The Awkward Squad Page 18

  “Spaghetti with onions, olives, and Parmesan. One of my own recipes. If you’d like some, I’ve made enough for a whole squadron . . .”

  “Lovely, thanks,” Capestan said, securing her hair with the black tie she kept around her wrist. “How’s Torrez?”

  “Fine, the doc’s optimistic. Although his colleagues aren’t exactly lining up to be at his bedside . . . They like the guy, but—”

  “Fine, I get it. I’ll go tomorrow. And the boy—”

  “Uh-uh,” Rosière cut in with a smile. “Eat. Drink. Stop working. Later.”

  “True. They can’t take away our downtime, too.”

  Lebreton went off in search of a baguette, while Rosière attended to her saucepan and Capestan kept half an eye on the pasta jiggling in the boiling water. The fridge was purring in the corner.

  “What about you, then? Single?” Rosière asked with her usual self-assurance, all the more direct now she was on her second glass of wine.

  “Yup.”

  “For long?”

  Capestan took a deep breath, as if to suggest she didn’t know the date.

  “Since the last time I fired my gun.”

  “You killed your ex?!”

  Capestan burst out laughing.

  “No, definitely not! Let’s just say it didn’t take long . . . The shot was the pretext.”

  Capestan’s husband had thought that there was no coming back from it; that something had flipped inside her. The feeling that he might have been right did occur to the commissaire, but she blinked it aside and gave the spaghetti another stir.

  “Basically, he asked for a divorce, and I let him have one,” Capestan said, setting her wooden spoon down on one of the unused hobs. “The pasta’s good to go.”

  She had changed the subject, but her mind was now transfixed with the image of a back and some suitcases walking out of her door.

  Her future, her strength, and her happiness had disappeared, as if they’d been sucked down the plughole. The door seemed to reverberate after it had shut. Capestan had sat down on the sofa and stared into the emptiness for several hours before resolving to do something else. She leaned forward to pick up the TV remote from the coffee table and selected the video-on-demand menu. The Magnificent Seven was available for 2.99 euros. She pressed the button.

  The following day they took away her service weapon.

  Both losses had been a struggle, but once the emotional pain had passed, Capestan was astonished to find that she enjoyed her solitary existence. She liked living in the comfort of an inner world that was designed for her and her alone, under the watchful, silent eye of her affectionate cat. Perhaps this would only be a passing pleasure, but she wasn’t so sure.

  Capestan distractedly carried the pan of spaghetti over to the sink and drained it carefully, making sure not to scald herself. She stood there in disbelief as the tangle of spaghetti spread across the sink.

  “You have to be kidding me . . . I forgot the colander,” Capestan said, rushing off to fetch it before rinsing the pasta.

  “And you, Eva. Any family?”

  “Yes. A dog and a son. But of the two, the dog probably gets in touch more often,” Rosière said, with a long-suffering shrug.

  They washed down their pasta with Côtes-du-Rhône, old stories from the beat, on-screen adventures, and tales about dogs. Afterward, Rosière and Lebreton went for a cigarette while Capestan lit a fire under the watchful nose of Pilote, who didn’t seem remotely worried about frazzling his coat.

  The smokers returned a few minutes later, carrying their glasses and the remainder of the bottle. Capestan brought the three investigation boards over to the fireplace, where she joined Rosière on the enormous sofa she was hogging. Lebreton was sitting in one of the shabby armchairs.

  The commissaire summed up her thoughts on the sticker and the idea that it was premeditated, then finished with a watered-down version of her talk with Buron. She had strongly considered telling them about the strange role the chief was apparently assigning the team, but felt that the boundaries of their responsibilities were still too blurred. She was afraid that it was simply a matter of settling grudges, and that this ill-fated assignment would shower neither the squad nor Buron in glory. A blend of loyalty and optimism was persuading Capestan to keep it quiet until she knew more. The main thing was that the chief had handed over Maëlle Guénan’s file, which Capestan had now fanned out on the coffee table.

