The Killing Song, page 16
And brought them death, apparently.
The Parc des Buttes Chaumont, where Nicole Duval’s body had been found, was on the city’s northern edge, in the nineteenth arrondissement.
Like the neighborhood of the morgue, the nineteenth was a working-class Paris that was very different than the tourist brochure version. We passed a market where bright caftans fluttered on plastic hangers and exotic melons and red octopuses were arranged like mosaics. Music blasted from stores advertising cheap CDs, and the air was thick with spices. It seemed to be the home of many immigrants, although I couldn’t tell what kind from any of the signs, and I still didn’t feel comfortable enough with Eve to ask.
She told me the park was just a short distance from her apartment and that when Juliette was a child they had often gone there on Wednesdays when school was out. Since finding Nicole Duval’s body, however, she had avoided the place.
As I walked through the park gates, I thought that there could be a dozen bodies buried here and they would never be found.
With its odd hills, winding paths, drooping willow trees and still green ponds, this park felt like a place of secrets, a place where a man could lure a woman into the dark, where her cries wouldn’t be heard, where her body wouldn’t be found for weeks or even months.
We walked steadily uphill and when we rounded a bend, I was surprised to see a rocky peak ahead, surrounded by a lake. Through the bare trees, I could just make out a structure of some kind on top.
We climbed higher, crossed a bridge, and I got my first good look at the Temple of Sibyl. It was a tall handsome structure, with Corinthian columns, like a small Roman ruin.
I stopped. I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.
“What is it?” Eve asked.
“It’s round,” I said.
She frowned. “So?”
“The windmill was round,” I said.
“And the ballroom where Mandy was found, that was round, too.”
Eve was looking at the temple now as if she were seeing it for the first time. I mounted the steps and stopped. “She was found here?” I asked, pointing to the center.
“Yes,” Eve said, coming to my side.
“Was her body posed, like a star?”
“Yes.” She let a moment go by. “Mademoiselle Downey was found in the same kind of position.”
“So was Mandy,” I said quietly.
I walked a slow circle around the temple with my head down. “You found nothing here with Nicole?”
“Nothing. There was no music, no tape, nothing here with her, Matt.”
I heard the frustration in her voice and turned. She was scanning the floor intently, like she was trying hard to remember what it had looked like two years ago. Suddenly, she looked up at me.
“She wasn’t killed here,” she said.
“But you told me—”
“I know. I wasn’t clear. She was killed nearby but then brought up here.”
“Where was Nicole killed?”
“Come, I’ll show you.”
We went back across the bridge and down a different path. I heard rushing water and as we rounded another bend, I was shocked to see an impressive waterfall. Eve motioned for me to follow her, and we crept along a slippery ledge and entered a small cavern.
“We found blood here,” Eve said, raising her voice to be heard over the rush of water. “It was Nicole’s.”
The cavern was littered with bottles, cigarette butts, trash and used condoms. The rock walls were covered with graffiti, most of it in French with a few American profanities and pentagrams thrown in. When my eyes came back to Eve, her expression was grim.
“We bagged up everything we found,” she said, as if reading my mind. “We went through everything, Matt, every piece of trash, but there was nothing connected with music.”
“But you didn’t know then that you were even looking for music,” I said.
She nodded slowly. The defensiveness was gone now, every trace of it.
I gestured toward the graffiti. “Maybe he wrote something here.”
She came up next to me and scanned the rock. “I do not remember exactly what was there two years ago.”
“What does the French say?” I asked, pointing.
“It’s just profanities, kids’ stuff.”
I was trying hard to make out some of the French words, looking for anything that registered. Then my eyes latched onto three words spray-painted in faded red.
CREEPING JESUS HEART
“Was that here two years ago?” I asked, pointing.
Eve stared at it for a moment and nodded. “Yes, I remember it was part of a phrase and we photographed it. I don’t remember what the rest of it was.”
The three words were an itch in my brain. But I couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t just that they were in English. Something about them was weirdly familiar.
If the music on the tape left with Tricia Downey was chants, maybe this was religious, too. I closed my eyes, trying to block out the rush of the waterfall, trying to summon up the hymns from all those Sundays Mom had dragged me to church. Lots of songs about Jesus but…
My eyes shot open. “It’s a rock song,” I said.
“What?”
I spun toward Eve.
The title wasn’t coming to me, but I could hear the melody as if it were booming from the speakers in my cottage back home. That vaguely country beat, that nasally voice, that barrage of words and images that had always appealed to the writer in me.
“I know this song,” I said. “It’s by Elvis Costello.”
Then the title came to me like a punch to the stomach. I looked up at Eve. “It’s called ‘Crimes of Paris.’”
23
We didn’t realize it, but we had closed the circle to just the two of us. That was how intense our concentration was as Eve and I sat at her dining room table. My laptop, her case files and all the photographs of the victims—Tricia Downey, Nicole Duval, Hélène Molyneaux, Casey Hoffmann, and Mandy—were spread out before us.
