The Sketcher's Mark (Lara McBride Thrillers Book 1) (23 page)

Lara ran the angles in her mind, the possible outcomes of putting the man’s face on the news, the internet.  Inciting a citywide manhunt.  If he was still in Paris, with a face as distinctive as his, they would probably have him in custody by morning.  But once they had him, would he talk?  How much time would he burn playing games and bargaining?  During that time, Janelle and whomever else he might have taken could end up dead.  She’d seen that before on other cases- abductors making requests in return for giving up hostages or locations, who were out there, dying.  She refused to play that game this time.  Not with Janelle involved. 

“He’s getting bolder.  He’s escalating.  First the Metro and now look what he did here.  A man who’s kept himself invisible for who knows how long is now executing people in public.  He’ll expect to be on the news.  When he sees he isn’t, he’s not going to know what to think.  That’ll confuse him, maybe make him come back after me.  We set that up, we’ve got him.”

Brouchard walked over and took the glass from Jason, slugged down the scotch, enjoying the rich burn and handed it back to the Englishman. Jason reached for a fresh glass and intended to have this shot himself.

“Detective,” Brouchard began, “if you tell me that all your experience- and whatever gift it is inside you that enables you to find these people- is telling you that what you’re suggesting is right, then I’ll stand by you.  But you have to be sure.  Any doubt and I am releasing the picture.”

Lara let out a long deep sigh and wiped her eyes, considering, trying to empty her mind.  She didn’t doubt herself.  If he didn’t see his picture on the news and the announcement of a manhunt, he wouldn’t know what was going on.  They would have the upper hand.  They would have control. 

“Let him run scared. Whatever he’s been building to, I think he’s near the end of it.  Let him think he has a Get Out Of Jail Free card, let’s see what he does with it.  At this point, it’s the only thing we can do to keep him in play.  Brenner said he probably lives out in the sticks and we don’t want him to leave the city.  Once he’s out there, what are we gonna do?  House to house calls at every country house in France? No, we let him think he’s still safe here.”

“You would rather do this than potentially have him in custody by tomorrow night?”

“Yes.  Jason, you should go home and get some sleep,” Lara said, looking over at him.  He turned to her and she saw the exhaustion in his eyes.

“Whatever you’re planning to do, don’t leave me out of it,” he said with conviction. 

“Go home,” she told him and he got up and headed slowly for the door.  He turned back and scooped up the bottle of Scotch.

“One for the road,” he said and walked out.  She sat in silence for a few moments, the only sound was the low hum of the air conditioning.  She got up and went to the window, drew back the long thick drapes and stared out at the response vehicles and media crews outside.  She counted at least six news cameras rolling with various reporters giving their updates on the scene.

Brouchard’s cellphone rang.  He saw the name on the screen said “Foche”, a homicide detective.  Not a man he particularly cared for and a call from Homicide was never good news.  Brouchard answered, not sure what to expect.

“Yes, Foche?” 

“We found the ambulance.”

Chapter Forty Eight

The ambulance had been abandoned on a cobbled street off the main Boulevard.  The vehicle was on fire, the light flickering off the cold stone walls of the surrounding buildings.  Firefighters had arrived only a short time ago and were just now setting up the hoses, spraying the vehicle down and sending smoke belching up in to the night air. Brouchard got out of his car and was met almost immediately by a man in his forties who always seemed to be eating.  He was dressed warm in a long overcoat over a cheap suit, which Brouchard recalled he had always seen him wearing.  The same suit.  Always eating.  The man’s jowly, unshaved face drooped down to his collar and his cocked smile remained fastened there like a graffiti tag on a city wall.  His name was Foche and he was enjoying a sandwich while the firefighters were struggling to get the flames out behind him.

“No witnesses, nothing to go on,” Foche reported between bites of his supper.  “The Paramedics are probably dead.  One of them’s in the front seat, he’s cooking up quite nicely.  I suspect the other one is in the back with the girl.  Of course, this is just a theory, but I’m a very good detective.”

Lara McBride got out of Brouchard’s car and took in the scene.  Foche looked at her with a raised eyebrow.  He had seen her on the news but in person, she was very fetching.  Stunning, in fact.  He straightened himself up and sucked in his gut.  He did not put the sandwich away.

“We can’t get in there to look to be sure.  I put a request in for extra manpower- given the situation.” 

Mayonnaise dripped on his tie and Brouchard looked away in silent disgust.  The rain was a mist now and a low fog had taken hold of the area, making it impossible to tell where the smoke ended and the fog began.  This was going to make it harder for the search teams.

Lara was looking at the buildings around them.  Brouchard watched with curiousity as she turned her back to the fire and her eyes took in every brick, every cobble, every shadow, every flicker of light.  She was filtering everything, blocking out the impurities and distractions of the response personnel and separating out all the things that did not matter.  Her eyes were sharp and focused but somehow there was no life behind them when he saw her do this, as though she had disappeared inside her own mind.  She had become a conduit to something Brouchard knew he could never understand or experience for himself.  And he was glad he couldn’t.  Brouchard felt chills and turned away from her, suddenly feeling like he was watching her in a vulnerable situation. 

“Everything he does is deliberate,” she said aloud.  “Why did he burn the ambulance?  Why did he bring it here to this specific alley?”

“Nobody can see this place from the street and there are multiple exit routes.  It’s a good spot,”  Foche commented, hoping to impress her.

“You’re right.  It is a perfect spot. But how did he know that?  Paris is a big city and we’re not that far from the hotel.  I don’t know every alley in Los Angeles.  Point being, he knows this place.  He came here on purpose.”

