Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

Tuesday Morning

AIMÉE STARED AT the clock. It was 6:00 A.M. Still no word, no call from the baby’s mother. The dried blood on the baby bag, the figure who had chased her in Place Bayre—these thoughts had kept her up half the night. Yet the responsibility for this small human terrified her most of all.

Streaks of an apricot dawn sky filtered in through the tall window, showing her vintage Chanel, now filthy, hanging from the armoire door. She envisioned the dry cleaner, hand on her hip, rolling her eyes, saying, “Miracles, Mademoiselle, cost more.” Reports were stacked on the desk, talcum powder dusted the duvet. All night she’d listened, alert to the breathing of the sleeping baby beside her, afraid at every hiccup that it would stop.

For a moment she imagined the room strewn with baby-care manuals, plush toys, dirty diapers, and a fine spray of pureed carrots decorating the cream moiré wallpaper. And herself, with sleep-deprived eyes and a misbuttoned sweater dotted with spit-up, like the bookstore owner’s wife around the corner who had three young children.

Next to her on the duvet, a little fist brushed her arm. The phone receiver stared her in the face. She had a business to run: a client meeting to attend, office rent to pay, and the sinking feeling she’d run out of diapers.

The phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring.

“Oui?”

“You sorted things out, right?” René said. “Had a good sleep?”

“Snatched an hour or two, René.”

The sound of a coffee grinder whirred in the background, a kettle hissed.

“You mean . . . the baby’s still there?” René asked. “Are you all right?”

She rubbed her eyes, torn between alternatives. She didn’t know what to do.

“I’m fine,” she said.

The coffee grinder sputtered to a halt.

“You know, and I know, that you’re an innocent party, Aimée,” he said. “But you could be accused of kidnapping.”

“Me, René?” she asked. “Her mother asked me to keep her for a couple of hours.”

“Don’t wait to read about a missing or kidnapped baby in this morning’s paper. It’s time you called Brigade de Protection des Mineurs, the child protective services,” René said, his voice rising. “You don’t know what’s going on. The longer you keep her . . . well, why get yourself in trouble?”

She gazed at the baby’s fingers, so small, curled around hers. She stroked the velvet fuzz on the baby’s head, like the skin of a peach. All night she’d racked her brain, trying to figure out who the mother could be and how she knew Aimée and had gotten her phone number.

René made sense. But she couldn’t send the baby away. Not yet. The woman had been in fear for her life and for the baby’s; she hadn’t even diapered her infant. Aimée knew she had to give the woman more time.

“She knows me, René, and she’ll be back,” Aimée assured him, wishing she felt as certain as she sounded.

“You’ll have to wing the Regnault meeting on your own, Aimée. Can you manage?”

“What?”

“I’m off to Fontainebleau,” he said. “The client likes the proposal but has questions to be answered before they sign a contract. This morning. You know how skittish they’ve been.”

A big, fat contract, too, if he could seal the deal.

“Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”

There was a pause.

“Think of the baby. The mother could be in jail, or on the run. Or . . . gone.”

She heard a thupt from a gas burner.

“Hasn’t that crossed your mind, Aimée?”

Just all night long.

“Promise me you’ll call child protective services.”

“I’ll take care of it, René.” She hung up.

In the stark daylight his words made sense. She should call the agency. Go through proper channels. But visions of a dreary nursery, short-staffed like all government institutions, filled her mind. Crowded, babies crying, indifferent social workers and judges and reams of bureaucratic red tape. She couldn’t bring herself to turn this tiny mite over to them.

Dulcet tones came from the covers. The little mouth was smiling like a cherub. Aimée lifted her arms up to tickle her and the yellow shirt rose on her birdcage chest. Bluish marks showed by a fold of skin under her armpit. Bruises. An awful thought struck her: this newborn might have been mistreated. Had an abusive mother abandoned her child, thrusting her into Aimée’s care? René was right. She was an idiot; she should have checked the baby more closely last night. Come to think of it why hadn’t René noticed?

Sick to her stomach, she peered closer. What she had thought were bruises—blue marks—looked more like scribbling with a pen. She could make out letters and numbers, a part of a word—“ing”—a name? Then “2/12,” part of a date? Odd. The mother hadn’t had the time to diaper her, yet she’d written. . . .

She grabbed the first thing she saw on her bedside table—a chocolate-brown lip-liner pencil—and copied into her checkbook the letters and digits she could make out.

The fax machine groaned as a page began to emerge from her machine. Due to scheduling conflicts, the Regnault meeting has been moved up to 8:00 A.M. Please bring the programming reports. Nadia Deloup, secretary.

Aimée thanked God she’d downloaded them last night. She glanced at the old clock and panicked. She had an hour. There was only one person she could call on.

“YOU DO NEED HELP, ” Michou said. He pulled off his red wig, stepped out of a sequined sheath, and hung it on a hanger under plastic. “You don’t know the first thing about them, do you?” He rolled his mascaraed eyes. “Sealing a diaper with packaging tape?”

She’d ruined three diapers and ended up taping one together.

Michou, René’s transvestite neighbor, stepped out of his pantyhose and into sweats. “You said it was an emergency so I came straight from the club.” He slathered his face with cold cream, using a counterclockwise motion. “I won’t be a minute.”

“Does Viard know about your maternal talents, Michou?” He and Viard, the crime-lab head Aimée had introduced him to, had been together for eight months . . . a milestone for both of them.

“Every man wants Paul Bocuse in the kitchen, Mother Teresa to care for his children, and a whore in the bedroom.”

No wonder she had no man. “What kind of dinosaurs think like that?”

“Not that we get it.” He grinned. His face wiped clean, Michou reared back in horror. “What did you do to this formula? It’s like cement, nom de Dieu!”

