Private Paris Read online

  “That’s a first,” I said. “Defacement of the corpse.”

  Investigateur Hoskins said nothing. For the first time since I’d met her, I saw indecision and uncertainty on her face. Claudia Vans, Private Paris’s chief forensics tech, was on the bed, examining the body.

  “I’ve got something,” Vans said, holding up a pair of tweezers. “Pubic hairs. Three of them. And obviously, because of the wax job, not Ms. Latrelle’s.”

  “That helps,” Hoskins said. “Nothing like DNA. Let me know if you find anything else organic.”

  Vans nodded. Hoskins suggested that we leave the tent.

  Out in the hall, the investigateur said, “Louis, I believe you’re right.”

  “C’est vrai?” he said, arching his eyebrows in a way that suggested she rarely admitted he was on the right side of anything.

  Hoskins nodded uncomfortably. “The position of the body is symbolic. And because the victim is Lourdes Latrelle, it takes AB-16 to a whole other level.”

  Louis paused with muted delight before looking to me. “It would be like a high-profile movie or television star being murdered in the States.”

  “I thought you said she was an intellectual author,” I said.

  “The French idolize the brilliant person,” Hoskins explained. “The person who is above the fray, living the life of the mind while facing none of reality’s consequences. Latrelle is a cultural icon, a member of L’Académie Française, for God’s sake.”

  Louis said, “The news of this murder will strike deep. Mark my words.”

  Behind us a man said, “I am marking them. And unfortunately I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  We all turned to find a short, older, painfully stooped man in a gray suit. He was balanced on a cane and had to twist his head to peer up at us through thick, round, wire-rimmed glasses. “Which is why we are going to keep all information about this crime scene from the press,” he added.

  He pointed the cane at Louis, then at me, and said, “You two shouldn’t even be here, but I’ll allow it because of Private’s proven forensics work. That does not, however, excuse you from my gag order. Are we clear?”

  “Crystal clear, Juge Fromme,” Louis said.

  The older man came closer. Every movement seemed to cause him great discomfort, and he had to will himself beyond it to crane his head up at me.

  “I am Guillaume Fromme, le juge,” he said in perfect English, offering his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you and your company, Monsieur Morgan.”

  “That’s nice of you to say so, sir,” I replied, taking his hand, which was surprisingly large, leather-palmed, and strong. “What exactly is your role here?”

  “In the French legal system, a juge is brought in on all major cases, especially those involving murder,” he said. “I am not a judge in the U.S. sense—more an investigative magistrate. Someone who will oversee the case from a legal perspective until a defendant is brought to court.”

  He looked at Hoskins and Louis. “Do I speak correctly?”

  They nodded, Hoskins unhappily.

  Fromme must have seen it because he lifted his cane toward the detective and said, “It is unusual to see someone like me at a crime scene so early in an investigation, which has made Investigateur Hoskins here nervous. But I am under orders. And based on my review of the case files to date, I agree with them. The position of the bodies and the photographs found in Monsieur Henri Richard’s pied-à-terre suggest that AB-16 poses a clear and present danger to Paris and to France.”

  Chapter 46

  FROMME MOVED AS if he was walking on nails before stopping in front of the tent where Lourdes Latrelle hung. He stood there several seconds before turning back to us, his face gone grave.

  “Who found her?” he asked. “Who’s seen her like this?”

  “An employee of the club opened the drapes after someone complained that they had been closed for hours,” Hoskins replied. “She had the good sense not to scream, and got the manager, who called us.”

  “So two people besides those present at this moment?” le juge demanded.

  “Yes, I think that’s right, sir,” Hoskins said.

  “I wish to speak with the manager and the employee,” Fromme said. “Any leads on who was with her in the club before she entered the tent?”

  “Yes,” Hoskins said. “Several patrons and the bartender said Madame Latrelle was watching an orgy when she was approached by a large francophone African male with a gold upper front tooth and a pale, brunette Caucasian woman with green catlike eyes.”

