The Day After Tomorrow

54

MCVEY STARED out Lebrun’s office window. Five floors below he could see the Place du Parvis, the open plaza across from Notre Dame, crowded with tourists. At eleven thirty it was beginning to warm into an Indian summer day.

“Eight dead. Five of them children. Each shot once in the head with a .22. Nobody sees or hears a thing. Not the next-door neighbors, not the people in the market.” Lebrun dropped the faxed report from the Marseilles police on his desk and reached for a chrome thermos on a table behind him.

“Professional with a silencer,” McVey said, with no attempt to hide his anger. “Eight more on the tall man’s list.”

“If it was the tall man.”

McVey looked up hard. “Merriman’s widow? What do you think?”

“I think you are probably right, mon ami,” Lebrun said quietly.

McVey had returned to his hotel from the park by the river a little before eight and immediately called Lebrun at home. In response, Lebrun had put out a countrywide alert to local police agencies warning of the life threat to Michele Kanarack. The obvious problem, of course, was that she had yet to be found. And with little more than a description of her—given, finally, to Inspectors Maitrot and Barras by residents in her apartment building—Lebrun’s alarm was a warning in the wind. Ghosts were very difficult to protect.

“My friend, how could we know? My men were out there by the river a full day before you and found nothing to indicate a third man.”

Lebrun was trying to help, but it didn’t lift the bitterness or the feelings of guilt and helplessness that were churning McVey’s stomach. Eight people were dead who might still be alive if somehow he and the French police had been just a little bit better at what they did. Michele Kanarack had been shot only a few moments after McVey had called Lebrun to alert him she was in danger. If he’d discovered the situation and made the call three hours earlier, or four, or five, would it have made any difference? Maybe yes, probably no. She was a needle who still would have been lost in the haystack.

“To protect and to serve” was the slogan lettered on the LAPD black-and-whites. Every day people laughed at it or scorned it or ignored it. “Serve?” Who knew what that meant. But protecting people was something else. If you cared, like McVey did. If they got hurt because you or your partner, or the department, wasn’t up to the demands put on it, you hurt too. Real bad. Nobody knew it and you didn’t talk about it. Except to yourself or maybe to the face in the bottom of a bottle when you tried to forget about it. It wasn’t idealism— that went out the first time you saw somebody shot in the face. It was something else. Why you ended up, after how many years, doing what you did, and were still there. Michele Kanarack and her sister’s family weren’t a broken VCR that could be fixed. The people in Agnes Demblon’s apartment building hadn’t been a car that was a lemon and could be fought over at an auto dealership. They were people, the commodity policemen dealt in, for better or worse, every working day of their lives.

“That coffee?” McVey nodded toward the thermos in Lebrun’s hand.

“Oui.”

“I’ll take it black,” McVey said. “Just like the day.”

By 9:30, Lebrun had had a tech crew at the park making a plaster cast of the tire track and sifting through the pine forest for anything McVey had missed.

At 10:45, McVey met Lebrun in his office and together they went to the lab to check on the tire imprint. They’d come in to find a technician working the hardening plaster with a portable hair dryer. Five minutes later,” the cast was dry enough for an ink impression on paper.

Next came the collection of tire tread patterns provided the Paris police by tire manufacturers. Fifteen minutes later, they had it. The ink impression taken from the plaster cast made at the park clearly matched an Italian-manufactured Pirelli tire, size P205/70R14, and made to fit a wheel rim fourteen by five and a half inches. The following morning, Monday, a Pirelli factory expert would be called to examine the cast to see if further specifics could be determined.

On the way back to Lebrun’s office, McVey asked about the toothpick.

“That will take longer,” Lebrun said. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. Frankly, I doubt it will reveal much.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe when he was picking his teeth he nicked a gum and bled on it. Or maybe he has some kind of infection or other disease that would be carried in the salivary tract. Anything will be more than we have, Inspector.”

“We have no way of knowing it was the tall man who used the toothpick. It could have been Merriman or Osborn or someone wholly anonymous.” Lebrun opened the door to his office.

“You mean a possible witness,” McVey said as they entered.

“No, I hadn’t meant that at all. But it is a thought, McVey. A good one. Touché.”

It was then the knock had come at the door and the uniformed officer had entered with the fax from the Marseilles Police.

McVey swallowed his coffee and walked across the room. On a bulletin board was posted a copy of Le Figaro, on it was a quarter-page picture of Levigne as he gave his story to the media. Clearly frustrated, McVey jabbed his finger at it.

“What gets me is this guy from the golf club is afraid we’d release his name to the media, then he goes ahead and does it himself. And what’s that do but tell our friend that he’s got an eyewitness out there who’s still alive.”

McVey turned away from the clipping, tugging at an ear. “All the king’s horses, Lebrun. We don’t find her, but he does.” Turning back, he looked at the French detective directly.

“How did he know to go to Marseilles when nobody else did? And when he got there, how did he know where to find her?”

Lebrun pressed his fingertips together. “You’re thinking, the Interpol connection. Whoever it was in Lyon who requested the Merriman file from the New York police may have had similar means of tracking her down.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”

Lebrun set his cup down, lit a cigarette and looked at his watch. “For your information, I’m taking the rest of the day off,” he said quietly. “A short, one-man holiday. A trip by train to Lyon. Nobody knows where I’m going, not even my wife.”

McVey frowned. “Pardon me if I don’t understand. But you show up in Lyon and start asking questions, you think whoever did it is just going to raise his or her hand and say,. ‘It’s me’? You might as well call a press conference first.”

“Mon ami.” Lebrun smiled. “I said I was going to Lyon. I didn’t say it was to Interpol headquarters. Actually, I’ve asked a very old friend to a very quiet supper.”

“Go on,” McVey said.

“As you know, Group D, to which your investigation of the headless bodies was assigned, is a subgroup under Interpol Division Two. Division Two is the police division revolving entirely around case tracking and analysis. Whoever made the request for the Merriman file will be a member of Division Two, quite possibly a high-ranking member.

“Division One, on the other hand, is general administration, which manages finances, staff, equipment procurement, custodial services and things like personnel, accounting, building maintenance and other everyday activities. One of those everyday activities is subgroup Security and is responsible for headquarters security. The individual in charge of this subgroup will have access to data records identifying the employee who requested the Merriman file.”

Lebrun smiled, pleased with his plan. McVey stared at him.

“Mon ami, I don’t mean to sound like a cynic, but what if that individual you’re so nicely taking to supper turns out to be the one who made the request? Don’t you realize you’re the guy they were keeping the information from in the first place? So they’d have time to locate Merriman. You asked me before if I thought these guys would kill a cop. If you were uncertain before, look at the Marseilles report again.”

“Ah, the man loves to warn via the bloody metaphor.” Lebrun smiled and squashed out his cigarette- “My friend, I appreciate your concern. And were circumstances different, I would wholeheartedly agree with you that my approach was careless. However, I rather doubt the supervisor of interior security would harm his eldest brother.”