Sidney Sheldon’s Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney)

PARIS

NINE YEARS LATER . . .

INSPECTOR JEAN RIZZO OF Interpol stared down at the dead girl’s face.

It was black and bloated, from the strangulation and from the drugs. Heroin. A huge amount of it. Track marks ran up both her arms, an advancing army of red pinpricks, harbingers of death. Her skirt was pushed up around her hips, her underwear had been removed, and her legs were splayed grotesquely.

“He positioned her after death?”

It wasn’t really a question. Inspector Jean Rizzo knew how this killer operated. But the pathologist nodded anyway.

“Raped?”

“Hard to say. Plenty of vaginal lesions, but in her line of work . . .”

The girl was a prostitute, like all the others. I must stop calling her “the girl.” Jean Rizzo chided himself. He checked his notes. Alissa. Her name was Alissa.

“No semen traces?”

The pathologist shook her head. “No, nothing. No prints, no saliva, no hair. Her nails have been cut. We’ll keep looking, but . . .”

But we won’t find anything. I know.

This was another of the killer’s signatures. He cut the girls’ nails after death, presumably to remove any traces of his DNA if they’d fought back. But there was more to it than that. The guy was a neat freak. He arranged his victims in degrading sexual positions, but he always brushed their hair, cut their nails, and left the crime scenes spotless. He’d been known to make beds and bag up trash. And he always left a Bible next to the corpse.

Today he’d chosen a verse from Romans:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrigh­teous­ness of men, who hold the truth in unrigh­teous­ness.

Eleven murders, in ten different cities, over nine years. Police forces in six different countries had spent millions of dollars and thousands of man-­hours trying to catch this bastard. And where had it gotten them? Nowhere.

Somewhere out there, a fastidious Chris­tian with a grudge against hookers was laughing his sick ass off.

Jean Rizzo stared out of the window. It was a rainy April morning and the view from Alissa Armand’s dingy studio apartment was relentlessly depressing. Alissa lived in an HLM, France’s version of a housing project, in the rough northern Parisian suburb of Corbeil-­Essonnes. Unemployment in this neighborhood ran at well over 50 percent, and the wreckage of addiction was everywhere. Beneath Alissa’s window was a litter-­strewn courtyard, its gray concrete walls covered in graffiti. A group of bored, angry-­looking young men cowered in a doorway out of the rain, smoking weed. In a few hours they’d be onto something stronger, if they could afford it. Or down in the métro, armed with knives, terrorizing their affluent white neighbors to feed their habits.

Jean hummed under his breath. “I love Paris in the springtime . . .”

The pathologist finished her work. Two uniformed gendarmes began moving the corpse.

“Can you believe there are guys who would pay to sleep with that?” one of them said to his buddy as they zipped up the body bag.

“I know. Talk about rough. I’d rather stick my dick in a meat grinder.”

Inspector Jean Rizzo turned on them furiously. “How dare you! Show some respect. She’s a human being. She was a human being. That’s somebody’s sister you’re looking at. Somebody’s daughter.”

“Sir.”

The two men returned to their work. They would save the raised eyebrows for later, once the Interpol busybody had gone. Since when was a little black humor not allowed at a crime scene? And who the hell was Inspector Jean Rizzo anyway?

INTERPOL’S PARIS HEADQUARTERS WERE small and simply furnished but the view was spectacular. From Jean Rizzo’s temporary office, he could see the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance and the white dome of the Sacré-­Coeur in Montmartre in the foreground. It was all a far cry from Alissa Armand’s squalid, lonely flat.

Jean Rizzo ran his hands through his hair and tried not to let the sadness overwhelm him. A short but handsome man in his early forties, with wavy dark hair, a stocky, boxer’s build and pale gray eyes that glowed like moonstones when he was angry or otherwise emotional, Jean was well liked at Interpol. A workaholic, he was driven not by ambition—­few ­people in the agency were less interested in climbing the greasy pole than Jean Rizzo—­but by a genuine zeal for justice, for righting the wrongs of this cruel world.

