“Of course you don’t.”
“I don’t know!” he hissed. “Isn’t this great?!!” This time his eyes had indeed widened madly. Nikki looked around self-consciously, but nobody in the cafe had noticed. Even the man on the sidewalk smoking the roll-your-own had turned the back of his blue suit to them. Rook startled her, grabbing Nikki by the elbow. “Oh, I know!” He snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Tyler Wynn—air quotes—international investment banker—was using your mother just like his fake job. As a cover. Pretending to be her lover.” He paused. “Notice I said, ‘pretending.’ Which is why Cindy quit and moved back to the U.S. when she married your dad.”
Heat finished her coffee and slid a euro under the saucer. “Rook, you need to know. There’s out of the box and there’s out of your mind.”
He worked on her the whole way back to the hotel, and one point of his logic she found hard to refute. That they came to Paris to look into the change in her mother’s life, and since Tyler Wynn had been such a factor—spy or not—they’d be remiss not to see if Uncle Tyler was still around to talk to. “Or is that too sensitive an area for you?” he asked. A crafty move on Rook’s part because, even if it were, the challenge aspect of his question made it impossible for her to back down.
Up in their hotel room Rook paced, spitballing how best to approach checking out Tyler Wynn. “I still have some viable clandestine contacts over here from the days I worked my Russia-Chechnya article. Also, there are a few favors I could call in at CIA and NSA. No, wait … Maybe we should start incrementally and make a vanilla sort of inquiry through the U.S. embassy…. Or possibly, Interpol. On the other hand,” he rambled, going back and forth, “this is potentially important enough that we could step it up to the DCRI—that’s the French equivalent of the CIA, if you didn’t know.” He noticed Nikki getting on her cell phone. “Who are you calling?”
She held up a finger for silence. “Bonjour, Mme. Bernardin? C’est Nikki Heat. First of all, thank you for your hospitality and for those wonderful photographs. I am so grateful to have them.” She nodded and said, “You, as well. I was hoping I could ask a favor. Do you have phone number for Tyler Wynn?” Heat smiled at Rook and began writing it down.
When she hung up, he said, “Well, there’s the lazy way, if you go for that sort of thing. I don’t. Feels kind of like cheating.”
Nikki held up the pad with Wynn’s phone number. “Should I not call it, then?”
He said, “Do you want to play games or get serious about this case for once?”
Her call began in French, but whoever answered spoke English. When Rook saw her shocked reaction when she asked to speak to Tyler Wynn, he scooted from his spot standing at the window to sit on the edge of the bed beside her. “That’s terrible,” she said. Rook waved for her attention, mouthing “What?”s like a pestering adolescent, and she turned away to concentrate, muttered a series of “Uh-huhs,” asked for an address, which she wrote down, then said her thanks and hung up.
“Come on, out with it. What’s terrible?”
“Tyler Wynn is in the hospital,” said Nikki. “Somebody tried to kill him.”
Rook leaped to his feet and spun in a circle. “That. Is the coolest. Lead. Ever.”
TEN
The taxi driver knew the place, the Hopital Canard, in the western suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, one of the wealthiest districts in Paris. The cabbie glanced at the couple in the backseat and asked if it was an emergency. They both answered at the same time. She said no, he said yes. Rook asked her, “And exactly what was it you told me Wynn’s housekeeper said his condition was?” He cupped his ear.
“Critical gunshot.”
“And that’s not an emergency?”