“Are you okay, honey? Did he hurt you?”
She was crying, saying she was fine.
“You're sure?”
“Go,” she said. “I know you want to go after him.”
I crawled around, feeling under the spindly legs and ruffled skirts of the wall-to-wall collection of antique furniture, saying, “You know I've got to. He'll still be watching us, Mandy.”
I found Henri's Ruger under the dresser and wrapped my hand tightly around the grip. I twisted open the blood-slicked doorknob and shouted to Mandy that I'd be back soon.
Leaning heavily on the banister, I walked off the pain in my thigh as I made my way down the stairs, trying to hurry, knowing that I had to kill Henri somehow.
Chapter 112
The sky was black, but the streetlights and the large and perpetually booked Hôtel du Louvre next door had just about turned night into day. The two hotels were only a few hundred yards from the Tuileries, the huge public garden outside the Louvre.
This week some kind of carnival was going on there: games, big rides, oompah music, the works. Even at this late hour, giddy tourists and folks with kids flowed out onto the sidewalk, adding their raucous laughter to the sharp shocks of fireworks and blaring car horns. It reminded me of a scene from a French movie, maybe one that I'd watched somewhere.
I followed a thin trail of blood out to the street, but it disappeared a few yards from the front door. Henri had done his disappearing act again. Had he gone into the Hôtel du Louvre to hide? Had he lucked out and caught a taxi?
I was staring through the crowds when I heard police sirens coming up the Place André Malraux.
Obviously, shots had been reported. Plus, I'd been seen running around with a gun.
I stuffed Henri's Ruger into a potted planter outside the Hôtel du Louvre. Then I gamely limped into the lobby, sat in an overstuffed chair, and thought about how I would approach the agents de police.
Finally, I was going to have to explain Henri and everything else to the cops.
I wondered what the hell I was going to say.
Chapter 113
The sirens got louder and louder, my shoulders and neck stiffened, and then the looping wail passed the hotel and continued on toward the Tuileries. When I was sure it was over, I reclaimed Henri's gun, made my way back to the Singe-Verts, and climbed the stairs like an old man. I knocked on the door to my room, said, “Mandy, it's me. I'm alone. You can open the door.”
Seconds later, she did. Her face was tear-stained, and there were bruises at the corners of her mouth from the gag. I opened my arms to her, and Mandy fell against me, sobbing like a child who might never be soothed again.
I held her, swayed with her for a long while. Then I undressed us both and helped her into bed. I shut off the overhead light, leaving on only a small boudoir lamp on the night table. I slid under the covers, and took Mandy into my arms. She pressed her face to my chest, tethered herself to my body with her arms and legs.
“Talk to me, honey,” I said. “Tell me everything.”
“He knocked on the door,” she finally said. “He said he had flowers. Is that the most simpleminded trick ever? But I believed him, Ben.”
“He said they were from me?”
“I think so. Yeah, he did.”
“I wonder – how did he know we were here? What tipped him? I don't get it.”
“When I unlocked the door, he kicked it open and grabbed me.”
“I wish I'd killed him, Mandy.”
“I didn't know who he was. A black man. He wrenched my arms behind my back. I couldn't move. He said? oh, this makes me sick,” she said, crying again.
“What did he say?”
“ 'I love you, Amanda.' ”
I was listening to Mandy and hearing echoes at the same time. Henri had told me that he'd loved Gina. He'd loved Julia. How long would Henri have waited to prove his love to Mandy by raping her and strangling her with those blue gloves on his hands?
I whispered, “I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.”
“I'm the jerk who came here, Benjy. Oh, God, how long was he here? Three hours? I'm sorry. I didn't understand until now what those three days with him must have been like for you.”
She started crying again, and I hushed her, told her over and over that everything would be all right.
“Don't take this the wrong way,” she said, her voice ragged and strained. “But what makes you so sure?”
I got out of bed, opened my laptop, and booked two morning flights back to the States.
Chapter 114
It was well after midnight, and I was still pacing the room. I took some Tylenol, got back under the covers with Amanda, but I couldn't sleep. I couldn't even shut my eyes for more than a few seconds.
The TV was small and old, but I turned it on and found CNN.
I watched the headline news, bolted upright when the talking head said, “Police have no suspects in the murder of Gina Prazzi, heiress to the Prazzi shipping fortune. She was found murdered in a room at the exclusive French resort Château de Mirambeau.”
When Gina Prazzi's face came on the screen, I felt as though I knew her intimately. I'd watched her pass in front of the camera in the hotel room, not knowing that her life was about to end.
I said, “Mandy, Mandy,” shook her arm. But she turned away, settled even more deeply into the feather bed and sleep.
I watched the police captain brief the press on TV, his speech translated and recapped for those just tuning in. Ms. Prazzi had checked into the Château de Mirambeau alone. The housekeepers believed that two people stayed in the room, but no other guest was seen. The police were not releasing any further information about the murder at this time.
That was enough for me. I knew the full story, but what I hadn't known was that Gina Prazzi was a real name, not an alias.
What other lies had Henri told me? For what possible reason? Why had he lied – in order to tell me the truth?
I stared at the TV screen as the anchor said, “In the Netherlands, a young woman was found murdered this morning in Amsterdam. What brings this tragedy to the attention of international criminalists is that elements of this girl's death are similar to elements of the murders of the two young women in Barbados, and also to the famous American swimsuit models who were murdered this spring in Hawaii.”
I dialed up the volume as the faces came on the screen: Sara Russo, Wendy Emerson, Kim McDaniels, and Julia Winkler, and now another face, a young woman whose name was Mieke Helsloot.
The announcer said, “Ms. Helsloot, twenty years old, was the secretary to the well-known architect Jan Van der Heuvel of Amsterdam, who was at a meeting in Copenhagen at the time of the murder. Mr. Van der Heuvel was interviewed at his hotel minutes ago.”
Jesus Christ. I knew his name.
The picture cut away to Van der Heuvel leaving his hotel in Copenhagen, suitcase in hand, journalists crowding around him at the bottom of a rounded staircase. He was in his early forties, had gray hair and angular features. He looked genuinely shocked and scared.
“I have only just now learned of this terrible tragedy,” he said into the clutch of microphones. “I am shocked and devastated. Mieke Helsloot was a proper, decent young lady, and I have no idea why anyone would harm her. It is a terrible day. Mieke was to be married.”
Henri had told me that Jan Van der Heuvel was an alias for one of the members of the Alliance, the man Henri called “the Dutchman.” Van der Heuvel was the third wheel who'd joined up with Henri and Gina during their romp through the French Riviera.
And now, soon after Henri had killed Gina Prazzi, Van der Heuvel's secretary had also been murdered.
If I hadn't once been a cop, I might have dismissed these two killings as a coincidence. The women were different types. They were killed hundreds of miles apart. But what I saw were two more flags on a grid, a part of a pattern.