Summertime All the Cats Are Bored

by Philippe Georget

  Lefèvre threw up his hands.

  “There’s no way I can say, but it can legitimately be feared that he might. Especially since he failed with Anneke . . . ”

  Castello took his lower lip between his teeth.

  “Damn, I hadn’t seen things like that. I’m completely at sea in that case. So we’re still at the same point?”

  “In a way, yes,” Lefèvre replied. “We’ve clarified one point—an important one,” he said, looking at Sebag“—but fundamentally nothing has changed. On June 26, a man kidnapped Ingrid Raven and killed José Lopez. Two weeks later, he tried to do it again with Anneke Verbrucke.”

  In addition to disappointing him, Lefèvre’s analysis plunged Castello into perplexity. After a moment of reflection he turned to Sebag.

  “Is that also your assessment, Gilles?”

  “There is a risk,” he said evasively. “Nonetheless . . . ”

  “What?” Castello said, full of hope.

  “Do you have a new theory?” Lefèvre asked apprehensively.

  “Not a new one, no,” Sebag replied.

  He said nothing more. The two superintendents glanced at each other in surprise.

  “And would you agree to present it to us?” Castello questioned.

  “It’s more a matter of reminding you of it.”

  “Let’s not play on words, go ahead.”

  “If you insist . . . ”

  “Yes, I insist, Sebag, get on with it.”

  “It’s that . . . ”

  Castello scratched the end of his nose and snorted.

  “Come on, Gilles, what game are you playing? Stop all this childishness.”

  “That’s fair,” Lefèvre interceded.

  “If you get involved here, too, we’ll never get anywhere. I’m wondering if I wouldn’t prefer the earlier situation. Divide and rule, that’s as old as the world but it can sometimes be good. Go ahead, Gilles.”

  “As you wish, superintendent. But this may take a while!”

  “We’ll be patient.”

  “Okay. In fact, I think the kidnapper has always had just one goal: to kidnap Ingrid Raven. All the rest is just a smokescreen.”

  “What about the attack on Anneke?” Lefèvre asked.

  “Same thing. A smokescreen!”

  “But you just said that there was still a danger of another kidnapping,” Petit retorted.

  “I didn’t say there was a risk of a kidnapping . . . ”

  Castello slammed the flat of his hand on his desk.

  “Now listen, Gilles, you’re out of your mind, we all heard you say that.”

  Sebag looked at his interlocutors, one after the other, then smiled.

  “I think in fact there is still a risk of an attempted kidnapping.

  Bernard Petit opened his mouth, but was so astonished he couldn’t close it again. Lefèvre turned to Castello.

  “It’s my turn to be completely mystified.”

  “Explain yourself, Gilles,” the superintendent begged.

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Then do it more clearly, please.”

  “I’ll try . . . As we now know, Josetta Braun was killed by Robert Vernier in a fit of madness and our kidnapper has nothing to do with this murder. Are we agreed about that?”

  “Completely,” Castello assured him.

  “Good. However, the other day, during his little treasure hunt, the kidnapper led us—after a stop on the Avenue Poincaré—to the Oleanders campground in Argelès. Why? To make us think that he was also responsible for that murder.”

  “You did talk about a smokescreen,” Castello remembered.

  “In fact, I suggested the other day that the kidnapper was taking pleasure in confusing us and that he was spreading smokescreens all around us. Outlandish demands, the excessive amount of the ransom . . . ”

  “You also claimed that the attempted kidnapping of Anneke was a smokescreen,” Lefèvre slipped in.

  Sebag hesitated. He would have preferred to take up that point later on. But since he was being pressed on it—too bad!

  “And I still maintain that.”

  Sebag’s assertion cast a chill on the room. The superintendents stared at the inspector, searching his face for signs of a sudden attack of insanity.

