The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [96]
He had to assume they belonged to Lebrun’s Ford, because he and the French inspector had arrived after the rain had stopped; any new vehicle entering the park would have left a second set of tracks.
Accelerating slowly, McVey drove around the park to where the trees met the top of the ramp leading down to the water. Stopping, he got out. Directly in front of him two sets of washed-over footprints led down the ramp to the river. His and Lebrun’s. Studying the ramp and the landing at the bottom, he imagined where Agnes Demblon’s white Citroën would have been parked near the water’s edge and tried to think why Osborn and Albert Merriman would have been there. Were they working together? Why drive the car to the landing? Was there something in it they were going to unload into the water? Drugs maybe? Or was it the car itself they had designs on? Trash it? Strip it for parts? But why? Osborn was a reasonably well-off doctor. None of it made sense.
Theorizing the red mud here was the same red mud he’d seen on Osborn’s running shoes the night before the murder, McVey had to assume Osborn had been here the day before. Add to that the fact that three sets of fingerprints had been found in the car, Osborn’s, Merriman’s, and Agnes Demblon’s, and McVey felt reasonably certain it was Osborn who had picked the river location and brought Merriman to it.
Lebrun had established that Agnes Demblon had worked at her job in the bakery the entire day on Friday and had still been there late in the afternoon, the time Merriman had been killed.
For the moment, and even before ballistics gave Lebrun a report on the bullet Vera Monneray said she had taken out of Osborn, McVey was willing to believe her story that a tall man had done the shooting. And unless he had worn gloves and had both Osborn and Merriman under his control, friendly or unfriendly, it was safe to assume he had not come to the park in the same car with them. And since the Citroën had been left at the scene, he would either have had to come in a separate car—or, if by the off chance he had ridden out with Osborn and Merriman, have had another car pick him up afterward. There was no public transportation this far out, nor would he have been likely to walk back to the city. It was possible, but very unlikely, that he’d hitched a ride. A man who used a Heckler & Koch and had just shot two men was not the kind of man who stuck out his thumb, thereby providing a witness who could later identify him.
Now, if one followed the Interpol, Lyon, trail to New York Police Department records, it would make Merriman, not Osborn, the tall man’s target. If that was so, did that mean there was a connection between Osborn and the tall man? If so, did the tall man, having killed Merriman, then double-cross Osborn and turn the gun on him? Or, had the tall man followed Merriman, perhaps from the bakery, to wherever he’d met Osborn, and then followed the two here?
Taking that theory further and assuming the fire that destroyed Agnes Demblon’s apartment building was designed primarily to terminate her, it seemed reasonable to assume the tall man’s orders were to take care not only of Merriman, but anyone else who might have intimately known him.
“His wife!” McVey suddenly said out loud.
Turning from the trail, he started back under the trees toward the Opel. He had no idea where the closest phone would be, and he cursed Interpol for giving him a car with no radio and no phone. Lebrun had to be alerted that Merriman’s wife, wherever she was, was in serious danger.
Reaching the edge of the trees, McVey was almost to the car, when abruptly he stopped and turned around. The path he’d just taken, in a rush from the murder scene, was through the trees. Exactly what a gunman leaving a shooting might have done. The way McVey and Lebrun had walked to the ramp the night before had been around