Richard knew Yves was screwing his wife. So he raped and killed Yves’ wife. When that wasn’t enough, he killed Yves, too.
Maggie brought to mind an image of Richard’s plain, open face. His eyes were trusting and kind. His homely, unassuming face a mask covering the calculated expressions and lies.
He’s the one with motive, the one no one bothered to query for an alibi, the one with easy access and opportunity.
Maggie’s hands gripped the steering wheel. She eyed her dead cellphone.
Yves was killed with a knife at the hospital. A surgeon’s knife.
Pijou was attacked in her apartment by someone she knew.
The nurse from Yves’ hospital killed earlier this summer…
He was killing the women that Yves had desired.
Suddenly, she heard the noise again.
This time, it sounded not so much like a pinging or rattling sound, but a creak or groan as if metal were pushing against leather. This time, Maggie did not reach for the radio knob or curse the fact that the car would be heading for the shop. Coupled with an escalating terror as she drove to the vacant driveway of her home, she had a logical explanation for the noise.
Someone was in the car with her.
Chapter Fourteen
1
Maggie’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. Domaine St-Buvard was less than a hundred yards away. Her mind whirled in a vortex of noise and confusion and she tried hard to hear her own thoughts.
Stop the car now! Jump out and run for it! He’s hiding, he’s not looking, he won’t expect it. Someone will see the car abandoned in the middle of the--! No one comes down this road at this time of night. My God, he’s insane to do this. He’s insane to do this--
Maggie snapped off the car’s headlights and ignition and jerked the driver’s side door open. Her fingers felt slippery and clumsy. She saw herself step back in slow motion from the scene--as if she’d already died and was having an out-of-body experience. It felt like hours as she watched herself push out of the driver’s seat and out the car door. Instantly, she was brought back to real-time when she stumbled on the large gravel rocks on the drive and lost a velvet clog. Behind her, she could hear him struggling with the car door. Kicking the other shoe off, she ran for the house, praying, praying, praying.
The mas stood, the only light in a field of moonless dark, beckoning her, urging her. Laurent was not home. Only a little dog and many dark rooms. And yet she ran to the light as if its glow alone could save her. As if its shuttered windows, like half-lidded eyes, held some secret hope of refuge. She ran home. To the place she would be safe.
She heard a terrible sound as she ran, as she neared the house. A sound of her own terror leaking out of her in terrible groans and gasps. She was nearly on the front verandah, its welcoming overhead light one of Laurent’s loving signatures, when she saw her reflection in the etched glass double doors. And when she also saw in the beautiful mas doors through the alpen-glow of the house light how close he was behind her, she knew there was no way.
She wrapped her hand around the front door handle and felt its hardness, its resistance. Terror fluttered up into her throat. She could hear his labored breathing, his grunts as he barreled up the steps after her. An image jumped into her mind of an evening earlier in the fall when she and Laurent had sat here in wicker chairs sipping pastis and watching the stars fall in a clear Provençal night, at the same time she felt the terrible strength of Richard’s cold hands on her neck.
2
The rain had begun by the time Bedard picked up his jacket and left the hospital. A hesitant halo of fog, it hovered over the parking lot misting raindrops like a malfunctioning automated car wash. Bedard threw his jacket in the backseat of his car and surveyed the nearly empty parking lot. He’d left two men to protect the crime scene and sent everyone else on their way, either back to the lab with their goodies, or home. He glanced at his watch. It was too late for Nicole. She’d have been asleep hours by now. He drove slowly back to his apartment, watching the building rain force his fellow motorists into more careful habits.
Maggie had been right, of course. The police work had not been good. His men had missed much. He, himself, had not ordered important tests, or insisted on certain samples being collected. It was just a job. It was just someone else’s daughter being carried away on a stretcher. Someone else’s grief and pain. Someone else’s need and agony. He tapped a finger against the steering wheel. As once it had been his own.