  On the whole, it did not tell them much more than the preliminary findings they had snatched thanks to the baby monitors, especially because the autopsy was still under way. The current thinking at the brigade criminelle was that it was an assault carried out during a burglary.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Lebreton said, his legs stretched out in front of him and his balloon glass rotating slowly in his palm. “First things first, it was in the morning—if the burglar didn’t want to be disturbed, he could have buzzed to make sure the apartment was empty. Then he would either come in through a window, which couldn’t have been the case here, or he’d break in, which wasn’t the case either,” he said, pointing to a line in the report with the base of his wineglass. “As for the murder weapon, I’m certain it was brought onto the premises.”

  “Why do you say that?” Capestan said. “They found the rest of the knife set in the kitchen.”

  “Maëlle couldn’t have afforded a high-end set like that. Even if she could, she’d have chosen a less designer-brand—something daintier and more colorful, or wooden. The knives jar with her apartment.”

  “Maybe they were a present?”

  “I don’t think so. The way I see it, the murderer came with the intention of killing her, then made it look like a burglary, or like an unplanned crime in which the weapon was grabbed in the heat of the moment.”

  “Same drill as with Marie Sauzelle,” Capestan said. “Double insurance: the murderer conceals his crime, but if he gets unlucky and it does come back to him, he can still deny premeditation and aggravating circumstances.”

  “There’s a different MO with the sailor, though,” Rosière pointed out as she slid a cushion behind her back.

  “That was the first murder—he hadn’t developed a strategy. Or maybe the two crimes are linked, but we’re dealing with different killers.”

  “Your boy who’s shown up both times . . . Do we think he might fit the profile of the killer who returns to the crime scene?”

  “He would have been two or three years old at the time of the first murder,” Capestan replied with a wry smile.

  “What’s that Corneille quote? ‘For souls nobly born, valor does not await the passing of years,’” Rosière recited, tapping her nose knowingly.

  “By the way, did you take the cat hair in for analysis?” Capestan asked Lebreton.

  “Yes. We’ll get the results in six or seven months . . . ,” he said with a grim smile.

  “Well, that’s perfect.”

  Capestan frowned irritably. She looked at the boards, shifting her attention from one to the next before adjusting her position on the sofa, as if trying to recalibrate her brain in its cranial cavity.

  “Right, let’s recap: three connected cases; three premeditated murders. The first, the sailor, happens twenty years ago with minimal staging. The second, the old lady, happens eight years ago. The third happens today. Why the big gaps? An anniversary? An impulse? A deadline?”

  “The sailor and the old lady were both killed in virtually the same month,” Lebreton said. “Not the widow, though. Maybe the first two were genuinely linked, whereas Maëlle was more like a repercussion?”

  “Yes. Maëlle, like the Squirrel, binds the case to the present. The murderer is still around; he still has a reason to act. I’m positive the kid can lead us to him. We haven’t gotten any further on that front, have we? Any friends or suspects recognize the description? Maëlle’s son?”

  “So far his description hasn’t triggered anything, not even with Cédric Guénan,” Lebret
on said. “But Naulin did remember an extra detail: the boy wanted to see Marie Sauzelle ‘about a boat that sank.’”

  “Back to that again.”

  A log spat in the fire, causing Pilote to lift a vigilant ear, then resumed its soft crackle. Capestan gazed into the phosphorescent, gray-edged embers, her cheeks reddening in the heat of the flames. She was trying to gather her thoughts.

  “The boat. The boat is what all the cases have in common . . .”

  “And us!” Rosière exclaimed, staring at her two colleagues in turn, her green eyes still piercing despite her tipsiness.

  “Us?”

  “The sailor and the old lady,” Rosière said, sitting bolt upright and making her saint medallions jangle. “It’s weird, isn’t it? We stumble on two cases in two different boxes, and they’re linked. That’s one heck of a coincidence.”

  “You’re right,” Lebreton said. “Did anyone else in the squad find a murder in the files?”

  “No,” Capestan said. “We went through all the boxes and these were the only murders.”

  “So there was a very good chance that these would be the cases we’d end up investigating.”

