SYNTHESIS
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Chapter 02 - "Journey"

Alex kept eyes on the house as long as possible, then kept gazing out the window as Bruno Volpe's house passed and McConnell turned left on Main Street, past the vintage homes and then into Milbury's tiny business district. Rise'n'Shine, the breakfast place that had opened at the end of January, was already lit up and filling with customers. Once the still-dark frontage of the Dark Crystal had passed by, Alex finally turned away, returning her attention to Bobby. In the morning light winking inside the big SUV, he still looked frayed.

For several years, the reappearance of Nicole Wallace had been a fixture in their work life, and then she had been thought dead, murdered by Bobby's old mentor, Declan Gage, only to reappear in 2013 in France, entangled with French diplomat and politician Marcel Pepin. The previous year Alex had learned Nicole had given birth to a daughter later in 2013, a child that, based on the deft Australian's own confession about her actions in Washington, DC, before Christmas 2012, she believed was Bobby's. Eight-year-old Mignon, whom they had met March 2022 in Washington, DC, was actually Pepin's child, a quick, lively, and happy soul petted and loved by both Nicole and Pepin. Two months later, Pepin had escorted both Nicole and Mignon to their small Cape Cod-style home, the house Nicole had derisively called "your dovecote." Her insult had backfired—the "dovecote" appellation had informally stuck, and occasionally one of them still called their shed-come-office "the Wendy house" as Mignon had.

Alex reached out and covered his long, nervously-flexing fingers with her own, and he glanced to his left and gave her a little smile. "Beautiful Alex," he said softly, then was quiet.

They had almost reached Southbury before Bobby asked, "Lieutenant McConnell, what's our itinerary?"

In response both his phone and Alex's tweedled. "That should be it now, sir. Bradley to Newark via Delta, then Newark to Charles De Gaulle via Air France. Executive business class. Everything's on your phones. Do you have AirTags?"

"No," Alex admitted.

"I have four for you," McConnell answered, "and I'll set you up when we get to Bradley."

They were on the interstate now, heading east into the sun, and Alex settled back, averting her eyes from the glare. "So...who actually summoned us? Bobby was told it was the State Department."

"Yes, ma'am, it was, but via Madame Pepin."

Bobby looked startled. "Marcel Pepin's wife Evangeline? What's her interest in us? We've never met her—and frankly I didn't know that she knew who we were."

"Marcel Pepin wasn't the only one with contacts in the State Department," McConnell responded blandly. "The Duplantiers have their own little network."

"I'm sure you know much more about them than I do," Alex commented, tongue firmly in cheek, but McConnell cleared his throat and responded dryly, "That's intelligence above my pay grade, ma'am. I'm just a little worker bee. I do what I'm told."

At the next traffic light, McConnell reached back to hand a college notebook sized bound volume to them. "Special Agent Saltonstall thought you could use this."

"A bound dossier?" Alex grinned. "They still make those old things?"

"Only for special people," the lieutenant chuckled, eyes fastened on the road.

"For traditional people like Penelope and me," Bobby said wryly.

He tucked the bound document into the outside pocket of his laptop case, then pulled out his phone and sent two texts before leaning back in the seat, taking Alex's hand and closing his eyes; in this way they passed the remainder of the drive to Windsor Locks. McConnell bypassed public parking completely and instead used a pass card to enter the terminal grounds. Once they had stopped, he opened the rear of the SUV, working quickly to insert the tracking devices in each suitcase, then installed the app on Alex's phone, noting down the username and password in her note-taking app. "Once you get to Newark you can install the app on Agent Goren's phone as well."

"Must I?" Bobby asked only half jokingly.

"You'd change your mind if your luggage went AWOL as often as mine has," McConnell said with a smile. "I lost some stuff I was really fond of last time I went PCS."

With the procedure completed, a tram appeared, driven by an older man with a seamed face who exchanged a confidential nod with McConnell before driving the pair and their luggage from the parking lot to the terminal. McConnell then made certain their luggage was tagged and routed correctly, and finally escorted them into the terminal proper, where they bypassed the TSA line completely by way of McConnell's credentials and an unobtrusive passageway. Procedure concluded, he wished them luck, saying farewell only when he'd settled them at Gate 11.

