Private Paris (Private 10)

Elodie nodded to the workman and we followed him into the closet. He attached a digital override device to the safe with coaxial cables and gave it several instructions before typing in a six-digit number. The safe made a whirring sound and then a click.

Before I could tell the workman not to open the door, he did and shined a flashlight inside. The beam picked up the glimmering object inside.

“What is it?” Elodie asked.

“A cigarette lighter,” I said.

Chapter 56

16th Arrondissement

11:20 p.m.

ON THE AVENUE de Montespan, Guy LaFont carried a briefcase as he climbed from the back of his car. A tall, elegant man in his late fifties, LaFont bid his driver adieu in front of the doors to the courtyard of his building. He used a key to flip the dead bolt, stepped inside, and closed and locked the door behind him.

Two soft lights cast the courtyard in warm shadows. He could clearly see his neighbor’s new Mercedes parked there, and the beautiful boxed flower garden his neighbor’s wife tended. It already bloomed with tulips and daffodils.

LaFont almost couldn’t bear to turn away from the box garden and walk to his door past another box garden that lay fallow and weedy. He did his best to avoid looking at it, and went inside. Locking the door behind him, LaFont took a deep, familiar, and agonizing sniff of home, and wondered at the chest-buckling pressure of his grief and loneliness.

When would it go away? Would it ever…go away?

LaFont recalled what his psychiatrist had told him: that grief was a process, a tearing down and a rebuilding. He didn’t often feel this crippling melancholy at work. His job still consumed him, drove him, and he believed he had fulfilled his responsibilities and stayed true to his principles in the past fourteen months with admirable strength and courage.

Without question, he thought forcefully. Without question.

But here in the home LaFont had shared with his beloved wife of twenty-six years, duty could not compensate for loss. He walked past Evelyn’s kitchen without stopping. He crossed through the salon she’d designed with such care. In the study where they’d watched television, he looked at pictures on the bookshelves: that snapshot from their honeymoon in Sardinia, their sons playing soccer and skiing at Chamonix, and Evelyn sitting in his lap at their favorite spot in Barcelona.

“We were so young,” he muttered.

LaFont stared at his reflection in the mirror, wondered when he’d gotten so old. He wondered if he should go back to the office, get something done, and then sleep on the couch.

Maybe his sons were right. Maybe it was this place that was keeping him from moving on. They were urging him to sell, but he hadn’t had the heart to call a realtor to put it on the market.

This was Evelyn’s home and he simply wasn’t ready to part with it or the ghosts of their life together. Turning on the television, he flipped the channels until he found a newscast. It led, as all newscasts had that day, with images of the AB-16 graffiti tag high on the cupola of the Institut de France.

The image filled LaFont with outrage!

He’d known Henri Richard and Lourdes Latrelle and had admired René Pincus. Attacking the French culture by murdering the best and brightest? LaFont wanted to pick something up and hurl it at the screen. Who the hell were they to do such a thing? What the hell did they want?

It all gave him a headache, and he hit the mute button before going to a cabinet and finding a bottle of Armagnac. He popped the cork, poured himself twice the usual amount, and drank until a fire exploded in his belly.

LaFont poured himself another generous amount, and took the glass with him after shutting off the news. He’d probably wake up with a scorcher of a headache, but at least he’d have slept, and the last time he’d looked, his agenda was thin in the mor—

He reached the landing at the top of the stairs and halted. The door to Evelyn’s art studio was ajar and there was light flowing from it into the hallway by their bedroom.

Who would have been in there? The maid? Wasn’t it her day?

Believing it was, LaFont marched down the hall, meaning to reach inside the room, flip down the light switch just inside the door, and seal the studio again.

Standing there, however, smelling the faint odor of paint and turpentine, LaFont decided that maybe it was time for a visit, and maybe a good cry. He hadn’t allowed himself one of those in at least a month.

He guzzled the rest of the Armagnac, pushed the door open, and stepped inside an L-shaped airy space with large skylights, windows, and banks of adjustable lights.

LaFont’s eyes welled and spilled, and he looked around, hoping to find solace in her paintings. There were dozens of them around the studio in various stages of completion. But through his tears, all he could see of his late wife’s imagined and real landscapes were the vivid colors she was known—

He sniffed. Was that fresh paint? He took off his glasses and wiped at his eyes with the sleeve of his suit. Putting the glasses back on, he froze.

On a long oak table, LaFont spotted a section of loose canvas that had been spray-painted with “AB-16.”