Seen and Not Heard (Maggie Bennett 4)

He could turn and go. He couldn’t touch her when the sky was clear—he’d sooner kill himself. But he could wait. It wouldn’t stay clear for long. Sooner or later the rain would return, and he’d be ready for it.

Without a sound he moved closer, dropping his massive bulk into the chair opposite the old lady. She stirred for a moment, then began snoring more loudly, as Gilles had settled down to wait.

In the end it had happened fast, too fast. A loud rumble of thunder, a renewed downpour, and the old one had woken up, her rheumy eyes opening to view her killer just as he plunged the knife into her chest.

It was always too fast. He felt cheated, frustrated, and he knew what he was going to do about it. Edgar lived alone on the top floor of one of the mean little houses on this narrow, dirty little alleyway. The only other occupant was a drug dealer who minded his own business. He wouldn’t interfere if there was a struggle. It was time Edgar learned his place.

The door was a flimsy one, and the lock didn’t hold against a man of Gilles’s bulk. The stairway was narrow and dank, and Gilles remembered the one other time he was here. Edgar had been sick, and Gilles had come to drag him into work. He accepted no excuses—if Edgar wished to work for him he would come to work with the runs, with a streaming nose, with typhus if need be. And Edgar had come.

He remembered the mattress on the floor, the dirty gray sheets that had once been white, with Edgar’s pale face and strong boy’s body lying there. He grew hard as he remembered, as he thought about just what he would do to the boy on that mattress. Something would be salvaged out of this miserable night. And then maybe he’d move the boy in with him, for as long as it amused him.

The room was very dark when he opened the door. No moonlight filtered through on such a rainy night, and the light from the hallway barely reached the mattress. He could see Edgar lying there, the smoothly muscled shoulder and tousle of dark hair. Gilles reached down and unfastened his pants, moving across the room on his silent cat’s feet.

Edgar moved, and a dim light speared across the room. The boy looked at him, at his erect flesh and the determination, and he moved back against the mattress. He was naked, and Gilles felt himself grow even harder.

“No,” said Edgar, the first time he had ever said such a thing to his employer.

Gilles grinned. He would have enjoyed this if Edgar had been passive, but a fight would add spice to the whole thing. He outweighed the boy by more than a hundred pounds, and his muscles, honed by years of slinging dead animals around, were impressive. He carried his knife loosely, the knife that had served him well once this evening, secure in the knowledge that he wouldn’t need it to overpower the boy.

“Yes,” he said, mocking, advancing. “But yes.”

He could smell the boy’s fear, and the sour, sweaty smell was an aphrodisiac. He remembered his own fear, when he was much younger than Edgar and Georges had come after him, and his excitement increased. Suddenly impatient, he went down on his knees on the mattress, dropped his knife, and lunged for the terrified boy.

It happened so quickly. One moment he was ready to draw the boy underneath him, in the next he felt the sharp thrust up against his throat. It was wet, hot and wet all around him, pouring over him, and he knew blood too well not to recognize the feel of it, the warmth of it, the ironlike smell of it.

It amazed him to realize it was his own. Somehow Edgar had managed to get hold of his own knife and stick it in his throat. He was dying, Gilles thought in surprise. His blood was soaking them both, and he was dying.

He tried to laugh, but the sound was a gurgling noise. Years ago he had killed a man for buggering him, and now he had met the very same fate. You had to laugh at the tricks life would play on you, he thought, falling onto the mattress. It was Edgar’s mistake, though. If he could talk he would have told him. He should have waited, put up with him until he was old enough to inherit the boucherie. That was what Gilles had done, and it had served him well.

No, Edgar had botched it. He was standing there, naked, watching his employer bleed to death on his mattress, and he didn’t make a sound. And just before he died Gilles noticed, with grim satisfaction, that Edgar had an erection too.

Tom couldn’t stop thinking about that curtain falling into place. He lay stretched out on his narrow, sagging bed, breathing in the lingering traces of Claire’s elusive scent, and thought about the watcher in the window.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, he chided himself. He hadn’t been able to resist the romantic gesture of kissing her good-bye, the two of them standing outside in the pouring rain. There would have been no problem with it if she didn’t already have a live-in lover with a possibly murderous streak. He’d been alone too long. He shouldn’t be in a garret trying to write the great American novel, he should be writing romances.

He wished he could share Claire’s faith that Marc Bonnard was harmless. He knew that he should—after all, he’d never met the man and Claire had lived with him for the past four or more months.

But Claire, for all her denials, had a hunted look in her eyes, one that wasn’t caused solely by her guilt over the hit-and-run accident. And she’d never told Bonnard about that, yet she’d confided in him within days of meeting him. That ought to count for something.

No, her common sense might tell her Bonnard was safe, but her instincts were disagreeing. He wished he knew which he could believe.

He stretched out in the bed, his feet touching the bottom railing, his head brushing the top. He’d planned to leave her alone for a couple of days, to think about that kiss, but right now he didn’t think he could do it. For one thing he didn’t want to go for days without seeing her; for another, that curtain still bothered him. He’d find out who lived on the first floor, in the apartment below her, and set his mind at ease.

He was almost asleep when a sudden, disquieting thought slid into his mind, disrupting what little chance he had of a decent night’s rest. The watcher had been on the first floor of the old building, just above the ground floor. Did Claire know the difference when she told him she lived on the second story? Did she know that in Europe the first floor was the ground floor, the second was the first, etc.? Did she actually live in the apartment that held the silent watcher?

He reached for the phone, then pulled his hand back. He would only make things worse. If it hadn’t been Marc he would worry her needlessly. If it was, she was already dealing with it, and she didn’t need his interference. He looked at his watch. Quarter past one in the morning. The earliest he could show up on her doorstep was eight A.M. Not until then would he be certain she was all right.

He sighed, sitting up. It was going to be a long night.

CHAPTER 12

“Isn’t modern science wonderful, Josef?” Malgreave lit another cigarette as he stared down at the medical examiner’s report. “A butcher gets his throat cut and his body gets dumped in an alley in Belleville. There’s so much blood on his corpse you can’t even tell what color his clothes were originally, and yet the coroner was able to determine some of that blood came from someone else. Someone with very rare AB negative blood.”

“Ah,” said Josef, putting his fingertips together and waiting.

“Now you and I both know that it’s always possible that Sahut’s attacker had that rare blood, and Sahut was able to inflict some damage before he died. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? So why am I searching further, Josef? Let me hear what you’ve deduced from all this.” Malgreave stabbed the air with his cigarette. “Don’t just sit there nodding portentously.”

“I don’t think the blood came from his attacker,” Josef said after careful consideration. “For one thing, the butcher was a huge, powerful man. The only way anyone could have gotten him is by surprise. If he’d had time to fight back, there would have been more than that trace of AB blood, there probably