things.”
The woman leaned on her mop, tucking wisps of hair back under her scarf. “The
“
“We’re not supposed to … something to do with insurance,” the woman said, shaking her head.
“Only take a moment.” Aimee smiled, hoping she sounded more authoritative than she felt. She edged her foot in the doorway.
“Tanya!” the other cleaning woman shouted from inside. The rest of the words were in Polish.
“Go ahead,” Aimee said, “I’ll just pop into the study, then leave.”
The woman looked at her wristwatch, hesitating.
“We’re running behind,” she said. “Got two more places to clean today.”
“I’ll make it quick,” Aimee said, stepping inside. “For your help,
The woman moved back reluctantly.
Thank God they hadn’t started in Romain Figeac’s writing room yet.
Aimee walked into the tall-windowed room, closed the door, and locked it with the key Christian had used. Pulling on latex gloves from her backpack, she found her Swiss Army knife and surveyed the room.
No bookshelves lined with books. No photos. No announcements tacked on the wall. Not even old mail or torn envelopes. Just a
She opened the desk’s only drawer. Full of off-white, thick vellum paper.
Blank.
On the desktop lay a wooden pen and an assortment of nibs by a bottle of
She looked closer. Under the Tallimard logo, a line read, “From the desk of Alain Vigot,
Fresnes was the prison where Jutta said her mother had been held!
She didn’t know its significance but she folded the paper and stuck it in her backpack.
If Romain Figeac wrote in ink, then transcribed it on the typewriter, where were the boxes of his work—as well as newspaper clippings, photos, or research notes? Where would Idrissa have put them?
She got on her hands and knees and went over the sloping wood floor looking for a floor safe.
Nothing but dust and cracks in the honey-colored parquet.
The floor creaked every time she moved. No wonder Christian Figeac heard noises. Or thought he did.
Dust motes flickered in the fading light slanting through the windows. She knew she was missing something. What, she didn’t know.
She sat in the desk chair, an old leather one. Then put her head down on the desk. She measured from that point to the red-brown bloodstain smudged on the wallpaper. At least a meter and a half.
She knelt. With her Swiss Army knife she cut away a long rectangle of the bloodstained floral wallpaper from the recess bordering the door frame. She peeled it down to the baseboard. Another layer of smudged wallpaper, older and with a faded blue striped pattern, emerged. The bloodstain was fainter.
She cut into the faded stripes, peeled off a section, and found an older layer with dense clusters of roses. Quaint, turn of the century.
Dark red blood splatters had even soaked into this old-fashioned rose wallpaper. Not only gruesome, she thought, but odd.
Carefully, she pulled the wallpaper down to the baseboard and pried loose the edge.
A dark red congealed clump had seeped down. She sat back; she really didn’t want to do this. Jutta Hald’s face flashed before her.
A faint metallic odor came from the dried, encrusted blood. She scraped up a sample, took a glue stick from her bag, and rubbed it over the wallpaper. She pasted each layer, except for the old-fashioned roses, back on and smoothed them over.
Still on her knees, she checked the creaking parquet floor. At the tall window, the rooftops of the Sentier spread before her, squat chimneys, impossibly angled rooflines, and bricked-up windows opposite.
Doubtful if anyone could see in.
She traced her gloved fingers over the cold glass windowpanes. Felt in the grooves where glass was framed by metal. Something hard was stuck between the glass and metal.
She wedged it out, fingered it.
A small ivory bone fragment.
She turned the fragment over in her palm. Curved and with jagged lines, like a river seen from space.
She felt around more. Near where the metal joined the floor was another bone bit.
Apprehension came over her. What gun had sufficient force to scatter bone this far?
She’d come here looking for clues about her mother. And they were here somewhere. But if Romain Figeac was a suicide, she was his onetime neighbor Madame du Barry.
The door rattled as the knob turned.
“Mademoiselle, we have to clean in here!”
Aimee scanned the room again, wondering where the writer’s files could be kept.
“Open up at once or I’m calling the agent!”
She slipped the bone fragments, the wallpaper sample, and then her gloves into a Baggie. Time to get out of here.
The cleaning woman shook her fist, but Aimee was out the door and bidding her
“SO YOU’VE joined the big boys now, eh, Serge? Working on a Sunday?” Aimee said, dumping the Baggie on the Institut Medico-Legal’s stainless steel counter. “Congratulations!”
Serge Leaud, with his rosy cheeks and trimmed beard, appeared too dapper to be a pathologist. He looked up from his microscope. “At least I don’t have to run from Belleville to Quai des Orfevres! They saddled me with the blood inquiries.”
From Leaud’s window, distant pinpricks of light could be seen twinkling on the quai. The muffled clatter of the Metro as it crossed Pont d’Austerlitz reached them in the white-tiled lab. Arctic air-conditioning brought goose bumps to Aimee’s arms.
“Seems I’ll never live down that Luminol case in the Marais,” he said.
“You’re a world authority on Luminol now … why would you want to?” she asked, gesturing around the lab. The high-powered microscopes and microtomes for tissue sectioning were impressive.
“I’d like to see my twins once in a while. My wife says they’ve forgotten how to say Papa.” He grinned, setting down long-handled tweezers. “But something tells me this isn’t a social call.”
Aimee was about to reply when a posse strode into the adjoining waiting room, three big-shouldered men in black suits.
Aimee grabbed a physician’s lab coat, slipped it on, and set the Baggie on a glass specimen tray. “I need your help, Serge.”
The men burst through the lab doors. Only Renseignements Generaux, an intelligence-gathering arm of the Interior Ministry linked to the police, entered the morgue’s lab like that.
“Gentlemen, we’re wrapping up a minor detail before I finish your report….”
“We’ll wait, Dr. Leaud,” interrupted the biggest one. He had a headful of curly red hair and thick lips parted in a smile. “No pressure, you understand, of course. Our report goes to the Quai des Orfevres.” His grin widened and he glanced pointedly at his wristwatch. “Within the hour, you understand. Priorities. But don’t rush on our account.”
Priorities my
