The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [115]
“Nineteen sixty-seven?” he said out loud. McVey took a swallow of the Sancerre, and poured .a little more in his glass. Osborn was no more than forty, probably younger. If he knew Merriman in 1967 or before, he’d have to have been a kid.
Screwing up his face, McVey pondered the possibility Merriman could have been Osborn’s father. A father who’d deserted the family and disappeared. As quickly, he discarded it; Merriman would have had to have been in his early teens to father someone as old as Osborn. No, it had to have been something else.
He was thinking about the drug Lebrun’s men had found, the succinylcholine, and wondering what, if anything, that had to do with the Osborn/Merriman thing.
Thinking about it made him realize he hadn’t heard back from Commander Noble. True, it had been hardly twenty-four hours since he’d left London, but twenty-four hours should have been ample time for the Special Branch’s finest to uncover hospitals or medical schools in southern England experimenting with advanced techniques in radical surgery. The other obstacle, tracing back missing persons over years to find the one who matched the severed head with the metal plate in it, could take forever, and maybe they’d still come up with nothing.
And what about his request that Doctors Richman and Michaels go over the headless bodies for puncture wounds that might have been overlooked because of the various stages of decomposition of the bodies. Puncture wounds that might have been made by an injection of succinylcholine.
This was the kind of thing McVey disliked. He preferred working on his own, taking the time he needed to digest what was there and then acting accordingly. Still, he couldn’t complain about the team around him. Noble and his staff along with the medical experts in London were doing precisely as he asked. Lebrun, in Paris, was too. Benny Grossman had been exceedingly helpful in New York, and now hopefully Rita Hernandez in L.A. would come up with a solid background sheet on Osborn that might give McVey some inkling of what might have gone before, something that might explain his tie to Merriman
But that was the problem. Osborn and Merriman, the dead private investigator, Jean Packard, the tall man and his murderous exploits and the secretive goings-on involving Interpol, Lyon. That should have been one case, The headless bodies found scattered over northern Europe, and the bodyless head found in London, all ultra-deep-frozen in some kind of bizarre medical experiment, should have been another.
Something told him they weren’t, that somehow, in some way, the two wholly disparate situations were intertwined. And the coupling—though he had absolutely no evidence to back it up—had to be Osborn.
McVey didn’t like it. The whole thing felt as if it was getting ahead of him.
“Open up the Osborn/Merriman thing, and you’ll open up the other,” he said out loud. As he did, he noticed the big toe on his left foot was beginning to push through his sock. Suddenly, and for the first time in years, he felt very much alone.
It was then the knock came at the door. Puzzled, McVey got up and went to the door. “Who is it?” he said, opening it to the chain lock. A uniformed policeman stood in the hallway.
“First Paris Préfecture of Police, Officer Sicot. There’s been a shooting at Ms. Monneray’s apartment.”
60
* * *
MCVEY Looked at the .45 automatic Barras had so neatly laid on a linen napkin on Vera Monneray’s dining room table. Taking a ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket, he stuck it in its snout and picked it up. It was a U.S.-made Colt, at least ten or fifteen years old.
Laying it back on the table and retrieving his pen, McVey glanced around at the activity. Sunday night or not, the Paris police had managed to fill the place with tech experts.
Across the hall, in the living room, he could see Inspectors Barras and Maitrot talking with Vera Monneray. Standing to one side was a uniformed