Addiction had ravaged the Rizzo family. Both Jean’s parents were alcoholics and his mother had died from the disease. Jean passionately believed that addiction was a disease, although growing up in Kerrisdale, an affluent suburb of Vancouver, he encountered few ­people who shared that view. Jean remembered neighboring families shunning his mother. Céleste Rizzo came from an old French-­Canadian family and had been a great beauty in her youth. But drink destroyed her looks as it destroyed everything. When the end came, there was nobody there to help her.

Jean’s father had recovered, but he too died young, of a heart attack at fifty. Jean’s one consolation was that Dennis Rizzo had not lived to see his daughter’s descent into crack-­cocaine addiction. Like today’s murdered girl, Jean’s sister, Helene, had turned to prostitution in the last, desperate years of her life. How Jean hated that word: “prostitute.” As if it contained the sum total of a woman’s life: her worth, her personality, her struggles, hopes and fears. Helene had been a warm and wonderful person. Jean Rizzo chose to believe that Alissa Armand, and all this killer’s victims, were warm and wonderful ­people too.

Jean’s superiors back in Lyon were reluctant to assign him to the Bible Killer case.

“It’s too personal.” Henri Marceau, Jean’s longtime boss and friend, cut to the chase. “You’ll end up torturing yourself and you won’t do a good job. Not without objectivity.”

“I have objectivity,” Jean insisted. “And I can hardly do a worse job than the last guy. Eleven dead girls, Henri. Ten girls! And we’ve got nothing.”

Henri Marceau looked at his friend long and hard. “What’s this really about, Jean? This case is colder than a ten-­day-­old corpse in the permafrost and you know it. You won’t solve it. And even if you did, no one would care. It’s not exactly a brilliant career move.”

Jean shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I want a challenge. I need something that will take up all my time. Distract me.”

“From Sylvie, you mean?”

Jean nodded. His French wife, Sylvie, had divorced him a year ago, quietly and without acrimony, after ten years of marriage. They had two children together and still loved each other, but Jean worked ceaselessly, seven days a week, and in the end the loneliness proved too much for Sylvie.

Jean hated being divorced. He missed Sylvie and his children dreadfully, although he couldn’t deny that he hardly saw them, even when he was married. As Sylvie pointed out to him when he complained of loneliness after dropping the kids back to her one weekend, “But, Jean, darling, it took you four months to realize we were divorced. The decree absolute came through in January, and you called me in May to ask me what it meant.”

Jean shrugged. “It was a busy spring. I had a lot going on at work.”

Sylvie kissed him on the cheek. “I know, chéri.”

“Can’t we just get remarried? You’ll hardly know I’m there.”

“Good night, Jean.”

The Bible Killer case was Jean Rizzo’s therapy and punishment and atonement, all in one. If he could catch this bastard; if he could find justice for those poor girls; if he could stop another life being taken; somehow he believed it would make everything right. His divorce, Helene’s death . . . it would all mean something. It would all be for something.

Ugh. He opened his eyes and leaned back in his chair, exhausted.

The problem is, I haven’t caught him.

I didn’t save Alissa.

Just like I didn’t save Helene.

Outside, the rain had stopped and Paris was once again beautiful, glistening like a wet jewel in the spring sunshine.

Jean Rizzo vowed, I can’t leave here until I’ve got something. I can’t go back to Lyon empty-­handed.

FOUR DAYS LATER, HE broke his vow.

His daughter, Clémence, had been rushed to the hospital with stomach cramps and given an emergency appendectomy.

“She’s fine,” Sylvie assured him. “But she’s been asking for you.”

Jean drove like the wind and was at Lyon’s Clinique Jeanne d’Arc in three hours flat. Sylvie was at their daughter’s bedside looking tired. “She just woke up,” she whispered to Jean.

“Daddy!”