  This was the first Louis and I had heard of the couple, but I remembered that someone at Chez Pincus had mentioned that the woman Henri Richard had brought to the restaurant once wore cat-eye contacts.

  I said, “You catch them on tape?”

  “God no,” Louis said. “A place like this, Jack, is based on anonymity, and a belief in personal space. The French do not like security cameras.”

  “Especially in their sex clubs?”

  “Now you understand,” Louis said.

  “Sketch artists?”

  Hoskins said, “That we can take care of.”

  When the investigator and magistrate moved off to discuss matters off-limits to Private Paris, I checked my watch. It was nearly five in the morning, and I was running on fumes.

  I was about to tell Louis that I was going back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep when something he’d said earlier came back to me.

  “Wasn’t Henri Richard a member of L’Académie Française?” I asked.

  “Oui,” Louis said. “But if you think there is a connection, it stops with Lourdes. Chef Pincus, as highly regarded as he was, was not a member.”

  “That shoots that.”

  Then Louis stared off into the distance and muttered, “Unless…”

  “Unless what?” I asked.

  “Come, Jack,” he said, hurrying toward the exit. “We must go talk to the only other Parisian I know who gets up and goes to work as early as I do.”

  Chapter 47

  6th Arrondissement

  5:15 a.m.

  LOUIS AND I climbed from a taxi on the Quai de Conti across the Seine from the Louvre. In the glow of streetlamps, I could make out the massive curved bulwark of a building and the silhouette of a domed tower that loomed above it.

  “What is this place?” I asked, feeling irritable after dozing off in the cab.

  “The Institut de France,” he said. “The epicenter of French culture.”

  “What does it do?” I said, following him across a courtyard in front of the grand building.

  “On a practical level, the institute oversees about ten thousand different foundations concerned with everything from French historical sites to museums and castles,” Louis said. “The five academies within the institute were formed back in the days of Louis XIV, and designed to preserve and celebrate the French culture, language, arts, sciences, and our systems of law and politics. The members represent the best of France, and must be voted in.”

  “There’s a nomination process?”

  He bobbed his head. “Anyone can be nominated. You can even nominate yourself. But then you must run a quiet campaign, almost like a political race, in which you prove that you are one of les immortels, the best of France.”

  Louis stopped before a door. “Hold on a second.”

  He punched in a number on his cell phone, waited, and laughed. “It’s Louis. I knew you were up. Listen, I’m out front. Can you buzz us in? It’s a matter of great importance, and potentially involves the institute.” Louis listened and said, “We shall meet you there.”

  The door buzzed and we entered a dimly lit hallway that led us to staircases and other hallways that Louis seemed to know intimately.

  “So who are we meeting?” I asked.

  “The director,” he said.

  “And how do you know this person?”

  “The director is an old, discreet, and dear friend,” Louis said.

&nbs
p; He went to some double doors and opened them, revealing a breathtaking room composed of four large and dramatic alcoves that met at a central amphitheater. The massive arches that defined the alcoves also supported a cupola that soared above the amphitheater to a dome built of stone buttresses and stained glass. The glass was starting to glow blue and gold with the dawn.

  A woman in a red pantsuit with a blue and white scarf about her neck stood below the cupola on an oval rug in the dead center of the amphitheater. She was talking to a younger man in a crisp white shirt and red tie. She was in her fifties and strikingly handsome, with silver-blond hair.

  “This is where all members of Les Académies meet,” Louis said quietly. “You could say that there is no place more French than this one room.”

  Before I could reply, the younger man turned and headed up the far set of stairs. The woman spotted us, grinned, and came over quickly to embrace Louis and buss his cheeks. “How are you, old friend?” she said in French.

  “I am magnificent as always, chéri,” Louis said in English, before gesturing to me. “Allow me to introduce Monsieur Jack Morgan.”

