by Cara Black
The shooter was smart. Lugers had no serial numbers, and making a definitive match would be difficult.
She heard water splashing in the distance. The whine of a bone saw. Tried not to cringe imagining Serge, with his black-framed glasses outfitted with magnifiers and his black beard muffled by a mask, leaning over a half-dissected corpse on the stainless-steel autopsy table.
“Thanks, Serge.”
“Now if you’ll let me get back to my autopsy,” he whispered.
“Wait, Serge,” she said. “Have you autopsied Sylvaine Olivet, the twelve-year-old rape victim?”
Pause. “What’s it to you?”
“Yes or no?”
She heard a door creak. Footsteps. He’d stepped into the corridor. “A hard one, Aimée. Children are the worst.” Serge had twin preschool boys.
“Was her convulsion brought on by the rape, her injuries?”
“Not what comes to mind, but I’d have to check my notes. Why?”
She had to think.
“I asked what’s it to you, Aimée?” He cleared his throat again. “I’ve got a whole queue of bodies—multiple gunshot wounds, suspicious asphyxiation, and that’s just before lunch.”
“But I found her, Serge, with her distraught mother, on the floor …” She paused, the scene playing in her mind, Sylvaine’s cold limbs. “Any traces of sedatives, drugs in her blood?”
“Does this have to do with you on the télé?”
“Long story, but yes, and Zazie might be another victim. Please, Serge, I’ll take the twins for their vaccinations.”
He hated to do that. A medical pathologist who couldn’t face seeing his own children poked with needles.
She heard a door shut. “Sir, the magistrate’s waiting.”
“I have to go,” he whispered. “And you owe me big time, Aimée. Vaccinations and the boys’ summer camp physicals.” He clicked off.
She groaned inside. Never mind taking them to the doctor, the boys were bad enough just to babysit—they never sat still for longer than a minute.
But a German Luger from the war? She filed that away. Right now her bladder called. Again.
Her seventeenth-century flat, bone-chill cold in the winter and stifling in the summer, welcomed her with stale air and the tang of lemons from the silver bowl on the dining table.
In front of the door, she’d found the package Madame Cachou had mentioned, which was addressed in René’s handwriting. More pregnancy books and Lamaze pamphlets. She’d promised he could be her Lamaze coach, whatever that meant. But she guessed she’d find out by studying this new batch of material.
First she had to get the bloody clothes off, wash up and think about next steps—what favors to call in. Favors she didn’t have. She’d just have to figure that out.
Steam fogged her gilt-framed Directoire bathroom mirror. In the tub she kept the bullet-wound area dry and sponged around the stinging in her shoulder. Only two stitches. She swabbed on the doctor’s ointment, attached an Asterix bandage over it.
Just as she was pulling a towel around her expanding middle, she heard the front door click. She froze, prickles running up the backs of her damp legs.
No one, not even René, had a key anymore.
Her cell phone sat in her bag by the door, her Beretta in the kitchen spoon drawer. Had the shooter followed her back from the hospital? Lock-picked his way in to finish the job?
Taking no chances, she grabbed her heated hair-straightening wand and manicure scissors and stepped behind the red-lacquered Chinoiserie dressing screen.
She took slow breaths.
Raised her arm.
The footsteps paused in the hall. The tall bathroom door creaked open. Her heart beat so hard she thought it would jump out of her chest.
She gauged the distance. Waited until he got within range. Swung.
A cry. The smell of searing flesh. She kicked the Chinoisierie screen over. She just had to make it through the hallway and reach her gun in the kitchen. Using the screen as a shield, she almost made it to the door, where she slipped. The intruder wrestled her to the ground. Her ankles were caught, and she jabbed out with the pointed manicure scissors.
But her wrists were caught in a steel grip. She was pulled down, hot breath on her neck. Melac’s perspiring face grimaced in pain.
“Still like to be on top, don’t you?” Melac sucked in his breath.
“Next time remind me you still have the key.” Her body went limp. “Morbier sent you, didn’t he?” His familiar citrus scent made her heart clench.
