Cold Plague

by Daniel Kalla

  They commiserated on their respective cities’ abhorrent recent weather, and then Avril established the purpose of her visit. She passed Van Doorn the out-of-date snapshot of Yvette Pereau that the husband had lent her. The manager studied the photo for a few seconds. “This is the woman,” he finally said in his impeccable French.

  “You’re sure?”

  Van Doorn nodded.

  “But you see so many guests…”

  “Of course, Detective Avars. At the Zanbergen we pride ourselves on the personal service we offer. I try to greet every new guest myself, when possible.” His business smile faded. “But with Mme. Pereau, it was something more.”

  “What was that, Mr. Van Doorn?”

  “She seemed…” He frowned. “Exceedingly tense to me.”

  Which might fit with someone about to embark on an affair, Avril thought, slightly deflated. “And she was alone when she checked in?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was led to believe she was with a man,” Avril said. “A man who was not her husband.”

  “Ah, yes. There were one or two noise complaints in the early morning hours from neighboring rooms,” he said diplomatically. “To be honest, that…ah…revelation came as a surprise to me, considering how anxious Mme. Pereau was when she checked in.”

  “Really?” Avril said. “In my experience, adulterers are often nervous in public places. I would imagine especially so in hotel lobbies.”

  He chuckled knowingly. “Detective Avars, I’ve worked in the hotel business my whole life. To a certain extent, affairs drive our industry here in Amsterdam. I try not to judge, but I think now I can spot a tryst from across the lobby. Usually, only one person checks in. And while it is true he or she might be nervous, it is somehow different. There is guilt, to be sure—often they avoid eye contact, not wanting to be recognized—however, there is excitement and anticipation, too. Mme. Pereau acted nothing like that.”

  “You think she was afraid?”

  “Exactly so! Almost as if…” He stopped and frowned again. “As if she needed help. I asked her as much, but she insisted she was fine.”

  “Did you see Mme. Pereau after check-in?”

  “Not that I remember, no. Though I wasn’t here the morning she checked out.”

  Van Doorn turned to the plump plain-faced blonde beside him whose name tag pinned to her red blazer read KALIE. She had been typing at a computer since Avril arrived, oblivious to—and possibly not understanding—the French conversation beside her. Van Doorn showed Kalie the photo of Yvette and addressed her in Dutch. She studied the photo and then viewed the manager warily. They launched into an unexpectedly long discussion. By the end of it, the clerk’s voice had dropped to a near whisper and her face had flushed slightly.

  The manager turned back to Avril. “Kalie was here that morning, but Mme. Pereau did not check out herself. Apparently, a gentleman paid in cash for the room and charges.”

  “Oh?” Avril glanced over to Kalie, whose cheeks were still colored. “But there is more?”

  “Yes.” Van Doorn cleared his throat. “The rest is almost…gossip. I am not sure how reliable it would be.”

  Avril grinned. “I will put a star beside it in my report.”

  Van Doorn nodded, appeased. “One of our chambermaids—who is not working today—told Kalie that she inadvertently walked in on…something…in the room.”

  “Walked in on what, M. Van Doorn?”

  “Apparently, there was no do-not-disturb sign on the door. And the maid was in the middle of her late-morning cleaning in that section. It was perfectly understandable that she should enter.”

  “Of course, she was only doing her job,” Avril said, trying to cloak her impatience. “I understand. What did she see?”

  “There was a woman. Naked.” He cleared his throat. “And she was handcuffed to the bed.”

  Avril gripped the edge of the desk. “Handcuffed?”

  “That is right. And there was a very large man standing over her.”

  Her stomach knotted. “And the maid didn’t report this to anyone?” she said.

  “Oh, no, no, no!” The manager waved his hand and smiled apologetically. “You misunderstand, Detective Avars. It was clearly a…consensual act. A sexual game of some sort.”

  “I see.” Though her mental image of Yvette Pereau did not jibe with the concept of someone who dabbled in bondage, in her professional experience Avril had learned never to jump to conclusions about people’s sexual practices. Again, she felt a slight letdown that this lead was not panning out better.

