The damp cold crawled up her legs. Dussollier checked his phone. Waiting, she realized, he was waiting for a call—his cohort to back him up? Her finger throbbed. She had to get him to admit it. “So this started twenty years ago with the murders of Pascal Leseur and Djanka Constantin?”
“We didn’t kill that blackmailer in the ministry. Or his Gypsy slut …” His words trailed off, and after a moment he said, “A real botched job, that one. We just covered it up.”
The bare bulb flickered into darkness for a moment, then lit the ground. She inched forward. Her clutch bag was almost in reach. “What do you mean?”
“A fool, that minister who liked little boys.” Dussollier waved his hand. “Leseur was blackmailing him for … what was it?”
She thought back to the incriminating photo. Fran?oise’s words: “the manipulator.”
“He wanted a ministerial post, I think,” Dussolier was saying. “Those thugs for hire were just supposed to threaten him. But it went wrong.”
“Wrong enough to kill Pascal Leseur and cover it up as a suicide?”
“Not my watch. Blauet, the fool, went along with them. Drunk, the thugs said, roaring drunk. This Pascal fell and hit his head. An accident, but the Gypsy lover walked in and, enfin, they couldn’t have a witness, could they?”
“So Blauet took Papa off the case to keep it quiet. To shut it down?”
“I worked the investigation with your father.” A tired smile. “We cooperated, not for the first time either.” Dussollier checked his phone again. She edged back in her chair, scrabbling in the dirt trying to reach her clutch. Her heart hammered. Waiting for Tesla? Would she be able to get away if there were two of them? “That’s the way things were done. You should understand, Aimée. Move on.”
She put it together now. “But now his brother Roland, aware of the tell-all memoir, suspected Pascal had been murdered, didn’t he? He figured out about your cover-up.” The puzzle pieces fit; she should have seen it earlier. “You’d be implicated. So you squashed the memoir. Then squashed him. Like Nicu. And Drina because you knew she’d expose the truth. Drina was the key. She saw you. Why didn’t you tell me, Dussollier?”
Stupid. All the arrows pointed in the same directions, but she hadn’t wanted to follow them—when Nicu had shown up after the baptism, Dussollier must have overheard somehow. Panicked that Drina, after all this time, had returned on the eve of his retirement to threaten his cover-up, to ruin the crowning glory of his daughter’s engagement party among his elite cronies and his relatives from Toulon. Toulon—it finally came back to her; the nurse at the clinic had told her the monsieur who had posed as ministry security had had a Toulon accent. Dussollier had abducted a dying Drina to keep her quiet, destroyed whatever incriminated him in her notebook, and acted helpful to distract and derail Aimée’s progress, while always staying a step ahead …
“I’m telling you now, see,” he said, a smile breaking on his face. “It’s healthy getting things out in the open, you’re right. It’s all for the best, you’ll see. I’m retiring, Chloé will have a little something … non, a big something for university. Put my gift in the bank now and see how it grows. Jean-Claude would have wanted that.”
A bribe? Invoking Chloé’s future? How twisted he was, claiming to care for her daughter and threatening her in the same breath.
“Jean-Claude loved you as you love Chloé, Aimée, remember that. He had to pay a price to keep you safe. You want to raise Chloé, don’t you?” Dussollier shrugged. “Alors, you don’t want your baby’s ex-flic father gaining full custody, do you? A court order declaring you unfit, like your crazy mother, barring you visitation until she’s eighteen?”
Her heart thumped. How the hell did he know this, if even she didn’t know what had happened to her mother? For a moment his bleary gaze settled on the guard. Her now throbbing hand scrabbled for her clutch, pulled it behind her. She tried to grip the gun’s handle. Her finger didn’t cooperate.
“Me, I keep a little insurance,” said Dussollier. “Know the weaknesses, the dirty secrets that people keep hidden. Judges’ drunken car crashes, ministers partying with young girls and boys, diplomats caught with cocaine. We keep it quiet, do our jobs.”
“Then you hold all the cards, Dussollier,” she said with a sigh. “What do you want me to do?” Could she lull him into thinking she’d cooperate—or would his reflexes have slowed enough for her to threaten him and escape? She wedged the clutch’s snap handle aside with her thumb.
Dussollier checked his phone again. His watch. Shook his head. “I can’t wait anymore.” He took a knife from his pocket. “I don’t want to do this, Aimée.”
“Then don’t,” she said, rubbing her hand. “You don’t have to. Let’s just …”
He shook his head. “I’m tired of explaining. Nothing’s gotten through to you, has it? You still think we should pay, don’t you? Me and Morbier?”
“What?”
A little laugh. “Ask him yourself.”
Tremors rippled through her legs. What could he be insinuating?
“Don’t fight me now, Aimée, we’ll make sure the baby’s taken care of,” said Dussollier, rubbing his cheek. “I wish you hadn’t made me do this.”
Gritting her teeth, she flexed her broken finger inside her clutch. Closed her hand around the pistol. “Talk to someone who cares, Dussollier. No one takes my baby. No one smears my papa. Maybe I was a selfish teenager, but I listened to Papa. And the last thing he said to Drina, before you murdered him in the explosion—”
“Don’t blame it all on me,” said Dussollier, brandishing the knife at her. “I wasn’t the only one.”
She pulled out the pistol. Aimed it, her hands shaking.
“Can’t do it, eh?” Quicker than she could think, Dussollier knocked her hand away and threw her down against the wall.
Her chest clamped; she couldn’t breathe. His black tie and tuxedo pressed into her face. Her stinging fingers scrambled on the ground, scratching the beaten earth, trying to feel for the pistol.