by Cara Black
“And you have no alibi, Mademoiselle,” he repeated.
“Say that after you’ve checked the Monday Milan flight manifests for Madame Albret, Inspector.”
“Dealing with you, as Commissaire Morbier told me, makes herding feral cats look easy,” Melac said.
Great help, Morbier! But she bit her tongue. Things were stacked against her.
“Going to nail my shoes to the floor, Melac?” she asked. “Or may I go?”
Melac tented his fingers. His expression was shuttered. Then he gestured to the office door. “For now.”
She stuck her hands in her pockets, so Melac wouldn’t see them shaking, and strode out of his office.
Tuesday Afternoon
RENÉ HAD NO enemies. Who would shoot him? Or implicate her?
She had to start at the office. Go through their clients’ files, their work calendar, René’s daily agenda, his address book.
This woman dressed like her, knew where she lived, as well as the address of her office. She’d shot René and framed her. Calculated, and chilling.
Leaves crackled under her feet as she headed toward Pont Neuf. Sirens whined. The smell of oil from a barge, chugging below on the Seine, floated on the wind.
She squared her shoulders and noticed the kiosk headlines: TRANSPORT UNION NEGOTIATIONS REACH IMPASSE. STRIKE THREATENED.
Another strike, a typical autumn.
But not for her.
She’d pick up her scooter from the garage repairing it. No use battling for taxis this week, with an impending Métro strike.
An hour later, she parked her faded pink Vespa in an alley off rue du Louvre. Diffuse, vanilla light filtered down from the mansard rooftops, but it did not dispel the chill emanating from the worn limestone. She snapped her denim jacket closed, knotting her scarf, wishing she’d worn her high boots instead of the pointed mid-calf vintage Valentinos.
Time to face the office, an office without René, and a daunting search through their files. Then she had to figure a way to force Mathieu to rescind his statement.
She headed to her building, an eighteenth-century soot-stained edifice with scrolled wrought-iron balconies and the thirties’ neon sign: Leduc Detective.
Maurice, the one-armed Algerian war veteran who manned the newspaper kiosk, handed her the evening’s Le Soir.
“Controversy over inquest—was Princess Diana pregnant?” Maurice read. Shook his head. “The stuff that sells papers!”
More than a month had passed since Diana’s crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, but the press hadn’t quit.
“They put this on the back page!” Maurice pointed to a six-line article reporting grave desecration in the Jewish section of Père Lachaise cemetery. “Skinheads defaced the star on my mother’s grave. Again.”
“Désolée, Maurice.” She’d had no idea.
“There’ve been vicious attacks in the Métro, outside the Orthodox school in Belleville,” he said. “These crimes go unpunished. You’d think, after Bergen-Belsen, they’d done enough. But it never stops.”
She set a franc on the counter.
“Weren’t you going to New York?” Maurice asked.
Would she ever get there? “My plans changed.”
A line formed behind her. She walked the few steps to her building.
Viaggi Travel’s door was dark. The crime-scene tape had been removed from Leduc Detective’s door. Inside, the rooms lay deserted and silent, without René. And to carve out time for her trip, she’d finished her work, for once.
Past the office partition, she viewed René’s desk. His laptop, files, his empty workspace. The stain left on the floor by his blood.
She felt adrift on a rough sea of lies. But she had to concentrate. The answer must lie here. Somewhere.
René’s laptop held sensitive data, clients’ files, operating systems, the works. Had a competitor broken in and shot René? Or was it an attempt to taint their firm and the computer security of the companies they monitored?
At her desk, she booted up her computer and checked network sharing and hardware, and looked for a break in the firewall. Nothing. Relieved, she accessed René’s e-mail for threats or ambiguous messages. Apart from a confirmation of the upcoming Nadillac hearing, there was nothing.
