Guilty Wives

by Patterson, James; Ellis, David

  Don’t say anything, I tried to tell myself. Your brain isn’t working.

  They showed me papers. I stared at them for a time, my head wobbly. Procès-verbal d’audition de la personne gardée à vue, they said. Some kind of a witness statement.

  “Your final…opportunity,” said Durand. “You can see that the others have complied. Your friend Winnie has confessed.”

  I closed my eyes, or maybe they were already closed.

  Winnie…no.

  “The others have confirmed—yes?”

  “Corroborated,” said Rouen.

  No…impossible…a bad dream…someone else’s nightmare…

  Durand pushed my chin up from my chest, so I was facing him. “Winnie says you gave her the gun. You assisted her.”

  No…not the gun…not my gun…

  “No,” I managed. “Never…touched a…gun.” My tongue was heavy; my words were coming with great effort.

  Durand shook the papers, the witness statements, in my face for emphasis. “You see here. All of them say it. It was le chantage. Blackmail, Abbie.”

  “Black…blackmail…who…?”

  “Still? Still you insist you know nothing?”

  “Why would we black…blackmail Devo?”

  “Devo,” Durand scoffed. “Do not call him that again.”

  “What should I…call him?”

  Rouen approached me, holding up an official photo of a balding man in a suit, his posture proud and confident, giving a speech with the flag of France behind him.

  It took me only a moment, my mental inebriation notwithstanding. Put a beard and a toupee on the man in that photo…

  “Oh, no,” I whispered.

  Devo the Tycoon was Henri Devereux.

  I was being accused of murdering the president of France.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE CELL DOOR OPENED. Dan Ingersoll looked in before entering. The woman was sitting on the floor in the corner, her elbows on her knees. Her hair was shoulder length, greasy, and flat against her head. Her face was pale and drawn. Her eyes were heavily bloodshot and vacant. Her gaze slowly made its way up to him.

  “Abbie Elliot?” he asked.

  She wet her lips and raised her chin. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Dan Ingersoll. I’m with the U.S. Embassy.”

  “Congratulations.” Her head fell back against the wall. The cell was all concrete. It was cold and clean.

  He wasn’t sure where to start. He’d never done this before.

  “Have you been treated okay?”

  She rolled her neck. It was probably a dumb question. Four days in French custody, being interrogated mercilessly. “They forgot the mint on my pillow,” she said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Oh. You’re serious.” Her eyes tracked up to the ceiling. “But not so serious to come visit me even once during four days of this?”

  “They denied me access,” he said. “This isn’t like Ameri—”

  “Oh, I swear, if another person reminds me that I’m not in America, there’s going to be a third murder to prosecute.”

  He could hardly blame her. She didn’t look like the type who had a history of spending time with angry cops and investigators. This must have been a nightmare.

  “How are the others?” she asked. “Have you talked to them?”

  “Only Serena Schofield,” said Ingersoll. “You two are the Americans.”

  “How’s Serena doing?”

  Ingersoll thought about his answer. He prided himself on his bluntness. An FBI agent once told him that he didn’t talk like a lawyer. He took it as a compliment. “It’s a difficult situation,” he said.

  “I didn’t ask you if it’s a difficult situation. I actually figured out that much all by myself. I asked you how Serena is doing.”

  He deserved that, he thought. “She’s distraught,” he said. “Terrified.”

  She nodded slowly. The sleep deprivation was evident. She appeared to be numb at this point, suffering from sensory overload. Four days of fear and anxiety and manipulation was too much for anyone. He wondered if Abbie had confessed. Most would under these circumstances.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. It wasn’t relevant—not for his purposes. She was an American citizen, and he needed to make sure she was given her rights. He wasn’t there to exonerate her.

  “And I sure as hell didn’t know that guy was the president of France. How was I supposed to know that?”

  It was the same thing Simon Schofield had said in his office a few days ago. How were they supposed to know who he was? Ingersoll didn’t have an answer then and he didn’t have one now.

  “Have you talked to my husband?” she asked.

  “Of course. He’ll be here soon.”

  “And what about my kids?”

  “I understand that they’re on their way to France,” he said.

  Abbie’s dry, dead eyes filled at the topic of her children.

  She didn’t look like a killer, he thought, even knowing how silly that thought was. He’d seen all kinds as a prosecutor. Some of the quietest, tamest people were some of the most vicious criminals. You just never knew.

  “This is everywhere, isn’t it? I mean, our identities? We’re all over the news?”

  Ingersoll nodded. “Your names are known, I’m afraid.”

  Abbie tilted her head in the direction of the door. “What are they telling you? About the evidence?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know much about that.”

  She stared at him for a long time. “Mr. Ingersoll, be the first person in here who doesn’t bullshit me.”

  It seemed out of character, the cussing. For some reason that he couldn’t pin down, he had a feeling that Abbie Elliot was a very good mother.

  He would see her on almost a daily basis now, assuming they incarcerated her somewhere close. He’d watch out for her and Serena. They were American citizens. He owed it to them. It wasn’t his job to save their hides, but he’d look out for them as best he could. His chest swelled at the thought.