Foche leaned in close to Brouchard and spoke in a low tone so only the Inspector could hear him.

“I thought she was being deported?” Foche asked.

“As you can see, she is still very much here and in action.  So, perhaps, we should listen to what she has to say.  And where did you hear she was being deported?”

“Like I said, I’m a very good detective.”

Lara walked over to the storage garages.  She saw the sign with the phone number hanging on the side of the building.  The garages looked large enough, two of them on the ground floor, the only two the building had to offer.  Some kind of old factory maybe that had been converted in to a storage unit.  A specialty kind of storage unit judging by their size.  These weren’t the kind of units one would rent just to throw a few pieces of furniture in.  One would need a lot of items or something big.  Vehicles.

“Anybody checked out these units?” she asked.  Now, Foche was ready to come in to his own and show the American how gifted he was.  He pulled out his notepad from his jacket pocket, still had it on the same page from when he’d written on it in the car when he was making his calls not too long ago.

“The building is owned by a property management company called Terril.  One man rents both these units and has done so for the last three years.  No problem with him as a tenant and no criminal record came back when I ran the name.”

“What’s his name?” she asked flatly.

“Jacques-Louis David,” Foche said, reading the deliberate handwriting off his notepad.  He was always careful with the spelling of names.  He’d seen people slip through the cracks because of a simple misspelling.

“It’s an alias,” Brouchard said.

“How’s that?” Foche asked, trying to figure out how he could have overlooked something that had been staring him right in the face.

“That’s the name of a painter.  He has several works in the Louvre.”

“When did you become an art expert?” Foche scoffed.

“He was my wife’s favorite painter.  We used to go every month.”

Foche went quiet.  He had met Brouchard’s wife a couple of times at the station over the years.  Beautiful woman. Smart, too.  Amazing smile and always quick to laugh, so different from her uptight husband.  He had been sorry when he heard she passed away and he had noticed the change in Brouchard.  It had made him retreat further in to himself, become less sociable, but at the same time it had also softened him.  Foche felt uncomfortable, not sure what to say.

“I should get a search warrant,” he offered.

“Excellent idea.  You really are a good detective, Foche.”  Brouchard patted him on the shoulder and followed Lara over to the front door of the first storage garage.

Chapter Forty Nine

Brouchard watched Lara try the door.  Locked, of course.

“Getting a warrant’s gonna burn time we don’t have,” she said.

“Indeed, but we need a reason to be able to go in and look around.”

“If the door was busted open that would be pretty good probable cause, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Absolutely,” Brouchard agreed.  Lara kicked the door so hard it splintered the wood and took off one of the hinges.  It hung loose and broken and Lara simply looked at the Inspector.

“Well, look at that,” she said, “looks like someone tried to break in.”

She stepped inside and turned on the light.  Brouchard looked over at the burning ambulance, where the fire crews were almost done dousing the flames.  Foche was on his cellphone, his back to them. Nobody had seen Lara kick the door open.  At this point, he wasn’t even sure he cared.  He just wanted to find this man now, but he wanted to protect Lara while they were doing it.  He followed her inside.

The garage was cold and spartan.  A work table sat on the concrete ahead of him, a cot bed up against the wall and a small closet, the kind one would buy from a store and spend half a day trying to assemble from instructions that were far more complex than indicated on the page.  The whole place felt wrong and for that very reason, he knew they had just walked in to the world of the man they were hunting.

“See the oil stains on the ground there?”  Lara pointed out to him.  He saw a large slick of oil that had clearly been made over some time.  He noticed that the two garages had been opened out in to one large unit that ran the length of the building.  His workshop.

“He had a vehicle waiting.  That’s why this alley.  Beth’s alive.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“If he had killed her, he wouldn’t need to bring the ambulance here, so close to home.  He might as well as send us his address.”

“Perhaps he is just being reckless, like you said.”

“He needed to get her in to his own vehicle quickly and quietly without being seen.  Then he set the blaze.  Didn’t matter to him after that, he just wanted her out of here.  Which means he has somewhere else where he keeps them and Brenner’s theory was on the money.”

“This place is off the beaten path enough.  Perhaps there is a basement here.”

“If this was where he was keeping them, he would have taken Beth somewhere else and burned out the ambulance.  He wouldn’t have led us here.  This isn’t his home base.  This is just…”

“..his workshop.”

“Right.  He led us here.  He knows how close we are.  He’s playing a game.  I think he likes being pursued after so many years of going unnoticed.”

“Perhaps you have put pressure on him and he does not know what else to do.  He’s gone crazy.”

“No, I think he’s become reckless.  He’s an artist.  He has an artistic temperament- extreme highs and lows.  Volatile.  Unpredictable.  Now he’s become reckless because he wants what every artist wants.”

“Which is what? I’ve never been particularly creative myself.”

“I think whatever he’s been collecting these Angels for, he wants to give us a ringside seat to view his work.  He wants an audience, Inspector.”

Lara walked over to the closet, opened it up and saw a jacket hanging inside.

“Do you have gloves?” she asked.  Brouchard searched his pockets and found a pair of disposable rubber gloves. He often had them in his suit jackets in case he got a call for a crime scene and had to handle evidence. He handed one to her and she snapped it on.

“Best if I do this myself, so you have some plausible deniability,” she said as her fingers reached in to the jacket pockets.  She tried the inside breast pocket and pulled out a flyer, a glossy card promoting an art show.

“Les Arts des Guillotine,” Brouchard read off the card.

“Guillotine as in the revolution?”

“The very same.”