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

In front of the building, she saw a town map displayed under a wooden canopy. She looked at it and found what she needed: the address of a medical center on Second Street.

The advantage of small towns like this was that everything was bunched close together. Alice had to walk only a couple hundred yards to reach a brand-new building with a resolutely modern façade: a vertical metallic-blue wave that stood out like a sore thumb amid the town’s old-fashioned architecture.

The sliding doors opened and she entered the lobby of the medical building. She went to the front desk and told the receptionist she wanted a chest X-ray. She was asked for a photo ID and her insurance card. As she had neither of these, she spoke the first lie that came to mind: she said she was a French tourist with lung problems and she wanted to see a doctor and get an X-ray. The receptionist looked skeptical.

“It’s quite important,” Alice insisted. “I would like to see the physician so I can explain my problem. I would pay all the costs, of course.”

“Let me find out,” the receptionist said, picking up the phone.

She spoke to someone for about two minutes, then hung up and told Alice, “Dr. Mitchell in the urgent-care clinic will see you. Could you show me some ID, please?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I left my purse in the car. But my husband is on his way here and—”

“All right, you can go up. The clinic is on the fifth floor.” She pressed a button that opened a Plexiglas security barrier, allowing Alice access to the elevator.

Fifth floor. Another reception desk. A waiting room decorated in soft, bright colors with white walls, PVC flooring, cushioned wooden benches and chairs. An old lady, sagging under the weight of her years, was turning the pages of a celebrity magazine. Opposite her, a burly young man with his leg in a cast and a swollen black eye was playing on his iPad and taking up almost the entire couch.

Alice sat next to him and started a conversation. “Car accident?”

“Football,” he replied, looking up from the screen. “I got taken down by the guys from Albany this weekend.”

Handsome face, cocky Ultrabrite smile, shining eyes. The girls must go nuts over him, Alice thought. And some boys, for that matter.

“Is there a Wi-Fi connection here?”

“Uh-huh.”

Alice didn’t beat around the bush. “How would you like to earn a quick fifty bucks?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening.”

She took a fifty-dollar bill from her pocket. “Lend me your iPad for five minutes, and this is yours.”

“I’ll do it for a hundred.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Okay, okay, don’t get mad!” he said, handing her his tablet.

Alice opened a web browser and connected to the sites of France’s three main newspapers: Libération, Le Monde, and Le Figaro. Strange as it might seem, Alice had never seen Vaughn’s face. He had been wearing a helmet when he attacked her, and whenever she thought of him, that was the image that came to mind: a predator’s black helmet, with sharp lines and bright edges; a metallic mirrored visor; a mouth vent and an aerodynamic chin bar, like a terrifying smile.

Later, during therapy, Alice had agreed with the psychiatrist that it was counterproductive to keep twisting the knife in her mental wounds by compulsively reading news articles about the case. But what the shrink didn’t know was that by then, Alice was convinced that Vaughn was dead.

That was no longer the case.

She found several photographs of the killer published in the weeks after her attack, a dozen different pictures in which Erik Vaughn appeared more or less distinctly. A man in his mid-thirties, dark-haired, reasonably good-looking without being unusual in any way.

What disturbed her was the difficulty she had in establishing a definitive portrait of Vaughn based on the different images. Alice thought of those chameleonic actors who seemed to metamorphose from one film to the next: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, John Cusack…

She took the fax of Caleb Dunn’s mug shot from her pocket and compared it to the other photos. Were Vaughn and Dunn the same person? It didn’t immediately strike her that way, but it could not be ruled out.

Alice knew that, with modern plastic-surgery techniques, it was possible to modify a human face in an almost infinite variety of ways. Some of her colleagues had recently dealt with criminals who had been physically transformed in the operating room with rhinoplasty, the insertion of barbed threads under the skin to redraw the shape of the face, otoplasty to correct ear deformations, injections of hyaluronic acid to emphasize the cheekbones, dental surgery to create a whole new smile.

She was handing the iPad back to its owner when she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket.

Seymour.

The man who could bring her nightmare to an end.

“Are you at the factory yet?” she asked, skipping the usual niceties.

“Not yet. I’ve only just left Sarreguemines. The traffic in Paris was hell, and it took Castelli a while to locate the place.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s supposed to be on Kastelsheim Street. I entered the address into my GPS, but nothing came up. Don’t worry, I’ll find it eventually. The problem is this goddamn rain. It’s pouring, so I can only see about ten feet in front of me.”

Alice could hear the windshield wipers beating frantically in the background.

“I’m calling you about something else,” Seymour said. “I had to bring Savignon and Castelli into the loop. I can’t ask them to do extra work without telling them why. They’re spending the night in the office, working every angle they can find.”

“Thank them for me, will you?”

“Savignon just called me about the serial number of the Glock you gave me this morning.”

She swallowed. She had completely forgotten about that lead. “Yeah, the gun I found in my jacket. So?”

“I tried the stolen-weapons list first, but it wasn’t on there. But when I mentioned Vaughn to Savignon, he had an idea right away. Two years ago, after Vaughn attacked you, we