Aimée rubbed her eyes. “I was up all night, Michou, watching her, afraid she’d stop breathing. I couldn’t figure out that damn diaper. And this formula . . .” She shrugged. “You get it in and it comes right up again.”

Michou patted Aimée’s arm. “You need some coffee.”

AIMÉE SHOWERED, SLICKED back her hair, hoped that concealer would cover the rings under her eyes, then rimmed her lids with kohl. She slid into her pinstriped suit, a Dior from a consignment shop, and picked up the daily Le Parisien from outside her door.

In the kitchen Michou hummed, hot milk frothing on the stove as he held the baby in his arms. Rays of sun haloed the baby’s head. Through the open window, Aimée saw sunlight glinting on the Seine, a tow barge gliding under the Pont de Sully’s stone supports. Another warm day. She scanned the quai for someone surveilling the apartment but saw no one lingering behind the plane trees or the stone wall. Just the man she recognized from the first floor walking his dog, a plumber’s truck idling out front. A morning on the Ile Saint-Louis, like any other. No sign of a stalker.

Michou stroked the baby’s cheek. “Notice how she turns toward my finger—she’s ‘rooting.’” He placed the bottle between her lips and she sucked. “Voilà, she’s a pro! Tilt the bottle up so the formula fills the nipple, otherwise . . .”

“Some kind of baby voodoo, Michou?”

“I’m serious, air’s the enemy,” he said. “If air gets in, she gets gas. Gas you don’t want.”

“Merci, Michou, you’re a lifesaver.”

“Such a little beauty, Aimée.”

She was.

He looked at her. “So she’s on loan, to see if you want to order a model?”

“Do I look the type?” Aimée gave him a brief version of how she had gotten the baby.

“Et alors, the minute the mother calls, I’ll let you know,” he assured her, rocking the baby, blowing air on her toes, eliciting a gurgle.

“You have the touch, Michou.” Some people were born with it . . . a woman’s touch, a maternal side.

“Maybe you do, too, Aimée.” He gave a knowing wink. “It comes with practice.”

“They should come with instruction booklets . . .”

“Like your computer? If only it were that easy,” he said. He grimaced at her chipped lacquered nails. “If you waited long enough for your nails to dry properly, they wouldn’t chip like that.”

As if she had time. She was lucky when she could grab a manicure at all. Still . . . “Gigabyte green, Michou, it’s the new color.”

“Quel horreur. Without that, you’re naked, Aimée.” He pointed to the tube of Chanel Stop Traffic Red on the counter.

As she wiped the lipstick over her lips, she checked Le Parisien for a mention of an abandoned baby or of a woman being attacked on the Ile Saint-Louis. But the headline was about the MondeFocus protest erupting into a riot. The accompanying story alleged that the CRS had provoked the demonstrators. She turned to the short articles from the police blotter, but saw nothing about a woman having been assaulted or a kidnapped baby. The crime section continued on the next page. There had been incidents of purse snatching and an attack in the Châtelet Metro. Strange, nothing about . . . then she saw a short notice in the lower corner: Body of a young woman found in the Seine by Pont de Sully near Place Bayre.

Her hands clutched the rim of the steaming café au lait bowl as she read: Police request help in identifying a young woman, early twenties, recovered from a drain in an overflowing sewer in the Seine.”

The public was allowed into the morgue in such cases in hopes that someone could identify the victim.

Her skin prickled. She recalled the figure with the tire iron who had chased her in the Place Bayre, across from the Pont de Sully. So close by, almost outside her window.

Her cell phone trilled.

“Taxi downstairs, Mademoiselle.” The meeting would start in twenty minutes.

“Go. Buy more diapers on your way back.” Michou kissed her on both cheeks. “What about bisous for the little peach, eh?”

Aimée leaned down into the baby smell, kissed the soft cheeks, and swallowed hard. She tucked the newspaper under her arm and headed for the door, walking faster than she had to. Then she turned around, came back for the denim jacket, thrust it into her backpack in a plastic bag, and ran.

AIMÉE NODDED TO Vavin, Regnault’s head of publicity, a man in his mid thirties, trim, with wide-set eyes. He was cradling a cell phone at his ear.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Vavin.”

He flashed her a quick smile and raised a finger, indicating that he wanted her to wait a moment.

She knew his type: a harried blue-suit who traveled all the time, delegating and supervising ten publicity campaigns all running at once.

Beige carpet, beige walls, beige cabinets. He stood behind his desk. Also beige. The only personal touch was a framed photo on his desk, a smiling child on a wooden hobby horse.

Vavin clicked off his cell phone. “We’ve been hacked,” he said, punching the thick stapled pile of computer printouts on his desk. “Our system’s compromised, Mademoiselle Leduc.”

“Not since last night, Monsieur Vavin. Remember, you only hired us yesterday.” She opened her laptop and brought up the report on her screen, forcing herself to concentrate and ignore the article about the drowned woman she’d reread three times in the taxi. “As contracted, you hired my firm temporarily to maintain your operating system. Shall we go over what I’ve accomplished so far?”

If he’d hired Leduc Detective last week when she had presented the security proposal to him, instead of yesterday, the hacker would have been foiled. But she thought better of pointing this out.

“You can see from these results, it’s running smoothly. The system is secure.” She smiled. “For now.”

He studied her screen and calmed down. “Excellent, Mademoiselle. I like the way you’ve streamlined user functions and smoothed out the glitches in the interface. You’re as good as you claim. A small independent security firm like yours is what we need right now.”

She decided to seize the opportunity to reoffer the comprehensive security design he’d hedged about committing to the previous week.

“My firm found vulnerabilities in your system during our comprehensive security overview. We did a minor patch last night. With hackers, you can close the door but they’ll look for an open window. In our proposal we noted that . . .”

