by Cara Black
She heard keys clicking over his keyboard. “On it.”
“Have you figured it out?” Her breath came in short gasps. “It’s the fourth-floor service stairs, and the door’s barred.”
“Got it. Fifty-nine rue Pigalle.”
“Bring your bag of tricks. Call my phone when you get here—I’m giving it to Zazie. She will be the one to answer.”
“I’m bringing an ax.” Saj clicked off.
She handed Zazie her cell phone. “Keep trying the door. Stay in contact with Saj. Can you do that?”
Zazie nodded.
Marie-Jo averted her eyes.
“Help Zazie if want to see your papa, compris, Marie-Jo?”
Marie-Jo gave a sullen nod.
“Now barricade yourselves in.”
AFTER SHUTTING THE kitchen door, she waited until she heard furniture shoved behind it. She stuck the Beretta in her leather maternity pants’ back pocket. Removed her wig, scratched, then took a bottle of water and splashed it over her head. Alert now, she took a breath.
Noises came from tunnel to the lighting booth. Shouts. Her neck prickled.
In the time it took until Saj arrived she had to hold Raoul off and find Zacharié. She crawled back through the hole to the lighting booth. The voices were louder. Zacharié was bent from the waist over the catwalk railing, a man pinning his arms behind him as he struggled. Not Raoul from the photo, but a blond, curly-haired man with broad shoulders, wearing a blazer and jeans. Aimée saw that he’d secured Zacharié’s hands behind his back using yellow plastic flex-cuffs.
She ducked behind the partition in the lighting booth.
“Can’t you keep to our deal, Zacharié?” the man was saying.
“You call having the Corsican murder my friends part of the deal?” Zacharié gasped. Keys and change rained down from his pockets to the stage below. “You planned it all along. Fool that I am, I believed you. Jules, just let Marie-Jo go and you get the file.” He coughed. “Even bonus material.”
Jules hesitated, shadowed under the stage lights.
Perspiration beaded her upper lip. Hot, it was so damn hot. And with the shadows she wouldn’t have a clear shot.
“Bonus material? Nice touch,” Jules said. “Like what?”
“Just let my baby go.”
“Look, you think I want to do this? I don’t want to hurt you anymore, Zacharié,” Jules said. “Cooperate. Easier all round.” He let Zacharié up. “Let’s go backstage. Marie-Jo’s safe and sound, and you’ll see her as promised. Now hand over what you owe me.”
Liar. She scanned the control panel, looking for the house-lights’ control switch.
“Marie-Jo’s backstage?”
“First the file.”
“You think I’ve got it on me?” Zacharié laughed. “I’m not that stupid.”
“Bon,” Jules said, checking his phone. “I’m late. This has caused my connection no end of worry. Life will be difficult all round if I don’t deliver.”
“Someone’s blackmailing you and your cronies, that’s why you’re so desperate?”
Jules blinked. Zacharié had hit a nerve. “Ten years I’ve worked for this. They owe me in the Ministry. No one’s taking it away from me now.” Jules gave a long-suffering sigh. “Haven’t I always come through for you, Zacharié? When you were young, when Marie-Jo got sick? Made sure you were in the best prison wing, received the early parole. Now I gave you this simple job, with a reward of a new identity, a new life.”
Aimée saw the catwalk shift, straining under their combined weight.
Idiots.
“I want that to happen, Zacharié,” said Jules. “Cooperate for Marie-Jo’s sake. Trust me.”
Aimée saw him slide something from his jacket pocket. Then a glint as he raised a knife to Zacharié’s neck.
Now. She had to act now. She pulled as many levers as she could reach, praying one would work.
The stage floodlights blazed orange, throwing a fire-like halo on the two men.
Thinking fast, she reached for a thin, stapled packet, a lighting manual, stuffed under the control panel and brandished it for him to see. “You don’t mean this, do you? Zacharié left it with me.”
Jules turned. His small eyes darted from Aimée to Zacharié and back. “You neglected to tell me about your new accomplice.” His mouth tightened. “A dripping Madonna in leather pants, interesting. So Zacharié gave you the file and bonus material?” Jules kept his grip on Zacharié. But confusion flashed in his eyes.
