Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

Saturday, 6:30 P.M.

OUT IN THE street, Aimée stamped the ice from her boots. She turned the key and pulled her scooter off the kickstand. Trying to avoid the slush, she zigzagged in the worn grooves of melting ice. A sputter, choking, and her scooter died. Out of gas.

Great. She flipped on the reserve tank, prayed she had a quarter of a liter and some fumes. She sloshed the scooter back and forth to get the juices flowing.

Again she sensed someone watching her. The shadow of a figure appeared on the pavement. An uneasiness dogged her.

Had Prévost followed her?

She whipped around. An old man, his collar pulled up against the cold, clutching a Darty bag, a Miele vacuum attachment poking from the top.

Get a grip. She needed to calm down, reason things out. Get back to Leduc Detective and show René the blue chalk diagrams.

Another scooter’s roar filled her ears. “Need help?” asked the helmeted figure, pulling over.

“Non, merci.”

But the rider pulled the helmet off. A fortyish woman, who shook her blonde curls and smiled. Kissed Aimée on both cheeks.

Did she know this woman?

“We’re going to Café Rouge. Behind you. We’re old friends.”

“Quoi? Who are you?”

A little laugh. “But a wonderful new hair color. Chic, I like it.”

She hadn’t been to the coiffeuse in six weeks. And then she felt her wrist seized in an iron grip.

Aimée struggled to shake the woman loose.

“What the hell … let go!” Panicked, Aimée looked around. No one on the street now.

“Stay calm. Cooperate.” Laughing now, the woman swiped the curls from her face with the other hand. “My instructions say we’ll sit at the café’s back table. They’re watching, so smile.”

This smelled bad. Security forces bad.

“And if I don’t?”

“A broken wrist. Unpleasantness.” She winked. “We wouldn’t want that.”

Not smart to struggle if they’d gone to these lengths.

“But my scooter—”

“Will be taken care of,” the woman finished.

The woman propelled her arm in arm, as if they were old friends, into the café. Grinning, a whispered aside. “Smile.”

Aimée sat down on the banquette under a beveled mirror. Before she knew it, the woman had disappeared and a man sat down next to her. She recognized Sacault, a member of the DST, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the national security branch under the Ministry of the Interior. He wore a brown suit. Brown-eyed, hair to match. Anonymous. He’d pass for an accountant. Muscular, mid-thirties, not an ounce of fat on him.

Sacault snapped his fingers at the man behind the counter. “Deux cafés, s’il vous plaît.” He turned back to her.

“Am I going to like the coffee here, Sacault?” she asked.

“Please listen. Ask questions after. D’accord?”

She suppressed a shudder. “Now I know I won’t like it.” She gestured to the man behind the counter. “Make mine a Badoit, s’il vous plaît.” She glared at Sacault. “Whatever’s going on, you know that I only talk with Bordereau.” Her lap-swim partner, the only one she trusted in the DST. She’d helped Bordereau before. And he’d returned the favor.

“Bordereau’s busy,” he said. “I’m the one you talk to now. We employ watchers, handlers …”

“And tough blondes.”

He continued. “Consultants on all levels. This morning, we had a cast of consultants for four hours until you showed up. Imagine what that costs?”

The DST could afford it, and more. A drop in the ministry bucket to them.

“Like that’s my problem?”

“You didn’t know?” Sacault cut in. “Sad news. Pascal Samour, your friend, died serving his country.”

She gasped. Pascal worked for the DST. Her heart thumped.

“My friend?”

“Went to his flat, didn’t you?”

Now she understood why they strong-armed her. But how much did they know about her connection, his great-aunt? She shook her head, determined to keep her cards close to her chest. “Alors, I’m sorry about Samour, but there’s a mistake.”

“Samour worked on something important for the security of our country.”

She clenched her knuckles under the table. The project. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“We’ve got more resources than you, but we need the pieces you can offer in the investigation to find Pascal’s murderer.”

Since when did the DST concern itself with a homicide? Already she didn’t trust Sacault. But had Pascal worked for them? It boiled down to Samour’s project. Or Sacault was lying. Or both.

“I don’t understand.”

He paused. “I think you do.”

She didn’t want to understand. She scanned the café. Empty. A chill ran up her arm. It made some kind of sense.

“Pascal died for his country,” he said. “I’m to remind you that your father worked for the forces in a similar consultant capacity.”

“So the DGSE claimed. I don’t believe it.” She’d refused a work “offer” from Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure military intelligence last month. Then, as now, she had no intention of taking them up on anything. “So you’re implying you at DST get in bed with the other big boys at DGSE when it suits you?”

He averted his eyes. Had she touched a nerve? A bitter rivalry existed between the DST and the DGSE, their military counterpart at the Ministry of Defense. Hatred described it better.

“For all intents and purposes, I liaise with the DGSE,” Sacault said.

