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would have been a second body.”
“A good point,” Malgreave conceded. “But what have we got to tie a butcher from Belleville with the murder in the Latin Quarter? What do you think, Vidal? You must be here for some reason other than to look pretty. Give me your thoughts. What have we got to tie him to Rocco Guillère, to Yvon Alpert?”
“Nothing,” Vidal said, unruffled. His pants were lavender today, and far too tight. Josef had taken one look at Vidal’s apparel and started fuming.
“Nothing indeed.” Malgreave took one last, greedy suck of the cigarette and stubbed it out in an already overflowing ashtray. The room was thick with blue smoke. “Nothing but an old cop’s instinct. There may be no connection with Guillère, or Alpert for that matter. They may have been acting on their own, random, copycat killers.”
“You don’t believe that,” said Josef.
Malgreave sighed. “I never have. It would be so much easier if I did. Such a nice, neat answer to a nasty problem. But I stake my career, my reputation, on my instincts. The victims may be random, the acts aren’t. The blood on Gilles Sahut’s clothes, that which didn’t belong to him or the animals he’d slaughtered, that blood came from Marcelle du Paine.”
Josef leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, an almost unheard-of act of relaxation in his precise lieutenant, while Vidal pulled himself upright from his lounging position in the doorway. Always at opposites, Malgreave thought with a sigh.
“How do you intend to find the connection, sir?” Josef said.
“Ah, Josef, that’s where the trouble comes in. Two years ago Rocco’s file disappeared from central records. It’s no wonder—the man has informers and friends everywhere. But it contained the only information we had about his early years. What we have now covers the criminal highlights of the last ten years of his life as we were able to reconstruct them, and there is no possible connection between him and the butcher and the bureaucrat.”
“What about the other two?”
“We’re still working on that. Alpert’s life is an open book. He grew up outside of Paris in the Marie-le-Croix orphanage, worked his way through college, got a job with the government, and was a model, industrious Frenchman. He was all set to get married next month. There is no clue, no hint as to why he would suddenly show up at a stranger’s apartment and murder her.”
“Do we know they were strangers?”
“It’s a logical assumption. The woman had very nosy neighbors, and no one had ever seen him before.”
“Besides, she said so in her phone call to the police,” Vidal offered.
“So she did.” Malgreave nodded his approval.
“Why don’t I check and see what records I can find concerning the orphanage?” Josef suggested, glaring at Vidal’s lavender jeans. “There might be something that would explain Alpert’s sudden derangement. Maybe he was a difficult child, maybe he came from an abusive home.”
Malgreave shook his head. “Another dead end. The place burned down years ago.”
“Before or after Alpert left?”
Malgreave grew very still. “Josef,” he said gruffly, “you cheer me enormously. I will be leaving this department in good hands when I retire.” He stood up, shuffling the papers briskly. “First things first. You start with the orphanage. Find out when the fire took place, see if any records survived the blaze, or if records were kept elsewhere. In the meantime, Vidal can scout out Sahut’s boucherie and see what he can find.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Maybe, my friends, just maybe, fate has decided to be kind. We may solve this case after all.”
“With you in charge, sir, I never had any doubts,” Josef said with complete sincerity.
He was going to kill her. He had always known he would, deep inside, but he’d hoped that this time his trust wouldn’t be misplaced. This time a woman would prove worthy of his love.
But deep inside he’d known. She’d lied to him, from the very beginning. She’d kept a tiny part of her hidden from him, no matter how he tried to charm it out, into the light and into his possession. She’d always held back.
A part of him had been glad when she’d kissed the American. He was sick of wondering, sick of giving her the benefit of the doubt. Now all questions were answered. Now it was up to him, to pick the time, the place. And how much he was going to make it hurt.
The predawn light was a faint pearly glow in the east. The rain had, for the moment, stopped, and streaks of pale blue were edging across the Paris sky. Claire lay there, curled in on herself, trying to fight her way back to oblivion, when she realized she wasn’t alone.
She could hear the steady, deep breathing. She could feel the weight on the bed behind her. Terror sliced through her, complete, mindless panic, as she lay there, not daring to move. Had Marc returned?
But no, Marc wouldn’t simply have crawled in bed with her, would he? Marc had very definite ideas about what the bed and Claire’s presence in it signified. And besides, why should she be frightened of Marc? He had never hurt her, and she had only Madame Langlois’s word for it that he’d hurt her daughter. No, her growing distrust of Marc had no logical basis in physical fear.
Still, she was frightened. In the predawn light and her sleep-disrupted panic she had to consider whether the stranger in her bed was the murderer who’d been haunting Paris the last few months. But no, they only murdered old women, didn’t they? Not thirty-year-old Americans.
Slowly, carefully, she turned her head, terrified of what she might find, of the monster that had invaded her bed during the night, waiting to rip her limb from limb.
