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business. I don’t know where they were from; they spoke French very well. They were light-skinned. Maybe German or Austrian, I don’t know.”
    “Were they staying in the Marais?”
    “They didn’t say. Our conversation, it was very short. I was drunk. I made the sale and left the pub. They stayed. That is all I can tell you, I swear.”
    I released his hair. The girl was crying. Geoffrey was trembling in the corner. I slowly backed away, out of the room.
    “The pills, Geoffrey, where are they?”
    Geoffrey stared at me as though he’d forgotten why I was there. The three pills were scattered on the floor next to him. He collected them, stood, and handed them to me.
    “Thank you,” I said, unloading the revolver. “I’m going to let you keep the gun. But I’m afraid the bullets are coming with me. Any objections?”
    No objections were raised.

Chapter 7
    Early the next morning, all hell was unleashed. The media caught wind of the missing girl due to a leak in the French police department. The AP picked up the story, and before you could say vultures, photographs of Lindsay Sorkin splashed onto the BBC, followed instantly by the twenty-four-hour horror networks back in the States. National Police Headquarters received a barrage of phone calls from the producers of Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren, and a host of other clowns too numerous to count. Journalists spilled into the lobby of the Hotel Claridge, where Vince and Lori Sorkin were now staying. A carefully controlled investigation had erupted into total chaos.
    “That’s it,” I said quietly to Davignon. “Now the bad guys go to ground.”
    We were standing outside a small café on Champs-Elysées, not far from the Hotel d’Étonner, as a drizzling rain bounced off our hard faces. It was only a few hours since I had left Remy’s, and although I hadn’t gotten any sleep, I felt wired. Unfortunately, however, that energy was quickly devolving into anxiety.
    Davignon punched a button and put his phone to his ear. “Any sign, Bertrand?”
    I finished my espresso as Davignon cursed and placed his cell in his coat pocket.
    I said, “Nothing yet, I assume. Means our boy is more than forty minutes late. He’s gone, Lieutenant.”
    We had been waiting for the bellhop Johan Fleischer to show up for work at the hotel. From the information I had gleaned from Remy the night before, Johan was now our link to finding Lindsay. There was little doubt that he was somehow involved. Too many coincidences otherwise. Remy had sold 007s to two German guys in Paris on business at a pub in the Marais, the same neighborhood where Johan Fleischer, a German national himself, was known to live. Only when Davignon’s men showed up at his flat at six in the morning to have another chat with him, Johan was nowhere to be found. He was due at the hotel for work at eight A.M. and still hadn’t shown. Johan Fleischer had vanished into the ether.
    “Where do we go from here?” Davignon said tentatively without looking at me.
    Davignon’s men had found me the Sorkins’ taxi driver and I’d chatted with him for half an hour this morning. The driver was a family man. Had two daughters of his own. Seemed sincere when he said he sympathized with the Sorkins. He had noticed little Lindsay. Adorable. Made a lot of noise, gave him a splitting headache, but adorable all the same. I believed him. He was clean.
    So was Avril Severin, the desk clerk who had checked the Sorkins in. She was studying literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and would graduate next year. During my talk with her at the hotel this morning, she broke into tears. Not about the girl necessarily—she’d caught only a glimpse of Lindsay in her mother’s arms—but about the state of the world and how nothing seemed to make sense to her anymore now that she understood so much. I felt for her, and let her go after just twenty minutes.
    I looked at Davignon. “Tell me more about the other little girls that went missing