“Will you talk about us in the next one, huh?”
Capestan felt her cell phone vibrating. She disappeared to answer it and was back in her seat two seconds later. The show still hadn’t begun.
“Any news?” Lebreton asked.
“Merlot lost the Squirrel.”
“That’s not too serious. We know where to find him now. Although we could do with a word with him, couldn’t we?”
The commissaire nodded slowly. A plan of sorts was forming.
“Yes. In fact, I think we should even arrest him.”
Standing on the freshly polished concrete floor of his garage, Lewitz pulled his mechanic’s overalls on top of his clothes. He zipped them up, then plucked a torque wrench from the set of tools lined up on his workbench. He approached the vehicle lift and gazed lovingly at the beauty that was mounted on it: hydraulic front-wheel assist, twin steering axles, and a 3.5-meter turning radius. Bound to handle like a dream. Lewitz felt a joyous tingle of anticipation down his spine. Sure, the engine—a 2800 cc VM HR 494 Turbo Diesel—did strike him as a little modest. All it would need was a little opening up.
42
The radio crackled and belched, filling the car with the occasional flurry of voices. Torrez’s right arm was still in a sling, though his head was now free of its bandages. Perched at the edge of his seat, he was trying to adjust the tuning with his left hand. With her index finger resting against the bottom of the steering wheel, Capestan did her best to ignore the racket as she surveyed the entrance to Valincourt’s building on the opposite side of boulevard Beaumarchais. The accident had drawn a line under Torrez’s bad luck and filled him with a renewed sense of purpose, a point illustrated loud and clear by this radio, which he had added to his demands for a siren and a flashing light. He was doing everything in his power to find the police frequency.
A constant swirl of pedestrians paraded back and forth in front of their windshield, one mass of people immediately replaced by the next. The passersby kept obstructing their view of the entrance, causing Capestan to refocus at various intervals. This busy street was a nightmare for a stakeout.
The stale cigarette smoke in the 306 had been erased by the delicious smell of tortilla and peppers, but their day of surveillance had thus far yielded nothing new on the divisionnaire, and the Squirrel still had not been around to see his father. They would have to exercise some real patience as they waited for Valincourt to make a significant blunder. Aside from the video, they did not have anything substantive enough to collar him. They would need something more to lever a confession out of him.
In the DNA era, scientific proof was sacrosanct, but Capestan still swore by good, old-fashioned testimonial evidence: the detailed confession. Cross-checking information, a bit of remorse, words start tumbling out with relief, and then the final word in the story. The suspect relaxes his shoulders, the culprit finds peace again, and the police officer can savor the sweet scratch of pen on paper. But with someone of Valincourt’s caliber, it was no foregone conclusion. They would need something concrete.
On Capestan’s lap, the sailor’s journal was lying open at some blank pages near the end. Her initial analysis had been extremely attentive, then she had skimmed it a second time. The journal charted the wanderings of a traumatized man trying to find peace. Various scenes from the shipwreck would pop up from time to time in the course of a long, introspective passage, but nothing in these ramblings ever corresponded with Valincourt: not a single name or detail seemed to relate to him. They were going to have to look elsewhere for the sequence of events.
“The reception’s terrible, but I think this is it. Something going on in the twentieth,” Torrez said, still fussing with the CB.
“Yes, an airport run. That’s the taxi frequency.”
Torrez let out a groan and hurled himself back into the search. As he bent down, Capestan suddenly noticed that the lieutenant’s thick, black hair was cut in a very unusual way—it was about an inch shorter on the right, with a slight wedge at the back. The commissaire was reminded of his head bandage in the hospital.
“Did they clip you up top?” she asked.
Without looking up from the radio, he ran one of his bearlike mitts around the back of his skull.
“No, it was my son. He wants to be a hairdresser, so I let him do mine. I give him two euros and—just like that—he’s happy and he’s learning.”
Capestan was touched by this fatherly sacrifice to his coiffure.
“How old is your son?”
“Nine. I know it’s not perfect, but I don’t mind. The poor kid’s got to make do with rounded scissors.”
Capestan gazed at the lieutenant’s hairdo for a few more seconds, then returned her focus to the surveillance. It would be a big help if Valincourt decided to leave his house. According to Orsini’s summary, the previous evening had involved a bit of shopping at the supermarket, a trip to the dry cleaner’s to pick up a uniform, then back to his apartment for the rest of the night. It was late afternoon now, and the light was still on in the window to his apartment.
Capestan’s cell phone vibrated. It was Lewitz.
“Yes, brigadier?”
“I’ve just spotted the boy. He’s on the boulevard, around Bastille, and he’s headed your way. Shall we nab him?”
Capestan hesitated for a moment. All they had on the young man was the offense of fleeing the scene at Maëlle Guénan’s and a telephone record that they’d obtained illegally. Not exactly a winning hand.
“Yes, arrest him, but go easy on him. Wait until he’s tying up his bike—that way he’ll have his hands full.”
She hung up and turned to Torrez. He stared at her, wide eyed with disbelief:
“Did you just ask Lewitz to make an arrest?”
“Yes.”
In an effort to mask her slight
