“I have a pretty good track record,” he tells her.
“I bet you do. Vance sent me to see if there were any problems.”
“Tell Vance he is not my babysitter. If there were problems, I dealt with them.”
“If you want to have a dick-swinging contest with Vance, you’ll have to start it yourself. I’m not telling him anything of the kind.”
It’s his turn to laugh. “You’re a hard woman, Billie.”
“Softness is overrated.”
“Not where I’m from.”
She pauses and they listen for a moment to the night sounds—birds, wind in the banana trees, and far away, the small, slight whine of an engine on the ocean. A fisherman, setting out for his nightly catch.
“Where are you from?”
He shrugs. “Here and there.”
She doesn’t reply and he feels the weight of her silence until he can’t stand it. “France. Burgundy, to be precise. My mother was Algerian and my father was Spanish, from the Balearics. That’s why I like islands,” he says. “It’s in my blood.”
“Was? Your parents are dead?”
“Yes. Before I joined the Museum.”
“So you grew up in Burgundy?”
He makes an impatient gesture. “You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m curious about people.”
“Yes, I grew up in Burgundy. On a winemaking estate. Don’t get ideas—it didn’t belong to my family. My parents worked for the people who owned it. Maman scrubbed floors and did the laundry. My father worked in the vineyard, spraying the vines with some toxic shit that ended up killing him. It was slow and ugly. Maman’s cancer was fast.” He paused and gave her a close look. “You don’t seem sad for me. Usually when I tell my tragic story, a girl would already be unbuttoning her blouse by this point.”
“I have sad stories of my own,” she says.
“Tell me and maybe I’ll unbutton my blouse,” he offers.
She smiles. “I like you a little more than I want to but not nearly as much as you think I do.”
“Fair enough.” He pauses and cocks his head, studying her face in the dim starlight. “So what do you want out of this job, American girl?”
“Well, I like to travel and the money’s good.”
He nods and she lobs the question back. “What do you want out of the job, French boy?”
“Money. Girls. A really nice car. And a house—a town house in Paris. I even know the exact one.” Billie raises a brow and he goes on. “The family in Burgundy, the one my parents worked for, they owned this town house. Like three hundred years of the same assholes living there, lording it over everybody. It’s abandoned now. But someday, I’m going to have enough money to buy it.” He pauses and cocks his head. “So, how did they find you?”
She tells him, giving him the bare facts of her arrest for assault, and he grins again. “Same. Only I was eighteen and it was for arson. It is why the Museum decided I should specialize in setting fires.”
“What did you burn?”
“The vineyard where my father worked.”
“Jesus.”
“And the house. With the family in it. That’s why the town house in Paris is abandoned.”
“They died?”
“All of them. Even the dog.”
He consults his watch and pushes away from the van. “Come on. It’s time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Alright, we got lucky finding Günther. Any suggestions on how to find Carapaz?” Helen threw the question out to the table. Akiko was wrestling with the stove at Benscombe, cooking dinner while Minka sat on a stool and pretended to help. The rest of us were throwing ideas at the wall, but so far nothing was sticking. Carapaz liked women and wine, but that wasn’t much help. Museum board members didn’t exactly have their addresses in the phone book.
“Let’s start with what we know,” Mary Alice said reasonably. “He lives in Paris.”
“Three million people in forty square miles. That narrows it down,” Natalie said.
Mary Alice smiled thinly. “You can be constructive or I can staple your lips together. I don’t much care either way.”
Natalie stuck her tongue out, but I spoke up before she could make things worse.
“He always wanted to buy a house in Paris—a specific house, I mean. It belonged to the people who owned the estate where his parents worked.”
Helen perked up. “There might be something in that. What was their name?”
I shrugged and looked around the table. Nobody else knew, so I pointed to the laptop. “His parents both died in Burgundy. I can’t imagine the name Carapaz is common there. I think it’s originally Spanish.”
Mary Alice sighed and reached for the laptop. She clicked around for a while, muttering to herself, until Minka took pity on her. There was a rattle of keys and suddenly the cheap printer in the corner was spitting out pages. They were a little blurry and the French was provincial, but I translated easily enough.
“It’s a death notice for his father. It lists his address as the Chateau d’Archambeau in Burgundy.” I pointed to Minka. “Now find us a property in Paris owned by the same family. Start with the 7th arrondissement.”
She worked with one hand and ate shepherd’s pie with the other. By the time we polished off the last of the apple crumble, she’d found it. She didn’t crow; she just printed it off along with a map of Paris showing the neighborhoods and dropped it on my empty plate.
“Is 15th actually,” she said with a smile. She pointed to where the 15th arrondissement bulged out into a U shape formed by the 7th on one side, the 6th on another, and the 14th on the last. “Near Montparnasse Cemetery. Owned by d’Archambeau family until 2008. Then it was sold to private holding company chartered in Panama.”
“Carapaz,” Mary Alice guessed.
“Most likely,” Natalie agreed. “He made director that year and that comes with a nice juicy bonus. He would have been able to afford it then.”
“And no director would have bought it outright,” Helen added. “A holding company is pretty convincing.”
I turned to Minka. “See if you can turn up anything else on that address in any database anywhere. We’re looking for a link to the name of Carapaz.”
She nodded and bent back over her laptop. The rest of us cleaned up and went about our business. I knew better than to pressure her while she worked. It took her another three hours, but just when we were ready to turn in, she had it.
Minka handed me a printout and I skimmed the dense lines with Nat reading over my shoulder. “What is this? It looks like a chat room.”
I pointed to the map Minka had provided with the d’Archambeau house circled in red. “It’s a message board for people who live in the neighborhood but it seems to be geared to expats. They’re all complaining about their French neighbors.” I skimmed the text until I came to the relevant line. “Here, one of them is complaining about the man next door, a Monsieur Carapaz, who puts out food for the stray cats. They keep coming into her garden, and she blames Carapaz.”
Natalie touched the woman’s signature line. “She’s at number twenty. What number is the d’Archambeau house?”
I grinned. “Twenty-two. We’ve got him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We spent the rest of the night passing around various printouts. We found detailed maps of the area, downloaded a brief history of the house in an out-of-print book on Parisian architecture, and took a Google Earth stroll down the Rue d’Archambeau, a tiny cul-de-sac tucked off the Avenue du Maine. It was Mary Alice who noticed the problem first.
“The entrance to the cul-de-sac is adjacent to the train station,” she said.
Helen raised her brows. “So?”
“So that’s a TGV station, high-speed, state-of-the-art. It’s going to be crawling with CCTV cameras.”