Private Paris Read online

  Rather than argue, we turned and bolted, with Louis telling our ride where to meet us. We emerged from the spa a few moments later, and a BMW sedan skidded up in front of the hotel. We jumped in.

  Louis yelled, “Go. Head for George V Métro.”

  The driver, whom I’d met only the day before, was Ali Farad, a former investigator with the French National Police based in Marseille. In addition to speaking six languages, Farad had been trained in anti-terror and drove like it. He wove us through the streets toward the George V Métro station, which Louis said lay in the direction Kim Kopchinski had gone in.

  We almost caught her.

  Her hair and clothes were still dusty from the ductwork when I spotted her crossing the Avenue George V toward the Champs-Élysées and the Métro entrance. Jumping from the moving car, I raced after her.

  Cars skidded and horns blared at me as I dodged out into heavy morning traffic. Kim heard the commotion, looked over her shoulder, saw me, and started running as well, but in the other direction.

  Crossing the southbound lane on the Avenue George V, a work truck appeared out of nowhere and damn near clipped me. I was forced to halt, gasping and angry. “Kim!” I shouted.

  She never broke stride and disappeared into the Métro station. I got there less than thirty seconds later, vaulted the turnstiles, and sprinted toward the sounds of screeching metal and pneumatic doors whooshing open.

  I hit an intersection in the tunnel where I had to decide on northbound or southbound platforms.

  I chose south.

  It was the correct platform.

  But by the time I pounded down the stairs and reached it, the train doors were shutting on Kim who waved at me sadly and mouthed the words, “Good-bye, Jack.”

  “C’mon!” I shouted. “Really?”

  When I ran back out the exit, breathing hard, I found Louis standing there, his cell phone pressed to his ear. He looked pale when he spotted me, held up a finger, and said, “Yes, of course, Evangeline. I’ll go there right now.”

  He hung up. “You catch her?”

  Pissed off, I said, “She went southbound. Maybe we can still find her.”

  Louis shook his head. “We don’t know where she is going. And Private Paris has just been called in on a delicate case.”

  “Louis,” I began, “Sherman Wilkerson is one of our biggest clients, and—”

  “Jack, you are the boss. I know this. But it is clear to me that Kim Kopchinski is a grown woman who does not want our protection,” Langlois said firmly. “So for the time, while you may go on a silly goose chase after her, I am going to the Palais Garnier. Henri Richard, the director of the Paris Opera and an esteemed member of L’Académie Française, has been found there, murdered. We have been hired to help the police find out why.”

  Trying to slow my breath and still pissed off about losing Kim, I said, “By who? His wife?”

  “Come, Jack,” Louis said wearily. “This is Paris. That was Richard’s mistress, Evangeline, who just phoned me.”

  Chapter 15

  6th Arrondissement

  9 a.m.

  GASPING FOR AIR and sweating, Sauvage rolled off Haja for the second time since they’d returned from the opera house to the small flat where he lived.

  Haja propped herself up on one elbow. “Satisfied?”

  “More than satisfied,” Sauvage said, lying on his back. “You’re a genius.”

  “I pleased you,” she said. “I’m glad. It pleases me.”

  The major glanced over at her. Her hair was still red from the evening before, but she’d taken out the contact lenses that had turned her eyes so electrically blue. Now they were back to that ice-gray color, which made her look even more striking. She was smiling, but he caught the envy in her expression.

  “Is it ever satisfying for you?” he asked.

  “In a way,” she said, tightening and looking away.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Haja replied. “You had nothing to do with it.”

  Sauvage hugged her and said, “You’ll get your revenge.”

  “It’s so close I can taste it like salt.”

  The major looked down at her again, and he felt that thing about her that had attracted him almost immediately, that thing that excited him every time he was with her. Haja gave off the sense that she was a true nomad, unfettered by rules, laws, and convention, as if she were limitless, as if there were no boundaries to what she’d say, and no telling what she might do at any given moment. In many ways, she was the most alluring woman he’d ever known.