  Kalie said something to Van Doorn in Dutch and pointed at the photograph. He nodded and turned back to Avril. “It is interesting, though.”

  “What is?”

  “The maid had seen Mme. Pereau on the day she checked in. She told Kalie that woman in the handcuffs was definitely not her.”

  Not Yvette! Avril thought as her grip tightened on the desk. “Where was Mme. Pereau?”

  Van Doorn turned and asked Kalie. The young clerk merely shrugged in response.

  Avril pointed to the photo. “Has Kalie seen Mme. Pereau since?”

  The manager asked in Dutch, and the clerk shook her head blankly.

  “M. Van Doorn, would you please phone the maid for me and see if I could arrange a time to speak to her myself?” Avril asked.

  “Of course,” Van Doorn said in his accommodating tone. “Excuse me a moment, while I find her number.”

  He disappeared into a back office. Avril waited, bubbling with the excitement of a fresh lead, though concerned for its implications. Questions swirled in her head. Who was the woman having sex in Pereau’s room, and where was Yvette? Were the disappearances of Yvette Pereau and Pauline Lamaire related? Could it be some kind of serial sex crime?

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the familiar tinny Chopin melody ringtone of her cell phone. She stepped away from the desk and dug the phone out of her purse. The call display read PARIS but did not provide a specific number.

  “Bonjour,” she answered.

  “Maman?”

  “Frédéric!” Avril said, warmed by the sound of her son’s voice. They had not spoken as often as she would have liked since their pre-Christmas clash in Montmagnon. “How is school, my love?”

  “Not good, Maman.”

  Something in his tone immediately launched her anxiety. “What is it?”

  “Maman, they say that you have to stop what you are doing!” he said in a ragged voice that was nothing like his usual flowing delivery.

  Her heart leaped into her throat. “Doing, Frédéric? I don’t understand.”

  “Your investigation, Maman,” he labored to say. “About those missing women. They told me to tell you to stop looking for them.”

  Avril fought off the tears and clutched the phone tighter against her head, desperate to keep her son on the line. “Frédéric, who is they?”

  “They say they will not harm me if you cooperate,” he said as if reading from a script.

  A clamp squeezed around her heart. The anguish was excruciatingly reminiscent of the moment she received the call about Antoine’s crash.

  Frédéric, my baby! Oh please, please, God, anything but this!

  Somehow she managed to maintain a calm tone. “Everything will be okay, Frédéric. Are you all right?”

  “I have to go now.”

  “Frédéric, let me speak to them!”

  “Maman, it’s the only way. Stop your investigation. Please!”

  “Anything! Just let me speak to—” Before she could get out another word, the line went dead.

  23

  Limoges, France. January 19

  For twenty minutes after leaving Michel Dieppe’s home, Elise and Noah did not exchange a word. The cloud cover was thick and the natural light was gray as dusk, but despite the snow flurries and the menacing wind gusting around them, they reached a silent understanding that they would walk back to their hotel.

  Halfway down the rue
de Consulat, Elise stopped on the sidewalk outside one of the grand buildings lining the street. Noah walked a few steps farther before slowly turning to face her. He waited for her to speak.

  “Noah, just because Benoît Gagnon and Philippe Manet happened to know each other, does that really change anything?”

  Anger pushed away Noah’s disquiet. He avoided eye contact with Elise and stared instead at the snowflakes accumulating on the sidewalk. “Sounds to me like they more than just knew each other,” he said.

  “No question.”

  “Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—any prion disease, for that matter—is not sexually transmitted.”

  “I am aware of that,” she said coolly, standing her ground. “But the two victims might have shared the same food, non?”

  “Doesn’t fit,” Noah said, measuring his words. “In almost two hundred previous human cases, there have never been any reported clusters or associations between the family and friends of victims. So why here—when we’ve only identified three victims—are two of them intimately linked?”

