The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [83]
Nearing Paris, Lebrun’s driver crossed the Seine and headed toward the Porte d’Orleans. In his broken English, he told McVey Lebrun was at a crime scene and wished McVey to meet him there.
The rain had started again by the time they pushed through a half block of fire equipment and rows of onlookers held back by uniformed gendarmes. Pulling up in front of a still-smoldering, burned-out shell of an apartment building, the driver got out and led McVey over a crisscross of high-pressure hoses and sweat-caked firemen still playing water on smoking hot spots.
The building was a total loss. The roof and the entire top floor were gone. Twisted steel fire escapes, arched and bowed by extreme heat into opposing courses, like unfinished elevated highway sections, dangled precariously from the upper floors, held there by brickwork that threatened to collapse at any moment. Between the floors, discernible through burned-out window casings, were the scorched and charred timbers that were once the walls and ceilings of individual apartments. And hanging over everything, despite the steadily falling rain, was the un-mistakable stench of burned flesh.
Skirting a pile of debris, the driver took McVey to the back of the building where Lebrun stood with Inspectors Barras and Maitrot in the glare of portable work lights, talking with a heavyset man in a fireman’s jacket.
“Ah, McVey!” Lebrun said out loud as McVey stepped into the light. “You know Inspectors Barras and Maitrot. This is Captain Chevallier, assistant chief of the Port d’Orleans arson battalion.”
“Captain Chevallier.” McVey and the arson chief shook hands.
“This thing was set?” McVey said, glancing up again at the destruction.
“Oui” Chevallier said, finishing with a brief explanation in French.
“It burned very hot, and very quickly, set off by some kind of extremely sophisticated device, probably using a military-type incendiary,” Lebrun translated. “No one had a chance. Twenty-two people. All dead.”
For a long moment McVey said nothing. Finally he asked, “Any idea why?”
“Yes,” Lebrun said definitively, not trying to hide his anger. “One of them owned the car Albert Merriman was driving when your friend Osborn found him.”
“Lebrun,” McVey said,, quietly but directly. “First of all, Osborn’s not my friend. Second, let me guess that the Merriman car was owned by a woman.”
“That’s a good guess,” Barras said in English.
“Her name was Agnes Demblon.”
Lebrun’s eyebrows raised. “McVey. You truly amaze me.”
“What do you have on Osborn?” McVey avoided the compliment.
“We found his rented Peùgeot, parked on a Paris street more than a mile from his hotel. It had three parking tickets, so it hadn’t been driven since early afternoon, yesterday.”
“No sign of him since?”
“We have a citywide out for him, and provincial police are checking the countryside between where Merriman’s body washed ashore and where his car was found.”
Nearby, two burly firemen dragged the scorched remains of a child’s crib through an open door and dropped it on the ground beside the burned-out shell of a box spring. McVey watched them, then turned back to Lebrun.
“The place you found Merriman’s car, let’s go there.”
The yellow lights of Lebrun’s white Ford cut through the darkness as the Parisian detective turned onto the road along the Seine leading toward the park where the police had found Agnes Demblon’s Citroën.
“He called himself Henri Kanarack. He worked at a bakery near the Gare du Nord and had for about ten years. Agnes Demblon was the bookkeeper there,” Lebrun said, lighting a cigarette from the lighter in die console. “Obviously they had a history together. What it was exactly we will have to imagine because he was married to a Frenchwoman named Michele Chalfour.”
“You think she set the fire?”
“I won’t rule it out until we question her. But if she was only a housewife, which it seems she was, I doubt she would have access to those kinds of incendiary materials.