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half hour of the night in the middle of their bed. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to see the search warrant, please.”
    The stocky man looked up from the thriller novel he was paging through. “OPJ Petit has it. He’s in the mayor’s study.” So Petit was an Officier de Police Judiciaire specifically in charge of investigating crimes—like murder.
    Louis turned on his heel. As he stepped into the hall, he said, “Make sure you don’t lose his page in that book, Officer.”
    He marched down the hall and into his father’s study. Originally Louis’s room, his father had taken over when Audrey moved in with her boyfriend, allowing Louis to move into her castle on the top floor. His father hadn’t bothered to repaint when he moved his desk in, so there were drawings of stick soccer players below the window and a picture of Zinedine “Zizou” Zidane in the corner. The other posters were taken down, but this one Louis had glued to the wall to make sure it wouldn’t be taken from him. And there it still was.
    The contents of all the drawers were laid out on the large beechwood desk. OPJ Petit had apparently already gone through it all and was in the process of shoving papers back into the desk. A small stack of papers at the end of the desk went into a cardboard box on the floor.
    The third officer, an aging Arab with a pot-belly, was efficiently leafing through all the books on the bookshelf. He was already on the second shelf, but had some work cut out for him. He’d started on the wall filled with fiction. Did he think that had a higher probability of containing proof of bribes than the section with political literature?
    “I’d like to see the search warrant, please,” Louis repeated to OPJ Petit.
    “Of course,” the man replied.
    Louis didn’t like his tone. It was as if he was humoring a child.
    Petit pulled a sheet of paper out of a pocket and handed it to Louis.
    Louis glanced at the search warrant, but since he’d never seen one before, didn’t really know what to look for. He spotted the date—yesterday—and his mother’s name and address. The stamp looked genuine. Louis gave the piece of paper back. He didn’t actually suspect them of faking the warrant in any case. He wanted to show them he wasn’t happy.
    Petit sat down in front of the laptop, which was already up and running. A Google Calendar page was open. “I’d like to access the mayor’s time-table over the last weeks,” the officer said. “But I need the password to get into all the Google appliances.”
    Louis was surprised, but kept his expression neutral. His father had an impressive resistance to technology. Once Louis had shown him he could ask the browser to connect him automatically, he’d been happy. He didn’t want to worry about internet security; he just wanted to do his job. Louis’s guess was that he’d accidentally logged off the last time he’d used the computer.
    OPJ Petit gave Louis an expectant look.
    “What?” Louis asked. Was he supposed to be accountable for his father not liking passwords?
    Petit sighed. “You wouldn’t happen to know your father’s password? I can go through other channels to have access to this information, but it would be a lot quicker if I could get in right now.”
    The man wanted him to help crack into his father’s agenda? Louis should have stayed downstairs with his mother; he hadn’t gotten all the gossip from her associations and charities yet.
    The thing was, Louis thought he might actually know that blasted password. Not wanting the bother of remembering several of them, his father tended to use the same one everywhere. Louis had helped him enter it for numerous sites over the years. It was the address to his father’s childhood home. Some numbers, one capital letter; everything requested for a password. But should he give it to the police?
    If the man sitting in his father’s leather chair hadn’t been so annoying at the wake the other day, he probably would