Nadillac, a short, overweight, twenty-something whiz nerd, had turned to his hobby—black-hat hacking—for revenue. He did what a growing number of hackers did: he’d employed “0days” or “zero days,” information and code enabling the penetration of the software run by governments, private citizens, and, in his case, the corporation Nadillac worked for. He’d deployed 0days, resulting in minor disruption of his company’s Web site, and then he’d paralyzed it. But she and René caught him before he’d taken total control of the company’s network. They’d submitted the incriminating findings of their investigation to his firm. Next week, she was slated to testify against him in court.
René’s four color-coded files were on his desk: IN PROGRESS, FUTURE PROJECTS, PROPOSALS SUBMITTED, and PROPOSALS ACCEPTED. For twenty minutes she checked each file but found nothing missing. The phone rang, startling her.
“Good afternoon, Mademoiselle Leduc.” A honeyed voice, indicative of a sales pitch or request for donation. “Paribas bank here. I’m inquiring about the recent deposits to your business account.”
She sat up, alert, remembering René’s accusation from the previous night.
“Can you tell me which deposits you’re referring to?”
“This is a courtesy call, Mademoiselle,” the honeyed voice continued. “For such large sums, we suggest a higher interest yield account.”
“Excusez-moi, but which deposits?”
With all that had happened, she hadn’t checked their account for the sums René had mentioned.
“I’m in the sales branch. Sorry, I don’t have that information.”
“Why not?”
“Your business’s banker keeps that. Think about moving funds to a higher yield account and increasing your portfolio’s value, Mademoiselle. We offer competitive rates.” The honeyed voice turned to vinegar. “I’ll call you later this week for your reply.” The phone went dead.
She should have checked this sooner! She accessed it online and scrolled through the bank statements, and gasped. A one-hundred-thousand-franc deposit, just as René had said.
No one owed them so much money.
No doubt there had been an electronic error, perhaps an account number mistyped by data entry. All too easy a mistake for a late-night data entry shift. But surely it would be simple to take care of; her bank would find the error and correct it.
After punching in their banker’s extension, she was put on hold.
With the phone crooked between her neck and shoulder, she went through René’s top drawer. It took five minutes to sort through the account files.
“Monsieur Guérin, at your service,” the banker’s recorded voice answered. “I’m in meetings today but will check my messages and get back to you before the close of business hours. Please leave your number.”
She left a message. She found nothing else new in René’s file drawers. But in his bottom desk drawer, she found his brown moleskin office diary.
No appointments yesterday. On Monday, she saw a conference call with Cybermatrice penciled in for the morning. There were notes to himself in the margins: train at Dojo; call Félice, EXPLAIN!; order chocolate Maman’s birthday; and a red line through the following week, Aimée NY.
Think. She had to think. Who might have had it in for René?
He’d broken up with Félice, a fellow student at the Dojo. Didn’t she have a new boyfriend? She remembered René saying he was a biker, a jealous type who’d done time in prison, not someone René thought worthy of Félice. And he had a motorcycle. For a moment she wondered if it came down to a jealous boyfriend. A stretch, but worth checking out.
But she recalled René’s grumblings last week over the tactics of Cybermatrice, their rival, his complaints o
ver their underhanded tactics. She called Cybermatrice, but only got a recording. Frustrated, she left a message.
She thumbed through René’s diary and found Félice’s number. And she had the perfect excuse to call: René was in the hospital.
“Allô?”
“It’s Aimée,” she said. “Remember me, René’s partner?”
“Where’s René? Our Dojo practice just finished. He never misses a class.”
Aimée heard a gong reverberating in the background.
“Félice, he’s in the hospital,” she said.
“Mon Dieu! What happened? Is René all right?”
“He’s stable,” Aimée said. “Someone shot him.” She didn’t know how to put her question. “René said your boyfriend’s the jealous type.”
“Manu? But we broke up. Alors, you can’t think he’d shoot René.”
“I need to eliminate him as a suspect. Where is he?”
“Good luck,” Félice said. “The salop took my keys and locked me out of my apartment yesterday. It took hours until the concierge came.”
Aimée heard an expulsion of breath over the phone.
“Manu’s got problems, but he wouldn’t hurt René, my friend, my Dojo partner. Even after. . . .”