“We pay you to keep them out.” He gave her a tired smile.

He wanted a finger to plug a hole in the dike but sooner or later it wouldn’t be able to hold back the flood.

“As outlined in our proposal, your system has numerous flaws and we recommend stronger firewall protection.” She paused for effect, consulting the file in her hand, which she’d memorized. “My report shows that twice last month hackers took advantage of your vulnerability. It’s not in your interest or ours to apply Band-Aids to an old system.”

“Correct,” he said. “But my manager’s overwhelmed. I put your proposal on his desk but he was off to Johannesburg. This year our accounts have tripled. And, as with many companies enjoying a growth spurt, our auditing and computer services have been neglected.”

“I suggest you start fresh.”

“In the meantime, Mademoiselle Leduc, we need to operate and keep our systems functioning and secure.”

She turned to the window overlooking the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical garden, while she thought. A few protesters with banners reading STOP OIL DUMPING stood on the pavement below, fanning themselves in the heat. She wondered why there were protesters in front of Regnault.

“I’m not up to speed on your client accounts yet but . . .”

He noticed her gaze, shrugged. “The environmentalists don’t understand. Our premier oil company account is Alstrom. They have recently acquired some small companies that have ignored regulations. But Alstrom has already taken steps to cure these infractions.”

Typical spin from a PR man. She thought back to the article about the MondeFocus riots in Le Parisien.

“From what I understand about the MondeFocus allegations—”

“All blown out of proportion.” His eyes snapped. “They jump on any bandwagon, smear ‘the big, bad corporations.’ Uncalled for. They’ve targeted us, not knowing our client is already cleaning up toxic waste. They’re misinformed—that’s putting it in polite terms.” He shook his head. “Look, I’m progressive, so’s our firm and those we represent. Bottom line, my firm’s integrity means more to me than a huge contract. I’ve got a family and like every parent I want my child to grow up in a clean world. Believe me, pollution’s a great concern to all of us.”

His intercom buzzed and he glanced at his watch. “Excuse me, I’ve got a meeting.”

She smiled and tried once more. “Our joint package of security and system administration makes economic sense for you.”

Vavin reached in his drawer. “Right now I need you to continue maintaining our systems.” He slid a new addendum extending their contract across the desk. “Our sysadmin’s been hospitalized with acute appendicitis and we’ve lost two of the contract staff to a crisis in Milan. Count on me to recommend your comprehensive package to my manager when he returns.”

One didn’t say no to a client. Especially one with this much potential. Better more work than no work, René would say. She scanned the contract, signed it, and shut down her laptop.

“Last week, when we met,” Vavin said, his voice lowered, “I didn’t realize the ongoing nature of our system issues.” He flipped open a file, studied it. “A few areas . . . well, they concern me.”

Of course, he wanted to look good to his boss, to appear to be on top of his projects. Or was there something else she couldn’t put her finger on?

“Do you foresee more problems, Monsieur Vavin?”

Nadia, his assistant, peered around the door and smiled at Aimée. “Your car’s here, Monsieur Vavin.”

“Merci, Nadia,” he said. Then he turned to Aimée.

“In our line of work, we call them issues, Mademoiselle.”

Aimée nodded. She noticed a stack of environmental reports, pamphlets bearing the MondeFocus logo by his key ring and briefcase.

Before she could ask him if he had studied them, he’d put on his coat, dropping his key ring into a pocket, and shouldered his case. Pausing at the door, he said, “Mademoiselle Leduc, I appreciate your help but there is one more thing. Any problems, you deal only with me.”

She detected something behind his words. “Of course, Monsieur Vavin.”

As a system administrator, their firm would monitor Regnault’s network, deal with glitches in the staff’s computers, but rarely, if ever, would this involve the managerial staff. His request was strange. Unless Vavin was watching his back.

“Only me, comprends?” he repeated.

OUTSIDE, AIMÉE STARED at the khaki-colored Seine lapping against the mossy stone. Two years ago, a clochard—now termed sans domicile fixe (SDF)—the politically correct phrase for “homeless”—who’d slept under a bridge had fallen in, his foot catching in the branches of a tree carried on the swollen water. The current had swept his bloated body past her window. She shivered. More often corpses sank, drifting along with the bottom currents until they were caught in the locks downriver at Sceaux.

She ran her fingers over the stone wall fronting the L’Institut médicolégal’s brick facade, Le Parisien under her arm, her laptop case slung over her shoulder. She had a bad feeling in her bones.

She wondered if the young woman found in the Seine might be the baby’s mother. Her father always said, Think like the criminal, find the motive. If that didn’t work, go with the victim. Retrace her steps. In this case, she imagined a young woman looking over her shoulder, seeing the light in Aimée’s window, trusting Aimée to keep her baby safe. Safe from whom and what, she had no clue. And how had the woman known her name and phone number?

Aimée tried to think the way she must have. Scared, running away from someone, something, she sees light, finds the digicode broken, as it had been for a week, and enters the town house through the front door. Before she can go upstairs, she hears noises; someone’s followed her. Quickly, she takes off her denim jacket—now she looks different. She wraps the baby in it. She runs through the courtyard, sees the garage, which is open late, and uses the pay phone to tell Aimée that the baby’s downstairs. Then she runs to the Place Bayre.

But the attacker has recognized her. Did they have a confrontation on the quai? Was he the father of the baby, demanding his child?

Questions . . . all she had were questions.

To her right, the Ile Saint-Louis glimmered in the weak sun. Her apartment stood past the curve of the quai. She turned to face the rose-brick médicolégal building.