  She reached out to shake my hand and began speaking to me in perfect British English. “Pricilla Meeks, director of the institute. Very nice to meet you, Mr. Morgan. Louis has spoken highly of you in the past.”

  I shook her hand, wondering how she could speak both languages with such perfect accents. But before I could dope that out, the spotlights went on outside. They hit high on the cupola, illuminating the interior of the tower while Louis went straight to the matter at hand.

  “Was René Pincus up for a vote on admission to Les Académies?” he asked.

  Pricilla Meeks sobered and said, “You know I can’t discuss things like that.”

  “Pincus is dead,” Louis grumbled. “So is Henri Richard, a member of the academy. And now, I hate to say it, Lourdes Latrelle.”

  Meeks gasped. “Lourdes! My God, Louis. How?”

  “I can’t get into the particulars under orders from a magistrate. But she’s dead. I saw her body myself.”

  Meeks sank into one of the plush blue seats, shaking her head. “What a tragedy. Why would anyone target—”

  “Pricilla!” the man with the red tie cried from the far staircase. “Someone has defaced the cupola!”

  The director jumped up and we had a hard time keeping up with her as she ran through the hallways and outside. The sun was just rising. It was difficult to see from the front courtyard, but when we retreated across the street and onto the Pont des Arts, the pedestrian bridge that spans the Seine, we got the full effect.

  High on the curved front face of the cupola’s dome, someone had painted a huge version of the AB-16 tag and an inverted cross in three parallel colors: red, black, and fluorescent green.

  “My God,” Meeks said, clearly horrified at the way the graffiti seemed to glow in an otherworldly way against the dark blue skin of the dome. “Why are they doing this?”

  “AB-16 is declaring war,” Louis said, as grim as I’ve ever seen him.

  “On what?” I asked. “The institute?”

  “Think of the symbolism and the placement,” Louis said. “AB-16 is making war on the entire French culture.”

  Chapter 48

  I THOUGHT ABOUT that, and maybe Louis was right. Paris was his city and France his country. He would know the symbolism and the meaning of this sort of thing. And yet I wondered if there was more to it than that.

  “Do you have any current or former disgruntled employees at the institute?” I asked.

  “Everyone in France is disgruntled to some extent these days,” Meeks said dourly. “But actually, people who work at the institute are by and large happy. Unless they really screw up, the job is for life, and it is a life of and for the culture, which they love, or they wouldn’t get hired in the first place.”

  “No one has screwed up lately?”

  Meeks said, “In answer to your question, Mr. Morgan, no. It’s been some time since we’ve had a major screwup. I run a tight ship.”

  “Okay, are there any current or former campaigners, people trying to be elected into one of the academies, who are embittered by their exclusion?”

  Meeks hesitated and said, “Many great Frenchmen and -women were never elected to Les Académies, including Victor Hugo and Marie Curie.”

  I picked up on the hesitation and said, “Since they’re both dead, we’ll put them out of consideration. I’m talking the last year or two.”

  Meeks glanced at Louis before sighing. “There is one who has been giving us—uh, me—many headaches.”

  “A name?”

  She seemed to struggle inside.

  I said, “AB-16 is targeting your members, Madame Meeks. I should think you’d want to protect them.”

  That got to her. “Of course I wish to protect them!”

  News vehicles pulled up in front of the institute. Cameramen got out and filmed the tag up on the cupola.

  “Who is it, Pricilla?” Louis grumbled.

  “Jacques Noulan,” she said, and filled us in.

  Noulan, a noted Paris fashion designer, was evidently infuriated when he lost an open seat in the academy of fine arts to Millie Fleurs, a more famous member of the fashion world. Meeks said that Noulan, who was more an expert marketer than an innovator, had organized a smear campaign after the election, trying to get Fleurs unseated. He was unsuccessful.

  “He made threats to me at a party recently,” Meeks said. “He was quite drunk, and belligerent.”

  “He unstable enough to start killing academy members?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” she said, playing with an earring.

