The Crypt Thief Read online

  “Is that a dung beetle?”

  “Exactement. Known to Egyptians as a scarab beetle. One was found at each crime scene, small, green, and made of glass.”

  Hugo stared at the picture, a smile creeping across his face. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Maybe, but we still have no idea how he got in or out. After the murder, we increased security at Père Lachaise. We thought about how best to do that and we decided that we couldn’t effectively police the inside of the cemetery. That place is more than a hundred acres in size, with seventy thousand monuments. We’d need hundreds of men to have enough eyes to be sure we had the place covered.”

  “Hardly practical at short notice.”

  “Especially in the summer. You may have noticed that we take our vacations right about now, police officers included. But in any event, not practical as you say.” Garcia held up a finger. “But, this is the twenty-first century and we are learning to make the most of its technology. We fixed the broken cameras and made sure we had at least one looking up and down every stretch of the cemetery’s wall. Not an inch was out of our view. We watched those walls in real time every moment and even played the tapes back after Tuesday night’s break-in, again in real-time speed.”

  “And saw nothing.”

  “Exactement.” Garcia spread his hands. “No one coming in, no one going out.”

  “How about extra cameras inside?”

  “One. By Morrison’s grave. Where else would we put them? And from it, nothing.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. “After Tuesday night’s raid,” Hugo began. “Who noticed—”

  “No one at first, even though we cleared the cemetery first thing in the morning.”

  “Cleared?”

  “We put a couple of men inside at opening time, just to walk the grounds, to see and be seen. They even ran dogs through to make sure no one was in there overnight, hiding.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Merci. Alas, nothing.”

  Hugo was incredulous. “So they walked right past a smashed-open grave?”

  “Yes and no. He’d pulled a tarpaulin from a nearby crypt that was being repainted. Draped it over Avril’s open grave.” He spread his hands again. “Simple camouflage.”

  Hugo grunted. “So how’s he getting in?”

  “No idea, but it shouldn’t happen again. This time we have men with dogs inside, all night long. They catch a sniff of someone, hear a footstep that shouldn’t be there, they will be released. And God help the salaud that they catch.” Garcia sat back. “But we can’t do that forever.”

  “I don’t think you’ll need to. He’s hit twice in three days so he’s on some sort of schedule.” Hugo snapped his fingers. “A schedule, of course! That’s why he didn’t see them coming and just hide.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “His schedule, the dark.” Hugo pointed at the sky. “I’m talking about the moon.”

  “So he’s a werewolf now?” Garcia smiled. “I prefer the idea of him as a zombie. They move more slowly. A round man like myself could even catch one.”

  “Or escape from one,” said Hugo, returning the smile. “But no. Quite the opposite. I think it’s possible he planned his raids to coincide with the new moon to ensure he’d be operating at the darkest possible time. Even if he gets spotted somehow, he just has to dive behind one of the seventy thousand monuments and you’ll never see him again.”

  “Makes sense,” said Garcia, nodding slowly. He looked up. “You think he’ll hit again?”

  “No idea,” said Hugo. “But if he does, it could well be tonight.” He stood and dropped change into the saucer on the table. “And you and I, my dear capitaine, are going to be there waiting for him.”

  Hugo let himself into his apartment on Rue Jacob. He heard the water running in the bathroom attached to the spare room. A moment later, Tom walked into the living room with a towel wrapped around his waist. His hair was still wet and bags sat under his eyes, dark and wide as if a child had been given license with a black crayon.

  “Surprised to see you wearing that,” Hugo said.

  “I heard you come in. Didn’t want to give you a complex.” Tom wandered into the kitchen and leaned over the sink. He cleared his throat and spat into the drain.

  “Nice,” said Hugo. “Couldn’t do that in the shower? Or not at all?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Planning to, as it happens.”

  Tom seemed to hear something in Hugo’s voice, raising bloodshot eyes to look at his friend. “Going where?”

  “A cemetery.”

  “Why?”

  “To catch a bad guy. Want to come?”