It cost him to say it, she could tell. Napoleon’s design to pit various forces against each other worked to this day. Like so much of the little dictator’s centralization in France. “Too bad,” she said. “Not a partnership I’d relish.”

“Alors, you’re in place,” Sacault said, his mouth tight. “Don’t ask me why. We want you to continue.”

How much did he know? She held her question until the waiter uncapped the moisture-beaded bottle of Badoit, poured her a glass, and retired.

“In place? I don’t understand, Sacault.”

“Your connection to the Musée des Arts et Métiers.”

“Connection?” She sat back, felt a gnawing at her stomach.

“We know it’s not your thing,” His lips pursed. “Not something you want to do. But we need your help to bring Pascal’s killer to justice.”

“You’re right, Sacault.” She hit her fist on the table. “It’s not the way I work. No contract with the DST. Not my style.”

She pushed her chair back and stood up.

“But if you cooperate, this will open channels,” he said, plopping a white sugar cube in his espresso and stirring with the little spoon. His tone was everyday conversational. “Highlevel security dossiers with intel might be interesting to you.”

She froze. He swam in the big league, like his predecessor, Bordereau. Was he implying what she thought he was?

“Concerning my … my family?”

A brief nod. He glanced at his vibrating phone on the table.

She remembered the ten-year-old letters from her supposed brother, the postmarked American stamps, the faded, childish scrawl.

“But the handwriting expert said there’s no proof I have a brother,” she said. She swallowed. “Do you know something more?”

“I know nothing about a brother,” he said, giving her a quizzical look. “But I could open other doors.”

He glanced at his still-vibrating phone on the table. “Un moment, I need to take this call.”

He stood and disappeared into the back.

She sat back down. Her mind traveled back a few weeks, before Christmas, to the crowded café with fogged-up windows. Paul Bert, the handwriting expert, hunched across from her with an open file on the marble-top table.

She’d leaned forward, wanting him to be wrong. “Didn’t laser techniques identify the paper’s age, the ink, the handwriting?” She paused her hand on the wineglass.

“Eh voilà, inconclusive results, Mademoiselle.” Bert exhibited all the charm of the wooden chair he sat on. And the warmth.

Empty-hearted, she’d stared at her untouched glass of Bordeaux, the café light fracturing on the rim.

These faded ten-year-old letters had led nowhere. A dead end to a supposed brother. No trail to her American mother, a seventies radical, still a fugitive on the World Security watch list.

She shook aside the memories, her brief hope gone.

“Do we have a deal?” Sacault sat down across from her.

Jolted back to the present, she noticed how he slid his phone in the pocket of his suit jacket.

“Information concerning your family in return for cooperation.”

Her mind spun with temptation. And simmering anger. For years she’d gotten nowhere. Time to test him. “A bit unusual coming to me now after all these years. Why?”

“Right place, right time.”

Intrigued now, she smiled.

“I want access to Interpol, MI6. CIA,” she said. “Show me proof. Or nothing.”

He met her gaze. Inclined his head with a slight nod.

Too easy. She should have asked for more.

“So you can reopen my mother’s files, grant me access?”

“On Sydney Leduc?” he said. “I said open channels, establish communication. But no guarantees.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m a fixer,” Sacault said. “I can make things happen. Or not. That’s the limit of my capability.”

Her pulse thudded. “That’s too vague,” she said. “Give me specifics.”

He sipped his espresso. “For example, access to a buried surveillance report, a sighting, a tracking log. Those types of things.”

Was her mother alive?

In his echelon, the shadow world, business was conducted behind closed doors, favors granted and repaid, a nod here, a career step up or down, the give and take of information. Priceless. Unavailable to outsiders like her.

“Compris?” he said. “You accept or not?”

She’d be a fool not to grab this shot, never get one like it again. But everything cost something, one way or another. To pay the devil? What the hell was she supposed to do? Foreboding hit her deep in her bones.

“Tell me what Pascal Samour worked on,” she said.

“I’m a fixer,” Sacault said again. “Furnished with limited intel. All I know is that Samour worked on a project vital to the country and he died for it.” His voice was businesslike. “Now, I received the call to assemble an operation. Recruit operatives, consultants, work the setup, get them in place. According to my instructions, you’re already in place at the museum. We agree, and I set up meets.”

“That’s it?”

“Routine.” He downed his espresso.

“Give me proof.”

“Your handler will contact you. With proof.”

He stood. The café had begun to fill up.

“One more thing,” he said. “You’ll have no cell phone contact on this. Remember in here.” He pointed to his head. She felt something slide into her hand. A matchbox with a red rooster on the cover. “Follow your instructions. Then destroy it.”

He’d counted on her cooperation. How transparent could she be? Ruffled, she wanted to slap it on the table.

But he’d gone.

