The Courbet Connection (Book 5) (Genevieve Lenard) (36 page)

“Google has mapped out the whole planet, handsome.”

“Yes, I know Google Maps.”

“Well, it’s pretty much the same thing. You can really travel the world with this. There are satellite images of the rural areas and street views of most cities and towns.”

Judith was quietly observing this interaction, leaning away from Caelan. He had surprised her and she wasn’t comfortable. I understood that. More importantly, I wanted this inane conversation to stop so we could return to finding these students. “Caelan, will you help us?”

He thought about that for a few seconds, then he straightened and looked at my shoulder. “What can I do?”

“We have a lot of documents here and we are looking for specific information. How good are you at concentrated searches?”

“The best.” He glanced at Francine. “Maybe not the best, but almost the best.”

I didn’t need to speak to Caelan as I did to neurotypical people. It made explaining what we were looking for much easier. I could be specific without having to give context and lengthy explanations. It felt good.

Caelan took the chair furthest from Manny and opened a notebook. “This is written in code. Oh, this is so amateur.”

“What is?” Manny asked.

“Boucher used a modular arithmetic shift cypher.” I’d recognised it immediately. It was simplistic and easily decipherable.

Manny grabbed a folder, opened it and frowned. “Bloody hell, Doc. Please don’t even explain to me what it is. Just tell me you can uncode this.”

“Uncode isn’t a word.” I took a deep breath. “It is easy enough to decrypt. Each number represents a letter.”

I took one of Boucher’s notebooks and opened it to the first page. Within three minutes I’d worked out the code and had written the numbers and their corresponding letters on the sheet of paper. “You can use this to decrypt his notes. I suggest we be as thorough as possible not to miss a potential clue.”

“It’s going to take weeks, Doc.”

I looked at Caelan. “No, it won’t.”

He was paging through the notebook, dragging his finger down each page before moving on to the next. I was impressed with how easily his mind was translating the numbers to letters, giving him the notes Boucher had made.

Manny and Colin looked at each other, both exhibiting apprehension and dread. Colin was the first to take a deep breath and pick up a notebook. “I think we should each have a copy of the cypher.”

“I’ll get it.” Manny grabbed the paper I’d written the code on and made three copies. Caelan didn’t even look up when Manny placed a sheet in front of him. He had memorised the code and was already one third of the way through his notebook. Manny sat down and stared at the documents on the table. “I think Judith and I will go through the folders with notes that we can read. You people can uncode that mathematical insanity.”

I thought it a prudent suggestion. Colin had opened a notebook and was already working through the first page. He was much slower than Caelan, but was making good progress. I took the notebook I had worked on and went through it at around the same speed as Caelan.

Two hours later, the three of us had worked through more than two thirds of Boucher’s notebooks. Manny and Judith had gone through the documents they could, left the team room and returned with fresh coffee and muffins.

I didn’t care for food or beverages. My attention was divided between working through the notebooks and what was taking place on the screen. An hour ago, the last young person’s organ auction had concluded. It had been Nikki’s other friend, Steve. He had not raised as much money as Michael, but it had still been a very profitable auction.

We didn’t talk about what was happening on the screen. Everyone’s eyes constantly strayed to it, now displaying the hunting auction’s page. The same large clock was counting down to the start of the auction and we were only twenty-seven minutes away.

Francine had left for her basement, hoping to have more success locating the live feed. Picking up another notebook, I was not feeling very optimistic.

“Um… I think I might have something.” Colin leaned closer to the notebook he was working on. “This is frying my brain, but I think this might be about these last cases.”

All movement stopped in the team room. The tension in everyone’s bodies had been increasing in the last two hours.
Therefore, the hope on Judith’s face didn’t surprise me. Colin pushed the notebook towards me. “I think you’d better read this. It would take me much longer.”

The first sentence confirmed Colin’s observation. “He’s talking about Christopher Leesa’s case.”

“Read it out, Doc.”

I nodded. “‘Leesa case stopped too fast. Why? Neighbours, schoolmates say CL is ambitious, studious, boring. Not adventurous. Caseload not fuller than usual. Why rush? Why use that excuse to stop? No one to complain. Why are B and H defensive about this when asked? Doesn’t add up.’”

“B and H would be Breton and Hugo.” Manny spoke as if to himself. I had thought the abbreviations to be self-explanatory. “What else does it say, Doc?”

I read for another fifteen minutes, none of what I was reading pertinent to our case. Boucher had dated each of his entries. Four days after the entry about the Leesa case, my eyes widened as I read Boucher’s note. “‘Why stop that investigation? Rimbaud had a Courbet forgery.’”

“Oh, my God. He’s talking about the old man.” Francine was sitting at her desk again. I hadn’t seen her return. “Did I miss how he became interested in that case?”

“Nope.” Manny stretched his neck. “His notes are questions about cases, a lot of free thinking, but so far not much that’s helpful.”

I looked up and the blood drained from my face. “The auction has started.”

“Holy Mother of all.” Manny got up and rubbed his hand hard over his face. “Supermodel, where the bleeding hell are they?”

Francine’s shoulders slumped, her head lowering. “I can’t get through the routing and encryption. Maybe after a few days with some extra help, but… I’m sorry, Manny.”

“Just keep trying, supermodel.”

The first person auctioned to be hunted was Michael. I wondered if this was going to be in the same order as the organ auction. Michael’s body language was different from the previous auction. As with Matthieu and all the others, he was no longer under some pharmaceutical influence. He knew his life was in grave danger. Fear was in every movement of his face and his body. Most predators loved watching the fear, the fight for survival, no matter how pointless it might be.