At six years old, Clémence was a carbon copy of her mother, all soft golden curls and saucerlike blue eyes. Clémence’s younger brother, Luc, also took after Sylvie’s family, much to Jean’s annoyance. “It’s totally unfair. I’m a genetic zero!” he would complain to Sylvie, who would laugh and ask him what he expected her to do about it.

“Maman said you were in Paris.”

“That’s right, chéri.”

“Did you catch the bad guy?” his daughter asked.

Jean avoided Sylvie’s eye.

“Not yet.”

“But you came back to see me?”

“Of course I did. Well, more to see your appendix really,” Jean joked. “Did they give it to you in a jar?”

“Eeeew. No!” Clémence giggled, then winced.

“Don’t make her laugh, you idiot,” said Sylvie.

“Sorry. When I was a kid they used to give it to you in a jar to take home.”

“In Canada?”

“Uh-­huh.

“In the olden days?”

Sylvie grinned. “As you can see, she’s making a quick recovery.”

After a few minutes a nurse came in and ordered rest. Jean and Sylvie slipped outside into the corridor.

“Thank you for coming.”

“Of course,” said Jean. “You don’t have to thank me. She’s my daughter, I love her to death.”

“I know you do, darling. I didn’t mean that. How’s the case going?”

Jean groaned. “It isn’t. Paris was awful. This girl, the way she lived. You should have seen it.”

His gray eyes were alight with emotion. Sylvie put a hand on his arm.

“You can’t save them all, you know,” she said kindly.

“Apparently I can’t save any of them,” Jean said bitterly. “Call me when you take her home.”

BACK IN HIS SER­VICED apartment a stone’s throw from Interpol’s General Secretariat at Quai Charles de Gaulle, Jean Rizzo switched on his computer. He typed in his user name, password and encryption code and watched as a cascade of windows opened relating to the Bible Killer murders.

Each of the victims had a serial number, under which local police had filed evidence. Or rather, where they’d bemoaned their lack of evidence before closing the cases, one after another. Internally, Interpol listed the girls simply as BK1, BK2 and so on. When Jean left for Paris, the file had ended with BK10, a Spanish redhead named Izia Moreno. Tomorrow, Jean Rizzo would add Alissa Armand’s name and image. BK11. That’s all she is now.

In addition to the official files, Jean had created his own, a much more visual affair that he thought of as a computerized whiteboard, like an online incident room. Pictures of the victims made up a montage in the center. To Jean Rizzo, these women would never be numbers. From this hub of faces, ideas fanned out like the spokes of a wheel: lines of inquiry, witnesses, common factors, forensic data, anything that seemed significant, or interesting.

Clicking open this personal file, Jean stared at it for a long time.

Nothing. We’ve got nothing.

A line one of his college professors used to use came back to him:

“In police work, what you don’t know is as valuable as what you do.”

If only that were true, Jean thought wryly.

The truth was, he didn’t know an awful lot. But the clues must be there. They must. No one was that smart, all of the time. He had to start looking at things differently.

The crime scenes were all clean as a whistle. Barring a miracle, they weren’t going to nail this guy on forensics. But there must be something else, some other link among the murders. I’m missing the bigger picture. I need to zoom out.

The concept of zooming out immediately made Jean think of Google Maps.

Maps. Geography.

He tapped the locations of the murders into the computer and brought them up on a map. Madrid, Lima, London, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, New York, Mumbai . . . For twenty minutes he played around, drawing lines between the map dots, rotating the shape, looking for a pattern. Nothing leaped out at him.

If not place, maybe time . . .

For the next two hours, Jean analyzed the dates, days and times of each murder. Was there a message in the numbers? He painstakingly cross-­referenced every version of the figures with the biblical verses left at each crime scene. Did Genesis, chapter 2, verse 18, have anything to do with February 18, for example?

Of course it doesn’t. He rubbed his temples wearily. I’m losing my mind.

He poured himself a whiskey and was about to call it a night when a final thought occurred to him. Maybe our killer’s not a mathematical genius. Maybe it’s way simpler than that.

