Personally, I thought divorcing the physical from the emotional was a recipe for disaster, but, for once, my mouth obeyed my brain and the words remained unspoken. “More?”
“Yes, I thought it was the truffles. And when Jean told me there was some trouble with some of my shipments, I came immediately. Mine is a business built on reputation and an ability to deliver.”
“You suspected Fiona Richards?”
Desiree’s eyes flicked to mine, then back out the window. “She seemed the most obvious one to consider.”
“Did you have a chance to talk to her?”
Again, the flick of a glance. “No.”
A chill washed over me. For the first time tonight, my gut told me she was lying.
* * *
Paolo eased the limo next to the guard shack at Jean-Charles’s gated community—I didn’t remember the entrance being quite so grand. The guard had to step out of the hut and walk the length of the car to talk to me through the back window. I told him my name—luckily Jean-Charles had put me on his permanent list of allowed guests. “Have you heard from Chef Bouclet?”
The guard’s gaze rose from his clipboard and held mine as he gave me a hard stare. “Not since he put you on this here list. You want I should call him?”
I almost said no, then I reconsidered. “Yes, yes, please. Try his cell. You have the number?” If Jean-Charles was avoiding my calls, which the fact that when I dialed his number it rang once, then flipped to voicemail, would indicate, perhaps he wouldn’t be so cavalier when it came to a call from the security guard assigned to guard his house . . . and his child.
“Yes, ma’am.”
As the guard turned his back and ducked into his little shack, I urged Paolo to move forward so I could watch and hear. He eased the car forward, the front bumper almost touching the closed gates, but he managed to maneuver me close enough as the guard picked up the phone and dialed.
Desiree met my eyes as we waited through one ring, two, three . . . We both whirled when the guard said, “Chef Bouclet? Yessir, yessir, your family’s fine. No, your house isn’t burning down, no one has broken in. Why? There’s this lady . . .”
I launched myself through the open window. Hanging half out of the car, I grabbed the phone from the guard and pressed it to my ear. “Jean-Charles? Are you okay?”
The guard tried to reclaim the phone. Desiree shut him down with a sharp
non
. He recoiled, snatching his hand back as if a viper had bitten him.
“Lucky? Oh, Lucky.” Jean-Charles’s voice hitched. “I am okay. You will know all soon. Christophe?”
I calmed down and tried to wiggle back into the car, tough to do with one hand. “He is safe. Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I cannot say.” He sounded tired, scared, a bit exasperated. “You must watch behind you.”
“Look over my shoulder?”
“This is it.” When he got like this, his English deserted him. “Do not trust anyone.”
“Jean-Charles, what the hell is going on?” I glanced at Desiree. Her stoic stare stopped me cold. “How can I keep everyone safe? How can I help, if I don’t know what’s going on? I don’t understand any of this.”
“You will. I can’t say more. Somebody might be listening. I must go.”
“Listening? Who?” I was having trouble keeping up.
“I will find a way to show you. I am only figuring it out myself.”
I tried to wiggle more fully into the back of the car, but the phone cord brought me up short. “You need to tell Romeo what happened.”
“He would not believe me. I must fix this.”
“Fix what?” My head spun, my thoughts whirled. Desiree looked at me, and her stoic façade slipped into an intense look I couldn’t read. She didn’t reach for the phone.
“Please keep Christophe safe, and Chantal. Desiree, she is difficult, but she is my sister. You be safe. Keep looking over your shoulder. People are not what they seem.”
“Jean-Charles, don’t . . .” The line went dead.
Holding the receiver to my ear, I waited, willing his voice to return. When the dial tone sounded, I thrust the receiver back to the guard. “Thank you,” I said, my manners in place, but my wits gone.
His brows lowered, he took the instrument, then backed away from the car. “Anything I should know?”
He would be horrified at all the things he didn’t know. But I tried to smile as I shook my head. “Perhaps if you could alert the patrol to be on the lookout for anything unusual, that would help. There have been some . . . threats. The police are on it, but their manpower is stretched thin. They would appreciate your help, I know.”
The guard nodded. “Yes, ma’am. The police are already here.” He eyed the card I handed him, then punched a hidden button, and the gate eased open. With a wave, he motioned us through.
As we wound through the neighborhood, the trees shrouding the street, deepening the night gloom, my heart beat faster with the irrational hope we would find Jean-Charles at home. Stupid, I know, but hope springs eternal—I’m foolish that way.