Pause. The gong sounded again.
“After what, Felice?”
“It’s a long story,” she said.
“I need to hear it.”
“But I’m late for work.”
“René’s hooked up to machines, Félice. The flics suspect me because the shooter used the gun in my desk.”
Félice gasped.
“But Manu wouldn’t. . . .”
“Wouldn’t what?”
Pause.
“Go on, Félice.”
“Zut. It’s nothing, but. . . .” She hesitated. “Manu met me the other day, after René and I argued,” Félice said. “René meant well, warning me about Manu, but it upset me. And he’s right, Manu’s a vicious salaud. But Manu picked up on the fact that René didn’t like him.”
“Vicious enough to get even?”
“Manu talks big, but no action. He brought over my apartment keys later. Now he thinks I’ll take him back.”
Aimée thought. “Does Manu know where our office is?”
“He picked me up there last week.”
Excited now, Aimée grabbed a pencil and wrote “Manu” in big letters on the Nadillac case spreadsheet, the first thing at hand. He had a motive and knew their location.
“Where can I find Manu?”
“Ça alors, I’m shattered that René’s been injured. I want to visit him.”
“The flics have him in protective custody,” Aimée said. “I just want to talk to Manu.”
“Manu left a message for me to meet him at Au Chien qui Fume at the bar tonight.”
“Good girl. Don’t go. Let me talk to him.”
Now she’d find out where Manu had been last night and whether he had a helmet like hers. The figure going into Tout-Moto was female. But if he’d enlisted an accomplice who had studied Aimée’s movements. . . . She wondered if he was the type who planned in detail. But prisoners learned more about crime on the inside than on the outside.
“One more thing, Félice,” she said. “Change your locks.”
* * *
AIMÉE OPENED THE door under the sign of the dog smoking a pipe, Au Chien qui Fume. An inviting warmth filled the old-style brasserie lined with mirrors above the red leather banquettes. Paintings and photos of dogs decorated the walls. A low hum of conversation and the clink of cutlery came from the dining area. Ahead she saw the curved polished-wood bar taking up the rear of the room. Liquor bottles lined the shelves behind it.
She reviewed the patrons on the stools: a banker type, talking into his cell phone; two middle-aged women drinking red colored apéros; a bus driver in his RATP-emblazoned green-blue jacket, reading Le Soir. This was not a biker hangout.
Then she heard the roar of a motorcycle outside. Someone opened the brasserie door. A gust of chilled air whipped the white tablecloths. A glimpse through the door revealed that it was l’heure bleue twilight. Distant Pont Neuf’s streetlights glowed like a string of misted pearls.
“The fog’s rising tonight.”
The speaker wore black leathers; longish tousled hair curled on his neck. He had a wide forehead, prominent cheekbones, and narrow lips. He was almost handsome, except for the scar running from the corner of his eye into his hairline.
He perched at the bar, his gaze resting on Aimée’s legs for a second, then shook hands with the bartender.
“Ca va, Charlot?” he asked.
“She’s not here, Manu.”
“A bière while I wait,” he said defiantly. He rested his boot on the railing below the bar.
No one paid him any attention. Neither did Charlot, the barman, once he’d set the foaming beer on a coaster before him. Not the most popular patron, Aimée could see.
“He’s right, Manu,” she said, slipping next to him at the bar.
“Eh, I don’t know you, but we can dispense with introductions.” His gaze again flicked over her black-seamed stockings.
“Aimée Leduc. But you know my partner.”
He shrugged. Took a sip of beer. Then another.
“Whatever you say, ma fille.”
“Mind telling me where you were last night?”
“Funny.” He shook his head, caught the barman’s attention. “She doesn’t look like a flic, does she, Charlot?”
Charlot averted his eyes. In the mirror, she could see Char-lot’s bald spot.
“Weren’t you on rue du Louvre, in our office?”
“Do you have a problem with that, ma fille? You don’t look the type to pick a fight.”
“But you do. Jealous, vindictive, a grudge-bearer. You locked Félice out.”