Logging in to the central Interpol database, the unimaginatively named I–24/7 Network, he typed in the date of each murder, then pulled up a list of all the violent crimes committed in the same city on the same day.

Nothing obvious came up.

Jean widened the search criteria to a week before and a week after the murder dates.

A smattering of other unsolved homicides popped up, along with rapes and serious sexual assaults. But there was nothing that looked like a pattern as such. Nothing that linked the Bible Killer’s work to any other crime.

On a whim, Jean deleted the word “violent” from the dialogue box. Now he was looking only for “serious crime” within a week either side of the BK murders, in the same locations.

One by one, they appeared on the screen.

Madrid: THEFT. $1m plus. Fine art. ANNTA Gallery.

Lima: THEFT. $2m plus. Fine art. Galería Municipal de Arte Pancho Fierro.

London: THEFT. $500,000 plus. Diamonds/other. Private residence (Reiss).

New York: THEFT. Fine art. Pissarro. Private residence (McMenemy).

Chicago: THEFT. $1m plus. Jewelry. Commercial (Neil Lane).

Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Mumbai.

THEFT. THEFT. THEFT.

Jean Rizzo felt his heart start to race. He picked up the telephone.

“Benjamin?’

“Rizzo?” Benjamin Jamet, Interpol’s Paris Bureau chief, sounded distinctly groggy.

“I found something. Major thefts. Art, diamonds, almost all of them seven figures. One or two days before every single murder. Has anything splashy gone down in Paris in the last two days?”

“Putain de merde,” Benjamin Jamet growled. “Do you know what time it is?”

“This would have been big.” Jean ignored him. “Did anyone hit Cartier or an embassy or . . . I don’t know . . . the Louvre? Most likely art but could have been high-­end jewels.”

There was a long pause on the end of the line.

“As a matter of fact, there was something. The German ambassador’s wife had a valuable collection of miniatures stolen from her safe.”

“How valuable?”

“Over a million euros.”

“When?”

“On Wednesday night.” Benjamin Jamet sighed. “But look, Jean, this has nothing to do with your dead hooker. We’re treating it as a domestic incident. All the embassy staff are being questioned. There were no signs of a break-­in and . . . Jean? Jean, are you there?”

JEAN RIZZO STAGGERED INTO work at nine the next morning, looking like he hadn’t slept in days. Ignoring colleagues’ greetings and jokes about his haggard appearance, he went straight into his office and closed the door.

After five minutes, his secretary, Marie, braved the lion’s den.

“Coffee?”

“Yes. Please. Lots.”

“Your ex-­wife called. She says your daughter’s going home this afternoon.”

“Good,” said Jean. He didn’t look up.

He had a lead. His first lead since he’d taken on this miserable case. Nothing else mattered.

Eleven murders, all bearing the hallmarks of the same killer.

Eleven audacious thefts, in the same cities, two days before the girls died.

None of the crimes solved.

There was a link. There had to be. It was simply too much of a coincidence.

But the link wasn’t a simple one. On the surface, Jean could think of no plausible motive that connected the slayings of prostitutes with the pilfering of fine art. Moreover, in at least three of the robberies, the suspected perpetrator had been a woman. Although he didn’t yet have the DNA to prove it, Jean Rizzo would have staked his children’s lives on the fact that the Bible Killer was male. No woman could have inflicted those vile, sexual injuries on another woman.

The coffee arrived. Jean drank two strong cups. Without much hope of success, he ran an initial database trawl for suspected art and jewel thieves, operating internationally and at the very highest end of the market. The list ran to well over four hundred names.

Scrolling up to sort by gender, Jean checked the female box and hit search.

Five files appeared on his screen.

Five!

One was dead.

Three were in jail.

Jean Rizzo clicked open the fifth file. A young woman’s face appeared on his computer screen. She was so beautiful, with her porcelain skin and chestnut hair and intelligent, moss-­green eyes, that Jean found it impossible to look away

“Tracy Whitney,” he murmured to himself. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”