13

The morning was sunny and surprisingly warm for early spring. Gaetan Roussel’s lyrics flowed through Nico’s car. Roussel’s “Inside Outside,” a catchy acoustic-pop tune with a contemporary refrain, seemed to suit his mood.

In front of headquarters, two security officers in bulletproof vests stood guard as the red-and-white gate rose. Nico pulled into his parking spot. He walked through the interior courtyard and up Stairwell A to the fourth floor. He nodded to his secretary, Rachel.

“Professor Queneau wants to talk to you, Chief,” she said.

“Put a call through to him right away.”

“And your mother?”

“She was able to squeeze my hand last night. She’s doing better.”

He walked down the narrow corridor to his office. His phone was ringing before he even sat down.

“Professor Queneau? Chief Sirsky here.”

“It’s good to hear your voice. How is your mother?”

“I think we’re past the worst part. That’s my hope.”

“Good, Nico. I have the DNA analyses here. The skeleton is Jean-Baptiste Cassian’s.”

“Now we can close the preliminary report. While I have you on the phone, I suspect you’ll be asked to supervise the rest of the excavation.”

“You mean the rest of the tableau-piège is going to be dug up?”

“I don’t see how else this investigation can play out. I think Samuel Cassian is willing to work with us.”

“Okay, I’ll come up with a plan. Thanks for the heads-up.”

Michel Cohen came in without knocking. His cigar preceded him, and the white smoke, along with its unpleasant odor, filled the room. As usual, Nico refrained from saying anything. His superior’s authority, established by a legendary career, absolved him.

“I’ll be in touch with you later, Professor,” Nico said as he hung up.

Cohen was a short man whose dense features seemed to compensate for his lack of stature. He had bushy black hair and thick brows above penetrating eyes. His nose was large. Cohen was a man who made his presence known. He walked over to Nico’s desk and tossed a pile of newspapers on it.

“Check out the morning’s headlines,” he said.

“Security at the Parc de la Villette: fact or folly?” one of the tabloid headlines read. “Weeping in the City of Blood,” declared another headline. “The Butcher of Paris rises again,” read a third.

“The reporters are going to town with this,” Cohen said. “You know what I always say in these cases.”

Nico did know. “When the shit hits the fan, everyone gets splashed.”

“Wrap this Leroy thing up quickly.”

“That’s the plan.”

“As for the Cassian banquet, it looks like a long list of VIP guests and potential suspects. The chance one of them will cry foul is huge. So be careful going through everything. You know the deal: too many people at a party, not enough Champagne to go around, and then everyone’s on edge,” Cohen said. “Oh, and Nicole asked me if you needed to take a few days off.”

Police Commissioner Nicole Monthalet was looking out for him. Some people thought she was a bit cold, but it was hard to find a better cop and leader.

“She also said you could do the impossible, which right now means dealing with two murders, the excavation in the Parc de la Villette, and a mother in the hospital.”

“The impossible? That’s my middle name,” Nico said.

Cohen, his spiritual father and his protector, stared at him for a second. Then he winked—his typical gesture of encouragement.

“Perfect. Keep me updated.”

Nico nodded. Jean-Baptiste Cassian’s murderer and the Butcher of Paris for Anya’s life. Amen.

Commander Kriven handed Deputy Chief Jean-Marie Rost a coffee, and they walked down the hall to Nico’s office, greeting Michel Cohen, who was heading in the other direction. They were quieter than usual. Kriven wasn’t in the mood for bantering.

“Chief,” he said to Nico as they entered the office. The boss looked both of them over.

“Your hair’s all messed up,” he told Kriven with a smile.

“Didn’t sleep well,” Kriven said.

“Oh, really? I saw you taking pizza into Dominique’s office last night,” Rost said.

“We just talked.”

His late-night pizza dinner with Dominique Kreiss had lasted until four in the morning. It was more than conversation. Kreiss, the shrink, had hit him with some hard truths. Losing a child could tear a couple apart. He and his wife had failed to conceive another child after losing their first, and Kriven had quit trying. But Kreiss brought him around to his real feelings: he still loved Clara.

“You were up talking all night?” Rost asked.

“Yep,” Kriven said, focusing on Nico. “Lara Krall Weissman just came in. How should we deal with her?”

“I’m still catching up,” Nico said. “Take her up to the interview room. Jean-Marie? You can finish the preliminary report. Professor Queneau sent over the DNA results. It’s a match.”

“I’ll have it on your desk by the time the interview’s over.”

“Is Plassard still dealing with the VIPs involved with the tableau-piège?”

“Slaving away at it,” Kriven said.

The photos they had picked up at the Cassian apartment were spread on Nico’s desk.

“Have you looked over the names of Jean-Baptiste’s friends that Samuel Cassian added to your notebook?” Nico asked Kriven.

