For a moment, Adele’s mind wandered to her old mentor, Robert Henry. He’d been sick—very sick—but recently had shown some signs of mild improvement. The thought alone weighed heavy on her heart, but she shook her head, focusing for the moment and trying to gauge her father’s response to her words.
His face remained blank. “What do you mean?” he probed.
“I mean what I said,” she replied. “Agent John Renee—do you remember him? He was working the case while I was…” Adele hesitated and trailed off.
“Taking a break,” her father said.
Adele knew the danger of allowing her father to fill in her sentences. There had been a time, not long ago, when given the opportunity, he might have said something like, “running away from your problems.” Or, “having a mental breakdown.”
Her father hadn’t been one to mince words. But they were beginning to see eye to eye more and more. What they saw neither much agreed with, but at the very least, they were beginning to understand how to relate. Or so she hoped.
Then again, the Sergeant had withheld evidence in her mother’s case, and Adele was still having a hard time looking at him the same way she had before. Still, he had loved Elise once upon a time and despite how things had ended between them, Adele knew he’d taken her murder very poorly. He deserved to know.
“He saw the killer? And did he catch the killer?” Still no expression.
“He tried, but failed to snag the bastard.”
“Adele,” her father said, sharply. “Language.”
She rolled her eyes. Some things never changed. “Fine. He failed to catch the killer. John had to save a victim.” She said this part with pursed lips, her voice tight. She had already been over it with Renee, and didn’t feel like getting into it with her father as well.
For his part, the Sergeant’s calm façade was cracking a bit. His eyebrows bunched lower, but even more so, a quiet storm brewed in his gaze. They were darker than she remembered, and his pupils almost seemed dilated. He was breathing in shallow puffs, and she noticed one of his hands had clutched the edge of his shirt, pulling on the white fabric.
“He saw his face, briefly, and got a look at his physique. He’s going to try to work with a composite artist,” Adele said, speaking as matter-of-factly as she could muster. Inwardly, her own stomach twisted and turned. She remembered her conversation with Renee, the flash of anger. Then the subsequent regret at how poorly she’d treated him. Clouding it all, though, had been the cold certainty: the killer was still out there, laughing in the dark. She cleared her throat, closing her eyes to steady herself for a moment, then continued, “It doesn’t look promising. And either way, I think the killer was spooked. Whatever he was up to, ducking out of cover, he’s going to stay in hiding for a lot longer this time.”
The Sergeant crossed his arms and growled, “Why did he let him get away?”
“Like I said, he had to choose between saving a victim and catching the killer.”
A sudden jolt of rage displayed across the Sergeant’s face, twisting his expression and causing a growling, barking sound to explode from his lips as he snarled, “Catching the killer would save lives.”
Adele shrugged sympathetically. “I know.”
Her father seemed to lose some steam now, and he collapsed in the couch facing the window, leaning back, his walrus mustache facing the ceiling fan.
“What do you mean you think he’s gone?”
“I mean, John saw him. Not well, and in the dark, but the bast—er, killer would be stupid to try anything else.”
“If you caught him once, you can do it again, can’t you?”
Adele winced and shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s going to be that easy. Look how long we’ve been searching so far, and only now did we stumble upon anything at all.”
Her father exhaled through his nose. “Well, he will have to remember then, won’t he. Whatever he saw. Your friend—this John. He has to remember.”
“It was dark. He only caught a glimpse. I don’t know what’s going to come of it.”
The Sergeant shook his head, frowning. “Anything else I should know?”
Adele sighed. “Nothing I can think of. Things got a little bit quiet after that. It was only a week or so ago. I had to see if I could follow up on any leads, but nothing came of it.” Adele paused, then said, “One of the cafeteria workers on the first floor at DGSI vanished about a week and a half ago. But her family says it’s not uncommon for her to go off traveling with some out of town boyfriend for the fun of it. We’re looking into it, but other than that, things have been calm.”
“A cafeteria worker vanished? Not retaliation for seeing his face, is it?”
“No body,” Adele said, wincing. “Like I said, they’re keeping an eye out.”
“Dammit,” said the Sergeant. He sat in silence for a moment, his head still reclined, still pressed into the couch.
Through the window, Adele watched as traffic moved through the streets of Paris. She breathed slowly through her nose, steadying her nerves by focusing on the exhalation.
She wasn’t sure what else to do. “I have a spare pillow and some blankets in the cupboard in the hall. You’re welcome to it. Stay as long as you like,” she said, not because she really meant it—but because she knew her father, like her, would want to spend as little time as possible in the same cramped space as they could manage.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love her father. It was that she didn’t know how to express it. And either he suffered the same difficulty, or had never learned how to kindle affection in the first place.
Either way, now that she’d said it, she wasn’t sure what to add. “I have some cereal in the cupboards,” she continued, hesitantly. “And I also—”
Before she could finish, her phone began to ring, chirping from her pocket with quick, punctuated sounds like a twittering bird.
“Sorry,” she said with a wince. Quickly, she answered, turning a shoulder to her father’s seated form. “Yeah?”
The voice on the other end replied, “Adele…” It was John, and Adele went suddenly stiff. She hadn’t left things with her old partner in a particularly healthy place.
“Yeah?” she said; the word had worked the first time, and she saw no reason to change it.
“Foucault wants us both in. A new case.”
Adele swallowed, trying to compose herself. For a moment, she had hoped John was calling for personal reasons.
“All right,” she said, “when?”
“Right now. Urgent.”
“I’m with—with my dad.”
“Germany?”
“No, he’s here. He just got in.”
“You want me to tell the Executive—?”
“No, no,” she said, quickly. “I’m on my way.”
She hung up and glanced at her father, flinching. If he’d been listening at all, he didn’t show it. His head was still tilted, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, his arms splayed out across the top of the couch, his chest rising and falling slowly beneath the thin fabric of his white T-shirt.
“Work,” she said, hesitantly.