Sidney Sheldon - Chasing Tomorrow

Jean’s father had recovered, but he too died young, of a heart attack at fifty. Jean’s one consolation was that Dennis Rizzo had not lived to see his daughter’s descent into crack-cocaine addiction. Like today’s murdered girl, Jean’s sister, Helene, had turned to prostitution in the last, desperate years of her life. How Jean hated that word: “prostitute.” As if it contained the sum total of a woman’s life: her worth, her personality, her struggles, hopes and fears. Helene had been a warm and wonderful person. Jean Rizzo chose to believe that Alissa Armand, and all this killer’s victims, were warm and wonderful people too.

Jean’s superiors back in Lyon were reluctant to assign him to the Bible Killer case.

“It’s too personal.” Henri Marceau, Jean’s longtime boss and friend, cut to the chase. “You’ll end up torturing yourself and you won’t do a good job. Not without objectivity.”

“I have objectivity,” Jean insisted. “And I can hardly do a worse job than the last guy. Eleven dead girls, Henri. Ten girls! And we’ve got nothing.”

Henri Marceau looked at his friend long and hard. “What’s this really about, Jean? This case is colder than a ten-day-old corpse in the permafrost and you know it. You won’t solve it. And even if you did, no one would care. It’s not exactly a brilliant career move.”

Jean shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I want a challenge. I need something that will take up all my time. Distract me.”

“From Sylvie, you mean?”

Jean nodded. His French wife, Sylvie, had divorced him a year ago, quietly and without acrimony, after ten years of marriage. They had two children together and still loved each other, but Jean worked ceaselessly, seven days a week, and in the end the loneliness proved too much for Sylvie.

Jean hated being divorced. He missed Sylvie and his children dreadfully, although he couldn’t deny that he hardly saw them, even when he was married. As Sylvie pointed out to him when he complained of loneliness after dropping the kids back to her one weekend, “But, Jean, darling, it took you four months to realize we were divorced. The decree absolute came through in January, and you called me in May to ask me what it meant.”

Jean shrugged. “It was a busy spring. I had a lot going on at work.”

Sylvie kissed him on the cheek. “I know, chéri .”

“Can’t we just get remarried? You’ll hardly know I’m there.”

“Good night, Jean.”

The Bible Killer case was Jean Rizzo’s therapy and punishment and atonement, all in one. If he could catch this bastard; if he could find justice for those poor girls; if he could stop another life being taken; somehow he believed it would make everything right. His divorce, Helene’s death . . . it would all mean something. It would all be for something.

Ugh. He opened his eyes and leaned back in his chair, exhausted.

The problem is, I haven’t caught him.

I didn’t save Alissa.

Just like I didn’t save Helene.

Outside, the rain had stopped and Paris was once again beautiful, glistening like a wet jewel in the spring sunshine.

Jean Rizzo vowed, I can’t leave here until I’ve got something. I can’t go back to Lyon empty-handed.

FOUR DAYS LATER, HE broke his vow.

His daughter, Clémence, had been rushed to the hospital with stomach cramps and given an emergency appendectomy.

“She’s fine,” Sylvie assured him. “But she’s been asking for you.”

Jean drove like the wind and was at Lyon’s Clinique Jeanne d’Arc in three hours flat. Sylvie was at their daughter’s bedside looking tired. “She just woke up,” she whispered to Jean.

“Daddy!”

At six years old, Clémence was a carbon copy of her mother, all soft golden curls and saucerlike blue eyes. Clémence’s younger brother, Luc, also took after Sylvie’s family, much to Jean’s annoyance. “It’s totally unfair. I’m a genetic zero!” he would complain to Sylvie, who would laugh and ask him what he expected her to do about it.

“Maman said you were in Paris.”

“That’s right, chéri .”

“Did you catch the bad guy?” his daughter asked.

Jean avoided Sylvie’s eye.

“Not yet.”

“But you came back to see me?”

“Of course I did. Well, more to see your appendix really,” Jean joked. “Did they give it to you in a jar?”

“Eeeew. No!” Clémence giggled, then winced.

“Don’t make her laugh, you idiot,” said Sylvie.

“Sorry. When I was a kid they used to give it to you in a jar to take home.”

“In Canada?”

“Uh-huh.

“In the olden days?”

Sylvie grinned. “As you can see, she’s making a quick recovery.”

After a few minutes a nurse came in and ordered rest. Jean and Sylvie slipped outside into the corridor.

“Thank you for coming.”

“Of course,” said Jean. “You don’t have to thank me. She’s my daughter, I love her to death.”

“I know you do, darling. I didn’t mean that. How’s the case going?”

Jean groaned. “It isn’t. Paris was awful. This girl, the way she lived. You should have seen it.”

His gray eyes were alight with emotion. Sylvie put a hand on his arm.

“You can’t save them all, you know,” she said kindly.

“Apparently I can’t save any of them,” Jean said bitterly. “Call me when you take her home.”

BACK IN HIS SERVICED apartment a stone’s throw from Interpol’s General Secretariat at Quai Charles de Gaulle, Jean Rizzo switched on his computer. He typed in his user name, password and encryption code and watched as a cascade of windows opened relating to the Bible Killer murders.

Each of the victims had a serial number, under which local police had filed evidence. Or rather, where they’d bemoaned their lack of evidence before closing the cases, one after another. Internally, Interpol listed the girls simply as BK1, BK2 and so on. When Jean left for Paris, the file had ended with BK10, a Spanish redhead named Izia Moreno. Tomorrow, Jean Rizzo would add Alissa Armand’s name and image. BK11. That’s all she is now.

In addition to the official files, Jean had created his own, a much more visual affair that he thought of as a computerized whiteboard, like an online incident room. Pictures of the victims made up a montage in the center. To Jean Rizzo, these women would never be numbers. From this hub of faces, ideas fanned out like the spokes of a wheel: lines of inquiry, witnesses, common factors, forensic data, anything that seemed significant, or interesting.

Clicking open this personal file, Jean stared at it for a long time.

Nothing. We’ve got nothing.

A line one of his college professors used to use came back to him:

“In police work, what you don’t know is as valuable as what you do.”

If only that were true, Jean thought wryly.

The truth was, he didn’t know an awful lot. But the clues must be there. They must. No one was that smart, all of the time. He had to start looking at things differently.

The crime scenes were all clean as a whistle. Barring a miracle, they weren’t going to nail this guy on forensics. But there must be something else, some other link among the murders. I’m missing the bigger picture. I need to zoom out.

The concept of zooming out immediately made Jean think of Google Maps.

Maps. Geography.

He tapped the locations of the murders into the computer and brought them up on a map. Madrid, Lima, London, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, New York, Mumbai . . . For twenty minutes he played around, drawing lines between the map dots, rotating the shape, looking for a pattern. Nothing leaped out at him.