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“Jesus.”
“And the house. With the family in it. That’s why the town house in Paris is abandoned.”
“They died?”
“All of them. Even the dog.”
He consults his watch and pushes away from the van. “Come on. It’s time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Alright, we got lucky finding Günther. Any suggestions on how to find Carapaz?” Helen threw the question out to the table. Akiko was wrestling with the stove at Benscombe, cooking dinner while Minka sat on a stool and pretended to help. The rest of us were throwing ideas at the wall, but so far nothing was sticking. Carapaz liked women and wine, but that wasn’t much help. Museum board members didn’t exactly have their addresses in the phone book.
“Let’s start with what we know,” Mary Alice said reasonably. “He lives in Paris.”
“Three million people in forty square miles. That narrows it down,” Natalie said.
Mary Alice smiled thinly. “You can be constructive or I can staple your lips together. I don’t much care either way.”
Natalie stuck her tongue out, but I spoke up before she could make things worse.
“He always wanted to buy a house in Paris—a specific house, I mean. It belonged to the people who owned the estate where his parents worked.”
Helen perked up. “There might be something in that. What was their name?”
I shrugged and looked around the table. Nobody else knew, so I pointed to the laptop. “His parents both died in Burgundy. I can’t imagine the name Carapaz is common there. I think it’s originally Spanish.”
Mary Alice sighed and reached for the laptop. She clicked around for a while, muttering to herself, until Minka took pity on her. There was a rattle of keys and suddenly the cheap printer in the corner was spitting out pages. They were a little blurry and the French was provincial, but I translated easily enough.
“It’s a death notice for his father. It lists his address as the Château d’Archambeau in Burgundy.” I pointed to Minka. “Now find us a property in Paris owned by the same family. Start with the 7th arrondissement.”
She worked with one hand and ate shepherd’s pie with the other. By the time we polished off the last of the apple crumble, she’d found it. She didn’t crow; she just printed it off along with a map of Paris showing the neighborhoods and dropped it on my empty plate.
“Is 15th actually,” she said with a smile. She pointed to where the 15th arrondissement bulged out into a U shape formed by the 7th on one side, the 6th on another, and the 14th on the last. “Near Montparnasse Cemetery. Owned by d’Archambeau family until 2008. Then it was sold to private holding company chartered in Panama.”
“Carapaz,” Mary Alice guessed.
“Most likely,” Natalie agreed. “He made director that year and that comes with a nice juicy bonus. He would have been able to afford it then.”
“And no director would have bought it outright,” Helen added. “A holding company is pretty convincing.”
I turned to Minka. “See if you can turn up anything else on that address in any database anywhere. We’re looking for a link to the name of Carapaz.”
She nodded and bent back over her laptop. The rest of us cleaned up and went about our business. I knew better than to pressure her while she worked. It took her another three hours, but just when we were ready to turn in, she had it.
Minka handed me a printout and I skimmed the dense lines with Nat reading over my shoulder. “What is this? It looks like a chat room.”
I pointed to the map Minka had provided with the d’Archambeau house circled in red. “It’s a message board for people who live in the neighborhood but it seems to be geared to expats. They’re all complaining about their French neighbors.” I skimmed the text until I came to the relevant line. “Here, one of them is complaining about the man next door, a Monsieur Carapaz, who puts out food for the stray cats. They keep coming into her garden, and she blames Carapaz.”
Natalie touched the woman’s signature line. “She’s at number twenty. What number is the d’Archambeau house?”
I grinned. “Twenty-two. We’ve got him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We spent the rest of the night passing around various printouts. We found detailed maps of the area, downloaded a brief history of the house in an out-of-print book on Parisian architecture, and took a Google Earth stroll down the Rue d’Archambeau, a tiny cul-de-sac tucked off the Avenue du Maine. It was Mary Alice who noticed the problem first.
“The entrance to the cul-de-sac is adjacent to the train station,” she said.
