Private Paris Page 16

  Two soft lights cast the courtyard in warm shadows. He could clearly see his neighbor’s new Mercedes parked there, and the beautiful boxed flower garden his neighbor’s wife tended. It already bloomed with tulips and daffodils.

  LaFont almost couldn’t bear to turn away from the box garden and walk to his door past another box garden that lay fallow and weedy. He did his best to avoid looking at it, and went inside. Locking the door behind him, LaFont took a deep, familiar, and agonizing sniff of home, and wondered at the chest-buckling pressure of his grief and loneliness.

  When would it go away? Would it ever…go away?

  LaFont recalled what his psychiatrist had told him: that grief was a process, a tearing down and a rebuilding. He didn’t often feel this crippling melancholy at work. His job still consumed him, drove him, and he believed he had fulfilled his responsibilities and stayed true to his principles in the past fourteen months with admirable strength and courage.

  Without question, he thought forcefully. Without question.

  But here in the home LaFont had shared with his beloved wife of twenty-six years, duty could not compensate for loss. He walked past Evelyn’s kitchen without stopping. He crossed through the salon she’d designed with such care. In the study where they’d watched television, he looked at pictures on the bookshelves: that snapshot from their honeymoon in Sardinia, their sons playing soccer and skiing at Chamonix, and Evelyn sitting in his lap at their favorite spot in Barcelona.

  “We were so young,” he muttered.

  LaFont stared at his reflection in the mirror, wondered when he’d gotten so old. He wondered if he should go back to the office, get something done, and then sleep on the couch.

  Maybe his sons were right. Maybe it was this place that was keeping him from moving on. They were urging him to sell, but he hadn’t had the heart to call a realtor to put it on the market.

  This was Evelyn’s home and he simply wasn’t ready to part with it or the ghosts of their life together. Turning on the television, he flipped the channels until he found a newscast. It led, as all newscasts had that day, with images of the AB-16 graffiti tag high on the cupola of the Institut de France.

  The image filled LaFont with outrage!

  He’d known Henri Richard and Lourdes Latrelle and had admired René Pincus. Attacking the French culture by murdering the best and brightest? LaFont wanted to pick something up and hurl it at the screen. Who the hell were they to do such a thing? What the hell did they want?

  It all gave him a headache, and he hit the mute button before going to a cabinet and finding a bottle of Armagnac. He popped the cork, poured himself twice the usual amount, and drank until a fire exploded in his belly.

  LaFont poured himself another generous amount, and took the glass with him after shutting off the news. He’d probably wake up with a scorcher of a headache, but at least he’d have slept, and the last time he’d looked, his agenda was thin in the mor—

  He reached the landing at the top of the stairs and halted. The door to Evelyn’s art studio was ajar and there was light flowing from it into the hallway by their bedroom.

  Who would have been in there? The maid? Wasn’t it her day?

  Believing it was, LaFont marched down the hall, meaning to reach inside the room, flip down the light switch just inside the door, and seal the studio again.

  Standing there, however, smelling the faint odor of paint and turpentine, LaFont decided that maybe it was time for a visit, and maybe a good cry. He hadn’t allowed himself one of those in at least a month.

  He guzzled the rest of the Armagnac, pushed the door open, and stepped inside an L-shaped airy space with large skylights, windows, and banks of adjustable lights.

  LaFont’s eyes welled and spilled, and he looked around, hoping to find solace in her paintings. There were dozens of them around the studio in various stages of completion. But through his tears, all he could see of his late wife’s imagined and real landscapes were the vivid colors she was known—

  He sniffed. Was that fresh paint? He took off his glasses and wiped at his eyes with the sleeve of his suit. Putting the glasses back on, he froze.

  On a long oak table, LaFont spotted a section of loose canvas that had been spray-painted with “AB-16.”

  What the—

  His disbelief was replaced by surprise when he picked up movement in the shadows at the rear of his late wife’s studio. His killer stepped into the light with a suppressed pistol, aiming in a way that spoke of honed skill.