  “They really were put there for us,” Capestan murmured.

  “They must have been burned by the same guy—he ditched them there thinking he was trashing them,” Rosière said, hammering the table with her podgy fist. “I’m getting a whiff of something crooked . . . I’m telling you, there’s something crooked here . . .”

  A nasty shiver ran down Capestan’s spine. Rosière was right. A police officer was involved—corrupt at best, criminal at worst. A second later, Capestan’s mind was racing through all the various probabilities, like the flicking letters on a departures board at the airport. One by one they stopped and spelled out a name. No. No, that had to be wrong; it couldn’t be him. He couldn’t have trapped her like that, not after all these years. He wouldn’t have dared. Her eyes met Lebreton’s, and he was intrigued to see how pale she had gone. Capestan stood up and went to gather the files from the various desks, trying desperately to restore her calm. She sat back down on the sofa and opened the folders on the coffee table. Her eyes darted across the different sheets, and just as easily as picking out a red marble in the middle of some gravel, she pinpointed the same name one, two, three times: Buron.

  Buron. Her mentor, her sponsor, her chief. Her friend. So, this was the aim of the squad. But why entrust them, and more to the point her, with these cases? Was he testing her intelligence? Her dedication? Or was he playing a game of Russian roulette to assuage his remorse? Suddenly the questions were banking up on all sides, overwhelming the commissaire with so many thoughts she feared she might suffocate. Buron. She needed to dunk her head in cold water; she needed to concentrate. Lebreton and Rosière waited. They had read the name, too.

  “Right,” Capestan said abruptly. “Buron features in each file. He was section commissaire at criminelle in ’93—he led the first Guénan inquiry. In 2005, before joining the antigang squad, he became head of crim. It was his group who took care of the Sauzelle case. He stayed put for Maëlle yesterday but sent Valincourt, his second-in-command.”

  “Buron has been an officer at 36, quai des Orfèvres for thirty years. It’s perfectly normal for his name to appear on all the files,” Lebreton pointed out.

  True, Capestan thought, relieved to feel a slight return to sanity after the emotional shock.

  “No, it’s not normal at all,” Rosière stated, draining her glass with a resolute swig. “Given his reputation as an officer, inquiries like these shouldn’t come up short. Crim’s usual way of doing things is to close each and every door. Here you get the impression they haven’t opened a single one.”

  Rosière hauled herself up from the sofa to stretch her limbs. She was concentrating hard on keeping her balance, managing to stay upright through sheer force of will. She skirted around the table and, using her scarlet fingernail as a tool, started pushing out the air bubbles from the only sheet of wallpaper that Merlot had deigned to paste. The walls were all resplendent now, creating a marked contrast with the yellowed, crumbling ceiling. No one had volunteered to repaint that—it was a job where the only guarantee was a stiff neck.

  “I agree,” Capestan admitted reluctantly. “There’s no rigor in these files, and no persistence either.”

  “Going from that to suggesting he’s committed the murders seems a bit hasty to me,” Lebreton said.

  Capestan stared at the commandant. He wasn’t wrong; she even hoped he might be right. That said, Buron’s behavior since the formation of this squad had been intriguing. Something about it didn’t flow. His usual serenity seemed to be stymied. The commissaire couldn’t hold off sharing this any longer:

  “There’s something else about Buron. I don’t think he created our squad on a whim.”

  “How do you mean?” Lebreton said, his attention piqued.

  Capestan gave a brief outline of the situation: Merlot’s discovery of the spat between Buron and Riverni, her own misgivings, and the details of her conversations with the police chief. Two seconds of shocked silence followed her declaration. Pilou sat up, on high alert.

  “And you’re only telling us this now?!” Rosière spluttered.

  “Yes, I didn’t consider it worth discussing before,” the commissaire answered firmly. “We only would have come up with a load of wild theories about his intentions. I wanted to let it play out on its own.”

  Lebreton turned to the flickering flames to absorb the information, while Rosière grumbled, still poking at her strip of wallpaper.

