Private Paris

Chapter 35

9th Arrondissement

1:20 p.m.

THE GREATEST CHEF in all of France hung upside down from a rope tied to his ankles and lashed to a steel beam that ran down the center of the kitchen ceiling. René Pincus’s swollen head hovered a few feet over the stovetops, and his arms were spread to the sides, tied with cooking twine.

“Same general position as Henri Richard,” Sharen Hoskins observed. “But the graffiti is much more visible this time. We won’t be able to contain it.”

The tag was painted three times inside the restaurant: once on the stovetop below Pincus, once on the dining room wall, and a third time across the front window. Word of the great chef’s death had leaked and a mob of media types gathered out front, training their cameras on the tag on the front window.

“Was he strangled?” I asked.

“No,” the investigateur said. “Drowned in his own chicken stock.”

“So the method of killing is different, almost ironic,” I said.

Hoskins nodded. “And it changes things, don’t you think? With those pictures you discovered, Henri Richard’s murder was easily attributed to revenge. Now I think we must look for a link between Henri Richard and René Pincus, some reason they were targeted for death.”

“There is one link,” Louis said.

“What’s that?”

“Henri Richard ate dinner here several times in the last six weeks.”

Hoskins squinted, crossed her arms, and said, “And how do you know that?”

Louis realized he’d set a trap for himself, but he smiled and said, “Private Paris never reveals its confidential sources, but I can assure you it’s true.”

“Louis,” she began.

“Chéri,” he said. “Are we here to follow every nuance of the law? Or are we here to catch a killer who grows more prolific?”

Hoskins stuck out her jaw. “Don’t call me chéri.”

“Ah,” Louis said, acting chagrined. “A slip of the tongue, no? I promise never to address you this way again.”

Claudia Vans, Private Paris’s chief forensics tech, came up to Louis. She showed him several plastic evidence bags containing cigarette butts and said, “What’s the chance the staff has a habit of flicking cigarette butts around this place?”

“Seems unlikely, but we’ll ask,” Hoskins said.

Out in the dining area, other Private Paris forensics techs were photographing and taking samples from the AB-16 graffiti on the wall. Hoskins went to speak with them. When she was satisfied that they were covering every angle, she went to the front door and started letting in the staff to be questioned.

Louis provided a running translation.

The maître d’, a plump, nervous man named Remy Fontaine, said, “Is it true? He is dead?”

“I’m afraid so,” the investigateur said.

Fontaine and the other four employees broke down crying and hugged each other. The sommelier, a stocky blonde named Adelaide St. Michel, stopped crying long enough to say, “Does it have to do with the Bocuse d’Or?”

“What makes you say that?” Louis asked.

“The other chefs in France hated Chef Pincus,” she said. “Three times he wins the Bocuse d’Or, and every time you hear the vicious rumors right away, the terrible things they said about him. It was all envy, and I think it was strong enough for people to want him dead. How did he die?”

Hoskins hesitated.

“How did he die?” asked Fontaine, the maître d’.

“He was drowned in his chicken stock,” I said.

The sommelier snapped her fingers at me, and then at Hoskins, who was glaring my way. “There you go, then,” Adelaide St. Michel said. “Chef Pincus was world famous for his stock. This is a statement.”

I had to agree. Killing him in his own soup was designed to send a message. But what, exactly?

Chapter 36

IT CERTAINLY DIDN’T appear to me that any of the staff were involved. All of them appeared genuinely heartbroken. To a person they seemed to have loved René Pincus. He was demanding. He was precise. He could be a withering critic of their work. But he was also extraordinarily generous.

“It was a side of René that no one outside of us knew, really,” said the maître d’. “To the staff, he was like a demanding uncle. In public, he was the French chef of iron.”

He’d said this last in English, so I corrected him. “Iron chef.”

“Yes?” Fontaine said. “René was the iron chef of the world, and now he is no more.” The grief-stricken man broke down sobbing again. “What is to become of us? Who will carry on with the restaurant?”

“Who would be the natural person to step forward?” I asked. “There must be a senior chef working beneath Chef Pincus.”

“That would be me,” said Peter Bonaventure. He looked about forty but had the build of a marathoner. “But I can’t even think this way. I did not want his throne. I loved my job. René was a genius who made our work a passion. And he paid us well, gave us profit shares that were equal to his own.”

“Equal?” I asked.

They nodded. With every one of them making the same amount of euros as Pincus, the idea of financial gain as motive seemed to be diminishing rapidly.

“How many of you smoke?” Louis asked.

Four of the staff members, including the maître d’, raised their hands.

“How many of you would discard a cigarette on the kitchen floor or in the wine cellar?”

All four hands dropped. To a person they looked horrified.

“That would be grounds for termination,” the sommelier said. “No smoking in the restaurant. René would have a fit.”

Louis, Hoskins, and I exchanged glances. Someone with no fear of Pincus had tossed the cigarettes. Probably his killers.

Louis got out his iPhone and called up a picture of Henri Richard. He showed it to them. “Did you see him in the restaurant in the past six weeks or so?”

Remy Fontaine, the maître d’, took one look and said, “Bien sûr. He is the dead opera director. Monsieur Richard. He came here often.”

“Alone?” Hoskins asked.

“Never alone,” Fontaine said. “Always with a woman.”

“Same woman?” I asked.

The maître d’ and the sommelier glanced at each other before she said, “The last two or three times we think it was the same woman. Exotically beautiful, with perfect caramel-colored skin and big cat eyes. But she was different every time she came in. Hair color and cut.”

“And eye color,” the maître d’ said. “Twice they were dark brown, but the last time they were in, her hair had been hennaed red, and her eyes were, I don’t know, like a cat’s eyes?”

“So she’s wearing different-colored contacts,” I said.

“And more than that,” the maître d’ said. “She had-how do you say?-extensions in her hair, and her cheeks, the thickness, they seemed to change.”

Louis said, “Probably putting cotton high in her mouth.”

“You ever hear him use her name?”

“Mariama,” the headwaiter said. “No idea on her last name.”

“You’re positive?” Hoskins said.

“Definitely,” he replied. “I heard him call her Mariama several times.”

The name could be useful, I thought. But then again, this is a woman who changes her hair and eye color and used cotton to alter her looks. It wasn’t a stretch to see her using an alias.

“Did Chef Pincus know Henri Richard?”

The maître d’ nodded. “They were not close friends, but they knew each other. In fact, the last time Richard was in with Mariama, René came to their table and talked.”

“About what?” Hoskins asked.

Fontaine shrugged. “I don’t know, but the chef shook his hand and seemed very happy returning to the kitchen.”

The wine steward agreed. “He was whistling.”

“And when was this?” I asked.

“Last week.”

“Are there security cameras here?”

Investigateur Hoskins sobered, shook her head. “There are very few outside of government buildings. The French see it as an invasion of privacy.”

“Who was the last to see Chef Pincus alive?” Louis asked.

The maître d’ and the wine steward raised their hands. They gave us the timetable, and then described leaving the restaurant shortly after 1 a.m., and seeing a drunk passed out in the alley by the Dumpster.

“You rarely see that in this neighborhood,” Fontaine remarked. “But you could smell the alcohol all over him, even over the garbage.”

“What does it mean?” the steward asked. “The graffiti?”

“When we figure it out, we’ll let you know,” Hoskins said. “For now, I want to clear the restaurant and let the forensics team complete its work.”

Louis and I didn’t argue. We went back through the kitchen, where Chef Pincus’s body had been cut down and covered with a sheet. Out in the alley, we crossed to the Dumpster, finding a broken bottle of beer sitting upright beneath it. There was still two inches of booze in the intact bottom.

“Why didn’t he drink it?” Louis asked.

“What, from the broken part? There are glass shards in there. He’d have swallowed them.”

“A clever wino would strain them out with his shirt,” Louis said. “Maybe this bum just wanted to smell drunk.”

Chapter 37

8th Arrondissement

6:12 p.m.

I GOT OUT of a taxi in the twilight, and felt vindicated and excited as I bid good evening to the doorman at the Plaza Athénée. Earlier, Louis and I left Investigateur Hoskins to deal with the media mob gathered around Chez Pincus, and went back to the offices of Private Paris. We put together a priority list for the evidence our techs had gathered at the scene.

It was a big deal for a Private forensics team to be called in by a local police department, and especially by a renowned investigative operation like La Crim. The decision spoke to the level of training and adherence to state-of-the-art forensics methods that I’d insisted on after deciding to get my company into the crime analysis business. Our labs were certified in fifteen states in the U.S. We maintain Interpol standards throughout the rest of the world, and police agencies were starting to recognize us for our efforts.

That alone had put a positive spin on my day. But around 2 p.m., I’d gotten a call that put me in an even rosier state of mind. Michele Herbert asked if I would like to have dinner with her. Though I’d felt like doing a back handspring in response, I kept my cool, and we made a date for nine.

I moved through the lobby and through an arch. I glanced to my right and saw a gathering happy hour crowd milling in an interior loggia that abutted the dining room and the courtyard. Along the walls of the high, narrow space, groups of the beautiful, the wealthy, and the famous sat in fine furniture, sipped from thirty dollar cocktails, and nibbled at plates of foie gras and caviar tureens.

About halfway down, I spotted Randall Peaks by that gaggle of Saudi princesses, all of whom appeared to have changed dresses since the morning. Peaks looked at me and nodded. I nodded back, and then got on the elevator. As I did, my phone rang.

“Jack Morgan,” I answered.

“It’s me,” Justine said. “The swelling on Sherman Wilkerson’s brain has started to subside. The doctors think they’ll be able to bring him out of the coma tomorrow, or the day after at the latest.”

“Long-term prognosis?” I asked.

“Could take a year of therapy, but good, I think,” she replied.

“That’s excellent,” I said, and breathed a sigh of relief. Not only was Sherman Wilkerson one of my oldest clients, but he was a truly good man, someone who most certainly did not deserve to live out his days in a vegetative state.

“Anything on the granddaughter to report?” Justine asked. “I’m sure she’ll be the first thing on Sherman’s mind.”

“She’s gone to ground. I haven’t seen any new alerts that she’s used her card.”

“How’s Paris otherwise?”

“Still the most beautiful city in the world.”

“The most romantic too, I hear,” she said.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “Things are all business here.”

“Uh-huh,” she said as the elevator dinged open and I got out at the eighth floor. “That’s not what Louis just told me.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, digging for my key card.

“Gorgeous famous artist and graffiti expert?”

I used the key card and pushed the suite door open, saying, “Oh, her.”

“Yes, her,” Justine said. “Louis says you’re smitten.”

“Take that with a grain of salt. The man is smitten himself about six times a day.” I walked the short hallway into the suite’s living area and set the key card on the table.

“Jack, it’s okay to be smitten.”

“I’m well aware of that,” I replied. I entered the bedroom and headed toward the walk-in closet.

Before she could reply, I heard a squeak behind me before something hit me hard right between the shoulder blades, stunned me, blew the wind out of me, and drove me to my knees.

Chapter 38

THE SECOND BLOW between the shoulder blades caused me to drop the phone, and threw me forward on my stomach, grunting, trying to get my breath.

A black tactical boot appeared in my peripheral vision and crushed the phone while someone grabbed my wrists, pulled them behind my back, and locked them together with zip ties. Still gasping for air, I saw a gloved hand come forward, take my chin, and wrench it down. Another gloved hand stuffed fabric so far into my mouth that I gagged and choked.

I was hauled to my feet and tossed on my back on the bed. Two men wearing jeans, black jackets, and panty hose over their heads to smear their features stood there. The dark-haired guy had a big nose. He also had a suppressed SIG Sauer pistol aimed at me.

The other, a blond guy with pale skin, held a ball-peen hammer in his right hand. In a thick accent, he said, “Here’s how it works, Monsieur Morgan. I take the gag out and you tell me where to find Kim. If you try to yell or if you lie, I will break your kneecap. Understand?”

My breath had come back, and already my senses were searching for a possible counterattack. I found it in attitude. Relaxing my face and softening my eyes, I acted as if I somehow had the upper hand in this negotiation.

“Vous comprenez?” the pale guy demanded.

I bobbed my head. The one with the gun reached over and yanked the gag from my mouth.

“Where is she?”

“Don’t know,” I croaked.

He raised the hammer.

“No, really,” I said. “Last time I saw her, she was running from your terrible shooting skills.”

“Fuck you.”

“If I’d been behind the gun, she would have hit the ground, not some waiter,” I said. “What do I call you, anyway? Since the first time I saw you, I kept thinking of you as ‘Pale Guy.’ So what name do you want? Pale Guy or Whitey?”

Pale Guy stiffened. But the one with the gun snorted, and under his breath he murmured something I barely caught before Whitey said in a reasonable voice, “My name is of no consequence to you, Monsieur Morgan. However, the things I can do, my expertise, in fact, is of total consequence to you.”

He slapped the hammer into his gloved palm. “Do you enjoy walking?”

“One of my favorite pastimes, but as I said, Whitey, I don’t know where Kim Kopchinski is. In case you hadn’t noticed, she’s been trying to avoid me as much as get the fuck away from you. Other than that, go ahead and turn my legs into oatmeal. It’s not going to change my tune. What did she do to you, by the way, that’s got you shooting up Paris?”

Whitey said to the one with the gun, “I believe him.”

“Yeah?”

“Oui,” he said, and then lowered the hammer and came closer to me. “Did you hear? I believe you, Monsieur Morgan.”

“Great. Just a little misunderstanding.”

“Exactly,” Whitey said, again in that reasonable tone. “Tell me. In the time when you were with Kim, was she still smoking and using that lighter she has on a chain around her neck?”

What did that have to do with the price of a croissant?

“She smoked like a chimney,” I said. “The pack of Gauloises was never far from her hand, and she still had the lighter.”

Before Whitey could respond to that, someone began banging loudly on the outer door to the suite.

Chapter 39

“JACK!” I HEARD Louis yell. “Jack, open up!”

Big Nose pivoted and moved out fast. Before following him into the outer room, however, Whitey threw his hammer from close range, hitting me hard and high on the flank of my left leg.

The effect was electric and painful, but I gritted my teeth and rolled off the bed and to my feet, barely able to feel my left butt cheek and thigh. No more than ten seconds had elapsed since Whitey and Big Nose had left the bedroom, but already the suite’s living area was empty. The doors to the balcony were open. Even in the dim light I could tell that it, too, was empty.

What the hell had they done? Jumped seventy feet to the sidewalk?

I limped fast to the door, where Louis was still pounding. Turning my back to the latch arm, I hooked the zip tie on it and pressed down.

Louis almost knocked me over, shoving his way inward.

“Justine was right!” he cried, pulling me back to my feet. “Who did this?”

“Our friend Whitey, and his pal, a guy with a big nose and dark hair,” I said. “You spooked them.”

“Where’d they go?” Louis asked, and I felt a blade slip between my wrists and sever the tie.

“They either jumped or they climbed to the roof,” I said, rubbing my wrists.

“The roof! Come, Jack. With luck we can cut them off!”

“They’ll be long gone,” I said, limping after him.

“Maybe not,” he said. “The footing up there is treacherous when it’s wet.”

