bodies might well be the result of failed attempts at a very advanced kind of cryosurgery attempting to join a severed head to a body not its own. And Dr. Paul Osborn was not only a surgeon, but an orthopedic surgeon, and expert in the human skeletal structure, someone who might very well know how these things could be done.
From the first McVey had believed he was looking for one man. Maybe he’d had him and let him go.
Osborn woke out of a dream and, for a moment, had no idea where he was. Then, with sudden clarity, Vera’s face came into view. She was sitting on the bed next to him, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth. She wore black, wide-legged slacks and a loose sweater of the same color. The black of the cloth and soft light made her features seem almost fragile, like delicate porcelain.
“You were running a high fever; I think it’s broken,” she said gently. Her dark eyes held the same sparkle they had the first time they’d met, which Osborn, for some reason, calculated had been only nine days earlier.
“How long was I out?” he said, weakly.
“Not long. Maybe four hours.”
He started to sit up, but sharp pain shot through the back of his thigh. Wincing, he lay back down.
“If you’d have let me take you to the hospital, you might be a little more comfortable.”
Osborn stared at the ceiling. He didn’t remember telling her not to go to a hospital, but he must have. Then he remembered he’d told her about Kanarack and his father and the detective, Jean Packard.
Getting up from the bed, Vera lay the wash cloth; in the pan she’d been using to keep the cloth damp, and moved to a table under a small, clam-shaped window that had a dark curtain pulled across it.
Puzzled, Osborn looked around. To his right was the door to the room. To his left, another door was open to a small bathroom. Above him, the ceiling pitched sharply so that the side walls were much shorter, than the end walls. This wasn’t the room he’d been in before. He was somewhere else, in a room like an attic.
“You’re at the top of the building in a chamber under the eaves. It was built by the Resistance in 1940. Almost no one knows it’s here.”
Lifting the cover from a tray on the table where she’d set the washbasin, Vera came back and set it down on the bed beside him. On it was a bowl with hot soup, a spoon and napkin.
“You need to eat,” she said. Osborn only stared at her.
“The police came looking for you. So I had you moved up here.”
“Had me?”
“Philippe, the doorman, is an old and trusted friend.”
“They found Kanarack’s body, didn’t they?”
Vera nodded. “The car, too. I told you they’d come when that happened. They wanted to come up to the apartment but I said I was on my way out. I met them in the lobby.”
Osborn let out a weak sigh and stared off.
Vera sat down on the bed beside him and picked up the spoon. “You want me to feed you?”
“That much I can manage.” Osborn grinned weakly.
Taking the spoon, he dipped it into the soup and began to eat. It was a bouillon of some kind. The salt in it tasted good and he ate for several minutes without stopping. Finally, he laid the spoon aside, wiped his mouth with the napkin and rested.
“I’m in no shape to run from anybody.”
“No, you’re not.” ‘
“You’re going to get in trouble helping me.”
“Did you kill Henri Kanarack?”
“No.”
“Then how can I get in trouble?” Vera got up and a picked the tray from the bed. “I want you to rest. I’ll come up later and change the bandages.”
“It’s not just the police.”
“What do you mean?”
“How are you going to explain me to—
Slinging the tray over one hip like a cafe waitress, Vera looked down at him.
“No?” Osborn was stunned.
“No—” A slight smile crept over her.
“When did that happen?”
“The day I met you.” Vera’s eyes never left him. “Now, go to sleep. In two hours I’ll be back.”
Vera closed the door and Osborn lay back. He was tired. As tired as he’d ever been in his life. He glanced at his watch. It was 7:35, Saturday night, October 8.
And outside, beyond the window curtain of his tiny cell, Paris was beginning to dance.
44
AT PRECISELY the same time, and some twenty-three miles out on the Autoroute Al, McVey’s Air Europe Fokker 100 touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Fifteen minutes later he was being driven back toward Paris by one of Lebrun’s uniformed officers.
By this time he seemed to know every nook and turn in Charles de Gaulle Airport. He ought to; he’d barely been out of it twenty-four hours when he was back.
Nearing Paris, Lebrun’s driver crossed the Seine and headed toward the Porte d’Orleans. In his broken English, he told McVey Lebrun was at a crime scene and wished McVey to meet him there.
The rain had started again by the time they pushed through a half block of fire equipment and rows of onlookers held back by uniformed gendarmes. Pulling up in front of a still-smoldering, burned-out shell of an apartment building, the driver got out and led McVey over a crisscross of high-pressure hoses and sweat-caked firemen still playing water on smoking hot spots.
The building was a total loss. The roof and the entire top floor were gone. Twisted steel fire escapes, arched and bowed by extreme heat into opposing courses, like unfinished elevated highway sections, dangled precariously from the upper floors, held there by brickwork that threatened to collapse at any moment. Between the floors, discernible through burned-out window casings, were the scorched and charred timbers that were once the walls and ceilings of individual apartments. And hanging over everything, despite the steadily falling rain, was the un- mistakable stench of burned flesh.
Skirting a pile of debris, the driver took McVey to the back of the building where Lebrun stood with Inspectors Barras and Maitrot in the glare of portable work lights, talking with a heavyset man in a fireman’s jacket.
“Ah, McVey!” Lebrun said out loud as McVey stepped into the light. “You know Inspectors Barras and Maitrot. This is Captain Chevallier, assistant chief of the Port d’Orleans arson battalion.”
“Captain Chevallier.” McVey and the arson chief shook hands.
“This thing was set?” McVey said, glancing up again at the destruction.
“It burned very hot, and very quickly, set off by some kind of extremely sophisticated device, probably using a military-type incendiary,” Lebrun translated. “No one had a chance. Twenty-two people. All dead.”
For a long moment McVey said nothing. Finally he asked, “Any idea why?”
“Yes,” Lebrun said definitively, not trying to hide his anger. “One of them owned the car Albert Merriman was driving when your friend Osborn found him.”
“Lebrun,” McVey said,, quietly but directly. “First of all, Osborn’s not my friend. Second, let me guess that the Merriman car was owned by a woman.”
“That’s a good guess,” Barras said in English.
“Her name was Agnes Demblon.”
Lebrun’s eyebrows raised. “McVey. You truly amaze me.”
“What do you have on Osborn?” McVey avoided the compliment.
