Murder in Saint Germain Read online

  He was spying on his colleagues, and he thought he’d enlist her? As if she would jeopardize her contract. “Désolée, Professor, but I cannot help you. Email is private.”

  “I assure you it’s not,” Dechard said. “This is a Ministry of Culture–funded institution. Any correspondence undertaken under the school’s name should be free and available to the public.”

  Aimée thought about that. She wasn’t sure what he said was correct, but she was sure taking a private contract to hack staff members’ emails for another staff member would cause her nothing but trouble.

  “I’d like to help you, but . . .”

  “You’re worried you’d get in trouble. But I guarantee that won’t happen. Sybille, the directrice, recommended I ask you to help with this. She’s my sister-in-law. Besides, nothing I’m asking for would violate ethical considerations.”

  Aimée hesitated. “If Sybille suggested I do this, she should ask me herself.”

  “Check with her to verify if you must,” Dechard said. “But please be discreet. Tell no one but Sybille.”

  The wad of money would probably cover childcare, the office rent, for months. Maybe even a few days away on vacances. If Sybille approved, how could Aimée say no? But something about this felt off to her. Why was Dechard so insistent on secrecy? What was he hoping to find evidence of? Usually these types of jobs involved an extramarital affair, or some other love-life indiscretion. Was Dechard married? He didn’t wear a ring. Or was this something else entirely? A rivalry with another faculty member? She’d heard academia was cutthroat.

  She’d talk it over with René—they’d return Dechard’s money if they had to.

  “I’ll see what I can find,” she said.

  In the early evening, Aimée stepped out onto the narrow street leading away from the Seine. The heat had barely cooled even as the shadows of the seventeenth-century building lengthened. No taxi in sight and a scorching three blocks to the Métro. Forget the bus with traffic at a standstill. Only a ten-minute walk if she hurried through the Left Bank. But before she could even cross the street, the sky opened. Late July was nothing but heat, showers, and tourists here in Saint-Germain.

  She ducked back under the glass marquise awning. Above her, rain drummed in three-quarter time. She belted her trench coat and debated unfurling the umbrella to battle the sheeting warm rain. Mais, non. Caught, she’d wait it out.

  Aimée’s grandfather Claude used to complain the Saint-Germain he knew in the old days had disappeared. It had tipped beyond the reach of the working class, the students and artists who used to populate the quartier. She knew Oscar Wilde had died in a fleabag hotel near the school, penniless and alone, rumored uttering the line “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.” Today the fleabag was a boutique hotel, and the streets surrounding it were chock-full of antiquaries, art galleries, and prestigious publishing houses. Claude had been in love with an artist’s model who had posed at the École des Beaux-Arts—before he’d met Aimée’s grand-mère, he’d assured her—and his nostalgia for that time had colored his thoughts, she suspected. Saint-Germain was a shadow of its storied past, her grand-père would tell her, a far cry from what it had been when Delacroix, Picasso, and Manet had lived here. Café les Deux Magots, where de Beauvoir and Sartre once wrote all day nursing a single coffee, had quadrupled its prices for tourists.

  Still, in her time here back when she was a premed student, she’d loved Saint-Germain’s bustling street life. The tiny art-house cinemas, the rue de Buci market, the bistros, the old cellar jazz clubs that closed at dawn. Change was inevitable, and Saint-Germain mixed old and new—like where the surviving fragments of a twelfth-century wall built by King Philippe Auguste had been repurposed into part of a parking garage.

  As quickly as it had begun, the rain stopped. She started down rue Bonaparte and paused, startled to see a familiar face beckoning her from a café tabac doorway.

  Suzanne Lesage—Melac’s former undercover partner, head of an elite undercover counterterrorism squad. Suzanne, blonde and fit, had always looked sharp, and today’s outfit proved no exception: flared gaucho pants, a crop top, metallic sandals, and gold hoop earrings. Usually dry and cool as a cucumber, Suzanne had rings under her eyes.

  “Quelle surprise,” said Aimée. “So you just happen to be on rue Bonaparte?”

  There was no such thing as a coincidence with top cops like Suzanne.

