"Ça va bien, merci, Madame."

She hated coming back to the Commissariat in Place Baudoyer; her father's memory stabbed her from every corner. There was the cold marble floor of his office where she'd done homework as a little girl when he worked late, later helping him clean out his desk when he joined Grandfather at Leduc Detective, then collecting his posthumous medal from the Commissaire.

Aimee's American mother had disappeared from her life one evening in 1968. She'd never returned from the Herald Tribune, where she worked as a stringer on the news desk. Her father had sent Aimee to boarding school during the week and on weekends he took her to the Luxembourg Gardens. On a bench under the row of plane trees by the puppet theater, she once asked him about her mother. His normally sympathetic eyes hardened. "We don't talk about her anymore." And they never had.

Three weeks without a cigarette and Aimee's tailored jeans pinched, so she paced instead of sitting. She'd always thought the crimes investigated by the Commissariat of Police in the Marais rarely matched the division's elegant accommodations. High-tech weapon sensors hid nestled in brass wall sconces of this Second Empire style nineteenth century mansion. Rose lead-paned windows funneled pink patterns across the marble walls. But the dead cigarettes in overflowing ashtrays, greasy crumbs, and stale sweaty fear made it smell like every other police station she'd been in.

This palatial building neighbored Napoleon's former barracks and the 4th arrondissement's Tresor public, the tax office on rue de la Verrerie. But Parisians called it flics et taxes, la double morte-cops and taxes, the double death.

She drifted over the scuffed parquet floor to read the bulletin board in the waiting area. A torn notice, dated eight months earlier, announced that Petanque leagues were forming and serious bowlers were encouraged to sign up early. Next to that, an Interpol poster of wanted criminals still included Carlos the Jackal's photo. Below that, a sign advertised a sublet in Montsouris, a "studio economique" for five thousand francs a month, cheap for the 14th arrondissement. She figured that meant a sixth-floor walk-up closet with a pull-chain squat toilet down the hall.