Deadly Jewels (17 page)

Good, thought Elias; here we are, now we can sleep. No one had slept on the train. Here there were no guards, just prisoners with armbands, big men, yelling. Here they were to be quarantined, their bodies dipped and scrubbed, their heads shaved.

Here, there was no rest.

Elias did what they told him to do. He put on the uniform. He placed his suitcase on the bunk assigned to him. He listened to everything the kapos said, and he followed their directions.

“You will join the rest of the prisoners when we are clear that you are not diseased,” said the camp commandant, Karl Koch, striding up and down in front of the ragged line they made outside the barracks. He was dressed in black and looked smart and elegant in the morning sunlight. “You will be treated well if you do as you are told. Here you will work. We have a quarry, and we have a factory. We are working for the Reich, and it is an honor and a privilege for you to do so.”

Elias felt neither. At night, they whispered together in the dark. “Could be worse, I've heard there's far worse than this place.”

Worse than this place? It was difficult to imagine.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The sound of the door closing woke me.

Fuzzy and disoriented, I realized I'd fallen asleep on the sofa, the photographs of the crime scene scattered around me, my notebook on the floor. I'd been dreaming of tunnels and endless corridors and someone calling my name.…

“Martine.” This voice was familiar, and I blinked in the light and looked up at Ivan. “Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you.”

“What time is it?” As though that made a difference.

“Almost midnight. I thought you'd be in bed.”

I struggled to sit up. “I thought you'd be back this afternoon.”

He sat down on the sofa, and a sudden wave of comfort engulfed me: Ivan's smell, Ivan's presence. Easy to forget all the anxiety and the fear: he was here now. “I know, babe. Sorry. I got delayed.”

“I don't understand.” I rubbed my eyes; it didn't help. “I kept calling you.”

“I know.” He sighed. “Didn't bring my charger, and there was a lot going on.”

My mouth felt like I'd been eating wet wool. “What is it?” I asked. “What's happened to Margery?”

He looked around the large loft space as though seeing it for the first time. “Wouldn't you rather talk in the morning? I think we're both exhausted.”

“Ivan, tell me.”

“Margery's all right. So's Peter. But she's feeling—I don't know. I've been talking with her about it for a day now and I still can't describe it. Like she's not doing what she thinks she should be.”

I blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“Back to the beginning,” he said. “Peter works for Doctors Without Borders.”

“I know that.” And that he was away a lot of the time; the kids complained of it.

“And he's out there doing good in the world. And she's living in a white-bread upper-middle-class suburb.”

I was starting to get the picture. “She wants to go with him.”

“Pretty much, yeah. She's been getting back into clinical work herself.” Margery had been a pediatrician back when she and Ivan were married. “She wants to make a difference. She's been depressed—”

“I know.”

“—and there's the African thing. She thinks this is the solution. For her, anyway.”

“What does Peter think?” I was avoiding the real issue here. Better to chat about how other people were doing, what they were thinking.

“He's all for it. He never wanted her to give up her clinical work.”

“I see.”

There was a long silence. We both knew what was coming next, and neither of us wanted to be the one to say it. “She wanted to know if the kids could come live with us,” Ivan said finally.

There it was. “And neither of you felt it was appropriate to involve me in this conversation?”

“It was premature. She wanted to talk with me first.”

“What, so you could make a preliminary decision? So the two of you could resolve whatever needs to be resolved and then report back to me?”

“They're our kids, Martine.”

I'd heard the expression before: seeing red. Who thought that it was literal? I never actually did it until that night: but there it was in front of me, pulsing and angry. Red, red, red. “
Your
kids? They're
your
kids now? After years of parenting them together? After years of not being able to make plans every other weekend, not being able to do anything in the summer that didn't involve them, not being able to afford things—don't say you don't remember that, it's exactly what was happening when we were first married—because of paying child support and transportation and braces and…” I was having trouble breathing, and running out of English. I do fury much better in French, possibly the only thing I have in common with my boss. I took a deep breath, tried to regroup. “After all that, suddenly, they're your kids? I'm good enough to cook and care and transport and pay, but not good enough to make decisions affecting their lives—oh, yes, and incidentally, my life, too?”

“You know that's not what I meant.”

“That's exactly what you meant! That's absolutely
precisely
what you meant! You don't give me any warning that it's what you're thinking about, you go off and don't answer your phone and leave me alone to deal with them and let me think all sorts of horrible things, that you were maybe even dead somewhere, and it's bad enough I have to deal with a murder here—”

“Wait,” he interrupted. “What murder?”

“Don't even go there! Don't you
dare
go there! That has nothing to do with you!” I was shouting and crying at the same time, and I had to stop, I really couldn't breathe.

“Listen to me.” Ivan grasped my hands in his. “Listen to me. I didn't know that's what it was about. Margery called me and asked me to come. She didn't say why, only that she didn't want the kids around for the conversation. So I thought that she was probably going to tell me she was sick. There was that hospitalization last year, and I know she's had some tests done at Mass General … anyway, I thought it was bad news, bad news about her health, which, yeah, might have led ultimately to the same thing, the kids coming to live here, but I didn't think that far. I thought I should honor what she wanted, they were okay here with you, we could have a conversation and that would be that.”

“And she told you to keep this whole thing secret from me?”

He expelled breath in something like a splutter. “Of course not. But after they told me on the phone—well, you remember, we were with the kids all day, Martine. I didn't want to make a big deal of it in front of them. I thought I'd call you from Boston, talk with you then.”

“But you didn't.”

