“Did this sudden trip stem from your corruption investigation? Things got too hot?”
Morbier gave a start in the plastic chair. She could have sworn guilt and something like fear crossed his furrowed brow. Then it disappeared. His sagging jowls, the day-old beard gave him a haggard look.
“Not for you to worry about, Leduc. Not in your condition.”
But his pinhole pupils were sharp in those brown basset-hound eyes.
“Mais alors, you got into a shootout,” he said, “in your condition.”
As if it were her fault? “A shootout is a mutual armed exchange,” she said, fuming. “Not an innocent woman gunned down in the rue as she is getting into her car. Get your facts straight.”
“Ever thought the shooter might have been aiming at you instead of this Madame …”
“Vasseur? The mother of Zazie’s friend, the rape victim?” Aimée shook her head. But could Morbier be right? Her spine prickled. Was she responsible for Madame Vasseur’s death?
“Your face plastered all over the télé didn’t help, Leduc,” said Morbier. “Why would you get mixed up with that gutter-press sensationalist who calls herself a télé-journalist? Unleashed a can of crazies. Typical. You act before you think.”
Morbier had a point. A uniform guarding the hospital room gave her some comfort.
“But this means the rapist’s cornered, desperate. That’s the whole point, Morbier. Force him out in the open so we can find Zazie.”
Poor Mélanie, first attacked and institutionalized, now motherless, left with a widowed father who had complained his high-powered wife put her law career before her daughter. Now even more than before, Mélanie was in his hands.
Guilt stung her. Mélanie’s mother had tried to help. Where was her phone?
A smiling medical attendant with a mustache appeared with a new clipboard.
“Commissaire, we’re moving the patient to the Obstetrics ward.”
“I’ll join you.” Morbier shuffled to his feet. Nodded. “After I stop in at the cafeteria.”
UPSTAIRS IN A room redolent with bleach and disinfectant, Aimée rubbed her stomach. She hated the hospital smell. Her open window overlooked darkened rails glistening in a night rain shower.
Marc lay curled asleep on an adjoining hospital bed, the covers pulled under his neck. Morbier took a bite of céleri rémoulade from her green tray. “Not bad, Leduc. Try some.”
“Hospital food?”
But hunger clawed, and the Bump needed to eat.
“Open wide …”
She almost batted the plastic spoon of glistening celery slivers back at him. “Quit treating me like an invalid.”
She finished the whole plate, and a second.
“Ready for my statement, Morbier?”
Wednesday, 8 A.M.
MADAME PELLETIER STARED at the files on her desk. They went back five years, but what she was looking for wasn’t here. That incident niggled in her mind.
She pushed her cup of steaming tilleul, lime-blossom tisane, to the side of her desk. Her vacances put on hold thanks to the backlog of cases and now the rapist terrorizing the ninth. She’d come in early this morning to catch up. Quiet for once—at least she could concentrate.
What if that Leduc had been right? Not that she was happy about the media pressure, how the woman had painted the police as inefficient. Leduc’s scenario—that her missing young friend, the thirteen-year-old redhead, had something to do with the rapist—hadn’t sounded realistic to her. Yet now the girl’s story bothered her. Madame Pelletier’s own daughter had run away when she was thirteen. Had she been projecting her own experience on the distraught parents—something she’d been trained not to do?
After the divorce, her daughter had decided to live with her father. Almost relieved, Madame Pelletier had agreed. She didn’t miss the yelling matches—you’re never home, it’s not like you’d miss me.
Now her daughter lived in the Cévennes, raised sheep, chopped firewood in the bitter winters. Never mind that she’d married a man who was the mental equivalent of a barn post. They grew what they ate and slaughtered their own meat, and they were expecting … Her daughter, now happier than she’d ever been, begged her all the time to visit.
There she went again. Projecting.
Quiet as they kept it, with the Brigade’s huge log of investigations—infant-and child-abuse cases, incest, child pornography—missing thirteen-year-olds like Zazie went to the bottom of the priority list.
Before the unit meeting, she’d pull up a few more years of files. She had to scratch that itch, make up for …
What was that name?
“Need you,” her commander barked from the doorway.
“But I came in early to work on that case.”
“Now, Pelletier. There’s been a sighting of the rapist and two missing girls. We had a false one last night, but this looks real.”
“Where?” she said, reaching for her cell phone.
“A warehouse. On the outskirts of Ivry.”
A tough industrial suburb, more than an hour away in morning traffic. She grabbed her jacket.
Wednesday, 9 A.M.
MILES DAVIS LICKED Aimée’s ankles at the concierge-loge door. Madame Cachou’s lips turned down in disapproval as she handed Aimée a shopping bag labeled “maternity” that had been left for her by Martine. Hand-me-downs from her fertile sisters who, according to Martine, had populated a good sixteenth of France.
Thank God. And designer goodies, too. She’d outgrown most of her armoire.
“Careful, I just waxed the foyer.”
Madame Cachou had always had a soft spot for Miles Davis—not so for Aimée. But since Aimée’s pregnancy the concierge had thawed, almost to lukewarm. She’d bring up the mail, slip in an article on prenatal nutrition or tips on bébé’s first months.
“Left another package for you upstairs by your door.”
“Merci, Madame.”