I scanned the driveway for a car, the front of the house for signs of life, but hope fled as quickly as it had risen. Except for one lone light in an upstairs window, the house was dark, the driveway empty. A Metro cruiser lurked in the shadows on the opposite side of the street and down a bit. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I did take some comfort in the protection for the kids.
Using her cell phone, Desiree called her daughter, whispering a few hushed words. Lights sprang on, and within a few moments the front door flew open and the girl bounded out—brown curls like her uncle’s, a guarded look like her mother’s. With thin-limbed teenage energy, she took a few strides, then grabbed her mother in a bear hug. It was a good thing I had taken Christophe, who now was dead weight in my arms, his head on my shoulder as he slumbered. Kids could succumb to the siren call of sleep with singular speed anytime, anywhere. A skill that adulthood, with its worries and demands, banished. I felt sleep niggling at me, but with frazzled emotions and tangled thoughts, that so wasn’t going to happen.
Chantal looked at me over her mother’s shoulder, her eyes wide with confusion. “The police were here. They had a piece of paper. Did Mother tell you?”
Desiree glanced at me, then her gaze slid from mine with a guilty look. Jean-Charles implied I could trust her, but she wasn’t making it easy. “No, what did they say?”
“They looked in Uncle’s office and through his room and the kitchen.”
“I’m sorry you were here alone.” I smoothed a curl from her forehead. “Did they take anything?”
“Nothing.” Her voice cracked as her brave front crumbled. “Where is Uncle? What is going on? Something is wrong, no?”
“Have you heard from your uncle?”
Before the girl had a chance to answer, her mother cut her off. “Come,” Desiree announced. “We should get inside.”
Their arms looped around each other in the casual yet fierce embrace of parent and child, Desiree and Chantal turned in unison and ambled toward the light streaming though the open door. Heads bent together, Desiree talked to her daughter in hushed, somber tones. The glow in the dark reminded me of the light at the end of the tunnel. If only it were so. . . . Given recent events, the glow was more likely from the headlight of an onrushing train.
Desiree’s voice was so low, I could barely hear. French was such a beautiful language it made even death sound melodic. I strained to capture the words and to translate, but couldn’t do much of either. Of course, I knew the story, or at least some of it. The rest, I’d have to discover when I could get Chantal alone and put the thumbscrews to her.
We trouped in tandem up the walkway. In the front hall, we parted company. The two of them disappeared through the kitchen toward the family room in the back of the house, while I turned and headed up the stairs with Christophe still slumbering in my arms. I welcomed the growing silence as the sound of their voices dimmed with the distance.
Christophe’s bedroom was the second right at the top of the stairs—if I remembered correctly. When I flipped on the overhead light, the pile of stuffed animals looking at me with their vacant stares confirmed my memory was indeed accurate.
Memories. I felt the echo of last night as I laid Christophe in bed, gently taking off his shoes and pulling the covers over him. Removing his clothes wasn’t going to happen. He looked so peaceful—I didn’t have the heart to awaken him. As I tucked the blanket around his chin, I smoothed the hair back from his eyes. He blinked to a moment of consciousness and gave me a smile that pierced my heart. I bent and kissed his forehead. “Sweet dreams, sweetie.”
His lids closed. “Pancakes? With happy faces?”
I had shown him how to make a smile out of chocolate drops. Had it only been this morning? It seemed like a lifetime ago. “Happy-faced pancakes, of course.”
“With Papa,” he whispered as his lids fluttered closed.
Turning the light off, I left the door open. If Christophe had a bad dream, I wanted to hear him. My hand trailed along the bannister as I retraced my steps down the stairs, the memories of last night echoing around me. Laughter as Jean-Charles tickled his son. Shouts of joy and competition during a hotly contested game of Wii tennis. Chantal, a curious mix of child and young adult, trying to remain above the childishness, but giving in eventually. A vigorous bath time for Christophe . . . with bubbles.
Then adult time. With a different kind of bubbles.
At the foot of the stairs, I turned right, pushing open the double louvered doors to Jean-Charles’s suite. The smells of the night lingered—the scented candles; his cologne, sensual and earthy; the musk of sex. I breathed them in. Savoring, absorbing, remembering . . . dreaming.
A dangerous game, and I knew it. I was hurt, needy, reaching for hope, hoping for love. So willing to buy into the fantasy.
Leaving myself open, raw . . . had I misjudged?
How well did I really know Jean-Charles? He’d told me people are not what they seem. Who? Who had something to hide or a grudge worth killing for? Adone? He’d already voiced his lack of affection for Jean-Charles. And I couldn’t say I blamed him. When folks climbed on high horses, I got testy, so I understood the young chef’s frustration. But kill?
