He offered it to me.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“I order them from a wholesaler in Miami,” he went on, flourishing his cigar and throwing his head back to blow out smoke. “Cojimars. Not to be confused with Cohibas, which are wonderful, but illegal if they’re Cuban versus those made in the Dominican Republic. Illegal in the U.S., at any rate. And I know that because I’m ATF. Yes, ma’am, I know my alcohol, tobacco and firearms.”
He had already finished his first glass of wine.
“The three R’s. Running, Running and Running. Ever heard that? They teach it in the school of hard knocks.”
He refilled his glass and topped off mine.
“If I came back to the States, would you see me again? For the sake of argument, what would happen if I transferred . . . let’s say, back to Washington?”
“I didn’t mean to do this to you,” I said.
Tears touched his eyes and he quickly looked away.
“I never meant to. It’s my fault,” I softly said.
“Fault?” he said. “Fault? I didn’t realize there was fault involved, as in something to be blamed. As in a mistake.”
He leaned into the table and smiled smugly, as if he were a detective who’d just tripped me with a trick question.
“Fault. Hmmm,” he pondered, blowing smoke.
“Jay, you’re so young,” I said. “Someday you’ll understand—”
“I can’t help my age.” He interrupted me in a voice that caused glances.
“And you live in France, for God’s sake.”
“There are worse places to live.”
“You can dance around words all you want, Jay,” I said. “But reality always has its way with people.”
“You’re sorry, aren’t you?” He leaned back. “I know so much about you, and then I go and do something as stupid as that.”
“I never said it was stupid.”
“It’s because you aren’t ready.”
I was getting upset, too.
“You can’t possibly know if I’m ready or not ready,” I told him as the waiter appeared to take our order and then discreetly moved on. “You spend far too much time in my mind and maybe not enough in your own.”
“Okay. Don’t worry. I won’t ever try to anticipate your feelings or thoughts again.”
“Ah. Petulance,” I replied. “At last you’re acting your age.”
His eyes flashed. I sipped my wine. He’d already finished another glass.
“I deserve respect, too,” he said. “I’m not a child. What was this afternoon, Kay? Social work? Charity? Sex education? Foster care?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this here,” I suggested.
“Or maybe you just used me,” he went on.
“I’m too old for you. Please lower your voice.”
“Old is my mother, my aunt. The deaf widow who lives next door to me is old.”
I realized I had no idea where Talley lived. I didn’t even have his home telephone number.
“Old is the way you act when you’re overbearing and condescending and a chicken,” he said, raising his glass to me.
“A chicken? I’ve been called a lot of things, but never a chicken.”
“You’re an emotional chicken.” He drank as if trying to put out a fire. “That’s why you were with him. He was safe. I don’t care how much you say you loved him. He was safe.”
“Don’t talk about something you know nothing about,” I warned him as I began to tremble.
“Because you’re afraid. You’ve been afraid ever since your father died, ever since you felt different from everyone because you are different from everyone and that’s the price people like us pay. We’re special. We’re alone and we rarely think it’s because we’re special. We just think there’s something wrong with us.”
I placed my napkin on top of the table and pushed back my chair.
“That’s the problem with you intelligence-gathering assholes,” I said in a low, calm voice. “You appropriate the secrets, the treasures and tragedies and ecstasies of someone as if they are your own. At least I have a life. At least I don’t live voyeuristically through people I don’t know. At least I’m not some kind of spy.”
“I’m not a spy,” he said. “It was my job to find out as much as I could about you.”
“And you did your job extraordinarily well,” I said, stung. “Especially this afternoon.”
“Please don’t leave,” he quietly said as he reached across the table for my hand.
I pulled away from him. I walked out of the restaurant as other diners stared. Someone laughed and made a comment I didn’t need to translate to understand. It was obvious that the handsome young man and his older lady friend were having a lover’s spat. Or maybe he was her gigolo.
It was almost nine-thirty and I walked with determination toward the hotel while everyone else in the city, it seemed, continued to venture out. A woman police officer wearing white gloves whistled traffic through as I waited with a great crowd to cross the Boulevard des Capucines. The air was bright with voices and cold light from the moon. The aromas of crepes and beignets and chestnuts roasting in small grills made me heartsick and dizzy.
I hurried like a fugitive evading apprehension, and yet I lingered at street corners because I wanted to be caught. Talley did not come after me. When I reached my hotel, breathless and upset, I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Marino or returning to my room.
I got a taxi because I had one more thing to do. I would do it alone and at night because I felt reckless and desperate.
“Yes?” the driver said, turning around to look at me. “Madame?”
I felt pieces of me had been rearranged and I didn’t know where to put them because I couldn’t remember where they’d been before.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know much about the city? Could you tell me about what I’m seeing?”
“Seeing? You mean now?”
“Seeing as we drive,” I said.
“Am I tour guide?” He thought I was very funny. “No, but I live here. Where would you like to go?”
“Do you know where the morgue is? On the Seine near the Gare de Lyon?”
“You want to go there?” He turned around again and frowned at me as he waited to insert himself in traffic.
