“Me neither, as you can see. Smells good.”
“Spaghetti with onions, olives, and Parmesan. One of my own recipes. If you’d like some, I’ve made enough for a whole squadron . . .”
“Lovely, thanks,” Capestan said, securing her hair with the black tie she kept around her wrist. “How’s Torrez?”
“Fine, the doc’s optimistic. Although his colleagues aren’t exactly lining up to be at his bedside . . . They like the guy, but—”
“Fine, I get it. I’ll go tomorrow. And the boy—”
“Uh-uh,” Rosière cut in with a smile. “Eat. Drink. Stop working. Later.”
“True. They can’t take away our downtime, too.”
Lebreton went off in search of a baguette, while Rosière attended to her saucepan and Capestan kept half an eye on the pasta jiggling in the boiling water. The fridge was purring in the corner.
“What about you, then? Single?” Rosière asked with her usual self-assurance, all the more direct now she was on her second glass of wine.
“Yup.”
“For long?”
Capestan took a deep breath, as if to suggest she didn’t know the date.
“Since the last time I fired my gun.”
“You killed your ex?!”
Capestan burst out laughing.
“No, definitely not! Let’s just say it didn’t take long . . . The shot was the pretext.”
Capestan’s husband had thought that there was no coming back from it; that something had flipped inside her. The feeling that he might have been right did occur to the commissaire, but she blinked it aside and gave the spaghetti another stir.
“Basically, he asked for a divorce, and I let him have one,” Capestan said, setting her wooden spoon down on one of the unused hobs. “The pasta’s good to go.”
She had changed the subject, but her mind was now transfixed with the image of a back and some suitcases walking out of her door.
Her future, her strength, and her happiness had disappeared, as if they’d been sucked down the plughole. The door seemed to reverberate after it had shut. Capestan had sat down on the sofa and stared into the emptiness for several hours before resolving to do something else. She leaned forward to pick up the TV remote from the coffee table and selected the video-on-demand menu. The Magnificent Seven was available for 2.99 euros. She pressed the button.
The following day they took away her service weapon.
Both losses had been a struggle, but once the emotional pain had passed, Capestan was astonished to find that she enjoyed her solitary existence. She liked living in the comfort of an inner world that was designed for her and her alone, under the watchful, silent eye of her affectionate cat. Perhaps this would only be a passing pleasure, but she wasn’t so sure.
Capestan distractedly carried the pan of spaghetti over to the sink and drained it carefully, making sure not to scald herself. She stood there in disbelief as the tangle of spaghetti spread across the sink.
“You have to be kidding me . . . I forgot the colander,” Capestan said, rushing off to fetch it before rinsing the pasta.
“And you, Eva. Any family?”
“Yes. A dog and a son. But of the two, the dog probably gets in touch more often,” Rosière said, with a long-suffering shrug.
They washed down their pasta with Côtes-du-Rhône, old stories from the beat, on-screen adventures, and tales about dogs. Afterward, Rosière and Lebreton went for a cigarette while Capestan lit a fire under the watchful nose of Pilote, who didn’t seem remotely worried about frazzling his coat.
The smokers returned a few minutes later, carrying their glasses and the remainder of the bottle. Capestan brought the three investigation boards over to the fireplace, where she joined Rosière on the enormous sofa she was hogging. Lebreton was sitting in one of the shabby armchairs.
The commissaire summed up her thoughts on the sticker and the idea that it was premeditated, then finished with a watered-down version of her talk with Buron. She had strongly considered telling them about the strange role the chief was apparently assigning the team, but felt that the boundaries of their responsibilities were still too blurred. She was afraid that it was simply a matter of settling grudges, and that this ill-fated assignment would shower neither the squad nor Buron in glory. A blend of loyalty and optimism was persuading Capestan to keep it quiet until she knew more. The main thing was that the chief had handed over Maëlle Guénan’s file, which Capestan had now fanned out on the coffee table.
On the whole, it did not tell them much more than the preliminary findings they had snatched thanks to the baby monitors, especially because the autopsy was still under way. The current thinking at the brigade criminelle was that it was an assault carried out during a burglary.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Lebreton said, his legs stretched out in front of him and his balloon glass rotating slowly in his palm. “First things first, it was in the morning—if the burglar didn’t want to be disturbed, he could have buzzed to make sure the apartment was empty. Then he would either come in through a window, which couldn’t have been the case here, or he’d break in, which wasn’t the case either,” he said, pointing to a line in the report with the base of his wineglass. “As for the murder weapon, I’m certain it was brought onto the premises.”
“Why do you say that?” Capestan said. “They found the rest of the knife set in the kitchen.”
“Maëlle couldn’t have afforded a high-end set like that. Even if she could, she’d have chosen a less designer-brand—something daintier and more colorful, or wooden. The knives jar with her apartment.”
“Maybe they were a present?”
“I don’t think so. The way I see it, the murderer came with the intention of killing her, then made it look like a burglary, or like an unplanned crime in which the weapon was grabbed in the heat of the moment.”
“Same drill as with Marie Sauzelle,” Capestan said. “Double insurance: the murderer conceals his crime, but if he gets unlucky and it does come back