  “Come now, Gilles, that’s absurd,” Castello spluttered. “It has now been proven that Ingrid’s kidnapper is the same as Anneke’s attacker. We aren’t going to go back over all that, after all . . . ”

  “I have no intention of contesting what has been proven, no. I was mistaken on that point, but it’s only a detail.”

  “Detail, detail,” Lefèvre protested. “You minimize things very easily when it suits your purpose.”

  “I thought the two cases were unrelated, and I was wrong; I recognize that. That mistake bothered me a great deal, but on reflection, it doesn’t affect my hypothesis. On the contrary, it supports it.”

  “When is this going to start getting clearer?” Petit complained.

  Sebag smiled.

  “The other day, I said that in order to confuse us, the kidnapper had claimed two crimes he hadn’t committed, the murder of Josetta and the attack on Anneke. Today, I’m still persuaded that the kidnapper’s goal is to sow confusion in our minds, but I can be more precise: to confuse us, he tried to claim the murder for himself, and in Anneke’s case he committed, not an attempted kidnapping, but a simulated kidnapping.”

  The three superintendents frowned simultaneously.

  “Do you mean to say that he never intended to kidnap Anneke?” Castello asked.

  Sebag nodded.

  “That’s a daring theory,” Castello commented.

  “I’d call it over-complicated,” Petit protested.

  “Can you prove what you’re saying?” Lefèvre asked.

  “Unfortunately, no. But this theory has the advantage of explaining the odd things we all noticed in the Avenue Poincaré attack.”

  “Can you remind us of them?” Petit implored him.

  “There were actually two things. To understand, we have to go back to the facts. On July 4, Anneke Verbrucke spends the evening with friends in a bar in Perpignan. Her attacker is also there. He’s watching her. Anneke leaves around three A.M. and heads for home alone. The man follows her. On the Avenue Poincaré, he slams her up against a car and puts a knife to her throat. Then, strangely enough, nothing happens. What exactly does he want? To steal from her? To rape her? To kidnap her? At the time, Anneke asked this question, and she still doesn’t know the answer. The man doesn’t do anything, doesn’t start to do anything, he seems to be waiting. How long? It’s hard to say. Then Anneke sees the headlights of a car coming down the avenue, and that’s the moment the individual chooses to try to make her get into the car he’s pinned her against. He relaxes his pressure, she fights with him, manages to push him away, and takes off. End of the episode and the first question: how could the attacker hope to make Anneke get into a car that wasn’t his and whose keys he didn’t have?”

  “It wasn’t his car?” Petit asked.

  “No. Reread the file, and you’ll see that the car belongs to Marc Savoy, a sales rep with no record who lives nearby. The car was parked in the neighborhood as it is every night. It was locked and has an excellent alarm system.”

  “That is strange, in fact,” Petit conceded.

  “And what do you conclude from that?” Castello asked.

  “Well, precisely that our man never intended to kidnap Anneke Verbrucke. At the moment that seemed to him most favorable, he pinned the young woman against the first car available and waited.”

  “Waited for what?”

  “That is the second question I asked myself. The answer now seems to me obvious: he waited until a car came along. That’s all. And what seemed to be clumsy blun
der turns out to be a very clever trick.”

  Sebag didn’t see any lights go on in the superintendents’ eyes. He was going to have to be more explicit.

  “He made sure the young woman had seen the car coming and at that moment, on the pretext of opening the car door, he relaxed his pressure on her. Reassured by the car that was approaching, Anneke took advantage of this to get away from him and run toward her rescuers.”

  A deep silence followed Sebag’s demonstration. The inspector gave his interlocutors time to think. The superintendents were looking for a flaw in his reasoning. Apparently the couldn’t find one. Sebag’s throat was dry.

  Bernard Petit was the first to speak.

  “All that seems coherent, but nonetheless it’s hard to accept.”

  “It‘s more like a crime novel,” Lefèvre said, half in jest, half in earnest. “Still, we can’t exclude the possibility that the kidnapper is a fan of thrillers. In fact, I have to admit that I find your theory seductive, but all the same I have an objection to make to it, Sebag: how could the kidnapper be sure that we would make the connection between the three cases?”