Who else had a bone to pick? Desiree? The others? The killer could be any of them. And Jean-Charles, could I trust him?
Should
I trust him? My track record proved I was way too trusting. And now, was I grasping at straws, desperate for someone to be who they said they were?
God, I couldn’t even trust myself.
I sat at the foot of the bed and lay back. Staring up at the ceiling, I ran my hands over the beautiful fabric as if making a snow angel. The textures, the smells, the sounds, all hit my heart and opened me wide.
Why was life so . . . confusing, upsetting, hard? It wasn’t supposed to be this way, was it? Being a grown-up really could suck.
And here I had thought that when I became a grown-up, I would have all the answers. But all I seemed to have right now were questions. What was going on with Jean-Charles, Fiona, Desiree, Adone, Chef Gregor, and a scientist from UC-Berkeley? And with two murders, this certainly seemed to be about far more than a truffle, no matter the uniqueness. But if it wasn’t about a truffle, then what?
A world-renowned chef, I seriously doubted Jean-Charles could be some closet murderer. Although Romeo had certainly seemed open to the idea, which I both understood and resented. I had to admit that each of us has murder in us—even me. My mother pushed me tantalizingly close so many times. Okay, that was a bit of hyperbole, but still, I could envision pointing the gun at someone and pulling the trigger. But it would take something incredible—protection of life and limb, of family.
Unwilling to resort to snooping through drawers and closets—the police had already looked, anyway—I closed my eyes.
What would push Jean-Charles to take matters into his own hands?
And why was I being drawn into the middle of this dangerous game? A tickle of fear prodded what was left of my rather spotty good sense. I squelched it.
Could Jean-Charles be protecting his sister’s reputation? Possible, but would he sacrifice his own in the process? Doubtful. No, there was something else going on—a high-stakes game I could just catch a faint scent of. Desiree’s circumspection didn’t make me feel any better.
She knew something; I could feel it. Where were the thumbscrews when I needed them?
Torture was something the French would understand.
I
pushed
myself to a seated position, swiping the hair out of my face. Worry about the future only wasted the present. Time to pull on the big-girl panties and get to work.
Launching myself to my feet, I strode out of the room, leaving behind my trip down memory lane . . . and the whiny pansy-ass I’d become. What had happened to the gal who shot first and asked questions later?
When I hit the family room, I felt the old piss and vinegar flowing through my veins. It felt good to have me back.
Chantal and Desiree huddled together on the couch, a nice, warm flame burning brightly in the fireplace. Desiree looked up as I walked in. “Christophe, he is okay?”
“For the moment. He wants his father.” I parked myself in front of the blaze. The warmth enveloped me—I hadn’t realized how cold I was. Chilled to the bone by too little food, too much emotion, and a lethal dose of worry.
“Yes, with no mother, his father is most important.” Desiree glanced at her own daughter. “Jean and I, we have not made the best choices for our children.” She brushed back the hair from Chantal’s forehead.
“You both do the work of two,” Chantal whispered.
“I thought Jean-Charles’s wife died in childbirth.”
“Oui.”
Desiree’s face clouded. “It was horrible. So sudden, she died in Jean’s arms. Her mother, none of her family, got to say good-bye.”
“They weren’t there for the birth?” Warmer now, I eased a bit further from the fire.
“They live very far away, several hours outside of Caracas. They’d made plans to come the following week. We had not met them before—Jean’s courtship and wedding, it was very fast. All fire and heat.”
“That didn’t burn out fast,” I finished the thought.
“No. They were very much in love.” Desiree paused as she gave me an appraising look, then nodded. “I am glad Jean found you. We have been worried. He has not had another since his wife died.”
“The heart can take a long time to heal.”
“I think it was not so much the heart, but the pain. So much loss.” Desiree brushed a curl out of her daughter’s eyes. “Christophe was very early. We almost lost him, too. Jean was frantic. I think my brother has been afraid to love again.”
That made perfect sense to me.
“It was all over so fast.”
My heart felt heavy for all of them—and I needed to explore a painful present on top of a horrid past. “We need to talk.” I caught Chantal’s attention. “Could you leave us alone for a bit?”
The girl eyed me, then shot a questioning glance at her mother. At Desiree’s nod, she pushed herself slowly to her feet, then sauntered out of the room with slouchy indifference, telegraphing her irritation at not being included in the grown-up discussion. Teenagers. The fact that the human race hadn’t died out years ago bore testament to a parent’s boundless love and endless patience.
