The Day After Tomorrow

43

WITHIN THE hour McVey was in a taxi, heading for Gatwick Airport. He’d left Noble and Scotland Yard scouring missing-person files for anyone who bore the description of their John Doe and who’d had head surgery requiring the implant of a steel plate and, at the same time, quietly checking every hospital and medical school in southern England for people or programs experimenting in radical surgery techniques. For a time he’d entertained the thought of requesting Interpol, Lyon, to have police departments do the same throughout Continental Europe. But because of the Lebrun/Albert Merriman file situation he decided to hold off. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, was going on inside Interpol, but if something was, he didn’t want something similar happening with his investigation. If McVey hated anything, it was having things going on behind his back. In his experience most of them were petty and backbiting, aggravating and time consuming but essentially harmless, but this one he wasn’t so sure about. Better to hold off and see what Noble could turn up first, on the quiet.

It was now 5:30 P.M., Paris time. Air France Flight 003 had left Charles de Gaulle Airport for L.A. at five o’clock as scheduled. Doctor Paul Osborn should have been on it but he wasn’t. He’d never shown up for the flight, which meant his passport was still in the hands of the Paris police.

Increasingly, McVey was distrusting his own judgment of the man. Osborn had lied about the mud on his shoes. What else had he lied about?

Outwardly and under questioning, he’d appeared to be, and admitted being, exactly what McVey thought he was a well-educated man approaching middle age head over heels in love with a younger woman. Scarcely anything significant in that. The difference now was that two men were violently dead and McVey’s “well-educated man in love” was connected to both.

The killings of Albert Merriman and Jean Packard aside, something else was gnawing at McVey, and had been even before he’d spoken to Lebrun: Dr. Stephen Richman’s off-the-record remark that the deep frozen, headless bodies might well be the result of failed attempts at a very advanced kind of cryosurgery attempting to join a severed head to a body not its own. And Dr. Paul Osborn was not only a surgeon, but an orthopedic surgeon, and expert in the human skeletal structure, someone who might very well know how these things could be done.

From the first McVey had believed he was looking for one man. Maybe he’d had him and let him go.

Osborn woke out of a dream and, for a moment, had no idea where he was. Then, with sudden clarity, Vera’s face came into view. She was sitting on the bed next to him, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth. She wore black, wide-legged slacks and a loose sweater of the same color. The black of the cloth and soft light made her features seem almost fragile, like delicate porcelain.

“You were running a high fever; I think it’s broken,” she said gently. Her dark eyes held the same sparkle they had the first time they’d met, which Osborn, for some reason, calculated had been only nine days earlier.

“How long was I out?” he said, weakly.

“Not long. Maybe four hours.”

He started to sit up, but sharp pain shot through the back of his thigh. Wincing, he lay back down.

“If you’d have let me take you to the hospital, you might be a little more comfortable.”

Osborn stared at the ceiling. He didn’t remember telling her not to go to a hospital, but he must have. Then he remembered he’d told her about Kanarack and his father and the detective, Jean Packard.

Getting up from the bed, Vera lay the wash cloth; in the pan she’d been using to keep the cloth damp, and moved to a table under a small, clam-shaped window that had a dark curtain pulled across it.

Puzzled, Osborn looked around. To his right was the door to the room. To his left, another door was open to a small bathroom. Above him, the ceiling pitched sharply so that the side walls were much shorter, than the end walls. This wasn’t the room he’d been in before. He was somewhere else, in a room like an attic.

“You’re at the top of the building in a chamber under the eaves. It was built by the Resistance in 1940. Almost no one knows it’s here.”

Lifting the cover from a tray on the table where she’d set the washbasin, Vera came back and set it down on the bed beside him. On it was a bowl with hot soup, a spoon and napkin.

“You need to eat,” she said. Osborn only stared at her.

“The police came looking for you. So I had you moved up here.”

“Had me?”

“Philippe, the doorman, is an old and trusted friend.”

“They found Kanarack’s body, didn’t they?”

Vera nodded. “The car, too. I told you they’d come when that happened. They wanted to come up to the apartment but I said I was on my way out. I met them in the lobby.”

Osborn let out a weak sigh and stared off.

Vera sat down on the bed beside him and picked up the spoon. “You want me to feed you?”

“That much I can manage.” Osborn grinned weakly.

Taking the spoon, he dipped it into the soup and began to eat. It was a bouillon of some kind. The salt in it tasted good and he ate for several minutes without stopping. Finally, he laid the spoon aside, wiped his mouth with the napkin and rested.

“I’m in no shape to run from anybody.”

“No, you’re not.” ‘

“You’re going to get in trouble helping me.”

“Did you kill Henri Kanarack?”

“No.”

“Then how can I get in trouble?” Vera got up and a picked the tray from the bed. “I want you to rest. I’ll come up later and change the bandages.”

“It’s not just the police.”

“What do you mean?”

“How are you going to explain me to—him. Frenchy?”

Slinging the tray over one hip like a café waitress, Vera looked down at him. “Frenchy,” she said, “is no longer in the picture.”

“No?” Osborn was stunned.

“No—” A slight smile crept over her.

“When did that happen?”

“The day I met you.” Vera’s eyes never left him. “Now, go to sleep. In two hours I’ll be back.”

Vera closed the door and Osborn lay back. He was tired. As tired as he’d ever been in his life. He glanced at his watch. It was 7:35, Saturday night, October 8.

And outside, beyond the window curtain of his tiny cell, Paris was beginning to dance.