“So Félice sent you?” He took another sip, then slammed the glass down. Foam dripped down the sides.
She told me you’d be here. But I’m here about René Friant, “my partner.”
The banker set down some francs, then edged off his stool, which scraped the mosaic-tiled floor as he left. Charlot wiped the inside of a wine glass with a towel until it squeaked.
“Your partner . . . the dwarf?”
“You had a grudge against him, so you shot him.”
“Shot him?” Surprised, Manu set his bière down, then threw back his head and laughed. “You think I shot that dwarf? Why?”
“You’re the jealous type, Manu,” she said. “You were angry about Félice.”
He pushed his hair back from his eyes. “I was at Place de la Bastille last night.”
“Quick thinking, Manu,” she said. “But I bet there’s a Blue Fever helmet in your motorbike’s compartment.”
“Charlot, put this on my tab.” Manu reached for his glass.
But Charlot took the half-drunk beer and dumped the glass in the sink. He motioned to the manager. “First, settle your old tab, Manu.”
Manu’s thin lips pursed. “No family feeling, eh? No wonder my sister left you, Charlot.” He straightened, reached into his pocket, and threw fifty francs on the bar.
Now that he stood, she saw that Manu was short; he didn’t even reach her shoulders.
“René’s a black belt; you wanted to avoid a confrontation you’d lose,” she said. “So you got some girl to impersonate me. Why?”
“All that, for Félice?” He snorted.
She followed him out the door. Mist enveloped the rue de Rivoli, drifting through the colonnades, blurring car headlights.
As he took his white helmet from the motorcycle compartment, she peered in. The end of a baguette, a can of motor oil. No Blue Fever.
He keyed the ignition, shaking his head. “Hire an assassin on the installment plan to shoot a dwarf?” His laugh echoed off the stone.
“Don’t tell me people don’t owe you favors, Manu.”
“You don’t quit, do you?”
“Convince me, Manu.�
��
“Like hell I will.” But his shoulders sagged. Resignation showed in his eyes. “I’m broke. I just spent my last fifty francs.”
She believed him.
“That dwarf didn’t change Félice’s feelings for me,” he said, grabbing her sleeve. “You did, Aimée Leduc, sticking your nose into my business. You scared Félice away, didn’t you? You persuaded her not to come.”
His arm went around her neck, snapping it back, choking her. She felt a sharp point raking her skin under her sweater.
Terrified, she tried to speak, but no words came out. Manu pressed the knife deeper against her rib. Choking, her air cut off, she struggled as the knife point went deeper.
Then he let go. The motor revved and he roared away. Gasping, she stumbled against a topiary tree, rubbing her side. And when she looked up, he’d vanished in the mist.
It had been stupid to accuse him outright. She was losing her touch. Losing her grip. Her shaking fingers were smudged with blood.
* * *
WHAT HAD SHE accomplished? She no longer thought Manu had bought the helmet or shot René. He seemed too petty a crook to have hired someone. Apart from making him her enemy, and needing a Band-aid, she’d gotten nowhere. She had to think more clearly and get some sleep. The twelve-hour kind.
Her office was only two blocks away. Shakily, she made her way beneath the rue de Rivoli arcade. At her corner café, she stared at the steamed-up windows. Zazie, the owner’s young red-haired daughter, sat doing her homework on the counter. The scene was familiar and inviting. But she couldn’t face Zazie, or anyone else, right now. She had work to do.
* * *
UPSTAIRS, SHE UNLOCKED Leduc Detective’s door, and again faced a dark, chilly office. She closed the window, then kicked the radiator until it rumbled to life.
The chandelier illuminated the marble fireplace, the beveled mirror over it, the recamier piled with folders, the emptiness. She found the first-aid kit, left the door ajar, and went down the hall to the WC. Viaggi Travel was still dark. The other offices, too, were closed.
In front of the tarnished mirror, she lifted her worn cashmere sweater and dabbed antiseptic on the tiny slit over her rib, and covered it with an Asterix Band-aid.
