Seen and Not Heard (17 page)

The door was a flimsy one, and the lock didn’t hold against a man of Gilles’s bulk. The stairway was narrow and dank, and Gilles remembered the one other time he was here. Edgar had been sick, and Gilles had come to drag him into work. He accepted no excuses—if Edgar wished to work for him he would come to work with the runs, with a streaming nose, with typhus if need be. And Edgar had come.

He remembered the mattress on the floor, the dirty gray sheets that had once been white, with Edgar’s pale face and strong boy’s body lying there. He grew hard as he remembered, as he thought about just what he would do to the boy on that mattress. Something would be salvaged out of this miserable night. And then maybe he’d move the boy in with him, for as long as it amused him.

The room was very dark when he opened the door. No moonlight filtered through on such a rainy night, and the light from the hallway barely reached the mattress. He could see Edgar lying there, the smoothly muscled shoulder and tousle of dark hair. Gilles reached down and unfastened his pants, moving across the room on his silent cat’s feet.

Edgar moved, and a dim light speared across the room. The boy looked at him, at his erect flesh and the determination, and he moved back against the mattress. He was naked, and Gilles felt himself grow even harder.

“No,” said Edgar, the first time he had ever said such a thing to his employer.

Gilles grinned. He would have enjoyed this if Edgar had been passive, but a fight would add spice to the whole thing.
He outweighed the boy by more than a hundred pounds, and his muscles, honed by years of slinging dead animals around, were impressive. He carried his knife loosely, the knife that had served him well once this evening, secure in the knowledge that he wouldn’t need it to overpower the boy.

“Yes,” he said, mocking, advancing. “But yes.”

He could smell the boy’s fear, and the sour, sweaty smell was an aphrodisiac. He remembered his own fear, when he was much younger than Edgar and Georges had come after him, and his excitement increased. Suddenly impatient, he went down on his knees on the mattress, dropped his knife, and lunged for the terrified boy.

It happened so quickly. One moment he was ready to draw the boy underneath him, in the next he felt the sharp thrust up against his throat. It was wet, hot and wet all around him, pouring over him, and he knew blood too well not to recognize the feel of it, the warmth of it, the ironlike smell of it.

It amazed him to realize it was his own. Somehow Edgar had managed to get hold of his own knife and stick it in his throat. He was dying, Gilles thought in surprise. His blood was soaking them both, and he was dying.

He tried to laugh, but the sound was a gurgling noise. Years ago he had killed a man for buggering him, and now he had met the very same fate. You had to laugh at the tricks life would play on you, he thought, falling onto the mattress. It was Edgar’s mistake, though. If he could talk he would have told him. He should have waited, put up with him until he was old enough to inherit the boucherie. That was what Gilles had done, and it had served him well.

No, Edgar had botched it. He was standing there, naked, watching his employer bleed to death on his mattress, and he didn’t make a sound. And just before he died Gilles noticed, with grim satisfaction, that Edgar had an erection too.

Tom couldn’t stop thinking about that curtain falling into place. He lay stretched out on his narrow, sagging bed,
breathing in the lingering traces of Claire’s elusive scent, and thought about the watcher in the window.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, he chided himself. He hadn’t been able to resist the romantic gesture of kissing her good-bye, the two of them standing outside in the pouring rain. There would have been no problem with it if she didn’t already have a live-in lover with a possibly murderous streak. He’d been alone too long. He shouldn’t be in a garret trying to write the great American novel, he should be writing romances.

He wished he could share Claire’s faith that Marc Bonnard was harmless. He knew that he should—after all, he’d never met the man and Claire had lived with him for the past four or more months.

But Claire, for all her denials, had a hunted look in her eyes, one that wasn’t caused solely by her guilt over the hit-and-run accident. And she’d never told Bonnard about that, yet she’d confided in him within days of meeting him. That ought to count for something.

No, her common sense might tell her Bonnard was safe, but her instincts were disagreeing. He wished he knew which he could believe.

