Dagger
Maelle’s hand was so cold that I held it between both of mine and brought it to my mouth. Worse was the glazed-over look in her eyes.
I’d participated in enough cleanups to know what was happening across the yard.
The bodies would go out first, then the phones—Géraud’s and Rémy’s both—then every trace of what had taken place in the last hour would be washed away.
Before dawn, whatever vehicle Géraud had arrived in would be gone, and there’d be no evidence remaining that he’d ever been at Valais.
As the clock struck, fireworks cracked over the vineyard and I kissed Maelle. Her father watched us over the heads of his guests. I could feel his gaze without needing to look.
He was in front of us before the last one fell.
“Where’s Rémy? He’s been gone an hour.”
“He’s taking care of something in the fermentation area,” I told him.
“You’re lying.”
I leaned in closer. “When your guests are gone, we’ll discuss this. Not before.”
He turned and made his way through the room, wishing everyone bonne année in a voice that told them to leave. Marthe and her staff had their coats in hand before they finished what was in their glasses.
Chantal caught Maelle’s arm. “What is your father doing? What is happening?”
“I don’t know, Maman,” she said.
An hour later, the cuverie was dark and the five of us stood in the hall of the chateau.
“What is going on?” Bertrand barked. “I demand you tell me now.”
I took his arm. “Let’s go to your study, where we can talk.”
“Will no one tell me what’s happening?” Chantal pleaded.
Maelle took her mother’s hands. “Everything, Maman. I promise. Not tonight. We need to speak with Papa first. Marthe—help my mother to bed.”
Chantal had been ill for months and awake for going on twenty hours. She let Marthe lead her upstairs, and the three of us went into the study.
The door was barely shut when Bertrand rounded on us. “I asked you a question. What did you—”
“Sit down!” I ordered.
He jolted and took his chair.
“Tonight, the questions are ours,” Maelle told him. “Starting with, how long have you known Aristide Géraud?”
“What?” He looked from her to me. “Maelle—”
“How long, Papa?”
“Nine years. Ten. What is this about—”
“Who introduced you?”
“Rémy. He interned at Fontenay before—” He stopped and gripped the arms of the chair. “Enough. I will not be interrogated in my own study. You will tell me what’s going on, or I’ll not say another word.”
Maelle took a step toward him, but I put my hand on her arm.
“I’ll start with who I am,” I said. “My name isn’t Rourke. It’s Killian Curran. I’m an intelligence officer with a private consortium.”
His mouth opened and closed.
“As am I,” Maelle said with the raised chin I knew so well.
“What are you talking about? You run a travel business—”
“I do not. Nothing you know about me is true. Nothing!” she spat at him.
“I…I don’t understand. The wedding—”
“There is no wedding, Papa. No engagement. It’s all fake.”
“But, why?”
“We were sent here to investigate Aristide Géraud,” I said. “It is in your best interest to tell us everything you know about him, all of your business dealings, everything, Bertrand. It’s your only chance at not spending the rest of your life in prison.”
His mouth fell open, and I’d swear he aged twenty years in front of my eyes.
“Where is Rémy?” His lip quivered as he spoke.
“He’s dead, Papa. Aristide Géraud shot him.”
He shook his head and lowered his gaze. “I don’t understand. What about Aristide?”
“He’s dead too. There was no choice.”
Bertrand raised his head, and when he did, his eyes filled with tears. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“First, you need to understand that in the morning, Chantal and Marthe will be informed that Rémy died in an accident in the vat house. As for Géraud, he was never here. He didn’t show, and you haven’t heard from him since.”
“I don’t understand,” he repeated for the third time.
I pulled out a chair and motioned for Maelle to take a seat. She hesitated momentarily, then sat down. I sat in the one beside her.
“Géraud was an international criminal. He arrived here tonight without being seen. He waited for Rémy in the vat house, where they arranged to meet. When your daughter went with her cousin. Géraud drew a gun on the pair of them and tried to put them both in a fermentation room. Rémy went for the gun. Géraud fired once. I fired next. Both men died. Now, tell us about Géraud again—from the beginning, all of it.”
He told the story in pieces. Rémy’s internship at Fontenay, ten years ago.
Rémy coming home with talk of Géraud wanting Burgundy in his catalog.
Rémy arranging the first meeting in Geneva.
“I negotiated that contract myself.” Even tonight, there was pride in it.
He talked about making deals on behalf of the other wineries and how he earned commissions on each sale.
