Private Paris (Private 10)

Other ropes were lashed to his wrists and held his arms directly out to the sides. All the blood in his body had responded to gravity and had rushed to the opera director’s head. His face was bug-eyed and dark purple.

“Who found him and when?” I asked.

“A security guard shortly after the shift change at six a.m.,” Investigateur Hoskins replied. “The guards on duty last night said Richard arrived on foot at the rear gate at around twelve thirty with an exotic redhead half his age.”

“Why do so many Parisian tales begin with a younger woman?” Louis asked.

Hoskins ignored him and said, “Because she was with Richard, the guards didn’t ask for her identification, and she managed to keep her face turned from the security tapes we’ve reviewed.”

“So she’s your killer?” I asked skeptically. “That’s a big man. It would take a woman of Amazonian proportions to hoist him up like that.”

Hoskins tilted her head as if reappraising me before saying, “Yes, and it would take an Amazon to strangle monsieur le directeur with a length of rope cut from one of the curtains. It appears she had one or more accomplices.”

“Is that fact or conjecture?” Louis asked.

The investigator directed her answer to me. “After the fire broke out across the street, the security guard forgot all about Monsieur Richard and his mystery date. But the tapes from the security cameras at the gate and above that stage door we came through indicate that someone sprayed the lenses with a gel of some kind shortly after the fire started.”

“So the fire was a diversion?” I said.

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Motive?”

“None that we understand at the moment.”

“Meaning what?” Louis asked.

“Meaning there’s more to this scene than you can see from back here,” Hoskins said curtly before marching down the aisle.

We followed her past plush red orchestra seats to stairs that climbed the left side of the stage. I could see high above us that the other end of the rope tied to Richard’s ankles had been lashed to a catwalk that gave access to scrims and overhead lights. The ropes that held the opera director’s arms at ninety degrees to the body were tied to light poles at the left and right of the stage.

Hoskins halted just shy of the corpse.

“There’s your motivation,” she said, gesturing to the stage floor.

I came around her with Louis trailing and stopped, seeing for the first time the looping, bloodred graffiti that would torment Paris in the coming days.

AB-16

Chapter 18

I STUDIED THE tag, then looked almost straight up at the opera director’s corpse. Henri Richard’s eyes seemed to stare directly down at the graffiti.

“What does it mean?” I asked. “AB-16? Some French thing?”

“We have no idea,” Hoskins said. “Or at least I have no idea. Yet. But tell me, Mr. Morgan, what does it all suggest to you? This mystery woman Henri was with. The fire diversion across the street so her accomplice could enter. The weapon. The setting. The position of the body postmortem. And this graffiti.”

Louis cleared his throat and said, “I’ll tell you what I think.”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion, Louis,” Hoskins said brusquely. “I’m interested in an L.A. perspective for the moment.”

Langlois puffed up in irritation but bit his tongue when I gave him an almost imperceptible shake of my chin and said, “From an L.A. perspective, the position of the corpse and the tag is meant to cause shock, attract attention, provoke interest, and perhaps invite speculation. Through a West Hollywood lens, it could be interpreted as fetishistic, the killers acting out some kind of perversity, real or imagined.”

“The weapon?”

After considering that, I went with my instincts and said, “The curtain rope is part of Richard’s world, so it could be symbolic or it could be ironic. The setting could be interpreted in either way as well, depending on the killers’ intent.”

The investigator wrapped her arms to