The Sketcher's Mark (Lara McBride Thrillers Book 1) (7 page)

“And what about unofficially?  You must have intelligence operatives based here.  Isn’t there somebody you can talk to, someone who can help.  I’d owe you a favor and I have a lot of pull back home .  That might come in handy for you some point down the line.”

“That’s very generous of you, Detective, but I really am kind of powerless at this point.  Even with the local Police involved there’s nothing we can do from our end in assisting them other than liaising on your behalf. I’d be happy to do that as a special favor considering your law enforcement credentials.  But the ‘intelligence people’ you spoke about, I don’t know anything about that.”

He was beginning to tune out of the conversation, his mind drifting to which restaurant he should take Cecille to before taking her back to his flat for the night.

“You’re looking for a female backpacker.  An American tourist who isn’t staying in the usual hotels.  She’s traveling with a crowd of people who move from place to place with no way of tracking them.  She could be working in a bar getting paid under the table here or Berlin or London or Madrid.  All they have to do is get on a train and jump off wherever they feel like.  If someone wants to get lost out here it’s pretty easy to do.  This isn’t America.  There are millions of people across Europe who are totally off the grid.”

He hadn’t meant it to sound so dismissive or final, but those were the cold hard facts and she had to realize that.  From the look on her face, he knew he had said too much. The woman leaned forward, determined.  Her eyes seemed to bore directly in to his soul and he found himself shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

“Mr Shaye, I know you have a lot of red tape and rules but if you could think about this situation, this one girl, outside of the box for a second.  She’s a young, pretty girl out there on her own and a man has her.  Girls like her- backpackers- traveling alone are perfect victims.  I agree with everything you just said and that’s why I think there’ve been others.”

“Now you’re saying there’s a serial killer in Paris you just happened to have stumbled upon because your sister didn’t come home time?  That’s a pretty big jump, don’t you think? ”

“He’s got a twenty four hour head start on us.  We’re way behind him already, Mr Shaye. I’m just hoping it’s not too late.”

“I guess I’m just having trouble with this leap.  How did we go from your sister to a man kidnapping multiple backpackers?  I’m not in law enforcement so forgive me if I sound naïve.”

“I give lectures on this kind of predatory behavior. When I spoke to him he seemed too controlled for a first timer.  He didn’t sound like someone who had just acted on impulse.  Answering her phone and talking to me took a lot of guts and confidence-
chutzpah
.  That suggests he’s comfortable doing what he does, that means he’s not a first timer.”

“I don’t follow,”  he muttered, genuinely confused.

“Balls, Mr Shaye.  You’re familiar with those I assume.”

It had already become evident to her that Derek Shaye was something of a moron, but he was a moron with potential juice at the embassy so she pushed on.

“For someone who wants to prey on young women out here, backpackers are perfect targets.  He could be long gone before anyone knew his victim was missing.”

Derek Shaye tried to process all of this.  It was new to him and, honestly, felt like something he had seen on TV.  He looked at the Detective and wondered if she was even sane.  Calling that Captain at the LAPD was sounding like a prudent thing to do right now to check her credentials.  Her sister was probably holed up in a hotel somewhere with some tanned muscle head she had met in a bar.

He took a moment to consider what all of this meant.  If she was right, that would mean more paperwork, forms to be filled in and a lot of sweat and effort he wasn’t interested in putting in.  If she was wrong and was simply just over reacting based on her experience as a Police Officer, then that, too, could mean paperwork.  He had to distance himself from her and wash his hands of the incident as quickly and finally as possible.  He decided the best way to do it was in the most diplomatic way possible, which was to steer her towards someone else.  In this case, the Paris Police.  He reached for his pen and wrote on a piece of paper on his desk.

“Inspector Jean Brouchard is a very experienced officer with the Paris Police.  He’s a friend of mine and if you tell him I sent you he will help you immediately.”  Derek Shaye finished writing the address of Brouchard’s station and the phone number and slid it to the Detective.

