A look she couldn’t fathom crossed René’s face.
“You found something on le Weasel?” She sipped more of his tea. “That’s what you needed to show me?”
“Who?”
She recounted her conversation with Tonette. Brought him up to speed on Marie-Jo and Zazie’s project.
“So le Weasel, Marie-Jo’s mother’s Eurotrash boyfriend, is the top suspect?” said René. “Marie-Jo and Zazie followed him at first to get dirt on him and show her mother, then linked him to the rapes?”
“That’s a working theory, René.”
“Ecoute, last night I staked out Marie-Jo’s apartment here on rue Chaptal,” said René. “Only these six people came or went: an older couple, these four mecs.”
He clicked through the images on his digital camera—his latest expensive toy. No one looked familiar to Aimée.
“You can see le Weasel here in the copy of Le Parisien Maurice gave me.”
Aimée opened the newspaper to the celebrity page. Actress Béatrice de Mombert accompanied by Hapsburg noble-cum-model Erich von Wessler—the couple puts on dancing shoes for a night of clubbing.
Aimée stared at the couple’s photo. Béatrice, late thirties, with a glazed smile, drooping eyelids, wearing an off-the-shoulder beaded camisole over leather stovepipe pants.
“Béatrice had been partying a little earlier, non?”
René nodded. He gestured with his balled-up fist like he was drinking from an imaginary bottle.
In the photo, Béatrice leaned on the arm of a long-haired, tousled type Aimée figured to be in his early twenties. His close-set eyes and chiseled nose and jaw emphasized his Aryan features. His thin lips formed a pout. Erich le Weasel looked fed up.
“Can’t say I’d pick him to match the FotoFit,” she said.
“But he’s got small eyes,” said René. “Look, he could tuck his hair under the cap. And if the girl’s terrorized, only catching a glimpse of him in dim light …”
Aimée read on. A small paragraph detailed Béatrice’s background: her parents both actors in the Comédie-Fran?aise, she grew up in theatre, attended the Conservatoire des Arts Dramatiques, branched into cinema for some unmemorable films then returned to the stage to continue the family tradition.
Next, in a sidebar: Car accident: The actress Béatrice de Mombert crashed into a lamp post on Pont Alexandre III after last night’s performance of Orphée Unchained. After sustaining minor injuries, she was released from H?tel-Dieu. Her press attaché cited the actress’s fragilité, saying she was suffering exhaustion from nightly performances and indicated she checked in for a Thalasso cure in Biarritz.
Press lingo for rehab, Aimée figured.
“According to Maurice’s tabloid, le Weasel’s a spoiled, impoverished Hapsburg descendant whose family branch lost the loot and the castle during the war. Obscure origins—Austria or Poland, no one’s sure.” René grinned. “He survives here with Dior Homme runway work and occasional GQ photo shoots, saves money by shacking up with Béatrice,” said René. “My violin’s playing.”
That made Aimée think. “Madame de Langlet, the violin teacher, promised to talk to me later.”
“Elle est formidable, that lady, and to the point,” said René. “I reached her an hour ago.”
“Et alors, did she …?”
“Confirm both girls were her pupils? Oui—but we knew that.”
“How about the other two victims?”
“Let me finish, Aimée—Sylvaine attended her lesson as usual late Monday afternoon but left early. Madame informed me in no uncertain terms that that was all she would tell me. She’s only talking to the police.”
René had gotten more out of Madame than Aimée had.
“What if she’s covering up for the rapist? For le Weasel?”
René nodded. “Madame spent the morning at the Commissariat—she only deals with the police, she repeated. Eh, wouldn’t you?” René took back the teacup and sipped. “Say le Weasel appreciates violin. I spoke to Nelié’s father this morning. According to him, Nelié heard someone clapping outside the window during her lesson.”
Strange for the rapist to draw attention to himself—could that be a red herring? Unless he had been too successful and gotten brazen; or maybe he’d lost control.
“Any chance Nelié recognized her attacker?”
René shook his head. “It was pouring rain. Nelié ran, trying to protect her violin case. But she heard him following her all the way to their apartment on Cité de Trévise. He hummed the Paganini piece she’d been practicing. Terrified, she ran in the gate and shut it behind her.”
“What time?”
“Her lesson went late. Eleven P.M.”
“After the seaman got beat up.”
The same time she’d wanted to drive to the music teacher’s—if only they had. If only she’d veto’d René—they might have caught him.
“Two attacks in one evening. Unusual.” René pulled his goatee. Thought. “Given his methodical behavior, the secrecy involved in this other life he lives, I’d say he was overcome by some pressure,” said René. He traced his finger on the moisture ring of his teacup on the green metal table. “Say an external event’s pushing him. He’s escalating.”
“We still don’t know what the crime-scene team found at Sylvaine’s house. What if Zazie walked in and disturbed him?”
René’s brow crinkled. “How do we know she actually went there?”
“We don’t,” she said. “Farfetched, maybe, but if Zazie’s captive, he’s under pressure, since he’s never had to deal with a witness who could expose him. Or …” Aimée stopped the thought.
“Face it, Aimée: Even if some pieces of this scenario are true, we might be too late. She could be dead.” René hung his head. “Désolé but …”