Armend looked at the clock; how much longer would this take?
Then she grabbed the towel by the two yellow ends and asked Armend to step over and turn around. As soon as he did so, she swung the towel around his neck and pulled fairly hard. The startled Armend almost fell backwards, but the woman released her grip in time.
“May I?” the bitch asked, as she gently tipped Armend’s jaw back showing the smudged eyeliner residue on his neck.
“Now the big money question, did either of the skin types match that of the deceased?” Brooke said.
“No.” Armend said, rubbing his throat, but actually his ego instead.
“Gentlemen, somebody other than the deceased was strangled in that room,” Brooke said while swallowing her first sip.
“But, mind you, this is just a cursory microscopic examination of bacterial communities and pigmentation levels,” Armend pointed out to take some of the sting away.
“But it appears all three do not match…” Lustig said looking over the towel.
“Of course, in a week we will have definitive DNA.” Armend said.
“But I got enough for a working theory.” Brooke took another sip of her coffee and dabbed at her lips with the demonstration towel.
“Which is what exactly, Brooke?” Joey asked, picking up the lab report and flipping through it.
“Well, it could have gone down like this. The towel was used by a third person to choke someone, probably the geek.”
“So you are putting four people in that room?” Joey asked.
“Two’s company, three’s a crowd, but four’s a party!” Brooke said with a wink.
Armend looked down at the towel; how could he have missed that? This American woman had a skill set his entire team lacked. But why would she care about this case?
“Well, Brooke, that’s good detective work, but where is this all going to lead you? You are not officially here to investigate this case; you are here to help us find the Architect or Engineer or whomever,” Joey said with a shrug.
“I know boss, thanks for these few minutes. I will pursue the rest on my own time.”
“Armend, please distribute this new theory to the team. See if they think it has enough meat on its bone for the judge to take a bite and maybe reopen the investigation.” He then turned to Joey and Brooke, “Shall we get started on today’s progress?”
They both agreed, and Armend took it as his cue to leave.
They spent the rest of the morning looking at priors and travel patterns of train engineers, civil engineers, sanitation engineers, chemical, electrical, software, computer, and mechanical and building engineers whose names were flagged by a crime computer for having any contact with the law. The largest list was that of building engineers, or superintendants as they were called in America, who most frequently called the police or had been called on by them. Nothing they found seemed to fit the kind of profile that Parnell had outlined.
In the afternoon, they dug into a list of ‘Architects’ with equally disheartening results. After work, Brooke went to the crime lab at FedPol and retrieved a few prints of the video frames from the club’s surveillance tape that she had requested during her quick lunch break. She planned to be at the club tomorrow night, Saturday; the murder had happened on a Saturday night.
Janice had arrived at Orly at about 7 a.m., and Bill was there at the airport to greet her. They had a very French breakfast at a little Boulanger Patisserie on the rue Monge. Bill could see she was tired from the all-night trip so he had worked at the embassy while she slept until mid-afternoon. Today, Saturday, they were going to see the town.
Befitting his position in the White House, Bill was afforded a driver/guide from the State Department. He and Janice had a crash course in Paris tourism 101. First the Louvre and then the Eiffel Tower for lunch. In the afternoon, they scooted up to Versailles and took a picture of themselves in a mirror in the hall of mirrors. Bill tried to point out that the Great War, World War One, the war to end all wars, ended in the Armistice drawn up in this room on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month; which is why Veteran’s Day is November 11th, but Janice was more impressed by the chandeliers. As the sun set they headed for dinner at a must-dine spot in the Paris Michelin Guide. Then Bill had a thought. He tapped his driver on the shoulder and said, “You have lived here your whole life. Where would you go tonight?”
“Me? Monsieur, I am not a VIP.”
“Hey, Francois, neither are we. I think we did enough of the tourist thing. What would a Saturday night for a Parisian, in Paris, be like?”
“Sadly, the place I recommend would not be in Paris.”
“Is the food good there?”
“The best!”
“Then, my good man, take us to your place,” Bill said, getting the smile of approval from Janice.
“I will have to call in this change of itinerary,” Francois said to make sure his passenger and responsibility for the evening understood that it would become a matter of record.
“Call it in then.”
Francois smiled. This VIP, he liked.
The drive outside Paris was both enchanting and surprisingly pedestrian. Many of the little clusters of poor neighborhoods were not the stuff of travel brochures, but the open spaces and quaint villages, now fed by ‘off the track’ tourism, were maintained to meet the expectations of the pseudo-Francophile and their greedy cameras.
The spur-of-the-moment venue for this evening was a tavern-like restaurant that was not dressed for tourism. The people inside were not tourists and the menus were in French only. Bill took in a deep breath and the aroma of the food told him he had found the true experience. As if on cue, a four-piece band struck up the familiar opening chords of The Beatles, Day Tripper. The vocals, in a decidedly French accent, made Bill joke to Janice that at some point the band would launch into the Beatles song, Michelle, and the place would probably stand as if it were the national anthem.
Flagrantly in violation of the diplomatic service rules, their guide and driver, Francois, joined them at the table and filled in the blanks in Bill and Janice’s hardly passable French. When the waiter came by with the wine list, Bill looked at Janice as if to say, ‘Should we?’
Janice just gestured with her palms up at their surroundings and said, “When in France…”
Brooke had persuaded the policewoman from FedPol to tag along with her to the club that night. In civvies, with her hair down, Verena’s out-of-uniform appearance turned Brooke’s two-woman, ad-hoc investigation team into a female dynamic duo of Saturday night warriors. Between the two of them, they got more invitations to join, offers of drinks and even a few marriage proposals, than all the regulars scored in an evening. To the chagrin of the males, and a few of the females, both these women were focused on the job at hand, namely to find out the ‘geek’s’ name. Here, being two hot blondes helped grease the memories and helpfulness of the club-goers.
Somewhere around eleven, they got a hit. ‘The brain,’ she called him and said she didn’t see him much anymore.
“Much or never again?” Brooke asked the bouncing twenty-something wearing a short skirt and flimsy tank top, which didn’t hide the lack of foundation garments beneath.
“Not for a while.”
“Do you know his name?” Verena asked in German.
“The brain? I don’t know, something like Renny or Rashie.”
“Do you know anyone who knows him?”
“No, but I just remembered, he was an engineer or something like that.”