He stretched out in the bed, his feet touching the bottom railing, his head brushing the top. He’d planned to leave her alone for a couple of days, to think about that kiss, but right now he didn’t think he could do it. For one thing he didn’t want to go for days without seeing her; for another, that curtain still bothered him. He’d find out who lived on the first floor, in the apartment below her, and set his mind at ease.

He was almost asleep when a sudden, disquieting thought slid into his mind, disrupting what little chance he had of a decent night’s rest. The watcher had been on the first floor of the old building, just above the ground floor. Did Claire know the difference when she told him she lived on the second story? Did she know that in Europe the first floor was the ground floor, the second was the first, etc.? Did she actually live in the apartment that held the silent watcher?

He reached for the phone, then pulled his hand back. He
would only make things worse. If it hadn’t been Marc he would worry her needlessly. If it was, she was already dealing with it, and she didn’t need his interference. He looked at his watch. Quarter past one in the morning. The earliest he could show up on her doorstep was eight
A.M.
Not until then would he be certain she was all right.

He sighed, sitting up. It was going to be a long night.

“Isn’t modern science wonderful, Josef?” Malgreave lit another cigarette as he stared down at the medical examiner’s report. “A butcher gets his throat cut and his body gets dumped in an alley in Belleville. There’s so much blood on his corpse you can’t even tell what color his clothes were originally, and yet the coroner was able to determine some of that blood came from someone else. Someone with very rare AB negative blood.”

“Ah,” said Josef, putting his fingertips together and waiting.

“Now you and I both know that it’s always possible that Sahut’s attacker had that rare blood, and Sahut was able to inflict some damage before he died. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? So why am I searching further, Josef? Let me hear what you’ve deduced from all this.” Malgreave stabbed the air with his cigarette. “Don’t just sit there nodding portentously.”

“I don’t think the blood came from his attacker,” Josef said after careful consideration. “For one thing, the butcher was a huge, powerful man. The only way anyone could have gotten him is by surprise. If he’d had time to fight back, there would have been more than that trace of AB blood, there probably would have been a second body.”

“A good point,” Malgreave conceded. “But what have we
got to tie a butcher from Belleville with the murder in the Latin Quarter? What do you think, Vidal? You must be here for some reason other than to look pretty. Give me your thoughts. What have we got to tie him to Rocco Guillère, to Yvon Alpert?”

“Nothing,” Vidal said, unruffled. His pants were lavender today, and far too tight. Josef had taken one look at Vidal’s apparel and started fuming.

“Nothing indeed.” Malgreave took one last, greedy suck of the cigarette and stubbed it out in an already overflowing ashtray. The room was thick with blue smoke. “Nothing but an old cop’s instinct. There may be no connection with Guillère, or Alpert for that matter. They may have been acting on their own, random, copycat killers.”

“You don’t believe that,” said Josef.

Malgreave sighed. “I never have. It would be so much easier if I did. Such a nice, neat answer to a nasty problem. But I stake my career, my reputation, on my instincts. The victims may be random, the acts aren’t. The blood on Gilles Sahut’s clothes, that which didn’t belong to him or the animals he’d slaughtered, that blood came from Marcelle du Paine.”

Josef leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, an almost unheard-of act of relaxation in his precise lieutenant, while Vidal pulled himself upright from his lounging position in the doorway. Always at opposites, Malgreave thought with a sigh.

“How do you intend to find the connection, sir?” Josef said.

“Ah, Josef, that’s where the trouble comes in. Two years ago Rocco’s file disappeared from central records. It’s no wonder—the man has informers and friends everywhere. But it contained the only information we had about his early years. What we have now covers the criminal highlights of the last ten years of his life as we were able to reconstruct them, and there is no possible connection between him and the butcher and the bureaucrat.”

“What about the other two?”

“We’re still working on that. Alpert’s life is an open book.
He grew up outside of Paris in the Marie-le-Croix orphanage, worked his way through college, got a job with the government, and was a model, industrious Frenchman. He was all set to get married next month. There is no clue, no hint as to why he would suddenly show up at a stranger’s apartment and murder her.”

“Do we know they were strangers?”

“It’s a logical assumption. The woman had very nosy neighbors, and no one had ever seen him before.”

