Cara Black - Murder in the Marais

"Even with you driving, Rene," she said. "We couldn't get this far so fast."

Up ahead, the wet brown walls dripped with rivulets of rusty slime from a ten-foot-diameter netted pipe.

Aimee pulled out her wire cutters from inside her jumpsuit and started cutting. Loud squealing sounded nearby.

"No way am I going to crawl in there," Rene protested. "I go through enough shit in a day as it is."

"It's not exactly what you think it is, Rene," she said, cutting through the thick wire. "It's not a toilet drain."

"Well, the smell could fool me," he said. "What is it?"

"The waste-station chute and the only way into the morgue," she said, helping him slide into the gaping hole she'd cut.

"Oddest break-in I've ever done," he muttered.

"Maybe a little blood or fluids that have been hosed down from the embalming tables might find their way down here," she said. "But it's all diluted."

"Makes me glad I haven't eaten today," Rene said, slowly climbing up the wet steel rungs, using his good arm.

Aimee pressed a button and the waste chute's hinged metal cover swung open. She pulled Rene up and realized they had climbed into a large storage closet. Mops, vacuums, and industrial cleansers took up most of the space. Several blue lab coats, worn by maintenance, were hanging from hooks along with plastic hair nets and rubber gloves. She stripped to her black leotard, donned the lab attire, and put her jumpsuit in the trash. She pulled Rene's boots off. He slipped on sneakers.

"We'll leave out the back door after I do a fingerprint match, OK?" Aimee whispered and looked at her watch. "With your help, it should take fifteen minutes."

"Why couldn't we have come in the back?" Rene said.

"Police guard," she said. "I wanted to time it for a shift change but that got complicated. We're in and out and no one knows the difference."

"Why the morgue?" he said.

"After we finish, I count on finding Sarah in the catacombs right behind the morgue wall."

Inside the morgue, only one of the fluorescent strips of light flickered in the hallway, the rest had burned out. The abattoir green tiled walls echoed with their footsteps. She pulled open a stainless-steel-handled door labeled PERSONNEL ONLY.

The vaulted room reeked of formaldehyde and was frosty cold. Gray-sheeted bodies were laid on wooden plank platforms, only their toes visible, each with a numbered yellow plastic tag. The scene reminded her of some fifteenth century medical print. The only things missing were the leeches and incisions permitting evil vapors to leave the body.

Aimee pushed open another swing door. The scales used to weigh organs hung suspended from the ceiling on metal chains. A corpse lay on a stainless-steel table, angled over the floor drain: a female, young, with long brown hair and discolored needle tracks along her hands and arms. She'd been slit from chest to pubic bone and sewed back together with black thread, harshly outlined against her chalk white skin. The top flap of her skull had been sewn back on but her hairline was too close to her temples. Sad, Aimee thought, and a pretty bad job. They usually tried for the parents. Maybe there weren't any.

She made her tone businesslike. "The medical examiner's computer should be through there." She popped Nicorette gum into her mouth and pointed down the dim hallway.

"Breaking and entering used to be more fun than this," Rene said and stopped. The hallway plunged into darkness.

"Where's the light timer?" She groped along the rough wall for the switch. Finally she found it and flipped it on. Ahead of her on the medical examiner's door was the biggest lock she'd ever seen.

T HIERRY PUSHEDS ARAH PASTthe bushes bordering the Square Georges-Cain into the dark hole obscured by the decaying pillar. He shoved her forward, forcing her to climb down half-rotten timbers. Inside a bone-pocked cavern, smelling of mold and decay, he motioned for her to sit down.

"Remember this?" he said. He shone the flashlight beam over the crumbling catacomb walls. Cistern water dripped down into black, oily puddles.

Her body shook. "How do you know about this place?"

Thierry held the fax he'd stolen from Aimee's office with Sarah's picture: her tar swastika, her shaved skull, and him as a baby in her arms. Sarah's face fell.

"Nom de Dieu!" she said. "Where did you find that?"

He remained silent, lit a candle, and pulled out a strip of silver duct tape.

"What's going on?" she asked uneasily. She started to get up, but he pushed her down in the wet dirt. "What do you want?"

"Your undivided attention," he said, binding her ankles with the tape. "Admit it," he said, sitting cross-legged across from her on a jagged marble slab. "Wasn't I a cute baby? Did you croon nursery rhymes to me here?" In a cloying falsetto he sang, "Frère Jacques, dormez vous?" He kicked at the dirt.

Sarah's black wig hung off her ear and the scar showed plainly in the candlelight. Damp air filled the cavern. "Why are you doing this?"

"You see, you should be proud of that." Thierry stood up and traced his finger over the raised swastika on her forehead.

Sarah trembled.

"You earned the Führer's seal, as few Jews could," Thierry said. "But you're still a kike. Tainted."

"Oui. Une Juive," she said. She stopped shaking. "But I don't live in fear because of it. Not anymore."

"But you have to pay," he said.

"Pay?" Her eyes widened. "I haven't paid already? My family taken by Gestapo, giving you up…isn't that more than enough?"

She shook her head. "As soon as I got back to Paris, I stood outside the Rambuteaus', watching you go in their door." She wiped her eyes with her dirty raincoat sleeve. "Right where I'd kissed you goodbye as a baby. You know what I did? I fell on my knees, in a puddle on the sidewalk, thanking the God I've despised for years that you were alive. Alive, walking, and breathing, a grown man." She struggled to continue. "I went to the temple, where I'd gone with my parents, and begged God's forgiveness for my hatred of him. You're healthy, you had loving parents."

Thierry snorted. "Loving parents? Nathalie Rambuteau loved the bottle."

"I'm sorry. So sorry."

"No matter how she promised," he said, "when I came home from school, she'd be drunk and passed out, stuck to the floor in her own vomit." He slammed his fist into the caked dirt wall. "That was on a good day. I thought it was because I was adopted."

"Adopted?" Sarah picked at the duct tape. "Did she tell you…?"

He interrupted, stooping down to bind her wrists with strips of duct tape, "To make my bed and clean behind my ears?" He grinned. "'Maternal' doesn't describe Nathalie."

"You survived!" she said.

He took her arm, peering at her as if she were a laboratory specimen.

"You show no pronounced Semitic features." His eyes narrowed. "Must be some ancestor raped by Aryan invaders back in the steppes and you carried the recessive genes."

"Killing me won't make you less Jewish." She raked her taped hand like a claw in the dirt. "Or change that I'm your mother."

"Proven inferiority." He pulled out a Gestapo dagger, which gleamed dully in the candlelight. "We've talked enough."

A FTER TEN MINUTE S, A IMÉEstill hadn't picked the Zeitz lock on the medical examiner's office door. Her hand ached.

"This is taking too long," she said.

Rene crouched near her on the scuffed linoleum and pulled out a Glock automatic.

"Not a finesse approach," he said. "But it will save time."

She hesitated, but kept winching the tumbler. A minute later, the huge metal lock clicked, then dropped open with a metallic sigh. Aimee rubbed her wrist as Rene reached on tiptoes to remove the lock and open the door.