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

No one can explain why the four victims opened the door to him quite late in the evening. All we have is a vague eyewitness account of a man in a black helmet fleeing on a three-wheel scooter. And there are thousands of vehicles like that in the Paris area.

Another vending-machine coffee. It’s cold and drafty in this room. I grip the plastic cup with both hands in search of some warmth. Staring into space, I go over the case in my head for the thousandth time, reciting the facts to myself like a mantra.

Four victims—four women living alone. Three of them single, one a divorced mother. In the same geographic area. Killed with the same MO.

For a long time, the newspapers nicknamed the murderer “the phone-thief killer.” Even the cops thought at first that he was stealing the victims’ cell phones in order to erase certain compromising information: calls, videos, photos…but this theory doesn’t hold up. In spite of what the press claimed, the phones of the first and fourth victims were eventually found. And while the phone of the second victim, the flight attendant, has never been located, that of the third victim—the nurse—was simply forgotten in a taxi.

I look at my own phone. I have downloaded hundreds of photos of the four victims onto it. Not those morbid crime scene shots but images from their daily lives, taken from their computers.

I scroll through these, always coming back to those of Clara Maturin. The first victim, the schoolteacher. The one I feel closest to. One of her photos particularly moves me. It’s a traditional class picture, dated October 2010, taken on the school playground. All the kindergartners from the Joliot-Curie school are gathered around their teacher. The image is full of life. The kids’ faces fascinate me. Some children are very serious, while others fool around—silly grins, fingers up nostrils, bunny ears, and so on. At their center, Clara Maturin smiles openly. She is a pretty, reserved-looking woman with blond hair cut in a bob. She is wearing a beige raincoat over a rather elegant pantsuit and a Burberry silk scarf. She must have especially liked this outfit, because she wears it in quite a few other pictures: at a friend’s wedding in May 2010 in Brittany; during a vacation in London in August of the same year; and even in the last photo of her, taken a few hours before her death by a security camera on Rue de la Faisanderie. I scroll from one to the next, finding the same favorite outfit in each one: raincoat, Working Girl suit, Burberry scarf around her neck like a cowl. When I linger over this last detail, however, something hits me: It’s not the same scarf. To make sure, I zoom in, using three fingers on the touchscreen. In spite of the poor resolution of the security-camera image, I am almost certain—the scarf has a different print.

The day she died, Clara was not wearing her favorite scarf.

A faint shiver runs down my back.

An unimportant detail?

Maybe, but my brain goes to work anyway, trying to make sense of this fact. Why did Clara Maturin change her scarf that day? Did she lend it to a friend? Did she take it to be dry-cleaned? Did she lose it?

Maybe she lost it.

Maud Morel, the third victim, also lost something—her cell phone, which was finally discovered in a taxi. And Nathalie Roussel’s phone, which we assumed had been stolen—maybe that had been lost too?

Lost.

Two phones, a scarf…

And Virginie André? What did she lose?

Her life.

But what else? I quit the photo app on my phone and call Seymour. “Hey, it’s me. Listen, about Virginie André’s murder, do you know if anything was ever mentioned about her having lost something just prior to her death?”

“Alice! You’re supposed to be on maternity leave! Just concentrate on getting ready for your baby!”

I ignore this. “Do you remember or not?”

“No, I have no idea, Alice. We’re not working that case anymore.”

“Could you find her ex-husband’s number? Text it to me. I’ll ask him myself.”

“All right.” He sighs.

“Thanks, Seymour.”

Three minutes after I hang up, I receive his text. I call the ex-husband immediately and leave a message on his voice mail asking him to contact me as soon as possible.

“Madame Schafer! You walked here again!” Rose-May exclaims, wide-eyed.

She is a plump woman from Réunion with a strong creole accent, and every time I see her, she gives me a scolding as if I’m a little girl.

“No, I didn’t. Honestly!” I say, following her into one of the third-floor rooms where she gives her birthing classes.

She asks me to lie down, then takes her time examining me. She assures me that the cervix is still closed, that I am not at risk of giving birth prematurely. She is pleased to see that the baby has turned over and is no longer breech.

“The head is pointing down now, and the baby’s back is to the left. The perfect position! He’s even begun to descend a little.”

She straps sensors to my bare belly and connects the monitor that records the baby’s heartbeat and my Braxton-Hicks contractions.

I hear my son’s heartbeat.

I am deeply moved—tears well in my eyes—but at the same time, my chest tightens with anxiety. Rose-May explains what I have to do when I begin to feel contractions, which should normally happen in about four to five weeks.

“If they’re happening every ten minutes, take a Spasfon tablet and wait thirty minutes. If the pain goes away, it was a false alarm. If it persists and—”

I feel my phone vibrate in the pocket of my parka, which is close by. I interrupt the midwife, sit up, and lean down to grab the phone.

“Jean-Marc André,” a voice announces. “I was just checking my messages and—”

“Thank you for calling me back, monsieur. I’m Captain Schafer, one of the officers investigating the murder of your ex-wife. I was wondering if you remember whether she lost something in the days prior to her death?”

“Lost what?”

“I don’t