  An assassin.

  Exactly the way Evelyn had always feared it would end for me.

  LaFont did not run or cry out for mercy.

  He looked at the death messenger, bowed his head in relief, and said, “Please.”

  Chapter 57

  8th Arrondissement

  April 10, 1:45 a.m.

  IN HER WORKSHOP on the Rue Clément Marot, the fashion designer Millie Fleurs sipped a glass of Fumé Blanc, studied the dramatic black cocktail dress on the mannequin, and compared it to the drawing on the table beside her.

  An off-the-shoulder sheath, the dress was more tailored than flowing, meant to hug the wearer, and it featured a daring geometric cutout at the navel. The edging of the cutout was embossed silver. So were the tips of the black leather strap that hugged the low belly and hung provocatively off the left hip.

  Fleurs walked around the dress, analyzing it from every angle. My God, it was stunning, certainly one of the best dresses to come out of her workshop in years.

  The designer knew it was exactly what her client wanted: classical enough to be worn at a gala, but hip enough for hitting a nightclub afterward. This dress fit the bill in every respect. No one who saw her in it would ever forget it.

  Which was both good and bad. As an haute couture creation, it was supposed to be one of a kind. But Fleurs already knew in her gut that she was going to introduce a replica with only the slightest of modifications at the July shows.

  The dress would be the showstopper that she needed to turn things around. The last few seasons had seen a drop-off in her company’s growth rate, and she saw the frock as a return to wider acclaim and bigger profits.

  Fleurs figured there were only a few things standing in the way of putting the dress on the runway. The client’s m—

  The designer thought she heard something behind her in the hallway off the workshop that led to stairs and the rear exit. She was alone. She’d been alone for hours tinkering with the more subtle aspects of the dress.

  It had to be the cat. Where had she gotten to?

  Fleurs set her wineglass down and headed toward the rear hallway, calling, “Madeline?” and making kissing noises. “Come here, little puss.”

  She flipped on the hallway light and managed a short shriek of surprise and terror before a six-inch leather awl was driven straight into her heart.

  “What?” Fleurs coughed. She stared blankly down at the tool handle sticking out of her chest and then up at her killer. “I was going to…”

  She coughed again and reached for the handle.

  Then she staggered backward into her workshop, careened off the cutting table, and died on the floor, facing the mannequin and her final creation.

  Chapter 58

  5 a.m.

  “JACK?”

  I startled awake at the whisper, pistol up reflexively, wondering where I was before realizing that I was back in the suite at the Plaza Athénée, sitting in an overstuffed chair by the bed, and Louis Langlois was standing in the open doors to my bedroom.

  Louis murmured, “If Kim’s friends are coming, it will be soon.”

  “Okay, I’m up,” I said. “Petitjean?”

  “Still working on the lighter,” Louis replied. “But the letter? AB-16 sent it to ten different news services.”

  Louis handed me an iPad. The screen showed the France 4 television website and a photograph of the letter in a hodgepodge of font sizes and styles clipped from various newspapers. In that respect, it loo
ked different from the one Ali Farad had received at Private Paris, but the text was the same as I remembered it, word for word.

  “AB-16 is trying to light that powder keg you were talking about last night,” I said to Louis, handing him back the iPad.

  “Most definitely,” Louis replied grimly. “And Fromme is petrified of that happening. I would not be surprised if—”

  The doorbell to the suite dinged.

  I glanced at my watch: 5:15 a.m.

  “Here we go, Jack,” he murmured, drawing a Glock, which carried a stubby sound suppressor. “Back-to-back.”

  In our stocking feet, we crept out into the living area. Louis followed me into the entry hall, walking backward and watching the balcony, which we’d left lit.

  I smeared myself into the wall on the hinge side of the door. Knowing that someone as ruthless as Whitey might shoot through the peephole the second they saw a shadow appear, I held up the room key card in front of it.

  Nothing.

