“What on earth is wrong with you?”
Well, this was what the morons were up against. Évrard jerked her chin in the dealer’s direction, and Merlot hauled himself up with great difficulty to start tailing him. When their target stopped to take off his aviators and check his smartphone, Merlot stopped in his tracks.
“No need to follow him a step farther,” he said. “I know where he lives: Villa Scheffer in the sixteenth. He’s the Riverni boy.”
“Riverni . . . Isn’t he a minister or something?”
“Secretary of state.”
“Not hard to see why the case was closed, then. This dealer didn’t strike me as a fast runner, let alone someone who might crawl through the net. So there we have it. Let’s call Capestan,” Évrard said.
“Absolutely. There’s a café on the corner: they ought to have a telephone.”
Évrard chose not to point out that she, along with the rest of the world, had a cell phone. Always best to indulge your colleagues. She went into Café Carnot and ordered a raspberry kir. Merlot was beaming: a highly satisfactory outcome, and all thanks to him.
16
Capestan managed to extract herself from the elevator dragging a dark-pink shopping cart filled to the brim with logs. She backed into the commissariat, pulling her cargo toward the fireplace. The room was thick with the strong smell of wax, and the parquet was gleaming like a horse chestnut fresh out of its shell. A broom wrapped in a wax-soaked cloth was leaning against the wall behind Lebreton’s chair. Capestan greeted the commandant first, then Rosière, who was squashing a teabag against the side of her mug as Pilou lay curled next to her blue stilettos. The three of them greeted her in return. Torrez and Orsini were no doubt both holed up in their respective offices. The commissaire unfolded the brass fire screen that she had slid down the side of the trolley and started stacking the logs to the right of the fireplace.
“So?” Rosière said, plopping the teabag in the green leather wastebasket beside her desk. “How are things looking with the old lady?”
“A bit blurry, for now. Tomorrow we’re off to Creuse to question the brother. How about your sailor?”
“The wife’s convinced the shipbuilder from the Vendée did it, so we’re off to the seaside. But we have to wait till the day after tomorrow—we needed to make an appointment.”
“Vacations all around,” Capestan said. “Are you taking the train? We’ve got the budget, if you want—”
“No, we’ll take the car. I prefer it that way, and Louis-Baptiste doesn’t mind,” Rosière said, glancing at her partner, who nodded. The dog, intrigued, trotted up to the pile of logs and sniffed them, clearly intending to contribute a squirt of something inflammable.
“No, Pilou! Buzz off!” Capestan shouted, pointing at Rosière’s desk.
The dog’s face turned in the direction of her finger, but his paws didn’t move an inch.
“The whole dog, please Pilou, not just the head,” Capestan insisted.
The dog obliged, but only because he had been distracted by an unfamiliar face: Évrard was hanging her navy-blue windbreaker on the hook by the door.
“Good morning, commissaire, we tracked down the dealer’s address,” she said. “Villa Scheffer in the sixteenth.”
“Wonderful!” Capestan said to the lieutenant, bursting into a smile, a log in each hand. “Quick work, very efficient. The nation is forever indebted to you.”
Évrard was visibly disappointed: the one time she received any praise for her work, she would have to dash their hopes.
“Well, there’s no point getting too excited. He’s the son of the secretary of state for family and the elderly, Riverni. Which no doubt explains why the file was squirreled away at the bottom of a box. I guess we’re not allowed to apprehend him.”
“Yes, yes, of course you can,” Capestan insisted with great optimism. “If he leaves his house carrying drugs, then bring him in.”
Rays of sparkling autumn sunshine were spilling into the room, hitting the back wall and making it shimmer in their heat. This was no day for negative thinking.
“Commissaire, I don’t mean to take issue with you, but if the file ended up here, then it means that two years ago an even bigger squad was told to back down. And they were fully operational. I don’t think they left it behind for our sake.”
“Hey, we’re fully operational, too. I’m not saying we’ll succeed, I’m saying we’ll try. If no one stands in our way, we’ll push on.”
That was how she wanted things to be. They already faced enough obstacles without having to invent their own. The least they could do was wait and see.
Évrard’s big, innocent blue eyes were wide open, but she was still uncertain. She did not much care for a trip to the sixteenth to spend hours negotiating with the family lawyer, only to go home empty handed after a good dressing-down. Capestan could see where she was coming from—her own encounter with Valincourt had been far from pleasant—but her squad must not be resigned to its fate; they could not wallow in indifference. That was what the top brass wanted. If they started surrendering without even trying, then they may as well not bother getting out of bed in the morning.
“We don’t even have a holding cell,” Évrard said, motioning around the apartment.
Capestan laid down the logs she’d been holding, rubbed her hands together, and pulled a Swiss Army knife from her enormous bag. She walked straight over to the bathroom, unscrewed the latch, and fastened it to the door of one of the
