Central Park

by Guillaume Musso

  “Doesn’t that strike you as weird?” he asked. “A retirement home employing an ex-con?”

  Alice didn’t reply. She was still staring at the mug shot, attempting to figure out the mysterious Dunn.

  Gabriel took a sip of his coffee and made a grimace of disgust. “Can I borrow your phone? I need to check something.”

  He called the retirement home where Dunn worked. He identified himself to the receptionist—“Special Agent Keyne, FBI”—and asked to speak to the manager. As had become their habit, he pressed speakerphone so Alice could listen in on the conversation.

  “Julius Mason. How can I help you?”

  Gabriel said it was a routine inquiry and asked for information about Dunn.

  “I hope nothing has happened to Caleb,” Mason said, sounding worried.

  “Did he turn up today?”

  The manager almost choked. “What do you mean? Caleb Dunn hasn’t worked for us in almost two years!”

  “Really? Sorry, I wasn’t aware of that.”

  Gabriel struggled to sound unfazed. Alice couldn’t help smiling. So, even the FBI couldn’t manage to keep its files updated. The slowness of bureaucracy was not solely a French phenomenon.

  Embarrassed, Gabriel hardened his voice and began interrogating the manager.

  “Did you know that Dunn had a criminal record when you hired him?”

  “Criminal record? Come on, all he did was sell a few ounces of pot and yell at the cop who arrested him. So what? He hardly merited a prison sentence.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “That’s right—my way.”

  Alice smiled again. This guy was not easy to interrogate.

  “When Dunn worked for you, did he ever behave in a strange or inappropriate way? Anything strike you as unusual?”

  “Not at all. Caleb was always very professional, very helpful. Our staff and our residents all spoke very highly of him.”

  “So why is he no longer working for you?”

  Mason sighed. “The board of directors wanted to reduce costs. To save a few dollars, we now use an external security firm. It costs less, but it’s much more impersonal.”

  “Do you know if he found other employment?”

  “Of course, and very quickly. I recommended him myself to a hospital in Maine that needed a reliable security guard.”

  “Do you know the name of that hospital?”

  “So you can update your damned files and continue harassing honest citizens?”

  “Mr. Mason, please.”

  “Sebago Hospital. In Cumberland County.”

  Gabriel and Alice exchanged an astounded look. The same tension electrified their bodies. Sebago Hospital was where Elizabeth Hardy had worked—the nurse found murdered at her home ten days earlier.

  Cops from their heads to their toes.

  Cops to their bones.

  Cops to the very cores of their beings.

  They didn’t have to discuss it for long to come to their conclusion. Why waste time in Boston? They would work as partners and strike out on their own, driving north to Lincoln to question Caleb Dunn themselves.

  “I must have missed this guy in my investigation,” Gabriel admitted. “Elizabeth Hardy was killed in her house near Augusta. She had deactivated the alarm system, which led us to think she knew her attacker. I interrogated lots of people who knew her: friends, work colleagues. I even went to Sebago Hospital, but this guy’s name never came up. He wasn’t a close friend of hers, I’m sure of that.”

  “How long will it take us to get there?”

  He examined the map, tracing the journey to Lincoln with his finger. “I would say three and a half hours. Less if we don’t stick to the speed limit.”

  “That long, really?”

  “As far as Haverhill, we can stay on the interstate, but after that we’ll have to go into the mountains. This is not a bad car, but it’s pretty old. The oil level worries me, and I happened to notice that the spare tire is flat. We should really stop at a garage before we go any farther.”

  Barbie, who had been hanging on their every word, exclaimed, “My cousin has a garage! I can call him for you!”

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “Where is he?”

  “In Greenfield, Massachusetts,” she said, pointing out the little town on the map.

  He looked at where her finger lay. It was less than an hour away. “You think he’ll know how to take care of an old Mustang?”

  “Why don’t you just call him and find out?” Alice suggested.

  The cop nodded and Barbie went to get her phone.

  Alice shot her a wink but felt another burning in her throat, stronger than before, as if acid were eating away at the lining of her stomach.

  When she got the telltale metallic taste in her mouth, she leaped off her stool and ran to the bathroom.

  My kingdom for a Nexium!

  Retching, Alice leaned over the toilet bowl. Her throat was on fire. She tried rubbing her stomach, but it didn’t help to calm the burning. Why was the pain so intense? Stress? The excitement of the investigation? Fatigue?

  She continued to massage her belly for over a minute, then stood up and washed her hands. She did not look in the mirror; she had no desire to see herself reflected, with the rings under her eyes and the drawn features. She splashed cold water on her face and stood there for a moment. Why had she woken up this morning with her blouse stained with Caleb Dunn’s blood? And who was he? A disciple of Vaughn’s, using the same MO to murder that nurse?

  Or Vaughn himself?

  No—she refused to imagine this possibility. Her father had no shortage of flaws, but she didn’t want to believe that he would lie to her to such an extent. It was too messed up. Too dangerous. The best cops in France had been relentlessly tracking Vaughn for the past two years, without success.

  That in itself is proof that the serial killer is dead, she told herself.

