Jim McGill 02 The Hangman's Companion Page 31

  But not now. Now, he had to get away.

  Magistrate Pruet’s Office

  21

  Glen Kinnard’s jaw was wired and his hands were cuffed behind his back when Odo brought him into Pruet’s office. McGill stood as the men entered and he winced when he saw what he’d done to Kinnard. Dark Alley tended to be a frightfully effective way to defend yourself. Comfort came in the form of the oldest rationale in the book: Better him than me.

  Odo said, “I took the precaution of restraining the prisoner.”

  In case he felt like taking another run at McGill.

  “Glen?” McGill asked.

  Kinnard shook his head.

  “You sure?”

  He nodded.

  McGill looked at Pruet. “I’d appreciate it if you would unhook him.”

  The magistrate gestured to his bodyguard. Kinnard’s hands were freed.

  “Have a seat, Glen,” McGill said.

  He took the chair to McGill’s left. The president’s henchman returned to his seat. Odo stood behind Kinnard. Which was okay with McGill. Some people you could trust only so far.

  Kinnard glanced at McGill and then turned to Pruet.

  “You are being treated well, m’sieur?” the magistrate asked.

  Kinnard nodded.

  “You have no complaints?”

  Through compressed lips, Kinnard mumbled, “I’m missing the baseball season.”

  Pruet looked at McGill, uncertain of what he’d heard.

  “Everyone’s a kidder,” McGill said. “He’d like to go home.”

  The magistrate turned back to Kinnard. “Our investigation is making progress, m’sieur. And now, if you don’t mind, we would like to have your assistance.”

  Kinnard’s eyes narrowed with suspicion and he turned them on McGill.

  “Relax, Glen. You’re not being set up. We just want you to look at a six-pack. You think you can do that?”

  He continued to stare at McGill for a moment, then nodded.

  “M’sieur le magistrat,” the president’s henchman said.

  At McGill’s suggestion, Pruet had sent Odo out to see if the photo of Diana the stripper could be matched to someone who had a criminal record. They’d found an indisputable match, according to the facial recognition software. Their perp had a record for prostitution, public drunkenness, and cutting a man with a knife. The last charge was dropped when the victim admitted he’d tried to have his way without first paying for it.

  There was something in Ms. Martel’s file that had made Pruet frown when he read it; McGill practiced a moment of self-restraint and didn’t inquire what the problem was. If the magistrate chose not to tell him, he’d write it off as purely a French thing.

  Diana Martel’s mugshot was put along with those of five other similar looking women in a 3x2 cardboard grid. Pruet took out the photo array and placed it on his desk in front of Glen Kinnard. McGill wondered just how good a look Kinnard had gotten of the woman in the low light under the Pont d’Iéna, and how well he retained his visual impression after the beating he’d suffered—two beatings, now that McGill had clocked him—and the passage of the intervening days. Glen might pick the wrong woman, and then where would they be?

  But McGill’s misgivings were quickly dispelled. Kinnard tapped his right index finger on Diana’s photo without a moment’s hesitation.

  Even so, Pruet asked, “You are sure, m’sieur?”

  Kinnard hit the picture hard two more times, then sat back.

  “Thank you, m’sieur. We are looking for this woman right now.”

  Kinnard held his hands out as if to say, “Well?”

  Pruet responded, “We will move you to more comfortable quarters, m’sieur. But we cannot release you for the time being.”

  McGill said, “The magistrate will find the woman for you, Glen. You still want me to stay on the case?”

  Kinnard nodded emphatically.

  “It’s costing your daughter a fair amount of money.”

  Kinnard tapped his chest with his right hand.

  “You want me to put you on the clock and take her off?”

  “Yeah,” the ex-cop grunted.

  “Anything else we can do for you?”

  Kinnard voiced something Pruet couldn’t understand.

  “What was that he said?” the magistrate asked.

  “Satellite TV,” McGill told Pruet. “He really would like to watch some baseball.”

