AL05 - Murder in Clichy

“Any reason you don’t answer your phone, Regnier?”

“Did you call with good news for me?” Regnier’s aftershave bothered her. It smelled cheap and metallic. The accordion pleated gate closed and the elevator juddered upward.

“My partner’s been kidnapped. The captor’s threatening to dismember him. Believe me, if I knew where the jade was—”

“I’d be the first to know, Mademoiselle Leduc?” he said. “I hope that’s what you were about to say.”

Had he kidnapped Rene? She watched his dull black eyes, saw no quiver of response.

“I’m sure you want to help me now.” He hit the out of service button. The elevator halted with a jerk. Her spine tingled. Up close she saw the threads in his overcoat.

Then he leaned closer, and whispered in her ear, “You’re under surveillance.”

First Tessier and now Regnier, but it didn’t make sense for him to warn her. He’d ransacked her apartment.

“By who?”

“We’re not all what we seem,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Was she a pawn in someone else’s power play?

He lifted her chin with his cold hands, so he could see her face.

Only then did she realize that she’d lowered her head and remembered how he’d stared at her on the quai. And that she had seen the butterscotch-colored button in his ear.

“How long have you been deaf?” Aimee asked.

His mouth twisted in a sad grin. “Long enough. Mine is only a tonal deafness at low range decibels.”

Was this a crack in his tough-guy facade? Aimee heard a buzzing sound and his finger shot up, adjusting the clip behind his ear.

“So the RG uses you, like they used my father, Regnier,” she said. Could she play on his sympathy? “I can help you,” she said.

“If you help me find my partner.”

He stared at her. In the small elevator with him and his aftershave, she felt claustrophobic. But she knew she should play along with him.

“You have more resources than I do, Regnier,” she continued.

Then his hands circled her neck. Terrified, she stepped back, tried to loosen his thick fingers. How could she have misread him like that?

“Let go!” His grasp tightened. Nowhere to move. It was like before, when she had been attacked. All she knew were those hands squeezing her neck. Choking her. No air.

She kneed him hard in the groin. Hit the elevator service switch with her elbow, then the button. The elevator shuddered and descended, throwing him off balance. He cried out in pain, let go of her neck and knelt on the floor.

She pried the elevator door open.

“Eh bien! I’ve been waiting a long time,” said a disgruntled man, on the ground floor.

“It’s all yours.” She squeezed past him and ran into the street. She didn’t stop until she stood on the quai de la Megisserie, several blocks away. No Regnier in sight. She leaned on the stone bridge, her shoulders shaking and her breath fanning into the air in frosted puffs. How were Regnier and Pleyet involved?

She caught her breath. Lars would know, or he could find out. She walked to the Prefecture de Police, glad she’d kept her fake police ID updated, and entered the Statistics Bureau. The wide door stood ajar, pieces of plaster sprinkled everywhere. Her footsteps crunched across the floor. A man with a mask gestured toward a penciled sign.

Due to pipe refitting, Statistics temporarily in Batiment B, second floor cellar.

Several stairways later she found it. And her friend Lars Sorensen, who headed the Prefecture’s statistics department. Statistics, a broad term, provided Lars interdepartmental and interministerial access.

The makeshift office, once a vaulted medieval cellar, consisted of rows of metal file cabinets and several vacant desks. The burnt odor of metal soldering pervaded the office. A green beanbag pillow sat forgotten in the corner.

Lars, wearing army fatigues, leaned back on his chair and drank Orangina. She figured he’d come from the special training he did midweek outside Paris. His prominent jaw and punched in nose made him look like a prize fighter. “Do me a favor, Lars, check what these mecs des RG, Regnier and Pleyet, are working on,” Aimee said. “Like you, they could be in reserve special ops.”

“Moi?” Lars grinned. “Let me see. Every month each commissariat turns in a report, some big patron’s idea so we classify and subclassify them. Like we’ve got nothing else to do, eh? Besides get manicures, trim the commissaire’s ear hairs, and play skat!”

Her father had put up with Lars, pointing out not many could ferret the devil out of a hole like him. But she actively liked him. Lars was half Danish. But to hear him talk you’d think he’d been born and bred in Copenhagen, not lived in the working class district of Batignolles since infancy, now with a French wife and three children.

Lars searched in his files. The whine of a sander came from the hallway.

“You didn’t see this, okay? ”

She nodded.

Lars opened a creaking file cabinet, pulled a state-of-the-art Titanium laptop from inside, and powered it up.

“How old is Pleyet?” he asked, typing in his password.

She noted the last four digits Lars entered.

“Fifties, in good shape, with deep-set gray eyes that take everything in, like a hawk.”

“But that describes a lot of them.”

She remembered something. “Keloid scars on his right wrist.”

He scanned the report. “Did he tell you he was RG?” He rolled his eyes. ”More like Surveillance Circle Line.”

“Circle Line?” she asked. “What’s that? Regnier, too?”

“Regnier’s RG,” Lars said. “But, according to this, he’s under suspension.”

Her mouth dropped.

“Suspension? For what and since when?”

“Let’s see. . . .” Lars hit some keys. “Pretty generic, misappropriation of operating funds last June. The chief discovered it in September.” He clicked more keys, “On the ball, eh, your government fonctionnaires!”

So Regnier had gone rogue, but felt bold enough to threaten her. He had sniffed the jade. But how? And that didn’t explain Pleyet.

Aimee leaned over Lars’ desk. “What does Circle Line mean, Lars? How’s Pleyet involved, eh?”

For the first time she saw hesitation in his eyes. He shifted in his chair and the springs squeaked.

“Don’t ask me, Aimee, I can’t tell you.”

“Please, Lars.” She ran her hand through her damp hair.

“I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” he said. “Just rumors.”

“Hinting at what?”

Lars didn’t meet her gaze. A plume of sawdust shot up in the hallway.

“Lars, your papa and mine were friends. Why hold back? Pleyet was on the Place Vendome surveillance. He looked familiar but I never knew his name. Any of their names. They made sure of that. I want to know his background, at least.”

Lars looked away.

“It’s important to me, Lars.”

“Nothing in here concerns the past,” Lars said. “This comes from Special Branch. They don’t data entry old, failed missions. You know that.”

But she’d figured one thing out. “So this Special Branch Circle Line’s new?”

He nodded.

Wiretapping? But the RG had been doing that for years.