Coulade’s face blanched in the hanging fluorescent office light. “We kept this terrible news from the students. I took over his symposium today. There are thirty-five students finishing their exams. And my notes …” He scrambled around amongst the papers on his desk. “… somewhere …”
Overwhelmed, she saw that. Nervous? Or guilty?
“This won’t take long,” she said, scanning the two cluttered desks. “Where’s the green dossier?”
“Eh?” His eyes gravitated again toward her neckline.
Her dislike for Coulade grew by the minute. “Pascal said you had the green dossier.”
“He told you that?”
Why couldn’t Coulade answer a question?
Coulade grabbed a pile of notebooks. Checked his watch. “Listen, I’m late. There are waiting students.”
“But Samour—”
“Zut! We share this office, but I’m only here part-time. My day job’s teaching at the lycée. I don’t know of any green dossier.”
“Two weeks ago there was one,” she said.
He expelled air from his mouth. “Et voilà.” He gestured to the files. All blue. “I’ve got no clue what Samour meant.”
Her stomach turned. “You really don’t know?”
“No idea,” Coulade said. “He was an absentminded type. Half the time, his head spun with ideas and he’d forget to write anything down. A dreamer.”
But it still didn’t explain Samour’s letter. “When did you last see Pascal Samour?”
Coulade hurried to the door and beckoned her to follow. “Last week, non, Monday. We were supposed to meet here yesterday, but …” His face fell. “I couldn’t.”
Coulade had to know more. Even if he didn’t realize it. She wouldn’t give up. “Meet regarding what, Coulade?”
“He didn’t tell me.” Coulade shrugged, eyed the door.
“Think back to the green folder.”
“Green folder?” Coulade shook his head, his face blank. “Color-blind, Pascal. All our folders are blue.” He waved toward the file cabinets. “But these folders, all they have are student grades. No way you’re allowed to look at them. Compris?”
Another bump in the road. A road going nowhere. She wanted to get Coulade’s eyes off her chest and nail his feet to the floor.
“Alors, Coulade, last night my partner and I discovered Samour’s body chewed by rats in the snow.” She stepped closer and pointed out the thick bubbled-glass window. “Juste à côté, not far from here. I think you know more than you’re letting on.”
“Eh?” Coulade ran his hand nervously over his neck.
“He told me to talk to you.”
Coulade reached for the door handle. “But I don’t—”
“Bon,” she said. “I’ll let the flics know you’ve got something to tell them. Let you sweat it out at the commissariat.”
Coulade stiffened. “Nothing to do with me, I tell you.”
“Too bad. I’m surprised they haven’t questioned you.” She shrugged. “I play fair, but they don’t.”
Coulade blinked, hesitating. “Half the time I didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not. He’d found this document misfiled in the Musée’s holdings. Or so he said. Ranted about how he’d found a link. But he needed more.”
She suppressed a shiver. “A link to what?”
Coulade shrugged. “Some design he worked on. But it never made sense.”
“I need something more specific.”
“He hadn’t put the pieces together. Or so he said.” Coulade shrugged again. “Yesterday he left me five messages here at the office. I’d turned off my cell phone.”
“Messages saying what?”
“To meet him here. He sounded excited. Paranoid, if you must know. Couldn’t leave specifics on the message, he said. Mentioned a fourteenth-century document. That’s all. But I’d taken my students on an all-day field trip to the Meudon Observatoire.” Coulade looked shaken.
“What time did he leave the last message?”
Coulade checked the pile of pink message slips on his desk. “Looks like five P.M.”
“Did he mention Becquerel?”
Coulade shook his head.
There was a knock on the office door.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said.
Aimée looked around the office. Sparse. Only one computer, on Coulade’s desk. Her heart sank.
“Didn’t Pascal work on a computer?”
“His laptop,” Coulade said. “Refused to use these antiquated ones the department furnishes. But he kept his at home, I think.”
He ushered her out and locked the door behind them. His footsteps beat a quick tattoo down the drafty hall toward a crowd of waiting students.
What wasn’t he telling her, she wondered. She waited until he turned the corner, reached in her bag and took out her lock-picking kit. Into the old-fashioned door lock, she inserted the snake rake, then the W pick, and jiggered the mechanism. She heard the tumbler turn.
“Mademoiselle?” a voice called from the hall.
She whipped around, keeping her back to the door and her hand on the lock picks.
An older woman, her hair in a bun held in place with a pencil, waved at her. “Professor Coulade’s received an urgent message.”
Aimée smiled. “If you hurry you’ll catch him. Left at the end of the hall.”
The woman clucked like a hen. “If it’s not one thing, it’s the other. We’re swamped. I don’t suppose you could bring him the message?”
“Desolée, Madame, I’m en route to the archives,” she said.
The woman’s ample bosom heaved, perspiration beaded her brow. She shrugged, then hurried past Aimée.
After the woman’s footsteps faded, Aimée turned the knob, removed the wires, and entered the office. That done, she reinserted the wires and locked the office from inside.
She needed to hunt for this green dossier.
But Coulade’s computer screen blipped. A swirling desktop image of a trebuchet, the medieval slingshot-like weapon used to hurl boulders at fortified battlements, floated across it. In his hurry Coulade hadn’t logged out. She hit the cursor. Apparently he didn’t have time to organize his files. There was data info all over the screen. A bonanza.
The key turned in the lock. Merde! Coulade had come back.
She depressed the key combination to store his log-in, then dove under Pascal’s metal-frame desk at the end of the narrow office.
Not a moment too soon.
“Everything’s handled,” Coulade was saying. “We’ll shift assignments, I found a substitute—”
A woman’s voice broke in. “Professor Coulade, the last exam’s begun. The departmental guidelines outline specific procedures.”
Aimée pulled at her sweater, which was bunching up her back in the cramped space. Her hands were coated in dust. At least the desk panel hid her from view. She wished she could hear their conversation better.
“But my mother-in-law suffered a heart attack.” Coulade opened his desk drawers.
“What can you do for her at the hospital?” The woman’s tone indicated his duty was here to the students.
Aimée agreed. She’d never understood the clannishness of French families. Perhaps because she’d only known it from the outside.
“If the department questions or invalidates the exam procedures, the students will have to postpone until a retake next semester,” the woman pleaded. “We can reschedule the evening symposium session, but—”
“If none of this had happened …” Coulade’s words trailed away.
As if he blamed his murdered colleague for the inconvenience.