Page 86 of Dagger’s Shield

“One more question, Papa,” Maëlle said. “Does the word Rhône mean anything to you?”

He shook his head.

“Papa?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Be sure. Rémy said it twice before he died,” she pressed.

“I swear to you on my life. I have no idea.”

I believed him.

We told Chantal and Marthe at nine the next morning. Rémy had died in an accident on New Year’s Eve.

Maelle’s mother wept. Marthe crossed herself once and went back to the kitchen. Bertrand held his wife and said words he’d obviously practiced. Still, his voice broke several times.

Rémy had been his protégé, his student, and the closest thing he had to a son. Nobody at Valais questioned his grief.

While we searched through everything we could find at Valais, Preacher and Cassidy worked from the cottage in Beaune. Four days later, after the team back at Onteora ran it, we had an answer about Géraud’s DNA. Not that it helped. No database on any continent had any record of him. His prints came back the same.

Two days after that, we learned the rest, and it was worse. Fifteen years ago, Aristide Géraud did not exist. There was no birth certificate, no school reports, no official photographs, and no taxes paid under the name. The identity began with Swiss papers that year and surfaced at the top of Maison Fontenay two years later. Before that, there was nothing. Somebody had built the identity the same way Killian Rourke’s had been.

Rémy’s mobile showed that in the six days before the party, he’d called Géraud’s number several times. The final one went out two hours before he died and lasted nine minutes. It also showed that Géraud rang him back right before Maëlle followed Rémy into the fermentation area.

We’d tracked where the money from the “extra” invoices went. Conveniently, it led us to Swiss accounts with Rémy’s name attached.

Within hours of that discovery, we were searching for anything Rémy might’ve left behind. Any clue. We hit pay dirt when we found a flash drive taped inside the office printer. It held a single document he’d written the day before he died. In it, he said the Swiss accounts in his name were fake and that if anything happened to him, Géraud would be the one who arranged it.

“He was covering himself,” Maëlle said.

“It reads that way.”

We had enough to put Maison Fontenay in front of a French prosecutor, but absolutely nothing on the man who ran it.

When I suggested I move to a guest room, Maëlle didn’t object. In fact, she barely acknowledged it.

We hadn’t touched since we left her father’s study in the early hours of the first day of the year. Maëlle worked across the table from me twelve hours a day and missed nothing. Not even me.

Rémy’s funeral was set for Saturday, and on Friday, I closed the last file. “I’ve gone as far as I can on the investigation for now. Onteora has everything.”

She murmured something I couldn’t understand but didn’t look up from her laptop.

I waited for a question, for my name, for anything.

“It’s time I make arrangements to return to the States,” I said.

“Right.”

“I’ll stay through Rémy’s funeral,” I said, and counted ten seconds. “Unless you need me to stay longer.”

“I do not,” she said.

I went up to the guest room and started packing.

20

MAËLLE