Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

Saturday, 4:30 P.M.

AIMÉE PICKED OUT Coulade, surrounded by students, in the office at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, adult division. The narrow two-person office he’d shared with Pascal—she recognized it from the photo. She sat down to wait in the anteroom, a high-ceilinged affair painted a faded institution green. A welcome warmth radiated from the chipped heater. She took off her coat and rolled up her sweater sleeves. A few minutes later, the students left, papers in hand.

“Oui, Mademoiselle?” Standing at the office door, Coulade gave a quick glance at the card she handed him. He was in his late twenties, black hair sprouting from a widow’s peak, stocky of frame under a dark sweater and tweed jacket. A typical academic. He looked rattled. “I’m sorry, nothing to do with me.”

“But I think it does,” she said.

Coulade took in her stovepipe suede leggings, his gaze resting a moment on the low V-neck of her black cashmere sweater.

“Since Pascal Samour’s murder—”

He stiffened and put his finger over his mouth. “Inside.”

Mock drama, a chance to grope her? She didn’t like him already. But she stepped inside the office. She needed answers and access to Pascal’s work computer.

Coulade’s face blanched in the hanging fluorescent office light. “We kept this terrible news from the students. I took over his symposium today. There are thirty-five students finishing their exams. And my notes …” He scrambled around amongst the papers on his desk. “… somewhere …”

Overwhelmed, she saw that. Nervous? Or guilty?

“This won’t take long,” she said, scanning the two cluttered desks. “Where’s the green dossier?”

“Eh?” His eyes gravitated again toward her neckline.

Her dislike for Coulade grew by the minute. “Pascal said you had the green dossier.”

“He told you that?”

Why couldn’t Coulade answer a question?

Coulade grabbed a pile of notebooks. Checked his watch. “Listen, I’m late. There are waiting students.”

“But Samour—”

“Zut! We share this office, but I’m only here part-time. My day job’s teaching at the lycée. I don’t know of any green dossier.”

“Two weeks ago there was one,” she said.

He expelled air from his mouth. “Et voilà.” He gestured to the files. All blue. “I’ve got no clue what Samour meant.”

Her stomach turned. “You really don’t know?”

“No idea,” Coulade said. “He was an absentminded type. Half the time, his head spun with ideas and he’d forget to write anything down. A dreamer.”

But it still didn’t explain Samour’s letter. “When did you last see Pascal Samour?”

Coulade hurried to the door and beckoned her to follow. “Last week, non, Monday. We were supposed to meet here yesterday, but …” His face fell. “I couldn’t.”

Coulade had to know more. Even if he didn’t realize it. She wouldn’t give up. “Meet regarding what, Coulade?”

“He didn’t tell me.” Coulade shrugged, eyed the door.

“Think back to the green folder.”

“Green folder?” Coulade shook his head, his face blank. “Color-blind, Pascal. All our folders are blue.” He waved toward the file cabinets. “But these folders, all they have are student grades. No way you’re allowed to look at them. Compris?”

Another bump in the road. A road going nowhere. She wanted to get Coulade’s eyes off her chest and nail his feet to the floor.

“Alors, Coulade, last night my partner and I discovered Samour’s body chewed by rats in the snow.” She stepped closer and pointed out the thick bubbled-glass window. “Juste à côté, not far from here. I think you know more than you’re letting on.”

“Eh?” Coulade ran his hand nervously over his neck.

“He told me to talk to you.”

Coulade reached for the door handle. “But I don’t—”

“Bon,” she said. “I’ll let the flics know you’ve got something to tell them. Let you sweat it out at the commissariat.”

Coulade stiffened. “Nothing to do with me, I tell you.”

“Too bad. I’m surprised they haven’t questioned you.” She shrugged. “I play fair, but they don’t.”

Coulade blinked, hesitating. “Half the time I didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not. He’d found this document misfiled in the Musée’s holdings. Or so he said. Ranted about how he’d found a link. But he needed more.”

She suppressed a shiver. “A link to what?”

Coulade shrugged. “Some design he worked on. But it never made sense.”

“I need something more specific.”

“He hadn’t put the pieces together. Or so he said.” Coulade shrugged again. “Yesterday he left me five messages here at the office. I’d turned off my cell phone.”

“Messages saying what?”

