Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

“What time did he leave the last message?”

Coulade checked the pile of pink message slips on his desk. “Looks like five P.M.”

“Did he mention Becquerel?”

Coulade shook his head.

There was a knock on the office door.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said.

Aimee looked around the office. Sparse. Only one computer, on Coulade’s desk. Her heart sank.

“Didn’t Pascal work on a computer?”

“His laptop,” Coulade said. “Refused to use these antiquated ones the department furnishes. But he kept his at home, I think.”

He ushered her out and locked the door behind them. His footsteps beat a quick tattoo down the drafty hall toward a crowd of waiting students.

What wasn’t he telling her, she wondered. She waited until he turned the corner, reached in her bag and took out her lock-picking kit. Into the old-fashioned door lock, she inserted the snake rake, then the W pick, and jiggered the mechanism. She heard the tumbler turn.

“Mademoiselle?” a voice called from the hall.

She whipped around, keeping her back to the door and her hand on the lock picks.

An older woman, her hair in a bun held in place with a pencil, waved at her. “Professor Coulade’s received an urgent message.”

Aimee smiled. “If you hurry you’ll catch him. Left at the end of the hall.”

The woman clucked like a hen. “If it’s not one thing, it’s the other. We’re swamped. I don’t suppose you could bring him the message?”

“Desolee, Madame, I’m en route to the archives,” she said.

The woman’s ample bosom heaved, perspiration beaded her brow. She shrugged, then hurried past Aimee.

After the woman’s footsteps faded, Aimee turned the knob, removed the wires, and entered the office. That done, she reinserted the wires and locked the office from inside.

She needed to hunt for this green dossier.

But Coulade’s computer screen blipped. A swirling desktop image of a trebuchet, the medieval slingshot-like weapon used to hurl boulders at fortified battlements, floated across it. In his hurry Coulade hadn’t logged out. She hit the cursor. Apparently he didn’t have time to organize his files. There was data info all over the screen. A bonanza.

The key turned in the lock. Merde! Coulade had come back.

She depressed the key combination to store his log-in, then dove under Pascal’s metal-frame desk at the end of the narrow office.

Not a moment too soon.

“Everything’s handled,” Coulade was saying. “We’ll shift assignments, I found a substitute—”

A woman’s voice broke in. “Professor Coulade, the last exam’s begun. The departmental guidelines outline specific procedures.”

Aimee pulled at her sweater, which was bunching up her back in the cramped space. Her hands were coated in dust. At least the desk panel hid her from view. She wished she could hear their conversation better.

“But my mother-in-law suffered a heart attack.” Coulade opened his desk drawers.

“What can you do for her at the hospital?” The woman’s tone indicated his duty was here to the students.

Aimee agreed. She’d never understood the clannishness of French families. Perhaps because she’d only known it from the outside.

“If the department questions or invalidates the exam procedures, the students will have to postpone until a retake next semester,” the woman pleaded. “We can reschedule the evening symposium session, but—”

“If none of this had happened …” Coulade’s words trailed away.

As if he blamed his murdered colleague for the inconvenience.

“Jean-Luc’s substituting, thank God,” he said. “He’s more qualified than I am. A grande ecole graduate and friend of Samour. No problem. I confirmed with the registrar.”

“But Professor Coulade—”

“Madame Izzy, for the tenth time, I’m part-time, not a professor, and all of this takes too much time from my family. My wife’s distraught.”

Or did Coulade want to distance himself from the murder, the complications?

Aimee heard the trilling of a cell phone.

“Oui?” Coulade’s voice rose. “But you don’t mean … I’ll try.”

Then the shuffling of feet as they left the office. The light switch flicked off and the office plunged in darkness, and the lock clicked. She didn’t have much time to trawl Coulade’s desktop for a misnamed file. She hoped, since Samour suspected danger, he’d have sent this file to an unsuspecting Coulade. Made a backup.

Coulade’s password prompt yielded to her keystrokes, and seconds later his swirling screen saver appeared: Engineering Tech. Slide Rule. Calculation Theorems.

In the heated office, which now felt stifling, she rolled up her sweater sleeves higher and pulled out discs from her bag. The heat made her sleepy. She needed an espresso, but there was no machine in the sparse office. Trying to stay alert, she inserted a disc and let the machine go to work copying the data. Later, Saj could weed through the program for a link to Pascal.

Now to Samour’s metal desk, which was cluttered with administrative memos, requisition lab slip receipts, and student papers. She picked his locked desk drawers to find more of the same. No laptop. Nothing to do with the museum holdings.

Frustrated, she searched his bookcases, documents, the blue files. Engineering manuals, phone books. Nothing interesting, until she found a frayed leather volume, nineteenth-century by the look of it, entitled Guilds in the 14th Century.

Had Samour meant this, she wondered, leafing through the gilt-edged, tissue-thin pages. A bookmark inside bore the logo of the occult bookstore on rue aux Ours.

She stuffed it in her bag, glancing at the time.

There was a click and whir as the copied disc ejected. She slipped in the second disc, which installed a spyware tracking bug. Hoped to God it worked as fast as Rene promised it could.

Her cell phone rang in her pocket. Quickly she hit mute. She debated not answering it, but Prevost’s number showed.

“Mademoiselle Leduc. You left me a message?”

“Oui.” She stepped to the back of the office, lowered her voice. She needed an excuse to discover more about his investigation. “I’ve remembered something.”

“Un moment,” Prevost said. She heard rustling, what sounded like his hand over the receiver.

In the meantime, she checked Coulade’s computer. A long moment until INSTALLATION COMPLETE popped on the screen. She hit eject. Another whir as the second disc popped. She scooped them both in her bag.

“Mademoiselle?” Prevost was back on the line.

“Doesn’t procedure dictate the Brigade Criminelle handle Samour’s murder?” she asked. From the crime report on Demontellan’s desk at the prefecture, she knew Prevost had inserted himself in the investigation. But why? She wanted to know more.

“Who says they’re not, Mademoiselle Leduc? For now you deal with me as chef de groupe of Police Judiciaire. Things have come up,” he said, suddenly hurried. “I don’t have time. Come at seven to the commissariat.”

She checked her Tintin watch. More than an hour. Almost enough time, if she left now, to check out Samour’s apartment and visit the museum.

The line buzzed. He’d hung up. Great.

Minutes later she strode down the overheated hallway. Students blocked the corridor, grumbling over the late-afternoon symposium postponement. Near the open door of the back exit, several students wearing parkas