  She held open a palm. “Obviously this throws another…what is the expression?…wrench into the situation.”

  “I could open up a hardware store with all the wrenches I’ve collected since I came here,” he said, but there was no levity in his tone.

  “We discussed this before. Limousin has a small population. At some point, we were bound to discover associations between the people involved.”

  Noah locked eyes with her. “What is it with you, Elise?” he asked quietly.

  She shook her head. “Me?”

  “Why are you so desperate to write everything off as coincidence?”

  Elise folded her arms across her chest. “What makes you say that?”

  “Right from day one, you and everyone at the E.U. have wanted this to be just another outbreak of BSE with a few human victims as collateral damage.”

  “Why would we want that, Noah?” she said frostily. “As you have seen, this is a disaster for the European agricultural community.”

  “Maybe the alternative is even worse.”

  “What alternative?”

  Noah wasn’t sure how to put his darkest thoughts into words, so he simply shook his head and said, “I don’t know.”

  Elise raised an eyebrow. “Is it not possible that after your experience with the ARCS virus and those terrorists…”

  “Yes?”

  She uncrossed her arms. “That perhaps you are more…suspicious now?”

  “You mean paranoid?”

  “I mean what I said.”

  “Maybe I was naïve before my experience with ARCS. Maybe I am jaded now. Who knows?” He narrowed his gaze. “What I do know is that my experience tells me all is not what it appears here. It’s like this whole time we’ve been trying to wedge together a jigsaw puzzle with the wrong pieces.”

  Elise clasped her hands in front of her. “You say that, and yet we have heard that the recent victims looked exactly like previous vCJD sufferers on autopsy. And we’ve found a central cattle supplier—proven to produce dangerous and illegal feeds—as the source for all known infected cows.”

  Noah leaned closer to her. “Yes. But we also have a disease that spreads with the speed of a common cold, and kills as fast as any virus. Nothing like a prion.”

  “I thought that microorganisms constantly mutate.”

  “Mutate, of course. Subtle changes that occur over time. They don’t become new diseases overnight!” He numbered the points with his gloved fingers. “Now we have victims who are sexually involved. There are supposedly infected cows coming from a farm that has never been known to have a symptomatic case. People touched by the investigation into this prion have been dying in fires and car accidents. And we have an informant who tracks me to my hotel in the middle of the night, and then spies on me at a train station.”

  “You don’t know that he was there to spy on you.”

  “Just another coincidence, right?” Noah snapped. “Like the fact that someone searched my room in Limoges as soon as we left for Paris.”

  Elise’s mouth fell open. “What are you talking about?”

  “Somebody broke into my hotel room and combed through my notes and research papers.”

  She closed her mouth, but her eyes were still wide with surprise. “How do you know? Is anything missing?”

  “No, but I had a marker in my notebook. It was moved.”

  “Could that not have been an accident? Maybe when the hotel maid was cleaning—”

  “No!” Noah was so frustrated by her reflex rationalization that he didn’t bother explaining how secure the clip was. He fought off a scowl and calmed his voice. “It is strange, though.”

  Elise pursed her lips and viewed him warily. “What is?”

  He stared at her for a long moment. “That someone seems to know where I am at all times.”

  Her eyes darkened. “Are you implying that I might have told someone?”

  “What I am saying is that very few people know my schedule in France.”

  Their breath crystallized between them for several seconds. “Except me?” she whispered hoarsely.

  “And Javier,” Noah said. “He seems very well apprised of what we are up to.”

  “He is my boss!”

  “Is that all he is?”

  Elise glared at him, fire in her eyes. “You have no right,” she said between gritted teeth. Tears suddenly welled up and spilled down her cheeks. She spun away from him and stormed off.

  Noah watched her stride away. His anger suddenly dissolved, replaced by guilt. With shoes sliding on the slick sidewalk, he broke into a jog after her. He reached her at the street corner, where she stood waiting for a break in the traffic. He laid a hand on her shoulder, but she shook it away without turning. “Leave me alone, Noah,” she said softly.

