The Inquisitor's Key (Body Farm 7)

It was in the bedroom that my mental pendulum swung back to my first thought. Having lived alone for years now, I knew what bachelor clutter looked like: dirty clothes strewn on the floor; clean clothes piled on the dresser and bed. Mostly I kept a handle on my housekeeping, though occasionally the clutter got out of hand. But Stefan’s bedroom was beyond cluttered; Stefan’s bedroom was a study in chaos. All the drawers of the dresser hung open, empty or nearly so; shoes, sweaters, even spare linens had been pulled from the closet floor and shelf; the overstuffed armchair in one corner of the room lay on its side, the fabric lining on its underside in tatters. “Somebody’s been here looking for something,” I said, feeling a chill run up my spine.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, boss,” Miranda murmured.

“Call Stefan’s phone again.”

“I’ve already called a dozen times. I called just before we went in the shoe store.”

“I know, but we weren’t in here when you did. I’m sure he’s not going to answer. I want to know if his phone’s in here.”

“Ah. Good idea.” She hit the redial button, and through her speaker, I heard his phone beginning to ring. Unless the ringer was off or the battery was dead, his phone wasn’t here.

After five or six rings, I expected to hear a voice mail coming faintly through the speaker. What I heard instead electrified me. There was a click, then silence: The call had been accepted, but whoever took it didn’t speak. Miranda’s eyes, big as saucers, met mine. “Hello?” she said. “Stefan?” No response. “Who is this?” she demanded. “Where is Stefan?” There was a long silence on the other end of the line, and then a click, and the screen flashed the message Call ended.

* * *

“Take a right here,” I said. “I think it’s in this block.”

“Where are we going, and why?” Miranda was edgy, and I didn’t blame her.

“A few nights ago — it was the night before we went to Turin — I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk. It was late, around midnight. I bumped into Stefan. He was coming out of the palace.”

“At midnight?”

“Yeah. We walked around for, I don’t know, half an hour or so.” Just ahead, on the left, I spotted the passageway leading from the Rue Saint-Agricol. “He brought me here.” I led her through the corridor and into the courtyard. “This used to be the chapel of the Knights Templar. Stefan had a key — funny, Stefan seems to have keys to everything — and he took me inside. He was kinda dragging his heels when we left.” Suddenly I remembered. “When I left. I walked away, but he didn’t — he hung around here, and I wondered if maybe he was waiting for somebody else to show up. He acted anxious to get rid of me, you know? And he stayed behind after he shooed me away.”

“Jesus, why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

“The truth?”

“Please.”

“I wondered if maybe he was meeting you. A moonlight rendezvous in the chapel of the Templars.” She didn’t say anything, but I noticed the muscles of her jaw working. Reluctantly, I reached for the black iron knob, hoping that it would not turn in my hand. But it did. The chapel’s heavy wooden door swung inward, and Miranda and I stepped inside.

The air was cool in the stone interior — cool, pungent, and coppery. It was a mixture of smells I knew only too well. “Maybe you’d better wait outside,” I told Miranda.

“Hell, no.” I knew there was no point arguing with her.

A maroon velvet drape separated the entryway from the soaring, vaulted space of the chapel itself. As I held the curtain aside, Miranda stepped through, and I followed half a step behind.

She gasped and reached back for me, her fingers digging into my arm. Then she turned and buried her face in my chest.

Congealing on the stone floor was a pool of blood, already black at its rim, still red at the center. High overhead was the arched metal truss that supported the theater lights. Suspended horizontally from a cable and pulley at the center of the truss was a short wooden beam. And nailed to that beam — like some modern-day minimalist crucifix — was the nude body of Stefan Beauvoir.

PART II

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion bod

y and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

CHAPTER 21

For a law-enforcement agency that had locked its doors and taken a holiday, the French Police Nationale now responded with impressive speed and force. Barely five minutes after Miranda had dragged a startled French passerby into the gruesome chapel — a desperate measure, but that’s what it took to persuade him we had a true emergency — I heard the two-note clarinet warble of a French siren. It was soon joined by another, then a third, then a fourth. The cacophonous quartet crescendoed and then died as the caravan of police cars screeched to a halt in the narrow street outside. Eight uniformed officers charged toward us through the passageway and across the courtyard. Miranda and the passerby waved them into the chapel as I held the door. When they saw Stefan’s body hanging in midair, his face a mask of agony, two of the officers crossed themselves; one, a close-cropped young man who couldn’t have been a day over twenty, staggered back to the doorway and vomited, barely missing my shoes.

A wiry, forty-something man with the crisp bearing of a former soldier took charge, ordering two of his underlings to cordon off the area. It wasn’t hard to do; they simply taped off the ten-foot-wide mouth of the corridor that led to the street. The words stretched across the opening were in French — ZONE IN-TERDITE — POLICE TECHNIQUE ET SCIENTIFIQUE — but the yellow-and-black tape spoke the universal language of crime scenes.