The Awkward Squad Read online

  “And the Guénan case?” he asked. “Any thoughts after looking at it with fresh eyes?”

  “Yes, in fact. I figure that a sailor like Guénan would instinctively have kept a journal to log his thoughts. Our mystery passenger must have gotten his hands on it.”

  “A journal. Of course,” Lebreton said. “The widow told us that he spoke about the shipwreck all the time. Maybe he wrote things down for comfort.”

  Lebreton was annoyed with himself for overlooking this possibility. They hadn’t varied their questions enough when they interviewed Maëlle. He would have to go and see her again as soon as possible. The commandant thanked Capestan with a nod, then went over to join Rosière. It was her turn, and she was guzzling down her third cookie under the watchful eye of Évrard and her digital watch.

  “One minute, ten! A new record!” the referee announced. “But no one’s broken the one-minute mark yet.”

  “More training required,” Rosière said with a splutter. “We’ll get there . . .”

  A few hours later, as Merlot indulged in a diligent siesta on the sofa, his colleagues’ research was progressing.

  Away in his den, Torrez had called André Sauzelle and they had had a long conversation. The brother did remember Guénan. He had never met the sailor, but Marie had spoken about him after the accident. Apparently they had spent several evenings together, weeping as they tried to describe their trauma, and—more important—to overcome it. One day the sailor had disappeared and André never heard anything more of him. Marie had not known him before the trip, so either they met on board or during their stay in Florida. Torrez had also contacted Naulin, but the neighbor had never even heard of Guénan.

  Orsini had been faxed a series of articles about the shipwreck. They showed the incident in a different light, one that was both more emotionally charged than the Wikipedia entry Lebreton had printed off and better synthesized than the sailor’s dossier. But none of the cuttings contained the smallest clue for them to hang on to. Orsini was going to deepen his research at the public library.

  At their end, Rosière and Lebreton still hadn’t managed to reach Maëlle Guénan, though they had had better luck with Jallateau. The name Sauzelle “rang a vague bell,” and “yes, it might have been from the petition,” but the main point to emerge was that they should “just get lost for once.” Rosière was filling in Capestan, who was writing all the information up on the board, when Dax called out to them from his PC:

  “I’ve got it!”

  In a split second the officers swooped on the lieutenant and his pal Lewitz, who was already congratulating him with a shake of the shoulder. With his fingers on the keyboard and wearing a gleeful expression, Dax jabbed his chin at the screen:

  “Jallateau’s criminal record! It took me ages to crack the préfecture’s security system, but I got it in the end. Jallateau: blank folder.”

  Capestan was so incredulous that it took a moment for her to pull herself together. For the last few hours, she had watched him thrash his mouse around and hammer at his keyboard like a jazz pianist on speed. His forehead glistening with sweat, Dax had paused just once, and only then for as long as it takes to siphon off three pints of tap water. All that energy and determination for him to come up with a document that was present in the original file they had received from the brigade criminelle. Capestan smiled to mask her dismay:

  “Fine effort, lieutenant. But we already had that folder. Rosière’s put in a call to have it updated. I mentioned it to you earlier on . . .”

  “Ah,” Dax said, then gnawed the inside of his cheek for a moment. “Right, I suppose I heard ‘folder’ and then just started looking.”

  Capestan nodded, as if this explanation justified his actions in full, then headed to the kitchen. She needed a coffee.

  The commissaire unfolded a paper filter and slipped it into the machine. Rosière’s giggling could be heard drifting in from the terrace, where she was smoking with Lebreton.

  “‘Muscle memory’—that’s a good one! Shame he hasn’t been to the gym for a while! The guy knows how to run a search, he just doesn’t know what for. Did you see him in there?” she said, turning to Lebreton for approval. No reaction, but she carried on in the same vein anyway:

  “Most teams get an IT whizz. Not us—we get an IT cretin.”

  She exhaled wearily:

  “We’ve got a long way to go, I’m telling you. A long way to go.”