“I’m on it. I’ll have an update for you by the end of the morning.”

Nico held up a photo of Jean-Baptiste Cassian and Lara Krall, surrounded by their happy friends.

“That hammer might have been swung by a woman,” he said.

Climbing the stairs to the interview room, Nico skimmed over Kriven’s notes on Lara Krall. She lived on the Rue Dumont d’Urville in the sixteenth arrondissement, in a corner apartment by the Place des États-Unis. It probably had a view of the Square Thomas-Jefferson. She was married to Gregory Weissman and had taken his last name. He owned one of the largest recruiting firms in Paris, with branches in Lyon, Bordeaux, and Marseilles. She was a stay-at-home mother of two teenagers. She had come a long way since the École des Beaux-Arts.

The officer on duty ushered Nico in. He took care to look relaxed, as he didn’t want to unnerve the middle-aged woman who was a smiling girl in the photos he had just looked at.

“Mrs. Weissman, have you been followed the news? Have you read about the excavation of Samuel Cassian’s tableau-piège in the Parc de la Villette?”

“Yes, I’ve seen the stories,” she said, sounding wary.

“And you were engaged to his son, Jean-Baptiste?”

“Thirty years ago, yes.”

“Did you meet at the École des Beaux-Arts?”

“Yes, he was absolutely charming. I admired his talent.”

“What were you studying? Photography?”

“Sculpture,” she said, looking at her hands.

Nico sensed resignation.

“I stopped doing all that a long time ago,” she said. “I’m too busy with my family. There’s just no time.”

She was lying. Managing the lives of her husband and children couldn’t fill the void in her heart. Why had she stopped sculpting? Because Jean-Baptiste had disappeared? Or because she couldn’t stand doing it after she killed him and buried him in his father’s most acclaimed creation?

“And you’ve never wanted to go back to it?”

“It’s not my husband’s cup of tea, and that suits me.”

“So you lost both your fiancé and your art. Two parts of yourself. Is there anything left of your twenties?”

“What business is that of yours?” she asked abruptly.

“When he disappeared, Jean-Baptiste was surprisingly successful,” Nico said, ignoring her anger. “Both in Paris and in New York. It makes me wonder. People had to be jealous of his success. Without his father, he probably wouldn’t have catapulted to fame quite as easily.”

“There’s always backstabbing. But I was too young to pay any attention, and Jean-Baptiste had real talent. Nobody denied that. The art critics in New York praised him to heaven.”

“And you? Nothing in New York or Paris?”

“I had plenty of time ahead of me. That was what I felt.”

“But not now?”

“I just told you that I’m busy with other things.”

“Did Jean-Baptiste get along with his father?”

“With Samuel?” Lara Krall asked, puzzled. “He loved him! He wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. His dream was to have a career as rich and brilliant as Samuel’s. He just wanted his father to be proud of him.”

Nico set the pictures on the table. Lara winced.

“Who took these pictures of the group?”

“Daniel Vion. He’s not in any of the pictures, though. He didn’t like being in front of the camera.”

“Who are the friends around you?”

“These two are Jérôme Dufour and Michel Géko. To their right are Nathan Sellière and Sophie Bayle. Laurent Mercier and Camille Frot were seeing each other.”

Nico pulled out the portraits of Jean-Baptiste Cassian. Lara’s eyes grew wide. She started breathing quickly.

“What’s wrong?” Nico asked.

“Well… It’s just that… I haven’t seen him since… I put all that behind me, you know.”

“I understand. Were these taken by Daniel?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen these pictures.”

“They’re awfully intimate, don’t you think? I even thought you might have been the one who took them,” Nico said pointedly.

She sat up in her chair.

“Do you remember the day Jean-Baptiste disappeared?”

“We were planning to have dinner together at my studio, and he was going to spend the night. I waited, but he never came.”

“You must have been worried.”

She shrugged.

“Had he let you down like that before?” Nico asked. “Did you have reason to believe something was keeping him elsewhere?”

She pursed her lips.

“He was seeing someone else, wasn’t he?”

Lara sighed and looked down.

“How did you figure it out?” Nico asked.

“He didn’t seem to be attracted to me the way he was when we met. He wasn’t as excited when we made love. And it was less and less often.”

“That’s all?”

“There was one week when he seemed unusually secretive. He was nervous about my seeing him without his shirt on. Then I accidently went into the bathroom when he was there, and I found out why. He had a bite mark on his shoulder!”

Nico shuddered. A bite on the shoulder. An implicitly sexual act.

“I was livid. I wanted to know who the woman was.”

“Which of your friends was he sleeping with? Sophie or Camille? Someone else?”

“Neither of them! He swore that he could never touch another woman, that I was the only one, and that he loved me. He wanted to marry me. That wasn’t it.”