If she didn’t check out her hunch, she’d kick herself later. She hated this place—the odors of body fluids that were hosed down the drains in the back courtyard, the miasma of misery and indifference surrounding the unclaimed corpses. She couldn’t forget identifying her father’s charred remains after the explosion in Place Vendôme as the bored attendant scratched his neck and checked his watch, as her tears had dropped into the aluminum trough by her father’s blackened, twisted fingers.

She took a deep breath and opened the morgue door.

AIMÉE STOOD ALONE in the green-tiled viewing cubicle of the morgue basement. On the other side of the window lay a young waxen-faced corpse, a white sheet folded down to her neck, livid stains appeared on the skin of her cheek and neck, but Aimée could see that her eyes were deep set and her cheekbones were prominent. Unforgiving, stark white light bathed her features; there was a bruise on her temple, a mole on her chin, and she had straw blond hair that hadn’t been completely combed back, falling in greasy strands over her temple. Her partly visible ear showed raw, jagged edges and there was a frothy blood bubble on her neck. Weren’t they supposed to clean up the corpse to protect the family’s feelings?

Aimée didn’t recognize her. She’d had a hunch, but she’d been wrong. Why had she expected a corpse to sit up and talk, to give her a clue to the baby’s identity? Nothing tied them together.

“I’m sorry,” Aimée whispered, her breath fogging on the glass, “whoever you are.”

The door opened and she heard shuffling footsteps behind her. A blue-uniformed flic from whom the telltale aroma of Vicks emanated—used by new recruits to combat the odor—approached her.

“Mademoiselle, can you identify the victim?”

I am so sorry but I can’t help you.” “

A young man in a zip-up sweatshirt, brown hair curling behind his ears, edged into the room.

“Then if you’ll follow me, Mademoiselle, I’ll see you out,” the flic said.

She turned to leave, heard a small gasp, and saw the man clap his hand over his mouth.

“Monsieur, do you recognize the victim?” the flic asked.

He shook his head, looking away. He had a copy of Le Parisien in his back pocket.

“You seem upset,” the flic said, gauging his reaction.

“It’s unnerving to see a dead person,” he replied.

Aimée followed the flic but not before she noted that the man had recognized the corpse.

“Mademoiselle, this way please,” the flic said, hurrying her past several other sad-eyed people standing in the hallway.

AIMÉE INQUIRED AT three offices before she found Serge Leaud in the morgue foyer, which was lined with busts of medical pioneers, talking with a group of white-coated technicians. She hated bothering Serge, her friend as well as a medical pathologist, but she had to clear up the nagging doubt she felt.

“What if?” kept running through her brain. She had to find out if the woman had recently given birth. She caught Serge’s eye, mouthed, “Please.” And waited.

Serge shifted from foot to foot, his gaze flitting from her to his colleagues, one hand in the pocket of his lab coat, the other stroking his black beard. A moment later, he excused himself and joined her.

No customary kiss on the cheek greeted her; instead, he displayed a harried frown.

“The chief’s here and my blood-screen panel’s waiting,” he said. “I’ve only got a minute, Aimée.”

“Can you show me an autopsy report, Serge,” Aimée said, lowering her voice, “for the young woman found in the Seine by Pont de Sully.”

Serge nodded to a white-coated staff member who passed them.

“Let’s talk over there.” He jerked his thumb toward the corner. “You mean for the Yvette?”

She knew that was what they called all unidentified female corpses.

She nodded.

“I’m not supposed to do this, Aimée.”

“Help me out,” she said, “and we’ll call it quits.”

He owed her. His mother-in-law and wife both down with grippe, Serge tied up at work, and no Sunday babysitter available, she’d answered his plea and agreed to take his toddler twin boys to the Vincennes Zoo. The highlight of the day had been the ride on the Metro, and the twins, fascinated with trains, had refused to leave the station. The afternoon was spent greeting trains and saying good-bye to every engine. She’d finally bribed them with Mentos to go home. She’d been exhausted, wondering how his wife coped every day.

“The autopsy’s later this afternoon,” Serge said. “Désolé.”

First she felt disappointment, then relief. Of course, the baby’s real mother was alive and would return; she might be at Aimée’s now. Yet Michou would have called if she had turned up. A prickling sense that it all connected troubled her.

“No ID, and waterlogged fingerprints.”

“Was the skin on the hand so sloughed off she’ll need the ‘treatment’?”

Serge shrugged.

She knew the treatment, a technique used on waterlogged corpses that consisted of slicing the wrist to peel back the skin of the hand so the technician, inserting his own gloved hand inside the skin, could exert sufficient pressure for a print. Gruesome.

“It’s a hard call,” Serge said. Creatures have nibbled on the fingertips and there are injuries on the hand from the buffeting of the waves. We’ll inject saline for the soft tissue pads to plump them out. And if we’re lucky, we’ll get prints.”

He shook his head. “A sad case, I’d say.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket. ”I have a prelim report. It indicates suicide. So young.” His brow furrowed as he thumbed through the pages. He flipped one over and read on.

“But the bruise I saw on her temple might mean she was attacked,” Aimée said.

“It could have been caused by contact with the stone bank after she hit the water.”

“And the blood froth?”

“I’d say blood pooling in the ear first, associated with drainage. Or feasting by the river creatures.”

Aimée suppressed a shudder.

“You mean they showed that side because . . .”

“The other side was worse.” Serge exhaled. “The river squad, well . . .” he paused. “Let’s say the turbulent current and sewer grate against which she’d lodged made it difficult to pull her out.”

He shook his head again. “I’ve seen it before. Suicide d’amour, a love affair gone wrong, depression. No one to talk to.” Serge read further. “Where was her mother, her aunt? That’s what’s so sad. She’s like any twenty-something you see on the street: lace camisole, espadrilles, jeans.”

Her ears pricked up. “Jeans? What kind?”

“Hmmm . . . Lick, some designer brand my wife wears.”

“That’s all?”