Several months before, the Plaza Athénée hired Private Paris to do a complete rethinking of its security system as part of a remodeling of the current hotel and an expansion into three adjoining buildings. Louis had inspected the four structures, cataloging all ways in and out of the future hotel, and in the process developed the new system.

My leg was no longer numb but threatened to charley horse now. But I managed to keep several steps back from Louis as he wound his way through the hallways to a stairwell. He stopped on the landing and looked up at a hatch in the ceiling. It was locked. There was a red plastic tag on the lock hasp.

“That’s my seal,” Louis said. “They didn’t get in this way.”

“How many other ways to the roof are there?”

“One other in the hotel. But six others among the three buildings the hotel bought for the expansion. They’re all empty, ready for interior demolition.”

He started up the ladder, got out his knife, cut the seal, and then dialed in the combination he said was the same on all eight hatches. When he pushed the hatch door open, I heard a whoosh. Wind and light rain blasted down on us.

By the time I got out on the roof, Louis was ahead of me in the low light, moving gingerly across the roof, which was copper, ghostly green, slick, and steeply pitched. To the left, it was an eighty-foot fall to the hotel’s power plant, and to the right, a drop of the same distance into the hotel’s famous courtyard. The windows of the rooms overlooking the courtyard were glowing, giving enough light that when I happened to glance back toward the Avenue Montaigne, I spotted two figures moving around air-conditioning compressors.

“Louis. There they are,” I hissed.

“I know where they’re going,” he said, scrambling over to me. “Back into the hotel through that second hatch.”

We scuttled back to the near hatch, climbed back down the steep ladder, and started to run through the hallways again.

“Call hotel security,” I grunted. The pain in my leg had died to a throb.

“And risk a shoot-out in here?” Louis said. “Excusez-moi, but that’s a bad idea that would probably cost us our lucrative contract with the Plaza. Best thing we can do is let them think they’re home free, and follow them wherever they go.”

It made sense, so I didn’t argue. But by the time we’d reached the second hatch, it was open, and the rain was blowing hard into the stairway. We heard the slap of footsteps several floors below us.

We ran to the elevator. It came up from two floors below. We climbed in and hit the lobby button.

“There are only a few exits and all are on the first floor,” Louis gasped.

The elevator dropped, and then opened, and we spilled out into the loggia, which was even more packed than it had been thirty-five minutes before. I spotted Randall Peaks still at his post. Beyond the Saudi entourage some people moved, revealing Whitey and his companion strolling with their backs to us as if they had not a care in the world.

“They’re going to the crystal bar,” Louis said.

He’d no sooner said that than the two men took a right toward open doors. Just before they disappeared into the bar, Whitey happened to look back and saw us staring right at him from fifty yards away.

Chapter 40

THE NEXT FEW seconds seemed to unfold in slow motion.

Even as Louis and I started to move toward them, Whitey reached under his leather jacket and said something to his comrade, and they both twisted our way, pistols rising amid the happy cocktail hour din.

They each touched off two rounds. I’d expected the sound suppressors to still be on, but they weren’t, and the four loud shots shattered a mirror behind us and a large vase to our left.

Beautiful, rich, and powerful people started screaming and diving for the floor. Whitey and his buddy disappeared into the crystal bar. Louis yanked out his Glock and we started to run forward, jumping over patrons crawling for cover.

Before we could get even close to the bar, Randall Peaks and three other Saudi royal bodyguards blocked the way. They were set up in a defensive semicircle, backs to the terrified princesses. Their guns looked a heck of a lot bigger than Louis’s.

“Drop it or I will shoot,” Peaks roared in French, and then English.

“They were shooting at us!” I yelled. “We’re the good guys, Peaks!”

“Drop the gun now, or I will kill you.”

“Screw you,” Louis said. He turned and began running back the other way.

“Don’t shoot him!” I shouted. “We’re going to the street.”

When I spun around and headed after Louis, however, there was an unmistakable prickle at the back of my neck, a sensation that only happens when there’s a gun aimed my way. Ignoring it, I followed Louis through the lobby and out into the street.

I heard screams down the block. Whitey and the Nose jumped an iron fence that surrounded an outdoor seating area off the bar and were sprinting away from us.

We chased them down the Avenue Montaigne, up the Rue François 1er, and then north on the Rue de Marignan. But my hip was killing me, and they were far younger than Louis. By the time we hit the crowded sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées, we’d lost them.

We trudged back to the Plaza Athénée to find six police cars out front with their lights flashing, and a crowd growing on the sidewalk across from the hotel. At first the police tried to keep us out, but when Louis explained that we were not only witnesses to the shooting but the targets, we were allowed entry.

There were ten, maybe fifteen uniformed officers already inside, and four detectives from La Crim, including Investigateur Hoskins, who took one look at Louis and me and said, “Really? The second night in a row you’re involved in a shoot-out? Really?”

“Calm down, Sharen…investigateur,” Louis said. “They came after Jack. One of these men was the same pale guy who shot up Open Café.”

“That true?” Hoskins asked.

“He wore a pair of panty hose over his head, but I’d put money on it,” I said. “They were looking for the same woman they tried to kill last night.”

“Do we know why they’re after her?”

“Something to do with drugs,” I said.

“They didn’t say anything else to you?”

“Uh, no…wait. Yes. They asked if she was still smoking, and I said like a chimney, and then Louis started banging on the door.”

“Well, just so you know, you’ve both caused an international incident,” Hoskins said. “There were Saudi royals in there when the shooting started.”

“We noticed,” I said.

“If they and their bodyguards weren’t there, I might have caught them,” Louis said. “They blocked us. Threatened to shoot me.”

“What about royal family don’t you understand?” Hoskins asked.

“Last time I looked, France was a European country,” Louis snapped.

“And last time I looked, the Saudis were vital allies of France,” she retorted. “I guarantee I’m going to be hearing all sorts of flak over this.”

“My condolences,” Louis said. “What about Pincus?”

“Nothing more than you knew this morning,” she replied. “You’ll need to come into La Crim in the morning to make a statement. Both of you.”

“First thing,” I promised. “Can I go back to my room?”

“They were wearing gloves?” she asked.

“They were, and, like I said, panty hose over their heads. So I don’t think they left much evidence other than the hammer Whitey threw at me.”

“I’ll send an officer up to collect it,” she said, and then turned away.

It was almost eight when I left Louis. Despite all that had happened, I was going to make my date with Michele Herbert. When I reentered the suite, it felt unprotected, strange, and violated. I double-locked the balcony doors, took a shower, changed clothes, and went back out in less than fifteen minutes.

The police had begun letting witnesses leave, and the loggia was emptying out. The staff was clearly out of sorts, and several of them, including fair Elodie, the concierge, glared at me as I walked through the lobby. I guess word had gotten around that the bad guys had been trying to kill me, and somehow I’d become a villain for aiding in a breach of the Plaza’s legendary decorum.

When I got in the taxi and gave the driver the address and name of the restaurant Michele Herbert had suggested, I tried to compartmentalize and clear my mind, tried to look forward to the artist’s company and several glasses of wine.

But something came back to me, something Whitey had said when they had me semi-hog-tied on the bed. He hadn’t just asked about her smoking: he’d specifically mentioned the lighter on the chain around her neck.

What the hell was that all about?

Chapter 41

11th Arrondissement

10:30 p.m.

A LINE SNAKED down the sidewalk outside Le Chanticleer Rouge. Most of the patrons trying to get into the Red Rooster club were well dressed and attractive couples, plus a few single women.

“Unaccompanied males are not allowed in the club tonight,” called a bouncer who was walking along the line with a short, severe brunette carrying a clipboard and studying everyone they passed.

“You,” she said to a woman with a plunging bust. “You four behind her.”

The bouncer stood back to let the woman and two attractive and now happier couples go forward. He ignored the people complaining that they’d been in line longer. It didn’t matter. The Red Rooster was not a first come, first served kind of place. Like at Studio 54 in Manhattan back in the hero days of disco, you had to be selected to enter.

The bouncer and the “hostess” continued to move along the line, dismissing at least twenty people before stopping in front of a brunette with skin the color of fresh crème and a big black guy.

He wore sunglasses despite the hour and a sharp suit with an open-neck white shirt, and thin black driving gloves. When he smiled, a gold cap glowed on one of his top front teeth. He could have been anything from a rap mogul to a movie producer to a gangsta on holiday, and he certainly looked nothing like Captain Mfune of the French Army, currently assigned to École de Guerre.

The brunette’s attire only added to the couple’s mystery and allure. She wore green cat-eye contacts and carried a black snakeskin purse. Her sleek gray dress was sleeveless, and she wore black elbow-length gloves, black pumps, black hose, and a black pillbox hat with a modest lace veil.

“You two are in,” the hostess said, and the bouncer directed them forward.

“Told you I knew what it takes to get in here,” she said out of the corner of her mouth as they walked along the line, giving scant attention to the envy and resentment in the faces of those who’d been passed by.

“You called it, Amé,” the captain agreed.

A bouncer pulled open the door, and they were hit by a wave of electronic dance music. They entered an opulent lobby, bypassed a coat check, and went to a cashier’s counter, where Mfune paid the forty euro cover charge.

“You have been here before?” the cashier asked. “Or do you need a tour?”

“I’ve been,” Amé said. “I’ll show my friend the ropes.”

“You’ll find those in the dungeon,” the cashier reminded her, and then looked at the captain. “And please, no cell phones. Not even texting when you are inside. This is to protect your anonymity as well as that of the others who enjoy this refuge from the real world.”

“No cell phones,” Mfune said. “Got it.”

The cashier put neon bands on their wrists and said, “We close at four a.m. tonight, but last call is at three.”

“Good crowd?” Amé asked.

“Very sexy,” the cashier said. “Have fun, and please, no means no.”

“Always.”

Amé led the way through plush red curtains and into a vast space decorated as if it were a fantasy harem encampment in the desert, with palm trees and murals of sand dunes and oases on the high walls. Below them stood arabesque tents, all gold and black, some with their curtains open to reveal beds, and others already closed to wandering eyes.

Two large gilt birdcages hung from the ceiling. In them women writhed against each other, oblivious, it seemed, to the crowded floor below them, where fifty or sixty provocatively dressed people danced and pulsed with the techno music.

To the left there was a long bar crowded with hard drinkers and lascivious friends. Within moments of Mfune and Amé entering Le Chanticleer Rouge, couples and single women began offering to buy them drinks and teasing them about what could be enjoyed inside the tents.

Amé turned them all down, saying, “We’re voyeurs for now.”

The truth was that they were looking for someone. Ten minutes later, they spotted her at the satellite bar upstairs, drinking a salt-and-pepper martini. In her forties, with short silver hair and a long, lithe body clad in a pearl-colored pantsuit, she was watching a writhing group of people in a room with glass walls.

“Ready?” Amé asked.

Mfune nodded. “Let’s do this.”

They sidled up next to her and ordered drinks. It didn’t take long for the woman to take her eyes off the orgy and glance their way. The instant she did, she turned fully toward them as Amé had suspected she would. Based on her surveillance, she knew that the woman liked black men and bisexual white women.

“My, my,” the woman said. “And who might you two be?”

Amé pursed lips glossed ruby red and smiled. “Lynette and Nico. And you?”

“Lourdes,” she said. “I’ve never seen you here before. First time?”

“First time for Nico,” Amé said, squeezing Mfune’s hand. “Not for me. I used to come here regularly with my lipstick girlfriends.”

“I’ve done that too,” Lourdes said softly as she raised one eyebrow. “So fun.”

The captain said, “You’re quite beautiful, Lourdes.”

“And you, Nico, are the definition of a man’s man.”

“You have no idea,” Amé said mischievously.

Lourdes’s eyebrow went up again. “C’est vrai?”

“Shockingly true,” Amé said, and pressed back languidly against Mfune, who beamed to expose that gold tooth.

“I must say, you two have made me rather breathless,” Lourdes said, setting her drink down and fanning her face. “And my skin-look. It’s gooseflesh.”

“We could solve that,” Amé said, “and any other problem you have.”

“And I yours,” Lourdes said, beaming. “Shall we go someplace private?”

Chapter 42

LOURDES TRIED TO lead them into the dungeon, but Mfune said he’d feel better in one of the tents. Amé found an empty one at the back of the club.

She let Lourdes and the captain enter the tent first. Glancing about, she saw no one else in the immediate vicinity-at least not in the visible vicinity. As Amé let down the flaps and tied them shut, she heard the smack of a paddle on flesh from the tent to the left, and cries of orgasm to their right.

She turned and saw the king-size bed with fresh sheets, and the sex swing above it hanging from a cable that ran down through a hole in the tent peak. Lourdes was finishing the last of her drink and eyeing Mfune hungrily.

“Do you like textures, Lourdes?” Amé asked, sinuously stroking her black gloves one against the other.

“I like everything,” Lourdes said. “Engage my body. Engage my mind.”

“I guess that’s a yes.”

“It’s a definite yes,” Lourdes purred. “What did you have in mind?”

“We want to worship you,” Amé said.

“You’re our goddess tonight,” Mfune said.

“You don’t know how right you are,” Lourdes said huskily, as the captain moved behind her and pressed his hips against her back. She trailed her hand along the side of his leg.

Amé sandwiched the woman. She and Mfune caressed Lourdes through her clothes until she was trembling with desire.

“Show us how beautiful the goddess is,” Amé said, standing back.

Lourdes did a provocative striptease that left her naked except for her backstrap high heels.

“You are a goddess,” Mfune said.

“I want to see you too,” Lourdes said.

“Not yet,” Amé said. “Lie back, Lourdes. Lose yourself in pleasure.”

The woman hesitated, but only for a moment before scooting onto the bed and looking at them saucily. “I have to admit, being naked like this and you both in your clothes is a total turn-on.”

“Just you wait,” Amé said.

Mfune walked around to Lourdes’s feet and began stroking them with the gloves, moving his hands slowly up her calves and pressing her knees apart.

“God. Kiss me there,” Lourdes whispered.

“Not yet,” Amé said, climbing onto the bed behind her. Reaching over Lourdes’s shoulders, she caressed the woman’s breasts. “Lie back now and shut your eyes. It will heighten your senses, make your climax more powerful.”

The captain’s gloved hands were massaging Lourdes’s inner thighs now, and she gave in completely, sliding back off her elbows so that her head came naturally into Amé’s lap, where she sighed with contentment and closed her eyes.

“You don’t know how much I’ve needed this,” Lourdes said.

“We see that,” Amé said, looking at Mfune as he moved his gloves higher.

Amé waited until Lourdes’s hips began a slow, sensuous squirm of anticipation, then reached over for one of the pillows.

With the naked woman’s eyes still closed and her mouth slightly parted in pleasure, Amé brought the pillow smashing down on the woman’s face even as Mfune pinned her legs and hips to the bed. Lourdes almost immediately began to fight and writhe. Her arms shot up, grabbing for Amé.

Her hands wrapped around the fabric of the black gloves covering Amé’s forearms and tried to tear them apart. She was strong, but Amé was stronger and threw her full weight onto the pillow even as Lourdes began to scream and whine. Muffled by the pillow, however, the noises sounded no different than other cries of ecstasy and spasm echoing from the tents all around them.

A little more than a minute later, Lourdes’s struggles lessened, and then she collapsed. They held her there long after the tension and the spirit had left her.

