“Jean-Luc’s substituting, thank God,” he said. “He’s more qualified than I am. A grande école graduate and friend of Samour. No problem. I confirmed with the registrar.”
“But Professor Coulade—”
“Madame Izzy, for the tenth time, I’m part-time, not a professor, and all of this takes too much time from my family. My wife’s distraught.”
Or did Coulade want to distance himself from the murder, the complications?
Aimée heard the trilling of a cell phone.
“Oui?” Coulade’s voice rose. “But you don’t mean … I’ll try.”
Then the shuffling of feet as they left the office. The light switch flicked off and the office plunged in darkness, and the lock clicked. She didn’t have much time to trawl Coulade’s desktop for a misnamed file. She hoped, since Samour suspected danger, he’d have sent this file to an unsuspecting Coulade. Made a backup.
Coulade’s password prompt yielded to her keystrokes, and seconds later his swirling screen saver appeared: Engineering Tech. Slide Rule. Calculation Theorems.
In the heated office, which now felt stifling, she rolled up her sweater sleeves higher and pulled out discs from her bag. The heat made her sleepy. She needed an espresso, but there was no machine in the sparse office. Trying to stay alert, she inserted a disc and let the machine go to work copying the data. Later, Saj could weed through the program for a link to Pascal.
Now to Samour’s metal desk, which was cluttered with administrative memos, requisition lab slip receipts, and student papers. She picked his locked desk drawers to find more of the same. No laptop. Nothing to do with the museum holdings.
Frustrated, she searched his bookcases, documents, the blue files. Engineering manuals, phone books. Nothing interesting, until she found a frayed leather volume, nineteenth-century by the look of it, entitled Guilds in the 14th Century.
Had Samour meant this, she wondered, leafing through the gilt-edged, tissue-thin pages. A bookmark inside bore the logo of the occult bookstore on rue aux Ours.
She stuffed it in her bag, glancing at the time.
There was a click and whir as the copied disc ejected. She slipped in the second disc, which installed a spyware tracking bug. Hoped to God it worked as fast as René promised it could.
Her cell phone rang in her pocket. Quickly she hit mute. She debated not answering it, but Prévost’s number showed.
“Mademoiselle Leduc. You left me a message?”
“Oui.” She stepped to the back of the office, lowered her voice. She needed an excuse to discover more about his investigation. “I’ve remembered something.”
“Un moment,” Prévost said. She heard rustling, what sounded like his hand over the receiver.
In the meantime, she checked Coulade’s computer. A long moment until INSTALLATION COMPLETE popped on the screen. She hit eject. Another whir as the second disc popped. She scooped them both in her bag.
“Mademoiselle?” Prévost was back on the line.
“Doesn’t procedure dictate the Brigade Criminelle handle Samour’s murder?” she asked. From the crime report on Demontellan’s desk at the prefecture, she knew Prévost had inserted himself in the investigation. But why? She wanted to know more.
“Who says they’re not, Mademoiselle Leduc? For now you deal with me as chef de groupe of Police Judiciaire. Things have come up,” he said, suddenly hurried. “I don’t have time. Come at seven to the commissariat.”
She checked her Tintin watch. More than an hour. Almost enough time, if she left now, to check out Samour’s apartment and visit the museum.
The line buzzed. He’d hung up. Great.
Minutes later she strode down the overheated hallway. Students blocked the corridor, grumbling over the late-afternoon symposium postponement. Near the open door of the back exit, several students wearing parkas stood around smoking, instead of venturing into the chill, moss-carpeted courtyard outside.
And the feeling of being watched hit her. She shuddered. But among all these milling students? Had she grown paranoid?
She passed a classroom and peered in the open door. Heads bent down over wooden desks built in the last century. She remembered those small desks. Murder on her long legs.
“Time’s up,” said a clear male voice. “You’ve earned a five-minute break.”
She peered inside at Coulade’s replacement. A tall, blond man gathered papers from the podium. If she hurried she’d manage a few words with him.
Shoulders jostled her. By the time she’d negotiated the stampede of outgoing students, she no longer saw him.
“Mademoiselle, you dropped this.”
The man held up Samour’s book.
Azure-blue eyes, a grin. Muscular shoulders under his denim jacket. Good-looking in a Nordic way, and an engineering genius to boot, she figured.
“Merci. I heard from Coulade you took over the seminar.” She thought fast. “You’re Pascal Samour’s colleague?”
“Pascal’s my old Gadz’Arts classmate.” His eyes flickered in pain. “Such a tragedy. I still can’t understand it.”
“Gadz’Arts?”
“Silly term.” He shook his head. “It’s from gars des arts, guys from the arts. Just what we call ourselves. But we graduates remain close. Our training and traditions bind us like family.” He shrugged. “That’s why I wanted to help out.”
“So this adult school and your grande école are connected?”
“Confusing, I know,” he said with a small smile. “This school was originally charged with collecting inventions and gradually became an educational institution, a grand établissement, a loose affiliation to us at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers. Liken this to an adult trade school granting doctoral degrees.”
She wondered at an engineer from an elite school teaching in an adult trade school. Service to the community?
But he knew Samour. This man was no doubt a source of information. And he had a test to give.
She smiled. “Do you have time for a aperitif later?”
If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. He handed her his card, a slow smile spreading over his face. Jean-Luc Narzac, Communications Division, Frelnex.
The telecom giant.
“Not that I’d turn down an apéro with a woman like you, but why?”
“It’s regarding your classmate, Samour.”
“You work in the Conservatoire, Mademoiselle?”
Not yet. But it gave her an idea. “A consultant. I’ll explain. Tonight?”
The hall buzzer sounded. Students tramped and engulfed them. He checked his watch.
“Let’s say nine P.M.”
In the ten minutes it took to reach Pascal Samour’s street, Aimée came up with a plan and made three phone calls, one of them to the Musée des Arts et Métiers. She scanned Pascal’s building on rue Béranger. The dark-blue doors hung open, revealing a long, cobbled courtyard. The concierge was making a half-hearted attempt to sweep the slush to the gutter. The scraping noise grated in Aimée’s ears.
A typical late Saturday afternoon on rue Béranger, the inroads of les bobos, the bourgeois-bohèmes. Families braved the crisp cold to guide toddlers on tricycles; middle-aged women in long down coats with shopping carts returned from the market. Newspaper delivery trucks double-parked mid-block outside Libération’s headquarters, near an indie art gallery. A leashed dog sniffed a lamppost, and a mufflered child laughed and ran ahead of his parents. Another world from Chinatown only a few blocks away.