It matched everything Maelle had found in the financials before Rémy scrubbed them.
“What you’ve been doing, Papa, is laundering money.
The minimum sentence you would receive if convicted is ten years, and the fine associated with it is seven hundred fifty thousand euros or half of everything that was washed, whichever the court prefers.
And then, seizure of whatever served the crime.
” She let him do the arithmetic. “The thing that served the crime is Valais.”
Bertrand looked as though he was going to be ill. “Do you need to take a break?” I asked.
“No,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “And the others?”
“If you mean the other wineries, they would face the same consequences,” Maelle told him.
I didn’t add that it would depend on who handled their books and how much they truly knew.
My guess was Géraud or Rémy had arranged for accountants who worked for Maison Fontenay or one of Géraud’s other businesses.
“What about the bank account in Geneva?” I asked.
“It was for the commissions. I never touched it.”
“Why not?” Maelle asked.
“It was for you and your mother. After I was gone.”
She scoffed and looked down at her hands.
“What I’m going to tell you next is the only thing that will save your arse, Bertrand. Do you understand?”
His eyes met mine, and I hated what I saw in them. The powerful, arrogant businessman was gone, and in his place was an old man scared out of his wits. God help me, I pitied him.
“Nothing changes,” I began. “The contracts, the shipments, the books—nothing. You tell no one, and you let us follow his money to whoever is above him. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I need to make it clear that if you do not do as we say, you will go to prison and you will lose Valais. The same will be true for anyone else in the valley who did business with Maison Fontenay.”
When he said, “I understand,” he raised his chin the same way his daughter so often did.
“One more question, Papa,” Maelle said. “Does the word Rh?ne mean anything to you?”
He shook his head.
“Papa?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Be sure. Rémy said it twice before he died,” she pressed.
“I swear to you on my life. I have no idea.”
I believed him.
We told Chantal and Marthe at nine the next morning. Rémy had died in an accident on New Year’s Eve.
Maelle’s mother wept. Marthe crossed herself once and went back to the kitchen. Bertrand held his wife and said words he’d obviously practiced. Still, his voice broke several times.
Rémy had been his protégé, his student, and the closest thing he had to a son. Nobody at Valais questioned his grief.
While we searched through everything we could find at Valais, Preacher and Cassidy worked from the cottage in Beaune.
Four days later, after the team back at Onteora ran it, we had an answer about Géraud’s DNA.
Not that it helped. No database on any continent had any record of him. His prints came back the same.
Two days after that, we learned the rest, and it was worse.
Fifteen years ago, Aristide Géraud did not exist. There was no birth certificate, no school reports, no official photographs, and no taxes paid under the name.
The identity began with Swiss papers that year and surfaced at the top of Maison Fontenay two years later.
Before that, there was nothing. Somebody had built the identity the same way Killian Rourke’s had been.
Rémy’s mobile showed that in the six days before the party, he’d called Géraud’s number several times. The final one went out two hours before he died and lasted nine minutes. It also showed that Géraud rang him back right before Maelle followed Rémy into the fermentation area.
We’d tracked where the money from the “extra” invoices went. Conveniently, it led us to Swiss accounts with Rémy’s name attached.
Within hours of that discovery, we were searching for anything Rémy might’ve left behind.
Any clue. We hit pay dirt when we found a flash drive taped inside the office printer.
It held a single document he’d written the day before he died.
In it, he said the Swiss accounts in his name were fake and that if anything happened to him, Géraud would be the one who arranged it.
“He was covering himself,” Maelle said.
“It reads that way.”
We had enough to put Maison Fontenay in front of a French prosecutor, but absolutely nothing on the man who ran it.
When I suggested I move to a guest room, Maelle didn’t object. In fact, she barely acknowledged it.
We hadn’t touched since we left her father’s study in the early hours of the first day of the year. Maelle worked across the table from me twelve hours a day and missed nothing. Not even me.
Rémy’s funeral was set for Saturday, and on Friday, I closed the last file. “I’ve gone as far as I can on the investigation for now. Onteora has everything.”
She murmured something I couldn’t understand but didn’t look up from her laptop.
I waited for a question, for my name, for anything.
“It’s time I make arrangements to return to the States,” I said.
“Right.”
“I’ll stay through Rémy’s funeral,” I said, and counted ten seconds. “Unless you need me to stay longer.”
“I do not,” she said.
I went up to the guest room and started packing.