hand. “Tomorrow. Wait for my call. I’ll tell you about her.”
“But I can’t take your money—”
“Recover my painting.”
“Monsieur, I need your car registration,” said the flic. He glanced around, noticing the scattered objects. “Your house was broken into as well? Is anything missing?”
“My wife. She died last year.”
“Desolé,” he said. “But I’ll need to take down the accident details before I make a robbery report.”
“No report,” Yuri said, shaking his head. His defiance belied the fear in his eyes. “I’m remodeling.”
She wondered why the old man was lying.
The flic’s eyes narrowed. Maybe he wondered the same thing. Yuri pulled open a drawer in the Art Nouveau chest, the most expensive-looking piece in the room. Took out a folder and handed it over.
As the officer noted the vehicle info, Aimée watched Yuri sit hunched in his chair, his mouth set, the blood clotting on his cheek. She wasn’t sure she believed him about her mother, or trusted him about his missing painting, but she felt pity for him.
“Let me ask a medic to look at your cut, Monsieur.”
He waved his wrinkled hand in dismissal. “Now both of you get out.”
OUTSIDE YURI’S DOOR on narrow Villa d’Alésia her hands shook. A man dead, her friend injured and in police custody, an old man who claimed to know her mother, and now a stolen painting. A sour aftertaste remained in her mouth and it wasn’t from the vodka.
The day had gone from bad to worse after René’s departure. She wanted this all to go away. To go home, crawl under the duvet. But first she had to help Saj.
Aimée needed her laptop case and reached for the car door handle. Couscous végétarien dripped all over the back floor.
“Not so fast, Mademoiselle,” said a balding flic. “I’ll need to search the car. And you.”
They suspected her now? “Search the car? I tell you, the man ran into us. Not our fault.” She hoped to God that René hadn’t left his unlicensed Glock under the seat.
“If you’re in such a hurry, better give me the details at the commissariat, Mademoiselle.”
A “midnight special” in a wire-frame holding pen? Forget it. Weren’t they supposed to offer her a trauma counselor?
“You call that procedure?” She flashed her détective privé license at him. Time to pull out the big guns. “I’m sure my godfather Commissaire Morbier will be interested, since that’s his dinner all over the floor.” A little lie, as Morbier’s appetite ran to bifteck-frites. But a way to take the focus away from her—and maybe divert it to Yuri. She gestured to the spilled takeout. “Care to explain to him why you think picking up takeout somehow involves me in the robbery of an old Russian man’s atelier?”
The flic’s mouth tightened. “Morbier’s into couscous végétarien now?”
So he knew Morbier better than she’d guessed. Oh well, she had to roll with it now. “Part of his new healthier lifestyle.” One could always hope.
“Robbery of the old Russian, you said, Mademoiselle?” The flic didn’t miss a thing.
She nodded. Let him draw his own conclusions when he saw the blood behind the old man’s armoire. “Too bad you can’t ask the Serb about the robbery. Right place, right time for him to know something.” She shivered, pulling her jacket tighter. “Don’t you find it strange the victim didn’t bleed? There’s no blood here on the street. Do you understand it?”
“No, I don’t.” He shrugged. “Maybe there was internal bleeding. We’ll know after the autopsy.”
The tow-truck driver’s horn shrieked a blasting echo off the stone walls. “Finished?” he yelled out the window to a crime scene tech. “Last run tonight. I need to hook up the cars and process them at the yard before it closes.”
“Take your things, Mademoiselle.” The flic waved to the crime scene tech and hurried ahead. “Open them up, show the officer.” He paused and turned back, his shoe squeaking on the stone. “And the trunk.”
AFTER FINALLY GIVING her statement, Aimée hurried down the cobbled lane. In the brisk chill, she searched her old address book for the fifth-floor criminal ward phone number in Hôtel-Dieu. She hoped her contact, Nora, a nurse, was working the night shift.
“Nora’s off,” said an older female voice laced with irritation. “Who’s this?”
She needed to know Saj’s condition and hated dealing with the notoriously close-mouthed police medical unit. She thought quick. “Traffic division in the fourteenth arrondissement. Any status update on the man injured in the collision fatality on Villa d’Alésia?”
“But I don’t even have your report yet. Why so eager?”
“Make my