  Lebreton made no comment beside her. Capestan could not tell whether his silence was due to indifference or a stubborn refusal to bad-mouth anyone. It was too close to call, but her intuition was leaning toward the latter option.

  She joined them outside, soon followed by Évrard and Lewitz. As she stirred the sugar into her coffee, she shared the latest cause for surprise with her colleagues:

  “I didn’t find the passenger list in the file from crim. There’s the one from Guénan’s dossier with the names of the petition signatories, but nothing about who was on board.”

  Rosière and Lebreton shook their heads to indicate that they had not tracked it down either.

  “Leave it to me. I’ll sort that out with the US ferry company,” said Évrard, checking her watch to calculate the time difference. “I’ll call them this evening.”

  “Are you bilingual?” Lewitz asked, clearly impressed.

  “Vacations in Vegas. Didn’t always work out for the best, but at least I picked up some English.”

  All they had to do now was touch base with the elusive Maëlle Guénan.

  Lebreton was sitting at the back of a Vietnamese restaurant on rue Volta. A television perched next to some fluorescent tubes was playing video clips with the sound turned off. The commandant was watching it without taking anything in, mixing his bo bun with nem sauce. With the big bowl in his hand, he was shaking the broth off the noodles on his chopsticks when his iPhone rang on the Formica table. Maëlle Guénan. He set down the bowl and the chopsticks and wiped his fingers on his paper napkin before answering.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, I’m sorry to be calling you so late. I’ve spent the whole day in the countryside with my son for his birthday. It was wonderful but there wasn’t any signal.”

  “No problem.”

  “We can meet up tomorrow, if you like? I’m not sure what’s going on—everyone seems to want to talk to me right now.”

  30

  Lebreton locked his mailbox with a half turn of the key, then walked out into rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin. That morning, a pale gray sky was sucking all the color out of the city. Paris was suffocating, floundering helplessly beneath the grubby canvas of this parachute. Lebreton took a right toward rue de l’Échiquier. The journal, the link with Sauzelle, the passengers, and anything the widow had forgotten or kept hidden. The commandant had spent the whole night attempting to collate all of Maëlle Guénan’s stories: the salt shaker, the glasses, the feet trampling on faces, the wives drowning their husbands . . . The panic had made those human souls seethe, provoking any number of unforgivable acts, and the bubbles must have carried on popping in people’s heads for months afterward. Maybe one of them drove someone to murder.

  As he turned on to rue Mazagran, Lebreton saw three police cars. The lights were flashing in silence. Uniformed officers were darting this way and that as they set up a security perimeter around Maëlle Guénan’s building. Orders were issued in tinny voices that crackled through the walkie-talkies. A vanload of forensics officers from identité judiciaire came to a halt a few yards from the entrance, the team slamming the doors shut before filling the lobby.

  It was the same building, but surely this commotion had nothing to do with Maëlle, Lebreton thought, refusing to believe it for a second.

  He took his POLICE band out of his pocket and slipped it onto his arm. He flashed his ID at one of the officers at the door, then took the stairs four at a time.

  The widow’s gentle face embedded itself in his mind. They should never have reopened the in
quiry.

  He met two agents on the second-floor landing going door-to-door to question the neighbors. This early in the morning, the man who opened up had his hair all over the place and still looked half-asleep. Lebreton hurried past them. The worn-out tablecloth, the chewed fingernails, the frayed sweater. A day in the countryside for her son’s birthday. The details of a life rushed by and filled his heart with remorse.

  Up on the fourth floor, the widow’s door was wide open, and the familiar sounds of police activity reached Lebreton’s ears. He took one step into the apartment and saw a running shoe on the foot of a corpse. A silver star gleamed on the lace. The commandant walked farther into the hallway and recognized Maëlle Guénan without even seeing her face. The body had fallen in a heap on the carpet. Bloodstains had transformed the embroidered butterflies on her jeans into scarlet swabs. The handle of a kitchen knife protruded from her abdomen.

