Murder Below Montparnasse - By Cara Black Page 0,18

with her grandfather’s sepia photo, complete with waxed mustache; Leduc Detective’s original license, circa 1925; her father’s first case in the newspaper; the old sewer maps of Paris.

“Nice that you’ve kept it in the family,” he said.

Looking down on her from the wall was her grandfather’s commendation from the Louvre for service to la République in recovering a Degas. Another stolen painting. She had her grandfather’s notes on the case. Somewhere. Fascinating, but not what she was searching for—she needed to find some connection to Yuri Volodya and her mother.

Think. Think like her father.

Trusting her gut feeling that Volodya had dealt with Leduc Detective in the past, she continued cross-referencing dates, names, and initials. Thirty minutes later, after eliminating the non-matches, she sat back, rubbing her big right toe along her left ankle to help her think.

“Remember your first impression,” her father had always said. “Nail it down or it comes back to nail you later.” Often all you had were first impressions to go on. She thought back to her first impression of Yuri Volodya, the old Russian—“a little Cossack,” one of the medic crew called him. Belligerent, scared. But a criminal?

Under RUSSIAN in her father’s case file, she found a photocopied Le Parisien newspaper article of a Trotskyist rally and conference in the 14th arrondissement. Dated 1972. A grainy photo showed what appeared to be an abandoned Regency-style townhouse splattered with graffiti, slogans, and banners with the hammer and sickle. A squat, according to the article, housing assorted anarchists and radical leftists in Action-Réaction. More photos showed smiling members with armbands holding posters. Her eye caught on a younger man, with more hair but stocky then like now. Yuri Volodya.

The connection—murky but there. So did her father know him? Or.…

She read further. The article detailed doings of the leftist squatters who’d played host to the German Haader-Rofmein gang—radical seventies terrorists—before a security forces raid.

Her throat caught. Several years ago she’d learned her American mother—Sydney Leduc—had been captured with the Haader-Rofmein group after she’d abandoned Aimée. Sydney had been imprisoned and deported in a deal wangled by her father. Her father never talked about it, refused to speak her mother’s name.

The hurt that never went away surfaced. Her hands shook.

Here was the connection. Why had her father kept this in his files?

She punched in Yuri Volodya’s number. Busy. She counted to sixty, tried again. Still busy. She pondered his logic of leaving her an envelope of cash with an urgent note about a priceless painting that needed protection, then going out for dinner, trusting a broom closet for security. Some elaborate ruse? But his anguish and fear had seemed genuine.

Tense, she glanced at the time. At Maxence, working at René’s desk. Wondered if she should chance leaving him alone and visiting Yuri.

Her cell phone trilled, startling her.

“Oui?”

“Since when do you run over Serbs, Aimée?” said Serge, her pathologist friend from the morgue.

“And live to tell?” She put Yuri’s information in her bag, switched gears and grabbed her ankle boots from the floor. “At first I thought he had a death wish, attempted suicide, or that he was drunk and confused, but.…”

“It didn’t feel right?” said Serge.

“All wrong. Tell me you’ve gotten results. His ID?”

“Besides the little Eastern European dental work he had?”

“That’s rhetorical, I assume.”

“Can’t talk, I’m finishing the autopsy.” In the background came the unmistakable whirring of a bone-cutting saw.

She grimaced. But with Saj facing a prospective manslaughter charge, his future teetered in the balance. Serge just loved to bargain; she would have to humor him. “S’il te plaît, Serge. I’ll babysit the twins.”

Pause. She heard the pumping spray of water pressure hoses. She cringed, unable to stop herself from picturing how the hoses were being used.

“Bon, twenty minutes. The usual place.”

SHE’D BEEN SLEEPWALKING since René’s departure yesterday, numb with the shock of hitting the Serb, Saj’s injuries. But now she needed to wake up and take action, figure out the dead Serb’s story and get Saj out of hot water. René would have warned her against getting involved and given valid reasons—a business to run, rent to pay.

Too late for that. Saj was in trouble. And there was no nagging finger to stop her.

But she also needed to figure out this Yuri Volodya. She’d checked Leduc Detective’s answering machine. Empty.

“Ever used Xincus database for a person search, Maxence?”

“Cut my teeth on Xincus,” he said.

“So dazzle me.” She wrote down Yuri Volodya’s name and address. “Find everything you can about him: birth, schooling, family, organizations he belonged to,