“Check her heart,” Amé whispered as the people in the tent to their left started paddling again.

Mfune reached up, rested his hand on her chest a moment, and whispered, “She’s finished.”

Only then did Amé allow herself a long exhale. She lifted the pillow to find Lourdes’s mouth slack and her open eyes dull and still.

“You’re a martyr to the cause,” Amé whispered. “You’re a hero, Lourdes.”

“Let’s get busy,” Mfune said. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

Twenty minutes later, after peering out a slit in the tent flap and making sure there was no one wandering this part of the swingers’ club, they exited quickly. Mfune carried the sheets in a bundle under his arm. Amé drew the flaps of the tent shut, with the Do Not Disturb sign still up. They walked away knowing that under the rules that governed the Red Rooster, no one would enter the tent before closing, and that was hours away.

They carried the sheets to the other side of the club and buried them in a hamper. Amé went into the women’s toilet, stripped off her gloves, and put them in her purse before washing her hands with scented soap to mask the odor of bleach. Only then did they head for the exit to Le Chanticleer Rouge.

“Going so soon?” the cashier said. “The party’s just getting started.”

“We’ve had our fun,” Amé said without turning back. “And we both have to work in the morning.”

Chapter 43

6th Arrondissement

April 9, 12:20 a.m.

WHEN THE WAITRESS cleared her throat, I startled.

Looking around, I realized that Michele Herbert and I were the only patrons left in the restaurant. It seemed like minutes since we’d walked in the door, but we’d been talking for nearly three hours.

At first our conversation had been directed at the death of René Pincus and the tag. The graffiti expert had been getting pictures of the tag in various places in and around Paris. As of early that evening, she’d received pictures of sixty-two different iterations of the tag, but no explanation of its meaning.

I told her about the men who’d shot up the Plaza Athénée, and their interest in the cigarette lighter that Kim Kopchinski kept on a chain around her neck. Michele agreed that it was an odd thing to ask about.

“There’s a lot of danger in your life, I think,” she said.

“At times,” I said.

“Tell me about your life, Jack.”

Usually I play things close to the vest, but Michele looked so radiant, and acted so, well, empathetic, that I started opening up to her. I told her about my fucked-up childhood and my dysfunctional family, especially my dad, who’d been a cop, a private investigator, a swindler, and a crook before dying as an inmate in a California penitentiary.

I told her about my mom’s death, and about my borderline-psycho twin brother, Tommy, and some of the stuff he’d pulled in the past. I even told her about the marines, my time in Afghanistan, and the helicopter crash that still haunted me.

“How terrible it must have been for you and your friend Del Rio to walk away from it when so many others died,” she’d said.

“It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” I admitted. “In some ways I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

“We all have such moments in our lives,” Michele said. “These are the times that define us, no?”

“In some ways, I guess how we handle tragedy defines us,” I replied. “Have you had such moments?”

She got sad then, and nodded. “I saw my parents die when I was nine.”

“Jesus. How awful. What happened?”

“A train accident in Italy on their twelfth anniversary,” she said.

Michele was sent to her only living relative, her mother’s older sister, who was divorced and had two children of her own. Her aunt squandered Michele’s inheritance and treated her horribly.

“I found art in school and retreated into it,” she said. “Out of that loss and that mistreatment came my life and my life’s work.”

That’s when the waitress cleared her throat.

“We should go,” I said.

We apologized and left a generous tip. Outside I was more than pleased when Michele put her arm through mine. We walked and talked for another hour. Around two, we were strolling across the Pont Saint-Louis.

“I could talk like this all night with you, but I must go home,” Michele said as we crossed the bridge. “I have an eleven o’clock class.”

A cab pulled onto the bridge and I hailed it. Opening the rear door, I said, “Thanks for the fine company and conversation.”

“I had a wonderful evening.”

“I’ll call tomorrow, see if you’ve gotten any more pictures of the tag.”

“Or I can call you.”

“Either way,” I said, and closed the door, thinking she was a remarkable woman. Gorgeous, yes, but a whole lot more.

After watching the taxi drive off, I headed east, hoping to find another cab on the Boulevard Henri IV. Halfway there, my cell phone rang.

I dug the phone out of my pants, looked at caller ID, frowned.

“Up late, Louis?”

“I was just awoken by Investigateur Hoskins, who needs our forensics help again,” he growled. “AB-16 has struck a third time, and once more they didn’t pull any punches.”

“Who was the victim?”

“Lourdes Latrelle,” he said. “One of France’s foremost intellectuals and best-known writers.”

Chapter 44

6th Arrondissement

2:58 a.m.

WEARING GLOVES, ROCK-CLIMBING shoes, and dark clothes, Epée adjusted the straps on his knapsack as he walked along the Rue Mazarine. His heart was beating wildly because he believed that the greatest act of his life was at hand.

It was audacious. It was daring. It was absolutely in-your-face, and Epée was beside himself with excitement. He hung a right onto the narrow sidewalk that ran between the Rue de Seine and a huge, five-story limestone building. The road ahead curved left. The wall of the building traveled a deeper arc, which created a larger, triangular space between it and the road.

Motorcyclists often parked there during the day, when it was in use almost constantly by pedestrians. But at that hour, the Rue de Seine and the sidewalks that bordered it were empty. Epée broke into a jog toward an arched passage, seeing through it to the bright lights of the Quai de Conti.

Instead of entering the passageway, he looked around one last time before taking two steps to a stout metal downspout that dropped straight down from the eaves and roof high overhead. Hefty metal brackets every thirty inches held the drainpipe solidly to the wall. Epée grabbed hold of the second bracket and then stepped up onto the first, finding that the gummy soft soles of the climbing shoes easily clung to the protruding half inch of metal.

In seconds, Epée clambered up the pipe and onto the narrow second floor ledge, where he paused to take in the scene below him. Still empty. He did the same at the third floor, and was near the top of the drain when he heard voices.

He had to freeze in an awkward position when a couple came through the arched walkway from the Quai de Conti, lingered, and kissed before finally continuing south on the Rue de Seine. Epée’s fingers were cramping before the couple was gone, and for the first time he thought about the long fall to the pavement.

No way. Not when he was this close to becoming a legend.

Epée had rehearsed this climb dozens of times. He’d taken photographs of the route from every angle and pored over them, studying every inch of the building’s face, eaves, and roofline until he believed he could climb it blindfolded.

He shinnied up against the eaves where the downspout disappeared. He got his right foot up onto a ledge about three inches wide.

Epée rotated his body over into a three-point bridge, with his left foot free. His core trembled as he pushed hard against his right hand and right toe before he stabbed up and over the eaves with his left hand, catching the bottom of the roof. He took a strained breath and then transferred his weight entirely to his left hand, and dangled there for a split second before throwing up his right hand and grabbing the roof.

Grunting with effort, he pulled his head, shoulders, and ribs up onto the roof. He scooted sideways into a valley where several rooflines came together and squirmed his hips and legs up into it.

Epée lay there, soaking wet and panting with effort, but also knowing that the worst of it had been conquered. When he’d regained some of his strength, he got up on all fours and used opposing pressure to ascend the roof as a climber would a chimney opening in a rock. He made the ridge a few moments later and sat there, straddling it.

Before la crise, with the spotlights shining on the front of the building, he’d have been easy to spot up there. But the recession had forced Paris to shut off the lights on its famous buildings and monuments after midnight. In the dark like this, he might as well have been a phantom.

Twisting around, Epée quickly surveyed the avenue and the pedestrian bridge that crossed the Seine to the Louvre Museum, which was also dark. There was no one on the bridge that he could see, and very few cars on the avenue. He got up on the curving peak of the roof and followed it toward a giant domed tower that rose fifty feet above the main building.

To his relief, he found the safety line, a three-quarter-inch cable discreetly mounted up the side of the tower, exactly where he’d spotted it the month before. Men cleaning the walls of grime, restoring the pale limestone color, had put the line up, and Epée used it now. Unzipping his jacket, he felt for the mechanical devices known as Jumars that were attached to a harness he wore and favored by rock climbers. The cams of these devices ran only in one direction: up. When pressure was applied downward, they locked.

Epée unclipped one of the ascenders. He attached it and the one still tied to the harness to the safety line, and then frogged up the side of the tower, taking rests at the various articulations in the dome.

The last ledge was underhung, and Epée had to make another contortionist move to get up onto it, right next to the base of the cupola. In daylight or under lights, the mosaics were a deep, cerulean blue. But now they were black as coal, which suited Epée’s purposes perfectly.

He got in position in line with the Louvre and the Pont des Arts bridge, looking straight down on the plaza in front of the building and the Quai de Conti. He paused a moment to reflect on the sheer magnitude of the moment.

Then he got out the spray paint and set to work.

Chapter 45

11th Arrondissement

3:40 a.m.

ACCORDING TO LOUIS, Le Chanticleer Rouge was the greatest of Parisian clubs for les échangistes, the swingers of France. Like most things French when it came to sex, the practice of going to places like the Red Rooster to engage in anonymous physical relations was accepted with a shrug.

Politicians and their wives did it. So did the big bankers and their girlfriends. That infamous chairman of the International Monetary Fund practically lived in one of these clubs. So did well-known painters, musicians, and television personalities, and, of course, writers.

That last category included Lourdes Latrelle, the famous French author, novelist, and television personality, who, ironically enough, was best known for being an expert on the politics of gender and sex. I say ‘ironically’ not only because her corpse was found in a swingers’ club, but because she’d been hung upside down and naked from a sex swing.

Black parachute cord tied to her wrists ran out to the tent supports and held her arms in that upside-down-cross position. As with the other victims, her face was bloated by the blood rushing to her head. A crude version of the AB-16 tag had been drawn on the victim’s belly with lipstick.

“That’s a first,” I said. “Defacement of the corpse.”

Investigateur Hoskins said nothing. For the first time since I’d met her, I saw indecision and uncertainty on her face. Claudia Vans, Private Paris’s chief forensics tech, was on the bed, examining the body.

“I’ve got something,” Vans said, holding up a pair of tweezers. “Pubic hairs. Three of them. And obviously, because of the wax job, not Ms. Latrelle’s.”

“That helps,” Hoskins said. “Nothing like DNA. Let me know if you find anything else organic.”

Vans nodded. Hoskins suggested that we leave the tent.

Out in the hall, the investigateur said, “Louis, I believe you’re right.”

“C’est vrai?” he said, arching his eyebrows in a way that suggested she rarely admitted he was on the right side of anything.

Hoskins nodded uncomfortably. “The position of the body is symbolic. And because the victim is Lourdes Latrelle, it takes AB-16 to a whole other level.”

Louis paused with muted delight before looking to me. “It would be like a high-profile movie or television star being murdered in the States.”

“I thought you said she was an intellectual author,” I said.

“The French idolize the brilliant person,” Hoskins explained. “The person who is above the fray, living the life of the mind while facing none of reality’s consequences. Latrelle is a cultural icon, a member of L’Académie Française, for God’s sake.”

Louis said, “The news of this murder will strike deep. Mark my words.”

Behind us a man said, “I am marking them. And unfortunately I couldn’t agree with you more.”

We all turned to find a short, older, painfully stooped man in a gray suit. He was balanced on a cane and had to twist his head to peer up at us through thick, round, wire-rimmed glasses. “Which is why we are going to keep all information about this crime scene from the press,” he added.

He pointed the cane at Louis, then at me, and said, “You two shouldn’t even be here, but I’ll allow it because of Private’s proven forensics work. That does not, however, excuse you from my gag order. Are we clear?”

“Crystal clear, Juge Fromme,” Louis said.

The older man came closer. Every movement seemed to cause him great discomfort, and he had to will himself beyond it to crane his head up at me.

“I am Guillaume Fromme, le juge,” he said in perfect English, offering his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you and your company, Monsieur Morgan.”

“That’s nice of you to say so, sir,” I replied, taking his hand, which was surprisingly large, leather-palmed, and strong. “What exactly is your role here?”

“In the French legal system, a juge is brought in on all major cases, especially those involving murder,” he said. “I am not a judge in the U.S. sense-more an investigative magistrate. Someone who will oversee the case from a legal perspective until a defendant is brought to court.”

He looked at Hoskins and Louis. “Do I speak correctly?”

They nodded, Hoskins unhappily.

Fromme must have seen it because he lifted his cane toward the detective and said, “It is unusual to see someone like me at a crime scene so early in an investigation, which has made Investigateur Hoskins here nervous. But I am under orders. And based on my review of the case files to date, I agree with them. The position of the bodies and the photographs found in Monsieur Henri Richard’s pied-à-terre suggest that AB-16 poses a clear and present danger to Paris and to France.”

Chapter 46

FROMME MOVED AS if he was walking on nails before stopping in front of the tent where Lourdes Latrelle hung. He stood there several seconds before turning back to us, his face gone grave.

“Who found her?” he asked. “Who’s seen her like this?”

“An employee of the club opened the drapes after someone complained that they had been closed for hours,” Hoskins replied. “She had the good sense not to scream, and got the manager, who called us.”

“So two people besides those present at this moment?” le juge demanded.

“Yes, I think that’s right, sir,” Hoskins said.

“I wish to speak with the manager and the employee,” Fromme said. “Any leads on who was with her in the club before she entered the tent?”

“Yes,” Hoskins said. “Several patrons and the bartender said Madame Latrelle was watching an orgy when she was approached by a large francophone African male with a gold upper front tooth and a pale, brunette Caucasian woman with green catlike eyes.”

This was the first Louis and I had heard of the couple, but I remembered that someone at Chez Pincus had mentioned that the woman Henri Richard had brought to the restaurant once wore cat-eye contacts.

I said, “You catch them on tape?”

“God no,” Louis said. “A place like this, Jack, is based on anonymity, and a belief in personal space. The French do not like security cameras.”

“Especially in their sex clubs?”

“Now you understand,” Louis said.

“Sketch artists?”

Hoskins said, “That we can take care of.”

When the investigator and magistrate moved off to discuss matters off-limits to Private Paris, I checked my watch. It was nearly five in the morning, and I was running on fumes.

I was about to tell Louis that I was going back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep when something he’d said earlier came back to me.

“Wasn’t Henri Richard a member of L’Académie Française?” I asked.

“Oui,” Louis said. “But if you think there is a connection, it stops with Lourdes. Chef Pincus, as highly regarded as he was, was not a member.”

“That shoots that.”

Then Louis stared off into the distance and muttered, “Unless…”

“Unless what?” I asked.

“Come, Jack,” he said, hurrying toward the exit. “We must go talk to the only other Parisian I know who gets up and goes to work as early as I do.”

Chapter 47

6th Arrondissement

5:15 a.m.

LOUIS AND I climbed from a taxi on the Quai de Conti across the Seine from the Louvre. In the glow of streetlamps, I could make out the massive curved bulwark of a building and the silhouette of a domed tower that loomed above it.

“What is this place?” I asked, feeling irritable after dozing off in the cab.

“The Institut de France,” he said. “The epicenter of French culture.”

“What does it do?” I said, following him across a courtyard in front of the grand building.

