Private Paris (Private 10)

“Good,” Louis said. He flipped the dead bolt and turned the handle. The door swung open silently.

The shop did have a security system. I remembered that from our visit. Why no alarm?

But I had no time to think about that because as we hurried across the darkened space, the crying stopped and we heard the sound of someone running overhead. Louis threw back the curtain and charged up the steep staircase toward the light and Millie Fleurs’s workshop.

We both got to the top of the staircase and came to a dead halt.

Millie Fleurs hung upside down by her ankles, which were bound with fabric twisted into a rope that was thrown over a rafter. The designer’s arms and hair hung limply. Blood from a chest wound had soaked her blouse, drained across her face, and dripped to the floor.

The pool of blood below the dress designer had reached but only partially obscured a variation of the AB-16 symbol, depicted not in red spray paint but with black and red silk fabric.

“Hoskins and Fromme are going to—”

Louis held up his index finger and then pressed it to his ear. I stopped, listened, and heard the whimpering.

It came from behind a door beyond the only bare mannequin in the studio. Louis gestured to a bloody footprint on the floor, and stepped around it.

He looked over his shoulder at me. I squared up, aiming at the door. He reached over and opened it.

“No! Don’t shoot!”

She was slurring and blubbering, a pretty young teenager with long black, braided hair, pressed to the back of the shallow closet, terrified and holding her hands up as if to block a bullet. Blood slicked her exposed palms, stained her white blouse, and gelled on the thighs of her black leather pants.

Smelling the strong scent of alcohol and cigarettes coming off her, I lowered the gun and said, “Princess Mayameen?”

She nodded feebly before sliding down the wall into a sobbing heap. “My mother is going to kill me this time, isn’t she?”

Chapter 59

WE TALKED WITH Maya, as she preferred to be called, for a good ten minutes before we put in a call to Sharen Hoskins, and for another ten minutes before calling Randall Peaks.

The Saudi security chief and the La Crim investigateur showed up at almost the same time, with Peaks following Hoskins up the stairs. The detective’s eyes were puffy and her demeanor on edge. She glanced at me and Louis, shook her head, mumbled something under her breath, and then shifted her attention to Millie Fleurs’s corpse.

Peaks reached the workshop, saw the teenager passed out on a daybed in the corner and the blood on her hands and shirt, and said, “Princess Mayameen will be leaving. Now.”

“Not a chance,” Hoskins said. “She’s explaining herself to me before she goes anywhere.”

“That young lady is Saudi royalty and has complete diplomatic immunity,” Peaks insisted. “She cannot be held against her will.”

“Who’s holding her?” Hoskins asked. “She looks to be a drunken adolescent to me, and as such is a danger to herself. I’m going to talk to her, make sure she’s fit to travel.”

“No lawyer, no talking,” Peaks said.

“She’ll talk and you’ll shut up, or I’ll have you arrested because I know you do not have diplomatic immunity,” said Juge Fromme, disheveled and in pain as he came up the stairs, leaning hard on his cane.

Looking as though he was having a root canal, no Novocain, Peaks said, “The Saudi family and government will take this as an affront to—”

“I don’t care,” Fromme said. “My country and countrymen are under direct attack, and that takes precedence over any foreign concerns. Period.”

Louis said, “Juge? For the record?”

The magistrate glowered. “You two are like flies to shit in this, aren’t you?”

Louis smiled weakly. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose. But for the record, the princess may be guilty of reckless judgment, of drinking too much liquor, and of deciding to pay Millie Fleurs an impromptu visit on her way home from clubbing. But she is not remotely connected to the murder.”

Peaks’s eyebrows rose, and he said, “Exactly.”

“She’s covered in her blood,” Hoskins said.