Murder in the Latin Quarter (30 page)

Friday Evening

“YOU ’RE SURE IT’S those two, Mademoiselle?” The earnest blue eyes of the young uniformed
flic
assessed the men coming down the street. Then focused on the bruise on Aimée’s arm.

Them or Castaing’s other minions. It didn’t much matter to Aimée. They’d block her access to the lab.

“They stole my bag, Officer!”

“I’ve radioed for backup,” he said.

“But if you don’t hurry, they’ll get away.”

One of the big-shouldered
mecs
halted on the pavement. Unsure.

“That’s him!” Aimée accused.

By the time the officer had read him his rights, cuffed him, and led him to the arriving police car, she was long gone.

This time she skirted the laboratory building entrance, keep-ing to the shadows. Past the crumbling walls with drains and wires snaking to the roof. Through the lighted windows, she saw the dinosaur skeletons hanging from the rafters. She smelled the wild lilac scent, which had mingled with the metallic tang of Benoît’s blood. The image of his sprawled body, his severed ear, played in her head. She forced herself to keep going. Gravel and fallen leaves crunched beneath her feet. She peered in the windows of the modern laboratory where Benoît and Huby had worked. A strip of fluorescent lighting shone above the cabinets. She tried Dr. Severat’s number.

No answer.

The lab doorknob didn’t turn. Locked. She crept around the side of the building. An orange plastic barricade stood at the rear, the only evidence of yesterday’s flooding.

The laboratory van was parked with its back doors open, revealing stacked wooden crates.

“Time for a beer, eh?” a man said, grinding his cigarette out in the gravel. He shut the van doors. Footsteps crunched on the gravel, walking away. One of the double lab doors had been left ajar.

She climbed the ramp, entered the building, and found her-self in a supply room with high shelves lined with chemicals and beakers. Not here, she thought, and opened the next door. Chrome and stainless-steel counters gleamed under the fluorescent lights.

She heard the discreet hum of the ventilation system and a low whirring.

She tried Huby’s office door handle. Locked. Back near the built-in cabinets, she saw light under the door to a storeroom.

Inside, she saw crates and more crates against the yellowed moisture-stained plaster walls. Tools, ropes, and cords hung from a ledge. A small red light blinked from the gray intercom panel laden with dust protruding from the wall. On it, buttons were labeled: LAB 1, LAB 2, CENTRAL OFFICE. They’d remodeled the state-of-the-art lab, but not this long walk-in store-room leading God knew where.

Her gaze rested on the legend on the box, “HYDROLIS PORT-AU-PRINCE RESEARCH SPECIMENS—KEEP COOL.” A triangle with an “H,” the Hydrolis logo, was stenciled in black on several of the crates. A packing slip, dated Monday, with a signature she deciphered as Benoît’s, was attached to them. But inside lay sty-rofoam forms, packing straw, and nothing else. Empty.

A small refrigerator stood in the storeroom. She opened it and saw a specimen tray holding several sealed glass test tubes, containing brown pinkish matter in clear gelatin, labeled “PORCINE SAMPLES #6 FARM PORT-AU-PRINCE ENVIRONS” with an “H” in a small triangle in the corner. Again, the Hydrolis logo.

It was beginning to make sense. Here were the pig-tissue specimens Huby had shown her under the microscope on Tuesday. Benoît had received these tissue samples from Haiti on Monday.

What if he’d viewed these samples and analyzed them, but hadn’t had time to write a proper report to corroborate his findings? Say he’d noted down his discovery of mercury and lead in the porcine tissue samples, and placed his notes in the file she’d found.

Instead of leaving them in the old lab in the adjacent building where he’d worked, Benoît had had the tubes sent here to protect them. Smart. His colleague Huby would have con-firmed the toxicity in the samples, ignorant of the implication.

Saddened, she realized Benoît hadn’t been smart enough. And not only he, but Huby too, had paid.

But she thought back to Huby’s protestation that Benoît’s murder was an accident, how he’d ducked her calls. Perhaps he
had
hoped to use Benoît’s work for his own purposes. Academic rivalry, publish or perish, the vital path to a professor-ship and tenure?

Still, it didn’t explain his death.

She made her way out of the storeroom and to the dim, musty older gallery, ringed by a walkway halfway up the walls that gave access to wooden drawers. If only her lockpicking kit hadn’t disappeared with her bag! She passed an old glass case with bone fragments labeled “Rhino pectorus, Euphrates Valley”; then she saw a screwdriver.

