The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [84]
Detectives Barras and Maitrot had been through Henri Kanarack’s apartment on the avenue Verdier in Mont-rouge and had found nothing. The flat had been all but empty. A few of Michele Kanarack’s clothes, a handful of catalogues advertising baby clothes, half-a-dozen unpaid bills, some food in the cupboards and refrigerator and that was it. The Kanaracks had evidently packed up and left in a hurry.
At this stage the only thing they knew for certain was that Henri Kanarack/Albert Merriman was in the morgue. Where Michele Kanarack was was totally up in the air. A check of hotels, hospitals, halfway houses, morgues and jails had come up blank. A trace of her maiden name, Chalfour, had done the same. She had no driver’s license, no passport, not even a library card— under either name. Nor had there been a photograph of her in the apartment, or in Merriman/Kanarack’s wallet. As a result, all they were left with was a name. Nonetheless, Lebrun had put out a wanted bulletin for her across France. Maybe local police would turn up something they couldn’t.
“What killed Merriman?” McVey made a mental note of the landscape as they turned off the highway and onto the muddy road that encircled the park.
“Heckler & Koch MP-5K. Fully automatic. Probably with a muffler.”
McVey winced. A Heckler & Koch MP-5K was a people-killer. A nine-millimeter light machine gun with a thirty round magazine, it was a terrorist favorite and weapon of choice among serious drug merchants.
“You found it?”
Putting out his cigarette, Lebrun slowed to a crawl, navigating the Ford through and around a series of large rain puddles.
“No, that’s from forensics and ballistics. We had a dive team working the river for most of the afternoon without success. There’s a strong current that runs a long way here. It’s what took Merriman’s body so far, so quickly.”
Lebrun slowed the car and stopped at the edge of the trees: “We walk from here,” he said, pulling a heavy-duty flashlight from a clip just under the seat.
The rain had stopped and a moon was peeking out from behind passing clouds as the two detectives got out and started toward the cinder and dirt ramp that led down to the water. As they went, McVey looked back over his shoulder. In the distance he could just make out the lights of Saturday-night traffic moving along the road that hugged the Seine.
“Watch your footing, it’s slippery here,” Lebrun said as they reached the landing at the bottom of the ramp. Swinging the flashlight, he showed McVey what was left of the washed-out tracks Agnes Demblon’s car had made when it was towed away.
“There was too much rain,” Lebrun said. “Any footprints there might have been were washed away before we got here.”
“May I?” McVey put out his hand, and Lebrun handed him the light. Swinging it out toward the water, he judged the. speed of the current as it moved past just off the shore-line. Bringing the light back, he knelt down and studied the ground.
“What are you looking for?” Lebrun asked.
“This.” McVey dug in a hand, came up with a scoop of it, shining the light on it just to make sure.
“Mud?”
McVey looked up. “No, mon ami. Rouge terrain. Red mud.”
45
* * *
COMPARED TO the boisterous reception at Kloten Airport, the dinner for Elton Lybarger was genteel and intimate, with guests taking up four large tables around a dance floor. More than an entry into an entirely new world, it was the setting Joanna found extraordinary, “ even incredible. In the private ballroom of a lake steamer leisurely exploring the shoreline of the Zurich-see, which the deep Alpine Lake Zurich overlooked, she felt as if she had become a character in some dazzlingly elegant, turn-of-the-century play.
Seated next to Pascal Von Holden, dashing and resplendent in a deep blue tuxedo and starched white, wing-tip shirt, Joanna was at a table for six. And although she smiled and made polite conversation with the other guests, paying attention as best she could, it was all but impossible for her to keep her eyes from the country-side they passed. It was the time just before sunset,