The Courbet Connection (Book 5) (Genevieve Lenard) (35 page)

“Doctor Lenard.” Judith smiled a greeting to me before holding out her right hand to Colin. “I’m Judith Jooste.”

It took me a millisecond to remember that Judith had never met Colin. She’d met William Strode. Colin displayed no discomfort, no surprise and no deception when he shook her hand.

“Colin.” He nodded towards the suitcase. “Right now we can do with all the extra help and information you can give.”

“Hi!” Francine waved from behind her desk. “I’m Francine.”

“She’s our IT expert.” Manny glanced at the suitcase again. “What have you got for us?”

“All of Boucher’s notes that he kept at home.” Judith put the suitcase on its side, crouched next to it and unzipped the large case. “I also have the official case files I requested, but I think we might find more in his personal notes.”

“His wife co-operated?” Manny asked.

Judith looked up from the case. “She believes someone killed her husband. According to her, Boucher was pedantic about the upkeep of his cars. He would never have allowed his car’s brakes, or anything else for that matter, to become so worn that they would fail him. She said that she’s questioned the police reports, asked for further investigation, but no one would listen to her. They all think she’s just a grieving widow.”

“Did Boucher ever talk to her about his cases?” Colin walked closer, crouched on the other side of the case and helped Judith unpack numerous folders and notebooks onto the round table.

“Sometimes he brought notes home and worked on them in his study, she said. He didn’t talk about it, but he did brood a lot. He would sit in his study and spend hours going over his notes, especially if he had a particularly difficult case. But that didn’t happen too often.”

“What about the months before his death?” I asked.

“She said there was definitely something bothering him. He spent more time than usual in his study, and some days came home very late because he’d been researching something.”

“And of course she doesn’t know what he was working on, right?” Manny asked.

“Nope. But she was very happy to give me all his files. Made me promise that I was going to find the people responsible for her husband’s death. She also seemed keen on cleaning out his study. It didn’t look like it had been touched since he died.” Judith shook her head. “Sad, really.”

The round table was covered in piles of folders, papers and notebooks that looked well paged through. I clenched my teeth at the disarray on the table. “Is there some sort of order in all of these documents?”

Judith frowned at the table. “No. I just grabbed everything I could and rushed back. I haven’t looked at a single file yet.”

“You should look at the Interpol files first,” I said. “You know what the electronic files said and can compare it to his case notes. If there are any differences you’ll notice them.”

“Good idea.”

“Okay, Doc. What do we do?”

“Not me.” Francine waved her hands in front of her. “I’m working on trying to find a way to locate these bastards. If I can get into that live feed, we might be able to stop this auction or prevent the hunting auction.”

Judith’s head shot up. “What hunting auction?”

“They’re first auctioning these students’ organs.” I pointed at the screen against the wall. The second organ auction seemed near its end. I didn’t want to look too closely at the prices paid for the young man’s body parts. “In another three hours and forty minutes they will auction each of these students to be prey to some sick individual who enjoys hunting innocent, defenceless human beings.”

Judith stared at me, her mouth agape. Then she turned to Manny. “What is she talking about?”

While Manny gave her an impressively concise summary of the case, I started putting some order to the papers on the table. I put all the notebooks on one pile. There were four large notebooks, seven smaller ones and ten very small notebooks that I suspected Boucher had carried around in his pocket. I made another pile with the loose papers that didn’t seem to belong anywhere. The folders I separated into two piles. One for the Interpol files and one for Boucher’s personal files.

Despite the disorganised state of these documents, Boucher appeared to have been quite meticulous in the private records he’d kept. On each folder was a name and a date. Inside these folders numerous pages of information were neatly attached with notes in the margins. The first page in the folder I was looking at was a photocopied page of a newspaper article about the budding ski industry in the smaller hills outside Strasbourg. The article didn’t catch my attention as much as the fact that the notes were written in some kind of code. Every folder I opened had coded notes on the documents.

It took Manny four minutes to finish his condensed summary. “That’s the skeleton. We need to go through these files to see if Boucher had any idea where these kids might be.”

“How did you determine which were the last cases Boucher paid attention to?” I asked. “I looked at the cases your team is investigating and I didn’t see anything of interest in the last three cases before Boucher’s death.”

Judith took a long time to look away from the screen. When she did, her lips were thinned. She blinked a few times, refocussing. “At any one time we have between three and twenty cases open. Some cases take a week to close, others take years of intense investigation. Boucher kept a log on his computer of the cases they were working on. Every week he changed the priority of those cases and saved it as a new file. The three cases that caught my attention were in the last six or
seven cases the unit took on before Boucher died. I noticed the first asterisk in one of the documents saved five weeks before his death.”

“How did you get access to his computer?” Francine was clearly listening while she was working on her computer. “Don’t the big guys lock someone’s computer away as soon as they are no longer with the agency?”

Judith’s smile was secretive. “I learned very early in my career how important friends can be in this business. Especially friends of the IT variety. That was my first stop when I started this job. I made sure that I gave the IT guys something of value.”

“Something that would prove you’re trustworthy and worth doing extra work for.” That was one of the reasons I would never be able to work in an average corporate setup. Not only did I lack those skills, I had no interest in the calculating approach to potential friends this required.

“Yes. It worked. The IT guys gave me Boucher’s computer for a day so that I could”—she lifted both hands and just like Nikki made finger quotes in the air—“learn from Boucher.”

“Devious.” Francine winked. “I like you.”

