Central Park by Guillaume Musso (ebook reader macos .TXT) 📕

in this neighborhood, and her body was threatening to collapse. She was paying for the strain of the morning. Her wrist was on fire with pain where the handcuff had dug into her skin, and her muscles were throbbing.

Worst of all, she felt horribly alone, filled with sorrow and confusion.

Her mind flashed up memories. The pawning of the watch had brought back painful fragments of the past. She thought about Paul. About their first meeting. How blown away she had been. She thought about how violently she had been in love; it was a force strong enough to destroy all fears.

Memories rose to the surface, erupting into her mind with the power of a geyser. Memories of happy days that would never return.

I remember…Three years ago

Paris

November 2010

The heavens have opened. The city is deluged.

“Turn right, Seymour, this is it. Rue Saint-Thomas d’Aquin.”

The windshield wipers wave frantically from side to side but cannot keep up with the torrent of rain falling on the French capital. No matter how fast the rubber blades sweep across the glass, the translucent curtain remakes itself almost immediately.

Our unmarked car leaves Boulevard Saint-Germain and takes the narrow road that leads to the Place de l’Église.

The sky is black. The storm has been raging since the night before, drowning everything. The city looks liquefied. In front of us, the pediment of the church has vanished, its decorations and bas-reliefs blurred by mist. Only the stone angels are still distinguishable.

Seymour drives around the little square and parks in a delivery area across from the gynecologist’s office. “You think you’ll be long?”

“Twenty minutes max,” I promise. The gynecologist confirmed the appointment by e-mail. I warned her I was running late.

Seymour checks his phone messages. “Listen, there’s a café just up there. I’m going to buy a sandwich while I wait for you. I’ll call the station and find out how Savignon and Cruchy are doing with their interrogation.”

“Okay, send me a text if you have any news. See you later. Thanks for coming with me,” I say. I get out and close the door behind me.

The rain hits me full force. I lift my jacket above my head to protect myself from the downpour and run the ten yards from the car to the doctor’s office. The secretary takes almost a minute to buzz me in. When I finally enter the lobby, I notice that she is on the phone. She gestures an apology and points me toward the waiting room. I open the door and collapse into one of the leather armchairs.

Today has been a nightmare thanks to this sudden urinary tract infection. Seriously, it’s been torture; I’m in pain and I need to piss every five minutes, and when I do, it burns like fire. I’ve even had blood in my urine, which freaked me out a little.

And on top of all that, this is really bad timing. For the past twenty-four hours, my team has been fighting on all fronts. We’re struggling to get a confession from a murderer whom we have no solid evidence against, and now we’ve just landed another case: the murder of a woman found dead in her own home in a bourgeois apartment building on Rue de la Faisanderie in the sixteenth arrondissement. A young schoolteacher, savagely strangled with a nylon stocking. It is three p.m. Seymour and I arrived at the crime scene at seven this morning. We’ve been questioning the neighbors ourselves. I haven’t eaten, I’m nauseated, and I feel like I’m pissing razor blades.

I grab the compact from my purse and, using the little mirror, attempt to put my hair back into some sort of order. I look like a zombie, my clothes are soaked, and I have the impression that I smell like a wet dog.

I take a deep breath to calm myself down. This isn’t the first time I’ve had these pains. It’s horribly unpleasant, but at least I know it’s treatable; I’ll take some antibiotics, and in a day all the symptoms will disappear. I tried the pharmacy across the street from my apartment, but the guy who worked there wouldn’t give me anything without a prescription.

“Ms. Schafer?”

A man’s voice. I look up from my compact and see a white coat. Instead of my usual gynecologist, there stands a handsome, olive-skinned man, his face framed by curly blond hair and lit up by laughing eyes.

“I’m Dr. Paul Malaury,” he says, adjusting his tortoiseshell glasses.

“But I have an appointment with Dr. Poncelet…”

“My colleague is on vacation. She should have let you know that I was filling in for her.”

I lose my temper. “Well, she didn’t. In fact, she confirmed our appointment by e-mail.”

I get out my phone and look for the message on my screen so I can prove it to him. Rereading it, however, I realize that the guy is right; I had only skimmed the message, noting the confirmation of the appointment but missing the part about her being on vacation.

Shit.

“Please, come in,” he says in a gentle voice.

I hesitate, momentarily disconcerted. I’ve had too many bad experiences with men to want one for a gynecologist. It has always seemed obvious to me that a woman is in a better position to understand another woman. It’s a question of psychology, sensitivity, privacy. Still on my guard, I follow him into the office, determined to keep the encounter as brief as possible.

“All right,” I say, “I’ll get straight to the point: All I need is an antibiotic for cystitis. Dr. Poncelet usually gives me—”

Frowning, he cuts me off mid-tirade. “Excuse me, but you’re not trying to write the prescription yourself, are you? I’m sure you realize that I can’t prescribe you an antibiotic without examining you.”

I try to suppress my anger, but I can now see that things are going to be more complicated than I’d hoped. “I’m telling you, I get cystitis all the time. There’s no other possible diagnosis.”

“That may be true, mademoiselle, but I am the doctor here, not