A frisson went up Aimée’s neck. “She said she couldn’t handle the shame. Like Sylvaine’s mother, who’s pressing charges against me.”
“Charging you won’t take the pain away,” said René.
“Displaced grief,” said Aimée. “Hurt and shame. Guilt over failing in the responsibility of protecting their children. Put it down to shock, devout religion, but what if …?” She paused, thinking. “It’s just a feeling, but I think Madame Vasseur was holding something back.”
René rubbed his eyes. He switched on the espresso machine, and it rumbled to life. “Don’t the flics always say look to the family first—it’s the husband nine times out of ten?”
“You’re thinking this distraught man shot his wife, then came to accuse me of …?”
She didn’t buy it. Or did she? The woman’s second thoughts kept coming back to her. A midday glow suffused the office’s high-ceilinged carved woodwork. Shafts of light prismed in the crystal drops of the chandelier.
“Say Monsieur Vasseur’s got a hidden history of incest with his daughter,” said René. “But that’s not enough, or he’s worried he won’t be able to keep her quiet.”
“Where’s the proof, René?”
“It’s always the ones you don’t expect.” He set the demi-tasse under the brown stream. “Don’t put it past him.”
“Put what past him?”
“He protests too much,” said René. “According to the police report, he was the one who discovered his daughter after she was raped. Imagine a different scenario—his grief and antagonism are a cover-up.”
She shuddered. “His wife didn’t strike me as a look-the-other-way type.” Aimée remembered her strident voice, her clear unhappiness in that elegant townhouse. “Her last words were about the shame of it.”
René stirred in a sugar cube. “For argument’s sake, what if she was ashamed not because her daughter was raped, like you thought, but because she had just realized who the rapist was?”
He paused to let this sink in. She nodded. A possible scenario that made her insides crawl.
“Sad but classic,” René went on. “The wife knows inside but hides the truth from herself, throws herself into work. You said Madame Vasseur was obsessed with her job.”
“I see where you’re going, René.” She didn’t like this. She hit the wall switch, and the overhead fan lurched into motion. A slow current of tepid air stirred.
“The father’s grown insatiable and attacks her classmates,” said René. “Easy prey. They know him already, maybe they’re friends with his daughter—say the girls practice violin together or overlap at lessons. These young girls trust him, let him into their houses when he follows them home from a lesson, then he frightens them into swearing to secrecy. Or maybe he never lets them see his face, just follows them home to familiar addresses. Sylvaine dies accidentally. He never meant this, but alors, the stakes have risen. Now you come into the picture, stir things up and get his wife asking questions. And she’s on the point of breaking down and telling you. Cornered, he has to silence her. Like he silenced his daughter, shipping her off to the Swiss clinic.”
“But I heard them arguing,” she said. “He accused her of sending his daughter away.”
“He’s a lawyer, non? Makes things appear one way, twists them around. We just saw him in action. Blames you—you were getting too close.”
“I don’t know about that. But I know I got too close.”
“Of course, he knew about his wife’s big speech last night,” said René, warming up. “What if she’d been about to confront him with his daughter’s message? Where was he last night, did you ask him?”
“He drives a Merc, not a motorcycle. They both do … did.”
“But he could have a motorcycle, too. Maybe borrow a friend’s?”
He raised good questions. She scrolled through her cell-phone call record, searching for the girl’s number at the Swiss clinic. When she found it, she hit dial. Just a message.
The grinding of a fax came from the machine. René picked up two pages as they rolled out. “From Serge.”
“More on the ballistics?”
“Not quite.”
GET WELL, AIMéE, OUR SUPERHERO was written in childish scrawl with a crude drawing of her: big belly, arms out and a cape streaming behind her. From Serge’s twin boys, whom she was dreading having to babysit.
“They sat still long enough to draw this?” René shook his head. “Aimée, the caped crusader.”
Her heart wrenched. She couldn’t sit here and run corporate scans after all these questions René had raised.
“This came with it.” He passed her a second sheet of Serge’s scribbled notes under Sylvaine Olivet’s blood panel.
Post mortem—PHENYTOIN with a level of 2 but normal therapeutic range to be 10–20. Abnormal collection of blood vessels, arteriovenous malformation, in temporal lobe with acute bleeding and herniation of brain. Victim’s doctor had no CT scan on record. No evidence of sexual penetration. Bruising and lacerations to the eye and chest. Bite marks on tongue, surmise bleeding from undiagnosed AVM with an acute seizure and herniation of brain.
RENé TOOK THE paper and read it. “Sylvaine was an epileptic, is that what this means?”
“Mon Dieu, it means he didn’t rape Sylvaine,” she said. “She had an undiagnosed blood-vessel abnormality that caused seizures. Poor thing. The doctor probably didn’t think her seizures had a specific anatomic cause—but since a CT had never been done, he would never have known. Lazy. But they treat seizures irrespective of the cause with Phenytoin—that’s the generic term for Dilantin. I’d say her seizure thwarted the rape, and that’s why he attacked Nelié the same night. She got away. He’s off his game, and there’s Madame Vasseur about to expose him—”
“Or he thinks she will,” interrupted René. “He shoots her. His own wife.” René frowned. “I’d say she suspected her husband.”