Free Murder in the Rue De Paradis by Cara Black Page B

the shuttered windows. “You’re sure?”
    “ Tout le monde ,” he said. Lolo waved his hand to encompass them all.
    “If anything strikes you later or Philippe can add anything, I’d appreciate a call.”
    A useless conversation. She turned to leave and then paused in mid-step. “Do your windows face the quai?”
    “Of course; that’s why the loft cost so much!”
    They faced in the same direction as the loft windows Yves had looked from last night.
    He yawned. “The noise woke me up before dawn.”
    “What noise?” Her ears perked up. Exhausted, she hadn’t heard a thing.
    “Like a hailstorm in August. On the windows.”
    “Did either of you see what made the noise?”
    “It stopped and we went back to sleep.”
    She’d learned something. And if she wasn’t mistaken, she’d find out more on the quai.
    SHE STOOD BY the Canal as it shimmered in the heat. Napoleon’s “gift to the people of Paris” was completed after his death on Saint Helena. And like his code of law, the little tyrant’s gift kept on giving. Even now.
    Gravel popped under her sandals as she walked along the quai. The nineteenth-century Hôtel des Douanes , the customs house, loomed further down. She was trying to figure out what could have made that noise.
    And then she stood under the loft windows. On the pavement lay some leaves curled in the heat and a few pebbles scattered on the light beige dust. “Like a hailstorm,” Lolo had said.
    Her first boyfriend had tossed pebbles at her window at night as a signal that he was there. She’d creep past her father’s room, listening for his snores, then meet her boyfriend outside on the quai. They’d spend hours necking on the embankment.
    Scenarios ran through her mind. Say Yves’s contact tried to reach him. If Yves had turned off his cell phone, this could have been the only way to signal him. Or maybe it had been a pre-arranged signal from a contact too scared to phone him. . . . Her thoughts spun. Suppose this contact had thrown pebbles at the window to get his attention, to signal a meeting, or to summon him to the rue de Paradis for a rendezvous.All plausible; but, again, why?
    Further on by the gutter, she barely avoided a clump of dried dog droppings, a St. Bernard by the size of it. Nice calling card. And in the heat it gave off a pungent aroma. A scuffle of green leaves blew over the stone. So far all she had were pebbles, the Eurostar ticket stub, and Yves’s marked-up copy of Le Monde.
    She walked downwind, opened the Citroën’s door, and sat, the hot leather burning her thighs. In the glove compartment she found René’s oversize blue Plan de Paris, the taxi driver’s street bible, and opened to the tenth arrondissement. With a pencil she marked the canal loft location; Microimage, where she’d met Yves; the Gare du Nord; and then the rue de Paradis. She drew lines connecting them. Two lines intersected, making a right angle. Almost a triangle. Yet it told her nothing. She wished his colleagues from Agence France-Presse would call; they had to know what Yves was working on.
    She turned the key in the ignition and drove along the canal. The silver rippling V of a duck’s progress marred the green-brown water’s surface. It was the only progress she saw.

Tuesday Afternoon

    A MESS, RENÉ thought. The hum and clack of the rails, the shunt of steam from the old locomotive accompanied his thoughts. It took three hours and three trains to reach the nodding, cypress-lined Loire river valley where he could just make out a glint from a château’s blue-tiled roof on the horizon.
    Looking out the window at the light brown dappled herds of Charolais cows grazing on wheat and the purple-hued grasses, he berated himself. He felt guilty for leaving Aimée.
    He hadn’t seen her so shaken since her father’s death. He couldn’t understand how Yves, a fling when he breezed into town, a bad-boy type who wouldn’t commit, could affect her so. She wasted her time on those