I watched her until she was out of earshot, then I hit her mother with both barrels. “Your brother is a suspect in a double murder investigation, and you are not being honest with me.” I kept my voice low, but I couldn’t keep it from shaking with worry, anger, and probably a host of other emotions I didn’t want to think about.
“Double?” Through her fatigue, she looked genuinely shocked.
“Mmmm, a scientist from a premier university.”
Her brows crinkled. “What could he have to do with this?”
“I haven’t a clue. This whole thing is a mystery, but your brother is in more than a bit of trouble.”
To her credit, Desiree didn’t try to deflect. She didn’t even deny my accusation; she just looked tired. She rose and stepped around the bar. I warmed myself by the fire and cooled my heels while she found a suitable wine and uncorked it. Dispensing with pretense, she chose two of the largest glasses, filling each to within a millimeter of the brim. Sort of the French version of doing shots, I guessed.
Handing me a glass, she stepped in beside me, absorbing the warmth. “Truly, I do not know what is going on.” She took a sip of her wine and practically groaned. “Jean, he has impeccable tastes.”
I wasn’t going to be sidetracked by Jean-Charles’s likes and dislikes. “You have your suspicions, though.”
“Oui.”
She narrowed her eyes, staring steely-eyed into the past or the future—it was hard to tell which. “How do I know I can trust you?”
I fixed her with a blank stare. “Jean-Charles has impeccable taste.”
Her head swiveled in my direction. She shot me a sardonic grin. “Touché.”
“I make good happy-face pancakes as well.”
Her brows crinkled. “What is this?”
“Deflection.” When the confused look remained, I waved it away. “A poor attempt at humor to break the tension. Never mind. Why don’t you tell me what you know, and what you suspect, and we’ll try to put some pieces of this puzzle together.”
She weighed my suggestion for a moment, then gave in. “About a month ago, some of my clients started complaining. I did not know what to do with this. I have never had an unhappy customer.”
“Never even one dissatisfied customer?” My voice rose in admiration. “You wouldn’t be looking to change careers, would you? Perhaps to hotel management?”
She smiled thinly. “When your products are few, and your suppliers are your friends, keeping customers happy is not difficult.” She pressed her nose into the bowl of the wineglass and inhaled deeply. An ingrained ritual I wasn’t even sure she was aware of doing. “So, when I hear complaints, I am confused. I call Jean. He asks some questions for me. It seems that my shipments are being tampered with. I don’t know where or how.”
“And what did your brother suggest?” I tried to keep my sinking heart out of my voice.
“He wanted to track the shipments.”
“How?”
Desiree looked like she was mulling over exactly how to explain it, so I waited.
“What do you know about cold-chain tracking?” She smiled at my blank stare. “Okay, well, it’s actually technology that has been around for a while. You have a corporate ID badge, correct? One that you hold in front of a scanner?”
I nodded.
“That’s the same technology. It’s called RFID and involves radio waves. When the tag is read by a reader, information can not only be read, but imprinted as well. So, if I put a tag on one of my shipments, every point at which it is within one hundred feet of a reader, that information will show up on the tag.” She signed and shook her head. “I am making this very simplistic, but you understand,
non
?”
I picked up the train of thought. “So, when the package arrives at its ultimate destination, all of the waypoints along the way can be discerned from the RFID chip.”
“In theory.” She swirled the wine in her glass while she talked. “The United States government is very interested in using the technology to keep the food supply in this country safe from terrorist tampering. They have installed readers almost everywhere.”
That sounded very scary—like the cameras on the city streets watching us all. “So your original shipments weren’t tracked?”
“It is an extra expense.” Filling her mouth with wine, she swished it around before swallowing. She gave an almost imperceptible gesture of appreciation. “And there was no need, at least for most of them.”
“How much information can be stored on the chips?”
Desiree took another sip of wine. “It depends on the type of chip. Most of it is out of my ability to understand. But I know that the chips can be read from a hundred meters or more and can be read through the packaging.” She looked at me, pausing. “They can even be implanted in humans.”
“Scary.”
“Much of life is like that,
non
?” She held up her glass, the fire lighting the blood-red wine. “Good things can be used for bad purposes.”
I couldn’t argue—the line between good and bad was razor-thin.
“My brother, he suggested his new chip, so we could see exactly where the packages went. Maybe this way we could determine who was altering them.”
“And in doing so, you stumbled into something a bit bigger.” I swirled the wine in my glass—carefully, as Desiree had overfilled it.
