“That’s where the call to Zazie came from. It was … hold on.” She consulted the phone log. “One thirty.” Her heart skipped. “That was when she was right here, talking to me. The little minx knew all the time.”
“Knew that her friend Sylvaine would be attacked?”
Tired, Aimée rubbed her eyes. Her fingers came back covered with mascara clumps. She must look a sweaty mess.
“That she’d keep investigating, René,” she said. “Even though she promised to wait until this evening and talk with me. She was hiding something even then.” She passed him the police report. “From this we know Madame de Langlet gave violin lessons to Sylvaine as well as Mélanie. That’s the connection.”
“Even so, we don’t know if these two other girls were Madame de Langlet’s pupils.”
“True. We’ll follow up with her tomorrow,” said Aimée. “Meanwhile, let’s prioritize.”
“Figuring out his profile—that’s key.”
Profile? René read too many true-crime books.
“Okay, René, let’s put things together,” she said. “Say he’s a music aficionado or a musician picking girls because he’s fixated on their talent. The rapes take place in the quartier and stretch back six months—he’s local, knows the girls’ movements, the families’ schedules. And he’s free in the evenings.”
René pulled his goatee. “Aimée, these attacks concern power. Power over a child, the only person he can dominate.”
Let René psychoanalyze. “Bon … but that doesn’t rule many people out. What else do we know about him, specifically?”
“We know he tapes and binds them,” said René. “Calls the shots. He needs to be in control. He probably attacks little girls because it’s the only time he feels he is.”
“But what does that have to do with music, René?”
“What if their talent threatens him?” said René. “Forget him being a connoisseur—he hears them play and feels inadequate. Resents such talented young prodigies. Say one rebuffed him. He sees them as little snobs needing to be taken down a notch. Only a twelve-year-old satisfies him. That’s key.”
She nodded. René’s profile sounded all too believable. But without any suspects, she had no one to apply it to.
Make a timeline, that’s what her father used to do. She remembered those charts in his office at the Commissariat.
“The first thing we have to do is use what we know to track her movements,” she said.
On the map below, she wrote in Leduc Detective, 1:30 P.M.
“When I got to the café at about seven, Virginie said Zazie was already almost an hour late.” Below that on the map, Aimée wrote Due home 6 P.M. “Figure Sylvaine’s father discovered her close to seven, since the ambulance arrived when I did.”
“What about Zazie’s phone?” René loosened his tie.
“Her uncle’s phone.” She checked the police report. “Discovered by the driver on the number sixty-seven bus a few hours ago, according to this. The number sixty-seven stops out front on rue du Louvre.”
René nodded and drew a red line of the bus route on his map of the ninth. “So we have her going toward Pigalle. The bus stops at rue de Navarin—that’s above Place Gustave Toudouze, where we pinpointed the call. And where there is a Wallace fountain that matches her picture.”
She pulled out her bus map. “Rue de Navarin’s more than midway to Pigalle,” she said. “Zazie could have gone a block down to Place Gustave Toudouze, where the call came from and where she’d taken this picture, or two blocks in the other direction, to Sylvaine’s on rue de Rochechouart.”
“Her photo of men in this square is all we’ve got right now. Think, Aimée.”
She sat up. “That’s right. Zazie said she’d borrow her friend’s camera again. What if her friend lived there? We have to talk to Virginie.”
“Hasn’t Virginie already called all Zazie’s friends, talked to the parents? No one saw Zazie.” René had checked in with a distraught Virginie in the café while Aimée sat in the Commissariat.
“What if Virginie overlooked someone? Look at this call log from the police report. Here’s the number that called Zazie at one thirty.”
“If Zazie kept secrets from you, she’d keep them from her mother, non?”
She tried the number. Out of service.
Her shoulders knotted. Teenager or not, the Zazie Aimée knew would have called home by now. Aimée could only imagine the worst. But to keep the horrific thoughts at bay she had to keep moving.
“Any other ideas, René?”
RUE DU LOUVRE’S streetlamps blurred pale vanilla over the glistening black pavement. The freshness in the air after the thunderstorms eased the headache building in her temple. But it did nothing to ease her mind.
In the café she and René sat across from Virginie. Pierre stood behind the counter serving late-night customers with his cell phone to his ear.
“See, Aimée?” Virginie said. “I listed everyone. René faxed the list to the flics. They’ll follow up in the morning.”
Virginie kept rubbing a towel over the spotted marble-topped table, her eyelids red-rimmed and her gaze distracted.
“That didn’t stop me from calling every single parent myself, mais non.”
Aimée looked at the checkmarks Virginie had made next to all the names but two. “What about those two girls?”
“Didn’t answer but I left their parents messages.”
“That’s good, Virginie.”
But who wasn’t on the list? Who did Zazie hide from Virginie?
“Can you think of a friend with this cell number who lives near Place Gustave Toudouze?”
Virginie stared, then shook her head.
“What about your husband?”
While Virginie showed Pierre, Aimée checked her own phone. No message from Morbier. Uneasy, she rang his number. Disconnected. She didn’t know what to make of it. She had to put Morbier out of her mind. Concentrate on Zazie. “Morbier’s phone’s disconnected, René.”