I turned the key in the ignition but stayed there in the parking lot with the engine idling. I felt cold. My eyes were heavy, my throat was dry, and my mind was still hazy with alcohol. I had rarely felt so exhausted. I hadn’t slept on the red-eye the night before and not much on the night before that. I was suffering from crippling jet lag, too much vodka, and too much stress. I could no longer control my thoughts, which were careening off in all directions. As rain hammered on the hood, I slumped against the steering wheel.

We need to talk, Thomas. I’ve found out something—something really fucking serious that…Maxime’s last words rang in my ears. What was it that he needed to tell me so urgently? What could he have discovered that was so serious? The future seemed grim. Though I had not yet reached the end of my investigation, I was forced to accept that I would never see Vinca again.

Alexis, Vinca, Francis, Maxime…the list of victims was growing. It was up to me to end this, but how? The smell inside my mother’s car took me back to my childhood. It was the perfume she had always worn—Jicky by Guerlain. An intoxicating, mysterious perfume that combined the scents of Provence—lavender, citrus, rosemary—with lingering notes of old leather and civet musk. For a moment, I soaked in the smell. Everything led back to my mother…

I turned on the overhead light. A frivolous question occurred to me: How much did a car like this cost? Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty thousand euros, probably. Where had my mother gotten the money to pay for it? My parents both had decent pensions, and they had a beautiful house they had bought back in the 1970s, when the middle class could still afford to buy on the Côte d’Azur. But this car did not fit with my image of my mother. Suddenly, it occurred to me that Annabelle had not left me with the convertible by accident. It had been a deliberate ploy. I thought about the scene this afternoon. Annabelle had presented me with a fait accompli. She had given me no choice but to borrow her car. Why?

I looked down at the key ring. I recognized the keys to the villa and the mailbox, but there was another one, a large impressive key with a black head. The expensive oval key ring of calfskin leather was monogrammed in chrome with the twined initials A and P. I assumed that the A stood for Annabelle, but what did the P stand for?