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  It sounds like neglect, doesn’t it, when I write it like that? Like their sin (and trust me when I say that sin there was) was a sin of omission, not of commission. But not loving us, not caring for us—that was really only the beginning.

  The rest was so very much worse.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mayor Jean-Luc Boulanger was prompt. My boss is always prompt; in the next election, he’s probably going to run on his ability to be on time.

  He certainly has precious little else to run on. He may well have appointed me to my position, but ours was an uneasy relationship: I needed his political connections, he needed my skills and expertise. I didn’t vote for Jean-Luc, and working for him hasn’t improved my opinion of the man. But we can’t always choose the people we work with, can we?

  He noted my arrival in the conference room on the first floor with a curt nod. “Bonjour, Madame LeDuc.”

  “Monsieur le maire,” I murmured politely, sliding into a seat across the table from him, opening my planner and pulling out a pad of blank paper, writing the date and time on the top sheet. September 18. 10:00 a.m. Anything to avoid small talk.

  Richard Rousseau, my deputy, came in and sat next to me, swiveling his chair to move it a little closer. “Do you have any idea what the meeting is about today?”

  “Non,” I answered, under my breath. A lock of hair had escaped and was on my forehead; I tucked it back behind my ear. “But I’ll give you three guesses.”

  He grimaced. “Danielle Leroux?”

  “Danielle Leroux, Annie Desmarchais, Caroline Richards, and Isabelle Hubert,” I reminded him, appalled that I knew the names by heart. Appalled at the reason for knowing their names. “All of the above.”

  Richard nodded and scowled across the table as the police director, along with the assistant director, two aides, and their public relations officer seated themselves obsequiously around the mayor. They were from the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal, or SPVM, the city police.

  Just to keep our lives interesting, we have three police forces that can potentially all be working in Montréal. They sometimes even actually acknowledge each other’s existence.

  There was the SPVM (the city police), the Sûreté de Québec—police who cover all of the province—and the national Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Three levels of policing, and they do not always play well together. The city police resent it when the provincial police try to hone in on anything in the city; and they both resent the Mounties, who aren’t all that popular anywhere in the province.

  Here in the province of Québec we often choose to forget that we are, after all, part of Canada.

  Ivan says it’s not so different in the States, where there’s a general understanding that city cops and state police and the FBI tend to step on each other’s toes. I waved that information away when he was trying to explain it to me: my life was complicated enough as it was; I didn’t need to know how they do things in Boston. Police are police are police, right?

  I turned to whisper something about the police to my deputy and found Richard staring hard at the director. No surprise there: Richard was constantly at odds with the police. Their public relations representative was as communicative as a brick wall, and my own small department subsequently found itself doing more damage control in more instances of potential public relations nightmares than should have been strictly necessary. One wondered why they’d bothered hiring someone for PR if they didn’t plan to do any of it. Most of the consequent problems fell onto my deputy’s plate, hence the scowl. I couldn’t really blame him.

  The mayor nodded to the mousy aide who had just seated herself in the background and she got up to close the door. He cleared his throat importantly. “Bon. Time to begin.” He looked around the table. “We’re rapidly becoming the murder capital of North America,” he said, crisply and inaccurately, “and I’d like to know what people are doing to stop it.”

  We all looked at the police contingent from the SPVM. The director cleared his throat in turn. “We have all available people working on it, monsieur le maire,” he said uncomfortably. “I’m not at liberty to say exactly—”

  “Not at liberty?” barked the mayor. “Not at liberty, you say? The way that you’ve been running—or should I say not running?—the department over this past year, I’d say that you didn’t have a clue what exactly is going on! As for being at liberty, need I remind you for whom you work? It’s intolerable, the way that things have been going…”

  I tuned him out. I’d heard this particular diatribe before, more than once, and it was getting a little more grating every time I heard it. Arguments seldom improve with age. The mayor and the director were famous for hating each other, and for taking any possible opportunity to make each other look bad in public. A dreary exercise at best, but it also engendered a major headache for those of us entrusted with the city’s image.