Desiree acknowledged the obvious with a quick shrug, which I caught out of the corner of my eye.
“So,” I continued. “Which shipment was the first to be chipped?”
“We started with the truffle.”
“Chef Gregor’s? The white Alba?” I thought perhaps that was redundant, but she sidestepped my ignorance, which I thought nice.
“This is the one.” A look of disgust pinched her face.“Truffles, especially one like that, must be kept cool and used within days of their harvest. And it was of exceptional quality, so I thought the chip a good thing.” Her Gallic shrug and pursed lips, turned down at the corners, exaggerated and expressive, reminded me of her brother, which hit my heart.
I slammed the lid on my emotions—they never facilitated logic. “And what about Fiona? When did you speak with her last?” As I raised my glass to my lips, I kept my eyes fastened on her over the rim.
Desiree left my side in front of the fire and stepped behind the bar to refill her glass—and stall for time. Her inner struggle marched across her face as she concentrated on the task at hand. Finally, she apparently reached some conclusion. When she looked at me, her face was calm, her eyes clear.
“I arrived only this morning, early.”
I lowered my glass without taking a sip. Apparently, I had been holding it there poised, wondering, waiting, and forgetting about the wine.
“I was angry to begin, and I’d had many hours to get even angrier—it is a long flight from Provence.”
I sensed she was a woman who didn’t like to be prodded, so I didn’t.
“I went looking for Fiona.” She stopped for a moment. I thought I saw her shiver. She rubbed her arm with her free hand. “I found her.” Desiree’s voice dropped to a whisper. “In the food truck.” When she looked up at me, her eyes were haunted. “She died before I could get a knife and cut her loose.”
“You were there?”
“Oui.”
A tear trickled from the corner of her eye. She wiped it away with an angry swipe.
“Did you see anyone?”
She shook her head.
“Who knows about this?”
“My brother. That’s what we were talking about when you brought Christophe.”
Desiree’s hand shook as she lifted her glass to her lips and drank deeply. She dabbed at her lips with a napkin as she set her glass down. “The box the truffle had been in was there.”
“With Fiona?”
She nodded once, her curls bouncing, then recoiling. Why I noticed that, I don’t know. “The Alba was not. The box Jean had stored it in was open, the truffle gone. I took the box and gave it to him.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing, really.”
“Was the tracking chip with the box?” I didn’t know enough to even sound intelligent.
“No, but the truffle had been in Jean’s refrigerator—at least that’s what he told me. I assumed he had taken the chip already.” She looked at me, her eyes large and unblinking. “I am in trouble,
non
?”
“Did you kill Fiona?”
Desiree’s head whipped back as if I’d slapped her. Her anger flared and then was gone—like touching a flame to gunpowder. She answered me with a word in her native tongue, not one I was familiar with. However, delivered with force, her meaning was clear. “Of course not! But I feel responsible. I tried to save her.”
“Then you don’t have much to worry about.” I glossed right over the fact that the police would take a dim view of removing evidence from the scene of a homicide. And they wouldn’t like the fact Desiree did sort of a hit and run by leaving the scene and not reporting the death. I had no idea how to spin all that with Romeo, not that it was my problem. But if I wanted her help, keeping her out of jail seemed like a good place to start. Assuming I trusted her in the first place. Which, at this point, wasn’t a given.
As I thought, I remembered the wine in my hand. My thoughts elsewhere, I swirled the liquid, sloshing a bit on my hand. Ignoring it, I stuck my nose in the bowl of the glass and sniffed. The full bouquet, fruity and bold with hints of spice and smoke, captured my attention. I sniffed again, then took a sip. “My God, what is this?”
“A very nice Bordeaux.” She eyed me blandly—so much like her brother.
“No, not a Bordeaux . . . a Burgundy. But, not that, either. Too smooth. Rounded edges. Not the
terroir
you folks in France are so hung up on.” I shook my head as I took another sip, moving the liquid around in my mouth before swallowing. Holding the glass to the light, I swirled it to give the wine some air, then stuck my nose in the bowl and breathed deeply one more time. “A California pinot. Sonoma Coast?”
Desiree smiled. “Adobe Road, 2009. You have the nose.”
I didn’t gloat—unusual for me. To be honest, my ability to distinguish wines came more from a lifetime of consumption than a talented nose—not something I thought gloat-worthy.
And sniffing a connection between newfangled technology, Jean-Charles, and a dead UC-Berkeley geek in his oven, didn’t take a brilliant nose, either.