“I will want to go there. But first I want to go to the Île Saint-Louis,” I said, scanning, looking for Talley as hope got dark like the street.
“What?” My driver laughed as if I were the premier crazy. “You want to go to the morgue and Île Saint-Louis? What connection is that? Someone rich die?”
I was getting annoyed with him.
“Please,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Okay, sure. If that’s what you want.”
Tires over cobblestone sounded like kettle drums, and lamplight flashing off the Seine looked like schools of silver fish. I rubbed fog off my window and opened it enough so I could see better as we crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe and entered the island. I instantly recognized the seventeenth-century homes that once had been the private hotels of the noblesse. I had been here before with Benton.
We had walked these narrow cobblestone streets and browsed the historic plaques on some of the walls that told who once had lived here. We had stopped in outdoor cafés, and across the way bought ice cream at Berthillon. I told my driver to circle the island.
It was solid with gorgeous homes of limestone pitted by the years, and balconies were black wrought iron. Windows were lit up, and through them were glimpses of exposed beams, bookcases and fine paintings, but I saw no one. It was as if the elitist people who lived here were invisible to the rest of us.
“Have you ever heard of the Chandonne family?” I asked my driver.
“But of course,” he said. “Would you like to see where they live?”
“Please,” I said with great misgivings.
He drove to the Quai
d’Orléans, past the residence where Pompidou died on the second floor, the blinds still drawn, and onto the Quai de Béthune toward the eastern tip of the island. I dug in my satchel and got out a bottle of Advil.
The taxi stopped. I sensed my driver didn’t care to get any closer to the Chandonne home.
“Turn the corner there,” he pointed, “and walk to Quai d’Anjou. You will see doors carved with chamois. That is the Chandonne crest, I guess you would call it. Even the drainpipes are chamois. It is really something. You can’t miss it. And stay away from the bridge over there on the right bank,” he said. “Underneath it, that is where the homeless and homosexuals are. It is dangerous.”
The hôtel particulier where the Chandonne family had lived for hundreds of years was a four-story town house with multiple dormer windows, chimneys and an Oeil de Boeuf, or beef’s eye, which was a round window at the roof. The front doors were dark wood ornately carved with chamois, and fleet-footed goats held on tooth and tail to form gilded drainpipes.
The hair pricked up on my flesh. I tucked myself in shadows and stared across the street at the lair that had spawned this monster who called himself the Loup-Garou. Through windows, chandeliers sparkled and bookcases were crowded with hundreds of books. I was startled when a woman suddenly appeared in the glass. She was enormously fat. She wore a dark red robe with deep sleeves, the material rich like satin or silk. I stared, transfixed.
Her face was impatient, her lips moving fast as she talked to someone, and almost instantly a maid appeared with a small silver tray bearing a liqueur glass. Madame Chandonne, if that’s who the woman was, sipped her drink. She lit a cigarette with a silver lighter and walked out of view.
I walked fast to the tip of the island, less than a block away, and from a small park there I could barely make out the silhouette of the morgue. I guessed it was but several miles upriver, on the other side of the Pont Sully. I scanned the Seine and fantasized that the killer was the son of the obese woman I just saw, that for years he had bathed nude here without her knowing, moonlight shining on his long, pale hair.
I imagined him emerging from his noble home and wandering to this park after dark to dip into what he hoped would heal him. How many years had he waded in that frigid, dirty water? I wondered if he ranged about the right bank, where he watched people who were as estranged from society as he was. Maybe he even mingled with them.
Stairs led down from the street to the quai, and the river was so high it lapped over cobblestones in murky ruffles that smelled faintly of sewage. The Seine was swollen from unrelenting rain, the current very strong, and an occasional duck flowed past even though ducks weren’t supposed to swim at night. Iron gas lamps glowed and dashed flakes of gold in patterns over the water.
I took the cap off the bottle of Advil and poured the pills on the ground. I carefully ventured down slick stone stairs to the quai. Water lapped around my feet as I swished the plastic bottle clean and filled it with frigid water. I snapped the cap back on and returned to the taxi, glancing back several times at the Chandonne home, halfway expecting cartel criminals to suddenly spring out after me.
“Take me to the morgue, please,” I said to my driver.
It was dark, and razor wire not noticeable during the day reflected light from cars speeding past.
“Pull into the back parking lot,” I said.
He turned off the Quai de la Rapée into the small area behind the building where vans had been parked and the sad couple had waited on a bench earlier in the day. I got out.
“Stay right here,” I said to my driver. “I’m just going to walk around for a minute.”
His face was wan, and when I got a better look at him, I realized he was very wrinkled and missing several teeth. He looked uneasy, his eyes darting about as if maybe he was thinking about speeding away.
“It’s all right,” I said to him as I got a notebook out of my satchel.
“Oh, you’re a journalist,” he said with relief. “You’re here working on a story.”
“Yes, a story.”
He grinned, hanging halfway out his open window.
“You had me worried, madame! I thought maybe you were some sort of ghoul!”
“Give me just a minute,” I said.