“To meet him here. He sounded excited. Paranoid, if you must know. Couldn’t leave specifics on the message, he said. Mentioned a fourteenth-century document. That’s all. But I’d taken my students on an all-day field trip to the Meudon Observatoire.” Coulade looked shaken.

“What time did he leave the last message?”

Coulade checked the pile of pink message slips on his desk. “Looks like five P.M.”

“Did he mention Becquerel?”

Coulade shook his head.

There was a knock on the office door.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said.

Aimée looked around the office. Sparse. Only one computer, on Coulade’s desk. Her heart sank.

“Didn’t Pascal work on a computer?”

“His laptop,” Coulade said. “Refused to use these antiquated ones the department furnishes. But he kept his at home, I think.”

He ushered her out and locked the door behind them. His footsteps beat a quick tattoo down the drafty hall toward a crowd of waiting students.

What wasn’t he telling her, she wondered. She waited until he turned the corner, reached in her bag and took out her lock-picking kit. Into the old-fashioned door lock, she inserted the snake rake, then the W pick, and jiggered the mechanism. She heard the tumbler turn.

“Mademoiselle?” a voice called from the hall.

She whipped around, keeping her back to the door and her hand on the lock picks.

An older woman, her hair in a bun held in place with a pencil, waved at her. “Professor Coulade’s received an urgent message.”

Aimée smiled. “If you hurry you’ll catch him. Left at the end of the hall.”

The woman clucked like a hen. “If it’s not one thing, it’s the other. We’re swamped. I don’t suppose you could bring him the message?”

“Desolée, Madame, I’m en route to the archives,” she said.

The woman’s ample bosom heaved, perspiration beaded her brow. She shrugged, then hurried past Aimée.

After the woman’s footsteps faded, Aimée turned the knob, removed the wires, and entered the office. That done, she reinserted the wires and locked the office from inside.

She needed to hunt for this green dossier.

But Coulade’s computer screen blipped. A swirling desktop image of a trebuchet, the medieval slingshot-like weapon used to hurl boulders at fortified battlements, floated across it. In his hurry Coulade hadn’t logged out. She hit the cursor. Apparently he didn’t have time to organize his files. There was data info all over the screen. A bonanza.

The key turned in the lock. Merde! Coulade had come back.

She depressed the key combination to store his log-in, then dove under Pascal’s metal-frame desk at the end of the narrow office.

Not a moment too soon.

“Everything’s handled,” Coulade was saying. “We’ll shift assignments, I found a substitute—”

A woman’s voice broke in. “Professor Coulade, the last exam’s begun. The departmental guidelines outline specific procedures.”

Aimée pulled at her sweater, which was bunching up her back in the cramped space. Her hands were coated in dust. At least the desk panel hid her from view. She wished she could hear their conversation better.

“But my mother-in-law suffered a heart attack.” Coulade opened his desk drawers.

“What can you do for her at the hospital?” The woman’s tone indicated his duty was here to the students.

Aimée agreed. She’d never understood the clannishness of French families. Perhaps because she’d only known it from the outside.

“If the department questions or invalidates the exam procedures, the students will have to postpone until a retake next semester,” the woman pleaded. “We can reschedule the evening symposium session, but—”

“If none of this had happened …” Coulade’s words trailed away.

As if he blamed his murdered colleague for the inconvenience.

“Jean-Luc’s substituting, thank God,” he said. “He’s more qualified than I am. A grande école graduate and friend of Samour. No problem. I confirmed with the registrar.”

“But Professor Coulade—”

“Madame Izzy, for the tenth time, I’m part-time, not a professor, and all of this takes too much time from my family. My wife’s distraught.”

Or did Coulade want to distance himself from the murder, the complications?

Aimée heard the trilling of a cell phone.

“Oui?” Coulade’s voice rose. “But you don’t mean … I’ll try.”

Then the shuffling of feet as they left the office. The light switch flicked off and the office plunged in darkness, and the lock clicked. She didn’t have much time to trawl Coulade’s desktop for a misnamed file. She hoped, since Samour suspected danger, he’d have sent this file to an unsuspecting Coulade. Made a backup.

Coulade’s password prompt yielded to her keystrokes, and seconds later his swirling screen saver appeared: Engineering Tech. Slide Rule. Calculation Theorems.