  As Seymour would soon assure her, Vaughn’s corpse was moldering at the bottom of a well in a scary-looking abandoned factory in a godforsaken hole in eastern France.

  Water had trickled down to her chest. She grabbed two paper towels and wiped her neck and the tops of her breasts. Embarrassed, she lowered her eyes.

  And that was when she saw it.

  A foreign body implanted under her skin, about two inches below her collarbone. Alice pressed down hard on the flesh to make the object stand out.

  It was the size and shape of a large SIM card: a rectangle half an inch square. She could see its edges quite clearly when she pulled at her skin.

  Her pulse sped up and beat loudly in her temples.

  Oh, fuck, who could have done this?

  Instinctively, she looked for traces of a recent operation. Standing in front of the mirror, she took off her T-shirt and examined her chest, throat, armpits.

  No sign of any recent incision. Not even the tiniest wound was visible.

  Sweat ran down her forehead. A hundred questions swarmed in her brain, but two emerged most urgently from the confusion:

  How long had she had this thing under her skin?

  And what did it do?

  17

  The Devil’s Tricks

  THE MUSTANG LEFT the interstate, entered a traffic circle, and took the first exit.

  Greenfield, on the border of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, was a small town that seemed frozen in time. The town hall, the post office, the courthouse, and the large white church with its pointed steeple were all clustered within a mile along Main Street. Also on this stretch of road were the public library, a bunch of restaurants, little stores, and an old movie theater, its sign blazing with dozens of electric bulbs. Over each building hung the Stars and Stripes, flying proudly in the wind, colored by the late afternoon sunlight.

  “Let me out here,” Alice said, adjusting the strap of her holster.

  “Here? But Barbie said her cousin’s garage is at the other end of town.”

  “I need to do someth
ing, Keyne.”

  He sighed. “I thought we’d stopped being secretive.”

  “I don’t want to just sit there twiddling my thumbs while they repair the car! I’m going to a café with Wi-Fi. There’s something I need to check.”

  “What?” he said, suspicious.

  “I want to look at some old newspaper articles about Vaughn. I’ll explain later.”

  The car stopped at a red light. Gabriel took out his pack of cigarettes. “There won’t be a café in this hole.”

  “I’ll find one, Keyne.”

  He thought for a few seconds. “Okay, I’ll drop you off here, but leave your gun in the car.”

  Alice was not thrilled with this idea, but she didn’t have time to go into endless discussions about it. The light turned green. She opened the glove compartment and put the holstered Glock inside it.

  “I’ll see you at the garage,” she said, opening the door.

  She crossed the road and walked up the sidewalk to the town hall. In front of the building, she saw a town map displayed under a wooden canopy. She looked at it and found what she needed: the address of a medical center on Second Street.

  The advantage of small towns like this was that everything was bunched close together. Alice had to walk only a couple hundred yards to reach a brand-new building with a resolutely modern façade: a vertical metallic-blue wave that stood out like a sore thumb amid the town’s old-fashioned architecture.

  The sliding doors opened and she entered the lobby of the medical building. She went to the front desk and told the receptionist she wanted a chest X-ray. She was asked for a photo ID and her insurance card. As she had neither of these, she spoke the first lie that came to mind: she said she was a French tourist with lung problems and she wanted to see a doctor and get an X-ray. The receptionist looked skeptical.

  “It’s quite important,” Alice insisted. “I would like to see the physician so I can explain my problem. I would pay all the costs, of course.”

  “Let me find out,” the receptionist said, picking up the phone.

  She spoke to someone for about two minutes, then hung up and told Alice, “Dr. Mitchell in the urgent-care clinic will see you. Could you show me some ID, please?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I left my purse in the car. But my husband is on his way here and—”

  “All right, you can go up. The clinic is on the fifth floor.” She pressed a button that opened a Plexiglas security barrier, allowing Alice access to the elevator.

  Fifth floor. Another reception desk. A waiting room decorated in soft, bright colors with white walls, PVC flooring, cushioned wooden benches and chairs. An old lady, sagging under the weight of her years, was turning the pages of a celebrity magazine. Opposite her, a burly young man with his leg in a cast and a swollen black eye was playing on his iPad and taking up almost the entire couch.

  Alice sat next to him and started a conversation. “Car accident?”

  “Football,” he replied, looking up from the screen. “I got taken down by the guys from Albany this weekend.”

  Handsome face, cocky Ultrabrite smile, shining eyes. The girls must go nuts over him, Alice thought. And some boys, for that matter.

  “Is there a Wi-Fi connection here?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Alice didn’t beat around the bush. “How would you like to earn a quick fifty bucks?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening.”

  She took a fifty-dollar bill from her pocket. “Lend me your iPad for five minutes, and this is yours.”

  “I’ll do it for a hundred.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Okay, okay, don’t get mad!” he said, handing her his tablet.

  Alice opened a web browser and connected to the sites of France’s three main newspapers: Libération, Le Monde, and Le Figaro. Strange as it might seem, Alice had never seen Vaughn’s face. He had been wearing a helmet when he attacked her, and whenever she thought of him, that was the image that came to mind: a predator’s black helmet, with sharp lines and bright edges; a metallic mirrored visor; a mouth vent and an aerodynamic chin bar, like a terrifying smile.

