"Of what?"
"Surveillance camera from the de Gaulle airport lot."
A color photograph came up-I'd expected something grainy and black-and-white, but this one was fairly clear. Tons of cars-duh, it's a parking lot-but people too. I squinted.
Berleand pointed to the upper right. "Is that them?"
The camera was unfortunately so far away that the subjects could only be seen at a great distance. There were three men. One was covering his face with something white, a shirt maybe, staving off the blood. Scar Head.
I nodded.
The blond girl was there too, but now I understood his question. From this angle-a back shot-I couldn't really tell her age but she certainly wasn't six or seven or even ten or twelve, unless she was unusually tall. She was full grown. The clothing suggested a teenager, someone young, but nowadays it is hard to know for certain.
The blonde walked between the two healthier men. Scar Head was on the far right.
"It's them," I said. Then I added: "What did we figure the daughter would have had to be? Seven or eight. The blond hair, I guess. It threw me. I overreacted."
"I'm not so sure."
I looked at Berleand. He took off his glasses, placed them on the table, and rubbed his face with both hands. He barked out something in French. The three men, including Lefebvre, left the room. We were alone.
"What the hell is going on?" I asked.
He stopped rubbing his face and looked at me. "You are aware that no one at the café saw the other man pull a gun on you."
"Of course they didn't. It was under the table."
"Most people would have put up their hands and gone quietly. Most people would not have thought to smash the man's face with a table, grab his gun, and shoot his accomplice in the middle of the boulevard."
I waited for him to say more. When he didn't, I added: "What can I say? I'm the balls."
"The man you shot-he was unarmed."
"Not when I shot him. His cohorts took the gun when they fled. You know this, Berleand. You know I didn't just make this up."
We sat there for another minute. Berleand stared at the monitor.
"What are we waiting for?"
"Video to come in," he said.
"Of?"
"The blond girl."
"Why?"
He didn't reply. It took another five minutes. I peppered him with questions. He ignored me. Finally his e-mail dinged and a very short video from the parking lot arrived. He clicked the Play button and sat back.
We could see the blond girl clearer now. She was indeed a teenager-maybe sixteen, seventeen years old. She had long blond hair. The vantage point was still from too great a distance to see the features up close, but there was something familiar about her, about the way she held her head up, the way her shoulders stayed back, the perfect posture…
"We ran a preliminary DNA test on that blood sample and the blond hair," Berleand said.
The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. I wrested my eyes away from the screen and looked at him.
"It isn't just his daughter," Berleand said, gesturing toward the blonde on the screen. "It's also Terese Collins's."
11
IT took me a while to find my voice.
"You said preliminary."
Berleand nodded. "The final DNA test will take a few more hours."
"So it could be wrong."
"Unlikely."
"But there have been cases?"
"Yes. I had one case where we grabbed a man based on a preliminary like this. It turns out it was his brother. I also know about a paternity case where a woman sued her boyfriend for child custody. He claimed that the baby wasn't his. The preliminary DNA test was a dead match-but when the lab looked closer, it turned out that it was the boyfriend's father."
I thought about it.
"Does Terese Collins have any sisters?" Berleand asked.
"I don't know."
Berleand made a face.
"What?" I said.
"You two really have a special relationship, don't you?"
I ignored the jab. "So what's next?"
"We need you to call Terese Collins," Berleand said. "So we can question her some more."
"Why don't you call her yourself?"
"We did. She won't pick up."
He handed me back my cell phone. I turned it on. One missed call. I didn't click to see who it was from just yet. There was what appeared to be junk mail, the subject reading: When Peggy Lee sang, "Is that all there is?" was she talking about your trouser snake? Your Small Pee-Pee Needs Viagra at 86BR22.com.
Berleand read it over my shoulder. "What does that mean?"
"One of my old girlfriends has been talking out of school."
"Your self-deprecation," Berleand said. "It's very charming."
I hit Terese's number. It rang for a while and then the voice mail picked up. I left her a message and hung up.
"Now what?"
"Do you know anything about tracing cell phone locations?" Berleand asked.
"Yes."
"And you probably know that as long as the phone is on, even if no call is being made, we can triangulate coordinates and know where she is."
"Yes."
"So we weren't worried about following Ms. Collins. We have that technology. But about an hour ago, she turned her phone off."
"Maybe she ran out of battery," I said.
Berleand frowned at me.
"Or maybe she just needed downtime. You know how hard it must have been to tell me about her car accident."
"So she-what?-turned her phone off to get away from it all?"
"Sure."
"Instead of just silencing the ringer or whatever," he went on, "Ms. Collins turned the phone all the way off?"
"You don't buy it?"
"Please. We can still run her call logs-see who called her or whom she called. About an hour ago, Ms. Collins received her only call of the day."
"From?"
"Don't know. The number bounced to some phone in Hungary and then a Web site and then we lost it. The call lasted two minutes. After that, she turned off her phone. At the time she was at the Rodin Museum. Now we have no idea where she is."
I said nothing.
"Do you have any thoughts?"
"About Rodin? I love The Thinker."
"You're killing me, Myron. Really."
"Are you going to hold me?"
"I have your passport. You can go, but please stay in your hotel."
"Where you can listen in," I said.
"Think of it this way," Berleand said. "If you finally get lucky, maybe I can pick up a few pointers."
The processing to release me took about twenty minutes. I started back down the Quai des Orfévres toward the Pont Neuf. I wondered how long it would take. There was a chance, of course, that Berleand already had me under surveillance, but I considered it unlikely.
Up ahead was a car with the license plate 97 CS 33.
The code, of course, couldn't have been simpler. The junk e-mail read 86 BR 22. Just add one to each one. Eight becomes a nine. B becomes a C. As I approached the car a piece of paper dropped out of the driver's-side window. The piece of paper was attached to a coin so it wouldn't blow away.
I sighed. First the overly simple code, now this. Would James Bond go so low tech?
I picked up the note.
1 RUE DU PONT NEUF, FIFTH FLOOR. TOSS PHONE IN CAR BACK WINDOW.
I did. The car took off, phone on and in tow. Let them track that. I turned right. It was the Louis Vuitton Building, the one with the glass dome on the top. The Kenzo department store was on the bottom floor, and I felt hopelessly unhip just opening the door. I stepped into the glass elevator and saw that the fifth floor was a restaurant called Kong.
When the elevator stopped, a hostess in black greeted me. She was over six feet tall, dressed in tourniquet-tight black and looked about as fat as your average lamp cord. "Mr. Bolitar?" she said.
"Yes."
"Right this way."
She led me up a staircase that glowed fluorescent green and into the glass dome. I would call Kong "ultra-hip" but it was almost beyond that-like postmodern ultra-hip. The décor was futuristic geisha. There were plasma TVs with sleek Asian women winking as you passed. The chairs were acrylic and see-through except for the printed faces of beautiful women with strange hairstyles. The faces actually glowed, as though there were a light in each one. The effect was kind of eerie.