hunted down with a determination bordering on fanaticism, and Rocco had no desire to be the object of such a manhunt. Malgreave was respected and even more unusual, well liked. There wasn’t a flic in all of Paris, perhaps all of France, who would rest before Malgreave’s killer was found.
Marc was the smartest man Rocco had ever known. He would have covered his tracks. There was no way Malgreave could figure out anything, no matter how good he was. If Rocco could get away with it for so long, no one could take Marc Bonnard.
But he still couldn’t get rid of that uneasy feeling lurking at the back of his neck. Maybe if he talked with Marc he’d feel better. He couldn’t go to the apartment on the Left Bank—he’d be walking into the police’s hands if they’d happened to find anything. No, he’d check with Hubert. Hubert would know if everything was well. Hubert would be able to make the contact with Marc if need be, or at least set his mind at rest. Hubert would take care of things.
He leaned forward and folded the paper. A shadow covered the sunny table, a hand reached over and took the paper from him. He looked up into Chief Inspector Louis Malgreave’s world-weary gray eyes and an unlikely shiver of foreboding swept along his backbone.
“Mind if I join you, Rocco?” Malgreave inquired amiably, pulling up a chair. “I wanted to talk to you about your childhood.”
Nicole felt absolutely horrible. She couldn’t open her eyes, the air was close and smothering, the bed hard as a board beneath her, and she wanted to throw up. She was cold, and frightened, and something was terribly, terribly wrong.
She would go back to sleep. That would improve matters. If things were too miserable to face, then sleep was the answer. Maybe then her stomach would stop jumping about. She hated to throw up. She hated kneeling on the hard marble floor in the bathroom, staring down into the dark cracks in the toilet bowl. She hated the burning along her throat, the horrid, childhood fear that she would throw up all her insides and then die.
No, if she just lay very still on the hard surface and tried not to breathe, maybe the sickness would pass. Maybe she would wake up and Grand-mère would still be alive. Maybe it had all been a nasty dream, Marc with the knife, Grand-mère dying.
But there’d been another dream, hadn’t there? Someone in the night, making her swallow something nasty. It hadn’t been the first time. And she knew that Marc was back.
At that her stomach finally gave up the fight. She crawled out from under the bed, gagging, and scrambled toward the bathroom. She didn’t make it in time, ending on her hands and knees, vomiting on the carpet. Marc had beaten her once when she’d tracked mud on it. What would he do when he found she’d thrown up on it?
It didn’t matter. Her stomach wasn’t worried about Marc—all it wanted to do was empty itself quickly and efficiently. When she’d finally thrown up everything, when the dry heaves finally shuddered into silence, Nicole sat back, wiping the mess from her mouth, shivering. She looked up, to the right, to the open door to her bedroom.
Marc was standing there. No knife in his hand, no blood on his clothes. He looked distant, almost affable, as he stared down at her.
“Sick, chérie?” he inquired softly, too softly. “We’ll have to clean it up, won’t we? And then I have a little game in mind.” And slowly, silently, he began to move toward her.
Claire couldn’t speak by the time she reached the sixth floor of Tom’s apartment. She’d passed any number of police along the way, and racing through her panicked brain had been the thought that maybe one of them might speak English, might help her.
But even the most sweeping command of the English language didn’t mean they’d believe her. Didn’t mean they’d let an American woman remove a French child from the custody of her French stepfather. And Marc could be so persuasive, so charming. What did it matter that his mother-in-law had been murdered last night? He would only use it as an excuse for Claire’s paranoia.
No, she didn’t dare stop, not until she reached Tom. But by the time she’d collapsed against his door, banging loudly, by the time she fell into his arms, she was sobbing and gasping for breath, unable to choke out more than a few struggling phrases, none of which made sense.
“Calm down,” Tom said, his hands steady on her arms. He gave her a slight, rattling shake. “You’re not making any sense. What about Marc? And Nicole? And you? Claire, are you all right?” His hand came up and caught her chin, forcing her face up to meet his, and his blue eyes were searching.