In the heated office, which now felt stifling, she rolled up her sweater sleeves higher and pulled out discs from her bag. The heat made her sleepy. She needed an espresso, but there was no machine in the sparse office. Trying to stay alert, she inserted a disc and let the machine go to work copying the data. Later, Saj could weed through the program for a link to Pascal.

Now to Samour’s metal desk, which was cluttered with administrative memos, requisition lab slip receipts, and student papers. She picked his locked desk drawers to find more of the same. No laptop. Nothing to do with the museum holdings.

Frustrated, she searched his bookcases, documents, the blue files. Engineering manuals, phone books. Nothing interesting, until she found a frayed leather volume, nineteenth-century by the look of it, entitled Guilds in the 14th Century.

Had Samour meant this, she wondered, leafing through the gilt-edged, tissue-thin pages. A bookmark inside bore the logo of the occult bookstore on rue aux Ours.

She stuffed it in her bag, glancing at the time.

There was a click and whir as the copied disc ejected. She slipped in the second disc, which installed a spyware tracking bug. Hoped to God it worked as fast as René promised it could.

Her cell phone rang in her pocket. Quickly she hit mute. She debated not answering it, but Prévost’s number showed.

“Mademoiselle Leduc. You left me a message?”

“Oui.” She stepped to the back of the office, lowered her voice. She needed an excuse to discover more about his investigation. “I’ve remembered something.”

“Un moment,” Prévost said. She heard rustling, what sounded like his hand over the receiver.

In the meantime, she checked Coulade’s computer. A long moment until INSTALLATION COMPLETE popped on the screen. She hit eject. Another whir as the second disc popped. She scooped them both in her bag.

“Mademoiselle?” Prévost was back on the line.

“Doesn’t procedure dictate the Brigade Criminelle handle Samour’s murder?” she asked. From the crime report on Demontellan’s desk at the prefecture, she knew Prévost had inserted himself in the investigation. But why? She wanted to know more.

“Who says they’re not, Mademoiselle Leduc? For now you deal with me as chef de groupe of Police Judiciaire. Things have come up,” he said, suddenly hurried. “I don’t have time. Come at seven to the commissariat.”

She checked her Tintin watch. More than an hour. Almost enough time, if she left now, to check out Samour’s apartment and visit the museum.

The line buzzed. He’d hung up. Great.

Minutes later she strode down the overheated hallway. Students blocked the corridor, grumbling over the late-afternoon symposium postponement. Near the open door of the back exit, several students wearing parkas stood around smoking, instead of venturing into the chill, moss-carpeted courtyard outside.

And the feeling of being watched hit her. She shuddered. But among all these milling students? Had she grown paranoid?

She passed a classroom and peered in the open door. Heads bent down over wooden desks built in the last century. She remembered those small desks. Murder on her long legs.

“Time’s up,” said a clear male voice. “You’ve earned a five-minute break.”

She peered inside at Coulade’s replacement. A tall, blond man gathered papers from the podium. If she hurried she’d manage a few words with him.

Shoulders jostled her. By the time she’d negotiated the stampede of outgoing students, she no longer saw him.

“Mademoiselle, you dropped this.”

The man held up Samour’s book.

Azure-blue eyes, a grin. Muscular shoulders under his denim jacket. Good-looking in a Nordic way, and an engineering genius to boot, she figured.

“Merci. I heard from Coulade you took over the seminar.” She thought fast. “You’re Pascal Samour’s colleague?”

“Pascal’s my old Gadz’Arts classmate.” His eyes flickered in pain. “Such a tragedy. I still can’t understand it.”

“Gadz’Arts?”

“Silly term.” He shook his head. “It’s from gars des arts, guys from the arts. Just what we call ourselves. But we graduates remain close. Our training and traditions bind us like family.” He shrugged. “That’s why I wanted to help out.”

“So this adult school and your grande école are connected?”

“Confusing, I know,” he said with a small smile. “This school was originally charged with collecting inventions and gradually became an educational institution, a grand établissement, a loose affiliation to us at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers. Liken this to an adult trade school granting doctoral degrees.”

She wondered at an engineer from an elite school teaching in an adult trade school. Service to the community?