“As soon as you put that knife away, Jules. May I call you Jules?”
Zacharié shook his head. “Don’t listen to her.”
“Long way down, boys,” she said. “And it’s never wise to upset a pregnant woman.”
Jules snorted. “Is she for real?”
“Want to find out?” Aimée waved the smudged packet.
“She’s making that up. I’ve got the file …”
“Jules, he claims I’m making it up,” she said. “But how can you be sure? More to the point, how can he trust you after I found Marie-Jo and Zazie tied up and hidden behind the bookcase?”
Zacharié’s jaw dropped.
“They’re escaping down those old servants stairs. So convenient. Safe. Nothing left to hold over him now, Jules, but if you don’t want this file …?” She flipped it open. “Someone else will.”
Jules dropped the knife, tightened his grip on Zacharié, and shoved him forward. Smiled. “Aah, a businesswoman. How much?”
She could almost hear Jules sniffing like a dog. Testing her.
“Fifty thousand, don’t you think, Zacharié?” she said.
The reflected orange light revealed Zacharié’s blackened eye, his shaking body. His foot caught in the plank’s rim, shaking it loose. The bar sailed through the air, crashing below.
Aimée shuddered. A long way down.
“Now I understand, you sly dog,” said Jules. His eyes narrowed as if assessing their relationship, his options, who to attack first. At least in his position that’s what she would be assessing.
“Playing happy families again? She’s a looker. And more stable than Béatrice, I hope. Now, Zacharié, keep moving to the cubicle.”
Jules’s blond curls had darkened with sweat, and they clung tight to his head. He gripped the catwalk rail.
“You know I’m undercover, a flic,” said Jules.
SHOCKED FOR A moment, she grabbed the wall … then remembered Cécile’s description. Old hookers didn’t lie about the law. She’d got his pressed-jeans look correct.
“So was my father,” she said, biting her lip before she said, “but he wasn’t a snake like you.”
“Then you know how the game’s played. The bond between flics. How it’s family, and in a family we help each other.”
No family to her, not after they drummed her father out of the force in disgrace. Not after the years it had taken to clear his name. Or witnessing the dead ends in the layers of corruption.
Instead she smiled. “Family maybe, but not a charity. Still, I don’t much buy into the family. My father died in a bomb explosion doing ‘routine’ surveillance. A damn setup.”
Jules gave a knowing nod. “Place Vendôme. Enough plastique to cinder the van and melt the fence around the column. I remember.”
“You?” Lying again. “You’re too young.”
“Happened during my first month on bomb disposal,” said Jules. “You never forget. Or the things that don’t add up.”
He had the details right. “What the hell does that mean?”
Stalling, the salaud was stalling for time. Trying to figure out how to kill them both.
“Word came down to leave your father’s investigation alone,” said Jules. “That’s how I learned the family punishes its own. Your papa played in the dirt; now so do you.” He shrugged. “Cut the high and mighty. You know I’m right. So it’s business now. I pay, and you provide.”
Why was she letting his words affect her? Why was her hand sh
aking so much she couldn’t steady it to shoot him right now, like she wanted to?
Zacharié reached the booth, and Jules pushed him toward her. Ready, she shoved Zacharié down.
“Maybe you’re lying,” said Jules. Recognition lit his eyes. “Now I remember. You’re the one on the télé.”
He’d halted, undecided, on the shaking catwalk, so close his cologne and stale-sweat smell reached her. The spiral staircase was right below him. One more step and she’d have him.
“Want to find out?”
“First my checkbook. But I need a show of good faith.”
He reached inside his blazer pocket toward a distinctive bulge. Bad move.
She shook the catwalk railing. Threw him off balance. He fell on his knees. Came up with a Sig Sauer pointed at her.
“Naughty,” said Jules. “Now put down the file and shove it with your foot.”
She shrugged. “You win.” She pushed the file forward with her toe, surreptitiously reaching for her Beretta. “Come and get it.”