  He’d been expecting that question. He’d thought about it while he was driving back to Perpignan and had found an answer only when he saw the front pages of the daily newspapers.

  “He wasn’t sure, and that’s why he helped us. Through the intermediary of the press.”

  “The first article in Le Parisien, of course!” Castello exclaimed. “Do you mean to say that he’s the one who informed the paper’s correspondent the other day?”

  “I think so. And he’s probably also the source for the article that appeared this morning.”

  Sebag’s answer dissipated Lefèvre’s last doubts.

  “The dirty bastard has really led us in a merry dance. I hope we’re going to catch him . . . ”

  Castello looked at his watch.

  “So what do I tell the reporters?”

  Sebag sat back in his chair. In his view, that question did not fall into his domain.

  “I think we should limit it to the murder in Argelès,” Lefèvre proposed. “That case has been solved, and you can give all the details the reporters want. And you absolutely refuse to answer questions about the other two cases. You can say that they’re under investigation and that you don’t wish to say anything about them at this time.”

  “What if they ask me if the other two cases are connected?”

  “You simply don’t answer. After the revelations regarding Argelès, the reporters will have to be more careful. They’ll no longer dare to talk about serial crimes.”

  “The reporter from Le Parisien is going to get bawled out by his colleagues,” Petit commented.

  “He should have done a better job of checking his sources,” Castello replied. “I’m planning to have a private talk with him after the press conference. I’ve got a few questions to ask him.”

  Lefèvre agreed:

  “If he tells you that someone suggested this idea of serial crimes, that will confirm Sebag’s theory.”

  “And if he knows who that someone is, that will give us a new lead,” Petit said hopefully.

  “Let’s not count on that too much,” Lefèvre said.

  Castello rose, signaling that it was time to go. He went up to Sebag and put his hand on his shoulder.

  “You must be tired, Gilles, huh?”

  “A little, yes.”

  “Vernier’s death didn’t affect you too much?”

  “For his family, it’s probably a good thing.”

  “I’m inclined to share that view but it mustn’t be repeated. Go and rest up, Gilles, you need it. But stay close to your cell phone. At least we’ve learned something about the kidnapper. He has good judgment: in you, he chose a tough adversary.”

  After leaving headquarters, Sebag did some errands. He bought some roasted chicken thighs, tomatoes, rice, pasta, a melon, and peaches. Enough to make himself a few bachelor’s feasts. When he got home he found in the mailbox a postcard from Claire that had been sent from Bonifacio the preceding week. The news was out of date but the thoughtfulness pleased him. In fact it was this time lag that made the card valuable, as if the words had mellowed in the space of a few days. The e-mails were precious because they provided almost instantaneous reports, but they would never have that slightly aged flavor. On a postcard, the words had been weighed while staring into space and chewing on the pen. They were laid down with care and measure, since there was limited room. The cards were redolent of coffee and fruit juice drunk on a terrace, the perfume of flowers in the shade of a public park. The e-mails smelled of a dirty keyboard and a poorly ventilated office.

  Claire’s card contained its share of banalities and loving words. These could even be synonymous. But three words moved Sebag. They had been slipped in after the signature.

  “I miss you.”

  He placed the card in a prominent place on the living room bookcase. He ran a finger over the bookcase. It was dusty. He’d have to clean the house. He realized that he hadn’t done anything in the house since Claire left. Usually, he didn’t mind doing housework and often went at household chores with more zeal than his wife did. An ideal father and husband. It was as if the role had been tailor-made for him. It fit him well and he’d constantly sought to live up to it. But the cloth had gotten old and the seams were coming out everywhere.

  He drove away his negative thoughts and settled comfortably into the chaise longue in the yard. So his superiors had authorized him to take another nap during his work day. The second in three days. The first one had been a punishment; this one was a reward. He fell asleep meditating on the precarious nature of honors in the French police force.