“You okay, Aimée?”
“Almost wrestled you down, didn’t I?” No point in telling him her shoulder stung like hell. “Don’t tell me you’re my police protection?”
“You’re carrying my child,” he said. “Or did that slip your mind as you were kicking high-heel ass and getting shot?”
“So it’s my fault I got gunned down in the street?”
He waved his hand in dismissal. “Why does someone else have to tell me about our baby?”
As if she hadn’t wanted to tell him? Sort of.
“I called,” said Melac. “Left you messages. Ecoute, Sandrine suffered a setback. Intensive care. I got caught up. But what’s the problem?” Surprise filled his face. “We planned all this, talked about fixing up my father’s farm, raising children together in Brittany.”
Once, one midnight, after too much champagne. “That was months ago. And you just assumed …”
“But you agreed, remember?”
Had she?
“Every morning I work with my old friend Paul—he’s buying a bigger fishing boat. The farm’s almost finished. There’s a perfect room for your office, but now it will be the baby’s room.”
There he was, tanned, muscular and so vulnerable on her bathroom floor. And brimming with crazy ideas. “My life’s there now,” he said. “Yours, too, and the baby’s. You won’t be alone raising a child.”
They hadn’t spoken for months, and he expected her to move to Brittany?
“Do you know how lucky you got last night?” His grey-blue eyes narrowed in concern. “You can’t just think of yourself now. There’s a new life growing inside you.”
This again? “You call a bullet lucky?”
He kissed her shoulder. “I’m worried. Think of the baby, Aimée. The farm overlooks the sea, the air’s clean and the only crime is poaching in the forest. You can learn to cook.”
Cook? Another reason they didn’t get along. It would always be this way with him.
He sighed, maybe realizing she wasn’t going to just say yes to him. “Zazie’s been sighted,” he said then. “Two units have staked out a warehouse. All under control.”
Her heart leapt. “How can they be sure? What if it’s just a ploy?”
“According to my friends on the force, no one appreciates your interference,” said Melac. “The chief of the Brigade des Mineurs is handling this case personally. Let them do their job.”
Interference? Would they even be looking for Zazie at all if she hadn’t gone to the lengths she had? “And you’re the messenger to warn me off?”
Melac pulled her towel off. “Beautiful.” He ran his hands over her stomach. “Son or daughter?”
“It’s a surprise.” She glared at him. But he’d pulled her close, his body heat enveloping her, his lips on her neck … his tongue licking her ear.
He smelled the same, that same citrus scent.
“I’ve missed you, how I’ve missed you.”
She couldn’t pull away. Then she didn’t want to.
“How long has it been?” said Melac.
“Four months and fourteen days, but who’s counting?” Immediately she wanted to take those words back.
Melac grinned. “So we’ve got a lot to make up for.”
Why did she want him to keep stroking her stomach? To keep feeling his hot breath in her ear? Why couldn’t she ignore that shiver she’d missed so much?
SHE WOKE UP on top of the duvet, M
elac’s tanned leg over hers. Delicious. A breeze rippled the gauze curtain, carrying in the scent of the lime trees below.
“Can’t beat making up like this,” he whispered and nuzzled her neck. She realized he was cradling his cell phone to his other ear even as he was nuzzling her. “Listen, the care nurse comes recommended. Trust her, Nathalie.”
Aimée sat up. Talking to Nathalie, his ex-wife. And she realized it would always be like this with him—his life dominated by his suicidal ex, who never stopped calling. A man stretched in all directions.
Right then she knew she wasn’t ready for a new role: moving to Brittany, working long-distance and figuring her baby’s life around Melac’s fragmented idea of a relationship. Always preoccupied and at the beck and call of his daughter and her health; his fragile, unbalanced ex who required so much maintenance.
She watched those blue-grey eyes, felt his warm hand on her thigh, but …
Stuck in Brittany? Think again. Maybe if she cared enough, but inside she didn’t know if she did. He had left her to go back to his first family, just put her to the side, and he would do that with their child. She’d always play second fiddle. No, she needed something more. Time to turn the page on the kind of freewheeling relationships she’d had before, the kind she just let happen to her.