  Later, during therapy, Alice had agreed with the psychiatrist that it was counterproductive to keep twisting the knife in her mental wounds by compulsively reading news articles about the case. But what the shrink didn’t know was that by then, Alice was convinced that Vaughn was dead.

  That was no longer the case.

  She found several photographs of the killer published in the weeks after her attack, a dozen different pictures in which Erik Vaughn appeared more or less distinctly. A man in his mid-thirties, dark-haired, reasonably good-looking without being unusual in any way.

  What disturbed her was the difficulty she had in establishing a definitive portrait of Vaughn based on the different images. Alice thought of those chameleonic actors who seemed to metamorphose from one film to the next: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, John Cusack…

  She took the fax of Caleb Dunn’s mug shot from her pocket and compared it to the other photos. Were Vaughn and Dunn the same person? It didn’t immediately strike her that way, but it could not be ruled out.

  Alice knew that, with modern plastic-surgery techniques, it was possible to modify a human face in an almost infinite variety of ways. Some of her colleagues had recently dealt with criminals who had been physically transformed in the operating room with rhinoplasty, the insertion of barbed threads under the skin to redraw the shape of the face, otoplasty to correct ear deformations, injections of hyaluronic acid to emphasize the cheekbones, dental surgery to create a whole new smile.

  She was handing the iPad back to its owner when she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket.

  Seymour.

  The man who could bring her nightmare to an end.

  “Are you at the factory yet?” she asked, skipping the usual niceties.

  “Not yet. I’ve only just left Sarreguemines. The traffic in Paris was hell, and it took Castelli a while to locate the place.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s supposed to be on Kastelsheim Street. I entered the address into my GPS, but nothing came up. Don’t worry, I’ll find it eventually. The problem is this goddamn rain. It’s pouring, so I can only see about ten feet in front of me.”

  Alice could hear the windshield wipers beating frantically in the background.

  “I’m calling you about something else,” Seymour said. “I had to bring Savignon and Castelli into the loop. I can’t ask them to do extra work without telling them why. They’re spending the night in the office, working every angle they can find.”

  “Thank them for me, will you?”

  “Savignon just called me about the serial number of the Glock you gave me this morning.”

  She swallowed. She had completely forgotten about that lead. “Yeah, the gun I found in my jacket. So?”

  “I tried the stolen-weapons list first, but it wasn’t on there. But when I mentioned Vaughn to Savignon, he had an idea right away. Two years ago, after Vaughn attacked you, we searched his apartment—and found a weapon.”

  “And?”

  “Savignon checked the paperwork—it was a Glock with the same serial number.”

  “What? That’s impossible. That gun was held as evidence.”

  “Savignon spent an hour in the evidence room. The gun is nowhere to be seen.”

  Fuck.

  The nightmare was not over.

  “Tell me the truth, Alice: Did you take that gun?”

  “Seymour! How can you even ask me that?”

  “Because we’re really in the shit here.”

  “Well, this isn’t the first time we’ve had problems with the evidence room. Remember a year ago, when we found out that security guard who worked there was selling guns and drugs? Maybe it was him.”

  “Hmm, I guess.”

  “And even if I had stolen that gun, how could I have brought it into the States? I’d never have gotten it through security.”
/>
  She heard her colleague sigh.

  “I want to believe you, Alice, but we really need to clear this up.”

  She sensed there was something he wasn’t telling her. “What else do you have?”

  “You won’t like it. It’s about your car.”

  “You found it?”

  “Yep. At the impound lot in Charléty. Savignon checked; the police prefecture officers towed it last night from Île de la Cité.”

  “From where, exactly?”

  Seymour took a deep breath. “Your Audi was found at four in the morning in the middle of the Pont de l’Archevêché. Right where Paul had his accident.”

  Alice was so shocked that she almost dropped her phone. At that moment, the waiting-room door opened and a white-coated giant poked his head out.

  “Ms. Alice Schafer?” he called out.

  18

  Sucker Punch

  DR. OLIVER MITCHELL was a big man with a shaved head and thick M-shaped eyebrows that met above the bridge of his nose. Despite his impressive height and lack of hair, he looked like he was barely out of college; he had a round, chubby face lit up by a childlike smile and he wore sneakers. A Ramones T-shirt was visible under his coat.

  “Sorry, I didn’t quite understand this thing about your lung problems,” he said when he entered the examining room.

  Alice decided to be honest. “That was a lie. I just needed to see a doctor.”

  “Oh, really? Well, that’s original…and kind of ballsy. You’re French, right?” he guessed, recognizing her accent.

  “Yes, I’m captain of the Criminal Division of the Paris police.”

  His expression brightened. “Seriously? At thirty-six Quai des Orfèvres? Like Jules Maigret?”

  Alice’s eyes widened. This was unexpected; what were the odds that a punk-rock urgent-care physician in Greenfield, Massachusetts, would be a Simenon fan?

  “My wife is doing a PhD in French literature at Harvard,” he explained. “Her dissertation is about Paris in the novels of Georges Simenon.”