  “Okay, no bullshit,” he said. “This thing is quickly spinning out of control. It’s a lynch-mob mentality. A very popular president is dead, and right or wrong, everyone seems to think that four beautiful, privileged foreigners did it. The people of France want blood. They want to bring back the death penalty just for you. The U.S. government wants to duck down and hide, because two of the suspects are American. My advice would be to get the best lawyer you can find.”

  He took a breath. Abbie’s face disappeared into her knees.

  “But Ms. Elliot, no bullshit, if there’s any way I can help you, I’ll do it.”

  She nodded her head, her face still buried between her knees. Her way of showing appreciation for his candor. She probably felt incredibly alone right now.

  As Ingersoll exited, he could hear her weeping softly.

  He wiped sweat from his face, as if Abbie Elliot’s anxiety had transferred itself to him. This was perhaps the biggest case the French had ever prosecuted, he realized.

  There was no way they were going to let these women walk free.

  BOOK TWO

  Nine Months Later: March 2011

  CHAPTER 32

  LE PROCÈS COMMENCE, blared the front page of Le Monde this morning. “The Trial Begins,” requiring no further elaboration; anyone in France who didn’t know what that meant was either comatose or a newborn. The International Herald Tribune, in its typically sedate way, informed the public that it was “Day 1 in Devereux Assassination Trial.” USA Today announced, “Trial of Monte Carlo Four Opens.” All this I knew courtesy of one of the guards at the jail in southern Paris where I spent the last two nights before my trial. They’d moved me from the prison where I was staying so that my route to the courthouse would be unknown. The French were taking the death threats seriously.

  I traveled in a blue vehicle with sirens on top, a cross between a minivan and an SUV, the
word GENDARMERIE stenciled in white on the side. I sat in the back along a bench, where I was restrained at the wrists and ankles and shackled to the bench itself. Across from me sat two armed gendarmes. Our area in the vehicle’s rear was sealed off from the driver’s cabin by a plastic shield, which had a slit that opened only for communication. There was some light back here, courtesy of the tinted, bulletproof windows.

  From what I understood, there were four separate vehicles for the four of us—each of which was taking a different route—and there were decoy vehicles as well. Whatever else the French wanted to do to us, they didn’t want us gunned down by some grief-stricken protester. They’d had enough high-profile security lapses for one decade. The heads of the entities primarily responsible for the safety of the French president, the Groupe de Sécurité de la Présidence de la République and the RAID unit—Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion—had resigned following President Devereux’s death. Apparently it was no excuse that the president hadn’t wanted his security detail, other than Luc Cousineau, to accompany him to Monte Carlo; they weren’t supposed to take no for an answer when it came to presidential security, and after his death, heads had to roll.

  The trial was at the Palais de Justice, which houses the Parisian police force and the courts, including the country’s supreme court, the Cour de Cassation. The Palais is located on the Île de la Cité, an island on the Seine that is home to the Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris as well. Next to the Palais is the Sainte-Chapelle, a chapel where Jeffrey and I, years ago, had spent an afternoon listening to a six-piece orchestra play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as daylight streamed through the stained-glass windows.

  The roads bordering the Palais de Justice were barricaded. A few news trucks had been let in but otherwise the only vehicles allowed passage were the decoys and the ones carrying the defendants. Spectators were lined up along the streets, many of them holding signs. Some of the signs were in French, some in English. Some supported us—FREE THE MONTE CARLO MISTRESSES—but most did not: JUSTICE POUR HENRI; DEATH TO THE KILLERS! The collective commotion of the crowd, which I heard through the thick windows of the vehicle, left me with the sensation of putting my ear up to the door of a rock concert.

  On the Boulevard du Palais, our vehicle passed through the magnificent wrought-iron gates into the courtyard of the Palais itself. I bent my head down to peer up through the window at the main building, where the supreme court was located—the long set of stone steps, the four majestic columns, and the words that I couldn’t make out but I knew were there, carved into the structure: LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ.

  In the courtyard, which was still open to public view, the vehicle went through an arched passageway that led into a loading area. I was taken out of the vehicle and walked through a series of empty hallways, the gendarmerie at my front and back.

  I’d made this trip often over the last nine months, but the security was much tighter this time—the barricades, the decoy cars. The threats had escalated in the last few weeks. The Palais de Justice had been emptied one day last week after a bomb threat, and since then the Sainte-Chapelle had been closed to tourists and the Palais limited either to people having business with the court or members of the public willing to undergo the screening, which rivaled that of an Israeli airport.

  Or so I’d been told. I’d been cut off from the outside world. I hadn’t spoken with, much less seen, my three friends for months, except during court hearings. I’d had only Jeffrey and my kids as visitors. I got most of my information from my attorney or the prison guards. The guard at the Paris jail for the last two nights was a chatty character named Solly, who was eager to touch any part of the biggest criminal case in modern French history. Solly had made the comment that I was the most famous criminel féminin since Marie Antoinette, which I think he intended as a compliment, but I don’t recall it turning out so well for her.

