Authors: Cara Black
S
HOCKED FOR A
moment, she grabbed the wall … then remembered Cécile’s description. Old hookers didn’t lie about the law. She’d got his pressed-jeans look correct.
“So was my father,” she said, biting her lip before she said, “but he wasn’t a snake like you.”
“Then you know how the game’s played. The bond between
flics.
How it’s family, and in a family we help each other.”
No family to her, not after they drummed her father out of the force in disgrace. Not after the years it had taken to clear his name. Or witnessing the dead ends in the layers of corruption.
Instead she smiled. “Family maybe, but not a charity. Still, I don’t much buy into the family. My father died in a bomb explosion doing ‘routine’ surveillance. A damn setup.”
Jules gave a knowing nod. “Place Vendôme. Enough
plastique
to cinder the van and melt the fence around the column. I remember.”
“You?” Lying again. “You’re too young.”
“Happened during my first month on bomb disposal,” said Jules. “You never forget. Or the things that don’t add up.”
He had the details right. “What the hell does that mean?”
Stalling, the
salaud
was stalling for time. Trying to figure out how to kill them both.
“Word came down to leave your father’s investigation alone,” said Jules. “That’s how I learned the family punishes its own. Your papa played in the dirt; now so do you.” He shrugged. “Cut the high and mighty. You know I’m right. So it’s business now. I pay, and you provide.”
Why was she letting his words affect her? Why was her hand shaking so much she couldn’t steady it to shoot him right now, like she wanted to?
Zacharié reached the booth, and Jules pushed him toward her. Ready, she shoved Zacharié down.
“Maybe you’re lying,” said Jules. Recognition lit his eyes. “Now I remember. You’re the one on the
télé
.”
He’d halted, undecided, on the shaking catwalk, so close his cologne and stale-sweat smell reached her. The spiral staircase was right below him. One more step and she’d have him.
“Want to find out?”
“First my checkbook. But I need a show of good faith.”
He reached inside his blazer pocket toward a distinctive bulge. Bad move.
She shook the catwalk railing. Threw him off balance. He fell on his knees. Came up with a Sig Sauer pointed at her.
“Naughty,” said Jules. “Now put down the file and shove it with your foot.”
She shrugged. “You win.” She pushed the file forward with her toe, surreptitiously reaching for her Beretta. “Come and get it.”
Jules’s eyes flicked from her to the file, back and forth as he reached out, the gun in his other hand trained on her.
His left hand grabbed at the file; her eye clocked on his right with his finger curled around the trigger. Aimée jiggled the catwalk, aimed her Beretta and drilled Jules three times in the right shoulder. He jerked, his shots going wild as she ducked.
Thupt
,
thupt.
Bullets thudded into the rafters and metal pinged. Jules grabbed at the shuddering catwalk rail, yelling in pain, and lost his grip. The file opened and papers spilled, floating and dancing in the orange light.
Jules’s shouts ended in a crashing thud. She didn’t want to look. But she did.
He sprawled on the stage’s edge by the DJ table. The microphone wires splayed around him like a wreath of snakes.
Aimée shuddered. Her palms were wet; her knees shook. She hated heights. “Let’s go.” She reached for Zacharié, who stood shaking and mute at her side. “Did you hear me?”
“I’m on parole. Now I’ll go back to prison.”
Even a bent
flic
“shot in action” marshaled the combined
préfecture
forces on his side.
“Not if they don’t find you. Hurry, we’ll go out the backstage door.”
“But where’s my Marie-Jo …?”
She checked her Tintin watch. With any luck Saj had the girls in a taxi right now.
“Safe. Wish I’d known she’s as stubborn as you.” With her Swiss Army knife she sawed through the plastic flex-cuffs on Zacharié’s wrists. She followed him down the steep, winding staircase again to the backstage door. “We’ll take his phone and what’s in his wallet and put the theatre keys in his pocket.” She wiped their prints off the keys with her scarf, then handed the bundle to Zacharié. “Can you do that?”
Zacharié stared at the body. Blood dripped from the turntable to a pool on the floor. “But he’s still chained me to him. I’m not free.”
“What can he hold over you from the grave?”
“Jules is … was my half brother.” He winced. The floodlights cast an orange glow over his swollen eye and the cuts on his forehead.
