The high clerestory windows in the shop burst just as he reached the building, raining bits of glass upon Descartes. Shielding his face in the crook of one arm, he ran to the door and tried it, but it was locked. Pushing through the lavender that hugged the wall, he reached a large window and peered inside. Even through the glass, the heat broiled his face and he wrapped both arms across it, leaving only a narrow slit through which he surveyed the interior. Through the dancing flames, his eyes locked on a shape. “Shit,” he muttered. Slumped over the work table was Dubois. His right arm was splayed out on the table, and resting atop the hand, slightly askew, was what appeared to be a pistol. The left side of the artist’s head was missing.
“Shit,” Descartes repeated—“shit, shit, shit”—and stepped away from the window to call the dispatcher. He had not even begun to dial when the window exploded. Shards seethed past his head and tore across the yard, shredding the leaves of ornamental plants. Moments later, the window on the other side of the door blew, too. Arms of flame reached out from each window, enfolding the building in a deadly embrace, clawing at the roof. Small blooms of flame sprouted through the arches of the clay roof tiles. Then, in swift succession, the rafters burned through, and a hole in the roof opened like a maw, gaping wider and wider until it had swallowed the top of the studio entirely.
By the time the fire trucks arrived, the building had been reduced to smoldering embers.
The autopsy and forensics report confirmed what Descartes already knew. The corpse was burned beyond recognition, but the coroner confirmed that it was a white male, somewhere in his fifties or sixties. Although the fingers had burned down to bare bone, and the artist had no dental records that Descartes could locate, DNA from the charred corpse was matched to DNA from a hairbrush in the house, so the dead man was positively identified as Dubois. His manner of death was a single gunshot wound to the head, and his death was ruled a suicide.
As he tucked the autopsy report into the case file, Descartes took one last look at the note Dubois had tacked to the gatepost at the entrance to his yard. “The police in London plan to arrest me, but they’re too late. I cannot bear the thought of prison, and so I take the coward’s exit. My life has been one long series of deceptions and evasions, so this sort of death is only fitting.” Descartes replaced the note, closed the dossier, and filed it in the archive of closed cases. Then he signed out and headed home for lunch.
When he unlocked the deadbolt, Descartes stood in the apartment’s open doorway, his face breaking into a smile as he surveyed the opposite wall. There, Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist—regal, serene, and sexy—basked in the glow of the halogen track lights Descartes had stayed up late last night installing. The painting looked infinitely better than the horrible Jackson Pollock print that had hung there for years. Thank God that bitch Yvonne had taken it with her when she left.
Perhaps he should have left Magdalene and the Baptist where he’d found them, propped against the fence at the Dubois place, beside the post where the artist had tacked his farewell note. But what business was the painting of the National Police? The painting was a parting gift—a personal gift—from the old faker. A second note, taped to the frame, made that clear: “Goodbye, Inspector. I enjoyed meeting you, and I hope this trifle brings you much pleasure. —R.D.”
He’d driven home in the pale, watery light of midmorning, the second note tucked into his pocket, the painting tucked into the trunk of his car, the shattered mirrors dangling and flapping on either side of the car. He’d slammed the trunk only moments before the firemen and the forensic technicians had arrived to hose down the ruins, recover the charred body, and gather their evidence.
Chapter 8
Dubois
Jack Woods raises the back of his chaise longue and takes a slow, appreciative swig of sangria. Woods is a grizzled sixty-year-old Englishman; until six days before, he was a grizzled sixty-year-old Frenchman, Jacques Dubois. He’s working hard to inhabit the new name, but so far he still thinks of himself as Dubois.
His eyes shielded behind reflective sunglasses, he surveys the youthful bodies gleaming on the sand here at Cala del Home Mort—“Dead Man’s Beach”—a speck of Spanish coastline whose very name seems tailor-made for Dubois. With a few pale, doughy exceptions, the nude young men on display here are as tautly sculpted and bronze as any casting by Donatello or Rodin, and despite the name of the beach, they seem very much alive.
Dubois’s lover, Fran?ois—one of the pale, doughy exceptions—dozes on a neighboring chaise. He’s neither attractive nor interesting, but he deserves Dubois’s undying gratitude. If not for the cadaver Fran?ois spirited away from his Marseilles mortuary—a fifty-six-year-old heart-attack victim, whose body Fran?ois replaced in the coffin with sandbags—Dubois could never have composed such an artful forgery of suicide: the charred body; the gunshot-shattered head; the pistol in the outstretched hand; even the new hairbrush, raked through the corpse’s hair and then planted on the bathroom counter. Yes, Dubois chose Fran?ois wisely, and he does feel deeply grateful.