“Then what was it?”

“He said he had tried something else to experience different feelings.”

“What was this different experience?”

“A man.” Lara sighed again.

“A man?”

“Yes. I thought it was my fault. I wasn’t enough for him.”

“Who was this man?”

“Jean-Baptiste didn’t want to tell me. He swore that it was just a one-night stand. He could never have the same kind of love with this person that he had with me.”

“And that explanation was enough for you?”

“I was twenty-two years old. I loved him. I wasn’t ready to give up,” she said. Her voice was thick with emotion.

“I read the police report on his disappearance. There was nothing about this.”

“It was private.”

“Did his parents know?”

“I was the only one. There was no reason Jean-Baptiste would have told them. It didn’t mean anything.”

“But he disappeared,” Nico said. “Mrs. Weissman, I’m sorry to tell you this. Jean-Baptiste is dead.”

She was silent. “The skeleton,” she finally said.

“Jean-Baptiste was murdered and buried in the tableau-piège. We think it’s possible that an argument got out of control.”

“Are you implying that I might have had something to do with this? I loved him. We were engaged!”

“But he had an affair, and it was with a man. That would raise questions in any other homicide investigation, don’t you think?”

“But I had decided to keep his secret. I was ready to forget about it and move on.

“Still, it was a betrayal.”

“An artist has to have new experiences.”

Nico decided not to press the matter.

“How did he die?” she asked.

“He was hit on the head with a hammer.”

“My God! Who would do such a thing?”

“One of your friends, out of jealousy?”

“But we were all very close. We were so happy for Jean-Baptiste’s success.”

“When did you meet Gregory Weissman?”

“Five years after Jean-Baptiste’s disappearance. He didn’t know Jean-Baptiste or any of our friends.”

“Very well. I don’t have any other questions right now. But I must ask you not to leave Paris until this crime has been solved. We’ll probably need to bring you in again.”

Lara Weissman seemed lost, bereft. Either she was a very good actress, or her life had just taken another unexpected turn. Jean-Baptiste hadn’t just disappeared, hadn’t just left her behind, but had been murdered. He was dead.

Fifteen minutes later, the chief of the Criminal Investigation Division took the preliminary report, which had been sitting on his desk, over to the prosecutor.

Lormes flipped through it.

“Opening an investigation to find the date and exact cause of death seems appropriate. We can’t investigate a specific person for murder, due to the statute of limitations, but lifting the veil on this affair is certainly in order. Jean-Baptiste Cassian’s disappearance has been a mystery all these years and has caused his parents to suffer. I hope we’ll be able to tell them exactly when and how he died. And perhaps the investigation will shed some light on the murderer.”

“I agree.”

“Only three days have gone by since the skeleton was discovered, and you’ve determined the probable cause of death and the victim’s identity. Well done, Chief. At this point, some of my colleagues would consider the investigation more or less resolved. No point in finding the murderer or determining the motives. I don’t share that opinion. I believe you’ll be able to get to the bottom of this, and I have faith in the magistrate who’ll make the final decision.”

Nico left the prosecutor’s office and headed toward Claire Le Marec’s.

“Where are you with Maurin?”

“We were putting the finishing touches on the victim’s profile and trying to unearth the trail.”

“What do you have?” Claire Le Marec asked.

A deal, Nico said to himself. His mother’s life in exchange for a promise to find Jean-Baptiste Cassian murderer. And that person could possibly be the one who murdered the young man in the Leitner Cylinder. But he couldn’t tell Le Marec about that.

“Jean-Baptiste Cassian had cheated on his fiancée with a man before he disappeared. According to Lara Krall, it was a one-time experience, something that he did to expand himself artistically. Nobody else knew.”

The eighties, the glitzy decade that saw the rise of MTV, consumerism, and a new generation of dance clubs, had also seen the stirrings of public acceptance of gay and lesbian love. Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” were both hits. In 1981, a huge gay-pride parade had taken place in the streets of Paris to press François Mitterrand to lower the age of consent for gays and lesbians. And in 1993, Philadelphia was released. It was the first mainstream Hollywood movie to speak out against homophobia and acknowledge HIV/AIDS. Tom Hanks won an Academy Award for his performance, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” also won an Oscar. Still, many gays and lesbians in the eighties and nineties feared revealing their sexuality to their parents and closest friends. And some were still grappling with the issue of their sexuality. It couldn’t have been easy, Nico thought, for a twenty-two-year-old who had just been thrust into the spotlight alongside his father to admit to himself and others that he was gay.

“What are you thinking about?” Le Marec asked.

Nico set the photos of Jean-Baptiste on the table.

“His lover bit him on the shoulder.”

“And?”

The door opened. “We’ve got a problem,” Commander Charlotte Maurin said quietly.

Someone just turned on the fan.