"We went to Gerard's father's estate in the south of France and remained there for several weeks. Gerard asked me to stay, to go into business with them. He really did like me. We were of different social backgrounds, yet he respected my views. I was the only one who told him that he was a hypocrite, living in luxury and enjoying his family's money while admiring Trotsky and Marx. He liked the way I challenged him. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't stay with him. So I returned to Germany. But I found no peace there, and so…"

He stopped, looked down at his fists. They were shaking and he relaxed them.

"So I went to the French Embassy in Germany," Hausen said, "and I told them what had happened. I told them everything. They said they would question Gerard, and I told them where they could find me. I was willing to go to jail, just to appease my guilt."

"And what happened?"

"The French police," Hausen said bitterly, "are different from other police forces. They look to settle cases, not solve them, particularly when they involve foreigners. To them, these were unsolved murders and they would remain unsolved."

"Did they even question Gerard?"

"I don't know," Hausen said. "But even if they did, think of it. A word of a French billionaire's son against that of a poor German boy."

"But he had to have explained why he left school suddenly--"

Hausen said, "Hen Hood, Gerard was the kind of man who could convince you, who could really convince you, that he left school because Trotsky's Mexican speeches were omitted from a text."

"What about the parents of the girls? I can't believe they let it go at that."

"What could they do?" Hausen asked. "They came to France and they demanded justice. They petitioned the French Embassy in Washington and the American Embassy in Paris. They offered rewards. But the girls' bodies were returned to America, the French turned their backs on the families, and that was that, more or less."

"More or less?"

There were tears in Hausen's eyes. "Gerard wrote to me several weeks later. He said he would return some day, to teach me a lesson about cowardice and betrayal."

"Other than that, you didn't hear from him?"

"Not until today when he phoned me. I went back to school, here in Germany, ashamed and consumed with guilt."

"But you hadn't done anything," Hood said. "You tried to stop Gerard."

"My crime was remaining silent immediately afterwards," Hausen said. "Like the many who smelled the fires at Auschwitz, I said nothing."

"There's a matter of degree, don't you think?"

Hausen shook his head. "Silence is silence is silence," he said. "A killer is at large because of my silence. He now calls himself Gerard Dominique. And he has threatened me and my thirteen-year-old daughter."

"I didn't realize you had children," Hood said. "Where is she?"