I’m in the wrong business, he told himself not for the first time.
I don’t care enough. I care too much.
He drove to the parking lot of his apartment building and turned off the car. He looked up at the fourth floor window of his apartment. The light was on. Nicole’s sitter, Naomi, was probably watching “ER” or some other American TV show. The television faces showing American intensity and openness, the voices lilting in comforting, veiled French. Bedard smiled, thinking of Maggie. Interesting how the words are the same, he thought. But the interpretation is oh, so different.
A car honked its horn as it sped by and Bedard doused his headlights. Does it make the women any less dead? he wondered. Or their terror any less? To find any of these monsters, in Arles or Chicago, Illinois, one needed to study their crimes, imagine their lives, picture their habits. Bedard lit a cigarette. One needed to crawl into their nasty, spume-coated heads and live there. Bedard remembered a stupid song from the early seventies: “To Know, Know, Know You is to Love, Love, Love You.” A criminal psychologist had come out a few years later with a study that confirmed that even when the object of one’s study was revolting and despicable--hardened criminals and serial killers, for example-- those whose job it was to study and understand them, often came, as a result of their intense focus, to care for and even like their subjects. Bedard’s stomach flopped painfully.
To unearth the clues, and then to read them well enough to follow them to where they led, one needed to come face-to-face with evil. That was his job. That was his nine-to-five. And that, Bedard thought as his eyes moved to his motherless daughter’s darkened bedroom window, was a place I never want to go again.
His car phone rang and he let it ring until he’d stubbed out his cigarette.
“Oui?” he said into the handset.
“We’ve found something,” his sergeant said mechanically.
Bedard’s gaze travelled back to his daughter’s window.
“Yes?” he said.
“You must come now.”
3
Laurent stubbed out his cigarette and, without obvious movement, motioned for the waiter and the bill.
Jean-Luc frowned.
“Surely, you are not leaving?” he said.
Laurent shrugged.
“I am tired,” he said.
“But the new potager,” the old man insisted. “We haven't discussed how you would replant it.”
Laurent shook his head.
“Already I have asked too much advice, taken too much time from you,” Laurent said, accepting the bill from the waiter of Le Canard. “I will design and build my own kitchen garden.”
“Non, non,” Jean-Luc put his rough, weather-battered hand on Laurent's larger one. “I want to do this for you, Laurent,” he said. “It is for me.”
“The debt is paid, Jean-Luc,” Laurent said firmly. His voice was abrupt but his eyes were kind.
“For me, never,” Jean-Luc said. “I want to do it. I must do it. Only I can plan such a masterful potager for you. You have it facing the east sun. The cabbages are buried under the sunflowers. Your wife will plant her Azaleas amongst the rose--” Jean-Luc looked up quickly at Laurent but Laurent waved away the man's guilty look.
“Maggie does not hate you, old friend,” he said, and then paused. “And I would be glad of your help. Thank you.” Laurent signaled to the waiter to bring a menu and two more pastis while Jean-Luc began to draw on the café napkin the tidy triangles and rectangles of the new po
tager.
4
Only this morning, she had held that creamer in her hands. Secure and comfortable in her own kitchen, in her own house. Laughing with Laurent over something, she couldn't quite remember what.
Now she stared at the creamer. The same creamer, no doubt filled with the same milk from her morning breakfast. Only now, nothing else was the same. Her life, what she had left of it, certainly wasn't.
Richard sat next to her on the sofa. He held a large hunting knife in one hand and rubbed the edge mindlessly with his thumb as he spoke. Maggie cradled her dog on her lap, staring alternately at the little creamer and the big knife.
“I am sorry to have startled you,” Richard said, reaching over to tousle the ears of Petit-Four. “He's certainly the little protector, isn't he? If he and I become friends, you see,” he explained to Maggie, “then I will not be needing to kill him after I kill you. I like dogs.”