  Haja moved away from him, rose naked from the bed. He watched her cross the room toward the bathroom, her back and arms as powerful as a swimmer’s, her legs and bum as firm as a sprinter’s.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To meet Epée. And you have class in forty minutes.”

  The major groaned, looked at his watch, realized she was right. Getting up from the bed a few minutes later, he padded past the bathroom, where she was already rinsing. He joined her, seeing that her hair was no longer red at all and significantly darker, almost back to that deep mahogany color he loved.

  “No one would ever recognize you,” Sauvage said.

  “Funny that something so superficial as color blinds people.”

  “It will be on the news soon.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re ready?”

  “I was ready when I turned twelve.”

  “Where will I find you later?”

  “At the factory. Working on the beast.”

  “Have you figured out how to make it burn?”

  She smiled. “Yes, I think so.”

  “See?” the major said, taking her in his arms. “I said you were a genius.”

  Chapter 16

  9th Arrondissement

  9:30 a.m.

  THE STREET IN front of the Galeries Lafayette remained cordoned off. The air still stank of smoke, and there were firemen still working up on the roof. Then I saw the yellow sawhorse and tape across the rear gate of the opera house, which made me wonder how we were going to get inside the crime scene.

  “Make nothing of it, Jack,” Louis said when I asked. “There is only one investigator with La Crim who might try to keep me out. The others I’ve known and worked with for years. They trust Private and they trust me.”

  At the barrier, a police officer stopped us, but then Louis and I showed him identification. He got on his radio. A few minutes later, the officer shook his head.

  “What?” Louis said, acting offended. “Who is the investigateur in charge?”

  “Hoskins,” the officer replied.

  “Merde,” Louis said.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “The one detective?”

  “The one,” Louis said, his face twisting in annoyance.

  “What’s he got against you?”

  “She,” Louis corrected. “And hell has no fury like the woman scorned.”

  “You scorned her?”

  “No, of course not,” he replied testily. “But we had an affair shortly after she came to Paris, an affair that didn’t turn out as she wished, and she does not let me forget it.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “What any man in my position would do,” Louis said. “I will—how do you say?—gravel.”

  “Grovel,” I said.

  “That one,” Louis said, digging out his phone again.

  He turned and walked away from me, going to stand against the Société Générale building, hunched over as if preparing for blows to his upper back. He listened and then put his palm to his forehead just before my cell rang.

  “This is Jack,” I said.

  The line crackled before Justine said, “I’m at Sherman Wilkerson’s place in Malibu. Someone broke in and trashed the place. Sherman must have walked in on them. It’s bad, Jack. They beat him. He’s unconscious, bleeding from his ears and nose. Del Rio called in Life Flight. They’ll be here in five mi
nutes. He’ll be with the neurologists at UCLA Medical in twelve.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I groaned.

  “What do you want us to do?”

  I paused, trying to collect my thoughts.

  “Jack?” Justine said.

  “I’m here,” I said. “Once he’s in the air, and before you call the sheriff, go through the place, very low impact. Try to figure out what’s missing without screwing up the scene. I figure you’ve got an hour before you absolutely have to put in the call. Use it well, and look for anything to do with France.”

  “We can do that.”

  “Keep me posted,” I said, and hung up, hating the fact that I was eight thousand miles from Los Angeles and unable to help, and wondering if the break-in and assault were connected to Kim. Had to be.

  Louis tapped me on the back and, with a weary smile, said, “We’re in.”

  “You grovel well,” I said.

  “One of my many talents,” Louis agreed. “But it was your name that did the trick. She wants your take on the murder scene.”

  Before I could ask why that could possibly be, the officer at the barrier pulled a sawhorse aside for us. We walked to a rear door, where crime scene techs were working and a woman in her early forties was waiting.