“If you’d like to give me a number where I can reach you…”

Lara shook her head. She’d recognized the look in his eyes as soon as she walked in- he was another predator, just a different kind to the one she was hunting and nowhere near as practiced, despite what he might think of his skills.

“I’ll call you if I can find something for you to do.”  Lara said and walked out the door. 

For the first time in his career, Derek Shaye couldn’t find anything to say.  She had left him speechless and emasculated.  He checked the clock and saw he would be able to meet with Cecille after all.  Lara McBride was no longer his problem. 

He had no idea how wrong he was.

Chapter Ten

Lara hailed a cab outside the Embassy and sat in the back seat as the Taxi stormed through the rain, passing the Arc de Triumph and on to the Champs d’Elysses.  She had the piece of paper in her hand with Inspector Brouchard’s contact details and she pulled out her cellphone to call.  She checked her watch.  It was pushing six o’clock now and she had wasted precious time waiting at the embassy.  Brouchard was probably not even on duty but she would try anyway.  She got voicemail- in French- but she thought she heard the name “Brouchard” in the greeting somewhere.  She hung up, not even sure what to say.  She had the address for his office and planned to head over there and see if she could find him in person.

She suddenly felt her chest tighten and her breathing became short.  She had the driver stop, paid him and got out of the cab halfway down the boulevard.  She needed air, even if it was raining so viciously.  She took cover from the downpour in a bus shelter while she looked around for a pharmacy.  Traffic swarmed on the busy street and people ran down the sidewalk to get out of the rain.  The city was alive and throbbing, the lights from the stores glowing in the early evening gloom.  She felt dizzy and tried to tune everything out so she could calm down and operate back at maximum efficiency.  Otherwise, she would be useless.

She had dreaded anything happening to close family or a friend.  She was afraid of it because she didn’t know if she would be able to perform as well when someone she was close to and cared about was the victim.  She was perfectly confident in her abilities as a Detective, she knew what she was doing and she had had the best training and the experience of doing it in one of the most dangerous cities in America.  But, when it was personal, she feared she would doubt her abilities, second guess herself and crumble under the pressure.  She didn’t want that.  She couldn’t let that happen.  She knew this tease of a panic attack was just her subconscious fear of failure kicking in.

“Well, fuck that…” she said to herself, opening her eyes and taking a deep breath, sucking in the taste of the city and opening herself up to it, surrendering every sense she had to the hunting grounds around her.

“I’m gonna find you.  You don’t know I’m here.  Maybe I say should hello.”  Sometimes talking out loud to herself gave her the best ideas and the simplest plans.  Now she had one.  She had to find a way to make contact with the man who had her sister.

Chapter Eleven

Guillotine looked at the missing posters stapled to the tree by the river, tour boats slowly moving over the river behind him like fat beasts migrating south.  It was Janelle. Someone had come looking for her. He looked down at the contact details beneath Janelle’s picture.  It implored whoever may have seen her to call “Lara”. The woman who had called Janelle’s phone repeatedly.  The woman he had chosen to talk to, something he had never done before. This Lara had wasted no time creating the missing posters and getting them out all over the major tourist spots.  Guillotine knew he should feel uneasy.  He was being hunted.  But he felt a thrill.  It wasn’t the first time someone had come looking for one of his Angels and put up flyers appealing for help but he had never made contact with them before.  They had all gone home empty handed.  There had been something pathetic and desperate about their attempts.  They had waited weeks, sometimes months, for their daughters and sisters before they had come out here looking. Lara’s dedication and tenacity piqued his interest. She was driven and wasted no time.  She was not playing by the rules and that excited him.  Clearly, she was not working with the Police, either- and that encouraged him further.

Ironically, she had nailed one of her missing posters over one of those for his gallery show next week, “Les Arts d’Guillotine”.  Had she not put her flyer on his poster, defacing it, making him come over to remove it, he may have missed it entirely.  Fate worked in mysterious ways, he mused.  People looked at him as he stood holding the poster in his hands, chuckling to himself.
 