“On a practical level, the institute oversees about ten thousand different foundations concerned with everything from French historical sites to museums and castles,” Louis said. “The five academies within the institute were formed back in the days of Louis XIV, and designed to preserve and celebrate the French culture, language, arts, sciences, and our systems of law and politics. The members represent the best of France, and must be voted in.”

“There’s a nomination process?”

He bobbed his head. “Anyone can be nominated. You can even nominate yourself. But then you must run a quiet campaign, almost like a political race, in which you prove that you are one of les immortels, the best of France.”

Louis stopped before a door. “Hold on a second.”

He punched in a number on his cell phone, waited, and laughed. “It’s Louis. I knew you were up. Listen, I’m out front. Can you buzz us in? It’s a matter of great importance, and potentially involves the institute.” Louis listened and said, “We shall meet you there.”

The door buzzed and we entered a dimly lit hallway that led us to staircases and other hallways that Louis seemed to know intimately.

“So who are we meeting?” I asked.

“The director,” he said.

“And how do you know this person?”

“The director is an old, discreet, and dear friend,” Louis said.

He went to some double doors and opened them, revealing a breathtaking room composed of four large and dramatic alcoves that met at a central amphitheater. The massive arches that defined the alcoves also supported a cupola that soared above the amphitheater to a dome built of stone buttresses and stained glass. The glass was starting to glow blue and gold with the dawn.

A woman in a red pantsuit with a blue and white scarf about her neck stood below the cupola on an oval rug in the dead center of the amphitheater. She was talking to a younger man in a crisp white shirt and red tie. She was in her fifties and strikingly handsome, with silver-blond hair.

“This is where all members of Les Académies meet,” Louis said quietly. “You could say that there is no place more French than this one room.”

Before I could reply, the younger man turned and headed up the far set of stairs. The woman spotted us, grinned, and came over quickly to embrace Louis and buss his cheeks. “How are you, old friend?” she said in French.

“I am magnificent as always, chéri,” Louis said in English, before gesturing to me. “Allow me to introduce Monsieur Jack Morgan.”

She reached out to shake my hand and began speaking to me in perfect British English. “Pricilla Meeks, director of the institute. Very nice to meet you, Mr. Morgan. Louis has spoken highly of you in the past.”

I shook her hand, wondering how she could speak both languages with such perfect accents. But before I could dope that out, the spotlights went on outside. They hit high on the cupola, illuminating the interior of the tower while Louis went straight to the matter at hand.

“Was René Pincus up for a vote on admission to Les Académies?” he asked.

Pricilla Meeks sobered and said, “You know I can’t discuss things like that.”

“Pincus is dead,” Louis grumbled. “So is Henri Richard, a member of the academy. And now, I hate to say it, Lourdes Latrelle.”

Meeks gasped. “Lourdes! My God, Louis. How?”

“I can’t get into the particulars under orders from a magistrate. But she’s dead. I saw her body myself.”

Meeks sank into one of the plush blue seats, shaking her head. “What a tragedy. Why would anyone target-”

“Pricilla!” the man with the red tie cried from the far staircase. “Someone has defaced the cupola!”

The director jumped up and we had a hard time keeping up with her as she ran through the hallways and outside. The sun was just rising. It was difficult to see from the front courtyard, but when we retreated across the street and onto the Pont des Arts, the pedestrian bridge that spans the Seine, we got the full effect.

High on the curved front face of the cupola’s dome, someone had painted a huge version of the AB-16 tag and an inverted cross in three parallel colors: red, black, and fluorescent green.

“My God,” Meeks said, clearly horrified at the way the graffiti seemed to glow in an otherworldly way against the dark blue skin of the dome. “Why are they doing this?”

“AB-16 is declaring war,” Louis said, as grim as I’ve ever seen him.

“On what?” I asked. “The institute?”

“Think of the symbolism and the placement,” Louis said. “AB-16 is making war on the entire French culture.”

Chapter 48

I THOUGHT ABOUT that, and maybe Louis was right. Paris was his city and France his country. He would know the symbolism and the meaning of this sort of thing. And yet I wondered if there was more to it than that.

“Do you have any current or former disgruntled employees at the institute?” I asked.

“Everyone in France is disgruntled to some extent these days,” Meeks said dourly. “But actually, people who work at the institute are by and large happy. Unless they really screw up, the job is for life, and it is a life of and for the culture, which they love, or they wouldn’t get hired in the first place.”

“No one has screwed up lately?”

Meeks said, “In answer to your question, Mr. Morgan, no. It’s been some time since we’ve had a major screwup. I run a tight ship.”

“Okay, are there any current or former campaigners, people trying to be elected into one of the academies, who are embittered by their exclusion?”

Meeks hesitated and said, “Many great Frenchmen and -women were never elected to Les Académies, including Victor Hugo and Marie Curie.”

I picked up on the hesitation and said, “Since they’re both dead, we’ll put them out of consideration. I’m talking the last year or two.”

Meeks glanced at Louis before sighing. “There is one who has been giving us-uh, me-many headaches.”

“A name?”

She seemed to struggle inside.

I said, “AB-16 is targeting your members, Madame Meeks. I should think you’d want to protect them.”

That got to her. “Of course I wish to protect them!”

News vehicles pulled up in front of the institute. Cameramen got out and filmed the tag up on the cupola.

“Who is it, Pricilla?” Louis grumbled.

“Jacques Noulan,” she said, and filled us in.

Noulan, a noted Paris fashion designer, was evidently infuriated when he lost an open seat in the academy of fine arts to Millie Fleurs, a more famous member of the fashion world. Meeks said that Noulan, who was more an expert marketer than an innovator, had organized a smear campaign after the election, trying to get Fleurs unseated. He was unsuccessful.

“He made threats to me at a party recently,” Meeks said. “He was quite drunk, and belligerent.”

“He unstable enough to start killing academy members?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said, playing with an earring.

“You just did,” Louis said.

“Pricilla!” cried a female television news reporter who’d come out onto the bridge to get a better angle on the cupola and the tag. “Have you heard about Lourdes Latrelle?”

Meeks turned toward the reporter, and the klieg lights went on.

Squinting, I took a step back as Meeks replied, “I have heard, and it’s a tragedy. France has lost another of her immortals.”

Investigateur Hoskins and Juge Fromme climbed from a police car and were swarmed by reporters. The tag’s placement and the murders had struck a deep nerve. No doubt about it now.

“I still think we want to talk to Monsieur Noulan, and sooner than later,” I said, backing away from Meeks and the journalists grilling her.

“Why?” Louis said, unconvinced.

“From an L.A. point of view, this is starting to feel like a well-organized marketing campaign with the tag as a brand,” I said as I headed toward the west bank and the Louvre. “Noulan is supposedly strong at this kind of thing, right?”

Louis stopped, looked back over his shoulder at the tag, and said, “With the coordination and the brutal precision of the murders, it feels more militant to me.”

Chapter 49

Pantin, northeastern suburbs of Paris

8:35 a.m.

HAJA LIFTED THE welding mask to study the latest muscle group she’d been working on, deciding that it suggested the beast’s raw power but didn’t overstate it, at least up close. She’d have to climb down and get a different perspective to tell for sure.

But when the sculptor reached the floor of the old linen factory, Émile Sauvage opened the door that led to the war room and called out to her, “Haja, you need to see this.”

She took one more look at her work in progress, sighed, and hurried through the steel door. At twenty-five by fifteen, the room was windowless. The wall to Haja’s left was covered in whiteboards. Across the top it said, “AB-16.”

Underneath there was an appointment calendar of sorts with dates on a long horizontal axis, hours in military time stacked on the vertical axis, and cryptic notations in the boxes.

The wall opposite the door featured fifty black AK-47 7.62mm assault rifles standing upright in an improvised gun rack. Boxes of ammunition stamped “For disposal” were stacked below the rifles, along with empty magazines and a thick, rolled-up Oriental rug.

Captain Mfune sat beside the rug, oiling the action and barrel shroud of one of the rifles. Epée lay on a couch watching a television screen that showed a close-up of the AB-16 tag up on the cupola.

“There it is again!” he cried. “They keep showing it over and over!”

“I knew putting it there would do the trick,” Amé said.

“A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed,” said Mfune, returning the now gleaming rifle to its spot on the rack.

The screen cut away to show the entrance to the Red Rooster, along with an author photo of Lourdes Latrelle.

Epée said, “Your execution was brilliant too, Captain. The great minds are under fire. That’s all they’re talking about besides the tag.”

“And we got out clean,” Amé said. “The mystery of AB-16 intact.”

“Perhaps too intact,” Sauvage said. “They think this is solely about Les Académies.”

“The slow burn is critical to mass awareness,” Amé insisted. “You have to let them chew on the mystery of it, employ their imagination to suggest answers, so that when the true scenario is revealed, it comes as even more of a shock to the population.”

“A call to action,” Mfune said.

“Exactly,” Amé said, snapping her fingers. “If we make the next few moves well, AB-16 will be bigger than the Dreyfus Affair.”

The screen jumped away from coverage of Lourdes Latrelle’s murder to an interview with Pricilla Meeks, the Institut de France’s director, who was out on the bridge with the tagged cupola visible behind her.

Haja spotted two men behind Meeks. They looked familiar.

Did she know them?

The screen cut to an exterior shot of La Crim and a shaken Investigateur Hoskins, who was vowing to track down AB-16 at all costs.

“I have been authorized to bring in as many detectives as is necessary to solve these murders,” Hoskins said. “We have even brought in the world-famous Private agency to work forensics and as consultants on the case.”

That provoked silence in the room until Mfune looked at Sauvage and said, “Private has a strong reputation, Major. A first-class operation.”

Sauvage said nothing, just twisted his head as if adjusting his collar.

“Can you rewind that?” Haja asked. “Back to when Meeks was talking?”

“Sure,” Amé said, and backed the feed up.

“Stop there,” Haja said, and then stepped closer to study the men behind the institute’s director. “I know these two. I saw them outside the mosque the other day.”

“Are you sure?” Sauvage asked, engaged again.

“Positive,” she said. “I never forget a face, Émile. The older one is French, but I think the other one is American.”

“Then we have a problem,” said Epée, who’d lost color. “The old one is Louis Langlois. He used to be a top investigator with La Crim.”

“How do you know that?” Haja demanded.

“He arrested my father for burglary when I was a kid,” the tagger said. “I think he runs Private’s Paris office now.”

“I’ll check,” Amé said, grabbing a laptop. A moment later, she said, “It’s Langlois. And the American is Jack Morgan, the owner of Private and the guy who found the Harlows last year.”

Haja knew exactly what she was talking about. Who didn’t? Thom and Jennifer Harlow, Hollywood’s most famous couple, had been kidnapped along with their three children. Morgan and Private L.A. had found and rescued the family in Mexico.

She felt minor panic ripple through her. Why had Morgan and Langlois been at the mosque that day?

Mfune and Epée were upset as well.

“Those Private guys,” the tagger complained. “I read about them in Paris Match last year. They cut corners, break laws. They’re not like normal cops. They never give up once they get on something, especially Morgan.”

Though his arms were crossed, Sauvage smiled. “No, they’re not like normal cops,” he said. “And Morgan and Langlois would appear to be formidable foes. But with a little creativity, I think Private Paris can be neutralized without much change in our original plans.”

“How?” Mfune demanded.

“We’ll put a pincer move on them, and squash them like bugs.”

Chapter 50

8th Arrondissement

10 a.m.

THE DESIGN STUDIO and haute couture showroom of Jacques Noulan was on the Rue Clément Marot, only a couple of blocks from the Plaza Athénée-a plus given the fact that I hadn’t slept in thirty hours. I planned on talking to the designer and then getting some much needed sack time.

But when Louis and I reached the reception desk, we were told that Noulan had come down with the flu several days before and was convalescing at his country home in Nance. When we asked for a phone number and address, we were politely told that it was impossible to disturb him. Louis left his card and asked that Noulan call as soon as he returned to work.

“Convenient that he’s out of touch,” I said outside.

“I grant you that, Jack.”

I was about to tell Louis that I was going to the hotel to get some sleep when he gestured down the street and said, “That must feel like a thorn in Noulan’s ass. Maybe this is about jealousy and revenge after all.”

Yawning, I said, “I’m not following you.”

“Millie Fleurs,” he replied. “That’s her shop not a block away, Jack.”

Flashing on my bed at the Plaza, I sighed and said, “Maybe she can shed light on the situation.”

We crossed the street and went down the block to the shop. The shop lights were on, but the door was locked. It was one of those places where you had to buzz to get in. A tall, thin man in an impeccably tailored mouse-gray suit was working behind the counter. We must not have struck him as impressive because he glanced at us on a computer screen, grimaced, and went back to ignoring us.

Louis buzzed a second time and held up his Private badge to the camera. The man studied it, curled his upper lip against a pencil-thin mustache, and then buzzed us in. Surprisingly, the shop had very few actual clothes, but it had many life-size black-and-white photos of models wearing Millie Fleurs’s gowns and evening wear. Samples of the designer’s famous purses occupied translucent pedestals around the room, but otherwise the place was empty and white save for the fitting mirrors and counter workstation.

“Yes? Can I help you?” the man behind the counter asked in a voice that suggested he had zero interest whatsoever in helping us. “This is the haute couture shop. Perhaps you’d be more interested in the ready-to-wear line? It’s a few blocks from-”

“We’re not here to buy,” Louis grumbled. “We’re here to talk to Madame Fleurs.”

“Yes, well, wouldn’t we all like to?” he sniffed. “I’m afraid that’s out of the question. You’ll have to call for an appointment, and the soonest time she has is three months out.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He hesitated, twitched his mustache, and said, “Laurent Alexandre.”

“Mr. Alexandre, is Millie Fleurs here?”

“No,” he said, and turned away. “I am the only one-”

Then a woman called out, “Laurent, are you down there?”

Unfazed at being caught fibbing, he hurried toward a curtain at the rear of the shop, calling, “I’ll be right up. No need to-”

The curtain parted. A woman who reminded me of Shirley MacLaine appeared. Wearing black tights, gold slippers, and a crème tunic, she had a dancer’s posture. Her hair was pulled back in a girlish ponytail. She shook a black fabric sample at Alexandre.

“This is not the fabric I ordered for the princess’s cocktail dress.”

“Of course it is, Millie,” Alexandre said wearily.

“It looks wrong.”

“It’s what you ordered. I checked myself.”

“It’s not good enough for the princess!” she protested.

“It will have to be,” her assistant said. “She’s coming tomorrow morning.”

When Millie Fleurs looked ready to continue her argument, Alexandre gestured at us. “Besides, these men would like to speak with you about…what is it about? And who are you?”

“We are with Private,” Louis said, walking toward Fleurs with his badge and ID visible. “And we are here to talk about Jacques Noulan and murder.”

Millie Fleurs’s eyes went wide. “Noulan has been killed?”

“No, no,” I said. “But as you probably know by now, Lourdes Latrelle has been murdered, and-”

“Lourdes is dead?” she cried, her hand covering her heart. “And you think Noulan did it!”

“Madame Fleurs, please,” Louis said. “If you would just let us-”

“You were right about those e-mails,” Fleurs said to her assistant. “The great Noulan has lost his mind and gone homicidal.”

It took us a few minutes to get them up to speed on the developments of the past twenty-four hours, including the fresh graffiti tag on the cupola of the Institut de France.

