Murder at la Villette, page 6
“So come in and prove it.”
“I will when I can prove it.” Frustrated, she didn’t know what else to say. She was getting away from her point, the reason she’d called. “Just help me with one thing. Look up the file of Carine Joffre, a girl raped and killed in the nineteenth, fifteen years ago. She was the first victim of a serial killer.”
Pause. “Le Balafré?”
Pockmark.
He knew right away.
“That’s right.”
Bellan missed nothing and remembered everything—even events before his time.
Yet no one had caught this serial killer—infamous for his pockmarked face.
“Isn’t the case still open?”
“Until he’s apprehended. No statute of limitations on this. His composite police sketch from a witness, the girl’s brother, still hangs in the brigade criminelle.”
A question rose in her mind.
“Did Morbier work that case?”
“Wasn’t he working with your father then? Non, too late for that. He wasn’t in le crim.”
Short for brigade criminelle.
Another pause. Voices in the background. “But you should know there’s been a letter from a witness who saw you,” said Bellan, voice lowered. “The lab’s processing and testing pieces of your clothing with Melac’s blood.”
“Of course there’s blood on my clothes. I was trying to pull him out of the canal.”
“There’s unknown DNA on the knife. They suspect it’s yours.”
How did he know that? It was impossible to test DNA that quick. The liar.
“I need help, Bellan.”
“You need a lawyer.”
Click. He’d hung up, scared and afraid for his own derrière, like the rest of them.
Part of her was searing in hurt. But the other part understood—Bellan had a lot to lose if he got involved: his children, his job . . . Yet he’d lose her, too.
She summoned her courage. But tears came out instead, big hot tears running down her cheeks.
Alone, on the run and worried for Chloé, she had to figure this out. Fix it. Do whatever she could before she got caught.
Focus.
Too much was at stake to sit spinning her wheels.
Her father always said to go with what you find—from this go to the next, always adapting. Always ready to pivot.
Morgue.
Until she could follow another lead, she’d scour the Le Parisien archives. What was her contact’s number?
It took a while, but she finally found it in her back-up Moleskine. She never threw one away. Thank God she’d stored it in the go bag.
“Long time no hear, Aimée.” Emile yawned into the phone. “But then you contact me only when you want something.”
“Bon après-midi to you, too, Emile. Glad you’re on shift.”
“Bonsoir, technically, and I’m off in an hour.”
He hadn’t said anything about her being accused of murder. She must not have been named in the press yet. Small blessings.
She thought. “But not if I’m bringing you lunch.” What was his favorite? “From Pizza Siciliano, non?”
After some back and forth, including which extra toppings, he agreed to cull articles and get her space in the newspaper’s reading room.
The newspaper’s temporary printing site was close by in a warehouse off the canal. Not near a commissariat. A bonus feature. She picked up the pizza and headed to the warehouse, where she eyed the overalls the printers wore. She recognized Emile’s bike out front.
Emile, a gangling archives research assistant, who still looked about twelve, shook his head at Aimée’s hopeful expression. “Turns out someone booked the reading room for a meeting.”
Disappointed, she bit her lip.
“Don’t you want this? It’s still piping hot.”
“Cheer up,” he said, taking the pizza box with one hand, clapping her back with the other. “Follow me to Obituaries. I found you space there.”
He was a genius in archives research on top of drawing for bandes desinées. Comic books for adults, René called them. Emile made more money drawing comics than at his shift at the paper. He insisted he preferred the anonymity and liked this grunt work where he could find ideas for his stories.
Throwing caution to the wind, she said, “Didn’t Jérome Melac have an appointment with you last night?”
“Yes, just before . . . Well, we all saw the headline. Wait, were you working with him?”
Emile didn’t know about their relationship. Or that she was involved in his death. At least until her name was released as a suspect. It was only a matter of time.
She shook her head.
The horror of it flooded back. Mired her in pain and fear. She breathed in slowly and deeply to quell her emotions, to function—to find who’d murdered him.
She could do this.
Couldn’t she?
“Unrelated. But can you tell me what Melac requested?”
Emile expelled air from his mouth. “He wanted crimes in the nineteenth for the years 1986–1994. Homicides specifically related to le Balafré.”
The serial killer. Again.
“Which makes how many?”
“See for yourself. But eight women were attributed to the serial killer. Very bizarre cases. Local, too.”
“What if he’s back?”
“Zut. Sounds like a headline. ‘Serial killer back . . .’ Why would you say that?”
She had only a dead man’s declaration.
“Humor me. Let’s say Melac’s murder carries the same signature as le Balafré’s first known murder,” she fudged. “This girl Carine Joffre from rue Petit.”
“Wasn’t she raped?” He narrowed his eyes at her. “How do you know those details about how Melac was killed?”
“Because I’m suspected of Melac’s murder,” she said, desperate. Far-fetched as it sounded, she had nothing else to go on. “I think le Balafré committed it.”
Emile’s mouth gaped open. “That’s you?”
He had no idea the headline they’d printed that morning was about her.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “How is le Balafré involved? I don’t get the connection.”