  And in the meantime, the body count was up to four. We were in September, still prime tourist season for Montréal, and still with a compelling reason for people to stay away. Which made it my problem.

  I sighed out loud. It was everyone’s concern. We were all behaving as though these deaths were somehow a great public relations fiasco. Yet to Danielle Leroux, Annie Desmarchais, Caroline Richards, and Isabelle Hubert, they were anything but. For them, it was the end.

  I glanced up and caught the mayor’s eye, belatedly realizing that everyone had heard the sigh. “So, Madame LeDuc,” he was saying, fixing me with a baleful glance, “I want you to be coordinating things between the police director and my office. As from now.”

  “Monsieur le maire?” I’d definitely missed something.

  He nodded briskly. “You’ll make sure that there’s a report on my desk every morning, recounting the previous day’s activities and what progress is being made,” he said, liking the idea. “And you, monsieur le directeur, will give madame every facility.”

  I cleared my throat. There was no way around what was about to happen. “Monsieur le maire, isn’t there someone else who is better qualified—who has more experience with police work?”

  “Madame LeDuc,” he said, a patronizing smile already spreading across his features. “Everyone else is very busy with immediate, important duties.”

  Say it, I thought. Say that you think my office is window dressing. Say that you think we don’t need a publicity department. Dis-le.

  He managed not to, because he knew it would come back to bite him in the elections. I’d done a lot to bring conventions, tourists, great visiting musicians, new festivals, and important events to the city—as everyone but the mayor acknowledged. “You are the one,” he said finally, “who can best work it into your schedule.”

  I looked across the table at François Desrocher, the police director. He scowled back at me. The mayor hadn’t exactly made his day, assigning someone for him to report to. And the fact that it was me—a woman—in particular … well, suffice it to say that it wasn’t the best news he could have received. Desrocher had a reputation for his treatment of women in the police force—looking the other way when male officers humiliated them, refusing them promotions, assigning them to clerical posts, not sending them for training. Having a woman breathing down his neck now, second-guessing him, was probably last on his list of desirable outcomes to this meeting.

  I smiled sunnily back, just to annoy him, and turned to the mayor. “Monsieur, have you considered calling in the Sureté?”

  “There’s no need for that,” snapped Desrocher. “We can handle the situation entre nous—among ourselves. There is no reason to think that there is any involvement off the island.”

  “There have been four deaths,” Richard, next to me, pointed out. He wasn’t too happy about the director’s dressing-down, either. “It doesn’t sound like you’re handling it.”

  “Enough!” An aide was whispering into the mayor’s ear, and he held up his hand. “We will reconvene tomorrow afternoon. Madame LeDuc, I want a report from you on
my desk in the morning. Now for God’s sake, tout le monde, go and find out what’s happening out there!”

  * * *

  Chantal sat at her desk in the outer office and watched Richard and me coming through the door. She summed up the situation with immediate accuracy. “Everyone’s blaming everyone else,” she said.

  “That’s about it,” agreed Richard, slumping into the chair next to her desk. “Everything short of name-calling.”

  “There was name-calling,” I said, standing in front of the desk and leafing through yet more pink message slips. “They were just trying to be subtle about it. This goes on, it will get more blatant, you wait and see.”

  “Something to look forward to,” said Richard.

  I looked at him sharply. “Are you all right?” He looked the same as he always did: very Gallic, elegantly dressed today in an Armani suit that he’d no doubt picked up secondhand—I knew what his city salary was—but managed to make it look perfect anyway. His compelling blue eyes and tousled dark hair made women turn around and look at him, more than once, more often than not. After working together for three years, I’d started to get used to it.

  He gave a very French shrug, then delivered the bombshell. “I knew her.”

