Free A World I Never Made by James Lepore Page A

to report, anonymously, that she had been out walking her dog and had heard gunshots and then seen a man running from the area of the small park near Rue Volney. She knew they were gunshots, she said, because her husband was a hunter and had taken her along on several trips to shoot quail in Normandy. She did not know if quail were to be found in Normandy, and if they were if they could be shot there, and now she smiled to herself at this thought. By now the police would have found the body.
     
    The ringing of her cell phone interrupted this chain of thoughts.
     
    She picked it up and flipped it open. “Hello.”
     
    “Catherine, c’est moi, Daniel:”
     
    “Uncle:”
     
    “How are you, ma petite niece?”
     
    “I am well, mon petit oncle.”
     
    “I have received your prints:”
     
    Daniel Peletier, now seventy-two, and his brother, Jean-Paul—Catherine’s father—five years younger, had both had long and respectable careers in French law enforcement. Daniel as a forensic scientist and Jean-Paul as a gendarmerie detective in St. Lô, their home city in northwestern France’s Manche province. They were uneventful, unspectacular, plodding careers in the old-fashioned practical way of the mid-twentieth-century French middle class. So plodding, so evenly paced, that unless you observed them periodically and with a skilled eye, you would not know that from one year to the next they accomplished all that they had set out to do in their lives: perform honorably at their jobs and raise their families in as much security and comfort as they could. It was her father’s sudden death in his sleep in 2001—she had lied to Pat earlier in order to get him to have dinner with her—that unmoored Catherine and left her stranded, with only a desolate marriage. Her mother, suffering from multiple sclerosis for twenty years, had died a year earlier, but even then it had never occurred to Catherine that Jean-Paul, only sixty-four, her childhood hero in his stylish uniform and hallmark gendarme’s hat, could conceivably leave her. She had no siblings. Uncle Daniel, retired these past two years, childless, also a widower, was all she had left.
     
    “What is it?” he asked. “What are you working on?”
     
    This question aroused Catherine from her brief reverie. She did not know at the moment exactly what it was she was working on. The Saudis would not be involved, Inspector LeGrand had said. The impact of the risk she was taking by leaving a dead body in the park and letting the injured man get away without pursuit hit her fully now. A simple call to the local precinct would have kept her career on its so far straight and narrow course.
     
    “I cannot say at the moment,” she replied.
     
    “Have you been promoted?”
     
    “No.”
     
    “You want these prints run, I take it?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “Whatever I do will leave a trail:”
     
    “Give me your password. I will do it from my computer.”
     
    “Impossible. The software includes voice recognition:”
     
    “Forget it then:”
     
    “Too late. I have already run the prints through:”
     
    “I told you to call me first, Uncle:”
     
    Catherine took a deep breath, her lips tightly set. She had put Uncle Daniel in danger. Tomorrow, or later tonight, she would make up a story to explain the whole thing to LeGrand.
     
    “And the results?” she asked.
     
    “I do not have them yet:”
     
    “How long will it take?”
     
    “An hour or so:”
     
    “Let me ask you:”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “You have read autopsy reports?”
     
    “Thousands.”
     
    “If a woman had delivered a child, say within two weeks of death, would there be signs?”
     
    “Yes, of course:”
     
    “Would a woman in the last stages of ovarian cancer have been likely to have been pregnant and delivered a baby two weeks before she died?”
     
    “You must tell me more, my dear. What does this relate to?”
     
    “A faked suicide:”
     
    “Is there DNA