Jules’s eyes flicked from her to the file, back and forth as he reached out, the gun in his other hand trained on her.
His left hand grabbed at the file; her eye clocked on his right with his finger curled around the trigger. Aimée jiggled the catwalk, aimed her Beretta and drilled Jules three times in the right shoulder. He jerked, his shots going wild as she ducked. Thupt, thupt. Bullets thudded into the rafters and metal pinged. Jules grabbed at the shuddering catwalk rail, yelling in pain, and lost his grip. The file opened and papers spilled, floating and dancing in the orange light.
Jules’s shouts ended in a crashing thud. She didn’t want to look. But she did.
He sprawled on the stage’s edge by the DJ table. The microphone wires splayed around him like a wreath of snakes.
Aimée shuddered. Her palms were wet; her knees shook. She hated heights. “Let’s go.” She reached for Zacharié, who stood shaking and mute at her side. “Did you hear me?”
“I’m on parole. Now I’ll go back to prison.”
Even a bent flic “shot in action” marshaled the combined préfecture forces on his side.
“Not if they don’t find you. Hurry, we’ll go out the backstage door.”
“But where’s my Marie-Jo …?”
She checked her Tintin watch. With any luck Saj had the girls in a taxi right now.
“Safe. Wish I’d known she’s as stubborn as you.” With her Swiss Army knife she sawed through the plastic flex-cuffs on Zacharié’s wrists. She followed him down the steep, winding staircase again to the backstage door. “We’ll take his phone and what’s in his wallet and put the theatre keys in his pocket.” She wiped their prints off the keys with her scarf, then handed the bundle to Zacharié. “Can you do that?”
Zacharié stared at the body. Blood dripped from the turntable to a pool on the floor. “But he’s still chained me to him. I’m not free.”
“What can he hold over you from the grave?”
“Jules is … was my half brother.” He winced. The floodlights cast an orange glow over his swollen eye and the cuts on his forehead.
The rotten half. But no one picked their family.
“Désolée, but it was him or you, and Marie-Jo wants her papa.”
“Years ago he took care of me, after our mother left,” he told her as he pulled Jules’s phone and wallet from the dead man’s pocket and planted the keys. “He was my big brother, all I had. But later he changed.”
A pang hit her. She could relate. Her mother had left, but at least she had had a father to raise her.
A vacuum whirred. The cleaning woman.
“Where’s Marie-Jo?” he asked.
“Follow me.”
Wednesday, 11 A.M.
MADAME PELLETIER HUNG her straw bag over the office chair, glad, after the futile trip to Ivry, to get back to investigating her hunch. She thumbed through the older dossiers filed under agressions sexuelles, squinting as the late-morning light glinted on the metal file cabinet’s surface. Then the next drawer. Nothing.
Tachet, her boss, poked his head around the door in the Brigade des Mineurs file room. “I’m holding off on calling that girl Zazie’s parents.”
He hated to give parents bad news. She nodded. “Should I do the follow-up, sir?”
“Follow-up? I’d rather charge the anonymous caller with wasting law-enforcement time and resources,” said Tachet. “We’ll give it a few more hours.” He was more irritated than usual at the expended manpower. Having personally led the squad, he looked angry enough to spit. “All this World Cup mess and we’re running around in the suburbs, wasting three hours?”
He didn’t expect an answer.
But her frustration simmered. “Sir, we still don’t know if a link exists between the rapist and this Zazie Duclos.”
Tachet’s lips pursed. “That’s the Brigade Criminelle’s realm now. Follow up on the five-year-old with the broken ribs and cigarette burns. That’s on your desk. Handle that.”
“D’accord,” she said.
“Good news. Your vacation starts tonight. Do what you can to wrap up the ongoing, then shoot them over to me before you leave.”
Good news indeed. She wouldn’t lose all her deposit on the beach chalet. Maybe she’d invite her daughter.
Back at her desk, she crossed the t’s on that final case, arranged the child’s interview with the psychologist and sipped on her steaming tisane. Still, she couldn’t push away her multiplying questions about the rapist. She had a growing sense of familiarity when she went over the facts—like he’d attacked before, years ago. But when and where she couldn’t place.