This all seemed to dumbfound her. “So you think Noulan is targeting the academy for letting me in and not him? And what does this ‘AB-16’ mean?”

“We don’t know,” Louis said. “Has he threatened you? Noulan?”

She made a throwaway gesture with the black fabric swatch and said, “Jacques has been threatening me since I would not sleep with him thirty-five years ago.”

Fleurs explained that she had worked as a designer for Noulan early in her career, but after he tried to make his bed part of the work arrangement, she quit and started her own company. For nearly three decades, he had gone out of his way to make disparaging remarks about her designs, and when she was elected to the academy, he went ballistic and started sending her threatening e-mails.

“Can you print them out, Laurent?” she asked. “Bring them to the studio?”

“Of course, Millie,” her assistant said, and went behind the counter.

“I’m sorry, messieurs, but you’ll have to come along if you wish to speak further,” she said, heading toward the curtain. “One of my most important customers is coming tomorrow for a fitting, and I’m still the cocktail dress short. I’ll probably be up all night finishing.”

We followed her. I happened to glance at Alexandre as I passed, and saw beside the computer a sketch pad with a drawing of a dramatic black cocktail dress on it-probably what he’d been working on when we rang the shop bell.

Fleurs led us behind the curtain and up a steep staircase to a workshop with two cutting tables, three industrial sewing machines, and four mannequins, three of which sported dresses: one maroon, another white, and the third crème-colored. On the wall behind them hung sketches of those same dresses with notations regarding fabric choices, color, and stitching instructions.

The designer gestured to the dresses. “What do you think?”

“Stunning,” Louis said. “Never have I seen such beauty.”

Fleurs raised an eyebrow at him, and then at me.

“Remarkable enough for a princess,” I said.

The designer smiled. “I hope so.”

“A Saudi princess?” Louis asked.

“Who else can afford haute couture these days?” Fleurs said. “There are fewer than two hundred customers in the world for one-of-a-kind Parisian dresses, and ninety percent of them are Saudi royalty.”

“This is true?” Louis said, astonished. “Where do they wear them?”

The designer laughed. “At women-only parties in Riyadh, where even their husbands don’t get to see their hundred thousand dollar dresses. And they wear them when they visit Paris. They wear their robes and veil until they clear Saudi airspace, and then poof! The veils and robes come off and-”

“I have them here, Millie,” said Alexandre, who held a sheaf of paper.

“Let them look,” she said.

The assistant handed Louis the papers, and he scanned them and said, “Have you shown these to the police?”

Fleurs looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t because the rumor is that Noulan is sick, perhaps with early dementia. I figured these e-mails were due to that.”

“She’s too kind in some ways,” Alexandre told me.

That made the designer harden. “He was my mentor once, Laurent. I still admire his genius. Maybe he deserves it, but I thought it would be a crime to run his reputation through the mud if all that was going on was senility and spite.”

“Three people dead,” her assistant replied, and then looked at us in alarm, as if he had just realized something. “Do you think Millie is in danger?”

“You are still a member of Les Académies?” Louis asked.

“Election is for life,” Fleurs replied.

“Then I suggest you take every precaution,” I said. “At least until the police have a suspect in hand.”

“Perhaps you should finish the last dress at home,” Alexandre said.

“Nonsense,” the designer snapped. “This is my atelier. No one is scaring me away from it, at least until the princess is pleased and a check has been written. There’s too much riding on this. You of all people should know that.”

Her assistant nodded, but he wasn’t happy. “You are the boss, Millie. As you wish.”

Chapter 51

MY CELL PHONE rang me awake after a much needed nap back in my suite at the Plaza. Groping for the phone on the nightstand, I knocked it to the floor and had to turn on the light. By the time I had the phone in hand, the ringing had stopped. When I checked caller ID, it said, “Michele Herbert.”

Before calling her back, I went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. My cell rang again, and I answered, “How’s my favorite art professor?”

“I wouldn’t know, Jack,” Justine said.

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize it was you.”

“I got that,” Justine said coolly. “Anyway, I’m just leaving UCLA Medical Center. Sherman Wilkerson has come out of the coma.”

“Thank God,” I replied. “How is he?”

“The doctors say he could be a lot worse.”

That made my heart sink. “That bad?”

“He’s disoriented and had no idea who I was, even after I identified myself for the fourth time,” Justine replied. “But he knows who you are, and he remembers that you are protecting his granddaughter.”

“You didn’t tell him we lost her, did you?”

“No, I figured it would upset him too much,” she replied, and then paused. “The problem is he thinks Kim is twenty, and taking a junior year in Paris.”

“Oh, that’s sad.”

“Heartbreaking, actually,” Justine said. “He kept talking about how she loved hot chocolate, and how her favorite place in Paris served the best hot chocolate in the world.”

“Okay…”

“I’m just giving you a report. Nothing on your end?”

“Kim’s vanished. And honestly, we haven’t had a minute to look for her.”

“Who has the beef with Les Académies?” she asked.

“Jacques Noulan, for one.”

“Noulan,” she said, impressed. “I owned one of his dresses once. Made me look glamorous.”

“You always look glamorous.”

“Sweet,” she said, softening. “And you almost always look dashing.”

“How’s Cruz’s mother?”

“Fading,” she said. “Going into congestive heart failure.”

“Sucks.”

“It does. I’ll be back to talk with Sherman in the morning, and I’ll call you afterward with an update.”

“That works,” I said, and hung up.

After a deliciously hot shower and a shave, I tried Michele Herbert and got her machine. I left a message that I was sorry to have missed her call. I dressed and ordered a croque monsieur sandwich and a salad. The melted ham and cheese on a fresh baguette was fantastic, and I was thinking I should order another when something dawned on me, and I picked up my phone again.

“You awake?” I asked Louis Langlois.

“I never went to sleep,” he said.

“Are you some kind of freak of nature?”

“You hadn’t noticed before?” Louis laughed.

“Can you come get me?”

“Of course,” he said. “Where are we going?”

“To search for the best hot chocolate in Paris.”

“A much debated subject, Jack,” he grunted. “Liable to start a fight. Or a squabble, anyway.”

Chapter 52

ACCORDING TO LOUIS, every Parisian has his or her own idea of where the best foods can be found in the city, from croissants and baguettes to cassoulet and goat cheese.

“But with hot chocolate, the argument verges on impossible,” Louis said as we stood outside the Plaza waiting for an Uber car.

“C’mon,” I said.

He shrugged and walked over to several other patrons of the hotel who were waiting for cars or taxis.

“Mon ami,” Louis said loudly to the doorman. “Where is the best hot chocolate in Paris served?”

“Angelina,” the doorman said without hesitation. “Rue de Rivoli.”

“For tourists!” cried a young woman smoking a cigarette. “Jean-Paul Hévin on Rue Saint-Honoré, no doubt. The blend they serve is heaven. An aphrodisiac.”

“Ah,” scoffed her friend, a sallow man in a suit and a thin tie. “I have nothing against aphrodisiacs, but the hot chocolate at Les Deux Magots is sublime.”

A fourth person chimed in to nominate the Café Martini, and a fifth said Carette in the Trocadéro was without a doubt the best purveyor of hot chocolate in the world.

The Uber car pulled up. Louis was roaring with laughter when we pulled away, and they were all still arguing the point. “I love Paris,” he said. “I really do.”

We went to Angelina first. The staff at the Viennese-style tearoom did not recognize Kim Kopchinski from the pictures we showed them. Neither did the various waiters and waitresses we talked to at Jean-Paul Hévin, Les Deux Magots, the Café Martini, and Carette.

It was almost 4 p.m. by then, and I’d all but decided that this was nothing but a wild-goose chase. When we climbed back into the Uber car outside Carette, I was going to declare surrender and suggest that we return to Private Paris. But then something occurred to me.

“Where was the best hot chocolate in Paris seven or eight years ago?”

Louis looked perplexed, but the driver said, “That’s simple. Besides Angelina, in those days it was definitely the Hôtel Lancaster on the Rue de Berri. Best hot chocolate of the new millennium.”

I shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”

“And it’s not that far,” Louis said. “We go.”

About ten minutes later, we pulled up in front of the Hôtel Lancaster, another of Paris’s famed five-star hotels. The entrance was far more understated than the Plaza’s, and we had to search for the front desk, where we asked about the hot chocolate.

We were directed to a tearoom overlooking a courtyard, and soon found an older waitress named Yvette, who took one look at the photograph and smiled.

“C’est Kim,” she said. “She’s been coming here off and on for years.”

“Lately?” I asked.

She nodded and said, “Yesterday, about this time. And the day before that.”

We thanked her, and she walked away.

“She’s not a celeb or a high roller,” Louis said. “She’ll be coming in the main entrance.”

We crossed through a lobby to a short hallway that led to double glass doors, where the valet and doorman were posted. I’d taken two steps when I saw Kim Kopchinski sprinting diagonally across the street, heading for the opposite sidewalk with Whitey in close pursuit and carrying a pistol.

Chapter 53

BY THE TIME Louis and I burst out of the Hôtel Lancaster, they were well down the block, heading south and west. I took off after them, with Louis bringing up the rear.

I was closing the gap when I realized that Big Nose was running ahead of me on the opposite sidewalk, paralleling them. Just shy of the Champs-Élysées, he cut across the street.

Kim and Whitey reached the corner.

A blue van screeched to a halt in front of them.

Whitey grabbed Sherman’s granddaughter, and she screamed, “I don’t have it anymore! I threw it-”

The pale man pushed her inside. The van squealed away, leaving the Nose, who had slowed to a walk. I hadn’t. He saw me coming just before I tackled him and knocked him to the street.

“What is this?” he yelled, and began to struggle beneath me. “Police!”

“You like hitting people with hammers?” I shouted, and was about to pop him low and in the back so he’d stop squirming.

But out of the corner of my eye, I saw something white and brown launch at me from between the parked cars. On instinct, I ducked a second before it landed on me and started viciously biting at my ear and neck.

Surprised by the pain, I rolled off the guy below me, and tried to defend myself. But the dog was in a frenzy, making these satanic throat noises that had me convinced a pit bull or something like it was attacking me.

“Napoleon!” a man shouted. “Napoleon, no!”

As soon as he yelled, the biting stopped, and I sat up, feeling blood drip from my ear and from wounds to my neck. The Nose was gone, and a twenty-two-pound wirehaired Jack Russell terrier sat about two feet from me, tongue hanging from his bloody muzzle as he panted through what looked like a smile.

A tanned man in jeans and a black leather jacket was running across the street, looking mortified. “Napoleon, what have you done?”

The dog was wagging its tail but barked when Louis pulled up, gasping and looking at my wounds in disbelief.

“I am so sorry, monsieur,” the man said. He was in his early forties, carried a leash, and was built robustly for a Parisian. “I’ve never seen him do anything remotely like that! Bad dog, Napoleon! You are a little terrorist!”

The dog cringed and lay flat on the sidewalk.

“Are you all right?” the man asked me.

“Does he look all right?” Louis asked, handing me a handkerchief.

“My God, you’ll need stitches,” the man said.

“And a rabies shot,” Louis said.

“Napoleon is up to date on all his shots,” his owner said.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I just need to see a doctor.”

“Of course,” the man said. “There’s one nearby, I’m sure.”

“We’ll take you to Private Paris’s contracted doctor, Jack,” Louis said.

“Private Paris?” the man said, sounding surprised.

“We both work for the company,” I said, gingerly touching my ear.

“This makes it all the worse, then,” the man said. “Again, I am so sorry for my little terrorist’s activities, and…”

“You have a name, sir?” Louis asked. “Somewhere we can contact you with the bill?”

He hesitated, but then reached into his coat and handed Louis a business card. “My name is Rivier, Phillipe Rivier. I’m just up here from Nice on business.”

Louis glanced at the card as I got up, and the dog came up off its belly and growled. Rivier took a quick step toward the dog and it lay down fast.

“Be quiet now,” he growled. “You’re in big trouble when you get home.”

“How about you put the emperor on his leash?” Louis said.

“Oh,” Rivier said, looking chagrined. “It’s just that he’s usually spot-on with his voice commands and-”

“The leash,” Louis said.

“Right,” Rivier said, and clipped the lead on the little dog’s collar.

Louis’s cell rang, and he turned to answer it.

Rivier smiled weakly at me. “Again, I couldn’t be more sorry. And please, I’m more than happy to pay for all medical expenses-and dinner. Let me buy you dinner, Monsieur…?”

“Morgan. Jack Morgan,” I said.

“Please. We are here for another day or two. Call me if you think of it. You have the number there.”

Louis turned, the cell pressed tight to his ear and his eyes squinting.

“I can’t promise anything,” I said, glancing at the dog, which had not taken its attention from me.

Rivier smiled weakly, and went off, scolding the dog, which skulked along beside him.

My ear was throbbing, and I was berating myself for letting Big Nose get away, when Louis said, “No one else sees it until we get there, Ali. And get the concierge doctor on duty to meet us at the offices. Jack’s suffered a dog bite and requires stitches.”

He hung up, looking shaken.

“That was Farad. AB-16 just sent Private Paris a letter, Jack, and he says the contents are beyond explosive.”

Chapter 54

15th Arrondissement

6:20 p.m.

“WHY YOU, LOUIS?” Sharen Hoskins demanded the second she barged through the doors into the lobby of Private Paris’s offices, which were situated in a newer building near the Porte de Versailles.

“It was not addressed to me, but to our newest associate,” Louis said. “Ali Farad, a recruit from the narcotics bureau in Marseille. The second Farad saw what it was, he acted to protect it, and the envelope, then called me immediately. Then I called you immediately, non?”

“Where is it?” said Juge Fromme, who limped in behind the investigateur. “What does it say?”

“It’s in the lab being analyzed by our best people, and we only just got here,” I said. “We haven’t read it.”

“Stop all tests until we’ve seen it,” Fromme insisted.

“As you wish, juge,” Louis said. “We are on your side here.”

“That remains to be seen,” Fromme replied curtly. “Take us to it.”

Louis went to a bulletproof door below a security camera and put his hand on a fingerprint reader, his eye to a retina scanner. The door whooshed open.

“You expecting terrorists?” Fromme demanded.

“We always prepare for the worst-case scenario,” I said.

Louis led us into a large open area where the agents worked, and then down a staircase to the lab, which was virtually identical to our state-of-the-art facility in Los Angeles. Dr. Seymour Kloppenberg, who ran the L.A. lab and was better known to us as Sci, also oversaw all forensics for Private, and he insisted that every lab be as well equipped as his.

It had cost me a small fortune, but the results were convincing. Outside of the FBI’s labs at Quantico, and Scotland Yard’s facilities in London, Private’s forensics were the finest in the world.

We passed techs working on evidence from the two AB-16 crime scenes on our way to an anteroom, where we were issued clean white paper jumpsuits, latex gloves, and operating room caps and shoe covers. After passing through an air lock, we entered a clean room where Ali Farad was watching Marc Petitjean, Private Paris’s head of forensics. Petitjean was peering through a ten-inch magnifying glass mounted in a frame above a plastic evidence sleeve containing a piece of paper and an envelope.

“Move away from the evidence, please,” Fromme said.