We now had two solid musical clues. But we still didn’t know what the songs meant. The Stones song left with Mandy referred back to Tricia Downey in the windmill. Did that mean the others pointed backward as well? Until we could figure out what the “creeping Jesus heart” of the Elvis Costello song meant and decipher what was on the damaged tape left at the windmill, we couldn’t be sure what the music was telling us.
We had decided to first tackle the tape, and Eve had gone to the bedroom to find the CD of the music her department techs had made.
Juliette had retreated to the kitchen to finish preparing dessert. Cameron had found a chair in the corner of the small living room where he was nursing a glass of Chablis and thumbing through a magazine.
Maybe it was the smell of strong coffee coming from the kitchen or the quiet of the living room, but I finally looked up from the crime report I had been reading.
I realized I had been ignoring Cameron all night. I had asked him to join us at Eve’s after telling her that he could help us decipher the rock lyric connections. If Eve had any reservations about welcoming a complete stranger to dinner, she was too classy to mention it.
As for Cameron, well, he was taking things with his usual aplomb. All during dinner, while Eve and I had been busy trading theories, he kept Juliette entertained with his stories about covering American rock stars.
I picked up the wine bottle and went over to him.
“Need a refill?” I asked.
“I’m good,” he said. He glanced to the kitchen. “But I don’t think Juliette is,” he added in a low voice.
I looked toward the kitchen, then back at him. “Why?”
He shrugged. “I have the impression she is worried about her aunt.”
“She said something to you?”
“No, it’s just a feeling.”
I went into the kitchen. Juliette was rinsing out a pot. On the counter was a strawberry tart and the little glasses that I knew Juliette would use to serve the Moroccan coffee she had secured from the shop downstairs.
“Your dinner was great,” I said.
She turned and gave me a big smile. I realized she looked a lot like Eve. But then again, I had never really seen anything approaching a smile like that from Eve.
“I’ve never had mushroom soup made from scratch,” I said.
“Scratch?” Juliette said.
“My mushroom soup always came from a can.”
She smiled again and started cutting the tart into quarters.
“You’re a great cook,” I said.
“Yes, I know. I could be a professional, but it does not really interest me,” she said. “I want to work with computers.” She stopped and turned to me. “Monsieur Owens…”
“Matt,” I said.
She smiled. “Matt.” She glanced toward the outer room. “I do not know you, but I feel I have to say this. I love my aunt very much. But I am very worried about her.”
I knew Juliette was only sixteen, but suddenly, she seemed much older, like she was the old soul in this home.
“These women who have died,” Juliette said. “My aunt, she—” She launched into a quiet flurry of French and then shook her head. “My English fails me sometimes. I am sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. Go on, please.”
She drew in a breath. “My aunt is too… worried about the women. It is for her une idée fixe.”
“Fixated?” I said.
Juliette nodded. “It has been five years now, ever since Hélène Molyneaux.” She shook her head slowly. “You should see her bedroom. It is all there on the walls, the photographs of the women, the reports. It is all there, and she is never able to get away from it.”
As hard as it was for Eve to live with this, I realized suddenly it had to be doubly hard for her niece.
“Things were better for a while,” Juliette said softly. “I think it was because my aunt believed she had done everything she could. But now, you come here, and I see it all over again. It is bad again.”
Bad? Bad for whom? For a moment, all I could think about was Mandy and I felt a flash of resentment toward this girl. But then I found myself staring straight into Juliette’s calm brown eyes and I understood.
Une idée fixe. Eve was obsessed. I was obsessed. But to the people who loved us, our obsession meant only pain and loneliness.
“Juliette, I didn’t come here to make things hard for you or your aunt,” I said. “I’m an investigative reporter. Your aunt is a detective. Both of us are vulnerable to obsession when we find a case that touches our hearts more than others.”
“I know,” Juliette said softly.
“For people like us,” I said, “the truth is the only thing that can relieve that obsession. I want to help your aunt find that. I promise you, I won’t make things worse.”
Juliette just looked at me, her eyes sad. She hesitated, then picked up a tray. “Would you help me take the dessert to the table?”
“Of course,” I said.
When I set the tray on the table, Eve was inserting the CD into a player so we could listen to the music found in the windmill.
“As I said, the tape was very poor quality,” Eve said. “But our technicians copied a clean section and looped it.”
Cameron brought his tart and coffee to the table and sat down with us. Eve hit the PLAY button.
I had spent countless hours under headphones and had attended a lot of concerts, but this was something I had never heard before. A little like opera or a Catholic liturgical piece, with a solo by an angelic voice that I could not distinguish as male or female.
From the bewildered look on Cameron’s face, I doubted he recognized this as anything in his memory banks.
“Well?” I asked.
“I have no clue,” Cameron said. “I agree it’s very similar to a chant, but there’s something vaguely modern about it that I can’t put my finger on. Play it again, please.”