  There was a moment of silence. I didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. I walked over to my door and opened it. “In my office. Now.”

  I didn’t sit behind my desk; I don’t need to assert my authority with Richard. I gestured him to the leather-covered sofa under the diplomas and sat in the matching adjacent armchair. I leaned forward, bridging the distance between us. “Talk to me.”

  He ran a hand through his hair again distractedly. “Danielle Leroux,” he said unnecessarily. “I know her. I knew her.” He paused, then said, explosively, “Merde, alors!” and buried his head in his hands.

  I waited a moment, then reached out a hand and touched his shoulder, keeping it there. “Richard. Je suis desolée.” I am so sorry. What an inadequate thing to say, in the circumstances.

  He looked up, tears in his eyes. “It’s just…” He took a long, shuddering breath. “Martine, there may be problems. I’m sorry, but there may be. We—we were seeing each other.”

  Oh, God. I tried not to let my consternation show; it wouldn’t help anything. I kept my hand on his shoulder reassuringly. “I think you should tell me about it, Richard.”

  He nodded miserably, but didn’t speak again for an eternity. “Danielle … she was a research librarian. Over at UQAM.” That explained how they met; Richard was working part-time on a graduate degree at the Université du Québec à Montréal, my own alma mater. “She … at first, we went out for a coffee a couple of times, we liked each other, what can I say? We spent a lot of time together. We took a long weekend, went up into the Laurentians…”

  I remembered him taking that time off; I’d had to change my own personal plans to accommodate him, and Ivan hadn’t been best pleased. That had been at least a month ago. If Richard had met Danielle when classes were still in session, they had been seeing each other throughout the summer.

  My stomach clenched with anxiety. Most people are killed by someone they know. Despite the profile pointing to this being a serial killer, there was no way that my deputy wasn’t going to be on the list of suspects.

  Pretty high up on it, too.

  I took a deep breath. “Richard. When did you see her last?”

  There was misery in his eyes. “Wednesday night.”

  Great. And she’d been killed sometime Thursday. It was going to be a very long day indeed.

  All of us at the orphanage had one thing, one terribly important thing, in common: we were mistakes. I never really understood what that meant, but Sister said it often enough that I knew it must be true. We came from villages, farms, even the city itself; we were brought with favorite toys or blankets or in harsh cheap unraveling baskets or by some relative who hid us from the light of day.

  Those who brought us in were fed the lies. Of course he can keep his favorite blanket. Naturellement, she will have her stuffed rabbit with her in bed at night. Bien sûr there will be a good education. We love them all as though they were our own.

  Well, we were theirs, all right; but love didn’t have anything to do with it.

  It was all about the work. Hard work.

  Even the smallest children had something to do. My earliest memories of the orphanage are of floors, of scrubbing floors. Perhaps because we were small and couldn’t reach much of anything else, we were made to clean the floors.

  I don’t know if the sisters even knew our names, or if they ever cared about any of us as individuals. We were their charges, the mistakes that they were tasked to deal with. And that was what united us: the need to be children, real children, with names and pasts and thoughts that were all our own.

  Not that they didn’t try to hammer the individuality out of us. We looked the same, all of us girls, wearing long scratchy shifts in bed at night and pinafores during the day—we all wore the same clothes, interchangeably; nothing was our own. Nothing showed that one of us was in any way different from any other one.

  In the winter we washed in water so cold that we had to break the ice on it, we got dressed and made our beds, lined two-deep the length of the dormitory. Sister inspected all the beds and had a stick ready to rap the knuckles of any child who didn’t do it properly.

  Needless to say, I got quite good at making my bed.

  Then we’d stand in line, single file, down three sets of stairs and out to the chapel for morning mass, which none of us understood on account of it being in Latin, but which we had to stay awake for anyway. I got good at staying awake and attentive there, too.

  We had no idea, then, that it could get better—or worse. It was the way our lives were. It was everything we knew. It just was.

