Free Treasure of Saint-Lazare by John Pearce Page B

moving just under 20 miles an hour when it hit him, which doesn’t sound like much unless the thing that’s moving weighs almost two tons. This was a big Lincoln Navigator.
    “The busboy told us he was walking this way to his job, so his back was turned and he didn’t see much. He said he heard someone call out, then turned to see the impact. I think he’s mostly telling the truth. He seems to be a good kid, twenty years old, lives with his wife and baby daughter just on the edge of Newtown, our black area, and has been working steady since he got out of high school a couple of years ago.”
    “May I have his name and address?” Eddie asked.
    “I presume you’d rather go by yourself?”
    Eddie just nodded.

    Thom offered to show Eddie the damaged Navigator. Although it was the blow to his head when it hit the curb that killed him, the impact of the car had been strong enough to leave blood on the damaged grill. Its DNA had matched Roy’s.
    “The final test results just came back from the state lab,” Thom told Eddie as they drove toward the garage, which was in the center of a dreary suburban industrial park on the east side of town. “I didn’t have any doubt, but we’ve settled it for certain now.
    “We also got some fingerprints and a little DNA material from inside the car, but there weren’t any hits from either of them, either in the state or FBI databases.”
    “You won’t find any,” Eddie responded. “I’m pretty certain the killers were the Germans Jen and I met, to our unhappy surprise, on a Paris sidewalk two nights ago. One of them was carrying a nasty-looking knife, a bayonet.”
    “He tried to kill you, too?” Thom asked,surprised.
    “No, I don’t think so. They were looking for something, and they thought at one time Roy knew where it was. They obviously decided he didn’t, so they killed him. Either that, or it was an ugly accident. Maybe he was trying to escape.”
    Thom asked, “Pardon me if I’m being too inquisitive, but how are you involved in this? Don’t you live overseas?”
    Eddie told Thom about his father’s association with Roy during the war and how they had stayed in touch for several decades after it ended, and how his father had brought him to Sarasota in the late 1980s, which was where he had met Jen for the first time. “But I think Roy’s interest flagged in recent years. He left a letter for my father that looks a lot like he’d reached the end of the line and given up on the project. It wasn’t dated, but it appeared to be several years old. It was marked for hand delivery to my father, so Jen got on a plane and delivered it.”
    “So you think he may have been killed because of something out of the distant past?”
    “It’s beginning to look that way. Someone is very interested in it. The two men who tried to attack us the other night in Paris were from the eastern part of Germany. That happened less than two weeks after Roy was killed, so I’m betting it was the same people.”
    “How could you tell they were from the east?”
    “The police in Paris arrested them after we got away. And, Jen heard them talking to each other and recognized the accent.”
    “She speaks German?”
    “She moved here when she was 13 years old. She doesn’t use it much but you don’t forget your mother tongue.”
    “That’s interesting. She’s a very well-known businesswoman in Sarasota, so much so that my chief asked me to keep him up to date. I haven’t had much to tell him yet, but he was very interested in the Paris connection.
    “How did they attack you, and how did you get away?”
    Eddie told him about the two men waiting in the museum’s front door, then how he had fought them off and escaped through the hotel, where the police had arrested the Germans.
    “That’s impressive. Where did you learn close combat like that?”
    “Special Forces. I hadn’t even thought about it in years, but it really came in handy.”
    Thom said, “That’s what I