Neither did she. But in every investigation, you had to go with your first leads, tenuous as they were. Percentage-wise, the lead rarely, if ever, panned out, but it led to the next place to investigate.
“I need to start somewhere. I’m tracing Melac’s last movements.” Her throat caught. “The cases he was investigating here in the archive—you said he was looking at le Balafré.”
“Guess you’re not on the flics’ favorites list.”
“Nothing new about that,” she said. She stared at the old newspaper. “Who’s the reporter on the crime beat, the faits divers?”
“I could find out.”
Relief washed over her. He was going to help. Not call the flics on her.
Yet.
After only twenty minutes, Aimée was kicked out by a group needing the space for an editorial meeting. She’d only skimmed the first few articles before the letters blurred. Her head ached.
“Come back tomorrow,” said Emile. “My boss is on the prowl.”
Great.
“I’ll put these aside for you.”
SHE KEPT IN the shadows, passing a new bike store. Too expensive.
A few blocks away, she could buy a stolen one from a fence—only cash, and no record.
Some fragment of information wiggled like a worm on the fringe of her consciousness. But every time she tried to grab it, it squirmed away.
What was it?
Her thoughts were scattered. Her head pounded. She usually did better than this under pressure. Usually worked harder, thought faster. Connected things.
Her vision wavered. All of a sudden there were two of everything. Fear filled her. She still hadn’t fully recovered from the attack—she didn’t need a doctor to spell it out.
Her double vision came from the concussion and damage to her ocular nerve.
Slow down and think smart. She stopped in the shadow of a doorway. Closed her eyes. Drew a mental map of her surroundings so she didn’t forget what it looked like in case her vision went out again.
She tried picturing the travel agent’s window next door to the bike store. She remembered posters advertising holiday packages: picturesque hiking trips in Brittany and seaside weekends in Vannes.
That word stirred in her mind. Vannes. Wasn’t that near Melac’s farm? She thought she remembered him saying in one of his garbled voice mails how Chloé could go to a good school in Vannes if she and Aimée came to Brittany.
It was all coming back. That night by the fireside at his farm, the best evening the three of them had ever spent together. Chloé had been two. She’d gone to sleep early after a day full of pony riding and collecting shells on the shingle beach. Aimée remembered Chloé’s cries of delight when she found part of a sea star. Melac had been watchful since rusted World War II ordnance still resurfaced even now, turning up in the wake of a storm. He’d found a live grenade only that previous weekend. Melac had made homemade soup with vegetables from the garden, and Aimée remembered Chloé’s thrill and delight at feeding the chickens with Papa.
It had been a day without arguments. No evening fights. It had ended with a warm cuddle at the fire and a vintage bottle of Château Figeac—Melac’s special treat.
That could have been her life: Chloé’s childhood spent in the outdoors and learning about nature. But could Aimée have lived overlooking the bleak tin-gray Atlantic? In the isolation from Paris and working from her laptop? She got bored there after a few hours.
Had she been selfish?
Even Miles Davis, a city dog, loved to run on the beach—his happy place. How she missed him. Madame Cachou was probably spoiling him rotten.
But Aimée had no friends in Brittany. And she hated the thought of being reliant on Melac. Morbier and her cousin, Sébastien, were her only family, and they were in Paris. So was her work, all the contacts she depended on for jobs, and the network she needed to stay au courant in the rapidly changing tech world. Martine, her best friend and journalist, didn’t care for Melac, and no way would René, her business partner and other best friend, travel to Brittany for staff meetings.
Melac had been a good father. But only on his terms.
SOME MINUTES PASSED before she opened her eyes. Her vision had cleared, thank God. She bought a slice of glistening tarte aux abricots and a day old baguette at the pâtisserie. She sat cross-legged, feeding the baguette crumbs to ducks and the occasional white swan who glided over.
What was it about the place? Why had the killer chosen to kill Melac here? Her father would always say—despite the fact that it was a cliché—criminals returned to the scene of the crime. He had told her about many cases proving the rule. The crime means a lot to the perpetrator, he’d said. The location is often significant. Remember, murder is about stepping over a line—the ultimate line of life and death. However things appear, the act of murder is imprinted on the killer. The stakes are raised. Nothing is as it was before. Or will ever be again.
Start simple, he’d say. There’s a reason the crime happens where it does. Think location. Think convenience, ease of execution, ability to escape.
He’d told her about an old case: a serial killer who had lived one Metro stop away from his crimes. The victims had been discovered on Wednesdays, late at night, behind garbage bins. At the time no one had put together how the attacks occurred on Wednesdays, market days, and centered within a three-block radius. Looking back, it was simple to see all the women shopped at the weekly market. But at the time, the flics hadn’t paid attention to the produce that fell from the women’s bags, the spilled coins from their change purses.
Sloppy policing, he’d said.
The connection had been made only after her father asked the question: What if the perpetrator goes to the market, too, and scouts out his prey? He could be a shopper, another person with a full bag who appears harmless to the women. The serial killer had turned out to be the adult caregiver of an older woman he escorted to the market each Wednesday.