  CHAPTER THREE

  As soon as Richard left, I got on the phone. “I need to come over there now,” I told the director’s assistant.

  “Madame LeDuc, we have you scheduled in for your update at two o’clock,” she said smoothly. “I’m afraid monsieur le directeur is busy at present.”

  “Then he will have to be interrupted,” I said. “I have information about the most recent homicide, and I need to speak with him at once.”

  “Madame—”

  “Never mind,” I interrupted. “It doesn’t matter. I’m on my way over.”

  I opened the small office closet and exchanged heels for flats. Never mind whether or not they went with my suit: comfort will always win out in my book. Life is too short.

  Chantal tapped on the door and put her head in. “Monsieur Petrinko is on line two,” she said cheerfully.

  I picked it up. “Ivan, I haven’t much time—”

  “Hi, babe. I’ll be quick.”

  I relented, told myself to back off, and drew in a deep breath. It wasn’t Ivan’s fault that everything else in Montréal seemed to be falling apart. “Sorry, sweetheart. What’s up?”

  “Just a minor domestic emergency,” he said. “Margery has to be in the hospital. Well, she’s there now, actually. Down in Boston. Gall bladder, or something like that. Something really serious.” Ivan gets a little flustered sometimes.

  I grimaced. Margery is Ivan’s former wife and the mother of his children. Any sentence that begins with her name inevitably ends in something somewhere between inconvenience and disaster. It isn’t Margery’s fault, it’s just the nature of shared parenting. “And?”

  “And the kids are already on their way to Montréal,” Ivan said. “Some neighbor dropped them off at Logan, and their flight will be in—oh, hell, in about half an hour. And I have this meeting—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “I can’t go pick them up at the airport.”

  There was a pause. “Martine, I wouldn’t ask if this wasn’t an important meeting. You know that.”

  “I know that,” I agreed, trying to reach across the room for my briefcase and not disconnect the line in doing so. “And yo
u know that I wouldn’t say no unless this was really important. I’m on my way to police headquarters. I seriously don’t have time.”

  There was a longer pause. “We’re going to have to have them for the weekend anyway, babe, and I’m sorry,” Ivan said, exploring my mood. “I can’t send them back to Boston, not with all this going on with their mom. I don’t want to ask Rob to deal with them, with everything else on his plate.” Rob was Margery’s husband. I didn’t know him well enough to pick him out in a crowd, but he seemed to make her happy, and the kids liked him. “He’s probably at the hospital with her now, anyway. I think she’s at Mass. General.”

  Wherever she was being treated couldn’t figure into my plans. “Ivan, I have to go,” I said.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll manage to get them. Or I’ll send somebody from here. Maybe Sylvie.” He was thinking out loud. “But—well, I thought you should know that they’ll be staying with us for a few days. At least through Sunday night. Sorry, I know it’s not our weekend to have them here, but I couldn’t say no.”

  He was repeating himself, which meant he was nervous. It gave me pause. Was I really that awful, that he needed to feel me out that much? But … yeah, extra time with the kids wasn’t exactly the way I’d planned on spending the weekend.

  I shouldn’t really say that. It’s not so much that I don’t like them—in unguarded moments I’ll even admit to loving them—it’s the fact of giving up our only free time together, of constructing a weekend that centered around Claudia and Lukas. Normally there would have been a conversation here about it. Today, not so much. “Of course you couldn’t,” I said. “I get it, I really do. But listen, Ivan, I really have to run. I’ll see you later. We’ll figure out the weekend then.” I disconnected the call before he could say anything else.

  It was time to concentrate on the easier of my two jobs, that of publicity director. The stepmother thing? Sometimes I felt like I’d never get a handle on it.

  Let’s face it: everyone’s got their own ideas about how children should be raised, but try getting four adults who don’t necessarily like each other attempting to co-parent together, each with their own past and thoughts on the subject, and it isn’t pretty.