Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Natalie
The skin on my ribs is still tender when I open my laptop the next morning.
Not sore. Sensitized. The ghost of fire tracing paths that my fingertips keep finding when I'm not paying attention.
I press two fingers against the spot where his hand held me down, and the pressure sends a line of warmth straight to my hips.
I close the laptop, open it again, force myself to focus.
Stephanie Dufrane agreed to meet me yesterday.
Former Elysium member, peripheral to the social circle that included Claire and Cécile.
She'd been cautious in our email exchange, vetting my credentials, confirming the book premise, asking who else I'd spoken to.
By the time she said yes, I'd spent three weeks earning it.
This morning, Stephanie says no.
The email is brief. She appreciates my interest. She's reconsidered. She doesn't think she has anything useful to add. She wishes me luck with the project.
The language is polite and empty, the verbal equivalent of a door closing quietly in a well-maintained house. No explanations offered. No opening left for follow-up.
Cold feet sounds like hesitation. Stephanie's refusal sounds like a decision made after a conversation with someone who wasn't me.
I read the email again. The phrasing is careful, almost coached.
I don't think I have anything useful to add is a telling construction.
It positions the problem as relevance, not willingness.
Someone must have told Stephanie that knowing something that mattered was dangerous.
Better she didn't know anything at all or continue to hold her silence.
My digital archive is open in the next tab.
Earlier this week I bookmarked a set of Elysium-related records from an online community forum that predated the club's closure.
Event calendars, discussion threads mentioning dates and attendees, group photos with timestamps.
Ambient digital detritus that platforms forget to scrub when the humans who created it move on.
The links are dead.
Every single one. The forum threads still exist, but the attachments are gone. The image hosting service returns 404 errors. The screenshots that I downloaded and cross-referenced against my case files have been removed at the source.
I check my local copies. Safe on my hard drive, intact. But the originals are gone, which means anyone else who tries to verify what I found will hit nothing.
Someone is cleaning the record.
I sit with that for a full minute, my fingers resting on the keyboard without typing.
The fire play left me raw in places that have nothing to do with my skin, and the analytical distance I rely on keeps slipping.
Sebastien's hands replacing the flame. The way I stopped trying to manage what my body was doing and let him have it.
The look on his face when I said I trust you, which I now realize carried a weight he heard and I didn't intend.
I switch to my email. A message from an address I don't recognize, sent in the middle of the night.
You should look at Tomas Hébert's financial records from the year Elysium closed.
I open the PDF. It's a set of bank statements, partially redacted, showing a series of cash deposits in the months surrounding Claire's death. Large, irregular amounts. No source identified. The implication is obvious: Tomas was paid for something.
It looks like misdirection. Tomas has a temper and a history of boundary issues that I already documented and deprioritized. Pointing me at his finances feels designed to pull me back toward a suspect I've mostly discarded.
But Gaudet is too smart to send me something I can dismiss on sight.
The best misdirection contains truth, and unexplained cash deposits around the time of Claire's death are worth verifying regardless of who brought them to my attention.
I save the PDF to my case files, tag it as probable misdirection, and add it to the list of things I need Andy to look at quietly.
Whoever sent this knows enough about my investigation to understand that Tomas is a plausible target. They know I've been asking about Elysium's inner circle. And they have access to financial records that would take either institutional authority or significant personal resources to obtain.
Stephanie's refusal and the vanished records arrive within hours of each other. The Tomas email follows soon after. That's coordination, and coordination requires a person who understands exactly what I've been building.
I pick up my phone and call Vivienne. She answers on the fourth ring. "Natalie."
"How are you?" I keep my voice neutral.
The pause lasts two beats too long. "I'm fine. Just busy."
Vivienne Thibault doesn't hesitate. She's a woman who carries silence like a tool, but this isn't her silence. This is the caution of someone measuring how much to say.
"Has anyone contacted you?" I ask. "Since we last spoke?"
She pauses again. "Why do you ask?"
