"And that's why I knew you wouldn't let me come up." Bart smiled. "Speaking of work, yours, as I might have mentioned, has taken on a decidedly weird twist."
"How?" Annja asked.
"Those fingerprints you asked me to run? They're connected to a homicide that took place sixty-three years ago."
Surprise stopped Annja in her tracks for a moment. "A homicide?"
"Yeah. They belong to the prime suspect."
Chapter 20
"SIXTY-THREE YEARS ago," Bart McGilley went on, "a woman was found dead in a hotel room in Los Angeles. She worked for MGM studios. Bought set pieces. Stuff they used in the backgrounds to make a scene more real."
"Anyway, from the way everything looks, this woman, Doris Cooper, age twenty-eight and an L.A. resident, was murdered for one of the things she bought."
"What was it?" Annja felt a sudden chill.
Bart shrugged. "Nobody knows. Nobody knew what she'd bought that day. The detectives working the case didn't follow up all that well. During the heyday of the movies back then, the death of a set designer only got a splash of ink, not a river of it."
"She was a nobody," Annja said, knowing the sad truth of how things had gone.
"Right."
Annja wondered if Roux was the type to kill a woman in cold blood. It didn't take her long to reach the conclusion that he was – if he was properly motivated. She was doubly glad that she hadn't followed Roux and Garin. Their talking about having lived five hundred years was already weird enough without also thinking of them as murderers.
"Those fingerprints popped up on a computer search?" Annja asked.
"At Interpol," Bart replied. "They're called friction ridges in cop speak, by the way. Back in the day, so the story goes, the L.A. investigators thought maybe the guy was from out of the country. On account of how Doris Cooper bought a lot of things from overseas. So they sent the friction ridges over to Interpol. After you sent them to me, I sent them on, thinking maybe you were looking for an international guy."
"Interpol happened to have the fingerprints of a sixty-three-year-old murder suspect?"
Bart blew out his breath. "Interpol has a lot of information. That's why they're a clearinghouse for international crimes. They've gone almost totally digital. Searchable databases. You get a professional out there in the world doing bad stuff, they've got a way to catch them. This case was one of those they'd archived."
"There's no doubt about the prints?"
Bart shook his head. "I had one of our forensics guys match them up for me. When I saw what I saw, that these friction ridges belonged to the suspect on a sixty-three-year-old murder, I knew I wanted a professional pair of eyes on that ten-card."
"Was there a name attached to the friction ridges?"
"No."
Two of Maria's cooks arrived with steaming plates of food. They placed them on the table in quick order and departed.
Annja's curiosity didn't get in the way of her appetite. Laying a tortilla on her plate, she quickly loaded it with meat, tomatoes, peppers, onions, lettuce and cheese.
"So this guy you printed," Bart said, "he was what? Eighty or ninety?"
He didn't look it, Annja thought. She would have guessed Roux was in his early sixties, but no more. During the shoot-out with the Brotherhood of the Silent Rain, he hadn't moved like even a sixtysomething-year-old man.
"I found the fingerprints on a coin," Annja said truthfully. She didn't want to mention that the coin was of recent vintage.
"So you thought you'd send them along to me?" Bart shook his head. "You had more reason than that."
Annja looked at her friend, thought about him getting married and realized that she truly hoped things didn't change between them. She knew one of the things that would change their relationship, though, was a lie.
"I was given the coin by a man in France," she told him. "He swapped it, while I wasn't looking, for a charm I'd found."
"Was the charm valuable?"
"Maybe. It was made out of hammered steel, not gold or silver. Not even copper. I haven't even found a historical significance yet." Annja couldn't tell him that it had been part of a sword that Roux had claimed once belonged to Joan of Arc.
Bart took a small notebook from inside his jacket. "Did you get his name?"
"Roux," she answered. "I'm not even sure of the spelling."
He wrote anyway. "No address?"
Annja thought of the big house butted up against the hill outside Paris. She'd never seen an address and Garin had never mentioned one.
"No," she said. "No address."
Bart sighed and closed the notebook. "I can ask Interpol to look up records on this guy. Maybe we'll get a hit on something."
"Sure," Annja said. Curiosity nagged at her. Roux was wanted in connection with a sixty-three-year-old murder. She wondered what other information the old man was hiding. She was glad that she was out of France and far away from him.
Annja spent the afternoon putting together the video on La Bête. She used the software on her desktop computer, loading up the video footage of Lozère, the books she'd cribbed for pictures and drawings of what the Beast of Gévaudan might have looked like, and the digital pictures she'd taken of the creature in the cave.
Using the green screen setup in one corner of the loft, she filmed different intros for the segment, a couple of closings, and completed the voice-overs. When she had it all together, it was late and she was tired.
She watched the completed video and timed it. Chasing History's Monstersgenerally only allowed nine to ten minutes per segment, allowing for setup by the host and the ensuing commercials.
So far, she was three minutes over but knew with work she could cut that down.
Okay, she told herself, all work and no play makes Annja a dull woman.
After grabbing a quick shower and a change of clothes, she packed her gym bag and headed out of the loft.
Eddie's Gym was an old-school workout place. Boxers exercised and trained there, smashing the heavy bag then each other in the ring. It had concrete floors, unfinished walls, and trendy exercise machines had never taken up residence there. Free weights clanked and thundered as lifters worked in rotation with their spotters.
It was a place where men went to sweat and burn out the anger and frustration of the day. Young fighters learned the intricacies of the fighting craft and the statesmanship necessary to sweep the ring and move up on a fight card. No one tanned there, and hot water in the showers was a random thing.
There really was an Eddie and he and another old ex-boxer had each been Golden Gloves and fought professionally for a time. They owned the place outright and didn't suffer poseurs or wannabes with no skill.
Training wasn't part of what a membership bought. That was given to those deserving few who caught the eye of Eddie and his cronies.
Occasionally, young men who had seen Fight Clubtoo many times came into the club and tried to prove they were as tough as Brad Pitt or Edward Norton. The regulars, never very tolerant, quickly sent the newbies packing with split lips and black eyes.
Eddie's was all about survival of the fittest. Annja liked to go there because it felt real, not like one of the upscale fitness clubs that were more about the right kind of clothing and the favorite smoothie flavor of the week.
When she'd first started working out there, she'd had trouble with some of the men. Eddie hadn't wanted her around because he didn't want the complication.