Artist (20 page)

“Miss Reynold, I assume?”

Cassie nodded. “Yes. I appreciate you seeing me Dr. Traver.”

“No problem, no problem. Come on in. Let me take your coat.” It was late summer but Le Havre, exp
osed as it was to the water, sat wet and chilly in the morning, the rain from the night before still puddled in the street.

Traver was a tall man, going not quite grey around the ears. He was wearing a tan sweater over a white shirt, and dark slacks, spoke with a light British accent. The dog followed him down the hall as he put away the coat.

“I can offer you coffee,” he said, “and some bread and butter if you haven’t eaten yet. I, afraid that’s about it until the housekeeper arrives. I usually eat most of my meals out. There’s a café right down the block. Excellent lunches. Here, sit down.” He gestured to a couch, lit up in a floral pattern. The whole room was done in flowers, the couch, and the wallpaper, even the carpet was laid out in bouquets of roses with green stems.

Tavern caught her looking. “Yes, yes, my mother was crazy about flowers. She passed two years ago, I inherited the place and can’t bring myself to change it. My wife hates it, but….. Oh, did you want coffee?” He shrugged.

“No, please. The room, it’s actually nice,” Cassie said, “Kind of quaint. Not a man’s room though.”

“Exactly. My father wouldn’t step foot in the place unless they had company. He built himself a place in the backyard, ran electricity back there. He used to watch football by himself, a sort of getaway. I use it as an office now.”

Travers settled in. “Now, from our conversation on the phone it seems you’re interested in Viktor Watt. What exactly is your interest?”

“I’m an investigator, Professor Traver. Bear in mind anything I te
ll you is confidential. Viktor Watt is being looked at for a series of crimes back in the States. We’re doing a background check and you were his mentor when he went to school in Paris. I was hoping you could give me a feel for the man.”

“What kind of crimes?”

“Murder, Professor. He’s teaching at the University of New Orleans and we think the murderer is tied into the University. Because of some evidence we have, Watt fits the profile.”

“My God,” Traver said. He thought for a minute. “Well, I have to tell you, I never saw anything that would indicate to me that he was violent. He could be…a little standoffish, I guess you would say and …I’m not sure how to proceed here. If you’re looking for evidence, I don’t think I can give you any. But there were some …rumors, if I can pick my words carefully.”

“What kind of rumors?” Cassie said.

Travers found a knot on the sleeve of his sweater, picked at it while he composed an answer. He dropped the knot into an ashtray on a side table. “Viktor Watt came from a family with money. He dressed well, ate well, never had a problem making ends meet. There were quite a few students like that and they all tended to group together, you see. Kind of a, not society but I guess what you would call a clique.”

“Watt was part of it?”

He shook his head. “No, that’s the thing you see. He tended to be alone most of the time. He was fine in a study group, but after the study group broke up, he would go off by himself whole everyone else went for a beer or food. I never saw him with anyone I would say was a friend.”

“And the rumor part of it?”

“Well, the rumor part of it is that he purchased his companionship if you know what I mean.”

“I’m sorry?”Cassie said, shaking her head.

“The rumor was that Watt spent a considerable amount of time in certain areas of the city that were known for their heavy populations of lower class cafes and bars where someone with money could find a woman for a few hours.”

“He went to prostitutes?”

“That’s the rumor. He had no girlfriends that I know of. I do know that he drank, sometimes heavily, and when he did he drank in the kind of places most people of his station would avoid like the plague.”

“How do you know this?”

“I was called in by the police, exactly twice, to come get him when he was involved in fights. He was also picked up once for being drunk in a doorway. Because he was a student, and probably because he was upper class, the police released him to me.”

“Did that happen often?”

“It happened often enough, and not just with Viktor Watt. Our students are young and sometimes they get in little scrapes. When Viktor was a student, I was still an Associate Professor, not much older than my students, and naturally they called me when they needed help.”

“Prostitutes,” Cassie said. “Was he ever arrested for being with a prostitute that you know of?”

“No. Our stud
ent body, the men at least, we eventually warned that if the police caught them with a prostitute in any fashion, expulsion was the punishment. The women also got a warning, but for a different reason.”

“And what was that?”

“Why, for their safety of course.”

Cassie shifted in her seat, leaned forward. “I’m sorry, but I’m not following. The school thought the girls were working as prostitutes?”

“Oh, Lord no. I thought that’s why you were here.”

“Professor, please. Tell me exactly what you’re talking about,” Cassie said.

Two hours later, Cassie was pushing the rental car hard across the French countryside. Travers allowed her to use his phone before she left. She called Wesling, catching her before she left the office for the day.

“I need a contact in the Paris Police, someone in Homicide, someone who’s been there a
while and speaks good English, or see if they can provide a translator if he doesn’t. Here’s what I’m looking for.” She gave Wesling all the details she could, hung up, and tried to catch Dupond. He was out. She would have to try him again, or be patched through on a radio and she didn’t want to broadcast anymore than she had to. She hit the outskirts of Paris just in time to catch the traffic and arrived at Police Headquarters after dark.

Watt spent most of the day in his office, going over class schedules. A steady parade of students and administrators passed the door. He walked across the commons to the University Center, ate lunch,
and went back to his office. No one paid him any attention and he saw no officers other than Flynn and Slade alone in their office. One of them had brought in a television. They were watching a game show. Late in the afternoon, Watt left the office, took the stairs down to the first floor, and strolled over to the library, a squat building of grey stone with open glass windows around the front and sides. He waited and watched, a book on French military history splayed out on the table in front of him. Saw nothing unusual, no strange faces hanging around, no lurking older men with who had no business on a college campus. A little more confident, he returned to his office.