Petitjean, who had a strong French ego, looked insulted and almost started to protest, but Louis and I both made cutting signs across our necks.

“Juge Fromme and Investigateur Hoskins wish to read the letter, Marc,” Louis said.

“There is much here besides the letter,” Petitjean said, openly peeved as he stepped aside so the magistrate could limp to the workbench and pick up the evidence sleeve.

He and Hoskins studied it for several moments, growing graver and paler by the second, which made me wonder what in the hell the letter said.

“Who has seen this?” Fromme demanded.

“Just myself and Marc,” Ali Farad said.

“It will remain that way,” the magistrate said. “This comes with me.”

“Wait. What?” Louis said. “Our lab meets-”

“I don’t care,” the magistrate said. “French national security is at stake, and under our censorship law, I forbid these two from disseminating this message in any way whatsoever. Are we clear?”

Neither Farad nor Petitjean seemed happy about it, but they nodded.

“How did the letter arrive?” Hoskins asked. “There’s no stamp.”

“It was there at the front desk, waiting,” said Farad. “Juliette, the receptionist, went to the toilette, returned, and it was there.”

“Did we pick up the drop-off on security tapes?” I asked.

Farad hesitated. “I hadn’t looked.”

“We need to,” Louis said, nodding to Petitjean.

The scientist picked up an iPad and asked Farad, “About what time?”

He shrugged. “An hour ago?”

Petitjean gave the iPad some instructions, and a flat-screen hanging above the examination table blinked on, showing the lobby with a running time stamp. Farad had the envelope in hand and was talking to Juliette. The scientist sped the tape in reverse, and we saw images of Farad walking backward through the bulletproof glass door, and then the receptionist returning to find the letter.

“There he is,” Louis said when the squiggly image of a man went by. “Take us to when he comes in.”

Petitjean rewound further and hit play. A man with swarthy skin, a scruffy black beard, and sunglasses entered the lobby carrying a motorcycle helmet with the FEZ Couriers logo clearly visible. He dug in a messenger bag with gloved hands, came up with a manila envelope, and left it, turned, and exited the lobby.

“You don’t get a very good look at him, do you?” Hoskins asked.

It was true. Other than the suggestion of Arab features and the color of his neck and cheek, he gave us no clear view of his face.

“There’ll be a record at FEZ of who the messenger was and where the letter came from,” Louis said.

“I can call Firmus Massi,” Farad said. “We attend the same mosque.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Fromme said, eyeing him before turning to Petitjean. “You indicated there was more here than the letter.”

“Physical evidence,” Petitjean confirmed. “Under fluorescent light you can see several stains on the page. And there were hair fragments in the envelope and in the glue. Three of them. And what looked like fabric lint.”

“They’re here?” Fromme said, shaking the evidence sleeve.

“Here,” Petitjean said, holding out four small sealed sleeves that carried stickers and numbers indicating that they’d already been logged into our system.

Fromme took these as well, and had Hoskins take note of the time of day and the names of the witnesses to the evidence exchange.

“Monsieur Farad?” the magistrate said.

“Yes?”

“You will need to come with us.”

“Why?”

“We want to know why you received the letter.”

“I can tell you right here. I have no idea.”

“And the fact that it came from a messenger from a friend’s service?”

“Massi is more an acquaintance than a friend,” Farad said. “We attend the same mosque. Beyond that, it’s a coincidence.”

“Perhaps,” Fromme said. “But we would like you to come with us, or I can have Investigateur Hoskins arrest you and bring you in for questioning.”

“Juge,” Louis sputtered. “What you’re insinuating here is…Farad was a decorated officer with the Sûreté, and Private Paris is-”

“Out of this investigation,” the magistrate said strongly. “This has gone to a whole different level, Langlois, and the government’s probe cannot be compromised in any way. I’m sorry, but that is the way it must be. Monsieur Farad must be looked at vigorously, and Private Paris will sit on the sidelines.”

Louis looked at Farad. “Go with them. I will call our attorney.”

“I don’t need one.”

“It’s a federal investigation now,” Louis insisted. “You need a lawyer.”

Farad looked beyond angry, and I couldn’t blame him. He’d done exactly the right things and was now under suspicion for God knows what.

When Fromme, Hoskins, and Farad had exited the air lock and were out of earshot, Louis looked at the forensics expert and said, “Feel like ignoring the magistrate’s order?”

“And break a federal law for a colleague?” Petitjean said. “But of course.”

He went over to the keyboard and gave it a command.

A screen quickly showed a blown-up image of the letter and the envelope.

It was written in French in letters cut from various newspapers and magazines. I got the gist of it, and my stomach yawned open into a deep, cold pit.

Chapter 55

8th Arrondissement

8:10 p.m.

“YOU’LL FIND AN attorney for Farad?” I said, climbing out of an Uber car in front of the Plaza Athénée.

“First thing,” Louis promised. “Get some sleep.”

In a mild daze, I entered the lobby, imagining a hot, hot shower and long, long uninterrupted sleep in my big empty suite. That’s all I wanted.

“Monsieur Morgan?” called a woman’s sweet voice.

I blinked, fought back a yawn, and spotted Elodie rushing out from behind the concierge desk. She danced over and said quietly, “I wanted you to know that we took care of Mademoiselle Kim for you.”

It took a moment to penetrate my exhausted brain. “Kim is here?”

“In your suite. We gave her a key. That’s what you wanted, yes?”

“Uh, yes,” I said, flashing on that image of Kim being thrown into the van outside the Hôtel Lancaster and wondering how she’d escaped.

“When did she arrive?”

Elodie thought about that and said, “Two?”

That was right after I left the hotel and two and a half hours before we saw her taken.

“When did she leave?” I asked.

“She didn’t. At least not through the lobby while I’ve been on duty.”

I smiled. “She got by you or ducked out a side door because I saw Kim later, around four thirty. Could you check and see when the door to the suite was opened after she went in?”

Elodie appeared miffed but went behind the concierge counter and worked on a computer. She looked up at me, chagrined. “Fifteen minutes later.”

“Perfect, really. Thank you for your graciousness.”

The concierge beamed. “Je vous en prie, monsieur.”

When I entered the suite, the lights came on, and I stood there in the living area, thinking. Why had Kim come here, and for only fifteen minutes? Her time of entry-roughly 2 p.m.-was less than twenty minutes after Louis and I got in an Uber car in front of the Plaza, leaving a heated discussion about hot chocolate in our wake.

Was that a coincidence? Had she come to us for protection, and found me missing? Or had she been watching, waiting to see us leave?

But why would she?

In my befuddled state, I couldn’t come up with an explanation until I thought of what I’d heard her scream as Whitey threw her into the van.

“I don’t have it anymore!”

She had hid something in here.

A good part of me wanted to sack out and look for it in the morning, but as I moved through the living area toward my bedroom, I kept thinking of how brazen and violent the men after Kim had been again and again.

They were willing to kill. Would they be willing to torture?

I had to imagine they would. And I had to imagine that, unless there were dimensions to Kim Kopchinski that I did not understand, she would break. And then they would come for whatever was hidden in my suite. Whitey and his pal had broken in once. They’d no doubt try a second time.

Realizing I would not sleep worth a damn there now, I went to the toilet, turned on the cold water in the basin, and stuck my head under it until the cobwebs cleared. Then I set about searching the place.

I went through my bedroom, my closet, and my bathroom from top to bottom. I checked under the mattress, in the drawers, and under my clothes, and even rifled through my suitcase. Nothing.

I began to doubt myself. Why would she bring it here in the first place?

For safekeeping, I supposed. It was the simplest answer.

I checked the safe in my closet: still locked. I typed in the six-digit code I’d given it, and found my passport and extra currency untouched. After hurrying into the room Kim had used, however, I entered the closet, took one look at the safe, and knew she’d locked something inside.

Elodie knocked at my door fifteen minutes later with a workman carrying a red toolbox.

“I must have slipped putting in my code,” I said. “I’ve tried twice and I know it will lock up for an hour if I try a third time.”

“No problem,” Elodie said. “It happens.”

But when I led her toward the room Kim had used, she balked.

“This isn’t your room,” she said.

“My suite.”

“Yes, but…”

I pulled her aside and murmured, “Remember the guys who shot up the place a few days ago?”

She nodded sourly.

“They’ve got Mademoiselle Kopchinski, and I have no doubt that eventually they’re coming back to the Plaza because of what is in that safe,” I said. “Now, Kim is my client. I was hired to protect her by her grandfather, who was beaten into a coma, I believe because of what is in that safe. So, to get the Plaza out of the line of fire and help Kim, I need that safe opened. What’s it going to be?”

The concierge hesitated, but then said, “You’ll remove this thing from the premises?”

“Immediately,” I promised.

Elodie nodded to the workman and we followed him into the closet. He attached a digital override device to the safe with coaxial cables and gave it several instructions before typing in a six-digit number. The safe made a whirring sound and then a click.

Before I could tell the workman not to open the door, he did and shined a flashlight inside. The beam picked up the glimmering object inside.

“What is it?” Elodie asked.

“A cigarette lighter,” I said.

Chapter 56

16th Arrondissement

11:20 p.m.

ON THE AVENUE de Montespan, Guy LaFont carried a briefcase as he climbed from the back of his car. A tall, elegant man in his late fifties, LaFont bid his driver adieu in front of the doors to the courtyard of his building. He used a key to flip the dead bolt, stepped inside, and closed and locked the door behind him.

Two soft lights cast the courtyard in warm shadows. He could clearly see his neighbor’s new Mercedes parked there, and the beautiful boxed flower garden his neighbor’s wife tended. It already bloomed with tulips and daffodils.

LaFont almost couldn’t bear to turn away from the box garden and walk to his door past another box garden that lay fallow and weedy. He did his best to avoid looking at it, and went inside. Locking the door behind him, LaFont took a deep, familiar, and agonizing sniff of home, and wondered at the chest-buckling pressure of his grief and loneliness.

When would it go away? Would it ever…go away?

LaFont recalled what his psychiatrist had told him: that grief was a process, a tearing down and a rebuilding. He didn’t often feel this crippling melancholy at work. His job still consumed him, drove him, and he believed he had fulfilled his responsibilities and stayed true to his principles in the past fourteen months with admirable strength and courage.

Without question, he thought forcefully. Without question.

But here in the home LaFont had shared with his beloved wife of twenty-six years, duty could not compensate for loss. He walked past Evelyn’s kitchen without stopping. He crossed through the salon she’d designed with such care. In the study where they’d watched television, he looked at pictures on the bookshelves: that snapshot from their honeymoon in Sardinia, their sons playing soccer and skiing at Chamonix, and Evelyn sitting in his lap at their favorite spot in Barcelona.

“We were so young,” he muttered.

LaFont stared at his reflection in the mirror, wondered when he’d gotten so old. He wondered if he should go back to the office, get something done, and then sleep on the couch.

Maybe his sons were right. Maybe it was this place that was keeping him from moving on. They were urging him to sell, but he hadn’t had the heart to call a realtor to put it on the market.

This was Evelyn’s home and he simply wasn’t ready to part with it or the ghosts of their life together. Turning on the television, he flipped the channels until he found a newscast. It led, as all newscasts had that day, with images of the AB-16 graffiti tag high on the cupola of the Institut de France.

The image filled LaFont with outrage!

He’d known Henri Richard and Lourdes Latrelle and had admired René Pincus. Attacking the French culture by murdering the best and brightest? LaFont wanted to pick something up and hurl it at the screen. Who the hell were they to do such a thing? What the hell did they want?

It all gave him a headache, and he hit the mute button before going to a cabinet and finding a bottle of Armagnac. He popped the cork, poured himself twice the usual amount, and drank until a fire exploded in his belly.

LaFont poured himself another generous amount, and took the glass with him after shutting off the news. He’d probably wake up with a scorcher of a headache, but at least he’d have slept, and the last time he’d looked, his agenda was thin in the mor-

He reached the landing at the top of the stairs and halted. The door to Evelyn’s art studio was ajar and there was light flowing from it into the hallway by their bedroom.

Who would have been in there? The maid? Wasn’t it her day?

Believing it was, LaFont marched down the hall, meaning to reach inside the room, flip down the light switch just inside the door, and seal the studio again.

Standing there, however, smelling the faint odor of paint and turpentine, LaFont decided that maybe it was time for a visit, and maybe a good cry. He hadn’t allowed himself one of those in at least a month.

He guzzled the rest of the Armagnac, pushed the door open, and stepped inside an L-shaped airy space with large skylights, windows, and banks of adjustable lights.

LaFont’s eyes welled and spilled, and he looked around, hoping to find solace in her paintings. There were dozens of them around the studio in various stages of completion. But through his tears, all he could see of his late wife’s imagined and real landscapes were the vivid colors she was known-

He sniffed. Was that fresh paint? He took off his glasses and wiped at his eyes with the sleeve of his suit. Putting the glasses back on, he froze.

On a long oak table, LaFont spotted a section of loose canvas that had been spray-painted with “AB-16.”

What the-

His disbelief was replaced by surprise when he picked up movement in the shadows at the rear of his late wife’s studio. His killer stepped into the light with a suppressed pistol, aiming in a way that spoke of honed skill.

An assassin.

Exactly the way Evelyn had always feared it would end for me.

LaFont did not run or cry out for mercy.

He looked at the death messenger, bowed his head in relief, and said, “Please.”

Chapter 57

8th Arrondissement

April 10, 1:45 a.m.

IN HER WORKSHOP on the Rue Clément Marot, the fashion designer Millie Fleurs sipped a glass of Fumé Blanc, studied the dramatic black cocktail dress on the mannequin, and compared it to the drawing on the table beside her.

An off-the-shoulder sheath, the dress was more tailored than flowing, meant to hug the wearer, and it featured a daring geometric cutout at the navel. The edging of the cutout was embossed silver. So were the tips of the black leather strap that hugged the low belly and hung provocatively off the left hip.

Fleurs walked around the dress, analyzing it from every angle. My God, it was stunning, certainly one of the best dresses to come out of her workshop in years.

The designer knew it was exactly what her client wanted: classical enough to be worn at a gala, but hip enough for hitting a nightclub afterward. This dress fit the bill in every respect. No one who saw her in it would ever forget it.

Which was both good and bad. As an haute couture creation, it was supposed to be one of a kind. But Fleurs already knew in her gut that she was going to introduce a replica with only the slightest of modifications at the July shows.

The dress would be the showstopper that she needed to turn things around. The last few seasons had seen a drop-off in her company’s growth rate, and she saw the frock as a return to wider acclaim and bigger profits.

Fleurs figured there were only a few things standing in the way of putting the dress on the runway. The client’s m-

The designer thought she heard something behind her in the hallway off the workshop that led to stairs and the rear exit. She was alone. She’d been alone for hours tinkering with the more subtle aspects of the dress.

It had to be the cat. Where had she gotten to?

Fleurs set her wineglass down and headed toward the rear hallway, calling, “Madeline?” and making kissing noises. “Come here, little puss.”

She flipped on the hallway light and managed a short shriek of surprise and terror before a six-inch leather awl was driven straight into her heart.

“What?” Fleurs coughed. She stared blankly down at the tool handle sticking out of her chest and then up at her killer. “I was going to…”

She coughed again and reached for the handle.