Back at Huby’s office door, she jimmied the lock. She jiggled the screwdriver until she heard the lock tumble, held her breath, and tugged. She worked the screwdriver handle up and down with her shoulder, pushing the door, which finally gave way, ripping her jacket as she stumbled inside a dark office filled with file cabinets and a desk piled with papers.

She switched on the light and saw a file on the desk. It was stamped RESEARCH GRANT DENIED, dated Wednesday.

Had Huby counted on using Benoît’s work in hopes of obtaining a research grant? Maybe the test tubes hadn’t arrived in time, so his research grant had been denied. She opened the file, flipping the pages in the folder, but the subject was bovine studies and BSE, as it was in each of the next three folders she thumbed through.

It didn’t connect. If Huby had had no personal interest in Benoît’s discovery, he’d had no reason to murder him.

She turned off the light and closed the door. She had to take Benoît’s test tubes before the staff returned.

She walked down the long corridor, made a left, and reentered the lab. Back in the storeroom, she opened the refrigerator door and slipped several tubes into her jacket pocket.

Hearing an unexpected sound, Aimée straightened up to see Dr. Severat, the anatomy research doctor, a brown-stained apron over her white lab coat.

“
Nom de Dieu,”
Aimée gasped. “You gave me a fright!”

“But what are you doing here, Mademoiselle?”

Aimée’s eyes traveled from the door to the test tubes in Dr. Severat’s latex-gloved hands. Something was fishy here.

“I could ask
you
that, Dr. Severat,” she said. “Don’t you work in the next building?”

“Excuse me?” The woman adjusted the volume on the flesh-colored plug in her ear.

Dr. Severat’s blond hair, silhouetted against the yellow storeroom light, formed a halo. Aimée noticed her frown, her flushed cheeks. An open plastic container of bleach and a few ammonia containers stood on the floor.

“I don’t understand,” Dr. Severat went on. “You don’t work in Dr. Rady’s department: I checked. Who are you?”

“Aimée Leduc. But—”

“You’re snooping. Like the others.”

Aimée began to perspire. The air was close and stale, and the bleach reeked.

“Why are you taking Professeur Benoît’s test tubes?” Aimée asked.

Dr. Severat backed up. “You’re mistaken. I’m doing control. All equipment must meet rigorous standards. We run a clean lab. Sterile.”

“I thought you worked in a different department.”

“Professeur Benoît’s materials do not belong here,” Severat said.

Protecting his work? Aimée didn’t think so. Seeing the tubes in Dr. Severat’s hands was adding to her uneasiness.

Aimée backed up against the wall and crab-walked her fingers up the fissures until she felt the protruding intercom. Grabbing a bit of braid hanging from her denim jacket, she pressed one of the buttons and lodged the braid to loop around it and keep it in the transmit mode. With luck, one of the workers would have returned and would overhear them.

“The Hydrolis logo on those tubes in the refrigerator matches those from Haiti.” Aimée pointed to the triangle. But the tube Dr. Severat held contained pinkish tissue. “I think you’re liquidating Professeur Benoît’s tissue samples, destroying the evidence.”

Dr. Severat’s mouth twitched.

“Like you destroyed Huby,” Aimée said. “You pushed him from the window because he’d figured it out.”

“Me? I’m a scientist.”

No surprise or curiosity. And she hadn’t denied the charges.

Aimée had to keep her talking, hoping someone would hear. Perspiration dampened her shoulder blades; the jacket clung to her skin. Her bag with her Swiss Army knife was gone. Her only evidence was the tubes in her pocket.

“After you lost your hearing aid, it took you some time to adjust to a new one,
non?
” Aimée asked.

“This is my old one. The stupid cords get in my. . . .” Dr. Severat stopped and stared at Aimée. “What do you mean?”

“The cellist remembers seeing you with Professeur Benoît at the Cluny concert on Monday,” Aimée said. “That’s why I came here. To ask you why you neglected to inform the authorities.”

“About attending a concert with my lover? But that’s my private life.”

“And then you murdered him. That was not ‘private.’”

“I tried to make Azacca understand,” Dr. Severat said.

She blocked the lab door. Aimée’s pulse raced.

“How much did Castaing pay you, Dr. Severat?”

“Pay me?” Her voice rose in surprise. “But why would he—?”

“These tubes contain pig tissue tainted with lead and mercury, the proof that Hydrolis is supplying toxic water in Haiti,” she said. “You’re destroying these for Castaing. He counts on World Bank funding to keep Hydrolis running in order to continue to exploit the poorest country in the world.”