Eve let the music play again and when it was over, the three of us sat there like our brain batteries had died.
“I think it sounds like the music from that movie about the French Revolution,” Juliette said.
We all turned to her. She was sitting at the bar that divided the kitchen and living room, coffee in hand.
“The one with Hilary Swank,” Juliette added.
I looked to Cameron. He shook his head. Juliette jumped off the stool and disappeared into her bedroom.
Eve sighed. “She has a thing about the revolution,” she said. “She has read every book, seen every play and movie on the subject.”
Juliette returned with a laptop. She set it on the bar and clicked on a link for an MP3. The music featured a woman’s voice with overlapping chants and a background of delicate bells. It was similar enough to the windmill music to get me on my feet.
“Who sings that?” I asked.
She paged through a few screens and looked up. “The credits say it is Dead Can Dance.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Cameron said. “They’re a sort of goth-punk group from Australia. They take music from all sorts of cultures and mash it into their own style. Very strange stuff.”
“Juliette,” I said. “Can you find a list of all their songs?”
She nodded and a few clicks later she had a long list on the screen, some titles in a foreign language, some that sounded like operas, others just plain bizarre.
“It’ll print over there,” Juliette said, nodding toward a printer in the corner.
I went over and waited for both pages to print, then started back to the table, reading as I walked. I stopped halfway across the room.
“What?” Eve asked.
“They have a song titled ‘The Song of the Sibyl,’” I said.
Eve looked to Juliette. Without a word, she started typing, and I knew she was trying to find the piece.
Less than a minute later, her laptop was playing Dead Can Dance’s “The Song of the Sibyl.” Juliette let it play for its full three and a half minutes, but it didn’t take that long for all of us to realize that we were listening to the same music that was on the cassette tape.
“Come sit down, Matt,” Eve said.
I dropped into a chair, staring at the cassette player. The song probably had lyrics, but I didn’t think we needed them. The clue was right there in the title. The tape that had been found with Tricia Downey in the windmill was a reference to the Temple of Sibyl, where Nicole Duval had been found. And just as the song that had been left on Mandy’s iPod referred to a previous crime, so did this one.
I looked up at Eve and Cameron. “The songs are clues to where he left his previous victim.”
“So who does the Elvis Costello song refer to?” Cameron asked. “Do you have a victim before Nicole?”
“I have only one other woman, Hélène Molyneaux, but we have never found her body,” Eve said.
“Plus she disappeared five years ago,” I said. “The time between the other murders is only about a year.”
“So if this pattern is true, there are two more victims we have not found,” Eve said, her voice tinged with excitement.
I caught Juliette’s eye. She was still sitting at the bar watching us. She slowly closed her laptop and went into the kitchen.
“Well, this will tell you where to start looking,” Cameron said, holding out a printout of the Elvis Costello song.
I took the printout and spread it on the table so we could all read the lyrics.
“What about the title, ‘Crimes of Paris,’?” Cameron asked.
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I said.
“What about the line ‘not a girl from Paris’?” Eve asked. “A reference to another American tourist, perhaps?”
“I doubt it. You would have already found her.”
“What about the reference to the Eiffel Tower paperweight?” Cameron asked.
“It would be hard to hide a body there, I would think,” Eve said.
“Plus, it’s not round,” I added.
“Round?” Cameron asked.
“I’ll explain later,” I said.
My eyes moved over the words a second and third time, then finally stopped on a reference to what I thought was yet another song.
“Cameron, do you know a song called ‘Hammersmith Blues’?” I asked.
Cameron froze, and I knew something had registered. “It’s not a song,” he said. “It’s a place, a dance club called the Hammersmith Palais de Danse. The Clash had a song called ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.’”
How could I have missed this? I had many of The Clash’s albums in my own collection. “Where is this Hammersmith place?” I asked.
“London,” Cameron said. “The place closed years ago. I don’t know if it’s still standing or not.”
London.
I glanced at Eve. We both knew a few lines from a song weren’t enough.
“I have a friend at Interpol,” she said, reaching for her cell. “I will see if he has anything.”
I had already pulled my laptop over and was firing up Nexis. I typed in the keywords “Hammersmith London” and “murder.” A three-year-old article from the Times of London popped onto my screen.
A twenty-five-year-old woman named Allison Stephens had been found dead in the Hammersmith Palais de Danse. I scanned the details, some of which seemed to match our cases, notably that she had been found naked and there had been only a single fatal stab wound to the chest. There was no mention of rape, but I knew from my own experience that when a young woman was found nude, it usually meant sexual assault.
But then a follow-up article came up: A man named Dylan Rumsley had been arrested in the murder. He was Stephens’s ex-boyfriend.
Eve had finished her call and was reading over my shoulder. “Was he convicted?” she asked.
I punched a couple keys and another article came up. I looked up at Eve. “Yeah,” I said. “Now serving time.”
Eve blew out a long breath and sat down. We just stared at each other for a few moments.