  Fit and attractive, Hoskins had spiked, frosted hair and wore jeans, a pink blouse, and a brown leather jacket. Her Paris Prefecture badge hung on a chain around her neck. She shot Louis a look that could melt ice, and then smiled at me.

  She shook my hand firmly, saying, “Sharen Hoskins. Nice to meet you, Mr. Morgan. I’ve read and heard a lot about you and your company.”

  To my surprise, Hoskins’s accent was not French. In fact, I swore it sounded like the Bronx. But before I could ask about that unlikelihood, she turned to Louis.

  “You don’t touch a thing inside. Are we clear on that, Louis?”

  “It will be as if I have leprosy. No fingers to speak of.”

  “Nice image,” Hoskins said sourly. She handed us booties and latex gloves, saying, “Nothing of what you are about to see gets out. Understood?”

  “I guarantee it,” I replied. “But I’m a little confused as to why we’re being allowed in here in the first place.”

  “You are said to be a smart, observant guy, Mr. Morgan,” she replied before leading us inside. “And I don’t believe in turf wars. Long as I put the handcuffs on whoever did this, I’ll be a happy girl.”

  We followed her down a long series of hallways before exiting a door into a stunning foyer, with a dramatic vaulted ceiling, huge mirrors, and gold paint that shimmered in the light of what looked like gas lamps. A grand marble staircase rose to a landing before splitting and climbing again.

  Hoskins started up the first flight, and I followed, saying, “Why does this seem so familiar to me?”

  “Phantom of the Opera?” Hoskins said.

  “That’s it,” I said, looking around in some awe. My late mother had taken my brother and me to see the play when we were boys.

  “Where was the body found?” Louis asked. “Richard’s office?”

  “Not so lucky,” the investigateur said, and crossed the landing between statues that supported a marble slab inscribed “Amphitheater.”

  We went through double doors and emerged in a horseshoe-shaped and lofty space decorated in gold and deep reds. A giant chandelier glowed overhead, revealing the incredible design and sheer opulence of the theater.

  “Where’s the body?” I asked.

  “I wanted you to see him just as he was discovered,” she said, and barked a command into a radio.

  The curtains began to open. The area behind it was shadowed until a spotlight went on above and behind us, throwing a beam aimed into the air ten feet above the center of the stage.

  “You don’t see that every day,” I said softly.

  “Exactly,” Hoskins replied.

  Chapter 17

  HENRI RICHARD’S CORPSE hung upside down from a rope tied about his ankles. His white dress shirt had come free of his suit pants and hung bunched up around his lower rib cage. A length of rope dangled from his neck.

  Other ropes were lashed to his wrists and held his arms directly out to the sides. All the blood in his body had responded to gravity and had rushed to the opera director’s head. His face was bug-eyed and dark purple.

  “Who found him and when?” I asked.

  “A security guard shortly after the shift change at six a.m.,” Investigateur Hoskins replied. “The guards on duty last night said Richard arrived on foot at the rear gate at around twelve thirty with an exotic redhead half his age.”

  “Why do so many Parisian tales begin with a younger woman?” Louis asked.

  Hoskins ignored him and said, “Because she was with Richard, the guards didn’t ask for her identification, and she managed to keep her face turned from the security tapes we’ve reviewed.”

  “So she’s your killer?” I asked skeptically. “That’s a big man. It would take a woman of Amazonian proportions to hoist him up like that.”

  Hoskins tilted her head as if reappraising me before saying, “Yes, and it would take an Amazon to strangle monsieur le directeur with a length of rope cut from one of the curtains. It appears she had one or more accomplices.”

  “Is that fact or conjecture?” Louis asked.

  The investigator directed her answer to me. “After the fire broke out across the street, the security guard forgot all about Monsieur Richard and his mystery date. But the tapes from the security cameras at the gate and above that stage door we came through indicate that someone sprayed the lenses with a gel of some kind shortly after the fire started.”

  “So the fire was a diversion?” I said.