  We reached the door of the holding area. One of the gendarmes used a key. I turned to the one holding my arm, a man named Guy, whom I had come to know and who liked to practice his English with me.

  “Wish me luck,” I said.

  I moved into the holding area and a door closed behind me. I heard Guy’s response through the door.

  “Elles n’ont pas besoin de chance,” he said to one of his colleagues. “Elles ont besoin d’un miracle.”

  He didn’t think I could hear him. No matter. He wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard a hundred times already. And I couldn’t bring myself to disagree.

  They don’t need luck, he’d said. They need a miracle.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE HOLDING CELL was a nondescript anteroom where the accused awaited the start of trial, handcuffed and guarded. I was the first to arrive, for no particular reason. I didn’t know where the others had been kept the last few days. I didn’t know much about my friends at all lately.

  We’d barely spoken in nine months, the four of us. The investigating judge assigned to our case had ordered our provisional detention while the murder of the president and his bodyguard remained “under examination,” as the French put it. A special judge hearing questions of custody—le juge des libertés et la détention—had upheld the decision to keep us in custody pending the close of the investigation. All of that meant that we weren’t going anywhere until trial.

  For some of this time, the four of us were detained in separate facilities. The stated reason was our personal security, as we had become rather notorious, to put it mildly, but I always figured they wanted to keep us separated so we wouldn’t communicate with each other.

  Winnie was the next one in. She looked terrible, primarily because she looked so different. Her silky, flowing mane of hair had been replaced with a close crop that hung lifelessly at her shoulders. Her eyes were sunken. Overall there was a withered quality about her: she had lost at least ten pounds that she couldn’t afford to lose, and her normally confident, almost regal carriage had been replaced by a defeated, wincing expression and slumped shoulders. It was, to me, as heartbreaking as anything that had happened over the last nine months.

  I smiled at her, and she at me. A moment of warmth on a day that was going to be very, very cold.

  Bryah was next, and then Serena, each looking about as bad as Winnie. All of us had been run through the wringer, our lives turned upside down, our dirty laundry aired for the world to see, our families humiliated, and our futures looking very, very grim indeed. We were scared and frustrated and bewildered and exhausted. And the trial hadn’t even started yet.

  But we had each other, together in the same room. We didn’t speak because we all knew by now that it was prohibited; we’d been to enough court hearings together to know the drill. But the looks on each of our faces told me that we were still a foursome; we still loved each other.

  No small chore, that. They’d done everything in their power to turn us against each other from the first day we were detained. Serena says it was all your idea. Winnie kept a lot of secrets from you. Whoever confesses first gets the most lenient sentence. Your friends won’t be your friends for very long. The French intelligence officer Durand, and the Paris cop Rouen, had worn out the groove on those lines for four days straight.

  Once the garde à vue had ended, the case was assigned to an investigating judge, whose role was theoretically an impartial one, seeking to discover the “truth” without favor to either the prosecution or the accused. But that judge was no different from Durand and Rouen, urging us to implicate ourselves and each other from the outset. The only “truth” I could glean from his investigation was that he wanted to confirm our guilt and get his name in the paper as often as possible.

  The prosecutor, a strident, ambitious woman named Maryse Ballamont, had offered to reduce the charges if we would sign written statements implicating the others. Even my own lawyer had impressed upon me over and over again that I should not try to “shield” my friends, that we were on a sinking ship and it was every woman for herself.

&nbs
p; “Keep your chins up, mates,” I said to my friends. One of the gendarmes clucked his tongue at me and put a hand on my shoulder. But really, what were they going to do to me—keep me in prison beyond my natural lifetime?

  Don’t think like that, Abbie. I had to keep alive some small semblance of hope, some kernel of possibility that there would be a break, that everyone would figure out they had the wrong suspects and we’d walk out of here free women.

  “Temps de commencer,” said one of the gendarmes, wearing his courtroom-best powder-blue shirt and navy-blue cargo pants. He was carrying a baton and firearm on his belt. The four of us stood. I winked at Bryah, who looked as if she were about to wilt. Serena blinked back tears. Winnie lowered her head and took a deep breath.

  And then we began the march to the courtroom. Our trial was about to begin.

  CHAPTER 34

  SALLE NUMÉRO TROIS—courtroom number three—broke into a collective hiss as we entered the courtroom from the side door.

  “Meurtrières!” someone shouted.

  “Assassins!”

  “Monstres!”

  I kept my chin up, trying to maintain a sense of dignity, taking my seat in the cage of bulletproof glass and staring forward as if nothing were happening around me. The sky-blue shirts of the gendarmes were everywhere, and they had apparently decided to let the spectators get a little venom out of their systems before enforcing the rule of silence in the courtroom.

  Try as I might to remain resolute, it was impossible to ignore the spectacle; it was like trying to meditate in the midst of a tornado. One man got to his feet and charged toward us, not getting very far before being subdued by the gendarmerie. An object—a shoe—slammed against the glass cage only a few feet from where I was sitting, having been thrown from the balcony.