  His hand fell off her shoulder. “I am sorry, Elise. I was out of line.”

  The traffic cleared momentarily, and Elise hurried across the street without acknowledging the apology.

  Noah watched her go. He stood, immobilized, in the same spot as the pedestrian light cycled through two more color changes. Feeling his phone vibrate in his pocket, he dug it out and brought it to his ear. “Noah Haldane,” he barked.

  “Catch you at a bad time?” the familiar voice said.

  “Gwen?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, amused. “You called me, remember?”

  “I did, didn’t I?” he said, pleased to hear her voice.

  “You said you wanted to run something by me.” Her tone grew more serious. “What’s going on over there, Noah?”

  “I’m not sure.” He moved away from two other pedestrians waiting for the light and stood off the edge of the sidewalk. “I think the situation is more involved than it first appeared.” He gave her a quick update of the recent events, including the break-in.

  “Shouldn’t you go to the police?” Gwen asked.

  “With what? A farmer who ran from me, and a bookmark that was moved in my hotel room?”

  “C’mon, Noah,” she said. “You are obviously being shadowed.”

  Shadowed. He bristled at the word. “If I am, then it’s probably the E.U. or the French government keeping tabs on me.”

  “Why bother if you’re already with one of their envoys?”

  “Maybe they don’t trust Elise?” But he did not believe his own explanation.

  “Hmmm. And would a government send a grizzled farmer to tip you off about the cattle supplier, and then have him wait for you outside a train station?”

  “No.” With wind biting at his neck, he turned up the collar of his jacket.

  “Other factors are at play here,” she said. “Noah, you need to be careful, you understand?”

  “We’re talking about me, Gwen.” He summoned a chuckle. “Remember? I’m the one who runs out of collapsing buildings ahead of the women and children.”

  “The way I remembe
r it, you saved me from that building.”

  “Yeah, but you were hit on the head. I could have told you anything afterwards.”

  “True,” she said with a light laugh. “Maybe chivalry is dead, after all.”

  “Long dead,” Noah said. “Enough about me and France. What’s new with you?”

  “Usual sky-is-falling kind of stuff that fuels this town.” She told him of the latest bioterrorism threats worrying the authorities in Washington.

  As Noah listened to Gwen’s matter-of-fact description of recent threats—anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, and botulism being just a few—he was reminded again of the momentous responsibility that she shouldered with such poise. “I guess a few mad cows and an angry farmer don’t seem so bad compared to your load,” he said.

  “Noah, there are people here who can cover for me for a couple of days. Why don’t I come over there and see if I can lend a hand?”

  Feeling as isolated as he ever had, Noah longed to have her by his side. He pictured her thoughtful eyes and captivating smile. He had a flashback of Gwen walking naked in that effortlessly sexy way toward him where he lay in the bed. But he forced himself to shake off the mental image. “Gwen, France is outside of the Bug Czar’s jurisdiction. Your crown wouldn’t shine as brightly here.”

  “Crown?” she scoffed. “I don’t even get a decent dental plan with this job.”

  Noah laughed, hiding his disappointment that she didn’t put up more of a fight.

  “You keep me in the loop, Noah Haldane.”

  “Dead center, I promise.”

  “And Noah…” Her voice dropped. “Be careful, all right?”

  As he hung up, he glanced at the call display that showed Gwen’s cell number. The sight reminded him of the two missed calls from the same local phone number two evenings earlier. He tried the number again, but the line rang unanswered, just as before. As he was hanging up, an idea hit him.

  He hurried across the street and continued toward the hotel. Three blocks later, he walked past the cybercafé he had spotted before. He ordered an espresso and sat down at an empty terminal. Struggling with his French spelling, he had a few missteps before he found his way to the website that provided reverse-phone-number searches. He typed in the number from his cell’s display of missed calls. The system paused as the hourglass icon hovered on the screen, and then it coughed up a name: Dr. Louis Charron.