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Motive?”

  “None that we understand at the moment.”

  “Meaning what?” Louis asked.

  “Meaning there’s more to this scene than you can see from back here,” Hoskins said curtly before marching down the aisle.

  We followed her past plush red orchestra seats to stairs that climbed the left side of the stage. I could see high above us that the other end of the rope tied to Richard’s ankles had been lashed to a catwalk that gave access to scrims and overhead lights. The ropes that held the opera director’s arms at ninety degrees to the body were tied to light poles at the left and right of the stage.

  Hoskins halted just shy of the corpse.

  “There’s your motivation,” she said, gesturing to the stage floor.

  I came around her with Louis trailing and stopped, seeing for the first time the looping, bloodred graffiti that would torment Paris in the coming days.

  AB-16

  Chapter 18

  I STUDIED THE tag, then looked almost straight up at the opera director’s corpse. Henri Richard’s eyes seemed to stare directly down at the graffiti.

  “What does it mean?” I asked. “AB-16? Some French thing?”

  “We have no idea,” Hoskins said. “Or at least I have no idea. Yet. But tell me, Mr. Morgan, what does it all suggest to you? This mystery woman Henri was with. The fire diversion across the street so her accomplice could enter. The weapon. The setting. The position of the body postmortem. And this graffiti.”

  Louis cleared his throat and said, “I’ll tell you what I think.”

  “I didn’t ask for your opinion, Louis,” Hoskins said brusquely. “I’m interested in an L.A. perspective for the moment.”

  Langlois puffed up in irritation but bit his tongue when I gave him an almost imperceptible shake of my chin and said, “From an L.A. perspective, the position of the corpse and the tag is meant to cause shock, attract attention, provoke interest, and perhaps invite speculation. Through a West Hollywood lens, it could be interpreted as fetishistic, the killers acting out some kind of perversity, real or imagined.”

  “The weapon?”

  After considering that, I went with my instincts and said, “The curtain rope is part of R
ichard’s world, so it could be symbolic or it could be ironic. The setting could be interpreted in either way as well, depending on the killers’ intent.”

  The investigator wrapped her arms together and pursed her lips.

  “And this graffiti?”

  “In L.A., graffiti can mean a lot of things,” I replied. “But here it strikes me like gang graffiti, meant to define turf in some way.”

  Hoskins walked around the tag, considering it, glancing up at the body, and then halting. She looked at Louis. “And you, Monsieur Langlois?”

  Louis’s eyelids went heavy. “Jack has said it all.”

  She stared at him with her jaw moving slightly, but then smiled at me and extended her hand. “Well, then, I appreciate you coming in, Mr. Morgan. At the moment, we need to clear the theater so the criminalists can do their job.”

  I shook her hand, took her card, and gave her mine.

  As we turned to leave, she said, “And Louis, I know you said Private Paris has been hired by Richard’s mistress, but that gives you no legal standing to get in the way of my murder investigation. We’re clear on that?”

  His eyelids still heavy, Louis said, “Très clair, madame l’investigateur.”

  The streets outside the Palais Garnier had been turned into a media circus by the time we exited the opera house. Word of Richard’s death was out. There were white television vans parked beyond the cordoned area. Several reporters recognized Louis and started peppering him with questions in French.

  He begged off, telling them that Investigateur Hoskins was the person to find. When we’d finally broken free of them, Louis lit a cigarette and puffed on it violently while using his iPhone to summon a ride through Uber, an app and company that provide on-demand private cars and drivers.

  “Two minutes,” he said. “This Uber thing really works, you know.”

  I nodded. “I’ve used it in L.A. when I’ve wanted to go out, have a few drinks. On another note, Hoskins really does not like you.”

  “Oh, really?” Louis said, drawing it out and dripping with sarcasm. Then he flicked his ash and added, with a tinge of regret, “It is a pity, actually, because I do admire her, and in the art of love she was truly magnificent.”