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from a car radio idling at the curb spilled over the cobbled street:
World Cup fever gripping Paris … In other news, the Ministry issued a statement denying police corruption and blackmail rumors …
    “W HY DIDN ’ T YOU tell me, Aimée?”
    As if she’d had time? “It’s all happened so fast. But I need your help. Zazie disappeared close to seven hours ago.”
    “Zazie?” René’s mouth quivered. “But I saw her at the office—what’s happened?”
    She opened the passenger door of René’s Citroën—a DS classic resembling an armadillo—sat and explained. René paced back and forth on the narrow pavement, listening through the open window.
    “First, I need to call Saj in to help with our taxes,” she said.
    “On it,” René said. “He got back from Mumbai this afternoon. Already got him reviewing fiscal data and estimates.”
    A wave of relief flooded her. She was confident Saj, their part-time hacker, refreshed after his meditation ashram, could take that over so she and René could focus on finding Zazie.
    “Do you believe this
mec
, who runs a bowl of
merde
?” said René, disgust in his voice.
    She didn’t care if René had history here. A drunken brawl when he was a student? Some students Pigalle’d it as a rite of passage.
    “No doubt he’s
un mouche
, an informer, too.” She put her hand on her tummy. “René, that’s how the
flics
navigate here. Not pretty, but informers …”
    “Talk for a price,” René interrupted. “Nothing’s free around here. It might not be the gangland of the fifties and sixties, but Pigalle’s still so sleazeville, the peep shows, stripteases, massage parlors.”
    She’d wondered why René was so ticked off about this place. “My father’s first beat with Morbier around here emptied the stardust from his eyes. Corsicans, North Africans and Auvergnats ran a tight network and owned all the clubs,” she said, keeping her eye on the street. Hoping for that unmistakable curly red hair. “Policed their own, according to him. ‘
Entre nous
,’ they’d say, settling scores if a pimp was murdered, if there was a jealous boyfriend, a waiter who robbed the till.”
    “Some noble code?” René snorted. “You make them sound chivalrous.”
    “We’ve got to find Zazie, René,” she said. “Use whatever works,
non
?”
    She noticed the charcoal smudge of looming clouds. Amidst the bars, massage parlors and sex shops across the way, the Moulin Rouge’s magic glitter had tarnished. A remnant of the past, if that.
    “Can you trust him, Aimée?”
    “Until he proves otherwise. Don’t read me wrong, René,” she said. “Takes a thief to find a thief. With a rapist on the loose, who better to spread the word than a seedy Pigalle club owner? According to Zazie, this is the third girl assaulted in six months.”
    Concern furrowed René’s brow. “So there must be a signature, the rapist’s MO,” he said. “These serial attackers all have a specific method. A ritual, an obsession. That’s what this is, you watch. A serial killer in the making. Not only
l’Amérique
has serial killers, Aimée.”
    He didn’t need to tell her.
    “Like Landru,” René went on. “He preyed on World War I widows—lured them via the personal ads, raped and murdered them. Then raided their bank accounts.”
    Not this again. All those thrillers and true-crime books he devoured. The bookcases in his studio apartment bulged. They were supposed to be a cyber detective agency, but Aimée knew René secretly imagined himself as another kind of detective as well.
    Meanwhile, she needed to find Zazie. Who else could she ask for help? She tried Morbier’s office. Was put on hold.
    A horn blared in the street, and she half-listened to René, who went on and on about serial-killer signature styles over the canned hold music. Her feet hurt. “Your point, René?”
    “We’re dealing with a pedophile, probably of arrested sexual development, who rapes twelve-year-old girls,”