Had she even been on the force then? Had she heard about a similar case when she was at the Police Academy? Or did it come from a conversation overheard in la cantine or in the incident room—a passing reference? An open secret in the branch, maybe? One of many overlooked incidents—the hands-off files, incidents involving people either too connected or too protected, which a good flic knew about and could lean on when needed. That’s how it worked and how it always had worked. The beat flic knew the score and tallied it. Old-style—the personal touch got you further than any computer or suit-wearing commissaire who had quotas to fill. She’d regarded the system as archaic and prone to favoritism. When the Brigade des Mineurs position opened, she’d applied and got in.
Yet everyone depended on the beat flics, the eyes and ears on the cobbles, who were often the first to report crimes against children. That never changed, nor did the fact the damn Commissariats didn’t communicate with one another. What was all this department reorganization worth if they didn’t implement communication? Or, now that the law had been passed, get the FNAEG up and running—the Fichier national automatisé des empreintes génétiques, which would authorize a database of sexual predators?
What was it she couldn’t remember?
Wednesday, noon
SIRENS WHINED BEHIND them as an ambulance parked by Le Bus Palladium. The cleaning woman had found the body. Any minute the flics would pull up.
No sign of the girls or Saj.
“Wear my sunglasses and keep your head down,” said Aimée. She relocked the backstage door, then dropped the key ring in the courtyard’s slatted drain cover. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
“But where are they? I won’t leave without Marie-Jo.” His hands shook trying to answer the vibrating cell phone in his hand. “Who’s this calling me?”
Aimée spotted her own number on his cell’s display. “Zazie. I gave her my phone.”
“Where’s Marie-Jo?” he said into the phone. He leaned against the wall. Listened. His shoulders relaxed. “Ma puce … you’re okay.”
Thank God. She saw a taxi, waved at it. But, spurred by the arriving rush of flic cars, it kept going uphill.
Merde.
They couldn’t stay here. Determined, she hooked her arm through Zacharié’s. She didn’t relish the long uphill climb to Place Pigalle with his noticeable limp. Still, he
r stomach appreciated being back on terra firma.
“Where are they?” she asked him as he hung up.
“At the apartment on rue Chaptal. Your friend Saj said there’s a taxi stand by the Sexodrome.”
Thank God. But first the hurdle of getting there unnoticed.
“Look, I can’t get caught in this,” she said. “Nor can you.”
“Marie-Jo’s going to go home to pack her things,” he said, his breath labored. His weight dragged on her arm. “I need to figure out what to do before things hit the fan.”
Fugitives. But she couldn’t think about that now. By the time they’d piled into the idling taxi just outside the Sexodrome, perspiration was dripping into her eyes.
DURING A TEARFUL reunion in the apartment on rue Chaptal, Aimée pulled Saj aside. “Good job. We need to talk.”
“Haven’t you let Zazie’s parents know?” said Saj.
She shook her head. She needed a game plan. Jules’s death complicated everything. Plus she felt bile rising from her stomach. Damn morning sickness, or nerves—or both.
“You look pale, Aimée,” he said. “Nausea again?”
She nodded.
“What about all our asana sessions, the centering meditation?”
Fat lot of good that did with a gun aimed at her.
From his orange cloth bag, stenciled with OM, Saj handed her a paper twist of brown powder. “Sprinkle it under your tongue. Let it dissolve. It’s an ayurvedic remedy.”
Right now she’d try anything. It resembled dried mud. Tasted like it, too.
“Zazie’s safe—thank God,” Saj said as she struggled to swallow. “The sooner we get the little troublemaker home the better.”
If only. Dry-mouthed, she shook her head. “Events went all sticky. I feel like I got caught in flypaper.”
She’d caught René up a minute ago, after she’d recovered her cell phone from Zazie. The girls were safe, but there was too much still to sort out—her own involvement in a murder, a rapist still on the loose and no leads left to follow. And a stubborn, desperate man who would be separated from his daughter forever if they couldn’t figure something out quick. “Listen. I want to help Zacharié.”