He riffled through the pages of the preliminary report. “It says here that she wore earrings . . . beaded. No, my mistake. No beads on the earrings, sorry. Blue beads were embroidered on the jean cuffs.”

Like the ones on the denim jacket? Aimée’s pulse raced. There it was, the link she had sensed.

“Look, Aimée, I’ve done you a favor, and I haven’t asked you any questions, but what’s this woman to you?”

“A baby was left in my courtyard. Someone called me and begged me to protect her.” She pulled the plastic bag from her backpack. “Look, Serge, this denim jacket is embroidered with blue beads; it was wrapped around the baby.”

Serge stared. “Et alors?”

She controlled her apprehension. “What if these beads match the ones on the cuffs of the jeans?”

Serge’s beeper, pinned to the lapel of his white lab coat, vibrated.

“Can’t you check, Serge?”

“Aimée, you’re asking me to wade in deep water for a few beads,” he said. “And I’m late.”

“If the beads don’t match, no one will be the wiser,” she said. “But if they do . . .”

“Why would I stick my neck out?”

Feelings in her bones didn’t count with the flics. She couldn’t involve them until she knew positively that the beads were identical.

“Ballet tickets, Serge. Opening night. Isn’t your anniversary coming up?”

His wife loved ballet.

“Eh? You could get tickets?”

With enough francs and her friend at the FNAC ticket office, she could. She nodded. Across the foyer she saw the mec she’d noticed in the viewing cubicle mounting the stairs, then entering the restroom. She had to talk to him.

“You’ll inform me of the autopsy findings when you get them, Serge?”

He took the plastic bag with the denim jacket from her. Nodded.

“Of course, you’ll babysit the twins,” Serge said. “We’d make an evening of it, dinner . . .”

“Don’t press your luck, Serge.”

BELOW THE STERN gaze of Pasteur, Aimée tapped her fingers on the blue plastic chair. She’d checked with Michou; still no word. She was waiting to question the mec, who she could have sworn had recognized the corpse. The woman might have been the baby’s mother.

She’d formulated her questions by the time he emerged from the restroom.

Typical student attire: Levi’s, hooded sweatshirt. He had a thin face with a jutting jaw, sharp nose, and sallow complexion. A crowd of blue-uniformed flics paused in the foyer, blocking her view, and by the time they’d moved on, he was gone.

Hurry, she had to hurry, to catch him before he reached the Metro or hopped on a bus and disappeared.

She saw him, already half a block ahead of her, crossing Pont Morland, and she ran to catch up with him. Below her, the anchored houseboats creaked, shifting in the rising Seine. She finally drew level with him, gravel crunching under her heels, two blocks further on, on Quai Henri IV.

“Excuse me, I need to speak with you,” Aimée said, gasping for breath.

His eyes darted behind her as he fussed with the zipper of his hooded jacket. Eyes that were red rimmed and bloodshot. Had he been crying?

“Why?”

“I’m sorry but in the morgue—”

“Who are you?” He shifted his feet.

Young, no more than twenty, she thought. “Aimée Leduc,” she introduced herself. “Did you know . . . the victim?”

“Know her?” He averted his face. “My cousin’s missing, but that wasn’t her.” His agitation was noticeable as he zipped and unzipped his sweatshirt. There was a slight compression of syllables at the ends of his words. Was he a foreign student perhaps?

“You saw the article in the paper. Are you sure this woman wasn’t your cousin?”

He backed away. “Yes.”

She handed him her card.

“‘Leduc Detective, Computer Security?’” He stiffened. “What do you want?”

“Didn’t you recognize her?”

“As I told the flic, I didn’t know her.”

“Non, you said your cousin was missing.”

And she even doubted that. She wished he’d stand still. A bundle of nerves, this one.

“Please, I’m not a flic, but I need to establish her identity. It’s vital.”

He broke into a run. She sprinted and finally caught him by his sleeve. Ahead, an old man scattered bread crumbs to a flock of seagulls by the bouquiniste, the old secondhand bookseller’s stand.

“Maybe I can help you,” she said, panting and clutching his arm.

“A computer detective can help me with what?”

He pulled away, knocking her shoulder bag to the ground. The papers in the Regnault file spilled onto the pavement.

“Sorry. Look, I’m in a hurry.” He bent down, picked them up, and then stared at the pages he held, before slowly handing them back to her.

She caught his sleeve before he could take off again.

“If you’re illegal, that’s not my business. But if you know her identity, that is my business.”

Instead of showing fear at the intimation that he might be an illegal immigrant, he bristled. “I’m an émigré; I have been granted political asylum. But the manipulations of ministries and business here are just as bad as it was under the Communists. You call this a corporate economy, but it’s all the same.”

What was with the political jargon? Though he had a point.

“Tell me her name, tell me where she lived.”

A bus crossed Pont de Sully, slowing into the bustop on their right.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

How could she reach this stubborn kid? She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Two nearby matrons holding shopping bags paused in their conversation and moved away from her.

She stepped closer to him, so close she could see small beads of perspiration on his brow.

“You work for them! I’ve seen the names in your papers,” he accused her. And he took off, jumping into the rear door of the bus before it took off.

Them? Regnault? What was going on? He knew something. But she couldn’t chase him on the bus. She had another idea. He wouldn’t get away so easily next time.

BACK AT THE MORGUE, Aimée spoke to an older man with a handlebar mustache who sat at the reception center. Behind him were shelves of files and a barred cage in which a bright green parrot perched. Since the morgue’s reception floor wasn’t a sterile environment and due to Ravic’s seniority he managed to bring his feathered pride and joy to work. “Ça va, Ravic?” she asked. “Pirandello got any new languages under his beak?”

Ravic grinned. “Esperanto—he took to it like his mother tongue.”