  “You just did,” Louis said.

  “Pricilla!” cried a female television news reporter who’d come out onto the bridge to get a better angle on the cupola and the tag. “Have you heard about Lourdes Latrelle?”

  Meeks turned toward the reporter, and the klieg lights went on.

  Squinting, I took a step back as Meeks replied, “I have heard, and it’s a tragedy. France has lost another of her immortals.”

  Investigateur Hoskins and Juge Fromme climbed from a police car and were swarmed by reporters. The tag’s placement and the murders had struck a deep nerve. No doubt about it now.

  “I still think we want to talk to Monsieur Noulan, and sooner than later,” I said, backing away from Meeks and the journalists grilling her.

  “Why?” Louis said, unconvinced.

  “From an L.A. point of view, this is starting to feel like a well-organized marketing campaign with the tag as a brand,” I said as I headed toward the west bank and the Louvre. “Noulan is supposedly strong at this kind of thing, right?”

  Louis stopped, looked back over his shoulder at the tag, and said, “With the coordination and the brutal precision of the murders, it feels more militant to me.”

  Chapter 49

  Pantin, northeastern suburbs of Paris

  8:35 a.m.

  HAJA LIFTED THE welding mask to study the latest muscle group she’d been working on, deciding that it suggested the beast’s raw power but didn’t overstate it, at least up close. She’d have to climb down and get a different perspective to tell for sure.

  But when the sculptor reached the floor of the old linen factory, Émile Sauvage opened the door that led to the war room and called out to her, “Haja, you need to see this.”

  She took one more look at her work in progress, sighed, and hurried through the steel door. At twenty-five by fifteen, the room was windowless. The wall to Haja’s left was covered in whiteboards. Across the top it said, “AB-16.”

  Underneath there was an appointment calendar of sorts with dates on a long horizontal axis, hours in military time stacked on the vertical axis, and cryptic notations in the boxes.

  The wall opposite the door featured fifty black AK-47 7.62mm assault rifles standing upright in an improvised gun rack. Boxes of ammunition stamped “For disposal” were stack
ed below the rifles, along with empty magazines and a thick, rolled-up Oriental rug.

  Captain Mfune sat beside the rug, oiling the action and barrel shroud of one of the rifles. Epée lay on a couch watching a television screen that showed a close-up of the AB-16 tag up on the cupola.

  “There it is again!” he cried. “They keep showing it over and over!”

  “I knew putting it there would do the trick,” Amé said.

  “A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed,” said Mfune, returning the now gleaming rifle to its spot on the rack.

  The screen cut away to show the entrance to the Red Rooster, along with an author photo of Lourdes Latrelle.

  Epée said, “Your execution was brilliant too, Captain. The great minds are under fire. That’s all they’re talking about besides the tag.”

  “And we got out clean,” Amé said. “The mystery of AB-16 intact.”

  “Perhaps too intact,” Sauvage said. “They think this is solely about Les Académies.”

  “The slow burn is critical to mass awareness,” Amé insisted. “You have to let them chew on the mystery of it, employ their imagination to suggest answers, so that when the true scenario is revealed, it comes as even more of a shock to the population.”

  “A call to action,” Mfune said.

  “Exactly,” Amé said, snapping her fingers. “If we make the next few moves well, AB-16 will be bigger than the Dreyfus Affair.”

  The screen jumped away from coverage of Lourdes Latrelle’s murder to an interview with Pricilla Meeks, the Institut de France’s director, who was out on the bridge with the tagged cupola visible behind her.

  Haja spotted two men behind Meeks. They looked familiar.

  Did she know them?

  The screen cut to an exterior shot of La Crim and a shaken Investigateur Hoskins, who was vowing to track down AB-16 at all costs.

  “I have been authorized to bring in as many detectives as is necessary to solve these murders,” Hoskins said. “We have even brought in the world-famous Private agency to work forensics and as consultants on the case.”