Cara Black - AL07 - Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

Where was Stella?

The baby had to be here. Panicked, she staggered upright. The man lay slumped, dead on the floor, in a dark pool of blood among the blood-spattered daffodils. She’d passed out. Whoever this man had been waiting for must have taken Stella.

She’d failed. Someone had kidnapped Stella.

She found her cell phone. She had to call the flics .

“Untie my hands,” Caplan said.

“Who took the baby?”

He shrugged. She took up the sword again and sawed away at the thick rope, strand by stubborn strand. She flinched as the rope broke and he cried out in pain. She sawed away faster to free his other hand, its thumb swollen and purple.

“Who took her?” she repeated.

“Hélène.”

The crazy homeless woman?

“No flics , please. Hélène’s helping . . . you.” His voice cracked.

“Where did she take the baby? Why didn’t she untie you?”

“She was too frightened. It would have taken her too long. I told her to take the baby before . . . there’s another one coming.”

She found a bottle of wine on the floor, uncorked it, and held it to his split lips. Blood still seeped from a dark red hole in his shoulder.

“He shot you,” she said.

“Never mind that now,” Caplan said. “Go into the shop and look in my chair. She told me it’s there.”

Aimée staggered into the shop to the chair where he kept his valuables. An envelope was wedged under the cushion. She picked it up. It bore quivering writing in violet ink that she recognized. Inside, there was a half-torn page from a magazine displaying a crossword puzzle. In the margin she could make out the words “Ask Jules Pont Louis Philippe . . . H.”

H must stand for Hélène, the clochard . The handwriting was identical to that on the note Aimée had received asking her to keep Stella. Hélène had written Nelie’s message.

She remembered Jules’s evasive answer when she’d asked him about Hélène . . . somewhere down by the bend, he’d said. Near the end of the sewer cavern lay Pont Louis Philippe and another drain sluice. Hélène might have taken Stella there.

She’d been close to Nelie last night. Vavin, her uncle, had been at the antique store nearby. Of course! Had Nelie had been here the whole time, hiding under the bridge? Right under her nose?

How long had Caplan known? Had this whole thing been a ploy, had they been using her? A sour taste filled her mouth.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” But his head had fallen forward; now he’d passed out.

She found his shop phone and dialed 17 for SAMU.

“Fourteen, rue des Deux Ponts. There’s a man bleeding to death, another dead of gunshot wounds to the chest.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Hurry!”

She hung up. She’d killed a professional, one of Halkyut’s hired guns, in self-protection. But she doubted the flics would see it that way. And she didn’t have time for explanations or hours to spend in the Commissariat.

She stood holding onto the wall as a flash of dizziness hit her, then found her bag under the bloodstained tapestry by the Jacadi baby clothes bag. She realized that she hadn’t found the saboteur, just one Halkyut thug. Was the saboteur Stella’s father? That could make sense even though she’d relegated the idea to the back of her mind after talking with Krzysztof.

Dumb. Consider all angles, her father always said.

She searched for the Doliprane in her purse. Popped the dry chalky aspirin and chewed it so it would work faster. Her cell phone trilled.

“Allô?”

“You want the good news? Aimée, we found the real pollution reports in Alstrom’s files,” René said. “The bad news, we’ve deciphered only half of them. And none of it will make us money. But that’s beside the point.”

“Is what you have deciphered enough to nail them?” Her hands shook.

“More than enough, in the right hands,” René said. “Sickening. A crime. Makes me never want to eat seafood again.”

She read off Daniel Ristat’s fax number. “Send it all through to that number. He’s expecting your fax.”

“One more thing,” René said. “Saj figured out what the writing on Stella was all about. It’s a file title. We opened the file and found meeting notes all right but not about Alstrom’s corporate board meetings. The notes refer to MondeFocus meetings, discussions, timetables of planned demonstrations. Alstrom knew every step MondeFocus took.”

Proof that there had been an Alstrom spy inside MondeFocus.

“Can you identify the sender?”

“Fancied himself—if it’s a he—quite the comic-strip hero. He signed himself ‘Stinger2.’”

“Like the Stinger?” The slick hit man who’d infiltrated the workers’ unions on the Marseilles docks, then sold his information to the highest bidder. The one who shut down the unions and took out the leaders.

“Nice role model.” René paused. “Shall I take over babysitting Stella now?”

Guilt stabbed her. Her fault. She had to admit it and, somehow, enlist René’s help. ”I found Jean Caplan; he’d been beaten up and shot . . .”

“Is Stella . . . hurt?”

“She’s gone. Hélène, the old woman, took her.”

“What? You let that homeless woman have her?” he said, accusation and hurt in his voice. “All you had to do was watch her. How could you put her in danger?!”

“René, I didn’t mean to but—”

“Playing Wonder Woman again!” He cut her off. “For once, I thought you’d grown up and would consider the risks and consequences, with an innocent child involved.”

What about Nelie, Stella’s mother, who’d left her in the first place, she wanted to say. Nelie had left her baby with a stranger. But he was right.

“You’re right, René,” she whispered into the phone. “I’m sick at what’s happened. I was supposed to meet Hélène at Caplan’s, but when I got there . . .”

“Aimée, I’m tired of wild-goose chases and your excuses.”

“If I hadn’t found him . . . But I think I know where Hélène took her.”

“Took her? Why can’t you admit that she kidnapped Stella?” he asked.

She’d never heard him so angry. “Hélène wrote that note on the crossword that was sent to me. She’s helping Nelie. But talking is taking time. Please meet me at Pont Louis Philippe. I think that Stella’s father must be the saboteur. The spy. He must have followed one of us; he’s after Stella, too. In that case, Hélène is definitely on our side.”

“Another one of your theories?”

“You have a better one? Suit yourself, René, I’m going.”

“If I do this, I want to ensure that Stella is safe. We call the child protection services. Do you agree?”

“Pont Louis Philippe. Ten minutes, René.”

She hung up. Avoiding the staring, dead eyes of the mec , she put one hand over her nose, and with the other reached under his lifeless leg for the Beretta 87. She slipped it into her pocket.

By the time Aimée reached Pont Marie, the metal lampposts illumined only the rustling branches of the trees that lined the quai and the glistening cobblestones. The nighttime quiet of the island was broken briefly as a couple emerged from Le Franc Pinot, a wine bar featuring jazz, the moan of a saxophone and the sound of cymbals following them.

She hurried beneath the wine bar’s old metal sign that jutted from the building—the artisanal emblem of a winemaker: a wrought-iron, grape-laden branch pointing toward Quai Bourbon. At the corner of rue Regrattier she paused under the statue of a headless woman in a niche above the street. It, like the king, had been decapitated in the Revolution. Under it was carved the former street name, rue de la Femme-sans-tête : street of the headless woman. Island lore said it really was Saint Nicholas. But over the centuries, no one had proved it either way.