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have cooperated. But he didn’t like the man, or that half the city was bound to have noticed the police cars parked in front of their house.
    OPJ Petit continued staring at Louis.
    “I’m sorry,” Louis said. “I haven’t been home much over the last ten years. And in any case, my father didn’t share his passwords with me.”
    Looking dubious, the officer started to speak, but Louis beat him to it. “Do you share your passwords from work with your children?”
    Since the man couldn’t be more than forty, if he had any children, they would be much younger than Louis. But the argument seemed to convince him and he turned back to the laptop. “I’ll access the public entries from his secretary’s account. I’ll get the private entries when the paperwork goes through.”
    Not sure what to do with himself but reluctant to leave the men going through his father’s things without supervision, Louis hovered in the doorway. After a while, the officer from the bedroom came back empty-handed and started in on the non-fiction bookshelf. Half an hour later, they were done. The three officers readied to leave, carrying with them the cardboard box holding three zip-locked bags filled with papers and his father’s laptop. Louis didn’t like their looks as they left—he had a feeling they might have found something.
    Louis shook their hands before they went downstairs to be let out by his mother. Before their cars were off the curb, he had his own laptop in his father’s study and the Google Calendar open.
    The expression un emploi de temps de ministre —used to describe a very busy schedule—came to mind when Louis studied his father’s agenda. It seemed a mayor was just as busy as a minister.
    He spent a few minutes figuring out the website before he was able to print out the details of all his father’s meetings over the last two months. Next, he went through the ones tagged “private,” for which the details wouldn’t be visible from the secretary’s account.
    One was a dentist’s appointment. There was no reason for his father to have sent this meeting to the dentist, and it was highly unlikely the man was involved either in corruption or murder, but Louis deleted it anyway. There might be the slightest taste of spite toward the police in what he was doing, but Petit’s approach to his job made Louis’s skin crawl.
    Two other private entries stood out: one was a lunch date eight days before the murder and one was a dinner appointment two days before the murder. The first was tagged as “M-P EZES,” presumably Marie-Pierre Ezes, one of the deputy mayors. The second entry was noted as “Jardins de l’Opéra,” which was a restaurant on place du Capitole. The first didn’t have a location; the second lacked a participant.
    In the publicly viewable entries, Louis didn’t see anything obviously suspicious. There were several meetings with the Toulouse public transport system, Transport Toulousain or TT for short. The deputy mayor responsible for the urban development plan also appeared frequently. Of course, this was most likely simply the proof of a mayor doing his job.
    Pocketing the agenda printout, Louis turned off his laptop, righted up a few thrillers in the fiction bookcase, sent a respectful nod to Zizou in the corner, and went downstairs to make sure his mother hadn’t eaten any of the officers on their way out.
     

 
    Six
    Catherine secured one of her favorite tables at the Café de la Concorde. She’d often enjoyed breakfast at this café in the past because it was situated between her apartment and the town center, and had an agreeable vintage feel. The walls inside were plastered with posters for theaters, concerts, and various other cultural occasions from the last fifty years or so. Everything, including the floor-to-ceiling windows, looked to have been there since the place was built over a hundred years ago. Peeling paint on the terrace roof pillars helped the café camouflage itself