The Day After Tomorrow

44

AT PRECISELY the same time, and some twenty-three miles out on the Autoroute Al, McVey’s Air Europe Fokker 100 touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Fifteen minutes later he was being driven back toward Paris by one of Lebrun’s uniformed officers.

By this time he seemed to know every nook and turn in Charles de Gaulle Airport. He ought to; he’d barely been out of it twenty-four hours when he was back.

Nearing Paris, Lebrun’s driver crossed the Seine and headed toward the Porte d’Orleans. In his broken English, he told McVey Lebrun was at a crime scene and wished McVey to meet him there.

The rain had started again by the time they pushed through a half block of fire equipment and rows of onlookers held back by uniformed gendarmes. Pulling up in front of a still-smoldering, burned-out shell of an apartment building, the driver got out and led McVey over a crisscross of high-pressure hoses and sweat-caked firemen still playing water on smoking hot spots.

The building was a total loss. The roof and the entire top floor were gone. Twisted steel fire escapes, arched and bowed by extreme heat into opposing courses, like unfinished elevated highway sections, dangled precariously from the upper floors, held there by brickwork that threatened to collapse at any moment. Between the floors, discernible through burned-out window casings, were the scorched and charred timbers that were once the walls and ceilings of individual apartments. And hanging over everything, despite the steadily falling rain, was the un-mistakable stench of burned flesh.

Skirting a pile of debris, the driver took McVey to the back of the building where Lebrun stood with Inspectors Barras and Maitrot in the glare of portable work lights, talking with a heavyset man in a fireman’s jacket.

“Ah, McVey!” Lebrun said out loud as McVey stepped into the light. “You know Inspectors Barras and Maitrot. This is Captain Chevallier, assistant chief of the Port d’Orleans arson battalion.”

“Captain Chevallier.” McVey and the arson chief shook hands.

“This thing was set?” McVey said, glancing up again at the destruction.

“Oui” Chevallier said, finishing with a brief explanation in French.

“It burned very hot, and very quickly, set off by some kind of extremely sophisticated device, probably using a military-type incendiary,” Lebrun translated. “No one had a chance. Twenty-two people. All dead.”

For a long moment McVey said nothing. Finally he asked, “Any idea why?”

“Yes,” Lebrun said definitively, not trying to hide his anger. “One of them owned the car Albert Merriman was driving when your friend Osborn found him.”

“Lebrun,” McVey said,, quietly but directly. “First of all, Osborn’s not my friend. Second, let me guess that the Merriman car was owned by a woman.”

“That’s a good guess,” Barras said in English.

“Her name was Agnes Demblon.”

Lebrun’s eyebrows raised. “McVey. You truly amaze me.”

“What do you have on Osborn?” McVey avoided the compliment.

“We found his rented Peùgeot, parked on a Paris street more than a mile from his hotel. It had three parking tickets, so it hadn’t been driven since early afternoon, yesterday.”

“No sign of him since?”

“We have a citywide out for him, and provincial police are checking the countryside between where Merriman’s body washed ashore and where his car was found.”

Nearby, two burly firemen dragged the scorched remains of a child’s crib through an open door and dropped it on the ground beside the burned-out shell of a box spring. McVey watched them, then turned back to Lebrun.

“The place you found Merriman’s car, let’s go there.”

The yellow lights of Lebrun’s white Ford cut through the darkness as the Parisian detective turned onto the road along the Seine leading toward the park where the police had found Agnes Demblon’s Citroën.

“He called himself Henri Kanarack. He worked at a bakery near the Gare du Nord and had for about ten years. Agnes Demblon was the bookkeeper there,” Lebrun said, lighting a cigarette from the lighter in die console. “Obviously they had a history together. What it was exactly we will have to imagine because he was married to a Frenchwoman named Michele Chalfour.”

“You think she set the fire?”

“I won’t rule it out until we question her. But if she was only a housewife, which it seems she was, I doubt she would have access to those kinds of incendiary materials.”

Detectives Barras and Maitrot had been through Henri Kanarack’s apartment on the avenue Verdier in Mont-rouge and had found nothing. The flat had been all but empty. A few of Michele Kanarack’s clothes, a handful of catalogues advertising baby clothes, half-a-dozen unpaid bills, some food in the cupboards and refrigerator and that was it. The Kanaracks had evidently packed up and left in a hurry.

At this stage the only thing they knew for certain was that Henri Kanarack/Albert Merriman was in the morgue. Where Michele Kanarack was was totally up in the air. A check of hotels, hospitals, halfway houses, morgues and jails had come up blank. A trace of her maiden name, Chalfour, had done the same. She had no driver’s license, no passport, not even a library card— under either name. Nor had there been a photograph of her in the apartment, or in Merriman/Kanarack’s wallet. As a result, all they were left with was a name. Nonetheless, Lebrun had put out a wanted bulletin for her across France. Maybe local police would turn up something they couldn’t.

“What killed Merriman?” McVey made a mental note of the landscape as they turned off the highway and onto the muddy road that encircled the park.

“Heckler & Koch MP-5K. Fully automatic. Probably with a muffler.”

McVey winced. A Heckler & Koch MP-5K was a people-killer. A nine-millimeter light machine gun with a thirty round magazine, it was a terrorist favorite and weapon of choice among serious drug merchants.

“You found it?”

Putting out his cigarette, Lebrun slowed to a crawl, navigating the Ford through and around a series of large rain puddles.

“No, that’s from forensics and ballistics. We had a dive team working the river for most of the afternoon without success. There’s a strong current that runs a long way here. It’s what took Merriman’s body so far, so quickly.”

Lebrun slowed the car and stopped at the edge of the trees: “We walk from here,” he said, pulling a heavy-duty flashlight from a clip just under the seat.

The rain had stopped and a moon was peeking out from behind passing clouds as the two detectives got out and started toward the cinder and dirt ramp that led down to the water. As they went, McVey looked back over his shoulder. In the distance he could just make out the lights of Saturday-night traffic moving along the road that hugged the Seine.

“Watch your footing, it’s slippery here,” Lebrun said as they reached the landing at the bottom of the ramp. Swinging the flashlight, he showed McVey what was left of the washed-out tracks Agnes Demblon’s car had made when it was towed away.

“There was too much rain,” Lebrun said. “Any footprints there might have been were washed away before we got here.”

“May I?” McVey put out his hand, and Lebrun handed him the light. Swinging it out toward the water, he judged the. speed of the current as it moved past just off the shore-line. Bringing the light back, he knelt down and studied the ground.

“What are you looking for?” Lebrun asked.

“This.” McVey dug in a hand, came up with a scoop of it, shining the light on it just to make sure.

“Mud?”

McVey looked up. “No, mon ami. Rouge terrain. Red mud.”