  I glanced at Louis, eased over, and peered out into the hallway.

  Randall Peaks, the Saudis’ security guy, was staring back at me, looking as though he’d recently developed an ulcer.

  What the hell was he doing here? And at this hour?

  Peaks reached over impatiently and rang the bell again.

  “We’re good,” I murmured to Louis. I stuck the gun in my waistband and opened the door.

  “How many men can I hire through you?” Peaks asked.

  “When?” Louis said.

  “Now,” he replied. “Can we speak inside?”

  I let him in and closed the door behind him.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I’m missing a princess,” Peaks grunted.

  “Never a good thing,” Louis said.

  The Saudi security chief glared at Louis. “This is bad, Mr. Langlois, and I need Private Paris’s help finding her as soon as possible.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Whatever you need. Which princess?”

  Peaks hesitated and said, “This has to be handled discreetly.”

  “I gather you’re the client?”

  He nodded. “I don’t want the other princesses knowing. No one can know.”

  “And heaven forbid the dad back in Riyadh,” Louis said. “Which princess?”

  “Mayameen,” he said, showing us his cell phone and a picture of the young princess I saw in the Plaza’s breakfast room a few days before. “She’s just turned sixteen.”

  “When did she disappear?” I asked.

  “Shortly after midnight she snuck out of her room while one of my men was using the john. We didn’t pick up on it until twenty minutes ago, when we checked our security tapes.”

  “How was she dressed when she left?” Louis asked.

  “For a club,” Peaks said sourly. “Stiletto heels. Black leather pants. White top. Too much skin between the two.”

  “She went out alone to a club?” I asked.

  Peaks cocked his jaw. “She has a history of this sort of behavior.”

  “So she’ll come back eventually?”

  “I can’t afford ‘eventually,’” the security chief insisted. “If she’s not at Millie Fleurs’s for a fitting at nine with her mother, I’ll be terminated.”

  “Then we start now,” Louis said. “Ten thousand dollars and I’ll send investigators to every club in the city still open.”

  It sounded like highway robbery to me, but Peaks said, “Done.”

  Louis said, “Bon. Most of the late-night clubs are in the 11th and 17th, but the two closest are Showcase and Le Baron. I will go there myself.”

  “I’ll go with him,” I promised.

  “You’ll text me the moment you find her?” Peaks asked.

  “Immediately,” Louis promised. “And in the meantime, if her mother and sisters ask after her, say that she’s got the terrible twenty-four-hour stomach virus that’s been going around Paris.”

  Peaks brightened. “Is there one going around Paris?”

  “Not that I know of. But it should buy you some time.”

  Peaks texted us the photograph of the princess and a picture of her passport. We promised to be in touch.

  Though the air exiting the elevator spoke of croissants baking and espresso brewing, the area outside the breakfast room and the lobby were dead.

  Even Elodie was struggling to remain awake until she saw me approaching. She stiffened enough to complain quietly, “S’il vous plaît, Monsieur Morgan, can it wait? I’m off duty in just five minutes, and—”

  I showed her the photograph. “Did she come through here after midnight?”

  The concierge studied the picture and then said, “She looked much older than in the picture. Who is she?”

  “You don’t want to know. Leave it for the shift change.”

  Elodie tried to hide her worry with a professional smile. “When will you be leaving us, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Believe me, Elodie,” I said, “as soon as I can.”

  I found Louis out front, trying to hail a cab. But the Avenue Montaigne was as quiet as the lobby of the Plaza.

  Louis gestured up the street two blocks toward the Rue François 1er, where a taxi crossed, and then another. “We have better luck there.”

  He began to jog, with me following. We were crossing the Rue Clément Marot when a woman’s bloodcurdling screaming stopped us in our tracks. Louis ran toward the screams, which had turned into hysterical crying.

  Racing after him, I realized that she wasn’t on the street. Her weeping was coming from overhead, through an open, lit window on the floor above the haute couture shop of Millie Fleurs.