Maggie felt her lunch edging up into her throat and she willed herself not to be sick. She willed herself not to do anything that might push Richard into any kind of action. A part of her brain found a sliver of hope in the idea that if she did nothing, perhaps he would do nothing. She let him talk.
“I killed Brigitte because husband was screwing my wife. You know about all that, yes?”
Why didn't you just kill Yves? Maggie forced her lips in a tight, silent line.
“And I guess I thought that would help,” he said tiredly. “I did punish her before I killed her…”
Maggie fought to keep her face expressionless.
“And the other nurse…the one that Yves had been with…why are you not talking? You talk so much normally. Do you find all this so boring?”
Maggie shook her head, trying not to stare at the knife.
“Well, you are not speaking.”
Maggie licked her lips.
“I am afraid,” she said.
Richard nodded with satisfaction.
“So were the others,” he said. “That is my only regret. I had to take Yves, how you say? by surprise. I did not see his fear. Ironic, no? The very one I was doing it for?”
Richard stood and stretched out his back.
“I never have had such luxury of time before,” he said. “I think I may be…what do you think?...a little creative tonight?”
Maggie felt the words push past her lips before she could stop them:
“My husband will be home any min--”
Richard brought his face close to hers and screamed: “A lie! A fucking lie and you, a liar like each one of them! I heard you talking on the phone at the hospital, you stupid, lying bitch! No one is coming tonight. You. Are. Mine!”
Maggie clutched the dog tightly, the hope draining from her as stared into Richard's terrible face, the face of the thing that was going to end her life, make her mother grieve, make Laurent rage and weep, and being quiet wasn't going to change or help a damn thing. She pulled her face back from his and could see, again, the sweet little Limoge creamer sitting on the dining room table that she and Laurent had bought together in a Paris flea market. It didn't matter what she did now. She could throw up, cry, beg or attack him physically. It was all going to happen as it had happened before. To Brigitte, to Pijou, to that poor nurse.
Richard straightened up again. He smiled at her as if he could read her thoughts.
“After you,” he said, scratching his head as if mulling over a logical problem, “I will kill the other American woman, and Marie, of course, and then Madeleine. And do you know why I will be able to do all this?”
Maggie spoke dully: “Because the police are so stupid?”
Richard looked at her as if at a dim, but surprising, pupil.
“Why, yes,” he said. “I suppose they are rather stupid.”
“And of course, you are so fucking brilliant.”
Richard flicked the edge of the knife hard, drawing his own blood across its blade.
“Perhaps I will not indulge in conversation next time,” he said, thoughtfully.
“You mean the next time you try to kill someone,” Maggie said.
Richard laughed.
“Oh, mon chou!” he said. “There will be no attempt. I will not 'try' to kill you. Oh, you are such the little Americaine, n'est-ce pas? You think you have a chance? That you may…outfox me?” He genuinely laughed.
Maggie's thoughts crisscrossed inside her brain. She was going to die. Laurent had not done the breakfast dishes. She had not allowed Petit-Four to relieve herself and the dog was fidgeting. Except for Yves, Richard hadn't killed the others with a knife. She still had her coat on. She was hungry. She was going to die. Maybe Bedard would call--maybe Grace would drop by--maybe Richard would fall down dead of a heart attack--
“I have to walk the dog,” she said, licking her dry lips.
Richard held the knife to the poodle's small head.
“I can save both of us the bother of ever having to walk the dog,” he said pleasantly.
Maggie resisted the urge to clutch the dog into her coat, a move she was sure would promote its immediate destruction.
“I thought you liked dogs,” she said.
“You're right. I do,” he said. He took the dog from Maggie's hands, walked to the garden door and set her outside. He returned and motioned Maggie to stand. “I don't imagine she will be going for the sheriff, eh? Like your Lassie or Rin Tin-Tin?” He giggled expansively over his American trivia knowledge.
Maggie stood slowly. Her hands were wet with perspiration and she wiped them against her coat.
