Murder at the Lanterne Rouge Read Online Free PDF Page B

disappeared.”
    René spread his hands, pleading. “We’re trying to help her. Please.”
    The nun looked around the deserted teak-wood foyer. She pulled out a paper from the drawer. “Ching Wao. We call him and he sends girls to work.”
    “They’re illegals?” Aimée asked.
    “I don’t ask.” The nun paused. “But I hope this girl, Meizi, is all right.”
    R ENÉ SPOKE INTO his cell phone outside the dojo as freezing wind off the Seine whipped the quai. He paced back and forth, trying to get reception as the Métro clattered on the overhead tracks from Austerlitz.
    Meizi had lied about living above the shop, and about cleaning bathrooms at the dojo. What else was she hiding?
    Aimée couldn’t bear to see René heartbroken. If she could find Meizi, talk to her, and … what? Get her to admit she had another man?
    Aimée opened the glove compartment and felt around. Under René’s car registration she found his licensed Glock pistol.
    With a full clip.
    Not only was he a crack shot, René had a black belt in judo. She’d always said he should register his fists as lethal weapons.
    René climbed into the car, brushing a soggy brown leaf from the shoulder of his wool overcoat.
    “Since when do you carry this loaded?”
    “The last time I was shot made me cautious.” A grim smile. “You never know what you’re up against.”
    True. Yet it didn’t ease her worry that René might go vigilante. She put the Glock on top of his car registration and shut the glove compartment.
    “Ching Wao understood when I said Meizi’s name.” He readjusted the height of his adjustable seat. “The rest was in Chinese. But we’ll go to his address on rue de Saintonge.”
    He gunned the Citroën up the ramp and over Pont d’Austerlitz.
    “René, you’ve known Meizi less than two months.”
    His jaw set in a hard line. She’d never seen him so upset. “You’re thinking she’s illegal. I don’t care. But I know she’s terrified, Aimée. And there’s nothing more to say until I get the truth from Ching Wao.”
    They drove into the honeycomb of narrow streets edging the Marais. Years ago her grandfather had told her the street names reflected the professions of the ancient quartier: rue des Cordelières, road of the rope-makers; rue des Arquebusiers, musket-makers; Passage de l’Horloge à Automates, watchmakers and windup machines. He never tired of reminding her that rue du Pont aux Choux—Bridge of Cabbages—was named after a medieval bridge spanning the open sewers. Or how he’d investigated a case on rue des Vertus—road of the virtuous—where hookers plied their trade.
    Traffic crawled, almost at a standstill.
    The image of the man’s body in the light of the red lantern came back to her. Her stomach clenched. His gnawed flesh, those vacant eyes.
    René parked near Cathédrale Saint-Croix des Arméniens, the small Armenian church. No. 21, their destination, sported chipped dark-green doors and a Digicode. Aimée tried to stifle her rising suspicions that Meizi was part of an illegal ring that preyed on Frenchmen. But that was ridiculous; she cleaned toilets.
    “Doubt your dental floss will work here, Aimée.”
    Wrong type of door. Damn, why didn’t she carry that casting putty anymore? The universal postman’s key, which she still hadn’t given back to Morbier, wouldn’t work either.
    “We’ll have to wait until someone comes out,” René said.
    “I don’t like waiting.” Aimée took her LeClerc face powder and makeup brush out of her bag and brushed the keypad with powder. She compared the congealed fingerprint oil to locations on the keypad.
    René blinked. “Giving the Digicode a makeover?”
    “Utility chic, René,” she said. “How many combinations can you get out of the numbers 459 and letter A?”
    “Two hundred fifty-six,” he said, a nanosecond later.
    Amazing. She’d need a calculator.
    He reached up on his toes peering closer. “Given the alphanumeric proximity and