Murder in the Latin Quarter Read Online Free PDF Page A

turned on the ignition. She stepped on the pedal. The engine rumbled to life. She revved into first and shot over the cobble-stoned street, grazing a parked truck’s bumper. A car alarm blared and she took off.
    She heard the man’s shouts. He half-ran, half-limped after her. An apartment window creaked open. “I’m trying to sleep,” yelled a man, shaking his fist.
    The scooter’s engine sputtered. Sirens sounded behind her. A late-night bus crossed the road and she veered behind it, then shot ahead onto the pavement abreast of the bus. She kept pace, hoping no pedestrians would appear, then turned with the bus onto Pont de Sully.
    The Seine gurgled below, dark and sluggish; the plane trees lining the bank filigreed the pavement with shadows. The dark hulk of Place Bayre on Ile St. Louis loomed on the right, the park’s horse chestnut trees nodding in the breeze. And then more sirens sounded. Flashing lights peppered the stone-walled quai.
    She braked, took a sharp left onto the sidewalk of rue Saint Louis-en-l’isle, cut the engine, and coasted under the stone portico of Hotel de Bretonvilliers, a seventeenth-century hôtel particulier in the midst of renovation. Shaking, she shoved the Vespa between the dumpster and the crumbling stone wall and ran.

Tuesday Morning

    IN AIMÉE’S DREAM, it was the freezing December after her mother left them. Papa was working at home, his piles of paperwork on the kitchen table. Her ninth birthday approached, and deep snow resembling glistening sugar carpeted the Jardin du Luxembourg.
    “Get my mitten, Aimée,” came a plaintive child’s voice.
    Icicles sparkled like shiny teeth from the garden’s gold-spike-topped gate. A blue mitten lay in the snow; the chill air reddened the little girl’s honey-colored cheeks.
    The girl had Mireille’s face.
    “Help your sister, Aimée,” her Papa was saying. But it was so cold, so wet. She wanted to take her Papa’s hand, leave behind this demanding stranger with the runny nose. Go away. As she reached out, the mitten turned into a dark severed ear. Blood droplets spattered the pristine snow.
    Aimée blinked awake on cold smooth sheets; she must have kicked her duvet onto the floor. A miasma of guilt engulfed her. She reached for the duvet and for Miles Davis, her bichon frisé, a bundle of fur asleep near her pillow. His little breaths warmed her arm. Pale apricot rays of dawn glowed through her window.
    Since Mireille had walked into her life, asking for help, Aimée had discovered a corpse and been chased. Assailed by doubt, she wondered again if Mireille really was her sister. Or if she’d been set up.
    She rubbed her eyes, unable to clear the images of the man’s severed ear and that circle of salt from her mind. At her laptop on the bedside table, the screen blinked with an e-mail from her partner, René, marked urgent. “Aimée, can you meet the contractor at the office? Aèrospatiale’s interested in our proposal . . . I’m at La Défense meetings all day.”
    Bon, she had to get to the office early. Would she find Mireille waiting with an explanation? Some scenario that would make this nightmare disappear?
    Not likely.
    In the kitchen she made coffee, then scooped the horse-meat from the butcher’s waxed paper into Miles Davis’s chipped Limoges bowl.
    “Breakfast, Furball.”
    In the night, it had rained. Clear drops glistened on the window. Lingering pearly puffs of clouds hovered over the blue-gray rooftops across the Seine. She opened the window and inhaled the rain-freshened air suffused with the dense foliage smell from the trees lining the quai below.
    And then she saw them. Two men sat in the front seat of a dented Peugeot parked in front of her building. Acrid puffs of cigarette smoke drifted from the car’s open window. Her fin-gers tensed on the cup handle. She stepped back, afraid they might be watching her apartment.
    Flics used dented Peugeots for stakeouts. But it was after 6 A.M., the time when flics