The Day After Tomorrow

Heckler & Koch and had just shot two men was not the kind of man who stuck out his thumb, thereby providing a witness who could later identify him.

Now, if one followed the Interpol, Lyon, trail to New York Police Department records, it would make Merriman, not Osborn, the tall man’s target. If that was so, did that mean there was a connection between Osborn and the tall man? If so, did the tall man, having killed Merriman, then double-cross Osborn and turn the gun on him? Or, had the tall man followed Merriman, perhaps from the bakery, to wherever he’d met Osborn, and then followed the two here?

Taking that theory further and assuming the fire that destroyed Agnes Demblon’s apartment building was designed primarily to terminate her, it seemed reasonable to assume the tall man’s orders were to take care not only of Merriman, but anyone else who might have intimately known him.

“His wife!” McVey suddenly said out loud.

Turning from the trail, he started back under the trees toward the Opel. He had no idea where the closest phone would be, and he cursed Interpol for giving him a car with no radio and no phone. Lebrun had to be alerted that Merriman’s wife, wherever she was, was in serious danger.

Reaching the edge of the trees, McVey was almost to the car, when abruptly he stopped and turned around. The path he’d just taken, in a rush from the murder scene, was through the trees. Exactly what a gunman leaving a shooting might have done. The way McVey and Lebrun had walked to the ramp the night before had been around the trees, not through them. Lebrun’s Inspectors and tech crew had found nothing to indicate the presence of a third man the night of the killing. Hence they assumed Osborn had been the gunman. But had they searched up here, under the trees, this far back from the ramp?

This was a bright, sunny Sunday after nearly a week-long rain. McVey was in a quandary. If he left to warn Lebrun about Merriman’s wife he ran the risk somebody, or a lot of people, with cabin fever would arrive at the park and inadvertently destroy evidence. Choosing, not too happily, to assume that since the French police had yet to find her, the tall man would have the same problem, McVey decided to steal the time he needed and stay where he was.

Turning back, he cautiously retraced his steps back toward the ramp, through the trees, the way he had come. The ground under the trees was a thick blanket of wet pine needles. Stepping on them, they sprang back like a carpet, which meant it would take something a great deal heavier than a man’s step to leave any kind of impression on them.

Crossing to the ramp, McVey turned back. He’d found nothing. Walking a dozen yards east of where he was standing, he made the crossing again. Still, he found nothing.

Turning west, he moved to a spot halfway between his original crossing and the one he’d just made, and started across again. He hadn’t gone a dozen paces before he saw it. A single flat toothpick, broken in half, nearly obscured by the pine needles. Taking out his handkerchief, he bent down and picked it up. Looking at it, he could see the split in it was a lighter color on the inside than on the outside, suggesting it had been broken in the recent past. Wrapping it in the handkerchief, McVey put it in his pocket and started back toward his car. This time he moved slowly, carefully studying the ground. He was almost to the edge of the trees when something caught his eye. Stopping, he squatted down.

The pine needles directly in front of him were a lighter shade than those surrounding them. In the rain they would have looked the same, but as they dried in the morning sun, they looked more as if they’d been scattered on purpose. Picking up a fallen twig, McVey brushed them lightly aside. At first he saw nothing and was disappointed. Then, continuing, he uncovered what looked like the impression of a tire track. Getting up and following it, he found a solid impression in the sandy soil just at the edge of a tree line. A car had been driven in under the trees and parked. Sometime later, the driver had backed up and seen his own tracks. Getting out, he’d gathered fresh pine needles and scattered them around, covering the tracks, but in doing so he’d neglected to note where he’d parked. Outside the tree line the tracks had washed away in the rain. But at the tree line, the overhang had protected the ground, leaving a small but distinct imprint in the soil. No more than four inches long and a half inch deep, it wasn’t much. But for a police tech crew, it would be enough.

51

“SCHOLL!”

Osborn had just finished urinating and was flushing the toilet when the name jumped out at him. Turning awkwardly, and wincing in pain as he put weight on his injured leg, he reached out and picked up the cane Vera had left from where it hung on the edge of the sink. Shifting his weight, he started back into the room. Each step was an effort and he had to move slowly, but he realized the hurt was more from stiffness and muscle trauma than from the wound itself, and that meant it was healing.

The room, as he hobbled out of the cubicle that served as a toilet and started across it, seemed smaller than it had when he was lying down. With a blackout curtain drawn across the only window, it was not only dark but felt stuffy and confining and smelled of antiseptic. Stopping at the window, he set the cane aside and pulled back the curtain. Immediately the room flooded with the bright light of an early autumn day. Straining, he gritted his teeth against the tug of his leg, pulled open the small window and looked out. All he could see was the roofline of the building as it fell steeply away and, beyond it, the top of Notre Dame’s towers glistening in the morning sun. What got him more than anything was the crispness of the morning air as it wafted across the Seine. It was sweet and refreshing and he breathed it in deeply.

Vera had come up sometime during the night and changed his bandages. She’d tried to tell him something but he’d been too groggy to understand, and had gone back to sleep. Later, when he awoke and his senses began to come back, he’d focused on the tall man and the police and what to do about them. But now it was Erwin Scholl who was in the front of his mind. The man Henri Kanarack swore, under the terror of the succinylcholine, was the person who’d hired him to murder his father. That had happened, he recalled, at almost the same moment the tall man had appeared out of the darkness and shot them both.

Erwin Scholl. From where? Kanarack had told him that, too.

Turning from the window, Osborn limped back to his bed, smoothed out the blanket a little, then turned around and eased himself down. The walk from his bed to the bathroom and back again had wearied him more than he liked. Now he sat there, on the edge of the bed, able to do little more than breathe in and out.

Who was Erwin Scholl? And why had he wanted his father dead?

Suddenly he shut his eyes. It was the same question he’d been asking for almost thirty years. The pain in his leg was nothing compared to what he felt in his soul. He remembered the feeling that had seared through his gut the moment Kanarack had told him he’d been paid to do it. In an instant the whole thing had gone from a lifetime of loneliness and pain and anger to something beyond comprehension. In stumbling upon Henri Kanarack, in finding where he lived and where he worked, he thought God had at last acknowledged him and that, at last, the suffering inside him would be ended. But it hadn’t. It had only been handed off. Cruelly. Neatly. Like a football to another player in a game of keepaway. And he was the one they were keeping if from, as they had for so many years.

The river, at least, had carried him somewhere conclusive. Had that place been death it would have been preferable to the one to which he’d been returned; the one that allowed him no rest, that kept him forever enraged, that made it impossible for him to love or be loved without the awful fear he would destroy it. The monkey had not gone away at all. Only changed form. Henri Kanarack had become Erwin Scholl. This time with no face, just a name. What would it take to find him—another thirty years? And if he did have the courage and strength to do it and finally, after everything, found him, what then?

—another door leading somewhere else?

A sound on the far side of the wall snatched Osborn from his reverie. Someone was coming. Quickly he glanced around for a place to hide. There was none. Where was Kanarack’s gun? What had Vera done with it? He looked back at the door. The knob was turning. The only weapon he had was the cane next to him. His hand closed around it and the door swung open.

Vera was dressed in white for work.