  The room was thick with the coppery smell of blood. Forensics officers in their white paper pajamas were dusting the surroundings and putting down yellow markers, while the photographer’s violent flash operated on shy Maëlle. Lebreton still could not see the full scene, and he was about to make his way through to the living room when a black suit, immaculate and buttoned up, stood in his way. On top of it was a face like a blade, with a dark complexion and watchful eyes. Lebreton immediately recognized Divisionnaire Valincourt, the head of brigades centrales.

  “Who are you?” he snapped.

  The crime scene was inexorably luring Lebreton in, and he could not stop himself from making furtive glances over the divisionnaire’s shoulder, despite the urgent need to answer the question. His information radically shifted the perspective on Maëlle’s murder, and crim needed it to get their investigation under way. Lebreton stated his name, rank, and department.

  “Yes, okay. And what are you doing here, commandant?”

  Lebreton outlined the bulk of what they had on Yann Guénan, all the while observing Valincourt’s body language. The divisionnaire was swaying gently from side to side; haughty, distracted, eager to get this over with. He was listening to Lebreton, but not attaching any real importance to the words. He was still giving out instructions, responding to one or another of his officers, or browsing any paperwork he was presented with. The commandant fell silent when he was done, obliging the man to display a modicum of courtesy, the sudden pause forcing the senior officer to pay Lebreton more attention.

  “Good, very good. And it dates from when, your case?”

  “July 1993.”

  “I see.”

  A half smile crept across the divisionnaire’s face. It would have made Capestan livid.

  “Commandant,” he said in an insincere voice, “this is all extremely interesting, and we’ll be sure to look into it . . .”

  He took Lebreton by the elbow and ushered him toward the door. A polite yet firm way of ejecting him from the crime scene. The commandant pretended to be heavy footed and uncertain, hampering Valincourt’s maneuver so he could buy himself some time to examine the living room. He wanted to know if someone had searched the room. He spotted a large red notebook next to the telephone on a side table. It looked like a directory of some sort. One thing was for sure: it had not been there on their previous visit. After years at RAID, when he would often have only a few seconds to take mental pictures of a room, Lebreton’s memory was fail-safe. Maëlle must have put the notebook aside after their telephone call the night before.

  Having led Lebreton to the door, Valincourt reiterated just how little importance he was attributing to the squad’s information:

  “Do send an overview to me at the Orfèvres. In the meantime, you know the drill. We’ll take it from here. Thank you, commandant, you may leave now.”

  The divisionnaire signaled to a policeman to escort the intruder downstairs, and the commandant had no choice but to leave the premises without any further intelligence, dismissed like the lowliest, most untrustworthy of witnesses.

  Lebreton mulled everything over on his way downstairs. He waited until he was at the junction with boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle before calling Rosière, who picked up immediately:

  “Hi, Louis-Baptiste . . . Pilote, down! Sit! No more jumping around now.”

  “She’s been murdered,” Lebreton announced, his spirits all the more dampened by repeating the news.

  They had met her barely a week before. They had told her that they would find her husband’s murderer. Now this. She had left behind a son. And to cap it all off, they had been blocked from the inquiry.

  But they still had control of the Yann Guénan case. This murder could still be considered a fresh lead. The police judiciaire would have to relay the information to them. In the meantime, they had to make sure nothing got past them.

  “Crim has taken control of it, and of course they don’t want us getting in the way. But it’s imperative that we retrieve the information. Give Capestan the heads-up. I’ll wait for you in the brasserie on the corner with the boulevard, opposite the post office. I’ll keep an eye on things. See you shortly.”

  31

  In the brasserie, intermittent blasts from the coffee machine rose above the hum of conversation, while the radio was tuned to a station that bombarded the clientele with frenetic ads. Lebreton couldn’t hear himself think. At the far end of the bar, the smoking area accommodated a line of people puffing away obediently. Just next to the till, the owner, damp cloth on shoulder, was pulling half-pints with the solemn expression of a judge. The commandant was slightly removed at a table in a bow window with an unrestricted view of rue Mazagran and its Stalinist post office.