  “I see you’re back in shape after your bébé,” said Suzanne, kissing Aimée on both cheeks—the customary bisous.

  “Chloé’s eight months now. Got one more kilo to lose,” said Aimée, ruing the previous day’s tarte aux abricots at the pâtisserie. Despite the shadows under her eyes, Suzanne’s face, makeup free apart from red lipstick, looked fresher than her own in the humidity. Aimée’s mascara had clumped in the heat, her eyelashes sticking when she blinked.

  “Your partner told me you’d be here, Aimée. Working at École des Beaux-Arts.”

  Her partner René?

  “He said you’d be delighted to offer assistance in an investigation.”

  The traitor.

  “Un café?” Suzanne gestured to her table inside.

  Acid roiled in Aimée’s stomach. She hoped she wasn’t getting mixed up in another sting operation.

  Suzanne ordered, then lasered in on Aimée. “Do you remember that favor I did for you, Aimée?”

  Aimée nodded. Her heart pounded. What was Suzanne about to ask her to do?

  “I’m calling it in, Aimée. You owe me.”

  Join the club, she almost said. Juggling work and childcare demanded all the favors she could call in and then some. Still, Suzanne had helped her out when she’d been desperate—Suzanne had used her professional connections and put her own career on the line to help Aimée track down a kidnapper when Zazie, the daughter of the proprietor of the café below Aimée’s office, had gone missing.

  “Of course, Suzanne.” Wary, Aimée wondered what she was agreeing to.

  “This is strictly between us, comprends?” Suzanne checked her phone. “I trust you, but I can trust no one else right now.” Then her face broke into a small grin. “Plus I know where you live. Un moment. I’ve got to take this call.”

  While Suzanne paced in the street on her cell phone, Aimée plopped two brown sugar cubes in her demitasse. She stirred, uneasy, wondering what this was about. In the mist, a bus pulled up down the street, disgorging dry passengers who were promptly replaced by damp ones. She inhaled the scent of Saint-Germain: a whiff of perfume from passersby, cigarette smoke, the smell of butter wafting from a boulangerie.

  Suzanne sat back down. Thin lines creased the bridge of her nose. “Alors, it’s crazy right now. I’ve been called in; a car’s going to pick me up in five minutes. So I’ll make this quick. I need your help.”

  Aimée nodded. “Why the cloak-and-dagger?”

  “No one must know we’ve talked. It’s off the book, Aimée.”

  “Unofficial?”

  Suzanne looked around. “I’m not speaking to you as an officer now. I’m another mother, okay?” She leaned over the café table. Her thick, stylishly blunt-cut hair swung over her shoulders. “Last night I stopped at my local café tabac to get my Loto ticket, like I do every Monday.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “I saw him, Aimée, in line at the counter.” Her hand twitched on the demitasse handle. Aimée realized Suzanne was shaking.

  “Saw who?”

  “I saw a ghost.”

  Tuesday, Early Evening

  “A ghost?” asked Aimée. “Explain.”

  Suzanne was rational, practical, a highly trained operative. A woman Aimée respected. A woman who was right now casting furtive glances behind her.

  “Last year my unit was part of an international team of military personnel and advisors. We were put together by The Hague and headed by a big-shot Dutch prosecutor
, Isabelle Ideler. We were sent to Foča in Bosnia to work with the local Bosnian force,” said Suzanne, her voice low. “Our mandate was to assist in arrests of fugitive warlords. We were operating under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY.”

  “Alors, Suzanne, let me pull the reins in on this right now,” said Aimée. “I do computer security, not international crime—”

  “Hear me out,” said Suzanne. “In a few minutes, a car’s picking me up and taking me to Lyon to give a report to Interpol.”

  “Won’t you find better help than I can give there, Suzanne?”

  “Non, the report’s unconnected.” Suzanne gave a dismissive wave. “Attends. My team had sealed indictments empowering us to bring to justice war criminals who committed atrocities during systematic ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian War. We’re talking war crimes. Massacres.”

  Aimée blinked. “The Bosnian War? Wasn’t that over three years ago? I thought there was a peace accord.”