“You’re talking politics,” Dr. Severat said coolly. “Not my metier.”

“Politics?” Aimée said. Her eye caught on a double door at the rear of the long-narrow storeroom. The ammonia odor from the plastic jugs stung Aimée’s nose. “What I know of politics could be wrapped around my little finger. But Benoît’s evidence of lead and mercury would set off fireworks.

“As you’re a scientist,” she continued, “you know how much his research mattered to Benoît. Why, you told me your-self that it meant everything to him. For Haiti. A greater good, more important than—”

“Us,” Severat interrupted.

The word chilled Aimée. Dr. Severat kicked the door closed behind her. The old wooden shelves rattled. The only light came from the bare hanging bulb. Shadows flickered over the fissured walls. Aimée stepped back.

The small intercom light blinked green. Weren’t the workers back? Hadn’t they heard? Where was the building’s security?

“So you’re destroying the evidence,” Aimée said. She tried to keep her voice level. She had to keep this woman talking. “Like you destroyed Benoît and Huby.”

“Trust you to make it sound pathetic,” Dr. Severat said. “That story, how you were down and out, dependent on Dr. Rady . . . I believed it.”

“Did you argue with Benoît after the concert?” Aimée prodded. “Was that it?”

“Look at me when you talk.” Dr. Severat stepped under the hanging bulb. Her mouth pursed. An intermittent buzz issued from the hearing aid.

“All our plans . . . together at last, the new apartment finally, yet I meant nothing to him,” she said, a catch in her voice. “He’d been seeing another woman. A woman consumed by the ‘cause’ they shared, he said. He was waiting for these ‘important’ samples; they would change everything. After the concert, he showed me his plane ticket to Haiti.” A sob escaped her.

Benoît had spurned her.

“You loved him, I understand,” Aimée said, moving toward the door, desperate to get out of this old storeroom. “Men! They never get it, do they? What a relationship means to us, how they get under our skin.”

“And that Haitian slut, all he could talk about was how he had to help her.” A look that could cut steel shone in her eyes. Her gaze rested somewhere in the distance. “She lied about me. I saw her.”

“That’s right, you read lips,” Aimée said. “But they spoke
Kreyòl.
You couldn’t understand that. Mireille didn’t murder Benoît. But you told the
flics
they’d quarreled to implicate her.”

“He made a pass at her. She was the one he trusted, that slut,” she said, tears brimming in her eyes. ”Why couldn’t he trust me?”

“He hurt you.”

“Azacca? Hurt me?” She shook her head, a tear trailing down her cheek. “No one ever made me feel the way he did. I didn’t have to prove myself to him like I do here every day to keep my position. I thought you, of all people, would under-stand.” She gave a short laugh. “Ten years in the lab, and I’m still under contract. Not like the others with tenure for life. Would they do that to a man?”

Aimée gestured to a wood carton. “You’re trembling. Sit down.”

Dr. Severat sat, still clutching a test tube. “With Azacca I could just be a woman,” she said, her voice ragged.

Aimée could almost touch the light switch on the wall above her. If she could just inch closer and switch the light off, she could make a break for the other door. Her foot struck a cobweb-covered bottle near the bleach container.

“Maybe you didn’t mean to kill him,” Aimée said, her tone soothing. “But after he was dead, you recalled that Benoît had survived Duvalier’s rule; he had spoken of the terror the ton-ton macoutes spread through the countryside and in his village. So you tried to make his death look like a tonton macoute reprisal. For you, it was easy: you’re an anatomy expert. But with that circle of salt, you made a mistake.”

“Do you think I got to my position by making mistakes?” Her eyes flashed. The woman’s moods seesawed from moment to moment. “I don’t make mistakes,” she insisted.

But she had. Frantically, Aimée’s fingers traveled higher on the cracked wall.

“He hurt you to the core, I understand,” Aimée said. “You’d believed him. But he’d lied to you.”

“It took all my savings to buy the apartment and furnish it with the things he liked,” she said. “Then I took out a loan to pay for our honeymoon cruise. But he pulled away—”

“You couldn’t have that, could you?” Aimée agreed. “Yet the guard, why kill him?”

“That meddling fool saw me leave the gatehouse!” Dr. Severat exclaimed. She sighed. “And Huby, who couldn’t get a grant to save his life, hid Azacca’s work.”