She sipped the fizzy Badoit as everything whirled in her mind: Pascal murdered a few blocks away, his great-aunt, a fourteenth-century document, Pascal’s job recommendation for Meizi, Prévost’s role in the investigation, the strange chalk diagrams on Pascal’s walls.

Pascal Samour spawned more secrets in death than in life.

Events had ratcheted up another level. If Pascal worked on a project for the DST, that explained why they’d surveilled and recruited her.

They were after what he’d hidden.

She shuddered, fingering the matchbox in her palm. Hesitated. Most access to intelligence dossiers came after the deaths of those involved. Even then, it could still be decades, given sensitive security issues.

Her hands trembled. Could she face the truth? Did she really want to know? Deep down the little girl in her longed for her mother to walk around the corner. The hope never died. She’d never move on.

She slid open the cardboard matchbox. A slip of cigarette paper with writing on it.

Café des Puys 10 p.m.

Nothing else. Disappointment filled her.

Out on the slick, wet pavement, she found her scooter parked and locked by a bare-branched plane tree. She glanced at the fuel meter. Full.

She quivered inside. Any of these passersby—the woman pushing a stroller, the middle-aged couple with a Westie on a leash—could be surveilling her. Any or all of them.

If she didn’t push those thoughts down and jump back on the train, she’d get nowhere fast.

The method of Pascal’s murder troubled her. The way he’d been wrapped in plastic, his hands bound behind him on the palette. The murderer had been sending a message, but what, and to whom?

The charcoal clouds trembled and the sky opened. Frustrated, she pushed her scooter under a glass marquee and watched the rain. After a call to the commissariat for the case number, she rang the Institut Médico-Légal’s number and hit the laboratory extension. Two rings. A clearing of a throat, water running in the background. “Oui?”

“Serge, s’il vous plaît.”

“Try Monday.”

“Maybe you can help me,” she said.

“We’re short-staffed.”

She needed answers. And now.

She clicked her phone. “That’s my other line. Look, this won’t take long. It’s concerning the autopsy results for a male, late twenties.” She paused, rustled her checkbook near the receiver. “A Pascal Samour.”

“Who’s this?”

Rain splashed on her boots. “I’m Prévost’s admin assistant, from the commissariat in the third,” she said. “He didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“I’ll check the paperwork, but it’s somewhere in the request,” she said. “The priority request for Samour’s autopsy results this morning.”

“Like I’ve had time to write the report?” he said. “I’m subbing for the interim assistant.”

At least he’d performed the autopsy. As interim staff, he wouldn’t know all the procedures. Or she hoped he wouldn’t.

“Mais alors, you should have said so.” She gave a short laugh, looked at the report number she’d written on her palm. “It’s case number 6A87. Just shoot the prelim over. Serge does it all the time.”

Pause.

“Prelim without pathology?” he said. “No analysis of nail scrapings, stomach contents? That’s all I’ve got.”

“That will do for now.” She let out a sigh. “Or read the results and I’ll type in the prelim. Add the path later.”

“Call back. Give me ten minutes,” he said.

And search for the nonexistent request?

She recognized the low thumping of hydraulic-pump pressure hoses washing down the autopsy tables, the dissecting tools, the tiled floor. Once, during her brief year in premed, her class spent a morning at the morgue. That’s when she’d met Serge.

“Prévost’s on my back screaming priority,” she said. “I’d like to mention how helpful you’re being. What’s your name?”

“Carton, but …” Pause. “Un moment.”

She prayed he’d find it. And before Prévost got wind of this. She shivered in her wet boots under the glass awning.

Carton cleared his throat. “Considering the snow, the temperature, the conditions, we put time of death at one to two hours before discovery.”

So he put time of death between seven and eight P.M.

“Does that take into account the plastic wrapping? Wouldn’t that keep in the body temperature?”

“Plastic?” Carton said. “I’m working from a cadaver, you understand. And given that this death occurred outside in the snow, the body would cool faster than the usual degree and a half, two degrees per hour. Let’s see, it says leg flesh was gnawed. There’s a note that says ‘rat meat.’ ”

She cringed.

“Cause of death asphyxiation,” he continued. “Apart from the ligature marks on his wrists, no abrasions or contusions were present.”

Unease flickered through her. She hadn’t seen the ligature marks. All she remembered were the eyes. “So you’re saying …?”

“I’m saying nothing,” Carton said. “The burns take longer.”

She grabbed her scooter’s handlebars. “Burns?”

“Traces on his right index and middle finger. Not fresh, hard to tell,” he said. “The tissue after microscopic examination will indicate the age of the injuries, the healing time. We never commit until the pathology report. Even then this looks cut-and-dry.”

Cut-and-dry? Samour was wrapped in plastic.

“Take it up with Serge. You got the prelim results. What you wanted, non?”

Not what she wanted at all.