Black notice (37 page)

"Jay Talley. Sorry to make you wait;" he said.

His hazel eyes were so penetrating I felt violated by them, his dark good looks so striking I instantly knew his type, because men that beautiful are all alike. I could tell Marino had no use for him, either.

"We spoke on the phone;" he said to me, as if I didn't remember.

"And I haven't slept since," I said, unable to take my eyes off him, no matter how hard I tried.

"Please. If you'll come with me."

Marino gave me a look and wiggled his fingers behind Talley's back, the way he did when he decided on the spot that someone was gay. Talley's shoulders were broad. He had no waist. His profile had the perfect slope of a Roman god, and his lips were full and his jaw was flared.

I concentrated on being puzzled by his age. Usually, overseas posts were much coveted and were awarded to agents with seniority and rank, yet Talley looked barely thirty. He led us into a marble atrium four stories high that was centered by a brilliant mosaic of the world and washed in light. Even the elevators were glass.

After a series of electronic locks and buzzers and combinations and cameras that cared about our every move, we got off on the third floor. I felt as if I were inside cut crystal. Talley seemed to blaze. I felt dazed and resentful because it hadn't been my idea to come here, and I didn't feel in charge.

"So what's up there?" Marino, the model of politeness, pointed.

"Well, the button don't have a number and it looks like you have to key yourself up," Marino went on, staring at the elevator ceiling. "I was just wondering if that's where you keep all your computers."

"Ibe secretary-general lives up there," Talley matterof-factly stated, as if there were nothing unusual about this.

"No shit?"

"For security reasons. He and his family live in the building;" Talley said as we passed normal-looking offices with normal-looking people inside them. "We're meeting him now."

"Good. Maybe he won't mind telling us what the hell we're doing here," Marino replied.

Talley opened another door, this one made of rich, dark wood, and we were politely greeted by a man with a British accent who identified himself as the director of communication. He took orders for coffee and let Secretary-General George Mirot know we had arrived. Minutes later he showed us into Mirot's private office, where we found an imposing gray-haired man seated behind a black leather desk amid walls of antique guns and medals and gifts from other countries. Mirot got up and shook our hands.

"Let's be comfortable," he said.

He showed us to -a sitting area before a window overlooking the Rh8ne while Talley collected a thick accordion file from a table.

"I know this has been quite an ordeal and I'm sure you must be exhausted;" he said in precise English. "I can't thank you enough for coming. Especially on such short notice."

His inscrutable face and military bearing revealed nothing, and his presence seemed to make everything around him smaller. He settled into a wing chair and crossed his legs. Marino and I chose the couch and Talley sat across from me, setting the file on the rug.

"Agent Talley," Mirot said, "I'll let you start. You'll excuse me if I get right to the point?" He directed this at us. "We have very little time."

"First, I want to explain why ATF's involved in your unidentified case," Talley said to Marino and me. "You're familiar with HIDTA. Because of your niece Lucy, perhaps?"

"This has nothing to do with her," I assumed uneasily.

"As you probably know, HIDTA has violent crimesfugitive task forces;" he said instead of answering my question. "FBI, DEA, local law enforcement, and of course ATF, combining resources in high priority, especially difficult cases."

He pulled up a chair and sat across from me.

"About a year ago," he went on, "we formed a squad to work murders in Paris we believed are being committed by the same individual:'

"I'm not aware of any serial murders in Paris," I said.

"In France, we control the media better than you do," the secretary-general commented. "You must understand, the murders have been in the news, Dr. Scarpetta, but in very little detail, no sensationalizing. Parisians know there's a murderer out there, and women have been warned not to open their doors to strangers, and so on. But that's all. We believe it serves no good purpose to reveal the gore, the shattered bones, torn clothes, bite marks, sexual deviations."

"Where did the name Loup-Garou come from?" I asked.

"From him," Talley said as his eyes almost touched my body and flew off like a bird.

"From the killer?" I asked. "You mean, he calls himself a werewolf?"

Yes.

"How the hell can you know something like that?" Marino elbowed his way in, and I knew by his body language that he was about to cause trouble.

Talley hesitated and glanced at Mirot.

"What's the son of a bitch been doing?" Marino continued. "Leaving his nickname on little notes at the scenes? Maybe he pins them to the bodies like in the movies, huh? That's what I hate about big organizations getting involved in crap like this.

"The best people to work crimes is the schmucks like me out.there walking around getting our boots muddy. Once you get these big-shot task forces and computer systems involved, the whole thing gets off in the ozone. It gets too smart, when what started the whole ball rolling ain't smart in the college sense of the word . . ."

"That's where you're quite mistaken," Mirot cut him off. "Loup-Garou is very smart. He had his self-serving reasons to let us know his name in a letter."

"A letter to who?" Marino wanted to know.

"To me," Talley said.

"When was this?" I asked.

"About a year ago. After his fourth murder."

He untied the file and pulled out a letter protected by plastic. He handed it to me, his fingers brushing against mine. The letter was in French. I recognized the handwriting as the same strange boxlike style I'd found on the carton inside the container. The stationery was engraved with a woman's name, the paper smeared with blood.

"It says;" Talley translated, "For the sins of one shall they all die. The werewolf. The stationery belonged to the victim and it's her blood. But what mystified me at the time was how he knew I was involved in the investigation. And this all moves us closer to a theory that's the root of why you're here. We have ample reason to believe the killer is from a powerful family, the son of people who know exactly what he's doing and have made certain he doesn't get caught. Not necessarily because they give a damn about him, but because they must do whatever's necessary to protect themselves."

"Including shipping him off in a container?" I asked. "Dead and unidentified, thousands of miles from Paris because they've had enough?"

