by Mark Pryor
Hancock’s head snapped up. “No! He’s not like that!”
Hugo sat back. “No, he wasn’t. He wanted you to turn yourself in, didn’t he?”
It was the slightest of movements and it stayed in her eyes, nothing that the cameras would catch, but it was there: a recognition of her lover’s decency, a tribute to him meant only for Hugo to see.
Charlee Brissette looked at Hancock, then at Hugo and Camille Lerens. “I think this interview is over. I need some time alone with my client.”
The policewoman nodded, then stood. “This is Lieutenant Camille Lerens, terminating the interview at nine forty-three a.m.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“I’m pretty sure we don’t need to be quite so formal,” Hugo said. “We could do this in bed, no? Like pillow talk?”
“No, we most certainly could not.” Two days later they were in his office, Claudia sitting across from him and about to switch on her recorder. “Look,” she said, “you promised me an interview and the full story. I’ve kept my mouth shut until now, or my computer closed—whatever. Fact is, you owe me and I’m not waiting any longer.”
“Fine, fine,” Hugo said. He sat back in his chair and swung his feet onto the desk. “Where do we start?”
“Who did you suspect first, Jill Maxick or Helen Hancock?”
Hugo furrowed his brow. “It doesn’t work like that. You journalists are so linear with your storytelling that you assume the investigative process is the same way. It’s not. I don’t figure out one thing and then plod along to the next clue, I just don’t.”
“Then tell me how it works, Mr. Patronizing.”
Hugo gave her a sheepish smile. “Sorry, didn’t mean to be.”
“Forgiven, just don’t do it again.”
“Alright, I’ll try.” Hugo composed his thoughts. “I try to rule people out. With alibis, preferably—put them somewhere else at the time of the crime. Narrowing the pool of suspects is always the best way to go. Given the rotating staff of the Sorbonne Hotel, that was difficult in this case, with the exception of Helen being at the spa when Andrew Baxter was killed. And because of that, like the idiot I am, purely on the basis of her alibi for that murder, I had ruled her out of being involved in the subsequent murders.”
“Hardly surprising.”
“Maybe. Anyway, later a few things made me look at her twice, a whole spaghetti of things that’s hard to describe. One of those things, though, was that all of this centered around her. Which might have meant she was just the target, of course, but nobody appeared to be trying to blackmail, threaten, or plagiarize her. In the end, I simply couldn’t find enough alternative connections to make her anything but a suspect.”
“I don’t understand. Connections?”
“Yes,” Hugo said. “Between the other people. Especially between Baxter and any of the writing group, Helen included. The only link to him was that he purchased the spy camera and we found in his locker a wiped-down laptop containing surveillance videos from Hancock’s room. But we knew that the laptop could have been planted, especially since the sex tape was leaked after Baxter’s death. So, really, there was no definitive connection between the writers and him at all.”
“I’m still not getting it . . .”
“In my mind, that lack of connection to Baxter ruled out Pottgen, Silva, and Rice, who had no reason to even know the guy,” Hugo said. “And given that Helen had virtually nothing to do with Lionel Colbert or Thomas Prehn, I couldn’t see them being involved.”
“Leaving you with Helen Hancock herself?”
“Right. I’m doing a poor job explaining, I’m sure, but what I’m trying to say is that it became clear to me that Jill and Helen were the hubs of this particular spinning wheel. What I didn’t get until later was the strength of the connection between them. It crystallized for me when I remembered the day the sex tape appeared online.” Hugo shook his head as he pictured the scene. “I was at the hotel. I arrived just as Helen was storming out of Jill’s office. She’d gone down to confront Jill about the tape, the spy camera, to tell her that the video was online for everyone to see.”
“OK,” Claudia said. “But—”
“Hang on, this is the important bit. You see, Helen stormed off, leaving Jill and me there, so of course I asked what was wrong and Jill told me. It didn’t click at the time, annoyingly, but she told me what was on the tape. The details about the sex and the toys and . . . well, the details.”
“Oh,” Claudia said, her eyes widening. “I see what you mean.”
“Right. If Helen had just told her about it that moment, if that was the first Jill knew of the sex tape, how did Jill know all of those details? She couldn’t have.”
“Unless she was the one who recorded it, who uploaded it.”
“Exactly. Camille’s forensics people are scrubbing her computer right now, so I’m betting they’ll find something. But, yes, I think that’s right.”
“What about the second camera they found?” Claudia asked.
“A distraction, pure and simple. An attempt at a smoke screen.”
“Makes sense. So what made you suspect Hancock? Jill was responsible for the distribution of the sex tape, and she pinned it on Baxter. But how did Helen become a suspect?”
“You know,” Hugo said. “A lot of the time we find incriminating evidence to connect a suspect to the crime. But every now and again there’s a telling lack of evidence in a case. Like I said before, a lack of a link between Helen and Baxter, but most of all a total lack of any reason for someone to spy on Helen. There was no blackmail attempt—she’d not hurt or cheated anyone. So why publish that video? And obviously it wasn’t Baxter who did it; he was dead by then.”
“I have no idea,” Claudia said.
