The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [56]
“La couleur!” McVey repeated, triumphantly.
“Rouge,” the man said.
“Rouge,” McVey repeated, trying to roll the sound off his tongue like the Parisian. Then, bending over, he scooped a handful of the gray mud into his hand. “Rouge?” he asked.
“La terrain?”
McVey nodded. “Rouge terrain? he said, sweeping his hand at the surrounding gardens.
The man stared at him, then swept his hand as McVey had. “Rouge terrain.”
“Oui!” McVey beamed.
“Non,” the man replied.
“No?”
“No!”
* * *
Back at his hotel, McVey called Lebrun and told him he was packing to go back to London and that he had the increasingly uncomfortable feeling Osborn might not be as kosher as he first thought, that it might pay to keep an eye on him until the next day when he was due to collect his passport and fly back to Los Angeles. “Oh yeah,” he added. “He’s got keys to a Peugeot.”
Thirty minutes later, at 8:05, an unmarked police car pulled up to the curb across from Paul Osborn’s hotel on avenue Kléber and parked. Inside, a plainclothes detective unhooked his seat belt and sat back to watch. If Osborn came out—leaving either by foot or waiting for his car to be brought around—the detective would see him. A phone call with an apology for ringing the wrong number had confirmed Osborn was still in his room. A check of rental-car companies had provided the year, color and license-plate number of Osborn’s rented Peugeot.
At 8:10, another unmarked police car picked McVey up at his hotel to take him to the airport, courtesy of Inspector Lebrun and the First Paris Préfecture of Police.
Fifteen minutes later they were still in traffic. By now McVey knew enough of Paris to realize his driver wasn’t taking the express route to the airport. He was right. In five minutes, they pulled into the garage at police headquarters.
At 8:45, still wearing the same rumpled gray suit that was unfortunately becoming his trademark, McVey sat across from Lebrun’s desk studying an eight-by-ten photograph of a fingerprint. The print was a full finger, clear image enhancement, made from a smudge on the piece of broken glass the homicide tech crew had found in Jean Packard’s apartment. The glass had been sent to the fingerprint lab at Interpol, Lyon, where a computer expert refined the smudge until it became a fully identifiable print. The print had then been scanned, enlarged, photographed and returned to Lebrun in Paris.
“You know Doctor Hugo Klass?” Lebrun said, lighting a cigarette and looking back at his empty computer screen.
“German fingerprint expert,” McVey said, putting the photo back into a file folder and closing it. “Why?”
“You were going to ask about the accuracy of the enhancement, correct?”
McVey nodded.
“Klass now operates out of Interpol headquarters. He worked with the computer artist on the original smudge until they had a legible ridge pattern. After that Rudolf Halder at Interpol, Vienna, did a confirmation test with a new kind of forensic optical comparator he and Klass had developed together. A smart bomb couldn’t be more precise.”
Lebrun looked back to his computer screen. He was waiting for a reply to an identification request made to Central File/Criminal Records data center Interpol, Lyon. His initial request had come back “not on file,” Europe. His second came back “not on file,” North America. A third request was for “automatic retrieval” and sent the computer scanning “previous data.”
McVey leaned over and picked up a cup of black coffee. No matter how hard he tried to be a contemporary cop and use the wide range of high-speed high-technologies available to him, he just couldn’t get the old school out of his system. To him you did your legwork until you had your man and the evidence to back it up. Then you went after him mano a mano until he cracked. Still, he knew that sooner or later he’d better come around and make life a little easier on himself. Getting up, he walked around behind Lebrun and glanced at the screen.
As he did, a “retrieve” file came up from Interpol, Washington. Seven seconds later, the screen scrolled up the name MERRIMAN,