  While that was being negotiated, McGill’s thoughts turned in another direction.

  He wondered where the heck was Gabbi after all this time.

  Fifth Arrondissement, Paris

  22

  The moment Gabbi Casale pulled up in front of Arno Durand’s building on a side street off the Rue Mouffetard she knew something was wrong. The three casement windows at the front of the sports reporter’s flat were open. Durand had told her the preceding night, after she’d given him a lift home, that when he had female companionship and the night air was pleasant he left his windows open. So that the music of his lovemaking might be added to the soundtrack of the city: the jazz, pop, and reggae coming from other apartments; the rush of traffic from Rue Mouffetard; the polyglot conversations rising from the streets of the Latin Quarter. When he was alone, though, all that noise kept him from getting his sleep and he kept his windows closed.

  As Gabbi had declined Durand’s offer to spend the night with him, the windows should have been shut. Of course, he easily could have gone out after she had left and found another woman. After having been aroused by the soiled flowers of Pigalle, that might have been the expected thing for Durand to do.

  Only there was a far more ominous sign that all was not well. To the right of the shuttered ground floor restaurant, the door to the stairway leading to the two flats above hung open, kept standing only by its bottom hinge.

  Paris was not a town where people left their doors unlocked.

  Much less hanging open. A sign too clear to miss.

  A big predator had fed and the scavengers were welcome.

  In normal circumstances, Gabbi would not have hesitated to call 17, the police emergency number. But her situation was anything but normal. She was working with James J. McGill, and McGill had involved Durand in this affair. If things had gone badly for the reporter, the fallout might land on the husband of the president. An event of this sort had not been covered by her State Department training but she couldn’t see that letting bad publicity happen would be a good thing.

  She took another look at the building and at the street nearby. Apparently, the ground floor restaurant relied on the dinner trade and no one had arrived for work yet. The flat immediately above the restaurant appeared to be vacant. Durand had told her it was tied up in a probate fight. No pedestrians were nearby. She slid out of the Peugeot, taking her handgun out of her pocket and holding it pressed against her leg.

  She crossed to Durand’s displaced door and peered through the opening. The staircase, in stark contrast to the door, was unblemished. Polished oak stairs were covered with a plush wine red runner. She thought she ought to be able to tiptoe up that without making a sound. Still, she was going to be bummed if her actions got her declared persona non grata and kicked out of France.

  Of course, Mom, Dad, and Gianni would be really depressed if she came home in a box.

  That thought was sobering enough to make her stop and think: Maybe what she ought to do was call McGill. If he was with her and they ran into trouble, he’d take the weight … she was pretty sure. He had the clout to absorb the blow without getting hurt. He’d shield her.

  Of course, all that was looking at things from a selfish point of view.

  Arno Durand might have a different take on things. He could be upstairs in his flat, busted up as bad as his front door. If she waited for McGill to arrive, Durand might die while she was taking the time to cover her ass. She didn’t like the reporter, but she wasn’t sure she could live with that.

  She quietly mutter
ed, “Merde,” and slipped past the dangling door, taking care not to make any noise or impale herself on projecting splinters.

  Once inside, she noticed two things. She could hear her heart beating like a kettle drum, and she could smell a body odor so powerful and offensive it was almost a physical assault. It made her eyes start to water. God! Contrary to U.S. stereotyping, the French people she knew were scrupulously clean, but this guy could start folk tales all by himself.

  There was no question in her mind who she was facing here: The Undertaker.

  She hoped to hell if she had to confront the SOB, it didn’t take more than a whole clip to kill him. Of course, as bad as the stench was, maybe she’d pass out before she got a shot off.

  To lessen the chance of that happening, she clicked off the safety and extended the weapon in front of her as she began her climb. She fixed her eyes on what lay above; a skylight banished any shadow big enough to hide someone lying in wait. None of the stairs betrayed her with a creak or groan. She was grateful for small favors, but she could still feel beads of sweat rappelling down her spine.

