Murder in Pigalle

His left hand grabbed at the file; her eye clocked on his right with his finger curled around the trigger. Aimée jiggled the catwalk, aimed her Beretta and drilled Jules three times in the right shoulder. He jerked, his shots going wild as she ducked. Thupt, thupt. Bullets thudded into the rafters and metal pinged. Jules grabbed at the shuddering catwalk rail, yelling in pain, and lost his grip. The file opened and papers spilled, floating and dancing in the orange light.

 

Jules’s shouts ended in a crashing thud. She didn’t want to look. But she did.

 

He sprawled on the stage’s edge by the DJ table. The microphone wires splayed around him like a wreath of snakes.

 

Aimée shuddered. Her palms were wet; her knees shook. She hated heights. “Let’s go.” She reached for Zacharié, who stood shaking and mute at her side. “Did you hear me?”

 

“I’m on parole. Now I’ll go back to prison.”

 

Even a bent flic “shot in action” marshaled the combined préfecture forces on his side.

 

“Not if they don’t find you. Hurry, we’ll go out the backstage door.”

 

“But where’s my Marie-Jo …?”

 

She checked her Tintin watch. With any luck Saj had the girls in a taxi right now.

 

“Safe. Wish I’d known she’s as stubborn as you.” With her Swiss Army knife she sawed through the plastic flex-cuffs on Zacharié’s wrists. She followed him down the steep, winding staircase again to the backstage door. “We’ll take his phone and what’s in his wallet and put the theatre keys in his pocket.” She wiped their prints off the keys with her scarf, then handed the bundle to Zacharié. “Can you do that?”

 

Zacharié stared at the body. Blood dripped from the turntable to a pool on the floor. “But he’s still chained me to him. I’m not free.”

 

“What can he hold over you from the grave?”

 

“Jules is … was my half brother.” He winced. The floodlights cast an orange glow over his swollen eye and the cuts on his forehead.

 

The rotten half. But no one picked their family.

 

“Désolée, but it was him or you, and Marie-Jo wants her papa.”

 

“Years ago he took care of me, after our mother left,” he told her as he pulled Jules’s phone and wallet from the dead man’s pocket and planted the keys. “He was my big brother, all I had. But later he changed.”

 

A pang hit her. She could relate. Her mother had left, but at least she had had a father to raise her.

 

A vacuum whirred. The cleaning woman.

 

“Where’s Marie-Jo?” he asked.

 

“Follow me.”

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, 11 A.M.

 

 

MADAME PELLETIER HUNG her straw bag over the office chair, glad, after the futile trip to Ivry, to get back to investigating her hunch. She thumbed through the older dossiers filed under agressions sexuelles, squinting as the late-morning light glinted on the metal file cabinet’s surface. Then the next drawer. Nothing.

 

Tachet, her boss, poked his head around the door in the Brigade des Mineurs file room. “I’m holding off on calling that girl Zazie’s parents.”

 

He hated to give parents bad news. She nodded. “Should I do the follow-up, sir?”

 

“Follow-up? I’d rather charge the anonymous caller with wasting law-enforcement time and resources,” said Tachet. “We’ll give it a few more hours.” He was more irritated than usual at the expended manpower. Having personally led the squad, he looked angry enough to spit. “All this World Cup mess and we’re running around in the suburbs, wasting three hours?”

 

He didn’t expect an answer.

 

But her frustration simmered. “Sir, we still don’t know if a link exists between the rapist and this Zazie Duclos.”

 

Tachet’s lips pursed. “That’s the Brigade Criminelle’s realm now. Follow up on the five-year-old with the broken ribs and cigarette burns. That’s on your desk. Handle that.”

 

“D’accord,” she said.

 

“Good news. Your vacation starts tonight. Do what you can to wrap up the ongoing, then shoot them over to me before you leave.”

 

Good news indeed. She wouldn’t lose all her deposit on the beach chalet. Maybe she’d invite her daughter.

 

Back at her desk, she crossed the t’s on that final case, arranged the child’s interview with the psychologist and sipped on her steaming tisane. Still, she couldn’t push away her multiplying questions about the rapist. She had a growing sense of familiarity when she went over the facts—like he’d attacked before, years ago. But when and where she couldn’t place.

 

Had she even been on the force then? Had she heard about a similar case when she was at the Police Academy? Or did it come from a conversation overheard in la cantine or in the incident room—a passing reference? An open secret in the branch, maybe? One of many overlooked incidents—the hands-off files, incidents involving people either too connected or too protected, which a good flic knew about and could lean on when needed. That’s how it worked and how it always had worked. The beat flic knew the score and tallied it. Old-style—the personal touch got you further than any computer or suit-wearing commissaire who had quotas to fill. She’d regarded the system as archaic and prone to favoritism. When the Brigade des Mineurs position opened, she’d applied and got in.

 

Yet everyone depended on the beat flics, the eyes and ears on the cobbles, who were often the first to report crimes against children. That never changed, nor did the fact the damn Commissariats didn’t communicate with one another. What was all this department reorganization worth if they didn’t implement communication? Or, now that the law had been passed, get the FNAEG up and running—the Fichier national automatisé des empreintes génétiques, which would authorize a database of sexual predators?

 

What was it she couldn’t remember?

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, noon

 

 

SIRENS WHINED BEHIND them as an ambulance parked by Le Bus Palladium. The cleaning woman had found the body. Any minute the flics would pull up.

 

No sign of the girls or Saj.

 

“Wear my sunglasses and keep your head down,” said Aimée. She relocked the backstage door, then dropped the key ring in the courtyard’s slatted drain cover. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

 

“But where are they? I won’t leave without Marie-Jo.” His hands shook trying to answer the vibrating cell phone in his hand. “Who’s this calling me?”