Sidney Sheldon's Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney #2)(31)

INTERPOL’S PARIS HEADQUARTERS WERE small and simply furnished but the view was spectacular. From Jean Rizzo’s temporary office, he could see the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance and the white dome of the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre in the foreground. It was all a far cry from Alissa Armand’s squalid, lonely flat.

Jean Rizzo ran his hands through his hair and tried not to let the sadness overwhelm him. A short but handsome man in his early forties, with wavy dark hair, a stocky, boxer’s build and pale gray eyes that glowed like moonstones when he was angry or otherwise emotional, Jean was well liked at Interpol. A workaholic, he was driven not by ambition—few people in the agency were less interested in climbing the greasy pole than Jean Rizzo—but by a genuine zeal for justice, for righting the wrongs of this cruel world.


Addiction had ravaged the Rizzo family. Both Jean’s parents were alcoholics and his mother had died from the disease. Jean passionately believed that addiction was a disease, although growing up in Kerrisdale, an affluent suburb of Vancouver, he encountered few people who shared that view. Jean remembered neighboring families shunning his mother. Céleste Rizzo came from an old French-Canadian family and had been a great beauty in her youth. But drink destroyed her looks as it destroyed everything. When the end came, there was nobody there to help her.

Jean’s father had recovered, but he too died young, of a heart attack at fifty. Jean’s one consolation was that Dennis Rizzo had not lived to see his daughter’s descent into crack-cocaine addiction. Like today’s murdered girl, Jean’s sister, Helene, had turned to prostitution in the last, desperate years of her life. How Jean hated that word: “prostitute.” As if it contained the sum total of a woman’s life: her worth, her personality, her struggles, hopes and fears. Helene had been a warm and wonderful person. Jean Rizzo chose to believe that Alissa Armand, and all this killer’s victims, were warm and wonderful people too.

Jean’s superiors back in Lyon were reluctant to assign him to the Bible Killer case.

“It’s too personal.” Henri Marceau, Jean’s longtime boss and friend, cut to the chase. “You’ll end up torturing yourself and you won’t do a good job. Not without objectivity.”

“I have objectivity,” Jean insisted. “And I can hardly do a worse job than the last guy. Eleven dead girls, Henri. Ten girls! And we’ve got nothing.”

Henri Marceau looked at his friend long and hard. “What’s this really about, Jean? This case is colder than a ten-day-old corpse in the permafrost and you know it. You won’t solve it. And even if you did, no one would care. It’s not exactly a brilliant career move.”

Jean shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I want a challenge. I need something that will take up all my time. Distract me.”

“From Sylvie, you mean?”

Jean nodded. His French wife, Sylvie, had divorced him a year ago, quietly and without acrimony, after ten years of marriage. They had two children together and still loved each other, but Jean worked ceaselessly, seven days a week, and in the end the loneliness proved too much for Sylvie.

Jean hated being divorced. He missed Sylvie and his children dreadfully, although he couldn’t deny that he hardly saw them, even when he was married. As Sylvie pointed out to him when he complained of loneliness after dropping the kids back to her one weekend, “But, Jean, darling, it took you four months to realize we were divorced. The decree absolute came through in January, and you called me in May to ask me what it meant.”

Jean shrugged. “It was a busy spring. I had a lot going on at work.”

Sylvie kissed him on the cheek. “I know, chéri.”

“Can’t we just get remarried? You’ll hardly know I’m there.”

“Good night, Jean.”

The Bible Killer case was Jean Rizzo’s therapy and punishment and atonement, all in one. If he could catch this bastard; if he could find justice for those poor girls; if he could stop another life being taken; somehow he believed it would make everything right. His divorce, Helene’s death . . . it would all mean something. It would all be for something.

Ugh. He opened his eyes and leaned back in his chair, exhausted.

The problem is, I haven’t caught him.

I didn’t save Alissa.

Just like I didn’t save Helene.

Outside, the rain had stopped and Paris was once again beautiful, glistening like a wet jewel in the spring sunshine.

Jean Rizzo vowed, I can’t leave here until I’ve got something. I can’t go back to Lyon empty-handed.

FOUR DAYS LATER, HE broke his vow.

His daughter, Clémence, had been rushed to the hospital with stomach cramps and given an emergency appendectomy.

“She’s fine,” Sylvie assured him. “But she’s been asking for you.”

Jean drove like the wind and was at Lyon’s Clinique Jeanne d’Arc in three hours flat. Sylvie was at their daughter’s bedside looking tired. “She just woke up,” she whispered to Jean.

“Daddy!”

At six years old, Clémence was a carbon copy of her mother, all soft golden curls and saucerlike blue eyes. Clémence’s younger brother, Luc, also took after Sylvie’s family, much to Jean’s annoyance. “It’s totally unfair. I’m a genetic zero!” he would complain to Sylvie, who would laugh and ask him what he expected her to do about it.