The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [134]
Kneeling down, McVey hiked a pant leg up over the dead man’s sock line.
“Prosthetics,” Osborn said.
“That’s a brand-new one on me.”
“You don’t think he did it on purpose?”
“Had his legs amputated so he could alter his height?” McVey pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket, then reached down and tucked it around the Cz automatic still in Oven’s hand. Pulling the gun free, he looked at it. Its handle was taped, its identifying marks filed off. Squirreled to its snout was a silencer. It was the workstation of a professional killer.
McVey looked up at Osborn. “Yeah,” he said. “I think he did. I think he had his legs cut off on purpose.”
69
* * *
MCVEY STEPPED back from Oven’s body and looked at Osborn. “Cover his face, huh?” Then he flashed his badge at a crowd of waiters gawking in horror and fascination a few feet away and told someone to call the police if somebody already hadn’t and to get the spectators out of there.
Pulling a white tablecloth from a nearby table, Osborn covered Bernhard Oven’s face while McVey went over the body for identification. Finding none, he reached into his jacket, ripped the stiff cardboard cover from his pocket notebook. Taking Oven’s hand, he pressed the thumb into his bloodsoaked shirt, then pressed the bloody thumb against the cardboard, giving him a legible thumbprint.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to Osborn.
Pushing quickly through the lingering onlookers, they crossed the dining room, went into the kitchen, and then out a back door and into an alley. As they came but, they heard the first singsong of sirens.
“This way,” McVey said, not really certain where they were going. From the moment he’d first reacted, McVey’s supposition had been that Oven had been about to shoot Osborn. But now as they stepped onto boulevard du Montparnasse walking toward boulevard Raspail, he realized the intended target could as easily have been himself. The tall man had killed Albert Merriman within hours after it was discovered he was still alive and living in Paris. Then, in quick order, Merriman’s girlfriend, his wife and her family had been found and slaughtered. The last, in Marseilles, some four hundred and fifty miles to the south. But in a wink, the killer was back in Paris and in Vera Monneray’s apartment looking for Osborn.
How had he found everyone in such rapid order? Merriman’s wife, for instance, when every local police force in the country had been put on alert and still had been unable to find her? And Osborn—how had he so quickly discovered Vera Monneray was the “mystery woman” who’d picked Osborn up at the golf course after he’d come out of the Seine when the media was still in the speculation stage and the police were the only ones who knew for sure? And then, in almost the same breath, Lebrun and his brother had been attacked in Lyon. Though probably not by the tall man. Even he couldn’t be in two places at once.
Clearly, what was happening was happening at an increasingly frantic pace. And, in turn, the deadly circle kept narrowing. That the tall man was suddenly out of the picture would probably make little difference. He couldn’t have done what he had without the help of a complex, sophisticated and very well-connected organization. If they had infiltrated Interpol, why not the Paris Prefecture of Police?
A squad car flew by, then another. The city rocked with sirens.
“How did he know we were going to be there?” Osborn said, as they fought through the evening crowd made electric by what had happened.
“Keep going,” McVey urged, and Osborn saw him glance back at the police cars sealing off boulevard du Montparnasse at either end of the block.
“You’re worried about the police, aren’t you?” Osborn said.
McVey said nothing.
Reaching the boulevard Raspail, they turned right and started up the street. In front of them was a Métro station. McVey thought briefly about taking it, then decided against it, and they kept on;
“Why would a policeman