It was wasted. He could feel it in his gut, a creeping nausea; she was already dead. He kept trying to dismiss it, but it was there like a certainty. Like Danny had said, there was a meltdown in progress and it had taken Aurianne with it, just like it had taken Viner, like it had taken the kid in the alley. It didn’t make sense that anyone would choose to kill her. But that was exactly what happened at times like this, innocent people got killed.
He looked at the room, too small, a hotel he wouldn’t use again. And he tried to piece together what he was thinking because a part of him was still clinging stubbornly to the idea that she was alive, that she was simply out or sleeping. He phoned again from the station for the same reason, let the message run its course, ignoring the cold logic of it with the thought that if he wasn’t a target she wouldn’t be one by association.
But he was a target. Someone had been sent to Geneva just as surely as someone had been sent to Paris for Viner. They’d failed to find him though, so they’d gone to Aurianne’s, had no doubt tried to get something out of her before killing her. They’d still be there somewhere, in her apartment or his, waiting on station but no longer believing he’d show, particularly now, the contents of his call to Danny already distilled and drip-fed back to them.
Once he was on the train he thought again about what Danny had said, but there was no choice, he had to know for sure. And he’d have the element of surprise on his side. The train would get him there first thing, and he’d be out on an early flight before they even realized he’d been there. He’d take her with him if she was okay, but with the night drawing on that thought was already failing in his mind, becoming just a token response to an unpalatable truth.
He stared at the window, a softly lit version of the car reflected against the night, his own face visible from the corner of his eye. There were only a handful of other people reflected there: an elderly woman reading, the rest traveling students: two girls sleeping, a small group talking at the far end, a guy on his own looking bored.
JJ wished he could be like them, wished he could just be a person traveling, no mental baggage, of no interest to anyone else. Some of them probably felt the same way, he was aware of that. He resented it though, resented that he was in so deep and that, despite what Danny had said, it was never just a question of disappearing for a while. He was tied in too tight.
4
Her apartment was empty, none of the choked-up early-morning airlessness of places which had been occupied and slept in. It was clean too, no coffee cups, no makeshift ashtrays, no leftover take-out cartons. It looked pale and pure, the way she’d planned it, the climbing sun blurring the edges of her minimalist living room, the fine spray of blood almost lost in the luminous white of the carpet, only the smudged red patch easily visible, where she’d fallen, where her head had temporarily rested. She’d been kneeling.
The bedroom was untidy, the look of morning but without the feel of it, missing the scent markers of a person only briefly absent, in the shower or making coffee in the kitchen. She’d been out of bed maybe thirty minutes when they’d come, probably the previous morning, her routine interrupted and left now like an exhibit, like something from Pompeii.
He checked the bathroom, strolled back out, and caught his first glimpse of the kitchen. It took him a moment to work out what was on the floor. At first it looked like the debris of a scuffle, but then he saw it for what it was—the shelves from the fridge, pulled out and thrown aside.
He walked toward it, and though he’d known she was dead he could feel the contents of his chest sinking at the sight of the shelves, the realization that he was finally about to be confronted by it, all doubt removed. He pulled the door open and stared, nodding gently at the cauterizing truth of it and at the strange completeness of seeing her there.
It was a big fridge and Aurianne was slim and lithe, but she looked uncomfortable even in death the way she’d been bundled fetal position into its white plastic confines. With the door open the light illuminated the side of her face, bruised around the mouth and in a line from her eye to her ear. The eye was swollen shut, the ear filled with congealed blood, and more blood matted her hair, enough for him to see the blows as they’d fallen. The bullet itself had gone in the other side and hadn’t come through.
He looked at her cramped body, not bruised but blood spattered. She was naked, had probably been raped as part of the process and, ironically, wouldn’t have been able to talk because she’d known almost nothing about him. The guy would have known that too, whoever he was, but some people got their kicks that way, under the guise of ruthlessness and efficiency.