His claw-footed wonder had won prizes, even talked on an RTL radio pet show once.

“Do me a favor, Ravic. Let me see the visitors’ log.”

“Eh? Didn’t you sign in?”

Of course she had; she’d had to show her ID. The student would have done so, too.

She leaned closer over the chipped Formica counter. “It’s embarrassing. I just saw an old friend, but I’ve forgotten his name.”

Ravic, one of her father’s old poker crowd, smoothed his mustache between his thumb and forefinger. “Regulations, Mademoiselle Aimée. I can’t.”

“Of course, I understand. But you could just slide the book across.” She flashed a big smile, lowering her voice. “We’re meeting for coffee and I feel stupid.”

“A chip off the old block, like they say,” he said. “I’d like to, eh, but I’m sorry.”

Ravic had aged little in the five years since she’d last seen him. She wondered how her father would have looked, had he lived.

“If I let you, everyone else and their mothers will want to . . .”

“Ravic, no one has to know.” She grinned, wishing he’d relent. A line had formed behind her; someone cleared his throat. “Just turn the log a little more to the right so I can read his name. That’s all.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “For old time’s sake then.” Ravic slid the register in front of her. There was a blue scrawl under her signature but it was undecipherable.

She thought hard. She’d shown her ID; he would have had to do so as well.

“Ravic, it’s not legible,” she said. “Remember anything from his ID?”

“A student card, that’s all,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mademoiselle Aimée.” He raised his hand to beckon to the person in line behind her.

She had to persist, couldn’t leave without something. Ravic had been a formidable poker player; he always remembered all the cards that had been played.

“You need to see an ID with an address,” she said. “Remember anything from this one?”

He scratched his cheek. “Polish?” Then he shook his head. “I’m not sure. So many people came today.”

“That looks like an L at the beginning and it ends with an I,” she persisted.

“Maybe it’s a Polish name,” he said.

She took a guess. “Lives near the Sorbonne or he used to.”

“That’s right. Rue d’Ulm.” He grinned. “My wife’s father worked on rue d’Ulm, I remembered thinking that.”

She pointed to the scrawl. “Look again, Ravic. Does anything jog your memory?”

He shrugged. She heard shuffling. A long line stretched behind her now. He didn’t remember. Disappointed, she turned as an irritated woman edged in front of her.

“Aha . . . that actress,” Ravic said. “Sounded like that actress.”

She paused and looked back. “Which actress . . . You said it sounded Polish.”

“Rhymes with Nastassja Kinski.”

“You mean Linski?”

He winked. “Got it in one.”

KRZYSZTOF LINSKI WAS the name she’d found listed in the phone directory at an address on rue d’Ulm. He lived in a sand-colored stone building near the Panthéon, a few doors down from the Institut Curie and the Lebanese Maronite Church. The ground floor contained a bar/pub with posters advertising heavy metal and rockadelic nights. Bordering the nearby Sorbonne, this was a student area, the Latin Quarter. The building had no elevator but there was a flight of wide red-carpeted stairs with oiled wood banisters, leading to apartments containing lawyers’ and psychiatrists’ offices. The staircase narrowed to bare wooden steps as it reached the sixth floor, which held a row of chambres de bonnes, former maids’ rooms.

Typical cramped student accommodations. Hovels was more descriptive, she thought. A shared hall toilet; the odor of mildew coming from the dirt-ingrained corners. Peeling floral wallpaper illuminated by a grime-encrusted skylight that let in only a sliver of light. Dust motes drifted in it and she sneezed. The chords of an amplified electric guitar reverberated from down the hall.

She knocked on the third door. No answer. Knocked again.

“Krzysztof Linski?”

The guitar drowned out her voice, her knocks. Either Krzysztof hadn’t returned yet or he was ignoring the raps on his door. His attitude had become belligerent; she doubted he’d welcome her. She’d have to convince him to trust her, open up.

The guitar stopped, someone swore. She heard footsteps below, slapping on the stairs.

A red-haired, pale-faced tall scarecrow of a mec edged past her and inserted a key into the lock on Krzysztof’s door.

She thought fast. “So you’re Krzy’s roommate.”

He nodded.

“I’m supposed to meet him.”

He shrugged.

Unsociable, and no conversationalist. Or was he mute?

“Mind if I wait?”

“Suit yourself.” He actually spoke as he started to shut the door.

“Inside?” She didn’t wait for an answer.

Once she was inside she realized the problem. The attic room wasn’t much bigger than a closet. Two people standing in it would touch shoulders. She hoped the mec wasn’t about to change his clothes.

Orange crates with slats for shelves supported piled textbooks and a Polish-French dictionary. On one side of the tiny room there was a sleeping bag crumpled on a Japanese straw futon. The mec stooped; still his shoulders touched the sloping wood ceiling. She could imagine him sticking his head out the skylight, like a giraffe, to breathe. A pair of black denims and a tuxedo under plastic wrapping hung from the rafters. Perhaps Krzysztof moonlighted as a waiter at fancy restaurants or catered affairs as many students did. She filed that thought away for later.

The mec set his backpack on the floor, sat down cross-legged, and pulled his damp sweater over his head, then started on his T-shirt.

“Sorry, I’ll turn around . . .”

In answer, he pulled closed a little curtain suspended on shower hooks—like those in the sleeper compartments of trains—for privacy. His welcoming skills rivaled his conversation for charm.

The small corkboard on the opposite wall, pinned thickly with photos, ticket stubs and fliers, caught her attention. She looked closer. Photos of a demonstration, Krzysztof carrying the banner of MondeFocus, groups of young people handing out leaflets clustered around a pillar that she recalled; it belonged to the Panthéon.

No one she recognized. Another dead end. She glanced at her Tintin watch.

“Any idea when Krzysztof will get back?”

