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

a text telling her he’d be out of the office this morning and asking her to get someone to cover for him.

He quickly got dressed in his previous day’s clothes—dark jeans, pale blue shirt, dark jacket, putty-colored trench coat, Converse sneakers—then opened the door of the closet where he had left his medical kit. He put a syringe filled with a powerful sedative inside a small leather toiletries case. After all, this woman was armed and potentially dangerous. He put the travel case in his briefcase and left the room.

Downstairs, he asked the doorman to call him a taxi, then realized he had left his remote control for the briefcase in his hotel room. If he went more than fifty yards from the receiver, an alarm and an electrical charge would go off automatically.

His cab was on its way, so he decided not to waste time by going back up to his room; instead, he left the briefcase in the hotel cloakroom.

In return, the employee handed him a claim ticket bearing the number 127.

A watermark of the intertwined letters G and H formed a discreet logo behind it.

25Just Before

Manhattan

7:15 a.m.

Forty-five minutes before Alice first meets Gabriel

NOTES FROM A jazz number crackled inside the cab.

It took Gabriel only a few seconds to recognize the legendary recording: Bill Evans playing “All of You” by Cole Porter at the Village Vanguard in 1961. Although he had no talent as a musician, the psychiatrist loved jazz and often went to bars and concert halls in search of new sounds or—the very opposite—in an attempt to rekindle the emotions he had felt as a college student when he first discovered the music in the clubs of Chicago.

There was roadwork on Harrison, so the taxi took a roundabout route to get on Hudson Street. In the back seat of the cab, Gabriel continued reading Alice Schafer’s file on his cell phone screen. The final part of the document, written by a psychologist at the clinic, consisted of a long biographical note supported by articles taken from French newspapers, each with a brief translated summary. All these articles mentioned the serial killer Erik Vaughn, who had terrorized the French capital two years earlier. Gabriel had never heard of the case. It wasn’t easy to read on such a small screen and with the taxi lurching from side to side. At first, skimming through the early press reports, Gabriel thought it was an investigation that Alice was working on, and he felt as if he were living inside one of those thrillers that he often devoured on train or plane trips.

Then he came to the four-page article from Paris Match that described the tragedy in Alice’s life: The young cop had found the killer, but she too had become one of his victims. What he read chilled him—Vaughn had stabbed her in the abdomen, killing the baby inside her womb and leaving her for dead in a pool of blood. And then the bitter coda: her husband dying in a car accident as he drove to the hospital to be with her.

The shock of this made Gabriel feel sick, and for a minute he thought he was going to throw up the two cups of coffee he’d drunk earlier that morning. While the car rushed along Eighth Avenue, he pressed his face to the window for several minutes, keeping himself very still. How could fate have been so cruel to this woman? After she’d endured such tragedy, how could fate strike her down with Alzheimer’s at only thirty-eight years old?

The sun was rising now, its first rays piercing the forest of skyscrapers. The taxi moved up Central Park West and dropped Gabriel at the intersection of Seventy-Second Street, near the park’s western entrance.

The psychiatrist handed the driver a bill and closed the door behind him. The air was cool, but the cloudless sky gave him hope that this would turn out to be a beautiful day. He looked around him. Traffic was growing dense. On the sidewalk, pretzel and hot-dog carts were already open for business. Opposite the Dakota, a street vendor was laying out his posters, T-shirts, and gadgets bearing the image of John Lennon.

Gabriel entered the park. The atmosphere was bucolic. He passed the triangle garden of Strawberry Fields and walked down the path that ran alongside the lake until he reached the Cherry Hill Fountain. The sunlight was beautiful, the air fresh and dry, and already the area was bustling with life—joggers, skaters, cyclists, and dog walkers all passing by in a sort of improvised but harmonious ballet.

Gabriel felt his phone vibrate in the pocket of his trench coat. Thomas had sent him a text containing a screenshot of a map showing Alice Schafer’s precise location. The young woman was still somewhere on the other side of the bridge that went over the lake.

Gabriel had no trouble orienting himself. The towers of the San Remo were behind him; farther up ahead were the Bethesda Terrace and Fountain; to his left was Bow Bridge, with its delicate arabesque decorations. He crossed this long, cream-colored bridge and went into the Ramble.

The psychiatrist had never been here, in the wildest part of Central Park. Little by little, the copses and bushes gave way to real woods: elms, oaks, a carpet of moss and dry leaves, boulders. He kept walking, eyes fixed on the screen of his phone so he wouldn’t get lost. It was hard to believe that a dense forest could exist so close to such a busy area. The thicker the vegetation grew, the quieter the sounds of the city became, and finally they disappeared altogether. Soon, all he could hear was birdsong and the rustle of leaves.

Gabriel blew on his hands to warm them up and looked at his screen again. He was beginning to think he must have gone the wrong way, when he came to a clearing in the woods.

It was a place removed from time, protected from everything around