Murder in Pigalle by Cara Black Read Free Book Online

“She’s like you. When you get something in your head, a tank won’t stop you.”
    The sky opened up. René jumped into the car.
    “Where’s your police scanner?” She’d given him one for his birthday a few years ago.
    René hooked up the console wires under his dashboard and flicked the scanner on. Static and intermittent bursts of conversation accompanied the thwack of the windshield wipers. René switched on the interior light as Aimée moved the passenger seat back and spread the newspaper clippings and Zazie’s scrawled notes out on the leather dashboard.
    Zazie had clipped articles from
Le Parisien
’s
faits divers
section. In the past six months there had been two attacks on young girls, each twelve years old. The girls attended the Lycée-Collège Lamartine and Collège-Lycée Jules-Ferry, both locatedin the ninth arrondissement. The attacks showed similar modi operandi. After returning home from school alone, the victims were bound and gagged; unable to call for help, they were left undiscovered for several hours until family members returned.
    “Parents let their kids go home alone that young?” René shook his head.
    Get real, she almost said. Instead she made a mental note to sign her child up for after-school programs.
    “I did. From the time I was eight.”
    Since the day she returned from school on a rainy March afternoon to an empty apartment. Her American mother had packed up all her things. Left and never come back.
    Aimée shivered. Made herself continue reading. “Look here. Discovered blindfolded, mouths taped and tied up.”
    None of the victims had been able to identify or describe the attacker. No more details.
    “I saw duct tape on the floor by Sylvaine,” she said, suppressing a shudder.
    “That doesn’t explain the FotoFit,” René said.
    “Zazie said Mélanie was able to give some description to the composite artist,” she said. “She must have glimpsed him somehow.”
    Aimée paged through Zazie’s grid-lined Claire-Fontaine notebook: notes on Bar NeoCancan, the list of schools. An unfinished map sketched in pencil with Xs. No street names, Métro stations or recognizable landmarks.
    René looked over her shoulder. “Could be anywhere,” he said.
    She hiked up her black linen agnès b. shift from last summer’s sales, glad of the Citroën’s roof between her and the pounding rain. All they needed was AC.
    “Zazie mentioned a pattern. So far, there’s their age, the fact they were latchkey kids, the same arrondissement,” she said.
    René pulled out his large-format navy blue Paris plan, thekind used by taxi drivers. Thumbed through. “
Et
voilà
.” He stabbed his finger on the page of the ninth arrondissement. “The two schools are here. And rue de Rochechouart, where Sylvaine was attacked, borders the ninth, which makes a triangle. Each school’s on the edge of the arrondissement: northwest, southeast … and if Sylvaine attended Collège-Lycée Jacques-Decour, the northeast.”
    She nodded. “A pattern the
flics
didn’t notice? But the school parents, from what Zazie told me, had gone up in arms at the Commissariat.”
    “What do the girls have in common?” said René. “A special type, a look? The fact he knew no one was at home?”
    “We need more,” she said. “But I know Sylvaine took music lessons. The violin.”
    René nodded. Excitement in his large, green eyes. “I’ll get on it. What if the others took lessons, too?”
    Aimée traced her finger on the fogged-up windshield. “Why did the others survive and Sylvaine didn’t?” she said.
    “He’s amped up?” René said. “Something’s thrown him off.”
    Her heart fluttered as she realized something. “Say his timing was off when he attacked Sylvaine. She wasn’t alone—Zazie was there. He didn’t know, she surprised him, which made him even more violent this time. Or …”
    “Or she really wasn’t there,” said René. “Keep that possibility in the mix.”
    What if Zazie had