I wandered around, feeling the damp cold of old stone and air blowing off the river as I moved around in the darkness of deep shadows and took interest in every detail, as if I were he. He would have been fascinated by this place. It was the hall of dishonor that displayed his trophies after his kills and reminded him of his sovereign immunity. He could do whatever he wanted, whenever he pleased and leave all the evidence in the world and he wouldn’t be touched.
He probably could have walked from his house to the morgue in twenty or thirty minutes, and I envisioned him sitting in the park, staring at the old brick building and imagining what was going on inside, what work he had created for Dr. Stvan. I wondered if the odor of death excited him.
A faint breeze stirred acacia trees and touched my skin as I replayed what Dr. Stvan had said about the man who had come to her door. He had come to murder her and had failed. He returned to this very spot and left her a note the next day.
Pas la police . . .
Perhaps we were trying to make his modus operandi far too complicated.
Pas de problème . . . Le Loup-Garou.
Perhaps it was as simple as a raging, murderous lust he could not control. Once the monster in him was aroused by someone, there was no escape. I was certain if he were still in France, Dr. Stvan would be dead. Perhaps when he fled to Richmond, he thought he could control himself for a while. And maybe he did for three days. Or maybe he had been watching Kim Luong the entire time, fantasizing until he couldn’t resist the evil impulse any longer.
I hurried back to my taxi and the windows were so fogged up I could not see through them as I pulled open the back door. Inside, the heater was blasting, my driver half asleep. He sat up with a start and swore.
38
Concorde flight 2 left Charles de Gaulle airport at eleven and arrived in New York at 8:45 A.M., Eastern Standard time, which was before we’d left, in a sense. I walked into my house mid-afternoon terribly out of sorts, my body confused about time, my emotions screaming. The weather was getting bad, with predictions of freezing rain and sleet again, and I had errands to run. Marino went home. He had that big truck, after all.
Ukrops grocery store was mobbed because whenever sleet or snow was predicted, Richmonders lost their minds. They envisioned starving to death or having nothing to drink, and by the time I got to the bread section, there wasn’t a single loaf left. There was no turkey or ham in the deli. I bought whatever I could, because I expected Lucy to stay with me for a while.
I headed home a little past six and didn’t have the energy to negotiate a peace settlement with my garage. So I parked my car out front. Wispy white clouds over the moon looked exactly like a skull, then shifted and were formless, rushing on as the wind blew harder, trees shivering and whispering. I felt achy and woozy as if I might be getting sick, and I got increasingly worried when once again Lucy didn’t call or come home.
I assumed she was at MCV, but when I contacted the Orthopedic Unit, I was told she hadn’t been there since yesterday morning. I began to get frantic. I paced the great room and thought hard. It was almost ten o’clock when I got back in my car and drove toward downtown, tension stringing me so tight I thought I might snap.
I knew it was possible Lucy had gone on to D.C., but I couldn’t imagine her doing that without at least leaving me a note. Whenever she disappeared without a word, it never meant anything good. I turned off on the Ninth Street exit and drove through downtown’s vacant streets and wandered through several levels of the hospital’s parking deck before I found a space. I grabbed a lab coat off the backseat of my car.
The orthopedic unit was in the new hospital, on the second floor, and when I got to the room I slipped my lab coat on and opened the door. A couple I assume
d was Jo’s parents were inside, sitting by the bed, and I walked over to them. Jo’s head was bandaged, her leg in traction, but she was awake and her eyes immediately fixed on me.
“Mr. and Mrs. Sanders?” I said. “I’m Dr. Scarpetta.”
If my name meant anything to them, they didn’t acknowledge it, but Mr. Sanders politely stood and shook my hand.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
He wasn’t at all what I’d envisioned. I supposed after Jo’s description of her parents’ rigid attitudes, I expected stern faces and eyes that judged everything they saw. But Mr. and Mrs. Sanders were overweight and frumpy, not formidable-looking in the least. They were very polite, even shy, as I asked them about their daughter. Jo continued to stare at me, a look in her eyes that called out to me to help.
“Would you mind if I speak to the patient in private for a moment?” I asked them.
“That would be fine,” Mrs. Sanders said.
“Now, Jo, you do what the doctor says,” Mr. Sanders told his daughter in a dispirited way.
They went out and the instant I shut the door, Jo’s eyes filled with tears. I bent over and kissed her cheek.
“You’ve had all of us worried sick,” I said.
“How’s Lucy?” she whispered as sobs began to shake her and tears flowed.
I placed tissues in a hand that was tethered by IV tubes.
“I don’t know. I don’t know where she is, Jo. Your parents told her you didn’t want to see her and . . .”
Jo started shaking her head.
“I knew they’d do that,” she said in a dark, depressed tone. “I knew they would. They told me she didn’t want to see me. She was too upset, because of what happened. I didn’t believe them. I know she would never do something like that. But they ran her off and now she’s gone. And maybe she believes what they said.”
“She feels what happened to you is her fault,” I said. “It’s very possible the bullet in your leg came from her gun.”
“Please bring her to me. Please.”
“Do you have any idea where she might be?” I asked. “Is there any place she might go when she’s upset like this? Maybe back to Miami?”