An hour later he pulled out of the faculty parking left, took the left on Leon C. Simon Boulevard and returned home. By the time the light began to fade, h
e had what he felt was a complete list of the cars that should be in the neighborhood. Anything else he would watch closely, especially any vehicles with people just hanging around for long periods. Dupond couldn’t have that many people watching him, if he had anyone at all out there. Full dark came. Watt went into his desk, found all the newspaper stories he collected over the last few weeks and spent some time cutting them into pieces with a pair of scissors. The scraps went into a bag and he carried the bag out to the dumpster. Back inside, he made himself a sandwich, watching out the window again. An older man and woman, well dressed, got out of their car, locked it, and headed off up the street. A scruffy man, some kind of beggar from the looks of him, approached them with his hand out. The older man gave him change and the bum retreated into the park. Watt turned off the lights and went to bed.

The investiga
tor turned out to be a woman. Her English was passable. Cassie showed her identification and they cleared a spot in a back room. There was a pile of tan folders stacked on the table, smelling of time and mildew.

“I went back one year on either side of the time period you asked about.” Therese Macon said. She was a solid woman, with big shoulders and short cropped ha
ir and a no nonsense air. “Over those six years we had twenty six murders of women, not all prostitutes. I included all murders of women.  Of those twenty six, fourteen resulted in convictions. Two others, we had good suspects but couldn’t put a complete case together. That leaves ten unsolved. Six of those were known prostitutes; two were visitors to the city, tourists. One was a housewife and the other was a high school student.”

“From the unsolved cases, how were they killed?” Cassie asked.

“That would be these,” Macon said, pulling a set of folders off the top of the stack. “Here’s a breakdown of names and the major points of the cases,” pointing to a separate sheet of paper on top.

“The interesting thing,” she went on, “is the six listed at the bottom. I thought they all fit together. I did at the time and I still do. Four women, all strangled in their own rooms. All tied in one way or another, some with tape, some with rope or twine. Three were prostitutes, one was a girl over here on a trip through Europe, a graduation present from her parents.”

“How many killings like this do you have in a given year?” Cassie asked, looking over the paper. Names listed on a sheet, the details of their deaths typed out neatly. It was, she thought, depressing and chilling at the same time. So why did she feel like she was holding some kind of prize?

Macon shrugged. “We get some. Paris is a big place and things happen. Most of the time we can trace it back to a boyfriend or someone the victim knew. With prostitutes, it’s a lot more difficult. Now, once you showed up asking, I plotted this out.”

There was a chalkboard on the wall behind her. Across the top, Macon had drawn a list of years, beginning three years before Watt arrived in Paris, ending three years after he left. In blue chalk, moving left to right, the line started out flat, bubbled , returned to relative flatness.

“Right around the time period you’re looking at, we had a rise in unsolved murders of women. Again, not all
of these women were prostitutes. One was a housewife. The rise smoothed out, as you can see, right around the time your man left Paris. A coincidence? Maybe not.”

“You work any of these cases?” Cassie asked.

Macon nodded. “I was new at the time. I caught two of them, both prostitutes. We knocked on doors, talked to people at the clubs where these girls hung out, put their pictures in the paper. I spent weeks warning the other girls about taking on customers they didn’t know, having a friend nearby, that sort of thing. It was a pretty big deal at the time. We talked to all the schools in the city, warned the women at the colleges to stay away, not talk to any strange men. We also warned the men to avoid the prostitutes because we were picking up their customers for questioning.”

“Why did you pick the colleges?”

“Because,” Macon said, “on two of the prostitute killings, we had witnesses, not good ones, who thought they saw the girls leave with a man they described as young, or college aged. The girls, obviously, fell into the age range of most of the victims. The outlier was the housewife. She was thirty-eight but known to like younger men. Her husband traveled. She had a tendency to party while he was out of town from what her neighbors said.”

“So. You have
six unsolved murders in four years in Paris. I’ve got almost that many in the space of a few weeks in New Orleans. You have more experience than I do. What does that tell you?”

“Have you read much on serial killers?” Macon asked.

“Some, not much.”

“Well, there are no hard and fast rules. It’s not unusual for them to take a break for one reason or another. Police pressure, fear, maybe they go to jail for some other crimes, whatever. It’s also not unusual for them to begin to slide out of control. Once they achieve some success, the idea that they can’t be caught, that they’re too good, too smart, begins to creep in. The idea that they build themselves into a frenzy has also been put out there, like sharks feeding I guess you could say. Blood lust takes over and they go on a spree. If this man Watt is our mu
rderer, and statistics say he’s a good candidate, he could go either way. He might stop if you put enough pressure on him, or stop for a while anyway. On the other hand he might go crazy and kill every girl in sight.”

“So, how would you handle it?” Cassie asked.

“Me? I’d get right in his face, haul him in, try and get a confession. If that didn’t work, I’d spend the rest of my time making his life miserable. Cause problems with his employer, his landlord, the guy who cleans his pool, his girlfriend. Do enough of that and he’ll snap.”

“And when he snaps?”

“Well, you’re American aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t all you Americans carry guns?”

Dupond, Adan, Pavone, and Slade met in the office in the afternoon. Flynn was on an off day, still trying to make waves with the musical co-ed. Watt was in his office and Dupond felt secure enough to bring the rest in while two people stayed back. Dupond made Pavone sit on the other side of the room. The undercover agent was wearing battered Ked’s with holes in both toes, a green Army surplus jacket, filthy jeans with a tear in the fabric taped together with Scotch tape, and a yellowed t-shirt spotted with questionable stains on the belly.
He carried a pillowcase grey with dirt. In it were a bag of Oreos, another t-shirt, and two speed loaders for his .38. He had another one in the front pocket of his jeans. The pistol itself was strapped to his ankle. He reeked of body odor and MD-2020.