“I didn’t either. So I thought about it from the other angle. The benefit side rather than the harm angle. And the only person I could think of who might benefit was Helen Hancock.” Hugo shrugged. “Maybe Silva, too, as association with a celebrity might make it easier to land an agent, but that seemed pretty remote. He was already associated with her, was friends and lovers with her. He didn’t need to do this. Which left Helen.”
“Maybe,” Claudia said dubiously. “But her lawyer’s already playing the humiliation card for the press.”
“Of course. The exact card Helen was going to play for the French courts. This country’s privacy laws are very strict, and very punitive for those who violate them. Helen herself told me that suing was ‘a good way to an easy buck.’ Her exact words. And from her contact with the lawyer, she knew how true that was when suing a place like the Sorbonne Hotel for such an incredible violation of her privacy.”
“And, this being France,” Claudia added, “while it was embarrassing, it might have helped her career here because we don’t care about that, about people having sex.” She pulled a face. “Not like you prudish Americans.”
“Hey, if you recall, I suggested we conduct this interview in bed.”
“Hugo!” She reached forward and clicked off the recorder. “My editors might listen to this; be professional!”
Hugo laughed. “I’m sorry, my dear, but you deserved that.”
“Maybe,” Claudia said with a frown. “Now then, if I turn it back on, will you behave?”
“Yes, I promise.”
She rewound the recording and stopped it just before Hugo’s suggestive remark, then hit Record. She winked at him, and asked, “So what else?”
“Once the picture began to take shape, the little things started to make sense. The things that earlier had nagged at me but not loudly enough for me to focus on them. Like how Baxter had a computer only for these videos. For a man who always needed money, it made no sense for him to buy a second computer just for surveillance. And the ease of finding it, along with the books by Helen, without even a password on it? I mean, it was like a trail of very large breadcrumbs.”
“Just a little too obvious?”
“In hindsight, yes. So it
came down to a lack of connections and, oddly, very obvious—planted—clues. For instance, why would she drive all the way out to the funeral to meet me?”
“I have no idea.”
“I think it was because she wanted to see for herself the person who’d be helping her, the person she was trying to fool.”
“Right. And what about Ambrósio Silva? She had to seduce and manipulate him, too. She played both of you. But why do you think she killed him? Or did she have Jill do that?”
“I believe Helen murdered both Silva and Maxick herself. And staged both to appear as suicides. Of course, we’re still waiting on forensics to confirm that she killed Maxick. As for Silva . . . that one we may never solve conclusively, unfortunately. I’m fairly sure he figured out what Helen was doing, and, if he did, he’d surely confront her.” Hugo’s shoulders slumped as he imagined the sad scene. “I think she stole Hunter S. Thompson’s gun, then persuaded Silva to go for a walk by the river, which is where she shot him. Tying the gun to a rock and tossing it in the Seine was a nice literary trick designed to throw us off, and precisely the kind of thing a writer would come up with. Conveniently for her, Silva was an avid Holmes fan. Her distraction played to the possibility that he would commit suicide with a literary flourish like that. Furthermore, it erased any physical evidence of her involvement.”
Claudia shook her head. “I still can’t believe she is so cold-blooded.”
“Well, I think she truly had feelings for Silva. He might have started out as a pawn, but eventually she grew to at least care for him. She didn’t like sharing him with Buzzy and asked him to end that relationship. . . . Who knows? Maybe she’ll confess.” Hugo sighed heavily. “But that’s probably unlikely. After all, if my suspicions are right and he tried to get her to come clean in the first place, look what happened to him. He took a bullet to the heart for it.”
“If you’re right, if Helen really did kill both Silva and Maxick, what will happen to her?”
“You’d have to ask Lieutenant Camille Lerens that question, or the examining magistrate. No doubt politics will play a role, but that’s beyond me, especially right now.”
“Do you feel sorry for her?” Claudia asked.
“No, not in the slightest,” Hugo said. “She caused the deaths of three people, directly murdered two of them.” He frowned. “I learned a long time ago that the time for sympathy is when someone’s in a difficult position, as Helen was with her career, but they’re trying to turn things around by working hard. Not by manipulating people. If you start treating other people as expendable, then no. No sympathy.”
“But she must have felt pretty desperate,” Claudia persisted.
“Desperate? Only when things started to go wrong. She absolutely was when she had to cover up her plan. Until then, she was just a famous author with a fragile ego.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Sure, her career was taking a dip, but, good Lord, is that ever a reason to hurt other people? Kill them, even?”
“Maybe when you spend half your life in a fantasy world . . .”
“I think you’re trying to understand Helen’s motivations or mindset,” Hugo said. “But it doesn’t make sense to people like you and me. It never will. For Helen, her entire identity was wrapped up in being this famous, wealthy, successful author. We don’t have that problem, and by ascribing reasons for her actions to her I wouldn’t want you, or anyone, to somehow turn that into an excuse or justification for what she did.”
“I’m not,” Claudia insisted. “Like you said, I think I’m just trying to understand. Killing two people to somehow further her slightly fading book career—it doesn’t make sense to me.”
