She looked at me for a while, then looked out the windshield, absorbing the information. Her eyes widened and then came back to normal.

She shook her head, as if to clear it. “Let’s update the fact-pattern. Have we made it clearer?”

“We’ve linked the Vaugeois attack to the Houdin and Rigalle killings, through the cleaners.”

“Therefore both link back to whoever it was that hired the cleaners in the first place.”

“Correct.”

“And we find them how?”

“I don’t know.” I patted my pocket and brought out the burner phone from the cleaner’s house. “I’m assuming this is how they got in touch. Call history has been erased.”

“So, you’re hoping someone calls.”

“Something like that.”

“And the Afghan?”

“Linked tangentially through the Woodcutter and his crew.”

Nazari thought about this for a moment. She said, “What now?”

I said, “Your house isn’t safe, you can’t stay there.”

“I’m with you on that, a hundred percent. Too isolated. I need to stop by the house so I can pack a bag.”

“Of course.”

“So why the uniform?”

“We’re going to talk to Simone Vaugeois. I thought we could impress her with a uniformed police officer.”

Nazari looked at me. “It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?”

“It’s going to escalate, because that’s the direction it’s been going, escalation.”

“Once they figure out that the freelancers aren’t coming back they’ll call someone else.”

“That’s highly likely.”

“And that 'someone else’ will be better.”

“They might be, but not as good as me.”

She smacked the wheel. “Did you get the registration numbers?

“Which registration numbers.”

“The vehicles that you dumped. The cleaner’s van and the meat truck.”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“Then we need to run them, right now.”

“Is that safe?”

She smiled. “At this point, what is safe supposed to look like?”

She had a point. “How soon do you get results when you do the look-up?”

She started the car and got it in gear. “Immediately. I’ll be a couple of minutes max.”

She drove one hundred yards to the police station. I reeled off the cleaner’s van and the refrigerated meat truck numbers that I’d memorized.

I waited in the car. Ten minutes later she came back out of the station with several printouts.

She tossed them at me. “Read it out loud.”

I examined the printouts while she drove. The cleaning van and refrigerated meat trucks were both registered to private companies. “Argo Enterprises. That’s the cleaning van. Meat truck is registered to a company called Gilbert and Sons. Both companies have a postal code starting with the numbers seven and five.”

“That’s Paris. They give specific addresses?”

“Just the code.”

Nazari whistled. “That’ll take some leg work.”