  “No thanks.” Tom spat again, but this time just for effect, Hugo thought. “Don’t feel too good. Not up to much right now.”

  “You owe me for your little friend, by the way.”

  “Oh. She was expensive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, don’t worry, she was worth it.”

  “I’m surprised you remember.”

  “I don’t. But any time I spend your money it’s definitely worth it.”

  Hugo faced him, his tone serious. “Tom, you can’t be doing that. Not here. I’m head of security at the US Embassy. Which means prostitutes, even expensive ones, are not allowed.”

  “Then we have a good system going. I fuck them, you pay them. Almost like it’s not prostitution at all.” Tom looked away, unable or unwilling to meet Hugo’s eye.

  “No more, OK?” Hugo hesitated. “What are your plans, Tom?”

  “For when? Tonight? This week? Or are you asking what I want to be when I grow up?”

  “Are you working this case with me or not?”

  Tom rubbed a hand over his face. “Yes. No. It’s complicated.”

  “How so?”

  “If it’s terrorism, I’m working the case, and if it’s not, I’m not. Problem is, no one seems to know yet.”

  “It’s not terrorism, Tom.”

  “Says you.”

  “Says me.”

  “Then fuck it, I don’t get paid and you get stuck with the bill for a hooker. How’s that?”

  Hugo walked past him toward his own bedroom. “Sober up, Tom. Keep going like this and even if Amelia Earhart herself moves in next door, no one’s going to trust you to find her.”

  “Prejudice against drunks?”

  Hugo stopped in the doorway to his room and looked at his friend, rolls of fat bulging over the towel, his face that of a man twenty years older than he was. “At some point, Tom, it stops being a joke. At some point, you have to realize that you are a long way from where you should be.”

  “And where the fuck is that?”

  “Not for me to say. But you just turned down the chance to go out in the field, to hide out in the most famous cemetery in Paris and catch a killer red-handed.” Hugo shook his head. “Turned your back on an adventure. Never thought I’d live to see that day.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Hugo looked up at the moon, a white sliver above their heads in the black night. He sat beside Capitaine Garcia on a wooden bench facing the rond point, the roundabout dominated by the statue of statesman Jean Casimir-Perier, near the center of the cemetery.

  They’d walked into Père Lachaise at six that evening, using the Gambetta entrance on the northeast side just as the cemetery was closing, past the crowds of tourists who streamed along the wide cobbled boulevards toward the realm of the living. They spent the first half hour with five policemen and their dogs, the unit designated to roam the cemetery grounds that night, each dog and handler with his own sector, each pairing alert to movement in a place where three hundred thousand souls had been laid to rest.

  Quietly, without fuss, Hugo and Garcia had spent that time touching the muzzles of the German Shepherds, letting the dogs sniff their hands and clothes to make sure their scent was familiar and couldn’t confuse the eager beasts, and making sure, too, that no teeth would
find their way into the skin of the two men there to catch a killer.

  When the leader of the canine squad nodded his satisfaction, they sat on the grass and waited as a shift of police bloodhounds and Labradors finished running through the cemetery, skipping over tombs like they were puddles, pausing only to sniff at the locked doors of the little stone houses that held the remains of the dead. No suspect was found, just three homeless people, flushed from their nighttime hiding spots and ushered out into the noisy, unsafe streets of Paris.

  After getting the all-clear, Hugo and Garcia had headed into the heart of the cemetery, downhill to Chemin Molière, which turned into the paved Chemin du Bassin, then taking a hard left along Avenue de la Chapelle, which took them to where they now sat.

  A policeman armed with a Heckler and Koch MP5 stood guard over Avril’s grave, but otherwise there was no precision to their staging point. In so large a place with so many potential targets precision wasn’t an option, so they had opted for a location that allowed them the greatest access to the whole of the cemetery. This was where they ended up, on a park bench at a roundabout, waiting for night to come and bring with it a man able to come here at will, unseen, a man who could seemingly flit across high walls and into these grounds as if he truly were a ghost.