The non-answer is the answer. "Vivienne."
"I received a message," she says. "Through the community network. Very polite. Very thoughtful. Expressing concern about the emotional toll of revisiting difficult memories."
The words are innocuous. The delivery tells me everything.
Someone reached out to Vivienne using the language of care to communicate a threat.
The message was wrapped in therapeutic vocabulary that anyone in the lifestyle would recognize as appropriate concern.
The genius is that Vivienne can't point to a single word that constitutes intimidation.
She can only feel the shape of what was communicated underneath.
"Did it come from someone you know?" I ask.
"It came from someone everyone knows." Her voice drops. "And that's all I'm going to say about it."
The line goes silent. I hear Vivienne breathing, the rhythm of a woman deciding whether to hang up or speak.
"Be careful, Natalie."
She said the same thing at the end of our last meeting. The repetition doesn't feel like a verbal habit. It feels like emphasis.
"I will."
"No," she says. "I mean be careful about who cares about you. The ones who care the most can see the most. And some of what they see, they'll act on."
She disconnects. I hold the phone against my ear for two seconds after the silence starts.
I set the phone down. The case board I've built in my head is shifting, the pins moving themselves into new positions. Stephanie silenced. Records erased. Misdirection planted. Vivienne warned.
The name forming in my head is Gaudet. Not proven. But the pattern keeps pointing the same direction, and the direction has stopped feeling like coincidence.
If I'm right about him, he didn't do any of this with a weapon or a threat.
He did it with relationships. He reached out to Stephanie as the concerned mentor he's always played.
He warned Vivienne through the language she'd trust. He pointed me at Tomas using evidence that looks damning until you understand it's been manufactured.
That's a big "if." But the if is shrinking.
A consent predator's methodology, applied to evidence instead of bodies. Hide inside the system. Use the access everyone gave you. Let the institution do the work.
A new message appears in my inbox. An address I've never seen, routed through what looks like a temporary hosting service. The sender left no name, no identifying information. Four words.
Stop looking for me.
My fingers freeze on the keyboard. The first thought is Cécile.
But I've been getting anonymous messages all morning.
Whoever is erasing my trail would love nothing more than to make me stop looking for the one witness who might confirm the pattern.
I let the question sit: Is this genuinely from the woman I've been searching for, or from someone who knows I'm searching and wants me to stop?
I read the message four times. The address is a burner, the kind you create in thirty seconds and abandon after a single use.
No way to reply. No way to trace. If this is another planted trail, it's a different breed than the Tomas email.
That one was designed to redirect. This one is designed to stop.
I start typing a reply before I stop myself. A burner address like this is probably already dead. If I send a response, it'll bounce, and if whoever sent it is monitoring the account for confirmation of receipt, I'll have just told them I'm paying attention.
A second message lands in my inbox. Same address, sent less than two minutes after the first.
Claire told me he knew étienne's room before she ever mentioned it to him. That's all I'm giving you. Don't write back.
That confirms it. The Tomas email was generic.
This is personal: Claire's case, Claire's details, knowledge that only someone close to Claire would carry.
This is Cécile. She hasn't vanished as completely as I thought.
She's reachable enough to create a burner address, break her silence with two messages she clearly agonized over sending.
The relief fades fast. Because Cécile isn't hiding from me. I'm a writer asking questions about a cold case. I'm not dangerous. Cécile is hiding from someone dangerous, and she's been gone long enough to make disappearing feel safer than staying.
The message is short but the meaning isn't. Claire told Cécile that a man knew which room étienne Comeaux had booked before Claire ever mentioned it to him.
étienne's room. The room where Claire died.
Claire had a standing booking with étienne, which Vivienne confirmed, so Claire would have been discussing plans in normal conversation.
And this man already had information she hadn't given him.
The message doesn't name him. It doesn't have to.
If the unnamed "he" is Gaudet, then he was in possession of information that Claire didn't give him. He knew where she would be before she told him.