The Left Hand of Justice

• Synopsis
  
• By the Author
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Epilogue
  
• About the Author
  
• What Reviewers Say About Jess Faraday’s Work
  
• Books Available from Bold Strokes Books
  

Starvation and disease haunt the streets of 1820s Paris, while supernatural terror stalks the night. The once-famous police force is a shambles, its elite Bureau of Supernatural Investigations disbanded. Only Detective Inspector Elise Corbeau remains, spared by a shadowy protector for a purpose not even she knows.

When charismatic cult leader Hermine Boucher is kidnapped, all fingers point to her ex-lover, inventor Maria Kalderash. But the further Inspector Corbeau investigates, the more suspects she turns up, until finally, the finger is pointing right back at the Paris Police.

Navigating a web of betrayal, hidden agendas, and shifting alliances, Corbeau must protect the innocent, bring the corrupt to justice, and escape the ever-growing list of people who want to see her at the bottom of the Seine. If she can do it, she just might save her job. And she may even find true love.

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The Left Hand of Justice

© 2013 By Jess Faraday. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-902-2

This Electronic Book is published by

Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

P.O. Box 249

Valley Falls, New York 12185

First Edition: March 2013

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Credits

Editors: Greg Herren and Shelley Thrasher

Production Design: Susan Ramundo

Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

The Affair of the Porcelain Dog

The Left Hand of Justice

Merci beaucoup to both of my writing groups—PCG and the Book ’Em Writing Group—whose insights made this book shine. Thanks also to Jean Utley of Book ’Em Mystery Bookstore in South Pasadena, CA, for her generosity and unflagging championing of local and fledgling authors. Greatest thanks, as ever, are reserved for my long-suffering Roy, without whose support and encouragement not a word would ever have been written.

“Inspector!”

The little boy’s voice at her door pulled Inspector Elise Corbeau back from warm, dreamless sleep—back into the biting bone-chill of the Paris night. The boy, Joseph, was her eyes and ears in the slums of the Montagne Ste. Geneviève. When things went bump in the night, he was the one who came to fetch her.

And since the new chief inspector had shut down the Bureau of Supernatural Investigations, a lot of things had been going bump.

“Inspector, open up!”

“It’s still dark,” she muttered, throwing off the covers. Her head was thick with sleep. But at least she’d slept a good few hours, and at least the night had sent Joseph and not another of Ugly Jacques’s men.

Joseph began to batter the door with the end of his wooden leg.

“Peace, child. I’m coming.”

Corbeau reached for the lamp on the wobbly bedside table and gave it a shake. Finding it nearly empty, she set it back down without lighting it. Her room was as spare as a monk’s and less than eight long paces across. She’d save the oil for when she really needed it.

Gingerly, she pulled herself upright, cradling her head in her hands. Her skull felt like an eggshell. A woolen dress lay crumpled at the foot of the bed. She pulled it over her nightshirt and cinched a thick leather belt around her waist. Then she slid the strap of a rectangular bag over her head and one shoulder. It contained the tools issued to every Bureau agent: bottles of iron filings, holy water, and salt—the dearest of the three and the lowest in supply. The bag also contained a rosary and a small, fat book of prayers in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. She pulled a box from under the bed and added half a dozen of the pills she had compounded the week before. The original recipe, a mild sedative, had come from her mother, a healer. Over time Corbeau had used her own knowledge and experience to refine it into an invaluable tool for subduing the natural and supernatural alike.

She tied back her stringy blond hair and stretched her neck and shoulders. Her left arm ached where Ugly Jacques’s collector had tried to separate it from her body earlier that night. With any luck, the next one wouldn’t find her before she received her miserable pay at the beginning of the month. But just in case, she pulled her truncheon from its place between the bed and the wall and tucked it into her belt as well.

She dragged herself across cold, bare wood to the door. Rattling open the locks, she blinked down at Joseph through bleary eyes. The darkness was so deep she could only make out the edges of his shape. But she didn’t need flickering paraffin light to know what she would see: a pinched, white face with light-brown eyes, brown hair the texture of straw sticking out from under a brown cloth cap, and some other child’s cast-off clothes hanging like rags from his birdlike limbs. As he shifted from side to side, she heard the unmistakable squeak of new boot-leather. Who had bought him shoes?

