She’d shielded her eyes, squinting at the bright sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the pale green anteroom. Her mind raced, thinking, trying to come up with a way to alter her looks.
“The light hurts my contacts. I’ve got to take them out.” She turned away, rubbing her eyes, then fished around in her bag. She always kept a quick disguise. A moment later she’d put on the large, black-framed glasses again.
“I usually wear these.” A sigh. “But today I’ve got a meeting, so I went for contacts. The curse of astigmatism.”
Lame, but the best she could do on short notice.
In the salle à manger, a nurse wearing a white uniform stood near a serving table crowned by a silver tureen. So nineteenth century—she was even holding her nurse’s cap in her hand like a supplicating commoner in the palace.
Perspiration broke above Aimée’s upper lip.
“Ninette’s from the clinique,” said Pons and turned toward her. “Ninette, does she look anything like the woman who, to quote your statement …?” Monsieur Pons pulled out a piece of paper from his lapel pocket. “… threatened to report and arrest you if you didn’t cooperate and stole a patient’s medical papers, despite your protestations? Who told you that your previous orders were changed and that, quote, ‘I’m handling this now.’ Is that correct?”
Word for word. Aimée swallowed. A dry, hard swallow that stuck in her throat.
“Something’s different,” said Ninette, the nurse. “Her glasses.”
Great.
“Take them off, please, Mademoiselle Leduc.”
The woman was backlit against the bright windows, and Aimée stepped closer to see her. She was older, plump-cheeked. Not the same nurse.
A setup.
“Of course,” Aimée said, taking them off. Calling her bluff. “Shouldn’t you be wearing your hospital badge on that uniform?”
“Not out in public, on the street,” Ninette said.
“Yet you wear a uniform. Let me see your nursing-staff identification.”
The woman blinked.
“It’s at the clinique.”
“So you’re prepared to swear an oath to that in front of a judge? Right now?” she said. She turned to Pons and Grévot. Locked eyes with Pons. “If you want to pursue this further, we do it at the commissariat.” She strode toward the door. “If that’s all?”
She didn’t wait for their answer.
AIMéE REACHED THE attorney’s secretary, explaining that an emergency had detained her but she was en route. Snapping her phone shut, she hurried through the courtyard. Double looped her scarf, her shaking subsiding to a dull tremble.
“Aimée, you all right?”
Hearing the familiar voice, she turned around. Her father’s colleague from the police academy, Thomas Dussollier got off his bike in the courtyard, his face flushed from exertion. He kissed her on both cheeks, gripped her hand and leaned into her ear. “I came from the commissariat as fast as I could. I’m sorry I wasn’t in time to warn you before the vultures got you.”
She blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“I heard via my network in the seventh you’d been brought here for a tête-à-tête,” he said, his voice low. “Lèfevre’s out of commission—his leg’s acting up again—so Morbier asked me to help you. But an old bull like me lags behind the young bucks, not that I like to admit it.”
“You’re Morbier’s connection?” Why hadn’t he confided in her?
“Forgot to tell you, eh?” Dussolier read her look. “Don’t be so hard on him, Aimée.”
She glanced at her watch. Hurry, she had to hurry. “But I have to go.”
“Attends un moment.” Dussollier took his briefcase from the bike’s basket. “Try to understand, Morbier’s tied up as the star witness in that Corsican case. He’s testifying behind closed doors and keeping your name out of the case.”
Now she remembered the sting he’d talked her into doing last year—handing off a memory stick containing faux court files at that café in Montparnasse. He’d promised her immunity if she helped him set it up, sworn there’d be no court appearance, no giving testimony in the judges’ chambers. She knew if the Corsican mob got her name, either tomorrow or a year from now, she’d answer the door to a bullet.
He was protecting her. And Chloé. And he’d drafted Dussollier, who was on the eve of retirement.
“You’re family, Aimée,” Dussolier was saying. “Once family, always family. We take care of our own.”
We take care of our own—like the Gypsies. Yet the Gypsies had shunned Djanka and Nicu, and the flics had drummed her father out, stained him with a corruption charge that took her years to disprove.
“So Morbier asked you to help me out. Have you discovered anything?” she asked, again glancing at the time.
“En fait, Morbier said to keep my ears open, poke around,” said Dussollier, chaining his bike to the ring in the wall. “I’m looking into it.”
“Whoever killed Papa and Djanka Constantin abducted Drina.” She tapped her high heel. “I explained all this to Morbier.”
“He told me.” Dussollier straightened up, expelled air. “And you came up with this theory how?”
Theory?
“Drina kept the proof in her notebook, which Nicu was murdered for at the Métro. That was the start of it, anyway.”
All her fault. She put her shaking hand in her jacket pocket.
“Anything else to go on?” he said. “Didn’t Drina give you more at the clinique?”
Startled, she stepped back, shaking her head. Her elbow hit the stone wall. “But how do you know …?”
“You can thank Doctor Estienne for the information Drina gave you. According to my sources, he abducted Drina and kept her in his clinique for observation—got paid off. Aimée, that’s common knowledge at this point.”
The slime.
“Where’s Doctor Estienne?”
“Long gone, they say. Someone’s gunning for you, Aimée.” Dussollier looked around the courtyard, lowered his voice. “I can’t do much to help you without some names, can I?”
Should she tell him? She needed help. Decided to trust him.
“Tesla and Fifi,” she said. “Ever hear Papa mention them?”