He was pulling on his jeans, in the middle of an argument with his ex. Miles Davis, at the foot of the bed, cocked his head.
On the bedside table, she removed her key from his key ring.
“Désolé, I have to catch the train at Montparnasse.” He pulled on his jacket. “There’s a problem with the nurse.”
And you just had great goodbye sex.
He noticed her look.
“Aimée, we’ll make it work. I want to do the right thing.”
Do the right thing like in an old Balzac novel, make an honest woman of her? Or more of a duty, like flossing every night? “Marriage?”
Melac averted his gaze. And when those blue-grey eyes looked up, he shrugged. “I meant give the baby my name.”
Stupid. Yet she wished her heart would stop shuddering, that she’d caught herself before blurting that out. “Marriage wouldn’t change anything, not that I would marry you,” she said, recovering. “As for wanting to be the father, give the baby your name—get in line.”
“What?”
“René’s already offered,” she shot back.
“René?” Melac shook his head. “Can you be that blind? Open your eyes, he’s—”
His phone beeped.
“My best friend and Lamaze coach,” she shot back. So involved she could swear she’d noticed him suffering sympathy back pain when she complained the other day.
“I can’t miss this train,” he said.
Duty called.
“I’ve never asked you for help,” she said, “and I’ve no intention of starting now.”
He checked his phone again. “Try to understand. I’ve got to deal with the hospital, rehab, getting the house adapted to move Sandrine in.”
“You’re spread thin,” she said. “I do understand. But it’s not for me.”
“You’re having my baby, who needs a father.”
A father who’d love it, be there for it—and for her. This would never work. But she’d felt that from the get-go.
“We’ll invite you to the christening.”
“Stubborn like always. But I’ll—”
“Miss the train if you don’t hurry, Melac.”
She shut the door behind him, locked it.
She felt a kick. “You want me to kick him down the stairs?” she asked the Bump. “Be nice.” She rubbed her stomach.
AIMÉE WATCHED MELAC walk along the tree-lined quai until he disappeared under the green leaves. Left alone, sadness overwhelmed her about what had happened last night, poor Mélanie who’d lost her mother, the desperate dead woman who’d prioritized her work to hide her shame. Guilt layered on top of guilt—Aimée’d judged this woman who was now on a slab in the morgue.
And now Zazie. She said a little prayer that the flics would rescue Zazie alive. Right now all Aimée could do was wash down her prenatal vitamins and the mild analgesic the doctor had given her and sip her espresso décaféiné.
Her eye caught on a man on the quai. Something about him was familiar. He saw her at the window and waved, then pointed to the green bench. A taxi, red brake lights on, idled at the curb.
Yes, she recognized him. The man on the bench was Marie-Jo’s father. Morbier had warned her to stay inside, the shooter still at large. But were the shooter and rapist one and the same? And could they be this man, this ex-con?
Right now the flics were going after Zazie at the warehouse. But if Marie-Jo’s father was connected to the man who abducted the girls, no way could she ignore his involvement. Or his possible ploy to pull her in.
Reason told her to stay inside, let the flics do their job. Yet her gut told her to trust him. She lumped a second mound of horsemeat into Miles Davis’s bowl. Took her Beretta from the spoon drawer, checked the clip. Full.
From the bag of Martine’s sisters’ pregnancy clothes, all of them splattered with high-end labels, she picked out a pair of black leather pants, buttery-soft pigskin, stylish and with an expandable waist. Paired them with a silk Dior tunic that hid her bandage. A minute later, mauve metallic ballet flats on, scarf trailing, she locked her door.
COOL BREEZES RUFFLED the Seine below into frothed white caps. The leaves shhhoo’d and trembled in the wind. A dry heat hung in the air this morning, the humidity gone.
“I need your help,” said Zacharié, Marie-Jo’s father and the former husband of Béatrice de Mombert.