But he knew Samour. This man was no doubt a source of information. And he had a test to give.

She smiled. “Do you have time for a aperitif later?”

If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. He handed her his card, a slow smile spreading over his face. Jean-Luc Narzac, Communications Division, Frelnex.

The telecom giant.

“Not that I’d turn down an apéro with a woman like you, but why?”

“It’s regarding your classmate, Samour.”

“You work in the Conservatoire, Mademoiselle?”

Not yet. But it gave her an idea. “A consultant. I’ll explain. Tonight?”

The hall buzzer sounded. Students tramped and engulfed them. He checked his watch.

“Let’s say nine P.M.”

In the ten minutes it took to reach Pascal Samour’s street, Aimée came up with a plan and made three phone calls, one of them to the Musée des Arts et Métiers. She scanned Pascal’s building on rue Béranger. The dark-blue doors hung open, revealing a long, cobbled courtyard. The concierge was making a half-hearted attempt to sweep the slush to the gutter. The scraping noise grated in Aimée’s ears.

A typical late Saturday afternoon on rue Béranger, the inroads of les bobos, the bourgeois-bohèmes. Families braved the crisp cold to guide toddlers on tricycles; middle-aged women in long down coats with shopping carts returned from the market. Newspaper delivery trucks double-parked mid-block outside Libération’s headquarters, near an indie art gallery. A leashed dog sniffed a lamppost, and a mufflered child laughed and ran ahead of his parents. Another world from Chinatown only a few blocks away.

Inside the cavern-like portal, she glanced at the mailboxes, high-security tungsten with each resident’s name in neat, black capital letters. SAMOUR, PASCAL, she noted. Escalier C, 3ème étage.

The concierge, trim for his fifties, set the shovel against the mailboxes with a thump. He squinted curiously.

“Looking for someone, Mademoiselle?”

In all the wrong places, she almost said.

No reason to share her goal of a murdered resident’s apartment. Sooner or later, she hoped much later, the flics would affix the notice with telltale red wax signifying a deceased resident and seal the apartment.

“Why, I just found my friend’s apartment … Escalier C.” She flashed a bright smile. “Bonne soirée, Monsieur.”

She stepped past him into the courtyard. Escalier C, the last on the left, was a circular, tower-like outcrop with a dizzying climb of seven stories. The polished brown stairs, sagging from wear in the middle, wound upward like a snail shell. This rear area around the courtyard had to be seventeeth-century if not older, she thought. And not remodeled since then.

On the third floor she caught her breath, found the longhandled key under the flowerpot. Anxious, she let herself in. In contrast to his great-aunt’s flat, Pascal’s was a cold room with a high-timbered ceiling.

Ransacked too.

She gasped. An IKEA bookcase overturned, a drawing table upside down, an armoire open, shirts and jackets littering the floor.

She reached for her keys, bunching them between her fingers, and scanned for an intruder. But the door had been locked, she remembered.

In the galley kitchen, emptied spice bottles and spilled pasta were strewn over the counter. Iron sconces on the stone walls held broken candles. Behind a battered bamboo screen she found an overturned iron bed frame, sprinkled goose feathers from a ripped duvet, a slashed mattress with ticking bulging out.

Living in a tower didn’t appear comfortable. Even the destroyed furniture gave off an unlived-in feel.

For twenty minutes she searched every nook and cranny in the single, cold room. No laptop. No green dossier.

She needed to put the little she knew together. Yet what good would that do, if the killer had the laptop or whatever Pascal wanted her to find? Non, she needed to think as Pascal would. Or at least try to.

A geek with searing intelligence, a highly trained technical engineer from a grande école, a loner. A man who taught at an adult trade school when his fellow graduates took jobs in high positions at companies like Frelnex.

Pascal, afraid for his life, had left a message two weeks ago instructing its recipient to find a green file, come to his apartment, and talk to Becquerel. But Becquerel had died. Hence, she figured, his repeated messages to Coulade yesterday.

And no green file. Or fourteenth-century document.

But why make it all so mysterious? Why not give concrete details? Unless …

Something happened yesterday. Unable to update Coulade, he’d seeded info in several locations. Pieces of a damned puzzle.

Yet, to find what?

A project his great-aunt had mentioned—concerning a museum file he’d told Coulade he’d discovered.