“Besides, she said so in her phone call to the police,” Vidal offered.

“So she did.” Malgreave nodded his approval.

“Why don’t I check and see what records I can find concerning the orphanage?” Josef suggested, glaring at Vidal’s lavender jeans. “There might be something that would explain Alpert’s sudden derangement. Maybe he was a difficult child, maybe he came from an abusive home.”

Malgreave shook his head. “Another dead end. The place burned down years ago.”

“Before or after Alpert left?”

Malgreave grew very still. “Josef,” he said gruffly, “you cheer me enormously. I will be leaving this department in good hands when I retire.” He stood up, shuffling the papers briskly. “First things first. You start with the orphanage. Find out when the fire took place, see if any records survived the blaze, or if records were kept elsewhere. In the meantime, Vidal can scout out Sahut’s boucherie and see what he can find.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Maybe, my friends, just maybe, fate has decided to be kind. We may solve this case after all.”

“With you in charge, sir, I never had any doubts,” Josef said with complete sincerity.

He was going to kill her. He had always known he would, deep inside, but he’d hoped that this time his trust wouldn’t be misplaced. This time a woman would prove worthy of his love.

But deep inside he’d known. She’d lied to him, from the very beginning. She’d kept a tiny part of her hidden from him, no matter how he tried to charm it out, into the light and into his possession. She’d always held back.

A part of him had been glad when she’d kissed the American. He was sick of wondering, sick of giving her the benefit of the doubt. Now all questions were answered. Now it was up to him, to pick the time, the place. And how much he was going to make it hurt.

The predawn light was a faint pearly glow in the east. The rain had, for the moment, stopped, and streaks of pale blue were edging across the Paris sky. Claire lay there, curled in on herself, trying to fight her way back to oblivion, when she realized she wasn’t alone.

She could hear the steady, deep breathing. She could feel the weight on the bed behind her. Terror sliced through her, complete, mindless panic, as she lay there, not daring to move. Had Marc returned?

But no, Marc wouldn’t simply have crawled in bed with her, would he? Marc had very definite ideas about what the bed and Claire’s presence in it signified. And besides, why should she be frightened of Marc? He had never hurt her, and she had only Madame Langlois’s word for it that he’d hurt her daughter. No, her growing distrust of Marc had no logical basis in physical fear.

Still, she was frightened. In the predawn light and her sleep-disrupted panic she had to consider whether the stranger in her bed was the murderer who’d been haunting Paris the last few months. But no, they only murdered old women, didn’t they? Not thirty-year-old Americans.

Slowly, carefully, she turned her head, terrified of what she might find, of the monster that had invaded her bed during the night, waiting to rip her limb from limb.

Lying next to her, on top of the covers, was the small, defenseless form of Nicole.

Relief and wonder washed over Claire. She shifted carefully, so as not to wake her visitor, and stared down at the
child’s face. Nicole looked younger in her sleep, less terrifyingly precocious. Her eyes were puffy and swollen, with the dried trace of tears beneath them, and she was curled in a fetal ball, as if even in sleep she knew she had to protect herself.

Yet she’d come to Claire, a fact that amazed her. Despite the uneasy truce that characterized their relationship, she’d sought out Claire for a comforting presence.

The room was damp and chilly in the early-morning light. Claire had made the bed the way Marc liked it, with a top sheet and a duvet, no blankets. Carefully Claire lifted the duvet away and wrapped it around the child’s body. Nicole shifted once, sighing, and sank back into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Claire lay there, shivering under the light sheet, watching the child, fighting the wave of maternal tenderness that had swept over her. It was too much for a little girl, first to lose a mother, then to be caught between a stepfather’s coldness and a grandmother’s paranoia. It should come as no surprise when Nicole turned to the only person who demanded no allegiance and only wished to offer comfort.

Usually Nicole wouldn’t accept that comfort. Last night’s dreams must have been particularly bad to send her into Claire’s bedroom, a bedroom Nicole always assiduously avoided. Looking down at her, Claire’s indecision vanished, the last of her doubts fled. She wouldn’t, couldn’t leave Nicole behind to the tender mercies of Marc and Madame Langlois.