“Another one?” she asked, pushing back a yawn.

“’Fraid so, Inspector.”

“That makes three, then.”

Three supernatural disturbances in the slum that week. Michel Bertrand was the first—a stout young man with the whiff of the stables about him, half-insane from nightmares he insisted were coming true. Then there was Claudine Fournier, a surprisingly refined young woman, given the broken-down rooming house where Corbeau had found her. Mademoiselle Fournier, too, was troubled by nightmares—only her nightmares were manifesting themselves in this world through spontaneous fires and glass objects bursting from no other cause than Mademoiselle looking at them. Corbeau had subdued the nightmares but left with singed hair and fingertips. Corbeau had managed to settle Bertrand and Fournier before the gossipmongers who made their living selling rumors to the scandal sheets had caught wind of them, but if things kept going like this, it would only be a matter of time before they did.

During her tenure with the now-defunct Bureau of Supernatural Investigations—before the new chief inspector had demoted her to fetching coffee and filing papers—Detective Inspector Elise Corbeau had answered such calls as a matter of course. Only a handful of incidents had necessitated actual spiritual intervention. But the recent incidents were different. Corbeau hadn’t been able to trace these disturbances to whistling wind or seeping damp. And she no longer had the support of the Bureau, her fellow agents, or their leader and mentor, Eugène Vidocq.

The floorboards felt like ice beneath her feet. Corbeau glanced longingly back at her narrow bed piled high with covers rapidly losing their warmth.

“It’s in our building this time,” Joseph said, sensing her hesitation. Ugly Jacques wasn’t the only one Corbeau owed. Joseph’s mother would be sending for Corbeau every time something went bump in her night for the rest of her life.

And Corbeau would have to drop everything and go.

Corbeau sighed. “Let me get my coat.”

She pulled on stockings, laced up her boots, and ushered the boy back into the tight blackness of the hallway. She buttoned her coat as they felt their way down the hall. She had candle stubs and a tinderbox in her pocket, but she wouldn’t squander them on the stairwell that she knew better in darkness than in daylight. Seconds later she and Joseph had wound their way down three cramped and creaky flights of stairs and stood shivering on the street in the weak light of an unreliably maintained streetlamp.

“Hard night?” Joseph asked.

“Hmm? Oh.” Her hand went to her face, fingers probing the tender, swelling cheek that throbbed in the early November chill. No doubt the skin was already turning an impressive shade of purple. “Something like that.”

“Ugly Jacques?”

She threw him a rueful glance. No nine-year-old should know the name of Paris’s most notorious moneylender. Less still should he know about Corbeau’s own financial difficulties. The Saint Christopher medal she’d given him glinted from the band of his cap.

“A little excessive for two weeks’ pay,” she muttered, abandoning the pretense of protecting him. “Of course the way prices are rising, he probably wants to get his money while it’s still worth something.”

“I bet you taught his man a lesson, though,” Joseph said with a smirk.

Corbeau grinned, and winced as pain shot through her head. She had left the bastard unconscious on the floor of Oubliette in a pool of broken glass and cheap wine. It had been a shameful waste of wine.

“Don’t suppose you’ve got cab fare, then,” Joseph said.

Corbeau’s eyes went to his wooden leg. She didn’t know how he’d gotten to her building, but he probably couldn’t walk all the way back home. Although he certainly seemed sprightly that night. She looked again.

“Where’s your crutch?”

Joseph usually limped along on a wooden post strapped to his leg just below the knee. Having had the apparatus since he was six, he’d become adept enough to become a useful messenger, provided he could catch a ride now and then. Without the crutch, though, he had a slow, lurching gait, like a drunkard.

But just now he’d scrambled down the stairs in front of her, unassisted and as nimble as a goat. She peered closer at his new boots. Two of them.

“You’ve got a foot under there,” Corbeau said.