Melac.
She stood frozen on the pavement, watching the door shut and the limo pull away down Boulevard du Montparnasse. A passerby snorted in disgust. “The team’s goalkeeper, partying … typical.”
Had her dark glasses deceived her? Melac, former Brigade Criminelle detective, the man she was supposedly in a relationship with, who’d taken a new assignment he couldn’t talk about? Gone incommunicado. The man who just last week had wanted to move in with her?
SHE SAT IN Leduc Detective alone, cocooned with memories, warming her feet at the sputtering radiator. Looking down on her from the nineteenth-century wood-paneled wall was an old photo she’d discovered of her grand-père and Papa as a young boy fishing on the misted quai, a haze of black and white. She was surrounded by ghosts.
She wondered how she could keep the agency afloat. If she even wanted to. First René gone on to greener pastures. Now Saj injured—if he could even return. She was reduced to counting on a teenage intern, who seemed capable of running her business well enough without her. How long could she even keep him?
And the deeper sting, this charade played by Melac. To think she’d fallen for it.
The chandelier’s light suffused her mahogany desk in a soft glow. She stared at her mocha-lacquered toenails on the radiator. Too long since they’d had a touch-up, too.
Melac kissing the blonde at la Rotonde replayed in her mind. She turned over what she knew about his supposed promotion, which would ease his alimony payments—his hush-hush position linked to the ministry, or so he’d implied.
Lies. He worked both jobs, by day still a flic, moonlighting as a pimp handler for sports celebrities. It made her sick.
Nothing new. She’d witnessed men in the force with her father lose their families, gamble, remarry, and moonlight more to pay more alimony. A spiral of debt and divorce.
Useless to sit and dwell on Melac’s gray eyes, those warm arms around her, his lime scent that lingered on her sheets. The weekend in Strasbourg they’d planned. Never trust a flic, it never worked out.
She debated, then punched in his number, hating herself. Hated herself more when it went to voice mail. Forget leaving a message—better to tell him off in person. Or not. Expose herself to face-to-face humiliation? Forget it.
He’d found a long-legged football groupie. Every male’s dream. And she’d thought, what? That he was different?
She had to admit it, she’d scored another relationship train wreck. She should have listened to that little voice of doubt. So different from Guy, her eye surgeon ex, who’d wanted her to forgo detective work, go suburban and be a doctor’s wife in Neuilly. Giving luncheons. Not that she’d considered it. Or Yves—she’d thought he was “the one,” but his ashes lay in Père Lachaise. She still wore his Turkish puzzle ring on her finger. But here she’d fallen for a flic. Against her own rules. What did she expect?
She pushed the hurt aside, determined to get over him. Feeling sorry for herself would get her nowhere. As her grand-mère said, spilt milk doesn’t fill the pitcher.
She’d start on her list right now.
Damien Perret’s number was busy. She tried Oleg Volodya again. Only voice mail. People didn’t answer their phones. It made her crazy.
With a sigh she picked up the printouts Maxence had left and started reading about Yuri Volodya. Engrossed, she didn’t notice the shadows lengthening in the window from rue du Louvre until the phone rang, startling her.
“Leduc Detective,” she said, reaching for a cigarette in her bag before remembering she’d quit. A glance at her watch told her in three more hours it would be two months.
“Aimée Leduc? It’s Damien Perret. I’ve been trying to reach you since you came to my.…”
“Printing works?” And your worker Florent attacked me? But she left that out. She popped a stick of cassis gum in her mouth. “Let’s meet at a café. Say fifteen minutes?”
A breath of expelled air came over the line. “I’ve been gone all day, we’re still running orders. I can’t leave.”
“Your deliveryman Florent around?”
“Florent? I fired him tonight. Why?”
Good.
“See you in twenty minutes,” she said and hung up before he could put her off.
At this time of night the Métro would be faster. She’d finish her reading later. She laced her red high-tops and headed for the door.
Until the bulge in her coat pocket reminded her to return her unlicensed Beretta to the desk drawer, and leave the old papers in the safe. She felt for her Swiss Army knife stowed in her bag’s makeup kit. Just in case. She double knotted a green leopard-print scarf around her neck and she was off.
AIMéE SNEEZED AT the tang of hot oil and ink permeating the printing workshop. Two large presses pounded out colored sheets. With the loud chopping noises of industrial paper cutters, she couldn’t hear herself think.
“Damien around?” she shouted.
An older man in grease-stained overalls looked up and hit a lever. He gestured to another white-haired codger to take over the press. She followed him past a stairway leading up to a storeroom, then through a dark wood hallway. He pointed to an open door with a sign: CHEF DU BUREAU.
Harsh white light illuminated a scuffed wood desk, file cabinets, and streaked glass windows that looked unchanged since the fifties. Banners and posters she recognized from this morning’s demonstration were piled in the corner. The only concessions to the nineties were the desktop computer, fax machine, and laser printer.
She knocked on the open door. Damien, whom she recognized from after the accident, looked up from his desktop. Bags under his eyes, swollen red lids. He’d aged overnight. She contained her shock at this twenty-something’s haggard appearance.
“So you’re the one Madame Figuer called about. The art flic?”