He checked his watch and saw he was already five minutes late for his meeting with Claude, the gallery owner and manager of new artists who had taken him under his wing to make him the toast of the Paris art scene.  A pretentious, peacocking fop, Claude was useful only to Guillotine in that he could bring his work to the world’s attention.  In that respect, Claude was a necessary evil.  He represented the money and business side of art and Guillotine detested that.  Art and commerce were two different species and their offspring could only be a bastard mutation.  However, Guillotine knew he needed Claude to bring more attention to him.  For the bigger piece.  He started walking, headed for the café where they were to meet.

Bald little Claude sat at his regular table wearing his most expensive suit with a purple handkerchief peeking out of his breast pocket. For Claude, it was a unique signature that he confidently felt gave him some artistic kudos and personal expression. Guillotine hated the purple handkerchief.  It offended him every time he saw him wearing it. Sometimes he had to struggle with the urge to use the cheese wire he kept in his pocket to sheer off Claude’s face, wrap it in that purple handkerchief and toss it to some wild street dogs as a treat on his way home.  Claude sat now, offensively slurping at a cappuccino and smiling at the waiter in as flirtatious a manner as he could muster.  He was an abomination, a parasite leeching off true artists like himself, soaking up the excess adulation like a greedy sloth. 

The first time he had met Guillotine, Claude had been on his way to an appointment when he had passed the mobile trailer Guillotine had parked on the street and decorated with his sketches.  He was doing portraits for tourists and had been sat chatting with a pretty young British girl.  Claude had stopped to admire his work.  These were not just mere portraits done for tourists for quick cash.  They were vivid and alive, as though Guillotine had captured their souls with paper and charcoal. He had asked if Guillotine did other work.  Guillotine had looked right at him and Claude had gasped seeing his face in the light.  The scars were like thick lips crisscrossing his face in elaborate tribal patterns, threatening to open any second and devour him.  He felt a sudden rush of sexual attraction and wanted to put his lips on every scar and force his tongue inside.  Claude was familiar with “scarification” but he had never seen it so beautifully rendered as it was on Guillotine’s face. Claude had watched Guillotine at his exhibitions, had seen how he wielded the scars as weapons, revealing them to those he felt were beneath him or wanted to shut up and go away. Claude found the man arousing- his confidence and power over people was intoxicating. 

Guillotine was an odd fellow, Claude had always thought, but then gifted artists always were.  He had shown him other works, masterpieces depicting the levels of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno.  Claude thought there was something deliciously anti-Catholic about Guillotine’s work, obsessed as it was with sin and punishment without redemption, the “heavenly” elements always presented as something of an exaggerated joke.  Guillotine’s work on pain and suffering was rendered on oil canvasses mounted on thick wooden frames giving them a dense, tactile existence, whereas the sketches were done on paper, as ethereal as the lives they captured.  Intrigued by the contradiction of hardcore suffering depicted on canvass and angelic beauty on paper, he had asked Guillotine why he chose the two mediums.  Guillotine had simply explained that beauty fades yet pain was eternal.  With sentiments like that, Claude couldn’t wait to find a suitable place to exhibit his work and get him in front of the press.  What sound bites and quotes he could give to promote his work.  Now, if only he could find out how close he was to finishing this masterpiece he kept teasing him about.

When Guillotine walked in to the café and sat opposite him, Claude felt the usual rush of excitement.

“Did you finish?  Is it ready?” he blurted.

Guillotine rarely looked at him, seemed fascinated now by the rain spattering against the windows.

“Soon,”  Guillotine replied, dismissive.  Something was on his mind.  Claude decided to change subjects.

“I have good news.  Paris Match will be covering the event. Le Monde is confirmed and I have someone coming from the British Sunday Times.   The Americans are not biting, but they will when we move the exhibit to New York after Christmas.”

