“Carapaz,” Mary Alice guessed.
“Most likely,” Natalie agreed. “He made director that year and that comes with a nice juicy bonus. He would have been able to afford it then.”
“And no director would have bought it outright,” Helen added. “A holding company is pretty convincing.”
I turned to Minka. “See if you can turn up anything else on that address in any database anywhere. We’re looking for a link to the name of Carapaz.”
She nodded and bent back over her laptop. The rest of us cleaned up and went about our business. I knew better than to pressure her while she worked. It took her another three hours, but just when we were ready to turn in, she had it.
Minka handed me a printout and I skimmed the dense lines with Nat reading over my shoulder. “What is this? It looks like a chat room.”
I pointed to the map Minka had provided with the d’Archambeau house circled in red. “It’s a message board for people who live in the neighborhood but it seems to be geared to expats. They’re all complaining about their French neighbors.” I skimmed the text until I came to the relevant line. “Here, one of them is complaining about the man next door, a Monsieur Carapaz, who puts out food for the stray cats. They keep coming into her garden, and she blames Carapaz.”
Natalie touched the woman’s signature line. “She’s at number twenty. What number is the d’Archambeau house?”
I grinned. “Twenty-two. We’ve got him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We spent the rest of the night passing around various printouts. We found detailed maps of the area, downloaded a brief history of the house in an out-of-print book on Parisian architecture, and took a Google Earth stroll down the Rue d’Archambeau, a tiny cul-de-sac tucked off the Avenue du Maine. It was Mary Alice who noticed the problem first.
“The entrance to the cul-de-sac is adjacent to the train station,” she said.
Helen raised her brows. “So?”
“So that’s a TGV station, high-speed, state-of-the-art. It’s going to be crawling with CCTV cameras.”
Helen was skeptical. “You really think Carapaz has had somebody hack into public security cameras for him?”
“He doesn’t have to,” Mary Alice said. She was reviewing the Google Earth tour and stopped, pointing to a tiny black spot above his front door. “He’s got cameras of his own.” She whizzed us around his house, looking from every angle, then popped across the street to look at the neighbor’s house. “Seventeen cameras. At least seventeen I can see. Now, some may be dummies and put there just for show, but at least a handful of them are going to be live and monitored, especially now that Günther is dead.”
Natalie had been quiet, surveying an old map of Paris she had unearthed from Constance Halliday’s study. “What are you doing with that?” I asked. “It’s not up-to-date. It doesn’t have any Starbucks on it.”
She grinned. “Nope, but it has exactly what I needed. I know how to get in.”
Mary Alice gave her a look. “Sprout wings and fly?”
“No, smartass,” Natalie said smugly. “Exactly the opposite. We’re going underground.”
The reactions were not positive.
“What do you mean we’re going underground?” Helen asked.
Natalie pushed her map over and traced a route with her finger. “The house is here, on Rue d’Archambeau just off of Avenue du Maine. The Avenue du Maine intersects with the Rue Froidevaux. And look where the Rue Froidevaux ends up.”
She tapped the map triumphantly. Mary Alice twisted her neck, reading upside down. “Les Catacombes de Paris. Oh, hell no.”
She folded her arms over her chest, but Natalie was undeterred. “It’s a brilliant idea.”
“It’s a grotesque idea. Have you ever been in that place?” Mary Alice demanded. “It’s just miles of tunnels full of bones. Bones, stacked upon bones, piled on top of—guess what? More bones.”
“The operative phrase being ‘miles of tunnels,’？” Natalie replied. “Besides, how can you be squeamish about bones?”
“I just don’t like them,” Mary Alice said stubbornly. “The skulls freak me out. They seem like they’re looking at you but they don’t have eyes. It’s not natural.”
“It’s completely natural,” Natalie argued. “It’s actually the definition of natural. It’s what happens when we die.”