I said, “I think we’re at the leg work stage. We’ll need to find out who rented the Opel Corsa from that place.”

“Pegasus Auto Leasing in Lille.”

“That’s the one.”

She turned the wheel. “Too late now to make the calls, but I’ll start calling around tomorrow. You said you saw two people in the Opel.”

“Correct. Is that meaningful in any way? Is it unusual to rent a car in Lille and drive down here?”

She shook her head. “On its own, no, it isn’t unusual. Let’s just say that at the moment it’s a fact to add into the fact-pattern.”

“I can live with that.”

We drove for a while without speaking. Then she turned to me and asked, “How did you kill them?”

“Cleanly with the least amount of fuss, given the circumstances.”

“Did they deserve to die?”

“Most definitely. They would have done the same to us, with the maximum amount of fuss.”

She nodded to herself, as if resolving something. “They would have made us suffer.”

“They would have done terrible things.”

“So it was justified, even though it was outside of the law.”

I said, “They put themselves above the law. It was their choice, not ours.”

She nodded. “They tried to put themselves beyond the law.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know much about the civilized kind of law. I’m more comfortable with the laws of physics. Not in a technical way, but experiential. Ballistics, inertia, friction, gravity. I know about that kind of thing.”

She shot me a look with those hazel and green eyes. “I can vouch for your command over the laws of physics. You do gravity and friction pretty well.”

“Thanks, but it takes two to tango.”

“We can do that again, soon.”

“I very much hope so.”

“Good, so do I.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

She drove and I looked out the window. Her house was past Brumaire. Farther out along the river and up into the valley. After a while we passed Fanny’s Friperie, which was closed. And I found myself thinking about the Afghan knifing victim, Qayoumi. Moreover, I was thinking of Nazari’s photo of Qayoumi’s tattoo. Some word in Dari or Pashto. Maybe Miriam could read it. Maybe it meant something.

Since it was Nazari who had initially pointed the way to Fanny’s Friperie, the day I’d arrived in town, I asked her if she knew Miriam. She did. I said, “Remember the tattoo on the Afghan victim’s hand, on his wrist? Maybe we could get Miriam to read it.”

Nazari didn’t remember seeing the tattoo. She dug her phone out of her pocket and multi-tasked, driving and thumbing through the photos. She glanced at it and passed the phone to me. “This one.”

I examined the photo.