“It’s Aimee Leduc, I have several messages on my phone.”
“Our patient, Laure Rousseau, is agitated. It seems she’s trying to get a message to you. She’s able to use a keyboard.”
Was Laure OK? Trying to communicate with her?
In the background Aimee heard a garbled noise.
“She can’t speak, but she can tap letters and numbers on a keyboard.”
“What has she said—I mean, tapped?” Aimee asked, wishing the nurse would hurry.
“Your name, number, and what looks like, ‘Remember . . . men saying Breton.’ That’s all.”
“Men on the roof? Ask her if it was the men on the roof.
Please, nurse.”
Aimee heard the nurse ask.
“She blinked yes.”
Laure had remembered something from the roof.
“Does she mean Bretonneau, the hospital?”
“She looks tired—”
“Please, it’s vital. Ask her,” Aimee said, trying not to shout.
“Yes. She tapped yes.”
“Tell Laure I’m en route.”
She stuck her cell phone in her pocket.
“Is Conari behind it?” Lucien asked.
“Things point to him but I’m not sure.” She had doubts. Yet he could use Lucien’s music contract to launder arms money. He had Corsican contacts and a construction company. But his ties to the government, evidenced by the man from the Ministry they’d seen with him at the church, confused her.
“Let’s find out.”
TOO BAD she hadn’t looked closer at the construction trucks parked inside the Hopital Bretonneau courtyard. “Conari Ltd.” was painted on them. It all fit together. The place had been vacant for six years, since 1989, according to the demolition permit on the wall. The year Jubert said her father had been given a contract to work on the stolen arms case.
She had been careless and now it would cost her. Again. No time to think of that. She had to get inside. They climbed over the locked gate, past the squat, which was dark and partly boarded up. She punched in Morbier’s number.
Busy.
She had to reach him. Tried again. Gravel crunched from a side building.
She tried another number.
“Rene? No secrets, right? I need your help.”
“Aimee?” he said, his voice sleepy.
“Call Morbier, keep trying to get him to alert the
“What? Why?”
“I’m at the Hopital Bretonneau in Montmartre, by the cemetery,” she said, breathing fast. “There’s an Armata Corsa arms cache underneath it, somewhere in the tunnel past the squat. No DST or RG. Make sure Morbier understands. Just the
She heard a clinking, like keys, over the phone.
“Hold on,” he said, awake now. “Wait right where you are until I get hold of Morbier, Aimee.”
“I can’t. I have to settle some business.”
“Business. You’re crazy! Does it have anything to do with clearing Laure?”
“Everything. Jacques’s killers are inside. I promised her I’d nail them. One more thing. Call Chez Ammad, the bar on rue Veron, and ask for the bricklayer, Theo. Find out from him which day Dumpsters by his building site on rue Andre Antoine are emptied.”
“Eh, a Theo . . .?”
“Please, Rene,
She clicked off before he could protest further.
In the shadows, Lucien pulled her close. She could see the mist of his breath in the cold air. He cupped her chin with his warm hands. A silhouette of black curls ringed his face.
“What did you mean? Is Conari inside?” he asked.
“He’ll use your contract as a way to launder money from gun sales,” she said. “He’s been providing arms, for a price, to those who made bomb threats under the guise of the Corsican Separatist movement.”
Lucien’s grip stiffened. “How can you be sure?”
“It’s a theory; you have to test it, eh, like a scientist? Use the empirical method and find out.”
In this instance, barge right in and hope to God her hunch was right. At least partly right. Whoever handled the stolen arms had to be stopped. She figured Jacques had been trying to do so. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have involved Laure.
Clouds obscured the moon; a single street lamp glowed over the cemetery wall. Cold air cloaked her legs. In the rafters above them, a nest of pigeons fluttered and cooed, disturbed by their noise.
“I need a sign,” he said.
“What? You’re worried about the evil eye?”
Before he could answer, she kissed him hard. Long. Her lips melting on his. Responding, his arms crushed her to him.
She pulled back and caught her breath. “Will that do?”
Silence except for the backfire of a car.
“For now.”
Did she hear amusement in his voice?
“Over there,” Lucien said, pointing to a crumbling brick building, a diffused light now radiating through the barred windows. “Careful, there’s someone there.”
She saw the orange tip of a cigarette and nodded. They crept toward the building’s sagging brick pavilion, careful to step around the gravel and wood piled by the trucks. Lucien had hitched his music case onto his back. He edged ahead. She heard a loud thump and an
Lucien had caught the
“Nice touch,” she said. Testing a hunch with a strong guy at her side wasn’t a bad idea, though she’d never admit it to him.
Only one guard? Why not more? Unless the rest . . . .
“You have a plan?” he asked.
She nodded. “We take them by surprise. Figure out where the arms shipments leave from and barricade it.”
Lucien shifted the scuffed metal door, slid it open, and she followed him inside the half-gutted building, past concrete mixers and old hospital gurneys turned on their sides. She flashed her penlight around them. No holes or openings leading to a tunnel. Just broken light fixtures, piles of crumbled lath and plaster, an old crucifix tilted against the remnant of a sagging green wall. Had she got it wrong?
She kept going, past exposed brick and arched iron beams. Saw a yellowish glow ahead. Plastic construction tape labeled DANGER WORK SITE UNSAFE STRUCTURE hung from wooden sawhorses.
She reached for her spray can of Mace and with her other hand picked up a metal rod. And felt herself sinking. “Lucien!” she called. But the only answer was the cracking of floor boards and the swoosh of shifting grains of sand. Under her feet, the floor was tilting, crumbling, throwing her off balance. Petrified, she grabbed for something, anything, as the floor gave way under her. Her hands came back covered with grit and tangled in an electric cord. And then she was dangling in cold air, swinging, her knees hitting against heaps of dull white stones. She heard the loud rumbling of a generator and saw the hewed-gypsum-walled cavern floor far below.
