TUESDAY MORNING, 11 MAY
Rain thundered on the roof of the car. Like a frantic heart, the wipers beat their rhythm across the windshield, thudding at the bottom of their arc, squealing on the return. Christophe slowed. It had just gone six in the morning, but it was as dark as night and almost impossible to see. His headlights illuminated dancing puddles in the road immediately before him but scarcely penetrated the heavy sheets of rain that drifted diagonally across his view. Finally, he pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. He sat for a moment, staring out into the moving wall of water. Fumbling above his head, he flicked on the interior light of the car. A newspaper lay on the passenger seat, folded to expose the morning’s headlines: Beast Strikes Again? He opened the paper and scanned the front page to read again the part that had so disturbed him: “… An unidentified Canadian woman who was with the deceased prior to his death was questioned and released … dined with Fournier and discussed a business matter, claimed to have left him alive and well … treating the case as a suspicious death …”
With a rush of anxiety that made him almost nauseated, Christophe crumpled the paper into a ball. If he had foreseen the ghastly way things would turn out, he would never have involved Mara, would never have engaged that cunning bastard Jean-Claude. But now, even if Jean-Claude was no longer in a position to talk, Mara had seen him prior to his death, had discussed with him a “business matter.” Which meant that the two of them had probably been in it together. Or at least that there was a risk that Jean-Claude had told her everything.
You can’t be sure of that, a voice in his head reasoned. But can you take the chance? another voice, the voice of the eye, argued. If Mara had the information, what would she do with it? What could she not do with it? Christophe stared into the rearview mirror. His left eye, the yellow one, looked slyly back at him. You must, both voices rang out at once, stop her from talking. With a groan, he plunged his face into hands that he no longer recognized as his own.