  Approaching the first floor landing, Gabbi lowered her gaze to look at the door to the vacant flat. It stood squarely in its frame, no sign of being disturbed. Caution dictated trying the doorknob to see if the door was locked, but that might give her away.

  It didn’t seem likely to her that a brute who had torn one door off its hinge would have a change of heart and neatly close another behind him. Still, it wouldn’t do to be faked out by the monster she was dealing with here. Then she came up with a solution to the problem — but the very thought of it made her wince.

  She’d reasoned that a huge hunk of stink couldn’t possibly be hiding behind that door without the density of the stench being increased by a factor of ten. Steeling herself, Gabbi crept close and drew a deep breath. It almost made her choke, but the reaction came only from gulping the air instead of sipping it. The Undertaker wasn’t lurking in the vacant apartment.

  Sure that she would never recover to smell another rose, Gabbi was nonetheless onto something. She sniffed her way up to Arno Durand’s flat, noticing no increase in the general stink. She had to hold the pistol with both hands now as her palms grew damp. The door to the reporter’s apartment, she saw, had been knocked completely out of its frame. It lay on an oriental carpet like a corpse awaiting the medical examiner.

  More important, though, the BO level held steady.

  Gabbi entered the flat in a crouch, suddenly no longer aware of any scent. Her sensory input had been reduced to painfully acute vision and a steady high-pitched tone ringing in her ears. She took in an apartment whose furnishings were suspiciously undisturbed. She’d expected a shambles, with Durand’s body lying prostrate in the thick of it. Instead, the only thing that caught her eye was a window in the kitchen at the rear of the flat. Just like the ones in the living room at the front of the place, it was wide open. Unlike the others, the kitchen window didn’t have a screen to keep out flying bugs.

  She crept forward keeping low, her field of vision rounding into a literal tunnel, the tinnitus in her ears sounding like a tuning fork struck with a sledgehammer. She was so low when she entered the kitchen she was duck-walking. She swung her pistol in a one-hundred-and-eighty degree arc, and then back again. Then a sudden wisp of fear that The Undertaker might somehow be sneaking up behind her made her pivot and fall to her knees. It was from that supplicatory posture she pointed the weapon back the way she had come.

  The flat remained as empty as ever. That left her only one thing to do.

  She got up, knowing she was already too late. She saw now that the kitchen window’s screen, like the two doors, had been forced out of place. She leaned against the casement next to the opening, stuck her head out and looked down.

  There he was, Arno Durand, lying face down in the alley thirty feet below. It looked to her as if he had jumped, escaping the murderous intent and vile stench of the creature that had battered its way into his home. Had The Undertaker thrown Durand out the window, she was sure he would have flown farther, perhaps to the roof of the two-story building across the alley.

  McGill had been right about the danger the reporter had faced.

  Poor, sad, lecherous—

  Gabbi saw a puddle forming on the pavement between Durand’s legs.

  Wasn’t there a moment ago.

  It took a second, but she realized the man had just peed.

  Dead men didn’t do that. They voided on expiration.

  Oh, Christ! Had he just died?

  The back door was bolted. Gabbi had to undo three locks before she could race down the stairs to see if she could aid Durand.

  France’s Good Samaritan law required no less of her.

  Chequers, Buckinghamshire, England

  23

  The Secret Service agents who guarded the president and the detective constables from Scotland Yard who protected the British prime minister were ready for anything—except a vaudeville routine between their two principals.

  The seven heads of government present at Chequers stood in an anteroom, making small talk as they waited for the cue to make their public appearance. The day was so gloriously fine that Norvin Kimbrough had decided that the G8 leaders would make their momentous announcement on the phasing out of crop subsidies on a terrace in full sunlight. A mob of reporters, photographers, and videographers was already in place, and growing restless in the surprising warmth of the day.