Already the bidding was picking up speed. Selling Michael to the highest-bidding hunter wouldn’t take more than ten minutes. I looked around the screen for any clues, anything different from the videos on Dukwicz’s computer.

It was on the top right-hand corner. They didn’t even bother to write it in code. Clear for all to see, the announcement went in and out of focus as I tried to maintain control and not give in to the blackness rushing at me.

“The hunting will start in two hours.” I was surprised my voice was audible.

“What are you talking about, Doc?”

“Look at the top of the screen.”

“Aw, hell!” Manny walked to my viewing room, came back, walked away again and stopped in front of the screen. “Two hours. Shit.”

I couldn’t watch anymore. I hated feeling so powerless. There had to be something in these documents that could help us find the key that would lead us to the students. I continued reading Boucher’s notes. Colin moved closer and was looking at the notebook as well, most likely slowly decrypting. There were a lot more questions about cases that Breton and Hugo hadn’t investigated properly, or that they’d outright dismissed.

His next entry was questioning the friendship between Breton, Hugo and Gasquet. How did Breton and Hugo fit into Gasquet’s relationship with Emile Rimbaud?

Three sentences later, I gasped and reread the last sentence. The connection was so obvious, yet so well hidden it didn’t surprise me that we hadn’t seen it before.

“Jenny?” Colin touched my forearm. “What is it?”

“The folder. I need to find that folder.” I got up and started looking through the folders on the table. No one spoke, the room quiet except for my frantic search. I found what I was looking for in the third folder. My breathing was erratic, my hearting pounding in my chest. I took out the photocopied newspaper article and held it in the air. “I know where they are. I know where Michael, Steve and the other two are.”

Manny stepped closer to me, took his phone from his pocket and swiped the screen. “Where are they, Doc?”

I paged through the rest of the folder until I found the correct document. I scanned it before giving it to Manny. “Here.”

“Where is it?” Colin asked.

“It’s in the mountains southeast of the city.” I was angry with myself for not pursuing this line of investigation earlier. “The article is about the ski industry in the smaller mountains around Strasbourg and how the local property owners were divided in their views. Some liked the increase of tourists. Others didn’t. I only scanned the first paragraph, so I don’t know how the rest of the article continues. It was Boucher’s note in the margin that gave me the connection.”

Judith leaned closer to Manny to look at the article. “It’s coded.”

“It is only one word.” I took a deep breath. Why had I not looked into this earlier? “‘Inheritance’.”

“Okay?” Judith lifted both shoulders.

“The certificate in this folder is proof of ownership for a large piece of land.” I lifted the folder that I got the article from. “It is registered in Adam Marot’s name.”

“Oh, my God. He was Monsieur Rimbaud’s lover who died twenty years ago.” Francine’s eyes were wide. “Give me a moment.”

As soon as she started working on her computer, Manny tapped on the screen of his phone. “We need to get the team there.”

He put the phone on the table and ringing came through the speakerphone. It rang only twice before Vinnie’s voice boomed through the room. “Whaddup, old man?”

“We’ve got them.” Manny lifted the proof of ownership document. “Get in the helicopter and start heading southeast. I’ll get supermodel to send you the co-ordinates now.”

“Are they still alive?”

Manny glanced at the screen. “They’re busy auctioning the second kid. The hunting is going to start in less than two hours. You better move your arses.”

“I’ve seen those vids. We need to narrow down the search, old man. We can’t go running around the woods, wasting precious time.”

“I’ll keep you updated. Just get out there now.”

“On it.”

Manny swiped the screen to end the call and sighed. Judith tapped with her index finger on the photocopied article in front of her. “This article is from twenty years ago. Boucher must have gone through the newspaper archives looking for information on Monsieur Rimbaud. This article has a quotation from Adam Marot who did not appreciate the tourists coming onto his land, hiking in the summer and looking for places to ski in the winter. He wanted to keep his piece of land as protected as possible, because it served as his inspiration and also a place where he and his housemate, Emile Rimbaud, went to get away from the city.”

“Adam bequeathed that piece of land to Gasquet.” Francine leaned back in her chair. “I have the change of ownership documents here. It was in his name until nineteen months ago.”

“When Rimbaud died,” Colin said.

“He transferred the ownership to one of his dummy companies’ names.” She sneered. “The same company that made payments into Breton’s and Hugo’s accounts.”

“Send those co-ordinates to the criminal. They need to get there.”

“Already done.” She straightened, her lips thinned. “Vinnie was right. We need to send them to the right place. That piece of land is more than two hundred and fifty hectares of mountainous terrain. They won’t find the students if they don’t know exactly where to go.”

“Doc, how sure are you that they’re there?”

“I’m not.” And I hated it. “It is just the most obvious conclusion taking into consideration everything we’ve learned about this case so far.”

“Genevieve is right.” Francine nodded at the screen. She’d brought up a satellite map, showing mountains and valleys. The image zoomed in until we were looking at an area that seemed completely green. There was not a building in sight. “This is Adam’s piece of land. It’s far from the nearest village, there are no major roads nearby and if there’s a building, it’s obscured by all the trees.”

“What videos?” Caelan asked. He’d been quietly listening to us, his arms tightly wrapped around his torso.

“What are you talking about?” Colin asked.

“The big guy said that he’d seen videos. What videos?”

“Um… I don’t think he should be looking at those videos.” Francine shifted in her chair, her expression concerned. I shared that concern.

“What’s on the videos?” Caelan’s voice raised a fraction.

I took a moment to consider what I knew about Caelan. It was a risk, but too many lives were in danger. “It shows young people being hunted in the woods.”