When he'd left, Alex quipped, "It's good to be the king."

"Or related to one," Bobby chuckled. "I used to do the courier jobs business class, but only because it was hard to seat me in coach."

"Was it Phil you texted, to take over for you tonight?" Alex asked.

Bobby rubbed at his tired eyes. "And Shard to cancel tonight's game, in case Phil can't make it."

McConnell had set them up in a corner with their carry-on luggage forming a barrier in front of their seats. They still had half an hour until boarding began, so with a flourish Bobby fished a package of Skittles from a coat pocket and handed it to her, and then retrieved the dossier, which was neatly tabbed. With an amused expression, Alex opened the package and popped a few candies in her mouth as Bobby opened the dossier between them. He read more quickly than she did, so she set the pace.

"So Pepin's from a family of government servants," she commented as they turned the pages. "He was a legacy fed the way I was a legacy cop."

"And Madame Evangeline Stéphanie Duplantier Pepin is from wealth, originally coal mining, then oil refining. Now 'Duplantix Ltd. is exploring renewable sources of fuel, including solar and wind power,'" he read softly, then continued, "Industry gossip says they have some very innovative ideas about future energy sources, but they're trade secrets which they're unwilling to share."

She paged forward to find a full-page color photo of Madame, a studio portrait, with her seated firmly upright in a white Empire chair wearing a classic A-line navy-blue dress with a choker of round, brilliant-cut emeralds around her slender neck, her short dark brown hair cropped sleek and silver-frosted around an oval, aristocratic face with an aquiline nose, pursed lips, and intense green-blue eyes. "Brrrr. And Nicole thought I was an ice queen."

Bobby tapped the bottom of the photo. "Madame Pepin thoroughly hated Nicole, but, what could she do? She's one of a dying breed, the last of the old-money, traditional upper-class wives who took her husband's name and position in society and gave birth to the children, and who accepted as a matter of course the fact her husband had a mistress."

With a teasing smile, she put her face close to his and whispered in mock-threat, "You'd better not get any ideas, buddy."

Bobby grinned, then gave a throaty laugh. "Now what would I need with a mistress when I share a bed with the sexiest woman on the planet?"

The dossier eventually slipped off their laps in the midst of a generous kiss, and Alex retrieved it hastily when they finished.

"What will happen with Mignon?" she finally asked.

"I don't know," he admitted, "but I'm certain Pepin made some provision for her future. You could tell he adored her when they visited us last spring. I can't imagine he wouldn't leave her some type of legacy, at the least an educational fund."

"But that's just money. Who will care for her? Where will she stay when she's not at school?"

"Luisa Carvallo will stay on, perhaps?" Bobby considered, referring to the child's nanny. "I understand that Mignon has her own rooms in a wing of the family home when she stays...stayed with her father: a bedroom, a little sitting room, a schoolroom, and access to the stables and the gardens."

"A...'wing'? How big is his 'family home'? The place you describe sounds like...Versailles!" Alex said, surprised.

"Maison Duplantier? Her family home. It's a 'little country estate' northwest of Paris. Probably only forty rooms or so," he said, a little mischievously.

"That's a boarding school," she objected, "not a home."

"Not for a Duplantier. The family's on a Forbes list of the twenty-five richest in France. Perhaps when the taxes catch up to them it will end up as one."

"I hope we don't look like rustic country cousins," she grumbled.

"Well, I'm just 'a big lumbering bear' even in a suit," he said fondly. "But you don't need to worry: you could come to a party in a feed sack and your mother's pearls and outshine the room."

"I'd tell you you're embarrassing me, but I like the compliments," she confessed, but smiled as she blushed.

Two hours later in Newark, having been greeted at the Delta gate by yet another Army lieutenant, this one a businesslike woman who scrutinized their identifications as if they were trying to trick her, they were whisked by tram to their gate at Terminal B just before boarding for their Air France flight began—Alex barely had time to connect to the wifi and load the AirTag software on Bobby's cell. Soon they were enveloped in enormous, comfortably-padded putty-grey leather seats and the prospect of hot meals instead of packets of pretzels, as well as complimentary sparkling wine or bourbon. Alex leaned back happily and sipped her shot glass of the latter. "Ah, to be Madame Pepin for a while."

