Private Monaco

Chapter 23

Sci was in his second-favorite place, a lab. His favorite place was his garage at home where he restored old motorbikes and the smell of grease, metal and two- and four-stroke combustion brought him to life. Labs were a close second though, and even this under-equipped example was a better place to be than the hotel suite, staring at a computer screen.

Sci didn’t know how Mo-bot did it. She never seemed to tire of her machines and didn’t even have the outlet of a hobby like his bikes to restore her. Mo-bot’s entire existence was devoted to the digital world. Sci was pretty sure that when Silicon Valley started to offer implanted computer chips, Mo-bot would be first in line to have one hooked up to her brain.

But he was happy for her. She had a vocation and, like him, had established herself as a world leader in her field.

It was Sci’s notoriety as a forensics specialist that had got him in the lab. Jack had phoned Valerie Chevalier and offered her Sci’s services as a consultant. He’d pressed hard and Valerie had agreed to ask her head of forensics, Pascal Garnier. She’d called back minutes later, accepting the offer.

Sci had written books, published papers and lectured on crime-scene investigations. He didn’t recall Garnier, but the man said they’d met briefly at a conference in Las Vegas. He was mid-fifties, quiet, thoughtful and so eager to please that he treated Sci like a celebrity, offering him free rein of the lab at Monaco police headquarters.

Sci wished he could have added some real value, but the lab was rudimentary, and any specialist work had to be sent to France, so he and Garnier were limited to reviewing the basics.

“Nothing off the guy’s prints?” Sci asked about the man they were holding in custody.

Garnier shook his head. “If he’s been arrested, we can’t find a record. And we’re not getting any results from his photo either.”

“Send it to me,” Sci replied. “We might be able to ID him.”

He was thinking about Weaver and the capabilities of the NSA, which would far outperform the resources of the Monaco police and Interpol. He rocked back on his swivel chair and put a supporting hand against a lab bench. They were surrounded by microscopes, chromatographs and spectroscopes but the place was missing things like fuming chambers, and Sci felt sad for Garnier because he would always be limited by his lab.

“Did you scope the guy’s clothes?” Sci asked.

Garnier hesitated, before shaking his head. “I didn’t,” he confessed. “I would only do that to place a murder victim or a—”

“Criminal at a crime scene,” Sci interrupted. “And where is the scene of an abduction, right?”

Sci understood why Garnier hadn’t examined the suspect’s clothes properly. Conventional thinking said they knew where the crime had taken place: over a relatively expansive area of the heart of Monaco. But Sci couldn’t rely on conventional thinking to find his colleague and friend.

Garnier hesitated again.

“Is it where the kidnap victim is taken? Or where they are held?” Sci smiled at him, like a professor trying to encourage a student to think outside the box. Clothes could reveal as much of a story as fingerprints. “A kidnapping is an ongoing crime. Scoping the perpetrator’s clothes might give us a clue as to the victim’s current location.”

Sci felt a little strange referring to Justine as a victim, because she was one of the last people he ever thought of in those terms, but it was an accurate word, and it kept his language from becoming personal and emotive in the company of another law-enforcement professional. For now, Justine was the victim of a crime, but hopefully not for much longer.

“You got some gloves?” Sci asked. “And a mask? Let’s gear up, get the suspect’s clothes and see what we can find.”