3:24.
McVey slid under the sheets, rolled over and turned out the light, and then lay back against the pillow.
If Judy were still alive, she would have come on this trip. The only place they’d ever traveled together, besides the fishing trips to Big Bear, had been Hawaii. Two weeks in 1975. A European vacation they could never afford. Well, they would have afforded it this time. It wouldn’t have been First Class, but who cared; Interpol would have paid for it.
3:26.
“Mud!” McVey suddenly said out loud and sat up. Turning on the light, he tossed back the sheets and went into the bathroom. Bending down, he picked up one of his shoes and looked at it. Then picked up the other and did the same. The mud that caked them was gray, almost black. The mud on Osborn’s running shoes had been red.
29
MICHELE KANARACK looked up at the clock as the train pulled out of the Gare de Lyon for Marseilles. It was 6:54 in the morning. She’d brought no luggage, only a handbag. She’d taken a cab from their apartment fifteen minutes after she’d first seen Agnes Demblon’s Citroen waiting outside. At the station she bought a second-class ticket to Marseilles, then found a bench and sat down. The wait would be almost nine hours, but she didn’t care.
She wanted nothing from Henri, not even their child who’d been conceived in love less than eight weeks earlier. The suddenness of what had happened was overwhelming. All the more so since it seemed to have sprung from nowhere.
Once outside the station, the train picked up speed and Paris became a blur. Twenty-four hours earlier her world had been warm and alive. Each day her pregnancy filled pier with more joy than the day before, and that had been no different, and then Henri called to say he was going to Rouen with Monsieur Lebec to see about opening a new bakery there, perhaps, she even thought, with the promise of a managerial job. Then, with the wave of a hand, it was gone. All Of it. She’d been deceived and lied to. Not only that, but she was a fool. She should have known the power that bitch Agnes Demblon carried over her husband. Maybe she had known it all along and refused to accept it. For that she had only herself to blame. What wife would let her husband be picked up and driven to work day after day by an unmarried woman, no matter how unattractive she might be? But how many times had ; Henri reassured her—”Agnes is just an old friend, my love, a spinster. What interest could I possibly have in her?”
“My love.” She could still hear him say it, and it made her ill. The way she felt now she could kill them both without the slightest thought. Out the window the city faded to countryside. Another train roared past going to ward Paris. Michele Kanarack would never go to Paris again. Henri and everything about him was done. Finished, f Her sister would have to understand that and not try to talk her into going back.
What had he said? “Take back your family name.”
That she would do. Just as soon as she could get a job and afford a lawyer. Sitting back, she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the train as it quickened down the track toward the south of France. Today was October 7. In exactly one month and two days she and Henri would ; have been married for eight years.
* * *
In Paris, Henri Kanarack was curled up fetally, asleep in an overstuffed chair in Agnes Demblon’s living room. At 4:45 he had driven Agnes to work and then returned to her apartment with the Citroen. His apartment at 175 avenue Verdier was empty. Anyone going there would find no one home, nor would they find any clue to where they had gone. The green plastic garbage bag containing his work clothes, underwear, shoes and socks had been tossed’ into the basement furnace and was vaporized in seconds Every last thing he’d been wearing during the murder of Jean Packard had, by now, filtered down through the night air and lay scattered microscopically across the landscape of Montrouge.
Ten miles away, across the Seine, Agnes Demblon sat at her desk on the second floor of the bakery billing the accounts receivable that always went out on the seventh of the month. Already she had alerted Monsieur Lebec and his employees that Henri Kanarack had been called out of town on a family matter and probably would not return to work for at least a week. By 6:30 she had posted handwritten notes over the telephone at the small switchboard and at the front counter directing any inquiries about M. Kanarack promptly to her.
At almost the same time, McVey was carefully walking the Pare Champ de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower. A drizzly morning light revealed the same overturned rectangular garden he’d left the night before. Farther down, he could see more pathways turned over for landscaping. Beyond them were more pathways, not yet; turned over, that ran parallel to each other and crossed other pathways at about fifty-yard intervals. Walking the full length of the park on one side, he crossed over and came back down the other, studying the ground as he went. Nowhere did he see anything but the gray-black earth that again caked his shoes.
Stopping, he turned back to see if maybe he’d missed something. In doing so, he saw a groundskeeper coming toward him. The man spoke no English and McVey’s French was unpardonable. Still, he tried.
“Red dirt. You understand? Red dirt. Any around here?” McVey said, pointing at the ground.
“Reddert?” the man replied.
“No. Red! The color red. R-E-D.” McVey spelled it out.
“R-E-D,” the man repeated, then looked at him as if he were crazy.
It was too early in the morning for this. He’d get Lebrun, bring him here to ask the questions.
Realizing, the man jerked it out and offered it to McVey.
“No. No.” McVey waved him off. “The color.”
“Ah!” The man brightened.
McVey nodded.
The man stared at him, then swept his hand as McVey had.
“No?”
“No!”
* * *
Back at his hotel, McVey called Lebrun and told him he was packing to go back to London and that he had the increasingly uncomfortable feeling Osborn might not be as kosher as he first thought, that it might pay to keep an eye on him until the next day when he was due to collect his passport and fly back to Los Angeles. “Oh yeah,” he added. “He’s got keys to a Peugeot.”
Thirty minutes later, at 8:05, an unmarked police car pulled up to the curb across from Paul Osborn’s hotel on avenue Kleber and parked. Inside, a plainclothes detective unhooked his seat belt and sat back to watch. If Osborn came out—leaving either by foot or waiting for his car to be brought around—the detective would see him. A phone call with an apology for ringing the wrong number had confirmed Osborn was still in his room. A check of rental-car companies had provided the year, color and license-plate number of Osborn’s rented Peugeot.
At 8:10, another unmarked police car picked McVey up at his hotel to take him to the airport, courtesy of