  The media people had been firmly instructed that their questions would be limited to the substance of the new agreement, an exercise in diplomacy that would materially improve the lives of millions of people in developing nations. Contrary to that, no questions would be taken concerning the gossip involving the presidents of the United States and France.

  Of course, England being a free country and having a tradition of brash reporting, should any of the newsies have the temerity to overstep their bounds, well, they couldn’t exactly be thrown into the Tower of London, could they?

  Presidents Grant and Severin would simply have to stand in front of the world’s press stone faced until the offending buggers were removed. And if the miscreants chose to make a spectacle of their ejections, well, that would only prolong the embarrassment.

  Exactly what Norvin Kimbrough hoped to see.

  Then his minions would leak the detail of the Darden-Severin romance at Yale.

  Who knew what mischief that might cause?

  But Kimbrough was sure his position would be enhanced as theirs were diminished.

  The usual protocol for the type of appearance the G8 leaders were about to make would have the leader of the host nation introduced first. He would then greet his visiting colleagues one by one as they were introduced and took their respective places in a lineup of smiling faces for the benefit of the media and their respective populaces. So when Norvin Kimbrough approached Patti and Erika Kirsch with a novel suggestion before the show got started, Patti smelled a rat.

  “Madam President, Madam Chancellor, I have it in mind that we might do with a bit of gallantry today, and let the ladies lead the way. Put our best faces forward, so to speak, before we bring out the chaps. Would that be acceptable to both of you?”

  The prime minister had asked his question with a bright smile.

  His makeup had been applied far too heavily, Patti thought, giving him a seamless vinyl finish. Made him look like a Norvin Kimbrough action figure. The prime minister wasn’t at all a bad looking man, but today he was trying too hard to look too young. And while modern makeup stood up quite nicely to the heat of television lights, a moment too long in direct summer sunlight could make it run like wax under a flame.

  Patti had done her own makeup — far more lightly — and that of Erika and Jean-Louis.

  The president said, “If that’s your wish, Prime Minister.”

  The chancellor nodded impassively. Erika was also suspicious.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Patti could s
ee Jean-Louis. He couldn’t quite conceal his merriment. He knew Kimbrough was about to attempt some sort of prank and, apparently, he had every confidence his friends would rise above it.

  So they formed up with the two women in the group standing side by side at the head of the line. Kimbrough came next, followed in single file by Gordon Kendrie, Ichiro Sugiyama, Matteo Gallo, and Jean-Louis Severin. A member of Kimbrough’s staff, standing outside, raised a hand to indicate all was ready. The Secret Service and Scotland Yard seconded that appraisal.

  “Ladies, if you please,” Kimbrough said.

  The president and the chancellor spared each other a glance, nodded, and stepped outside. The temptation was for the two women to march, as if heading a wedding or graduation processional, but Patti let Erika have a half-step lead on her. The chancellor understood intuitively what her friend had done and maintained her small advance. The two of them strolled at a comfortable pace, looking natural, not like drum majorettes.

  The walked along a cobblestone path toward a stage thirty meters distant; the media mob gathered behind a rope-line ten meters farther on. Both women were glad they had worn shoes with low heels. Walking the stones in high heels would have been treacherous. As it was, there were two patches of shade cast by trees where everyone had to watch his or her step as the light level fell and rose.

  A voice speaking over a public address system announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the leaders of the G8. Mesdames et messieurs…”

  The newsies normally responded with pro forma applause. Today, however, having received press handouts detailing the fact that the politicians had actually accomplished something of substance, the media broke with tradition and cheered.

  Every pol in the world knew how to respond to that: a smile and a hand held high in recognition, and implicitly calling for the cheers to continue.

  But as both the president and the chancellor were about to emerge from the second patch of shade, each woman dropped her raised hand just enough to shade her eyes. Erika’s step faltered ever so slightly as her foot searched for a secure landing on the next cobblestone. Instinctively, Patti’s left hand moved out to steady her friend.