  Louis tried the front door. Locked.

  He hesitated, but only for a moment, before he drew the suppressed Glock, stepped back, and put three rounds through the glass, which turned to spiderwebs above the door handle. He flipped the gun over and used the butt of the pistol like a hammer to break out enough glass to reach inside.

  “Gonna have an alarm,” I said.

  “Good,” Louis said. He flipped the dead bolt and turned the handle. The door swung open silently.

  The shop did have a security system. I remembered that from our visit. Why no alarm?

  But I had no time to think about that because as we hurried across the darkened space, the crying stopped and we heard the sound of someone running overhead. Louis threw back the curtain and charged up the steep staircase toward the light and Millie Fleurs’s workshop.

  We both got to the top of the staircase and came to a dead halt.

  Millie Fleurs hung upside down by her ankles, which were bound with fabric twisted into a rope that was thrown over a rafter. The designer’s arms and hair hung limply. Blood from a chest wound had soaked her blouse, drained across her face, and dripped to the floor.

  The pool of blood below the dress designer had reached but only partially obscured a variation of the AB-16 symbol, depicted not in red spray paint but with black and red silk fabric.

  “Hoskins and Fromme are going to—”

  Louis held up his index finger and then pressed it to his ear. I stopped, listened, and heard the whimpering.

  It came from behind a door beyond the only bare mannequin in the studio. Louis gestured to a bloody footprint on the floor, and stepped around it.

  He looked over his shoulder at me. I squared up, aiming at the door. He reached over and opened it.

  “No! Don’t shoot!”

  She was slurring and blubbering, a pretty young teenager with long black, braided hair, pressed to the back of the shallow closet, terrified and holding her hands up as if to block a bullet. Blood slicked her exposed palms, stained her white blouse, and gelled on the thighs of her black leather pants.

  Smelling the strong scent of alcohol and cigarettes coming off her, I lowered the gun and said, “Princess Mayameen?”

  She nodded feebly before sliding down the wall into a sobbing heap. “My mother is going to kill me this time, isn’t she?”


  Chapter 59

  WE TALKED WITH Maya, as she preferred to be called, for a good ten minutes before we put in a call to Sharen Hoskins, and for another ten minutes before calling Randall Peaks.

  The Saudi security chief and the La Crim investigateur showed up at almost the same time, with Peaks following Hoskins up the stairs. The detective’s eyes were puffy and her demeanor on edge. She glanced at me and Louis, shook her head, mumbled something under her breath, and then shifted her attention to Millie Fleurs’s corpse.

  Peaks reached the workshop, saw the teenager passed out on a daybed in the corner and the blood on her hands and shirt, and said, “Princess Mayameen will be leaving. Now.”

  “Not a chance,” Hoskins said. “She’s explaining herself to me before she goes anywhere.”

  “That young lady is Saudi royalty and has complete diplomatic immunity,” Peaks insisted. “She cannot be held against her will.”

  “Who’s holding her?” Hoskins asked. “She looks to be a drunken adolescent to me, and as such is a danger to herself. I’m going to talk to her, make sure she’s fit to travel.”

  “No lawyer, no talking,” Peaks said.

  “She’ll talk and you’ll shut up, or I’ll have you arrested because I know you do not have diplomatic immunity,” said Juge Fromme, disheveled and in pain as he came up the stairs, leaning hard on his cane.

  Looking as though he was having a root canal, no Novocain, Peaks said, “The Saudi family and government will take this as an affront to—”

  “I don’t care,” Fromme said. “My country and countrymen are under direct attack, and that takes precedence over any foreign concerns. Period.”

  Louis said, “Juge? For the record?”

  The magistrate glowered. “You two are like flies to shit in this, aren’t you?”

  Louis smiled weakly. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose. But for the record, the princess may be guilty of reckless judgment, of drinking too much liquor, and of deciding to pay Millie Fleurs an impromptu visit on her way home from clubbing. But she is not remotely connected to the murder.”