Art of the Chase by Jennifer Giacalone

Author:Jennifer Giacalone [Giacalone, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 195082241
Publisher: Ylva Publishing
Published: 2023-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The diagram in Fleur’s head was getting more complex. Now there was Herling and Vitali. And this mysterious LeMain, who was possibly also Gustave.

Gustave had set them up to catch Herling. And he had made sure that Vitali was there to cover it and maybe also to piss off Fleur and Renata. But why? It was a taunt, clearly, but there had to be more to it than that. His scavenger hunts always seemed to serve more than one purpose.

Her best guess was that they were getting too close in Paris, and he wanted to draw them away, back to Amsterdam, to distract them from their current path of investigation. It made more sense than anything else. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d been onto something with Debrosse, that he was somehow an important point of conjunction for the moving parts in this story, even though it had been an apparent dead end.

She sat at her kitchen table nursing a gin and tonic, moving the pieces in her mental picture, trying to figure out where everything fit.

Renata swept in from outside. She was returning from dropping Luca back at Centraal Station. Fleur twitched a bit but she didn’t comment as Renata kicked off her shoes in the middle of the hallway, tossed her jacket over the back of a chair, and padded into the kitchen just as if she still lived there.

“Drop-off go all right?” Fleur asked.

Renata waved a hand around. “Eh. He was a little upset with me. He wanted to stay. So now my sister has to stay at the house with him to make sure he goes to school and doesn’t try any more bullshit.”

Fleur whistled. “You’re leaving Nicoletta with that little firecracker? God help her.”

Nicoletta was only two years older than Renata, but she was about as different as one could imagine: a slightly frumpy bookkeeper who was, from Fleur’s best reckoning, the black sheep of the family. The rest of the Cellini clan shared Renata’s flamboyance. She was a kind enough soul but a rather gray one: hapless, not much for conversation, the sort who could fade into the wallpaper. She couldn’t imagine poor Nicoletta contending with the young man she’d met.

“Eh.” Renata opened one of the cabinets and peered inside. “It’s fine. He feels a little bad for her, so he doesn’t act up that much when he’s around her. He saves all his bullshit for me.”

Fleur flipped through the notes she’d jotted in her phone. “So Gustave or LeMain or whatever we want to call him probably wasn’t even here. Luca was probably right when he said the IP address was a fake.”

“They should fire Schermer and hire my son.”

Fleur lifted her glass in a silent toast to the notion of it.

Renata opened the refrigerator. After frowning into it for a few moments, she pulled out bacon, eggs, and a wedge of cheese. After scowling into another cabinet for a few seconds more, she pulled out a box of egg noodles.

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