Guillotine shook his head, began to trace a finger over the thick welt on his left cheek that ran down to his jaw.  He was twenty four when he’d made that one.  A blunt kitchen knife.  He’d actually seen the inside of his cheek and the muscles beneath.  He tapped it now, imagining the muscle beneath the skin and the nerves that were dead and gone like the memories he had killed by doing it.  Memories of his Madeleine and Marie.

Claude reached over and touched Guillotine’s hand to get his attention.  Guillotine pulled away as though he had been burnt.

“Are you alright?” Claude enquired, genuinely concerned.

“I have a new sketch for the exhibition.  I want it to have its own place away from the others- but it is not to be sold.  This one is a favorite.”

Guillotine pulled up his satchel and removed the portrait of Janelle he had made in the square.  Claude caught his breath as he so often did when drinking in the sight of his most gifted client’s work.  It was incredible.  He felt as though he could reach in to the paper and caress the girl’s face.

“..incredible!” he exclaimed.  Guillotine looked out across the boulevard and made an impulsive decision.

“I think I’m going to work on a companion piece.”

Chapter Twelve

Lara had spent all morning putting flyers up in the tourist areas.  She had covered the square at the Pompidou, been around the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and had now reached the Cathedral at Notre Dame.  It was exhausting, but she was intent on getting it done and then going to see Inspector Brouchard.  She walked in to the square, the light rain tapping coolly on her cheeks.  She began stapling a flyer to the bark of a tree as a tour group walked past her, Japanese tourists taking photos.  Then she heard someone behind her, shouting. 

Turning, she saw a Police Officer pointing at the flyer on the tree, talking fast in French.  Lara was ready.  All morning she had had shopkeepers, cops, traffic wardens tell her she could not put up her flyers.  She posted them anyway, knowing they would more than likely be torn down seconds later, but she could always return with more.  In the few precious seconds or minutes while the flyers were up, she knew that someone passing by might recognize Janelle’s face.  Better yet, the man who had taken her might see them and call her.

“I don’t speak French. 
Americain
.” Lara shrugged at the outraged Police Officer and walked on.  She watched him reach up and tear the flyer off the tree, tossing it to the ground.  Lara felt anger snap inside her and she started shouting back at the Police Officer. The wind picked up the flyer and it tumbled across the square.  Another Police Officer approached.  Tourists stood braving the cold wind and rain watching the excitement unfold.  Some took pictures.

Guillotine put his foot on the flyer as it blew towards him on the other side of the square. He picked it up off the ground and examined the picture of Janelle.  His sketch of her was far better and it would have made a more eye catching and, frankly, affecting poster, he thought to himself.  He looked out across the square and saw Lara being handcuffed by the Police Officers.  The rain was getting in his eyes so he moved closer, to get a better look.

She was incredibly beautiful, even as her face twisted in anger, screaming at the Police Officers. He marveled at her strength, her passion.  This was the woman who was hunting him and she looked formidable.  He felt the blood rush to his groin and he licked his lips without thinking.  He watched one of the Police Officers take her by the arm while the other barked in to his radio, summoning a Police van from across the street, lights flashing, hurrying to sweep up the latest street trash.  Guillotine knew they would not hold her for long.  They never did with tourists, especially Americans. 

As they put Lara in the back of the van, shouting and kicking, Guillotine decided he would call her tomorrow.

Chapter Thirteen

Lara had sat in the holding cell for three hours surrounded by French drunks and whores before they brought her upstairs to the Missing Persons Unit.  As she was brought in by a young uniformed Officer who reminded her of the rookie at the house in Koreatown, she saw that the entire back wall of the room was covered in photographs of missing people.  Some color, some black and white.  All people who were missed by loved ones whose whereabouts were still unknown.  Lara McBride was not given to emotional reactions.  It wasn’t that she didn’t care or didn’t empathize.  A therapist had once told her she was borderline sociopathic in her detachment, in her objectivity.  Lara had to explain to the woman she was not unfeeling, she was simply logical and objective and felt that the act of displaying emotions to other people was little more than attention seeking. 