Hiding in plain sight.
The attack on Melac had taken planning. Melac had been watching Aimée every night after work; he’d gotten into a pattern. The murderer must have been counting on his being there that night, too.
The small details were important. Mentally she went back and cataloged what she remembered: a blue light down the canal, the crunch of broken streetlight glass, the sounds of water. She wrote them down in her Moleskine to check later.
The first twenty-four hours of a murder investigation were crucial. After that, the success rate dropped.
She found a bus shelter and clocked the bus routes. She took a sheet of paper from the trash—an advertisement for a local parfumerie—and drew a quick diagram, marking the passerelle bridge with an X. She sketched out the quai and streets on both sides of the canal. Her paper was too small, so she rummaged in the bin for another sheet. Still too small.
So she used her Moleskine. Now she sketched the areas on both sides of the canal that were approximately a five to eight minute walk away from the Metro. She added the bus routes that crossed these streets.
This was a huge area. She’d have to map this out in more detail, fill in the streets, the narrow lanes and the villas, the narrow alleys with workers’ houses, often gated, on either side. Grunt work and shoe leather, her father would say. As she walked, most people paid her no mind. After all, the nineteenth was a working-class arrondissement. The residents worked, struggled and paid little attention to things other than laundry, that night’s dinner, schoolwork and making ends meet until payday. She liked it because it reminded her of what Paris had been like when she was growing up, before Île Saint-Louis got too chichi. The concierges, the cheese-shop owner, the butcher, the cleaners, the teachers, the everyday people and impoverished aristos who lived in crumbling seventeenth-century hôtels particuliers—town houses like hers—without modern plumbing and electricity.
She wanted to study these streets, but it would be too time-consuming. Better to go with a broad-stroke canvassing, then ask herself: Why would a killer use this location? How could they get away and melt into the quartier? What was the best vantage point?
After forty minutes, her legs ached. She felt like she hadn’t learned anything relevant.
Then she saw the map of the quartier outside the Metro—a big circle showing a five-minute-walk radius.
Idiot. Why hadn’t she looked at this in the first place?
She needed to start where the killer could have watched the quai. Where there was the best view. Somewhere easy to reach.
The bridge.
She hesitated, not wanting to revisit the scene or deal with those recent vivid memories. A stiff drink would help. She walked into the bistro on Avenue Jean Jaurès by the red lacquered wood Chinese restaurant—an old-school homage to the Forbidden City—and up to the bar.
Dubonnet, Pastis, and a score of liqueurs filled the mirrored shelves behind the bartender, their colorful bottles seeming to dance even though her vision was steady.
“Like a rosé gingembre? With one of these little umbrellas?”
The older bartender, double jowled and smiling, reached for a glass holding pastel paper umbrellas by the lemon slices.
Tempted, she grinned. “A double espresso, s’il vous plaît.”
“Ah, you’re working?”
Did he think she was a hooker? She nodded and slapped several euros on the zinc counter. “It’s not what you think. But maybe you could help me.”
“À votre servis,” he said.
He knocked the grinds into the bin with several loud thwacks, filled coffee grounds into the portafilter and leveled it. Once inserted, he pushed the worn button on the high-end coffee machine, and it thrummed to life.
Getting to the point would cut time.
“Were you working last night?” she said. “When the championship was on?”
“My night off,” he said. “Why?”
“Wondered if you remember where you were.”
“I do remember. We saw a film at the mk2 cinema—you know, they show old movies—and walked home down the quai. My wife loves Cary Grant.”
“Walked home? You live nearby?”
“My uncle owned this bistro. I’ve worked here since I left school. Now I’m semi-retired and his grandson runs it.”
“I don’t mean to pry, but . . .”
“You a flic?”
Smart.
“Close enough. Détective privé.”
She flashed a megawatt smile as he set down the steaming espresso in a turquoise demitasse. Then she sipped and leaned closer.
“This involves a messy divorce case. Remind me never to take one of these on again.”
“Et alors, divorce? That’s no big deal these days.”
Didn’t miss a trick, this one.
“When it’s tied up with money and inheritance, it is,” she said. “Sticky and litigious.”
“What do you want to know?”
Maybe he’d seen something. Or not. But he could have acute observations.
“My job’s canvassing the streets and hotels, and mostly boring surveillance. I wonder if you noticed anything last night around eleven. Or if you heard something. It’s about verifying a detail the subject’s adamant about.”
“What?”
She shrugged. “Afraid I can’t say, but . . .”
“I understand. The flics said the same thing.”
“The flics?” she said, alert. Was he onto her?
The waitress shouted out, “Un Campari soda, deux Limoncellos,” and rang up the drinks on the cash register. Aimée waited as the bartender shook ice and mixed drinks, filling the waitress’s order, and set them on the zinc counter. The pastel glasses were dusted in the pale vanilla afternoon light.
“I thought you said you were off last night,” she said when he put down the last one. “Why were you talking to the flics?”
“The flics were questioning people on the quai,” he said.
Interested, she leaned forward and drained her espresso. “Vraiment?” she asked, her tone encouraging.