  A bitter laugh. “Bosnia’s the wild west. A lot of war criminals are still in hiding. Some of them have been camped out in remote villages for years. And now, with the war in Kosovo, all the unrest and the massacres, the old warlords are making a fortune off of the conflict, smuggling arms, you name it.” Suzanne shook her head, her eyes dark. “Aimée, you cannot imagine what it’s like there. We were sent to Foča, a remote town surrounded by dense forest, accessible only by winding roads. It was the site of some of the worst ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian War. On Milošević’s orders Serbian forces had destroyed mosques, burned villages, tortured men, and tossed their bodies into the river. These animals used little Muslim girls as sex slaves and forced their grandmothers to watch.” Suzanne paused. Her nervous fingers balled up a sugar wrapper. “We were there when they were exhuming the bodies from one of the mass graves. That day’s burned into my brain.” Suzanne stopped again and took a breath. Her eyes closed. “The tiny bodies of young girls, raped, then shot. All piled together—and their parents who had watched them be murdered . . . Horrific.”

  Aimée sucked in her breath. “Terrible. Yet why tell me?”

  Suzanne gripped Aimée’s wrist, pulled her close. “Aimée, let me finish. We’d made no headway in tracking down one of our targets in Foča, a Serbian thug. Finally, we managed to wheedle a tip from a survivor. Those animals were so cocky, thinking they could hide near the scene of their crimes. Isabelle—that’s the prosecutor—she insisted we had to do it by the book. The ICTY needed a proper arrest for the indictment to stick. So we bided our time, got the Bosnians to issue the warrant, set up the perfect textbook house raid. Somehow they smelled us. They opened fire, riddled our car with bullets, killed my bodyguard. Two of them holed up in a tunnel. A grenade went off—one of ours. No one in the tunnel could have survived the explosion. Our mission was aborted. The NATO ground crew collected the remains for DNA samples.”

  Suzanne opened her bag, pulled out an envelope, and slipped it across the table to Aimée. “Mirko Vladić. The one responsible for those little girls in the pit. I saw body parts being dragged out of the tunnel. His body parts.”

  Aimée sipped her espresso, willing the sweet jolt to dispel the bile in her throat. “So this man was killed in the explosion.” She studied the photo on an ICTY document from the envelope. A grainy black-and-white head shot of a mustached man, early thirties, Slavic cheekbones, nothing that stood out, except for the eyes. The flat, dead gaze of a killer. The next photo showed a bombed-out cluster of charred stones and wood beams, a partial view of a cobbled street torn up by a bomb crater. It was strewn with kitchen utensils; in the middle, a birdcage lay on its side. “I still don’t understand why you need me.”

  “Last night I saw Mirko Vladić in the café buying cigarettes. Around twenty after eight. Mirko Vladić, the butcher of Foča. The war criminal I surveilled. I’d know him anywhere.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “He survived,” said Suzanne. Her voice quavered. “The man I thought was dead. Who we were mandated to capture. Bring to trial.”

  Aimée controlled her disbelief with effort. Tried to be rational. “Attends, didn’t you just tell me you saw his body taken away after the explosion?” None of this made sense. “Back up. Why were you even in Bosnia? You’re based in Paris.”

  “I just returned from a year’s posting in The Hague,” Suzanne said. “Paul”—her husband—“is doing a term as a legal advisor in the Hague Tribunal—it was a career move for him. The brigade got me a position on secondment to ICTY’s war crimes investigative unit. We put our girls in the local Dutch schools. I worked with that team until the case fell apart.”

  “Suzanne, you must have mistaken someone else for this man. It’s just someone who looks similar.”

  Suzanne shook her head. “You know how surveillance works—I knew everything about him, how he walked, how he moved, every hair on his head.”

  Aimée respected Suzanne’s skills too much to truly doubt her. But why would a supposedly dead Serbian war criminal be here in Paris? “Okay, let’s say there is a chance this Mirko got away in the skirmish—it was chaotic, right?” said Aimée. “Shouldn’t you report this to the ICTY? Isn’t this their investigation?”

