Epilogue

Two weeks later

A revolution in point of view: something that looked entirely banal when viewed horizontally could become something fresh and innovative when viewed vertically. Surely that was one of Samuel Cassian’s objectives—to capture a specific moment in time and invite people to stop what they were doing and see it from an entirely different perspective. Cassian had accomplished this and was ready to move on.

He had no way of knowing that his banquet burial would end not just a chapter in his life, but his whole life as he had known it.

“How could I have imagined that some crazy person would make my own child a prisoner of my art? That he’d murder my son and bury him in this trench?” Cassian ruminated as he stood with Nico in front of the pit, which was being filled for a final time.

Nico put his hand on the distraught old man’s shoulder. The bones would be returned to Jean-Baptiste’s family. Samuel and his wife would finally be able to give their son a proper burial in a site with a marker.

“We have a house in Sicily. A beautiful island,” Cassian said. “Jean-Baptiste will be put to rest there.”

The last cubic feet of dirt covered all traces of the banquet burial. Nico felt the man shaking.

“Justice has been served,” Samuel said. He had been moved to tears. “Thank you.”

“I was only doing my job, sir.”

“Don’t be so modest. Maigret can sleep soundly. He has a worthy successor.”

Nico smiled.

“You’re a good man, Nico. My son would have become one too, but he made an error in judgment that turned out to be fatal. I could have helped him.”

“He didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“I wish he had thought more of me. Gay or straight, I loved him. And maybe if he had come out, I could have told him that his friend, Mercier, was the wrong person to be involved with.”

“I know.”

Nico thought of his own father, an amiable man, like the one he was talking with here.

“The Criminal Investigation Division has made an arrest in the thirty-year-old slaying of the son of well-known artist Samuel Cassian,” a reporter told Parisians watching the afternoon news. “Charged with murder is Laurent Mercier, a school friend of Jean-Baptiste Cassian. The arrest was made just before the artist’s dig at the Parc de la Villette was filled in again, after its exhumation.”

Those at the site clapped as the banquet was buried for the final time. The journalists started jostling each other and shouting questions. Louis Roche, the head of park security, gave Nico a nod. But Nico’s mind was elsewhere. He was already thinking about a new investigation. There was no respite in Nico’s job: solving Paris homicides. Because it wasn’t just a job. It was personal.