The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [119]
For several seconds, he heard nothing. Then there was a click and a light went on. A moment later there was a second click and more of the basement was illuminated. What little he could see he had seen before when the French police had come through. The basement looked like a small warehouse. Old wooden coat bins, now jammed with tenants’ furniture and private belongings, lined either wall and vanished into the darkness beyond the lights. Osborn thought that had he got ten that far, to the area where the lights ended, he could have hidden anywhere. Perhaps even found an exit the far end.
Immediately there was a scattering sound overhead and something dropped onto his chest. It was a rat. Fat and warm. He could feel its claws press into the skin beneath his shirt as it moved across his chest and sniffed at Vera’s scarf, sticky wet with drying blood, which bound his injured hand.
“Doctor Osborn!”
McVey’s voice reverberated the length of the cellar. 0sborn gave a start, and the rat dropped off and hit the floor McVey heard it thud, then saw it disappear into the darkness under the stairs.
“I’m not crazy about rats. How do you feel about them? They bite when they get cornered, don’t they?”
Inching up, Osborn could see McVey standing halfway between the furnace and the dark at the far end of the room. Piled to the ceiling on either side of him were dusty crates and ghostlike furniture, draped with protective cloths. The height of them made McVey seem almost miniature.
“With the exception of uniformed details at the front and rear of the building, the French police have left. Ms. Monneray has gone with them. To headquarters. They want her to see if she can pick the tall man out of photographs. If Paris is anything like L.A., she’s going to be there a long time. There are a lot of books.” McVey turned around and looked toward the furniture behind him.
“Let me tell you what I know, Doctor.” Now he turned again and started walking slowly back toward him, his footsteps echoing lightly, his eyes searching, looking for any suggestion of movement.
“Ms. Monneray was lying when she told the French police she used the gun. against the tall man. She’s a highly educated, remarkably connected woman, who’s also a physician in residence. Even if she managed to pull a gun as big as a forty-five automatic on an assailant, even if she shot at him, I rather doubt she’d .chase after him down a dingy back stairway. Or follow him out into the street, still shooting as he drove away.” McVey stopped where he was and looked back over his shoulder, then turned and continued on the way he had been going, moving slowly toward Osborn’s hiding place, talking loud enough to be heard either in front or behind him.
“She says, by the way, that she heard a car drive off but that she didn’t see it. If she didn’t see it, how did she manage to shatter its rearview minor with one shot and take the top off an iron fence post across the street with another?”
McVey would have known the French police had been all over the basement and found nothing. That meant he was taking a stab that Osborn was here. But it was only a stab, and he wasn’t sure.
“There were fresh bloodstains on the hallway door upstairs. On the floor in the kitchen and on the landing by the service door that leads to the street. The Paris Préfecture of Police tech squad is pretty good. They determined in short order that there were two types of blood. Type O and type B. Ms. Monneray was not cut or bleeding. So I’m willing to bet that between you and the tall man one of you is O and the other B. How badly either of you is hurt, I guess we’ll find out.”
McVey was directly under Osborn now. Standing, looking around. For some reason Osborn smiled. If McVey had been wearing a hat like ’40s L.A. homicide detectives, Osborn could have reached out and plucked it off his head. He pictured the expression on McVey’s face if he did.
“By the way, Doctor, the Los Angeles Police Department is doing an in-depth profile on you. By the time I get back to my hotel,