The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [81]
“Benny, eleven thirty-seven A.M. Thursday in New York is four thirty-seven Thursday afternoon in Paris.”
“So?”
“The request was for that file, nothing else—”
“Yeah—”
“It wasn’t until about eight A.M., Paris time, Friday, that the inspector in charge of the case for the Paris P.D. got a photocopy of the print. Just a print. Nothing else. But fifteen hours before that, somebody at Interpol not only had the print, they had a name and a file to go with it.”
“Sounds like you got interior trouble. A cover-up. Or private agenda. Or who knows—But if something goes wrong it’s the investigating cop who’s on the line because you can bet four ways from Sunday there won’t be any record of who got the first transmission.”
“Benny—”
“What, boobalah?”
“Thanks.”
Interior trouble, cover-up, private agenda. McVey hated those words. Something was going on somewhere inside Interpol, and Lebrun was holding the bag without knowing it. He wouldn’t like it, but he had to be told. The trouble was when McVey finally got through to him in Paris twenty minutes later, he didn’t get that far.
“McVey, mon ami” Lebrun said, excitedly. “I was just about to call you. Things are suddenly very complex around here. Three hours ago Albert Merriman was found floating in the Seine. He looked like a big cheese chewed over with an automatic weapon. The car he’d been driving was discovered about ninety kilometers upstream, close to Paris. Your Doctor Osborn’s prints were all over it.”
43
* * *
WITHIN THE hour McVey was in a taxi, heading for Gatwick Airport. He’d left Noble and Scotland Yard scouring missing-person files for anyone who bore the description of their John Doe and who’d had head surgery requiring the implant of a steel plate and, at the same time, quietly checking every hospital and medical school in southern England for people or programs experimenting in radical surgery techniques. For a time he’d entertained the thought of requesting Interpol, Lyon, to have police departments do the same throughout Continental Europe. But because of the Lebrun/Albert Merriman file situation he decided to hold off. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, was going on inside Interpol, but if something was, he didn’t want something similar happening with his investigation. If McVey hated anything, it was having things going on behind his back. In his experience most of them were petty and backbiting, aggravating and time consuming but essentially harmless, but this one he wasn’t so sure about. Better to hold off and see what Noble could turn up first, on the quiet.
It was now 5:30 P.M., Paris time. Air France Flight 003 had left Charles de Gaulle Airport for L.A. at five o’clock as scheduled. Doctor Paul Osborn should have been on it but he wasn’t. He’d never shown up for the flight, which meant his passport was still in the hands of the Paris police.
Increasingly, McVey was distrusting his own judgment of the man. Osborn had lied about the mud on his shoes. What else had he lied about?
Outwardly and under questioning, he’d appeared to be, and admitted being, exactly what McVey thought he was a well-educated man approaching middle age head over heels in love with a younger woman. Scarcely anything significant in that. The difference now was that two men were violently dead and McVey’s “well-educated man in love” was connected to both.
The killings of Albert Merriman and Jean Packard aside, something else was gnawing at McVey, and had been even before he’d spoken to Lebrun: Dr. Stephen Richman’s off-the-record remark that the deep frozen, headless bodies might well be the result of failed attempts at a very advanced kind of cryosurgery attempting to join a severed head to a body not its own. And Dr. Paul Osborn was not only a surgeon, but an orthopedic surgeon, and expert in the human skeletal structure, someone who might very well know how these things could be done.
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