“Remove the coat,” Richard said, wagging the knife at her.
Maggie unbuttoned her coat and slipped out of it.
“Put it on the couch,” he said.
She did so, feeling as nearly naked in her skirt and sweater as if she had just arisen from a bath. He handed her a black marker he had taken from his jacket pocket.
“Usually I do this part myself,” he said.
She took the marker.
“Draw a large X across your face,” he said.
“An X,” Maggie said, numbly.
“Very simple. Not hard to do.”
She thought, for one mad moment, of telling him to go ahead and kill her but the words wouldn't come.
“Come on,” Richard said. “Shall I do it, after all?”
Maggie put the pen to her forehead and forced herself to draw the nib downward across her nose and cheeks. Her stomach lurched and she thought she might vomit. When she finished, she dropped the market to the couch. He scooped it up and put it in his pocket.
“Mustn't leave les cadeaux for the police, eh?” He grinned and then lazily waved his knife at her. “In the kitchen. I'm hungry.”
Maggie's mind, jumbled one second with conflicting images and thoughts and frozen the next with fear and disbelief, seemed to suddenly converge into one searing, blazing light. The confusion of thoughts fell to the wayside with the utterance of those three words: into the kitchen.
She moved slowly, afraid to let him know by any movement or involuntary facial muscle that she had found a glimmer of hope and direction amongst the terror.
She was not going to be slain where she sat on the sofa amongst her Egyptian pillows and Pashmina throws. She was to be given a glimpse of an opportunity.
And if she worked it right, it would be enough.
The Glock was in the kitchen.
5
Bedard frowned at the paper bag sitting on his desk.
“Where did you find it?” he asked.
The sergeant stood across from him and chewed a dirty fingernail.
“Housekeeping found it, sir,” he said.
“I didn't ask you who found it, Sergeant,” Bedard replied.
He should be happy. He didn't feel happy, but really, he must be. It was, after all, the murder weapon.
“In the laundry, sir,” the sergeant answered. “He didn't even bother to wipe it clean. We sent the blood samples to the lab--”
“They will match up,
” Bedard said. “Perhaps the man's ego will be such that he did not bother to wipe his prints, either. Finally, we have the bastard.”
“Well,” the sergeant shifted from foot to food. “Perhaps it is not unusual to find a bloody scalpel in a hospital. Sir.”
Bedard looked up at the sergeant for the first time since he entered the room. The man actually cared about looking incompetent, Bedard realized with a surprise. He was trying to cover for himself.
“Sergeant,” Bedard said, not unkindly. “Are you a complete fucking moron or do you honestly believe that surgeons traditionally dispose of their operating equipment by tossing them into the hospital laundry after use?”
“I am not aware of how the knife got there,” the sergeant replied, his face shiny and red.
“I know you're not,” Bedard said, rubbing his tired eyes with his hand and wondering why recovery of the murder weapon did not delight him. “That will be all, Sergeant. Good work.” He squeezed the last two words out like trapped air from a balloon. The sergeant turned to leave and then stopped at the door.
“Oh, there was one more thing, sir,” he said, his face vibrant from his blushes.
6
She held the baguette on the chopping board and carefully sliced off four large pieces of bread with the serrated bread knife. Richard stood by her side and held his large butcher knife to her chin.
“Your hands tremble,” he said to her. “Mind you don't cut yourself.” He giggled.
Maggie put the bread knife down.
“What do you want on your sandwich?” she asked.
“What do you have?”
Maggie moved to the refrigerator. Her eyes darted to the space between the refrigerator and the counter where she had seen the gun before and prayed that Laurent had not removed it to yet another hiding place or, God forbid, gotten rid of it altogether. She pulled open the refrigerator door and drew out a large chunk of cheese and some shaved ham.
“Pickles would be good, too,” Richard said from behind her.
Her hands shook as she pulled a jar of gherkins from the refrigerator and set the items down on the counter.
The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4 Page 83
