then out toward the main current. Osborn glanced at his watch. It had taken ten seconds for the branch to move away and get caught up in the predominant flow. Another twenty and it disappeared from sight around the outcrop of rock and trees. All told, just about thirty seconds from the time he tossed the branch in until he lost sight of it.
Turning back, he recrossed the landing to the woods on the far side. He wanted something heavier, something that might begin more to approximate a man’s weight. In a matter of moments he found the uprooted trunk of a dead tree. Struggling for a grip, he hefted it, then carried it to the water’s edge, stepped into the mud once more and heaved it in. For a moment it remained still in the water, as the branch had, then the current picked it up and started forward along the shore. Once it reached the curve of the outcropping it moved swiftly and steadily out toward the main current. Once more he looked at his watch. Thirty-two seconds until it reached mid-river and was swept from view. The tree trunk had to have weighed fifty pounds. Kanarack, he estimated, weighed about one hundred and eighty. The ratio of the weight from the branch to the tree trunk was far greats than the ratio of the tree trunk to what Kanarack weighed, yet both had taken nearly the same time to be swept up and out and then be fully caught up in the current.
Osborn could feel the rise of his pulse and the sweat at his armpits as the reality of it began to set in. It would work, he was certain! Moving sideways at first, then-turning, Osborn started to run, hurrying along the riverbank and past the trees to where the land projected farthest out toward midriver. Here, he found the water deep flowing and free of obstacles. With nothing to stop him, Kanarack, physically helpless under the succinylcholine, would float off like the tree trunk, picking up speed as he reached the flow line. Less than sixty seconds after his body was shoved out from the landing it would reach midriver and be caught up in the Seine’s main current.
Now he had to make sure. Pushing through a stand of high grass, he followed the river’s edge through shrubs and thicket for a half, mile or more. The farther he walked, the steeper the embankment became and the swifter the current flowing between the shorelines. Reaching the top of a hill, he stopped. The river kept on uninterrupted for as far as he could see. There were no small islands, no sandbanks, no yawning catch-alls of dead trees. Nothing but fast-moving open water cutting through raw countryside. Moreover, there were no towns, factories, homes or bridges. No place at all, as far as he could tell, from which to see a thing rushing along with the current.
Especially if it were happening in the rain and darkness.
21
LEBRUN AND McVey had followed Osborn. and Vera to the gardens of the National Museum of Natural History. There, another unmarked police car had taken over and tailed them to Vera’s apartment on the Ile St.- Louis.
As soon as they entered, Lebrun was radioed the address. Forty seconds later they had a printout of the building’s residents, courtesy of a computer cross-check with the Postal Service.
Lebrun scanned it then handed it to McVey, who had to put on his glasses to read it. The listing confirmed that all six of the apartments at 18 Quai de Bethune were occupied. Two of the surnames carried first initials only, indicating they were probably occupied by single women. One was an M. Seyrig, the other a V. Monneray. French
It was at that moment that headquarters abruptly called off the surveillance. Dr. Paul Osborn, Lebrun was told, was under the spotlight of Interpol, not of the Paris Prefecture of Police. If Interpol wanted somebody to watch from across the street while Osborn had dalliance with a lady, let them pay for it, the locals couldn’t afford it. McVey was all too aware of city budgets, where management cut corners and where pork-barrel politics vied for every allotted franc. So, when Lebrun apologetically dropped him off back at headquarters a half hour later, all he could do was shrug and head for the beige two-door Opel Interpol had assigned him, knowing he would have to do the legwork himself.
It took a good forty minutes, driving in circles trying to find his way back to lie St.-Louis, before McVey finally pulled into a parking space at the rear of Vera Monneray’s apartment building. The stone and stucco structure that ran the entire length of the block was well kept and freshly painted. Service entrances, at convenient intervals along the way, were secured by heavy, windowless doors, making the ground floor at the back seem like a sealed military garrison.
Opening the car door, McVey got out and walked the half block down the cobblestone street to the cross street at the end of the building. That it was raining and cold didn’t help. Or that the ancient cobblestones under his wing tips were slippery as hell. Pulling a handkerchief from a hip pocket, he blew his nose, then carefully folding it on the creases, put it back. It didn’t help either that he was beginning to think of a warm, smoggy day on the Rancho Park course on Pico across from the Twentieth Century Fox lot. Tee off about eight when the sun was just beginning to warm things up, and for the next few hours make light with the rest of his foursome, Sheriff’s Department homicide detectives playing hooky from domestic chores on their day off.
When he got to the cross street, McVey turned right and walked to the front of the building. To his surprise he was literally on top of the Seine. If he put a hand out he could almost touch the passing barge traffic. Across the river, the entire Left Bank hung under a blanket of clouds that rolled out left to right as far as he could see. Cranking his head back and looking up, he realized that nearly every apartment in the building must have the same remarkable view.
What the hell can the rent cost here? he thought, then smiled. It’s what he would have said to his second wife, Judy, who really was the only true companion he’d ever had. Valerie, his first wife, he’d married out of high school. They were both too young. Valerie worked as a checkout clerk at a supermarket while he struggled through the academy and his first years on the force. What mattered to Val was not work, not a career, but children. She wanted two boys and two girls, the same as her family. And it was all she wanted. McVey was into his third year on the LAPD when she got pregnant. Four months later, while he was in the field on auto theft, she had a miscarriage at her mother’s house and hemorrhaged to death on the way to the hospital.
Why the hell was he thinking about that?
Looking up, the found himself staring through the filigreed wrought-iron security gate at the main entrance to Vera Monneray’s apartment building. Inside, a uniformed doorman looked back at him and he knew the only way he was going in there was with a search warrant. Even with one, supposing he could get in, what did he expect to find? Osborn and Ms. Monneray still in the act? And what made him think either of them was still there? It had been almost two hours since Lebrun and his team had been pulled off the surveillance.
Turning away, McVey started back toward his car. Five minutes later he was behind the wheel of the Opel trying to figure out how to get off the Ile St.-Louis and back to his hotel. He was at a stop sign and had made an agonizing but final decision to turn right instead of left when he saw a phone booth on the corner next to him. The idea came fast. Cutting off a taxi, he pulled to the curb. Going into the phone booth, he opened the directory, looked up V. Monneray, then dialed her apartment. The phone rang for a long time and McVey was about to give up. Then a woman answered.
“Vera Monneray?” he said.
There was a pause and then—
With that, he hung up. At least one of them was still there.
“Vera Monneray, 18 Quai de Bethune? A name and address?” McVey closed the open folder and stared at Lebrun. “That’s the entire file?”
Lebrun squashed out a cigarette and nodded. It was a little after six in the evening and they were in Lebrun’s cubicle of an office on the fourth floor of Police Headquarters.
“A ten-year-old kid writing a TV show could come up with more than that,” McVey said with an