Then she staggered backward into her workshop, careened off the cutting table, and died on the floor, facing the mannequin and her final creation.

Chapter 58

5 a.m.

“JACK?”

I startled awake at the whisper, pistol up reflexively, wondering where I was before realizing that I was back in the suite at the Plaza Athénée, sitting in an overstuffed chair by the bed, and Louis Langlois was standing in the open doors to my bedroom.

Louis murmured, “If Kim’s friends are coming, it will be soon.”

“Okay, I’m up,” I said. “Petitjean?”

“Still working on the lighter,” Louis replied. “But the letter? AB-16 sent it to ten different news services.”

Louis handed me an iPad. The screen showed the France 4 television website and a photograph of the letter in a hodgepodge of font sizes and styles clipped from various newspapers. In that respect, it looked different from the one Ali Farad had received at Private Paris, but the text was the same as I remembered it, word for word.

“AB-16 is trying to light that powder keg you were talking about last night,” I said to Louis, handing him back the iPad.

“Most definitely,” Louis replied grimly. “And Fromme is petrified of that happening. I would not be surprised if-”

The doorbell to the suite dinged.

I glanced at my watch: 5:15 a.m.

“Here we go, Jack,” he murmured, drawing a Glock, which carried a stubby sound suppressor. “Back-to-back.”

In our stocking feet, we crept out into the living area. Louis followed me into the entry hall, walking backward and watching the balcony, which we’d left lit.

I smeared myself into the wall on the hinge side of the door. Knowing that someone as ruthless as Whitey might shoot through the peephole the second they saw a shadow appear, I held up the room key card in front of it.

Nothing.

I glanced at Louis, eased over, and peered out into the hallway.

Randall Peaks, the Saudis’ security guy, was staring back at me, looking as though he’d recently developed an ulcer.

What the hell was he doing here? And at this hour?

Peaks reached over impatiently and rang the bell again.

“We’re good,” I murmured to Louis. I stuck the gun in my waistband and opened the door.

“How many men can I hire through you?” Peaks asked.

“When?” Louis said.

“Now,” he replied. “Can we speak inside?”

I let him in and closed the door behind him.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’m missing a princess,” Peaks grunted.

“Never a good thing,” Louis said.

The Saudi security chief glared at Louis. “This is bad, Mr. Langlois, and I need Private Paris’s help finding her as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” I said. “Whatever you need. Which princess?”

Peaks hesitated and said, “This has to be handled discreetly.”

“I gather you’re the client?”

He nodded. “I don’t want the other princesses knowing. No one can know.”

“And heaven forbid the dad back in Riyadh,” Louis said. “Which princess?”

“Mayameen,” he said, showing us his cell phone and a picture of the young princess I saw in the Plaza’s breakfast room a few days before. “She’s just turned sixteen.”

“When did she disappear?” I asked.

“Shortly after midnight she snuck out of her room while one of my men was using the john. We didn’t pick up on it until twenty minutes ago, when we checked our security tapes.”

“How was she dressed when she left?” Louis asked.

“For a club,” Peaks said sourly. “Stiletto heels. Black leather pants. White top. Too much skin between the two.”

“She went out alone to a club?” I asked.

Peaks cocked his jaw. “She has a history of this sort of behavior.”

“So she’ll come back eventually?”

“I can’t afford ‘eventually,’” the security chief insisted. “If she’s not at Millie Fleurs’s for a fitting at nine with her mother, I’ll be terminated.”

“Then we start now,” Louis said. “Ten thousand dollars and I’ll send investigators to every club in the city still open.”

It sounded like highway robbery to me, but Peaks said, “Done.”

Louis said, “Bon. Most of the late-night clubs are in the 11th and 17th, but the two closest are Showcase and Le Baron. I will go there myself.”

“I’ll go with him,” I promised.

“You’ll text me the moment you find her?” Peaks asked.

“Immediately,” Louis promised. “And in the meantime, if her mother and sisters ask after her, say that she’s got the terrible twenty-four-hour stomach virus that’s been going around Paris.”

Peaks brightened. “Is there one going around Paris?”

“Not that I know of. But it should buy you some time.”

Peaks texted us the photograph of the princess and a picture of her passport. We promised to be in touch.

Though the air exiting the elevator spoke of croissants baking and espresso brewing, the area outside the breakfast room and the lobby were dead.

Even Elodie was struggling to remain awake until she saw me approaching. She stiffened enough to complain quietly, “S’il vous plaît, Monsieur Morgan, can it wait? I’m off duty in just five minutes, and-”

I showed her the photograph. “Did she come through here after midnight?”

The concierge studied the picture and then said, “She looked much older than in the picture. Who is she?”

“You don’t want to know. Leave it for the shift change.”

Elodie tried to hide her worry with a professional smile. “When will you be leaving us, Mr. Morgan?”

“Believe me, Elodie,” I said, “as soon as I can.”

I found Louis out front, trying to hail a cab. But the Avenue Montaigne was as quiet as the lobby of the Plaza.

Louis gestured up the street two blocks toward the Rue François 1er, where a taxi crossed, and then another. “We have better luck there.”

He began to jog, with me following. We were crossing the Rue Clément Marot when a woman’s bloodcurdling screaming stopped us in our tracks. Louis ran toward the screams, which had turned into hysterical crying.

Racing after him, I realized that she wasn’t on the street. Her weeping was coming from overhead, through an open, lit window on the floor above the haute couture shop of Millie Fleurs.

Louis tried the front door. Locked.

He hesitated, but only for a moment, before he drew the suppressed Glock, stepped back, and put three rounds through the glass, which turned to spiderwebs above the door handle. He flipped the gun over and used the butt of the pistol like a hammer to break out enough glass to reach inside.

“Gonna have an alarm,” I said.

“Good,” Louis said. He flipped the dead bolt and turned the handle. The door swung open silently.

The shop did have a security system. I remembered that from our visit. Why no alarm?

But I had no time to think about that because as we hurried across the darkened space, the crying stopped and we heard the sound of someone running overhead. Louis threw back the curtain and charged up the steep staircase toward the light and Millie Fleurs’s workshop.

We both got to the top of the staircase and came to a dead halt.

Millie Fleurs hung upside down by her ankles, which were bound with fabric twisted into a rope that was thrown over a rafter. The designer’s arms and hair hung limply. Blood from a chest wound had soaked her blouse, drained across her face, and dripped to the floor.

The pool of blood below the dress designer had reached but only partially obscured a variation of the AB-16 symbol, depicted not in red spray paint but with black and red silk fabric.

“Hoskins and Fromme are going to-”

Louis held up his index finger and then pressed it to his ear. I stopped, listened, and heard the whimpering.

It came from behind a door beyond the only bare mannequin in the studio. Louis gestured to a bloody footprint on the floor, and stepped around it.

He looked over his shoulder at me. I squared up, aiming at the door. He reached over and opened it.

“No! Don’t shoot!”

She was slurring and blubbering, a pretty young teenager with long black, braided hair, pressed to the back of the shallow closet, terrified and holding her hands up as if to block a bullet. Blood slicked her exposed palms, stained her white blouse, and gelled on the thighs of her black leather pants.

Smelling the strong scent of alcohol and cigarettes coming off her, I lowered the gun and said, “Princess Mayameen?”

She nodded feebly before sliding down the wall into a sobbing heap. “My mother is going to kill me this time, isn’t she?”

Chapter 59

WE TALKED WITH Maya, as she preferred to be called, for a good ten minutes before we put in a call to Sharen Hoskins, and for another ten minutes before calling Randall Peaks.

The Saudi security chief and the La Crim investigateur showed up at almost the same time, with Peaks following Hoskins up the stairs. The detective’s eyes were puffy and her demeanor on edge. She glanced at me and Louis, shook her head, mumbled something under her breath, and then shifted her attention to Millie Fleurs’s corpse.

Peaks reached the workshop, saw the teenager passed out on a daybed in the corner and the blood on her hands and shirt, and said, “Princess Mayameen will be leaving. Now.”

“Not a chance,” Hoskins said. “She’s explaining herself to me before she goes anywhere.”

“That young lady is Saudi royalty and has complete diplomatic immunity,” Peaks insisted. “She cannot be held against her will.”

“Who’s holding her?” Hoskins asked. “She looks to be a drunken adolescent to me, and as such is a danger to herself. I’m going to talk to her, make sure she’s fit to travel.”

“No lawyer, no talking,” Peaks said.

“She’ll talk and you’ll shut up, or I’ll have you arrested because I know you do not have diplomatic immunity,” said Juge Fromme, disheveled and in pain as he came up the stairs, leaning hard on his cane.

Looking as though he was having a root canal, no Novocain, Peaks said, “The Saudi family and government will take this as an affront to-”

“I don’t care,” Fromme said. “My country and countrymen are under direct attack, and that takes precedence over any foreign concerns. Period.”

Louis said, “Juge? For the record?”

The magistrate glowered. “You two are like flies to shit in this, aren’t you?”

Louis smiled weakly. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose. But for the record, the princess may be guilty of reckless judgment, of drinking too much liquor, and of deciding to pay Millie Fleurs an impromptu visit on her way home from clubbing. But she is not remotely connected to the murder.”

Peaks’s eyebrows rose, and he said, “Exactly.”

“She’s covered in her blood,” Hoskins said.

“Because she was trying to help her,” I said.

“I’d rather hear this from the princess,” Fromme said.

“I’m sure,” Louis said, glancing at the princess, who was curled up fetal and sucking her thumb. “But from the looks of it, you might wait hours before she is in any condition to talk again.”

The magistrate fumed, but Hoskins said, “Out with it.”

Louis and I recounted the story we’d gotten out of the princess. On her way home from the nightclub Le Baron, she saw the light on in the workshop above Millie’s shop, knew she was going there with her mother in a few hours anyway, and, on impulse, wanted to take a sneak peek at her new dresses. She knew the location of the rear entrance from an earlier visit, hit the buzzer, and got no reply. She tried the door and found it unlocked.

“When she came into the workshop, she saw Millie hanging upside down, with her back to her,” Louis said. “She ran to Millie, and tried to lift her body, which explains the blood on her hands and blouse. Then she started screaming, which is when Jack and I heard her.”

Fromme squinted. “Why would she try to lift her?”

“Millie was special to the princess,” I said. “Her favorite designer. Drunk as she was, she was just trying to help a friend in need.”

“There,” Peaks said. “You have it, then. Now can we avoid an international incident here? I’m sure the princess’s father will be more than grateful if we can keep her name out of the press. Please: that would smear her reputation at home for years, and home is Riyadh, not Paris. She doesn’t deserve what would happen to her there.”

Hoskins and Fromme exchanged glances. The investigateur said, “I’ll need some kind of statement from her.”

Louis waved his iPhone. “You’ll have it. I videoed our conversation and her physical condition with her consent.”

“Wait. What?” Peaks protested. “She can’t consent. She’s a drunk minor. Whatever she told you is inadmissible.”

“What do you care?” I asked. “She’s on the record, but the record stays private because she’s a minor. Correct?”

Juge Fromme said, “I can live with that.”

“I can too,” Hoskins said, sighing. “Clean her up. Take her back to her mother.”

Peaks looked at Louis and me with an expression that said, I owe you both in a big way. We nodded, and he went to the princess’s side and tried to wake her. She groaned and threw an arm over her head.

There was a commotion downstairs, and I could hear Laurent Alexandre arguing with the police officers securing the crime scene.

“That’s Millie’s personal assistant,” Louis told Hoskins.

The investigateur leaned over the railing and called down to the officers, telling them to allow Alexandre to come up. He did a few moments later, dressed in a bespoke blue suit with high-water pants and yellow socks that matched his tie. The outfit was totally at odds with the expression on his face as he climbed up from the shop: he looked like a scared little kid being forced into a haunted house at a carnival.

“She’s dead?” he asked in a quavering voice full of disbelief.

Louis gestured in the direction of the designer’s corpse, which still hung from the rafter. Alexandre didn’t seem able to turn that way.

Instead, he said, “Noulan? Did he kill her?”

“Doesn’t look that way,” Hoskins said. “AB-16.”

“What?” he whined before pivoting to face the workshop.

His trembling right hand came arthritically to his mouth, which gaped in horror. “Oh, dear God, Millie,” he whispered. “What have they done to you?”

Then his knees buckled, and he fainted dead away.

Chapter 60

DAWN WAS COMING on while Randall Peaks cleaned Princess Mayameen with water and paper towels, and Hoskins revived Alexandre, who came around choking and weeping as he answered questions.

The designer’s assistant said he had left the workshop at around eight the previous evening. Millie had still been working feverishly on the princess’s dresses.

“She said she would sleep here on the daybed,” he said. “She did it all the time when she had clients coming, and wanted me here at six fifteen sharp to wake her. If the princess hadn’t…I would have…”

Peaks got the princess to her feet, but she didn’t like it.

“I want to sleep, Randy,” she groaned.

“Back at the Plaza,” Peaks said.

“No,” Maya grumbled. “I want to sleep here.”

The bodyguard hesitated, and then hauled off and slapped her hard across the rear.

“You’re going to the hotel, Maya,” he said. “Now.”

That got her wide awake, and she shouted, “You’ll lose your job for that! I’ll make sure of it!”

Peaks grabbed her tightly about the wrist and dragged her toward the rear hallway, saying, “I figure I’ve already lost the job because of you, but I will get you to your mother’s room safe and sound whether you like my methods or not. You’re a princess, for Allah’s sake! Start acting like it!”

When they’d gone, Alexandre’s lower lip quivered, and he said to Hoskins, “Can I go downstairs, please? I can’t stand seeing her this way.”

“Of course,” the investigateur said.

Strong lights bathed the window.

Louis went over and looked out. “Television cameras. Four of them.”

The designer’s assistant went to the stairs, wiping his eyes with his suit sleeve. “Am I free to inform her family and friends?”

Fromme said, “Yes, but don’t talk about the crime scene.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

As Alexandre trudged down the stairs, I studied the room again.

“Why is the body positioned differently?” I asked. “Her arms, I mean. They’re not spread to the side like with the others.”

Louis said, “Maybe someone from AB-16 was in here about to do that when the princess opened the door downstairs.”

“We can’t suppose that until we get a time of death,” Hoskins said.

“Where is our forensics team?” the magistrate asked.

“They’re wrapping up another scene.”

“Once again, I offer Private Paris’s aid,” Louis said.

Fromme shook his head. “We will wait for our people, and the both of you should leave. Now.”

He stated this all flatly, without the rancor and innuendo he’d shown after he’d seen the letter sent to Ali Farad.

“Juge?” I said. “Has our associate, Mr. Farad, been released?”

The magistrate stiffened and said, “He has not.”

“What?” Louis said. “Why not?”

“As I indicated last night, Monsieur Langlois, AB-16 is a direct threat to our national security, and-”

“So Farad is a suspect because AB-16 sent him a letter?” I asked, incredulous. “Are you going to arrest people at all the news outlets that received copies of the letter?”

Fromme glanced at Hoskins, who was stone-faced.

At last the magistrate cleared his throat and said, “There is more to it than just the letter, Monsieur Morgan, I assure you. Beyond that, I-”

Phones buzzed, alerting Fromme and Hoskins to incoming texts. They got out their cells and read them. The detective’s breath caught in her throat. Fromme went deathly pale for several beats, and then pointed his cane at us.