“To catch the nice man who took the girls from your ex-wife’s apartment yesterday?” She felt for her Beretta in her secondhand Birkin bag. “The man you’re in league with?”
Surprise crinkled his brow. His fingers worried the buttons on his shirt.
“I’ll bet he’s into music. Marie-Jo plays violin, doesn’t she?”
“Piano. I don’t know what you’re getting at, but I know where Zazie and my daughter Marie-Jo are being held.”
Old news. “They’ve been sighted at a warehouse in Ivry,” she said. “Two units were dispatched.”
She noted the grim set to his mouth. He shook his head. “That’s a diversion,” he said. “They’re in Paris.”
The hairs on her arm rippled. “I don’t understand. They’ve tracked the rapist—”
He raised his hand. “Forget him. He has nothing to do with this.”
Neither girl was the rapist’s type. But then how did the attacks connect to Zazie’s circle of friends? Could it be just a coincidence? “The rapist’s not involved in the girls’ disappearance?”
He shook his head. “And I can’t tell you any more.”
“Fine.” She made as if to stand. “I’m leaving.”
He grabbed her wrist. “To keep them alive we need to move now.”
Her fingers trembled. “You expect me to trust you? Just like that? Tell me why I should.”
“It’s complicated.” His voice cracked. Serious. He was serious. But he was holding back.
“You’re on parole, your ex-wife’s in rehab, you know this man.”
He averted his eyes.
“Why should I believe you?”
“My daughter’s …” he took a breath. Looked toward the taxi. “They’re both pawns.”
“Pawns in what?”
He hesitated.
“If this man’s holding something over you, why not go to the flics?”
“You know I’m on parole. I can’t. That’s why I came to you.”
This put a new spin on it. But she needed more. “Tell me who took them.”
“Do you really want an answer? Or do you want to rescue the girls?”
A nervous energy emanated from him. Intense eyes. The eyes of a father. She hated to, but she believed him.
“Why me?”
“Everyone trusts a pregnant woma
n; together we’ll be able to get in without arousing suspicion. Plus you’re a detective, I checked,” he said. “I saw you on the télé—you want to save them as much as I do.”
He had that right.
“But last night’s murder …” Her throat caught. “Were you involved in the shooting of that woman? Is that related to whatever this is?”
“Non. Pas du tout.” He stood. “But your choice. Either you take the chance and believe me, or you wait to find out the Ivry warehouse is a hoax and lose two hours.”
He was already hailing the taxi, which started up its engine.
“Coming?”
Wednesday, 11 A.M.
PIGALLE. THE MORNING street sweepers’ brooms raked the detritus from the celebrations into the flowing gutters. The scraping over the cobbles sounded not unlike fingernails on a chalkboard to Aimée—her nerves were acting up. Parents walked children to school on the narrow pavement. The neon club signs looked naked in the sunlight.
“Follow the plan, okay?” said Zacharié.
A makeshift plan involving a reputed lead to an old crony’s brother-in-law, but she put on her Jackie-O sunglasses and readjusted her spiky black wig, the one she kept in the pocket of her oversize bag. Thank God the leather pants’ waist was expandable. “I’ll call you.”
“What?”
“If there’s an obstacle, we go to plan B.”
“What’s plan B?” said Zacharié.
“Improvise.”
She left the taxi in front of the disco Le Bus Palladium, the “temple of rock” when she and Martine clubbed there in the early nineties. Or had it been the late eighties? The white facade glared starkly in the daylight.
She was overrun by doubts about Zacharié’s plan. But she knew one thing. If Zazie was here, she’d find her.
“Bonjour.” She smiled at the young woman barring her way with a vacuum cleaner. “I’m late. But he’s waiting for me.”
“Who?” The woman stood her ground, readjusting her paisley headscarf.
“Like I said, he’s expecting me.” Aimée scanned the vacant box office, the deserted, red-carpeted foyer. She remembered the layout: beyond the ground floor’s closed double doors lay the dance floor. That wouldn’t help. To the right was a short staircase leading to a resto. Directly across from the resto she saw a sign: OFFICE.
