“So, tell me, how am I, as a cook?” Lysette chuckled.
“Three Michelin stars. Your cassoulet was always a special occasion meal.” Lysette clapped her hands together joyfully, but Nikki could see fatigue descending on the old couple, and before they faded, there were some basic questions she needed to ask. The same ones she would ask the parents of any victim from her precinct. “I won’t take much more of your time, but there are some details I wish to know about Nicole.”
“Of course, you are a daughter but policewoman, too, n’est-ce pas?” said Emile. “And, please, if it helps you discover what happened to cher Nicole …” He choked up, and the couple joined hands again.
Detective Heat began with Nicole Bernardin’s work. She asked if she had any professional bad blood such as rivalries or money troubles. They answered no, same as when Nikki asked if they knew of any troublesome relationships in her personal life, either in Paris or New York: lovers, friends, jealous triangles? “How did she seem to you the last time you spoke?”
M. Bernardin looked at his wife and said, “Remember that call?” She nodded and he turned to address Nikki. “Nicole was not herself. She was curt with us. I asked her if something was wrong, and she said no and would say nothing more on the subject. But I could tell she was agitated.”
“When was that call?”
“Three weeks ago,” said Lysette. “That was another unusual thing. Nicole always called on Sundays, just to check in. She went her last weeks without contact.”
“Did she say where she was when she called?”
“An airport. I know this because when I asked her what was wrong, she cut me off and said she had to board her flight.” The woman’s brow fell at the memory.
Rook asked, “Did your daughter have a place here in Paris?” In preparing for the visit he and Nikki had hoped to discover an apartment to search—with the parents’ permission, of course. But Nicole didn’t keep one.
“Whenever she visited the city, Nicole stayed here in her old bedroom.”
“If you don’t have an objection,” asked Detective Heat, “may I see it?”
Nicole Bernardin’s bedroom had long before been redecorated and put to use as an art studio for Lysette, whose watercolor still lifes of flowers and fruit lay about in various stages of completion. “You will pardon the mess,” she said unnecessarily. The room was tidy and organized. “I don’t know what you wish to see. Nicole kept some clothing and shoes in the armoire, not much. You may look.” Nikki parted the antique wood doors and felt the pockets of the few items hanging there, finding nothing. Same for the insides of her shoes and the lone, empty purse hanging on the brass hook. “Everything else of hers is in there,” Lysette said, moving an easel to indicate a large drawer at the bottom of a built-in. Nikki found the drawer as orderly as the rest of the apartment. Clean underwear, bras, socks, shorts, and tees—neatly folded—lived in a clear plastic container. Heat knelt and unsnapped the lid to make her inspection, carefully returning everything as it had been, stacked and sorted. Beside the container sat a pair of running shoes and a bicycle helmet. She examined the interiors of both and found nothing.
“Thank you,” she said, closed the drawer, and replaced the feet of the easel to the dimples they had made in the rug.
As they rejoined Emile in the living room, Rook asked, “Did Nicole keep a computer here?” When Mme. Bernardin said no, he continued, “What about mail? Did she get any mail here?”
M. Bernardin said, “Nothing, no mail.” But when he said it, both Heat and Rook noticed something unsettled in the way he lingered on the thought.
“You seem unsure about the mail,” said Nikki.
“No, I am quite sure she got no mail here. But when you asked me, it reminded me that someone else had recently asked the same thing.”