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

Claude had the perfect cover. He filmed MondeFocus demonstrations; Brigitte knew him. He probably attended the planning meetings for the demonstrations. Of course, that’s where the information and meeting notes would have come from. Idiot . . . she should have figured it out sooner. The perfect informer. The saboteur. Claude.

“I can’t believe I found you.” And he was standing over them. “That old woman’s sadly confused. She ran away,” Claude said. Light bobbed from his miner’s helmet, a walkie-talkie was clipped to his belt, as well as some tools. His motorcycle boots crunched over the sandstone.

“My God, they hurt you!” he said, looking at the ribbon bandaging her forehead.

She wavered. His dark hair curled over his leather jacket, his sandalwood scent wafted over the cool limestone, his intense eyes stared at her.

“Are you all right?”

Had she got him wrong?

He shone a flashlight on Nelie. Now the blanket was becoming soaked with bright blood. “Can we move Nelie? I’ve got gauze for a tourniquet.”

“She needs more than a tourniquet, she needs a hospital,” Aimée said. “My God, she’s hemorrhaging, losing blood fast. How did you find us, Claude?”

She hoped he hadn’t heard the sound of panic in her voice.

“Stinger2, mission complete?” was the message that came from the walkie-talkie.

Stinger2. It was certain. He was the one who’d sent Alstrom the MondeFocus meeting notes.

He clicked off the walkie-talkie. “Aimée, I told them not to hurt you. Not you,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“What?” She felt sick, dirty. She’d slept with him, for God’s sake. And liked it.

“We’ll get Nelie to a safe place,” he assured her.

Like he’d taken Orla to a safe place?

“René’s getting help.” Or had he taken care of René and Stella, too? Her stomach lurched. “A rescue squad’s coming, the flics are on the way.”

“You asked me to trust you, Aimée. I do. We’re good together. We fit; you feel it, too, I know.”

She worked her fingers on the cell phone, hit speed dial.

René’s number. Then her shaking hands dropped it. Merde!

“Where is she? Where’s my baby?” he asked. “We can make it work.”

“Make it work?”

He sighed. “I have an apartment in Zurich, a new state-ofthe-art studio, contacts. You could help me raise my daughter the right way.”

Psychotic. But hadn’t that crossed her mind, too, riding on the back of his motorcycle? She, he, and Stella. Her fingers tensed but she worked them inside her pocket.

“What do you mean, Claude?”

“You’ve had my daughter all this time. You can keep a secret, you’ll keep this one.”

She gazed in horror at the hammer hanging from his belt as he reached for it.

“Nelie’s had a massive loss of blood. She won’t recover, you know. The surgeon and I tried to find her to help her, but it’s too late now. I’m going to put Nelie out of her misery and pain. It will all be over in a second.”

Like putting an animal down. Sick, he was sick. Did he actually think she’d stand by and watch him bludgeon Nelie to death? Nelie, the mother of his child? He was a monster. Why the hell hadn’t René picked up when she’d tried to phone him? Where was the SAMU?

“You followed Hélène here, didn’t you? You could have taken the baby from her. No one would have paid attention to what she said. . . .”

“Aimée, you’re not listening.” His voice, his tone, were soothing, reasonable. “Nelie knows. She knows too much. She’s the only one who can prove that I spied on MondeFocus and informed Alstrom about their plans. I have to dispose of her so we can have a life together. So we can take care of my daughter together.”

But wasn’t he forgetting something? Now she knew, too.

The tools hanging from his utility belt were silhouetted in the light. There was a heavy-duty flashlight in addition to the walkie-talkie and the hammer. It would be so easy for him to pound Nelie’s skull to fragments. And then hers. He’d escape, disappearing in the vast warren of tunnels and quarries that lay beneath Paris. And surface somewhere . . . but not in Zurich. No one would ever catch him.

“What about your documentary?” she asked, saying the first thing that came into her head. She had to distract him until help came. “Were those all lies you told me?”

“The money’s come through,” he said. “Now, with what I’ve been paid, I can make it happen. It’s taken years, but I’ll be able to finish my video and begin work on new projects.”

“You did it for the money? But everything you said about your mother—a committed Socialist, a union organizer . . .”

“Did you have holes in your shoes when you were a kid? Did you grow up with your neighbors jeering, ‘Commie, Commie’ at you? They recruited me, but it wasn’t too hard.”

“Halkyut recruited you?”

“I didn’t go looking for them, Aimée. At first, they just asked to see my footage of the environmentalists’ demonstrations. Their money helped me keep going. Then they asked me to do a little bit more, to document who attended and who the leaders were. I realized I could live like the other half. Now I won’t have to scrounge in commune kitchens, licking the pot after the others have eaten. Neither will my daughter.”

She had to keep him talking. “But why did you have to kill Orla?”

“I didn’t mean to. You have to understand that,” he said. “She argued, she wouldn’t listen to reason. She ran away, then she slipped off the quai.”

“Slipped, Claude? I think you threw her into the river after hitting her with a tire iron.”

His eyes narrowed. “Never mind about Orla. It’s you and me now. We’re alike, Aimée. Each of us was abandoned by the one person who should have put us first. I know you could be a wonderful mother. I’ve seen you with the baby. Don’t disappoint me.”

Nelie was moving, struggling, the blanket falling open. He was holding a gun. Where had that come from?

She saw Claude aim at Nelie’s head.

“Stop, Claude, the flics are coming. You don’t have to do this.” She reached for the Jacadi baby clothes bag.

“I can buy my baby everything she wants now. We can both live the way we were meant to.”

“We’ve all had crap in our childhoods, Claude. Get over it. Her mother’s right here.”

“I grew up without a real mother. Just a woman wrapped up in causes, dragging me to strikes. Never home after school. No father. No real home. My daughter won’t be brought up like that, poor and ashamed and lonely.”

He was playing his vulnerable card again. But he’d said the wrong thing. She hated men who whined.

“Do you own that copyright, Claude?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“You refuse to understand,” he said, aiming at Nelie, pulling back the safety.

“Wrong, Claude,” she said. “I do understand.”

She fired the Beretta through the Jacadi bag. The first shot hit his shoulder; the second, his kneecap.

She let him live. After all, he was Stella’s father.

Saturday Afternoon

AIMÉE CLENCHED HER fist around the sponge, watching the slow trickle of her blood dripping down the clear plastic tube. She cleared her throat and read aloud from the special edition of L’Express: “Colonel Lorrain of the Ministry of the Interior has called for the cessation of the Alstrom oil negotiations and for an immediate inquiry into toxic substance dumping. Certain reports with respect to an oil tanker crew and to uranium poisoning have come to light . . .”

She paused, glancing at the occupant of the hospital bed.

“Nelie,” Aimée said, “did you hear that? Alstrom’s finished.”