“No, and I'm sorry about that. I really am. First it was Margery—you know how she is, she feels guilt anytime she isn't the world's most perfect mother, and she was still going back and forth over the decision. And then I got a call from the casino—”

I could feel the hysteria rising again. “You took calls from the casino but not from me!”

“—and it was an emergency.” “Emergency” is one of the words we respect in each other's lives. We both work with the public in highly visible positions. We both have jobs that aren't expected to end at the close of the day. We both acknowledge and accept that, and “emergency” is a word we don't use lightly. Normally, I would have completely accepted and respected his need to deal with an emergency rather than calling me. But this wasn't a normal night. “I don't care if the
foutu
casino was burning to the ground! I had a right to know! To not worry! I thought you might be dead, and instead you and Margery were talking about your lives, and…” I ran out of steam. The tears that had been vying with my shouting were too overwhelming.

“I'm sorry, Martine,” Ivan said gently. “I should have involved you.”

“Yes,” I sobbed.

“And we're going to have to talk about it, but not now.”

“No,” I sobbed.

That's the problem with people, isn't it? That they will disappoint you. That even Ivan—who by and large is one of the best human beings I've ever met—is sometimes stupid, selfish, and completely unaware. I had an inkling that I wasn't completely easy to get along with all the time, either. But marriage is where you acknowledge that your partner isn't exactly who or what you want them to be, and you love them anyway. That they can disappoint and you can move on. I knew that, even as I crawled miserably into bed, to nurse the hiccups following in the wake of my meltdown. I knew that we would make it all right.

I just wasn't yet seeing quite how.

*   *   *

Monday morning, and the sun was far too bright. I felt as though I'd been up partying all night. I winced at the smallest sound.

And, worse luck, I had to go to work.

Hard to believe everything that had happened over the weekend: it was Thursday when I'd been called in to a meeting and heard Patricia Mason's story for the first time. I felt as though I'd been living it forever.

Richard was already in and looking disgustingly cheerful. He took one look at me and signaled to Chantal, who kept an espresso machine in the outer office. “
Ça n'va pas
?” he asked. “What is the matter?”

“An argument with my husband.” I left it at that.

He followed me into my office. “I heard about the murder,” he said. “It was in the newspapers yesterday.”

Of course it would be. We'd gone from a PR coup to being a city in which young women students got killed: that was exactly the way that Jean-Luc would see—and articulate—the situation. And, somehow, it was going to be my fault.

“They're investigating it,” I said, sitting down.

“And the jewels?”

“It's been passed on to a pay grade way over our heads,” I told him. “All the way to Ottawa.”

“C'est dommage,”
Richard commented. He sat down in one of the chairs facing my desk, elegantly crossing one leg over the other. “You won't hear from
monsieur le maire
, though, that's one good thing.”

“What?” A glimmer of light in a very dark mood. “Why not?” I'd been expecting the summons to already be on my desk.

“He's in Québec City,” Richard said. “The conference. He left Saturday, will not return until tomorrow or Wednesday.”

“So maybe he doesn't know?”

Richard sighed and, reaching over, riffled through the piles of paper on my desk. He extracted a copy of the
Gazette
and held it up for me to see. I sighed. “Okay, so he knows.”

“He knows,” Richard agreed, tossing the paper back on the pile. “But you can be sure that it is not going to ruin his stay at the Château Frontenac.”

The one thing we could count on: the mayor taking care of himself first and foremost. He was probably enjoying a massage at the Payot Institute spa even as we spoke. On the taxpayers' dollar, of course.

“No,” I agreed. “Nothing could ruin that.” I took a deep breath. “Okay. We need to send out a press release about the murder. Can you get a quote from the city police about how the investigation is going?” It was going nowhere, of course, but they'd find a way to say otherwise. No one wanted the people of—or the visitors to—Montréal thinking there was a mad killer on the loose.

If only they knew that they were perfectly safe in their beds. This particular killer was only interested in one thing. But what? I watched Richard leave and pull the door shut quietly behind him and still I couldn't move. What did the killer gain by eliminating Patricia?

I picked up my smartphone and snapped at the robotic voice to call Julian. “There had to be something she wasn't telling us,” I said when he answered.

“Good morning to you, too.”

“It just occurred to me. Sometimes people don't say everything that they should, they assume there will be time later to do it, but maybe in her case there wasn't. So maybe that's what we have to find out.”

“Sounds like you're talking from personal experience.”

“Did that occur to you?”

He sounded like he was talking to an old person. “Yes, Martine. That did occur to me.”

“Oh.” I felt deflated. “So, have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Found out what it was?”

A long sigh. “Not yet, Martine.”

“Will you tell me when you do?”

There was a long pause. “This is a criminal investigation, not a cold case. An active criminal investigation.
I'm
even on the periphery, for God's sake.”

“You work best on the periphery,” I reminded him. Julian had somewhat rejected the life his family name and money could have allowed him—or at least put it on hold—yet was never really accepted into the rank and file of city police. Never really one of them. And probably driven to show results more than anyone else on the force because of it.

“Julian,” I said. “The only thing we have going for us is that we know her. Knew her, I mean.” I remembered his energy, the last time the police had shoved him aside, his willingness to follow his own ideas, his own instincts, and where it had led. I wanted that Julian back again. “We should figure out who was following her.” I had, of course, no idea how one might do such a thing.

“I've been assigned to pulling her history.” He sounded glum.

“That should take you about five minutes.”

He sighed. “I give up. All right. That guy she saw, that I saw, he may have just caught that bus because it was available and he knew I was onto him.”