  As the sun fell from the sky, Garcia had begun to fidget, throwing long looks around him as if checking on posted sentries. Except they were alone here, the soft footfalls of the canine squad well beyond their hearing. As the last traces of orange tinged the skyline, the shadows cast by the crypts around them grew. The patches of gray that in early evening had circled the monuments like little skirts now spread like spilled blood, staining the grass and the stone walkways, tinting the newest of the marble monuments in a slow, inexorable creep of darkness that silenced all sound, except for the occasional hoot of an owl, and the noises of discomfort that they made themselves as they waited for a man with a gun. A man with a gun and, they suspected, a bag in which to carry away the bones of someone long since dead.

  Garcia shifted again in his seat. “Mind if I smoke?” he whispered.

  “Smoking will land you in the cemetery.”

  “Funny.” Garcia felt his pockets and a moment later a cigarette glowed in his mouth. “I figured we’re waiting rather than hiding. If those dogs don’t get him, I’m not sure we will.”

  “True,” Hugo said.

  They sat in silence as Garcia smoked, the breeze rising and falling, the trees around them chattering like giants one moment and the next falling quiet, watchful.

  “It is a strange place this, non?” Garcia dropped his cigarette on the ground and put his foot on it. “Three hundred thousand bodies, right here.”

  “Strange as in creepy?”

  “A little. Perhaps it is our childhoods that make it so. Graveyards are nothing if not locations for all the things that scared us, ghosts, vampires . . .”

  “Zombies,” Hugo added.

  “Precisely. Is it any surprise we carry these fears with us into adulthood?”

  “I wasn’t aware I had.”

  “Everything pushed out by logic, is that it?”

  “I don’t believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, either.”

  “Logic and reason make for a pretty dull existence.”

  Hugo stood and put his hands on his hips, arching his back to stretch. “I lead an interesting life. Or used to. Don’t tell me you believe in those things?”

  “I’ll believe in ghosts before I believe in Santa Claus,” Garcia said. “But I’d have to see one myself.”

  “Well, you’re in the right place.”

  They fell silent again but Garcia didn’t seem to like the quiet, or the stillness. He shifted on the bench. “You think he’ll come early or late?”

  “He has a lot to do,” Hugo said. “If he comes at all, my guess would be early.”

  “And if he doesn’t come? We wait until the next new moon?”

  “That’s one option. Or we go a different route.”

  “Such as?”

  “Assuming we’re not tossed from the investigation because it’s all about terrorism, I’d suggest profiling the victim.”

  “You mean victims.”

  “No. I think the couple was unlucky. I think they stumbled on our guy as he was heading to someone’s grave site. Probably Jane Avril. So profiling them would be a waste of time, and possibly misleading.”

  Garcia patted his pockets again, looking for a second cigarette. He was about to speak when the sound of stone on stone, a low grating, swept past them.

  “Merde, what was that?”

  Hugo checked his watch. Ten. The timing was right. He looked around, unable to pinpoint where the sound had come from.

  They heard it again, a scraping that was almost a rumble, for no more than a second.

  “What is that?” Garcia whispered.

  “No idea,” said Hugo, on his feet. “But I don’t hear any dogs. Either they aren’t close or they haven’t picked up anything odd, scent or sound.”

  “Should we radio, get someone over here?”

  “Maybe,” Hugo said. “But those guys are patrolling their quadrants, I don’t want to mess them up unless we have to. Let’s go take a look.”

  He thought the sound had come from the other side of the Casimir-Perier statue, but there was no wall there, no way in or out of the cemetery. Someone hiding in a crypt? Hugo thought it unlikely the dogs had missed someone when they swept through at closing time.

  He started forward, Garcia in his wake. They kept to the grass, skirting the cobbles that made up the roundabout, staying close to the trees and crypts as cover, and Hugo not wanting the sound of his boots to alert any intruder. He walked with a flashlight in his hand, but switched off, comforted by the gentle weight under his left armpit of a more lethal tool.