Some things triggered an explosive rush of feelings in her over which she had no power at all.  Seeing the faces on the wall and thinking of the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters and friends who were thinking about them right now, worried and concerned, melted Lara McBride’s heart and she suddenly felt tears come to her eyes.  Not because the people were missing and not out of pity.  Lara McBride had tears in her eyes because it made her realize there were people in the world who still cared.  It gave her hope that the world still had some good in it.

Inspector Brouchard was a tall, burly man who had packed on a few extra pounds over the years, especially once he had hit his fifties. Beneath the extra bulk, he carried the litheness that had made him an effective soldier before he became a cop.  He was standing in the doorway to his office.  The Officer who had escorted her from the holding cell excused himself and Brouchard motioned for Lara to sit on the leather chair in front of his desk.  She walked in to the office, scanning it for information about the man before he started talking.  Most people gave away information about themselves in the way they decorated their work place.  Hobbies, interests, schooling, sexual preferences, family status, vacation spots, second homes- all of this could be gleaned in a sharp glance from a keen eye.  She saw the three books she had written were sat on his shelf in the corner.  This could be interesting.  She was also curious about why he was the only person in the Missing Persons Unit right now.

There was a picture of a young girl in her late teens framed on the desk but the Inspector wore a wedding ring on the opposite hand and there was no picture of his wife.  Lara figured he was widowed and the sight of his wife’s face smiling back at him was too painful a reminder to experience every day, hence no pictures of her.  A sensitive man, then, who had exposed his weakness by trying to hide it.  Lara hated her intuition at times like this, feeling like she was intruding on a secret, a delicate pain she had no right to see. The anger that had built up since she had been thrown in the back of the Police van disappeared when Brouchard looked her in the eyes and smiled.  She liked him straight away.

“Detective McBride, I assume resisting arrest and assaulting Police officers is as much a crime in your country as it is here,”  Brouchard’s voice was deep and commanding.

“I didn’t assault-“ Lara began, but Brouchard raised his hand to stop her and shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter. We will not be pressing charges.  I extend this to you as a courtesy.  Let’s call it a misunderstanding.  Actually, let’s say we’re even.”

“Even for what?  Have we met before?”

“Yes, sort of.  I saw you lecture in Boston a few years ago.  They sent me over to study the latest in American law enforcement methods.”

“Did it help?”

“I closed eight cold cases when I got back.”

“Guess it did.”

“You taught me to look at the evidence in a different way- with fresh eyes.  To think creatively.  Thank you for that.  So, how can we help you, Detective?”

“My sister has been abducted.  She said she was on her way to the airport but she never made the plane.  I called her phone on the flight over and a man answered.  He said he had her.  He said, ‘she’s my Angel now’.  I don’t think this is his first time doing it.”

“That’s not much to go on.”

“The more time we waste debating whether this is happening or not is more time for the trail to go cold.  And you know the chances of finding missing persons become almost impossible after forty eight hours.  Witnesses forget, security footage gets erased and they slip through the cracks.”

“I understand that this is personal so, if I may ask, in your professional opinion, is it possible that you may be overreacting?”

She looked at the picture of the beautiful young woman on his desk.  It was a single shot of her, backlit by the sun on what looked like a college campus.  Not a wedding picture and she could see a family resemblance in the eyes.  His daughter then.  Brouchard was a good man and she hated herself for what she had to do next to give push him in to helping her.

“I’m assuming that’s your daughter in the photograph.  Did you raise her yourself after your wife died? How would you feel if it was your daughter who went missing?  ”

Brouchard bristled and sat back in his chair, his fingers rolling the wedding ring over in circles. 

“You’re very clever, Detective. I had no doubt.  But manipulating me is beneath you.”

“I’m just trying to find her before something happens.  I’m sorry.”

“I had help from my sisters.  She was ten when her mother passed away.  She handled it very well.  Strong girl.  Like her mother.”