Mirot studied me, leather creaking as he shifted his position in his chair and stroked a silver pen.

"Probably not," Talley said to me. "At first, yes. That's what we thought, because every indicator pointed to the dead man in Richmond as this killer: Loup-Garou written on the carton, the physical description as best you could tell, considering the state the body was in. The expensive way he was dressed. But when you supplied us with further information about the tattoo with, quote, yellow eyes that might have been altered in an attempt to make them smaller. . ."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Marino cut in. "You saying this Garou guy's got a tattoo with yellow eyes?"

"No," Talley replied. "We're saying his brother did."

"Did?" I asked.

"We'll get to that, and maybe you'll begin to pick up on why what happened to your niece is tangentially connected with all this," Talley said, filling me "No," Talley replied. "We're saying his brother did."

with torment again. "Are you familiar with an international criminal cartel we've come to call the One-Sixty-Fivers?"

"Oh, God," I said.

"Named such because they seem to be very fond of onesixty-five-grain Speer Gold Dot ammo," Talley explained. "They smuggle the stuff. They use it exclusively in their own guns and we can generally tell their hits because Gold Dot's going to be the bullet recovered."

I thought of the Gold Dot cartridge case recovered from the Quik Cary.

"When you sent us information about Kim Luong's murder-and thank God you did-pieces began to fit together," Talley said.

Then Mirot spoke. "All members of this cartel are tattooed with two bright yellow dots."

He drew them on a legal pad. They were the size of dimes.

"A symbol of membership in a powerful, violent club, and a reminder that once in, you're in for life, because tattoos don't come off. The only way out of the One-SixtyFiver cartel is death."

"Unless you are able to make the gold dots smaller and turn them into eyes. A small owl's eyes-so simple and so quick. Then escape to some place where nobody will think to look for you." .

"Like a niche port in the unlikely city of Richmond, Virginia," Talley added.

Mirot nodded. "Exactly."

"What for?" Marino asked. "Why suddenly does this guy freak out and run? What's he done?"

"He's crossed the cartel," Talley replied. "He'd betrayed his family, in other words. We believe this dead man in your morgue," he said to me, "is Thomas Chandonne. His father is the godfather, for lack of a better term, of the OneSixty-Fivers. Thomas made the small mistake of deciding to make his own dope and do his own gun trafficking and cheat the family."

"Mind you," Mirot said, "the Chandonne family has lived on the fie Saint-Louis since the seventeenth century, one of the oldest, wealthiest parts of Paris. The people there call themselves Louisiens, and are very proud, very elitist. Many don't consider the island part of Paris, even though it's in the middle of the Seine in the heart of the city.

"Balzac, Voltaire, Baudelaire, Cezanne," he said. "Just a few of its better-known residents. And it is where the Chandonne family has been hiding behind their noblesse facade,, their visible philanthropy and high place in politics while they run one of the biggest, bloodiest organized crime cartels in the world."

"We've never been able to get enough on them to nail them;" Talley said. "With your help, we might have a chance."

"How?" I asked, although I wanted nothing to do with a murderous family like that.

"Verification, to start with. We need to prove the body is Thomas. I have no doubt. But there are those little legal nuisances we law enforcers have to put up with." He smiled at me.

"DNA, fingerprints, films? Do we have anything for comparison?" I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.

"Professional criminals make it a point to avoid such things," Mirot remarked.

"We've found nothing," Talley replied. "And that's where Loup-Garou comes into the picture. His DNA could identify his brother's."

"So we're supposed to put an ad in the paper and ask the Loup to drop by and give a blood sample?" Marino was getting surlier as the morning went on.

"Here's what we think might have happened," Talley said, ignoring him. "On this past November twenty-fourth, just two days before the Sirius set sail for Richmond, the man who calls himself Loup-Garou made what we believe was his last murder attempt in Paris. Notice I say attempt. The woman escaped.

"This was around eight-thirty in the evening," Talley, began his account of the events. "There was a knock on her door. When she answered it, she found a man standing on her porch. He was polite and articulate; he seemed very refined; and she thought she remembered an elegant long dark coat, maybe leather, and a dark scarf tucked into the collar. He said he'd just been in a minor car accident and could he please use her phone to call the police. He was very convincing. She was about to let him in when her husband called out something from another room and the man suddenly fled." -

"She get a good look at him?" Marino asked.

"The coat, the scarf, maybe a hat. She's fairly certain he had his hands in his pockets and was kind of hunched against the cold," Talley said. "She couldn't see his face because it was dark. Overall, it was her impression he was a polite, pleasant gentleman.'

Talley paused.

"More coffee? Water?" he asked everyone while he looked at me. I noticed his right ear was pierced. I hadn't seen the tiny diamond until it caught the light as he bent over to fill my glass.

"Two days after the murder attempt, on November twenty-fourth, the Sirius was to sail out of Antwerp, as was another vessel called the Exodus, a Moroccan ship that regularly brings phosphate to Europe," Talley resumed as he returned to his chair.

"But Thomas Chandonne had a sweet little diversion going, and the Exodus ended up in Miami with all sorts of guns, explosives-you name it-hidden inside bags of phosphate. We've known what he was doing, and maybe yo u're beginning to see the HIDTA connection? The take down your niece was involved in? It was just one of manyspinoffs of Thomas's activities."

"Obviously, his family caught on," Marino said.

"We believe he got away with it for a long time by using strange routes, altering books, you name it," Talley replied. "On the street, you call it spanking. In legal business, you call it embezzling. In the Chandonne family, you call it suicide. And we don't know exactly what happened, but something did, because we expected him to be on the Exodus and he wasn't.