She pulled herself to her knees, pinched his nose shut, checked his tongue, and started blowing air into his mouth. Her hands were so cold. None of the breath-and-pause sequences elicited a response from his blue lips.
“Can you hear me, Jacques? Can you talk?”
His mouth moved. She folded her hands, began quick, sharp thrusts to his chest. As Jacques tried to speak, a thin line of blood trailed from his mouth. She thrust harder now, counting and breathing. The air was stinging cold. Faster now, because while she panted and thrust, she felt him go limp. “Don’t leave me now, Jacques!”
She didn’t know how long her frozen, numb hands worked on Jacques. Finally, she heard footsteps on the scaffolding and the clang of metal. Chalk white beams blinded her.
“Take over . . . he’s . . . respond . . .” She struggled, trying to get her breath.
She heard static from a police radio and the words “Move away from the gun!” And then she was flying into the wall, tackled, her head shoved into the snow. She couldn’t breathe. Her hands were wrenched behind her, she heard the clink and felt the cold steel of handcuffs.
She fought, jerking her head, tried to move her legs. “What are you doing?” She spit out the ice that had been forced into her mouth.
More radio static, biting wind.
Catching her breath, she shouted, “Help him for God’s sake.”
A medic leaned over Jacques. She heard the words “crackling . . . subcutaneous emphysema wound seepage.” A stark white beam of light showed the black-red bullet hole and the blood seeping from Jacques’s chest.
“Too late,” the medic said. “He’s gone.”
Her shoulders slumped.
“Backup’s here, crime-scene unit’s on the way,” a hoarse voice shouted. When it was one of their own they made it a priority response. “Move her . . . careful.”
She felt her arms lifted, hips shoved forward.
“I’ve seen it before,” the hoarse voice said. “They shoot them, then try to save . . .”
“What do you mean? Check the roof,” Aimée said, melting ice running down her face. “Someone attacked the officer on the scaffold. I heard noises and came up here and found her, then him.”
So you shot him with his own gun.” “
“You’re wrong, I tried to save him!”
More footsteps and a portable halogen light illuminated Jacques’s body slumped on the slanted rooftop between the chimney pots. His coat and pants pockets had been turned inside out. Clumped red matter spread across the snow. He’d been shot at close range, Aimée observed, horrified.
In the beam of the halogen light, Aimée saw a Manhurin F1 38 .357 Magnum nonautomatic, the standard police handgun, in a plastic bag laid down on the blue tarp. Jaques’s gun or Laure’s? Snowy sleet whipped by, sending flurries across the roof.
An officer, his crew cut sprinkled with snow, rolled up Jacques’s pants. “His gun’s still strapped to his ankle. Yet this Manhurin’s police issue.”
“It must belong to the officer at the edge of the roof,” Aimée said.
“And it just flew over here?” he asked.
She realized she’d better shut up and wait to explain to the investigating magistrate.
He leaned into his matchbox-sized monitor and spoke. “Bag the hands of the officer below and check for gunshot residue.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Aimée burst out, despite her resolve. “Jacques came up here alone to meet someone.” She’d deduced that from what Laure had said.
“And bag this woman’s, too,” he said. “We’ll send her down.”
The wind rose again, whipping more snow into lacy flurries. Each breath stung. She wanted to wind her scarf over her mouth. The Level 3 weather warning had turned into a first-class storm. The plastic sheeting the crime-scene unit had raised whipped into shreds in the wind and blew away.
“Get another plastic sheet, quick!” a crime-scene technician shouted. “Now! Haven’t seen a storm like this since 1969!”
A few members of the crime-scene unit unpacked their equipment on the coating of ice by the skylight, making a futile attempt to deal with the area.
“The light’s changing every second!” said the photographer, pulling out his camera, his shoes crunching on the brittle snow. “Hurry up, I can’t get a good light-meter reading!”
Aimée noted the interlacing footprints. Any evidence there might have been was now compromised.
“Take her downstairs,” the officer said, an edge to his voice.
“I know my rights.”
The officer waved her away.
From the edge of the roof, Aimée saw flakes swirling in flashlight beams and snow-carpeted rooftops stretching toward distant Gare du Nord. Across the courtyard, several lit windows appeared amid the yawning dark ones. Strains of bossa nova fluttered on the wind. That party in the adjoining building was still going on.
Down in the apartment, Laure crouched as a group of men with snow-dusted shoulders huddled about her, an anguished look on her pale face as the gloved technicians pressed double-sided adhesive tape over her fingers and palms. The wind blowing from the window snatched away their conversation but she overheard “Custody . . . at the Commissariat. . . .”
“Bibiche!”
Aimée froze. Laure’s hair was matted and wet, a large knot welled on her temple, the white of one eye was discolored with blood. “Poor Jacques . . . who’ll tell his ex-wife?” she asked as she tried to stand and slipped on the wet floor.
An officer steadied her. “Sorry, Laure, you know I have to do this and report anything you say,” he said.
“Report what she says?” Aimée repeated, raising her voice to be heard over the wind. “Laure needs medical attention.”
The flic turned to Aimée, irritated. “Who gave you permission to talk, Mademoiselle?”
“I’m a private detective.”
“Then you should know better,” he said, nodding his head at the man beside him. “Run this woman’s ID. Why hasn’t someone bagged her hands for gunshot residue?”
Edith Mésard, La Proc, the investigating magistrate, entered wearing a black cocktail dress under a fur stole. She stamped the snow from her heels. Procedure dictated that in dicey situations she arrive at the same time as the Brigade Criminelle. “Désolé, Madame La Proc,” the flic said.
Aimée stepped forward.
Recognition dawned in Edith Mésard’s eyes. “Mademoiselle Leduc.” She sniffed, then frowned. “Light a match to your breath and the building would go up in flames.”
Before Aimée could respond, La Proc cleared her throat. “Give me the details, Inspector. How does it come about that a flic shoots another flic on a slippery zinc-tiled roof in a snowstorm? Convince me.”
“We found her weapon on the roof.”
“Was it next to her?”
“The officer in question lay on the scaffolding below,” he said, abashed. “Her gun lay next to Jacques . . . the victim.”
“Merde!” La Proc said under her breath, pulling out tennis shoes from her Vuitton bag.
“What? Are you accusing Laure of shooting her partner?” Aimée said. “That’s absurd.”
“Or maybe you shot him, Mademoiselle?” said the inspector.
Panic coursed through her.
“Take her statement at the Commissariat!” Edith Mésard said, before climbing out the window.
The flic shoved Aimée forward and down the stairs.
The few bystanders in the narrow street—an old woman, her bathrobe flapping under her overcoat; a man with tired eyes in a blue-green bus driver’s uniform—were illuminated by the blue rays of the revolving SAMU ambulance light. Morbier stood by an old parked Mercedes, its roof flattened under the weight of the snow. A tow-truck driver had hitched Jacques’s green Citroën to his truck.