“Not anytime soon,” the mec said from behind the curtain.

“Why’s that?”

“His stuff’s gone. Guess he forgot to tell you.”

“But the tuxedo?”

“He hated that tuxedo.”

Done a runner. Lost him. Again.

As she was about to stand up, she saw several MondeFocus pamphlets stuck halfway into a dictionary. She’d take one, get the address, and ask around for him there. She coughed to cover her actions as she slid a leaflet out.

A photo fell to the floor. A group shot of student types sitting in front of the Panthéon. And then her heart skipped a beat. She saw the dead girl—straw blonde hair, wearing jeans and a denim jacket, a serious expression on her face. Sitting next to her were Krzysztof, two other women, and two men. But the blonde girl didn’t look pregnant.

The curtain was pulled back. “Jealous type, aren’t you?” he said.

She thought quickly. When caught, brazen it out. And pointed to the blonde girl. “Then she is his girlfriend!”

“What else?”

“For me, eh, it’s casual.” She shrugged. “I met Krzysztof two days ago,” she said, improvising. “But he owes me two hundred francs. Do you know his friends or where he hangs out?”

“You know him a day longer than me.” He shrugged. “No clue.”

This one was really helpful!

All the way down the stairs she thought of Krzysztof’s look of recognition as he saw the dead woman’s face, his reaction to the pages of the Regnault files that he’d picked up and scanned, his parting shot, “You work for them.” It all tied together . . . but she didn’t know how.

She caught the bus, sat in the rear, and turned the photo over. “Orla, Nelie, me, Brigitte, MondeFocus antinuke” was the inscription, but there was no date.

So Orla was the blonde woman in the morgue, his girlfriend, and both were involved with MondeFocus. Strange that he’d refused to identify his girlfriend. Then she wondered if the dead woman might have been the mother of his child. And why would Orla have telephoned her for help and entrusted her infant to Aimée? But now that she had the MondeFocus address, she had someplace to start.

Aimée debated calling the flics and dropping the information she had so far into their hands. But she knew what they’d say. No proof this Orla was the mother or Krzysztof, the father. Why wouldn’t the dead woman have left the baby with Kryzsztof if he was the father? She decided to postpone making any decision until she received the results of the autopsy. First she had to go shopping.

SHE STARED AT the Monoprix aisle crowded with diapers, formula, teething rings, bibs, nonirritant soap . . . endless. How could tiny babies require all this? Every package bore labels color coded to age and weight. Endless varieties of formula, including soy and lactose-free. A large display printed with symptoms and arrows cross-referenced photos of homeopathic herbs for diaper rash, floral remedies for colic, a veritable rainbow of products for ages zero to five; it resembled the duty-free brochure on an Air France 747. Her mind balked; she was overwhelmed. Unless it was for shoes, shopping wasn’t her forte.

Did it have to be this complicated, did she need to take courses? In Madagascar, women squatted by thatched huts, letting their diaperless babies do their business in the white sand, then rubbed them with coconut oil. No vast crowded Monoprix aisle for them.

Her hand brushed a booklet, Using a Pacifier or Not . . . the Hidden Traumas. Here was a new world, new worries . . . pacifier trauma?

She had to get a grip; it couldn’t be that difficult. She looked for the newborns section, figuring the baby weighed less than five kilos, like her laptop. But she stood devastated by the array of baby wipes, scented and unscented; shampoos; vitamins. She would need hours to read the labels, to compare and match them to the baby’s skin condition and digestive disposition. She didn’t have that kind of time; she had work to do—a body that had been found in the Seine to identify, her security programming assignment to complete . . .

She needed a method to bring order out of confusion.

Within three minutes she’d located several women with infants. One held a baby in a carrier across her chest, its pink knit cap with rabbit ears poking up, who looked the right size. She trailed the woman to the baby aisle. Every time the woman selected an item from the shelf and put it in her cart, Aimée followed suit.

With a full cart she stood at the cash register.

“You sure you want the night-control protection diapers for a newborn and for a ten-month-old?” the cashier asked with a wink. “Had them close together, eh?”

Aimée reddened. “Oui . . . non, I mean you can’t be too careful at night.”

A woman chuckled behind her in the long checkout line. She stammered merci, grabbed her change. Ran out and hailed a taxi, jumped in, and piled her bags on the seat.

She was late. Ahead, a snarl of buses and cars sat in midday stalled traffic. Pedestrians filled the zebra-striped crosswalks; the outdoor café tables on the sidewalks spilled over as the lunch crowd took advantage of the unexpected heat.

“Quai d’Anjou. Fifty francs extra if you skirt the traffic on rue Saint Antoine,” she said, perspiration dampening her collar.

The driver grinned and hit his meter.

Ten minutes later, she set her bags down in her sun-filled kitchen, where the wonderful scent of rosemary filled the air.

“Bought out the whole baby section, have you?” Michou pulled out pureed broccoli tips, yellow squash in small jars. “Quite the organic gourmet . . . but a thing this little won’t eat solids for a few months.”

She was useless. She couldn’t even buy the right food.

The baby cooed, wrapped in Aimée’s father’s soft old flannel bathrobe. Michou had improvised a bassinet from an empty computer-paper box resting on the table.

A surge of protectiveness overwhelmed Aimée. Duty—no law—required her to turn the baby over to the authorities. But the mother knew her name and had begged her not tell the flics. Until the autopsy result revealed whether Orla was the baby’s mother, she’d keep her and care for her.

She put the future out of her mind. She planned to monitor Regnault’s system, deal with their other contracts, and master diapers this afternoon. She lifted the lid of the copper pot simmering on the stove, swiped her finger across the surface, and licked it. “Ratatouille!” The last time she’d used the stove had been for heating up takeout. For her, that counted as cooking.