  Through the glass, he saw the black Lexus slide alongside the pavement and come to a smooth halt. Capestan jumped out of the passenger seat and made for the café, quickly followed by Orsini, Rosière, and Pilote. Lebreton stood up as they came in.

  “Torrez is on his way,” Capestan announced. “He had an idea and needed to stop home first.”

  As always, everyone battened down their hatches at the mere mention of Lieutenant Malchance: it was as though the commissaire had not said anything at all. She was carrying on regardless, though, determined to play it down as much as possible. She shrugged off her coat with an elegant movement and folded it over the back of her chair.

  “So?” she said, looking back at Lebreton.

  “I introduced myself and I was shown the door. Valincourt was in charge: do you know who I mean?”

  “I know who you mean. Did he play the ‘overview’ card?”

  “Precisely,” Lebreton said.

  Capestan shook her head, more furious than offended. That welcome hardly surprised her. Lebreton stayed on his feet while Capestan sat down at the table. Merlot burst into the café and went directly to the bar to shake hands with the owner. Évrard and Dax followed soon after and joined them at the table.

  “They can have their overview. We’ll wind up their inquiry before they can even get it off the ground. That will settle it,” the commissaire said.

  “To do that we’ll need the preliminary findings, the time of death, the autopsy report . . . Can you go through Buron?”

  Capestan thought about it for a moment. So far her calls to the decision makers at 36 had taught her one lesson. If the squad was about to launch a competing investigation into Maëlle’s death, then they’d be better off keeping it under their hats to avoid being slapped with an official injunction. On the other hand, the widow’s murder constituted a development in the Yann Guénan case, and by extension the Sauzelle case. If they were simply pursuing the investigations they had already started, then there was no need for authorization. Setting all good faith to one side, they were not stepping on the brigade criminelle’s toes; rather, they would be working in parallel. It was a blatantly underhand approach, and no doubt Buron would give her a dressing-down for it, but it did avoid the risk of being directly disobedient. No contravention meant no punishment. There was one drawback, however: they could not ask for anything.


  “No. For now, we’re staying on our own. Low profile,” Capestan said.

  Lebreton made a face. He would have preferred to keep his superiors in the loop. Even though his love for protocol had started to wane in recent weeks, he still was not a fan of all these roundabout routes in the outer fringes of the law. He frowned and leaned back against the window, his hands in his trouser pockets. Nevertheless, he nodded his agreement:

  “Maëlle had set the journal aside for me; I saw it next to her telephone.”

  “Did you show it to the others?” Capestan said with a smile.

  “No,” Lebreton said. “Let’s just say that something about Valincourt’s patronizing tone made me reconsider.”

  “We have to get that journal.”

  “We can’t exactly steal it, though.”

  Capestan hesitated for a moment before deciding to skirt around the issue:

  “Anything else?”

  “When we were there the first time, she had a blue filing cabinet in her living room that contained the dossier and other bits of paperwork. It was lockable. I couldn’t get close enough to see if it had been forced, but if it was, then the killer was looking for documents, just like us.”

  “We have to get back in there,” Capestan said. “Crim are inside, along with officers from the commissariat in the tenth and the forensics guys . . . It’ll be tricky for anyone to distinguish between us and the officers working on the investigations. As soon as Valincourt leaves, we can try to get ourselves onto the premises.”

  “Even if we can take a peek, we’ll never manage to stay and take notes without being spotted,” Rosière objected. “If we want a proper look, we’ll have to ask.”

  “No deal,” Capestan said, still smiling.

  “What then? Snatch the details right out of their hands?”

  “No, not that. If anyone has any other ideas . . .”

  All of them looked at each other in silence. They had identified a problem but not a solution. They didn’t even know the time of death. At present their hopes of a parallel investigation seemed like a long shot.