The rotten half. But no one picked their family.
“
Désolée
, but it was him or you, and Marie-Jo wants her papa.”
“Years ago he took care of me, after our mother left,” he told her as he pulled Jules’s phone and wallet from the dead man’s pocket and planted the keys. “He was my big brother, all I had. But later he changed.”
A pang hit her. She could relate. Her mother had left, but at least she had had a father to raise her.
A vacuum whirred. The cleaning woman.
“Where’s Marie-Jo?” he asked.
“Follow me.”
M
ADAME
P
ELLETIER HUNG
her straw bag over the office chair, glad, after the futile trip to Ivry, to get back to investigating her hunch. She thumbed through the older dossiers filed under
agressions sexuelles
, squinting as the late-morning light glinted on the metal file cabinet’s surface. Then the next drawer. Nothing.
Tachet, her boss, poked his head around the door in the Brigade des Mineurs file room. “I’m holding off on calling that girl Zazie’s parents.”
He hated to give parents bad news. She nodded. “Should I do the follow-up, sir?”
“Follow-up? I’d rather charge the anonymous caller with wasting law-enforcement time and resources,” said Tachet. “We’ll give it a few more hours.” He was more irritated than usual at the expended manpower. Having personally led the squad, he looked angry enough to spit. “All this World Cup mess and we’re running around in the suburbs, wasting three hours?”
He didn’t expect an answer.
But her frustration simmered. “Sir, we still don’t know if a link exists between the rapist and this Zazie Duclos.”
Tachet’s lips pursed. “That’s the Brigade Criminelle’s realm now. Follow up on the five-year-old with the broken ribs and cigarette burns. That’s on your desk. Handle that.”
“
D’accord
,” she said.
“Good news. Your vacation starts tonight. Do what you can to wrap up the ongoing, then shoot them over to me before you leave.”
Good news indeed. She wouldn’t lose all her deposit on the beach chalet. Maybe she’d invite her daughter.
Back at her desk, she crossed the t’s on that final case, arranged the child’s interview with the psychologist and sipped on her steaming tisane. Still, she couldn’t push away her multiplying questions about the rapist. She had a growing sense of familiarity when she went over the facts—like he’d attacked before, years ago. But when and where she couldn’t place.
Had she even been on the force then? Had she heard about a similar case when she was at the Police Academy? Or did it come from a conversation overheard in
la cantine
or in the incident room—a passing reference? An open secret in the branch, maybe? One of many overlooked incidents—the hands-off files, incidents involving people either too connected or too protected, which a good
flic
knew about and could lean on when needed. That’s how it worked and how it always had worked. The beat
flic
knew the score and tallied it. Old-style—the personal touch got you further than any computer or suit-wearing
commissaire
who had quotas to fill. She’d regarded the system as archaic and prone to favoritism. When the Brigade des Mineurs position opened, she’d applied and got in.
Yet everyone depended on the beat
flics
, the eyes and ears on the cobbles, who were often the first to report crimes against children. That never changed, nor did the fact the damn Commissariats didn’t communicate with one another. What was all this department reorganization worth if they didn’t implement communication? Or, now that the law had been passed, get the FNAEG up and running—the
Fichier national automatisé des empreintes génétiques
, which would authorize a database of sexual predators?
What was it she couldn’t remember?
S
IRENS WHINED BEHIND
them as an ambulance parked by Le Bus Palladium. The cleaning woman had found the body. Any minute the
flics
would pull up.
No sign of the girls or Saj.
“Wear my sunglasses and keep your head down,” said Aimée. She relocked the backstage door, then dropped the key ring in the courtyard’s slatted drain cover. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
“But where are they? I won’t leave without Marie-Jo.” His hands shook trying to answer the vibrating cell phone in his hand. “Who’s this calling me?”
Aimée spotted her own number on his cell’s display. “Zazie. I gave her my phone.”
“Where’s Marie-Jo?” he said into the phone. He leaned against the wall. Listened. His shoulders relaxed. “
Ma
puce
… you’re okay.”
Thank God. She saw a taxi, waved at it. But, spurred by the arriving rush of
flic
cars, it kept going uphill.
Merde.