  “Whatever, it couldn’t be clearer, these cases reek of crooked cops,” she concluded. “And if that’s true, then Buron is the killer and he’s hoping we’ll serve up a nice little scapegoat so he can sit back and enjoy his retirement.”

  “If he’s guilty, the last thing he’d want is for these files to resurface,” Lebreton objected. “The cases were wrapped up happily and waiting to lapse—it was ideal.”

  “If that’s right, then why does he just throw them our way rather than giving us a proper heads-up? He twiddles his thumbs at HQ, he doesn’t give Anne any info when she goes to see him . . . He throws us some blocks and some rings and tells us to play ring throw. Does that sound like an innocent man to you?”

  Rosière came and sat back down, pulling a rolled-up tissue from her sleeve and rubbing her nose irritably. The commissaire was deep in thought. Yet again, she was finding it impossible to tease out a theory about the chief—his fondness for manipulation meant that no theory was off-limits.

  The smell of wood smoke was now masking the onions, bringing with it a different kind of comfort. Capestan felt the tough cotton of the sofa’s armrest softening under her hand. This investigation required a delicate approach, come what may.

  The commissaire took a deep breath before airing her thoughts:

  “The fact is, one way or another, Buron is involved. He knows something we don’t, and he doesn’t want to share it with us. We can’t question him, but we can put him under twenty-four-hour surveillance and see where he leads us.”

  Buron, in his slightly tight-fitting black Lanvin suit, presented his ticket to the usher without forgetting to give her a smile. The young woman guided him to the third row of the boxes and pointed to the fourth seat in. As always, Buron’s features contorted in a brief grimace as he contemplated how narrow the gap was. Damn these Italian-style theaters, he thought to himself. The hum of the audience in the Salle Richelieu began to swell, and heady gusts of perfume wafted across the walkways. The divisionnaire was already reveling in the spectacle. Don Giovanni in French—absolutely unmissable. The customary three claps sounded as he wedged himself into the red-velvet seat. He was feeling marvelously at ease that evening, safe in the knowledge that Capestan would do what was necessary.

  38

  The neon lights were buzzing in the hospital’s lackluster corridor, and the air was thick with the unmistakable smell of bleach. Ca
pestan’s shoes squeaked on the blue-black marble-effect linoleum as she followed the numbers on the patient room doors. One of them was ajar, revealing a bed-bound patient in a crumpled hospital gown wriggling up toward her dinner tray. Capestan knocked when she reached number 413.

  Wearing a pair of yellow flannel pajamas with brown bears on them, Torrez was sitting up in bed, propped against a white pillow. He had a bandage double-wrapped around his head and a splint was preventing his shoulder and elbow from moving. His right hand was attached to a drip via a plastic cannula, and the bag was filled with a thick, transparent liquid. He was gripping the remote in his right hand even though the TV was off. His face lit up when he saw Capestan. The commissaire had brought along a portable stereo and a CD of French classics, which she placed on his bedside table.

  “How are we this evening?” she said, adopting the tone of a nurse about to empty a bedpan.

  “We’re fine, we’re happy. We’d quite like to pee.”

  “Oh! Do you want me to call someone?” Capestan asked.

  “No, I’m only joking.”

  Torrez smiled broadly, causing his bandages to crinkle. Capestan wasn’t sure she had seen that expression on his face before. He winced as he sat up a bit higher. The monitor next to his bed emitted some beeps that sounded like a game of Breakout on an old Atari Arcade. Capestan didn’t know how to express her thoughts, so she kept things simple for lack of a better option:

  “Thank you. If it weren’t for you I would have been a goner.”

  “Don’t you realize?” Torrez said, seeming genuinely happy. “You’re not dead. I took the hit.”

  She felt terrible, but Torrez was in high spirits:

  “The spell’s over. It’s been reversed, even. I didn’t just avoid cursing you, I actually kept you alive, too.”

  “I was certain nothing would happen to me. I don’t believe in bad luck. I’m all about good luck.”

  A shadow fell over the lieutenant’s swollen face:

  “You think it’ll only work on you?” he said.