“You two: out. Now,” he growled. “Back door. And no talking to the media under promise of arrest. Are we clear?”

Louis’s eyebrows knitted in anger. “You’ll arrest us if we-”

“Without hesitation,” Fromme said. “Now out and silent.”

“You act as if there’s been another AB-16 murder,” Louis said.

“An assassination,” Hoskins said, shock in her tone.

“Investigateur Hoskins,” Fromme said in warning.

“Who’s the victim?” I asked.

“Madame investigateur,” Fromme said.

The detective ignored the magistrate and said, “Guy LaFont. Minister of culture.”

Chapter 61

LOUIS WAS NOT himself as we circled through the streets from Millie Fleurs’s shop to the Plaza. A light drizzle fell and people were already heading to work, heads down and balancing their umbrellas.

“I fear for France, Jack,” he said grimly. “AB-16 assassinated not only a sitting member of the president’s cabinet, but one of the staunchest opponents of letting Muslims from our former colonies continue to immigrate here. There will be repercussions, I’m sure. This could easily spin out of control.”

On that disturbing note, we entered the hotel lobby, which was crowded now. Another member of Peaks’s security team stood watch outside the breakfast room. He nodded to us, giving us a one-finger salute.

Upstairs, we walked in heavy silence to the suite door. I was going to take a shower and Louis was going to order breakfast before we called our attorneys to work on getting Ali Farad released from custody.

“They seem to think they have evidence implicating him,” I said, passing the key before the lock.

“I don’t believe it,” Louis said. “Not for a minute. I vetted Farad myself. Ali is-how do you say?-squeaky-clean.”

I pushed the door open and knew something was wrong. The drawer to a desk in the suite’s hallway had been tugged open. I got out my gun and motioned to Louis to do the same.

We snuck into the living area, seeing that the French doors to the balcony were ajar and that the suite had been tossed in our absence.

Every drawer was open or on the floor. The mattresses had been thrown aside and my personal belongings searched and strewn about. Both safes were unlocked and empty, as I’d left them. When I’d taken the lighter to Petitjean for examination, I’d also brought along my cash and passport and left it all in a safe at Private Paris.

“I’ll call housekeeping,” I said, and headed toward the phone by my bed.

Louis grunted in reply, and then his cell phone rang. He answered, listened, and cried, “Merde! We are coming!”

He stabbed off the phone and shook it at me. “Hoskins and Fromme-they had to have known! And they say nothing to us!”

“Calm down. What’s going on?”

“It’s bad, Jack. Government agents are searching our offices, taking our computers, and seizing all evidence in the lab.”

Chapter 62

15th Arrondissement

10:40 a.m.

WHEN WE CLIMBED from the Uber car, there were black vans parked in front of our building and plainclothesmen wearing body armor and carrying submachine guns standing guard.

“Shit,” Louis said. “They’re carrying MP5Ks. Those guys are anti-terror.”

This was bad-very bad for Private Paris, and for me. The suggestion that Private was tied to terrorism was probably the worst thing that could ever happen. Clients would flee us like rats off a sinking ship.

Louis walked up to the nearest officer, his identification out.

“May I inspect the warrant?” he asked.

The officer played it professional and retrieved the document. While Louis studied it, Marc Petitjean and Claudia Vans were shown out the door by two more anti-terrorists.

Petitjean was enraged. “Thrown out of my own lab!”

Vans said, “You act like we’re criminals.”

“Maybe you are,” one of the officers said laconically. “That’s what we’re here to find out. If so, you will most definitely be hearing from us.”

“This is slanderous,” the scientist said.

“But legal,” Louis said with a sigh, handing back the warrant. “When can we reenter?”

“Couple of hours?”

“Please lock it when you leave,” he said, and turned to me. “We should go, Jack. The press will get word of this, and it does not help us to be photographed in connection with a terrorism investigation.”

The four of us walked away.

When we were well down the street, Petitjean said, “Given the letter and the initial reports we sent to La Crim yesterday, it didn’t surprise me that we were raided.”

“What reports?” Louis asked.

Vans frowned and said, “We ran DNA on the cigarette butts left at Chez Pincus and the pubic hairs we found at the sex club, and got enough to know that we are dealing with seven different people: five male, two female, and all of Middle Eastern or North African descent.”

“Farad?” I asked. “Is he a match?”

“He’s from the same general gene pool,” Petitjean said. “I could know more definitively in a couple of days, but they took the samples.”

Vans said, “We did get a match on the newsprint used to compose the letter. They were all cut from Algerian and Tunisian newspapers.”

“You can tell something like that?” Louis asked.

“It’s technical,” Petitjean said. “But yes.”

We rounded the corner, and I realized something else and groaned.

“What is it?” Louis asked.

“Kim’s lighter was in the lab. My passport and my money too.”

“No,” Vans said. “I’ve got your passport and cash.”

“And I have the lighter here with my cigarettes,” the scientist said, patting his breast pocket and smiling. “By the way, I know what it really is.”

After making sure we weren’t under surveillance, we found a café, went inside, and ordered double espressos and croissants that were good, but they didn’t splinter like the Plaza’s.

“So, what is it?” Louis said after the waitress had left. “The lighter?”

Private Paris’s head scientist dug in his breast pocket and came up with a blue box of Gitanes cigarettes and the stainless steel lighter that had caused havoc all over the city in the past few days. He held the lighter, admiring it.

“Quite a piece of technology,” Petitjean said. “Must have cost a small fortune to engineer. Very James Bond. Took a bit to figure it out, but I did.”

He turned the lighter upside down. He used a paper clip to press against the bleeder valve at the center of the flame control dial.

“There was actually butane in it the first time I tried,” the scientist said. “And that kind of threw me, until I…”

He used his thumbnail to turn the dial clockwise. Setting the paper clip aside, Petitjean took the lighter by both ends and tugged. It separated into two pieces, and revealed, sticking out of the bottom piece, a USB micro-B connector similar to the one that attaches a charger to my camera.

“It’s a data storage device,” Vans said.

“And heavily encrypted,” said Petitjean, who looked irritated that she’d spilled the beans. “I tried to hack my way in, but it was beyond my skills.”

“And mine,” Vans said.

I looked at Louis. “Le Chien?”

He smiled and said, “Excellent idea. We’ll put the Dog on it.”

Chapter 63

11th Arrondissement

11:35 a.m.

THE BRAIN-INJURED HACKER cradled an iPad connected to the memory stick and went into slow orbit around the perimeter of his apartment, completely ignoring Louis and me as he probed the method of encryption.

Louis shifted gears and put in a call to our French legal team regarding Ali Farad. I got on the phone with a Palo Alto, California, company that provides twenty-four-hour data backup services for Private offices around the globe, and authorized it to move a copy of all of Private Paris’s files to a secure virtual office where we could access them.

I called Justine, too. It was 2:35 in the morning, L.A. time, but she picked right up. The Dog orbited past me while I got her up to date on Kim Kopchinski’s kidnapping, the lighter, and the raiding of Private Paris.

“Private the focus of an anti-terror investigation,” Justine said. “A disaster.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“What about Farad?”

“Louis swears by him. And his record is immaculate. Not even a rumor of Islamic radicalism.”

“But you said the police hinted that they had more than a rumor?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“I honestly have no idea,” I said, glancing at Louis, who was in the Dog’s kitchen intently listening to his cell phone.

“Has news of the raid gotten out?” Justine asked.

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“Could be time to hire a publicist who specializes in crisis management,” Justine said. “Have something ready in case it does come out.”

“Maybe,” I said. “How’s Sherman?”

“Slightly better,” she said. Wilkerson had remembered her when she visited the night before. He also remembered that three men wearing masks had assaulted him in his house. They had wanted to know where Kim was.

“Sherman kept asking me if you had her safe,” Justine said. “I told him you were working on it, and that seemed to undo his progress. He got very agitated and angry with me-shouting, even-and the nurses asked me to leave.”

“Great,” I said, watching the Dog leave the cluttered living area and orbit into a back hallway.

Shaking his head, Louis hurried from the kitchen, glanced at me in deep distress, and said, “The lawyers, Jack. They say to watch the news. Life is getting worse for us and for Farad.”

Before I could reply, he snatched the remote off a coffee table.

I told Justine I had to go, and hung up in time to see the flat-screen on the wall blink and then jump to a Parisian street scene I recognized immediately.

“That’s Barbès,” I said. “The mosque. FEZ Couriers.”

“And Al-Jumaa tailors,” Louis said as the camera angle shifted to show officers wearing bulletproof vests and carrying MAT-49s as they led the tailor out of his shop in handcuffs.

Other anti-terrorists stood guard at the doors of the mosque and the courier service. A perimeter had been formed, blocking off a growing crowd of onlookers that burst into angry shouts when the police brought out Firmus Massi in cuffs. The owner of FEZ Couriers looked shaken and bewildered.

“Killers!” some began to chant. “Assassins!”

I recognized one of the protesters as that kid who’d chased the robed woman down the sidewalk, trying to get her picture. He still had the camera hanging around his neck, and shook his fist at the camera, yelling, “These immigrant AB-16 bastards want to destroy France, but France will destroy them!”

The mob’s fury built when the feed cut to the mosque doors, where anti-terrorists were hauling out Imam Ibrahim Al-Moustapha, who held his head high despite the wrist restraints and the hysterical crying of his wife and three children behind him.

Immigrants in the crowd began to shout, protesting the arrest.

“They think Farad’s involved because that’s his mosque,” I said. “And he knows that guy Massi, right?”

Louis nodded, transfixed by the imam, who looked right into the camera as he went past it, saying forcefully, “We are innocent. We have nothing to do with AB-16 or these killings. France is our home. We would never-”

The anti-terrorists pushed the imam into the back of a black van along with the head of the courier service and the tailor. The doors slammed shut and the van drove off.

Several men wearing FEZ jackets appeared, shouting angrily in French.

“I’m not getting what they’re saying,” I said.

Louis replied, “They say that the imam is a man of peace, and that this is a travesty of justice and a mockery of France’s tolerance. They say Massi was targeted because he’s a Muslim immigrant who has built a big business during the economic crisis, and the old French hate him for it. They don’t agree with the AB-16 killings, but they understand the reasons.”

On-screen, a bottle sailed through the air. It struck one of the men on the side of the head, and he staggered, bleeding. A piece of brick followed. Within moments the street all around the reporter erupted into chaos and fighting before the feed cut and the screen went to black for several seconds. Then it jumped to a pair of rattled French news announcers apologizing for the break in coverage.

Louis looked over at me gravely.

“I fear we are entering a dark and dangerous time in Paris,” Louis said. “We may be seeing the end of Private in France, and perhaps Europe.”

My stomach plummeted. This sort of thing could easily snowball, destroy the reputation of an investigative firm I had nurtured over years.

“Unless Farad and the imam are telling the truth,” I said.

“But if they’re not?”

Before I could answer, the television feed cut to, of all people, Laurent Alexandre, who was on the sidewalk across from Millie Fleurs’s shop, fighting back tears as he publicly mourned her death and denounced AB-16.

“French culture is not going anywhere,” Alexandre vowed. “Paris is the number one tourist destination in the world because we are so fierce about our culture. Millie was fiercely passionate about Paris and France, and I know she would want us to fight for it, to show her killers that her spirit and our culture go on. I have spoken with several of Millie’s friends, and instead of a funeral or memorial, we are going to put on a celebration of her life, a runway show in her honor. We’re hoping it will be televised to the nation.”

Before I could begin to wrap my fatigued brain around that, the Dog orbited back into the room.

“Louis,” he said before someone knocked sharply at the apartment door.

The hacker moved straight down the short hallway and looked through the peephole. Still cradling the iPad and the memory stick, he started to unlock the dead bolts.

“Who is it?” Louis asked.

“Maria,” he said.

“The concierge,” Louis told me.

Our attention shot back to the television screen, where the feed had cut from Laurent to Barbès. Tear gas was being fired at the rioters.

The Dog made a weird noise. I turned to see the hacker crouched and moving backward, and the old concierge shaking from head to toe.

Whitey was behind her. He had a gun to her head.

Chapter 64

“WEAPONS ON THE ground and back away, or she dies, and the retard’s next,” Whitey said, leering at us with yellow teeth.

Louis grimaced but unholstered his pistol and set it down. I did the same.

Whitey pushed the old woman inside, and his buddy, the Nose, appeared, also armed. He followed Whitey, shutting the door.

Still pressing his gun to the concierge’s head, Whitey said, “Where’s the lighter? Start talking or she dies.”

“You’re out of luck,” Louis said. “Government took it along with everything else when they raided our offices last night. It’s true-you can check.”

“Is that what you’ve been after all this time?” I asked. “A lighter?”

Whitey ignored me, but he was looking conflicted.

His partner said, “What do we do, Le Blanc? Call-”

“Shut up,” Whitey said, and I thought for a moment that he was going to cut his losses and bolt.

But then the Dog said, “I’m not retarded.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Whitey said, and then did a double take at the hacker.

He threw the old woman aside. In two bounds, he was in front of the Dog, who shrank in terror. Whitey snatched the iPad from him, held it up so his partner could see the memory stick jutting out the bottom, and said in triumph, “Bonus coming! We got it!”

The Nose grinned, then sobered and said, “They get in?”

Whitey slid his finger across the screen, studied it, and said, “Negative. We’re good.”

He pulled the memory stick and stuck it in his pocket. He tucked the iPad under one arm and said, “Just in case.”

“Whatever’s on that stick, you’ve got what you were after,” I said. “Let Kim Kopchinski go.”

The Nose snorted, “That’s not exactly up to us.”

“Zip ’em up, and we’re gone,” Whitey said.

They used zip ties to bind our ankles and wrists behind our backs. They shoved rags in our mouths and forced the four of us onto the floor.

“The shit you’ve caused us, we should shoot the both of you,” Whitey said, waving his pistol at me and Louis. “But we’re not sore winners.”

Then he kicked me hard, in the stomach. And the Nose did the same to Louis, low in the back. It took several painful minutes after they’d left for the two of us to recover enough to try to free ourselves.

The Dog was way ahead of us. He’d gotten to his feet somehow, hopped into his kitchen, and soon returned holding a pair of scissors behind him. Several contortions and a careful snip later, Louis’s hands were free. Louis took the scissors and cut off Maria’s bindings first and made sure she was okay before removing the Dog’s restraints and then mine.

I was feeling exhausted and low. We’d lost the memory stick, and whatever leverage we might have had to get Kim Kopchinski back. What was I going to say to Sherman? What could I say?

The hacker, meanwhile, went over to the concierge, and said something to her in Portuguese. She nodded, rubbed her wrists.

The Dog looked at us and said, “I am not retarded.”

“Absolutely not,” Louis said.

The hacker took several steps away with that vacant expression, and I thought he was going off into orbit again. He stopped, however, and said, “I’m smarter than they are, Louis.”

“I have no doubt, my-”

“No,” the Dog insisted. “I am smarter, Louis. Before I went to the door, I quit out. But I’d already cracked the security and copied most of the stick wirelessly to my iCloud account.”