They couldn’t stay here. Determined, she hooked her arm through Zacharié’s. She didn’t relish the long uphill climb to Place Pigalle with his noticeable limp. Still, her stomach appreciated being back on terra firma.
“Where are they?” she asked him as he hung up.
“At the apartment on rue Chaptal. Your friend Saj said there’s a taxi stand by the Sexodrome.”
Thank God. But first the hurdle of getting there unnoticed.
“Look, I can’t get caught in this,” she said. “Nor can you.”
“Marie-Jo’s going to go home to pack her things,” he said, his breath labored. His weight dragged on her arm. “I need to figure out what to do before things hit the fan.”
Fugitives. But she couldn’t think about that now. By the time they’d piled into the idling taxi just outside the Sexodrome, perspiration was dripping into her eyes.
D
URING A TEARFUL
reunion in the apartment on rue Chaptal, Aimée pulled Saj aside. “Good job. We need to talk.”
“Haven’t you let Zazie’s parents know?” said Saj.
She shook her head. She needed a game plan. Jules’s death complicated everything. Plus she felt bile rising from her stomach. Damn morning sickness, or nerves—or both.
“You look pale, Aimée,” he said. “Nausea again?”
She nodded.
“What about all our asana sessions, the centering meditation?”
Fat lot of good that did with a gun aimed at her.
From his orange cloth bag, stenciled with OM, Saj handed her a paper twist of brown powder. “Sprinkle it under your tongue. Let it dissolve. It’s an ayurvedic remedy.”
Right now she’d try anything. It resembled dried mud. Tasted like it, too.
“Zazie’s safe—thank God,” Saj said as she struggled to swallow. “The sooner we get the little troublemaker home the better.”
If only. Dry-mouthed, she shook her head. “Events went all sticky. I feel like I got caught in flypaper.”
She’d caught René up a minute ago, after she’d recovered her cell phone from Zazie. The girls were safe, but there was too much still to sort out—her own involvement in a murder, a rapist still on the loose and no leads left to follow. And
a stubborn, desperate man who would be separated from his daughter forever if they couldn’t figure something out quick. “Listen. I want to help Zacharié.”
“But you already have.” Saj smiled. “Earned good karma helping each other.”
“If only it were that simple, Saj.”
Saj’s amber prayers beads caught between his fingers. “What did you do now, Aimée?”
She gave him a quick version. Told him about Jules. Minimized the shooting.
“Shooting … in your condition?”
“
Zut
! Pregnancy’s not a disease. Look, it was either him or—”
“No way whoever contracted Jules for this information will let Zacharié get away,” interrupted Saj. “Or you. You’re implicated all right.”
Her thoughts, too. Fear vibrated through her. “What if the bent cop left insurance?”
“We need to think this through,” said Saj.
She pulled out what she’d discovered in his pockets. His phone, the police ID from his wallet—Assistant Chief of Internal Affairs, a
bœuf-carotte.
Saj whistled. “He must have been desperate, or he wouldn’t have made stupid mistakes. How’d Zacharié get involved?”
Before she could answer, Zacharié appeared in the doorway. His shoulders heaved. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Jules used everyone to pave his way from Internal Affairs to the Ministry. For years he’s kissed ass, lied, covered up and looked the other way. With the information in the file, he’d seal the evidence. Get his Ministry post. No one could afford for him not to.”
Internal affairs and links to the Ministry … did that connect to Morbier’s corruption investigation?
“Apart from the Corsican, his henchman, only Marie-Jo and I …” His throat caught. “Link to him.”
She scrolled Jules’s call log. One number repeated. “Except this caller. I’d say he’s implicated, or a client for the hands-off material.”
“
Merde.
I’ve got to think this through,” Zacharié said. “Act smart for once. Outwit the
salaud
.” He glanced back to the bedroom, where Zazie sat talking to Marie-Jo as she packed. “After I married, Jules came back into my life,” he said. “He’d risen in the force. Changed. But I had a crazy wife and my little girl. I was weak. Took the easy way. Let him wrap me around his finger. I did things for Jules I shouldn’t have.”
Doubts assailed her. At the end of the day, she had risked her baby’s life to nail a bent
flic.
The price of recovering Zazie and Marie-Jo? Yet she still didn’t know anything about the rapist—who was still on the loose.