Judith’s smile widened. “Thanks. Having the computer didn’t really give me much. The most I got were the weekly lists he saved. But it did make me look at those three files.”

I followed her index finger pointing at the three Interpol files carefully laid on top of each other. “Tell me about the cases.”

“In a nutshell? The first one that got an asterisk was an ID theft case. It was cut short to look into Edward Taylor. When I checked out Boucher’s report on this case, it had considerably less information than his other cases. He was really quite detailed in his other reports. This one was just the basics.”

“Did you see anything suspicious about the case?” Manny asked.

“Apart from it being put on the back burner to investigate Edward Taylor? No. It was the second case that made me suspicious. It was abandoned after a week. In that week very little investigation was actually done.”

“What kind of case?”

Judith glanced at the screen. “An art student at a Lille university was reported missing a few days before a major exhibition. He was some kind of prodigy. His university called in the report six months ago.”

The adrenaline rushing through my body made me feel cold. “Are you talking about Christopher Leesa?”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “You know about him?”

“He’s one of the many students Doc found missing across Europe.”

“I know I didn’t find all the missing students.” I stopped myself from rubbing my arms in a self-soothing gesture. “I found twenty-two names. We found thirty-eight videos showing students being hunted. I don’t have names for all of them.”

“My God.” There was no sound in her shocked exclamation, just a rush of air. “What are we dealing with?”

“Monsters.” Francine’s top lip curled, her voice hard.

“What about this case?” Colin asked. “Was there anything apart from the asterisk that’s interesting?”

“No. I was hoping to find something in Boucher’s notes.” Judith lifted one of the files on the table. “If not in the case file, maybe the notes from his house.”

“The last case?” I asked.

“It was an anonymous tip about someone offering assassination services. The case was opened a few days before Boucher died and went cold after his death. I asked Breton and Hugo about this and they said only Boucher ever spoke to this informant. Since they had no idea how to get hold of this person or where to even start investigating this alleged crime, they dumped the case.”

“Dukwicz,” Colin said.

“We can’t be sure it is him.” We had no evidence.

Colin shrugged. “Taken into context, I think we can be sure it’s him. For all we know Boucher was the so-called informant.”

“That is outrageous conjecture.” I didn’t want to waste any time on theories. The auction on the screen had concluded. I didn’t recognise the second young man, had never met him, but felt irrationally responsible for what he was experiencing. “Judith, look through the Interpol files and report if you find any additional information. We will start looking through these folders. We need to find notes Boucher might have made relating to these cases, to Breton and Hugo, to Gasquet, to Dukwicz or to anything related to the kidnappings.”

No one questioned my directive. Judith took the three official files and sat on the chair Vinnie usually used. Manny joined us at the table and the room became quiet, only the rustling of papers and Francine’s tapping on her computer audible.

When Judith sighed heavily for a third time, I looked up. She was biting her bottom lip, a deep frown pulling her eyebrows in and down.

“What’s wrong? Have you found something?” I hoped so.

“Nothing. The Leesa case doesn’t make sense.” She lifted a folder and shook it. “This has reports from Breton, Hugo and Boucher. Breton and Hugo’s reports give exactly the same spiel. Most of their reports are a lot of blah, blah, blah. And then they state that Leesa isn’t missing. In their opinion as investigators who have seen many such cases, they reckon Christopher Leesa dropped out of university and is working somewhere warm, most likely in a bar in Greece. Can you believe it? They actually wrote that here! Their reasoning is that he’s a social misfit and wanted to go someplace where he could start over.”

While Manny and Judith discussed the lexicon used in the report and its possible interpretations, I wondered about Breton and Hugo’s involvement in the kidnappings. I also thought it sounded as if they had closed this case in this manner to
draw away any suspicion. Were
they
kidnapping the students? Were they using their positions in Interpol to ensure no investigation into these kidnappings? What were their roles?

“Doctor Lenard! I’m here! Doctor Lenard!” Caelan appeared in the doorway, Tim slightly behind him. Phillip’s assistant looked at me with his eyebrows and shoulders raised. Caelan’s hair was short, in places cropped tight against his skull. I wondered if he’d cut it himself. He no longer smelled bad, was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a white t-shirt and appeared relaxed. The lack of inappropriate geographical facts confirmed that he wasn’t distressed. “I want a girlfriend.”

Francine made a distinctly unfeminine sound and Manny scowled at Caelan.

“Have you got any useful information for us, lad?”

Caelan frowned. “In 1932, the winter was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.”

He stepped into the room and Tim shifted behind him, clearly waiting for something.

“What is the problem, Tim?” I needed to understand his discomfort.

“Is this okay? Can he stay?”

I looked at the pile of disorganised documents on the table and made a decision. “Yes, Caelan might just be able to help us.”

“I want a girlfriend.” Caelan walked up to Judith and studied her, his eyes finally settling on her shoulder. “Who are you?
You’re kind of pretty. A bit old, but pretty. Will you be my girlfriend?”

Judith’s eyes widened, her bottom jaw going slack.

“That’s not how you’re going to get a girlfriend, kiddo.” Francine rapped her knuckles on her desk to get his attention. “You better listen to Doctor Lenard and help us. We really need you.”

“Will you teach me then how to have a girlfriend?”

“You’re like a dog with a bone.” Francine shook her head. “Yes, I said I’ll teach you.”

“Do you really have nothing useful to add to this case, lad?”

“No. Doctor Lenard said I didn’t have to give you anything. So I Google Earthed.”

“You what now?” Manny turned to Francine when Caelan ignored him. “What’s he talking about?”