  “I have no proof.” Suzanne glanced at her phone, which was vibrating on the marble-topped table. “I’m going to talk to a contact at Interpol. But meanwhile, my own team doesn’t believe me. My boss has put me on desk duty,” she said, her tone grimly sarcastic.

  “You told your boss you saw this man?”

  “He called me crazy. Ordered me to back off. And now he’s breathing down my neck about this report. Scrutinizing my every move to see if I’ve lost it. If I don’t watch it, they’re going to send me for posttrauma psych evaluation.”

  Aimée felt a rush of sympathy for Suzanne. There were so few women who’d reached her position in the field, and they always had to be twice as good as men. Especially in the competitive crème de la crème squads.

  “Aimée, I admit it’s shaken me up. I’d had a long day when I got to the café tabac. I was tired, dropped my purse, and coins scattered everywhere on the floor. People bent down to help pick them up, but one man didn’t. That’s why I noticed him. By the time I had registered who he was, he’d gone.”

  Aimée wondered what more she could say, went back to the most logical explanation. “You said yourself it had been a long day. What if it’s a case of mistaking this person for Mirko, Suzanne?”

  “I can’t get it out of my mind,” said Suzanne, her tone intent. “After dinner I got online to check the ICTY investigations database. Mirko’s listed as presumed dead. No DNA proof to match. And the arrest order’s void. I printed out his picture. That’s when I knew for sure.” She reached over the table and grasped Aimée’s wrist hard. “It was him, Aimée.”

  Uneasy, Aimée looked around. “But Paul—what did he say?”

  “Like I could tell him. He’d just worry. He’s working in Nantes this week. There’s nothing he could do to help. I queried the ICTY to check for any reports or updated sightings, et cetera. But sometimes they don’t update everything, so I emailed two of my old team members.”

  “Et alors?”

  “Isabelle hasn’t replied. The other couldn’t tell me anything new. I’m not sure how or in what capacity they’re still involved in sealed indictment cases.”

  “Suzanne, okay, say Mirko survived. Somehow. How could a wanted man travel across several countries?”

  “Search me.”

  “You think he came after you personally? Why not in disguise?”

  Suzanne shrugged. “Sloppy technique? Arrogance? He’s a thug. He talks with guns. He’s not a finesse criminal.”

  “And he just walks into your local café . . . Did he see you?”

  “I don’t know.” Suzanne’s hands rattled the demitasse, clacking the sauce
r. Dark tan foam spilled.

  He’d gotten under her skin; Aimée could tell.

  Suzanne tossed back her espresso. “Aimée, it’s those girls. I can’t get them out of my head.” She raked back her hair with one hand. “No one’s being prosecuted for the crimes that were done to them.” She gripped Aimée’s hand tight. “One of those girls was just about eight years old, the same age as my Hélène. They practically tore her in two. Dead but still holding her doll.” Her lip quivered. “Sick doesn’t describe it. He’s an animal. You’ve got a daughter, Aimée. Wouldn’t you want this animal caught?”

  Chloé’s rosebud mouth flashed through Aimée’s mind. Her trusting grey-blue eyes.

  “I can’t open an investigation because the case is closed, and jurisdiction resides in another country,” Suzanne said. “Interpol can, if they listen. But the justice system’s too good for these men. I should have put a bullet in his skull. If the ghost is here, I need to finish the job we were sent to do.”

  Suzanne dropped a ten-franc note on the table as a black car pulled up in front of the café. She nodded to the driver, who’d stepped out. “I can’t let this go until I know you’ll help, Aimée. I called in favors for you last time. Big favors.”

  She owed Suzanne. “What can I do?” said Aimée, hesitant. “I’m not a trained operative.”

  “That’s better. No one knows you. You don’t have restrictions like we do.”

  Aimée’s heel stuck to a gummy spot under the table. “What do you mean?”

  “Do what you do best,” said Suzanne. “Use your imagination. Snoop around. I need you to find proof that he’s here.”

  In her spare time? She had an eight-month-old, a babysitter going on vacation, a business to run.

  “I know I’m asking a lot,” said Suzanne. “But no one knows you. There’s no connection between us. I’m back in two days.” Suzanne’s gaze bored into Aimée. “Find out what you can, and I’ll take it from there.”