  In the late afternoon he went back to headquarters, booted up his computer, and saw that his colleagues hadn’t been loafing.

  They’d started over from the beginning, the teams cross-testing for greater security: what escaped one of them might attract the attention of others. Lambert and Llach had finished the list of “BWs,” including in their search all the Wangs and Wongs in the Vietnamese community who had been previously set aside. Molina had interviewed Anneke Verbrucke, Ménard had met with Sylvie Lopez and the Revel couple, while Raynaud and Moreno had taken on Gérard Barrère and Fabrice Gasch.

  For his part, Lefèvre had listened over and over to the recordings of the kidnapper’s telephone calls. He’d gotten everything possible out of them, but it still wasn’t much. Despite the caller’s whispering, he concluded that the man had a deep, toneless voice. His breathing was strong and slow, clearly audible: that could indicate that he was greatly overweight, but contradicted the physical description of the suspect. Lefèvre assumed that the heavy breathing must reflect an effort to control a strong internal tension. The voice had no trace of an accent, but the slow delivery might have been intended to conceal it.

  The police had done a great deal of work. But they hadn’t found anything new.

  They’d made hardly any progress.

  Sebag had searched his memory all afternoon. But not a single face or name had risen to the surface. He couldn’t imagine who the kidnapper might be. And still less why he had chosen him as his chief contact.

  It was almost 8:00 P.M. when Castello came into his office.

  “I knew I’d find you here. Once you’ve started, it’s impossible to stop you.”

  The superintendent sat down in Molina’s chair.

  “It’s too bad that sometimes it’s so hard to get you to start working.”

  Sebag tried to protest but his boss stopped him.

  “I’m not here to criticize you. This is not the time. I know you’ll give me other opportunities for that . . . ”

  He pushed aside the papers on Molina’s desk so he could rest his elbows on it.

  “I wanted to tell you about my conversation with the reporte
r from Le Parisien. He had an appointment in the late morning and I had to dangle an exclusive in front of him to get him to agree to come back to headquarters this afternoon. So far as the exclusive is concerned, he got it.”

  Mechanically, he lifted the sheets of paper he’d piled up on the side of the desk and abstained from any remark on seeing an issue of a sports magazine.

  “All that to tell you that you were right,” he continued. “The reporter didn’t want to admit it right away, but he was in fact contacted. He received an anonymous letter, typed and mailed from a post office in Perpignan. At first, he claimed to have thrown the letter away, but then he acknowledged that he’d kept it and argued that it was a matter of respecting the privacy of his sources. In short, he doesn’t want to give it to us.”

  “That doesn’t matter. There won’t be a clue in that letter any more than in the others.”

  “That’s what we thought. However, he was willing to look at several fonts that we showed him, and he definitely recognized the one used for the letters making claims.”

  “That amounts to a signature.”

  “We’re in agreement about that.”

  “I think this validates my theory, doesn’t it?”

  “Looks like it. I have to offer you, for the second time today, my warmest congratulations. I hope you’ll develop a taste for that sort of thing. We still have work to do to find Ingrid.”

  CHAPTER 29

  How long had she been pacing around her cage? Twenty minutes, an hour, two days, a month? She was losing all sense of time. Only meals and showers punctuated her solitude. Night and day were the same: endless hours that she usually spent lying on her old, damp mattress, hovering between consciousness and somnolence.

  The fear and boredom had made her bulimic. Everything her jailer brought her to eat she wolfed down without ever leaving even a crumb. Thoughtfully, he increased the portions but could never satiate her. She would have eaten forever. And without hunger. She thought she must have gained at least six or seven pounds. She felt plump.

  Plump like a sow being fattened up for slaughter.

  She didn’t need a mirror or a scale to see what was happening. The rolls of fat on her belly provided the best evidence. She was familiar with these little rings around her waist: they returned from time to time. Every time she had an exam at school or was depressed about her love life.