She still couldn’t manage more than a few disjointed sentences. “Marc’s … back. Nicole … drugged. … Afraid …”
The hand on her arm tightened almost painfully. “When did he come back?”
“Last night. I … thought … you …” She gave up the struggle for a moment, leaning against him and shuddering in remembered distaste.
Tom began to swear, a low string of obscenities that was curiously comforting. “I should never have left you.”
“It … would have … made things worse.”
“I should have brought you home with me, then.”
She lifted her head. “We’ve got to get Nicole. I couldn’t … move her. She was too heavy. He’s given her something, and I don’t think it’s the first time. I didn’t dare stay, but I was afraid if he woke up and found her …”
“We’ll get her.” He’d already put her aside and was pulling on a jacket. He was dressed as she was, in jeans and sweater and running shoes, and even with his superior height Claire had to wonder whether he’d be a match for Marc. She couldn’t imagine it would come to that, but so much had happened already that was beyond her wildest nightmares. Something was very, very wrong in that apartment, with her lover of the last four months, and that wrongness was so evil, so permeating, that it defeated even her overblown fantasies.
“Should we call the police?” She didn’t even flinch as she headed toward the door, prepared to retrace her mad dash of only minutes before.
“After we get Nicole out of there. The French do everything at their own speed, and I don’t think they’re going to like taking the word of a couple of Americans against that of a fellow Parisian. Bonnard is a fairly well-known figure in certain circles—it will only make it more difficult.”
There was no reply she could make to that, only swallow the groan of despair that threatened to overwhelm her. She was halfway out the door, ahead of him, when the phone rang. She stopped dead still at the top of the stairs, and Tom careened into her, almost knocking her down the steep flight.
“Answer it,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. We have to get back as quickly as …”
“Answer it,” she said again, her voice dull and resigned.
He didn’t argue, simply turned and went back into the apartment, picking up the serviceable black phone and barking a French greeting into it.
She could tell by the sudden whiteness of his face that her instincts had been right. He held out the receiver to her. “It’s Bonnard.”
She didn’t ask how he knew where to find her. Tom wouldn’t know any more than she did. All that mattered was that Marc knew.
She took the receiver from him, holding it gingerly, as if it were a cobra about to bite her. She held it to her ear. “Marc?” she said, and her voice was surprisingly calm.
There was no answer. Just the same thick, impenetrable silence she’d heard on those other occasions. She could see him at the other end, the exaggerated expressions, the perfect command of his trained body, but God only knew what he was telling her in his silence.
And then she heard Nicole scream.
CHAPTER 17
The call came in just before three in the afternoon. Malgreave had assigned one of the newer detectives to manning the phone. Over the last two years there’d been so many false leads and crazies calling in with messages from God that Malgreave no longer bothered to deal with them directly. He left it up to Pierre Gauge, a not very bright transfer from the police department in Rouen. What he lacked in brains he more than made up for in doggedness, and Malgreave knew he could count on having a complete transcript of every call concerning the old women that came in, be they from concerned citizens or Saint Joan herself.
Gauge even taped them all, keeping the tapes for a week at a time, long enough for Malgreave or Josef to review them to see whether Gauge might have missed something. He seldom did. Even with his limited command of languages other than French, he managed to do a creditable job, and his nighttime replacement, a weary old veteran on the edge of retirement, did the same.
Gauge knew enough to recognize Vidal’s voice when he heard it, patching the call directly through to the Chief Inspector. “Summer’s still talking with the mayor,” Vidal said. “But he thought this couldn’t wait any longer. You were right—Yvon Alpert, Rocco Guillère, and Gilles Sahut were all inmates at the Marie-le-Croix orphanage at the time it burned down. Two people were killed in the blaze—an elderly gardener and the matron of the house, an old woman named Estelle Marti. There was a question of arson at the time, but nothing could be proven. Besides, the boys were only about ten or twelve years old. Not old enough to be criminals.”