  Halfway around the circle Hugo stopped to peer into the night, looking for movement of any kind, straining to hear a noise that didn’t belong. Nothing. He looked over his shoulder at Garcia who shook his head. They moved on, feet silent on the grass.

  They stopped again at the far side of the statue, either side of an oak tree, and Hugo was about to keep going when a screech let out behind them, deeper into the cemetery, and a black silhouette flashed between two narrow headstones.

  “What the hell was that?” Garcia whispered.

  “Raven,” Hugo said. But the noise had startled him and his heart hammered in his chest. He took three slow, deep breaths. “Keep going?”

  “Merde!” Garcia cursed and flung himself at Hugo, slamming him into the tree and then rolling him down its side onto the ground. Shards of bark splintered onto them and Hugo heard the distinctive crack of a pistol, and the immediate whine of a bullet going overhead.

  “Where is he?” Hugo hissed, reaching for his gun.

  “Four or five crypts deep.” Garcia ducked as another bullet slammed into the tree. His head pressed to the ground, he held the walkie-talkie to his mouth. “This is Garcia. Division thirteen, by the Casimir-Perier statue, south side. He’s here and he’s shooting, let the damn dogs go.”

  Hugo didn’t wait. The tree was their only cover and whoever wanted them dead had a thousand stone shields protecting him as he moved about. It was a matter of time, probably seconds, before he found a clear line of sight. Hugo got to one knee and a bullet kicked another handful of bark into his face, stinging his cheeks. But it told him which direction he needed to go.

  “I’ll cover you,” Garcia said. “Go!”

  Hugo ran to his left, putting the tree between him and the shooter, sprinting for the nearest row of tombs. Behind him, Garcia fired three shots and he heard each one zinging off stone. Hugo reached the first tomb, a low rectangle of granite, and he hurdled it, pulling himself behind the head-high mausoleum beside it. He kept going, knowing that the shooter would expect him to pause, get his bearings, maybe shoot. But Garcia was still exposed and Hugo wanted to invert the element of surprise. He circled the area where he w
as sure the intruder lurked, moving swiftly and quietly between the rows of the dead, gun in his hand and his eyes scanning for movement.

  Hugo saw him. A short, stocky figure, no more than a silhouette moving between the headstones, weaving like he’d been here before and knew where he was going.

  Hugo angled to his left, aiming to cut the man off, keeping the bobbing figure at the edge of his vision, losing him and then spotting him again. Hugo felt his breathing go ragged as he closed in on the man, but he was slowed as a crypt the size of a small house loomed, forcing him wide again, dropping him ten yards farther behind his quarry and taking the man out of his sight.

  He rounded the building and stopped in his tracks.

  A man, short perhaps, his head seeming unusually large in the darkness. Hugo was more certain about the man’s eyes, impossibly black and staring at him down an extended arm, down the barrel of a gun, the rest of the man’s body hidden behind a granite fleur-de-lis.

  Two waist-high headstones were between them, and more lay either side of Hugo. He was unable to move, as if there were too much cover to choose from, as if the gun were in fact a magnet holding him in place. Twenty yards away the pistol jerked as fire spat from the muzzle, telling Hugo the man had missed, releasing him from its pull. Hugo dove to his right and kept rolling, hearing the snap of metal bullets fracturing stone above his head.

  And then all went quiet.

  Reloading?

  Hugo stayed low, moving between the stone and marble blocks in a crouch, gun extended, trained on where the man had been standing. The slender moon above cast a filtered light over them and Hugo knew he’d be able to see if the man rose from behind the stone flower that protected him.

  He slowed as he got closer, gun raised higher now, finger on the trigger, eyes flicking to the ground to make sure he didn’t stumble. Twenty yards away he changed angle, moving diagonally to give himself a sight behind the headstone. But as the ground opened up, Hugo realized the man wasn’t there. Instinctively, he swung around covering the area behind him but too slow to dodge the black shape hurtling toward him. The breath caught in his throat and he braced himself for impact but the shape flew past, a black ball of growling fur that brushed him as it went by.