The wavering slants of pale light pouring through the window, the aroma of herbes de provence perfuming the kitchen, reawakened a warm familar feeling she remembered from the deep recesses of her childhood. Good homemade food had been as much a given as breathing in her grandmother’s kitchen. She recalled the hazy summer heat in her grandmother’s Auvergne garden; her mother’s laugh, her sun-warmed pockets filled with fragrant fresh-picked raspberries—red, glistening jewels exuding a scent that was so sweet. Her laughter as she popped them into Aimée’s mouth. Her mother . . . where had that memory come from?

“Take a cooking class, Aimée.”

“I’d do better to get a wife, Michou. Like you.”

Michou grinned. “Try cuisine dating. It’s for singles. You cook together, eat, and see if any sparks fly.”

Baby products, cooking classes . . . what next? As if she had spare time after completing her job: computer security, sysad-min, and programming. Let alone time to discover why a baby had been left in her courtyard, and why the mother, if indeed it was she, was lying in the morgue.

“At least you bought diapers. That’s a start, Aimée.” Michou shouldered his bag, rubbed his chin. “I need to wax my chin and iron my gown. We’re playing in Deauville tonight.”

She caught her breath. “Deauville? You’ll be that far away?”

“The casino.” He smiled. He patted her on the back. “You’ll do fine. Oh, by the way, the phone rang in the middle of her bath, but when I answered they hung up.”

She wondered if the mother had tried to make contact, then had hung up, scared by a man’s voice answering Aimée’s phone.

“Michou, did you hear voices?”

“Only in my head, chérie.”

“Wait a minute, Michou. You answered the phone, said, ‘Allô’—”

Common courtesy, of course,” Michou interrupted, putting “his wig case into his tote bag.

“Try to think, Michou. Repeat what you did and said. There could be a clue, some way to—”

“You mean like in Agatha Christie?” Michou’s plucked eyebrows shot up on his forehead. “Mais oui, I looked out the window.” He took a mincing step. “I showed la petite the birds nesting in the . . .”

“I mean when you answered the phone?”

“I bathed her in the kitchen sink, wrapped her in a towel, of course, but oui, right here.”

He took another step, gestured with wide arms to the open kitchen window. “Allô, allô . . . I kept saying allô, that’s all.”

From below came the churning of water, the lapping of waves against the bank as a barge passed them on the Seine.

“Michou, think back,” Aimée said, trying to keep her foot from tapping. “Did you hear anything in the background? Maybe traffic, indicating the call came from a public phone, or was it quieter, like in a resto or from a home. . . .”

“That’s why it seemed so hard to hear—it was the water.”

“Water?”

“C’est ça!”

“You heard water like the sewers being flushed or—”

“The river.”

Aimée controlled her excitement. “You’re sure?”

Michou’s eyes gleamed. “Over the phone, I could hear a barge whistle . . . that’s right. Like someone was calling from right downstairs.”

Hope fluttered in Aimée’s chest. There were no public phones on the quai downstairs but the mother was nearby, and alive, she sensed it. She would surely make contact again.

Michou shouldered his bag.

“Don’t forget, Aimée, keep the baby’s umbilical stump out of the water for at least two weeks.”

“But I don’t know how old . . .”

“I rubbed off all those ink marks. An infant’s skin is very delicate. Why in the world would anyone . . . ? But it doesn’t matter. She didn’t have an allergic reaction and they’re gone now.”

Good thing she’d copied them.

Aimée eased the pink bunny-eared hat she’d bought over the baby’s fontanel. “Never too early for a fashion statement, petite.”

“You’d like to keep her, Aimée.”

She froze.

“It’s written all over your face,” Michou said.

“She’s not mine, Michou.”

He sighed. “You’re becoming involved; it’s impossible not to with a baby. Aimée, don’t let yourself get hurt. . . .”

Of course she wouldn’t. She kissed Michou on both cheeks. “You’re a lifesaver, merci.

”

A tinge of color swept over Michou’s cheeks. He paused. She’d never seen him tongue-tied before.

“All in a working girl’s day, chérie.”

THERE HAD BEEN no call. Aimée rubbed her eyes, strained from monitoring Regnault’s system. Boring, tiring, drudge work. Several hours of it. The most lucrative in the business. The baby, on a pillow in a hatbox on the floor, gurgled.

She entered her old student ID number on a second computer and combed the Sorbonne student directory. She accessed the administrative files using the technique a savvy friend had shown her—useful for altering grades. She accessed the personal files of all the students, then narrowed her search to émigré-status students with the name Linski.

Voilà. Krzysztof Linski was an engineering major. She even found his class schedule, which she downloaded. Twenty years old, born in Kraków, Poland. Member of the chess club and an above-average student. And he knew about computers.

She copied the information, put it in a file. The baby let out a bleating cry and Aimée picked her up and rocked her.

With the baby in the crook of her arm, she hunted online for Orla, a search by first name. But the program, an old one, indicated that the last name was required. No go.

At least she could contact MondeFocus and seek some answers there. She telephoned the number given on the flier but a generic recorded message was the only answer: Sorry we missed your call. Leave a message. Frustrated, she left her name and cell-phone number and hung up.

Right now she should be questioning the garage owners for information about the woman who had used their phone. Again she wondered why the woman hadn’t called back. She stood the baby in her arms and reached for the group photo she had stolen from Linski’s room. Too bad there were no last names written on the back. She sniffed as she caught a rank whiff, then gasped in horror at what leaked from the baby’s diaper all over the keyboard of her computer.

As she reached for a tissue, beeping came from her computer. Error code. GX55 flashed on the screen with respect to Regnault’s system. The beeping was a counterpoint to the baby’s cries. A system glitch. Perfect timing. Everything happened at once.