Frustrated, Aimée righted a chair by the window and noticed blue dust on her fingers. She smelled it. Chalk dust.

She paused at the lead-framed window and, with her gloved hands, opened it and pushed the shutters back. The view gave way to scattered low buildings, the crescent edge of a courtyard, a glass-roofed atelier below. The approaching dusk darkened exposed patches of earth. Unusual to find open space in a dense quartier like this, where every meter was utilized.

But more unusual were the diagrams in blue chalk on the curved stone wall below. Blue chalk lines intersected and arced in what reminded her of a star chart. An amateur astronomer, a stargazer? But she saw no telescope, no binoculars.

A configuration. But of what she had no clue.

Pascal would be a puzzle lover, she figured. A dreamer, Coulade had said.

But driven and edgy in his work? If this was a guide, a map, she wondered again why he’d made it so difficult. Especially since he’d suspected the danger.

Too clever for his own good? Or afraid of discovery and running out of time?

She breathed in the cold air. Her mind cleared. The diagram was so familiar. But from where?

She pulled out her palm-sized digital camera, René’s latest must-carry gadget, shot photos of the wall diagrams, a few of the room layout, the view from the window. If she hadn’t found answers here, she’d picked up a sense of how to look for them.

She locked the apartment door behind her and descended to the ground level.

Her breath caught.

Prévost, a blue-uniformed flic, and a mec she recognized from Brigade Criminelle strode across the courtyard.

She ducked into a cove containing garbage bins, crouched on the damp flagged floor behind a broken chair. Odors of last night’s fish clung in the corners.

Prévost huddled in conversation with the plainclothes, who wore a bomber jacket just like Melac’s—a definite undercover trademark. After a long moment, the mec handed Prévost an envelope and jerked his thumb upward. Prévost turned on his heel and the man headed toward the tower entrance. And toward her.

Pascal had left her the key, and his great-aunt had hired her to investigate. By all rights they’d given her access to the apartment. But try explaining that to la Crim or a flic. One she didn’t trust.

They could accuse her of violating procedure, regulations, the order of the law, or of ransacking a victim’s apartment. With no time or desire to engage in semantics, she kept her head down, hoping her knees didn’t give out.

Five minutes later, after the last footsteps sounded on the staircase above, she crossed the courtyard. She checked for Prévost or police presence on rue Béranger. None.

Turning left, she headed toward her parked scooter and called René. René was better at puzzles, loved a challenge. His phone rang and rang. Too late, she remembered the hotel …

“Can’t you give us some time, Aimée?” René answered, irritated.

“Desolée, but it’s important,” she said, checking her Tintin watch. “You’re going to get a call.”

“From who?”

“I’m volunteering and you’re going to give me a stellar reference, René.”

“Gone crazy, have you?” A sigh. “Consider our accounts, our security projects out for bid. Accounts who’ll pay real money.”

“The volunteer coordinator from the Musée des Arts et Métiers will call, can you remember that? I’m volunteering to assist in digitizing the museum holdings during their renovation,” she said. “Pro bono, of course, a service to the community. Tell her how Leduc Detective welcomes opportunities to preserve history and culture for the next generations—”

His line ticked.

“Right on time.” She prayed this worked out. “A glowing recommendation, René.”

She heard the click of heels behind her. A woman walked into an art gallery. “Call me back. I’m en route there now.”

She shouldered her bag, double-looped her scarf, and turned the key in her scooter’s ignition.

“Seems they’re desperate since the last volunteer left. You got the job,” René said, ten minutes later. “Digitizing the catalog collection, sorting through centuries.”

She figured as much.

“She wants to meet you. I said you’ve made time in your busy day, et cetera.” Pause. “This involves Pascal Samour, n’est-ce pas?”

“Bien sûr. It’s the only way to find out.”

“Find out who murdered him by volunteering at the museum?”

“Long story, René.” The image of Pascal Samour’s corpse flashed in her mind. “I took the job. Five thousand francs retainer.” Not to mention Tso’s cash “retainer,” but she kept that to herself. “You in, René?”

“The old lady reminds you of your grandfather, n’est-ce pas?”

Maybe she did.

“And Meizi’s still a suspect,” Aimée said.

Pause. “I’m in. See you at the office in a few hours.”