“You’re looking at it wrong,” Hugo said gently. “I don’t suppose she set out to murder anyone; that was never part of her plot. In fact, when I talked with her and her students about who plotted their stories and who made it up as they went along, she said she was a plotter. But she made a point of saying that things didn’t always go as planned; and, while I didn’t think much of it then, maybe I should have.”
“If she didn’t plan this the way it ended . . .” Claudia shook her head. “It was some kind of mistake?”
“In a way. Don’t get me wrong—she made conscious choices every step of the way. And every step of the way, she could have stopped this from getting worse. But I suspect a few things happened that she hadn’t predicted. Maxick killing Andrew Baxter, Silva finding out about that . . . I just don’t know. But this particular story—dreamed up by a writer with a vivid imagination, remember—probably just began with a spy camera and a few red faces. Followed by an increase in book sales, a slightly saucier reputation, and a lawsuit to bring in more cash.”
“But when things got out of control, she continued to spin stories, to hide the truth to save herself.”
“Exactly,” Hugo said. “She had two ways to run. Back toward the truth, which would have been humiliating and maybe would have landed her in jail. Or away from it, which was the safer and easier path in the short term, but it meant lots of small, unanticipated steps that led to the murder of two people, and a woman increasingly desperate to save herself.”
“Amazing,” Claudia said. “One quite clever idea, the camera in the painting, led to a landslide.”
“I wish she’d just done the tape thing,” Hugo said quietly. “Paid an actor and done that as a stunt.”
“Why?”
“Because despite what she told us, that videotape helped her.”
“How do you know?” Claudia asked.
“A week ago, when she and I first met, she told me that it wasn’t even a sure thing that her new book would be published here in France. Since then, since the tape, they’ve inked a deal for its publication here.”
“How do you know?”
“Michael Rice told me; he met with her editor, and she was raving about Helen. And it’s interesting, don’t you think, that a publishing deal for that new book slipped Helen’s mind whenever she was talking to me or the police?”
“That does seem odd,” Claudia agreed. “If she’s innocent, that is.”
“Right. Also odd was the fact that Helen would not change hotels after being spied on at the Sorbonne Hotel and after a murder happened there. I suggested that Camille check the hotel records and see exactly how much Helen was paying for that room, and for how long.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m betting it was free from the moment she got here. Hotel managers have a lot of discretion when it comes to comping rooms, especially at nice hotels like the Sorbonne, and double especially when it comes to celebrity clients.”
“So there’s no question in your mind that Jill Maxick was involved?” Claudia asked.
“None. I mean, quite apart from the fact that she wound up dead, it’s pretty clear that she killed Baxter. And she was the one who had unlimited access to all of the rooms. She’s the one who planted the first laptop in Baxter’s locker and then put compromising files onto his actual laptop and hid it in Colbert’s stuff. It wasn’t a coincidence that she was there when Leo dropped the box and it spilled out.”
“They were dating . . .” Claudia said.
“Which made it even easier for her to access his belongings. And why would she have the same legal research in her apartment as Helen had?”
“Yes, that is hard to explain otherwise.”
“As his manager, she could have Baxter show up anywhere she wanted in the hotel, at any time,” Hugo pointed out. “And with all my worry about connections, she’s the only one. The only one connecting Helen and Baxter. Think about it. Why would he go buy a spy camera for anyone else? I imagine she said it was for hotel security, the poor guy.”
“They used him.”
“Yes, they did. Took advantage of a nice guy with a gambling problem. And, speaking of addictions, I noticed something small but interesting about Helen’s drinking. You remember when we first met her?”
“At the church, yes. You thought she’d had a sip or
two.”
“Exactly. The first few times I met with her, she seemed to be tipsy at least. But lately she has been sober. With all that’s going on, if she had a genuine drinking problem you’d have expected her to up the intake. Instead, she cut back. Why?”
“Because she needed to keep her wits about her,” Claudia suggested.
“Precisely. Enough that she came up with the plan for Silva’s murder—to steal the gun from the library and devise a literary distraction with a Sherlock Holmes twist.” Hugo swung his legs off his desk as a figure appeared in the doorway. “Camille, come in, but beware, Mademoiselle Roux has her digital recorder on.”
Lerens moved into the room, and Claudia turned, her mouth falling open. “Wait, what’s going on?”
“What?” Lerens said. “You’ve never seen me out of uniform?”
“I’ve certainly never seen you in . . . is that running gear?”
“It is.” Lerens turned to Hugo. “You all stretched out and ready to go?”
“Not quite,” Hugo said. “Just finishing up with this pesky reporter; you know how they can be.”
“You’re not even dressed,” Lerens said, crossing her arms. “Move it.”
Hugo pointed to a bag in the corner. “All right there. Now, if Claudia will turn off the recorder and you ladies will give me some space, I can dig out the spandex.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
They started off walking, breaking into a slow jog as they hit the Jardin des Tuileries, weaving their way past the ambling tourists and sidestepping the untethered children who chased after pigeons, and each other. They were starting to breathe a little more heavily when Hugo said, “We have to finish this run before you tell me anything?”
“I was going to run you into the ground, then make you feel better with the good news.”
He glanced over. “What good news?”
“First of all, that I’m staying here. I turned down the job in Bordeaux.”