"Your book could be a runaway best seller," he ventured, only in half-jest, "and we could indulge in fine living."

"Ice Blue? I don't think so. I hope it sells well, but I don't expect best seller status. I don't say anything new, I just tell it from a different gender perspective. Besides, as far as I'm concerned, we do indulge in fine living. It's been such a nice winter I'm sorry it's over—working with the kids, arranging things with Krystine and Zes for the tour, the TV appearances..."

"The kids really enjoyed seeing you put Sam through his paces on Today," Bobby said with a reminiscent smile. "Savannah Guthrie seemed to get a big kick out of it."

"It was a good promotion for therapy dogs." She added gently, "It's your book I hope gets to be the best seller."

"There are dozens of stories like mine," he protested.

"Not with the library connection," she said.

When Alex had retired from the New York City police department, she'd toyed with an idea to write a memoir about her time on the force and the challenges of being a female detective in a changing, but still patriarchal system. Her post-retirement/house fire melancholy had left her too indifferent to address it, until her cousin Phil Cochran's intervention had brought her back into Robert Goren's orbit. When things started, as she put it, "fitting together again," she'd at first tentatively, then more confidently, tackled a manuscript, and, to her surprise, when Richard Carver had showed the ragged first draft to a friend at Hastings House publishers, she'd acquired an editor named Holly Lewin.

Meanwhile, during COVID lockdown Bobby had done something he'd disparagingly called "taking my resentments out on paper" and had scribbled in longhand a memoir about his childhood with an often-absent, untruthful but charming father; a loving, clever but schizophrenic mother; and an occasionally kind but increasingly erratic older brother. His mother had been a librarian, and where his brother didn't understand the attraction of books, Bobby had fallen under their spell early, and had taken refuge from an unsettling and unstable home life in libraries. Holly had coaxed him into allowing her to read the now-typed manuscript, finished it in one sitting late into the night, and had loved it. With both manuscripts lovingly molded into acceptable narratives under Holly's guidance, the two books, Alex's Ice Blue and his The Refuge, would be released concurrently in a few weeks; they would be leaving on a book tour soon afterward.

He leaned back in his seat and pulled out his Kindle; he preferred paper books, but when traveling the e-reader made more sense than transporting a half dozen different titles so he could read what interested him at the moment. She settled back as if to sleep, and he warned, "I wouldn't do it, Eames. If we want to conform to French time, we need to stay awake through most of the flight so we'll sleep tonight. We can probably doze off between five and seven our time."

"You really know how to spoil a girl's first trip to Paris," she grumbled, but still warmed to the use of her last name as an endearment. He'd called her that when they worked together for professional reasons, but later it had become something more intimate. She leaned over and tapped on the dossier, which Bobby had out on his armrest. "So tell me about the rest of the Pepin family."

"The eldest child and older son, Yves, is in banking—an executive at Crédit Agricole. His wife Morgane was originally his executive secretary. She was raised in Amiens. The Pepins' only daughter Stéphanie works as a chef in a four-star Michelin restaurant in Chartres; she has a partner named Agathe who works at the Musée National d'Art Moderne. The younger son and youngest child, Laurent, is still unmarried—it's noted that he's a bit of a mama's boy, but not in a totally negative sense—and still lives at home, breaking hearts wherever he goes. He's an executive at Duplantix—word on the street is that it was an appointed position, not earned, as it's also noted that he's Madame's favorite offspring. Also, apparently he's the only one of the official Pepin household who tolerated Nicole and likes Mignon."

She leaned forward in her seat. "You mean the poor kid isn't even accepted by her half-siblings? What happens at mealtimes? Does she eat at the opposite end of the dining room with Luisa?"

"This is very traditional household, Alex. First, Luisa would never eat with the family—she's a nanny. And Mignon doesn't eat with the family either; she eats in the nursery with Luisa, just as you read in books about Edwardian children."

"That's elitist and barbaric," she said fiercely.

"It's what she knows," he answered.

"It doesn't make it fair."

"I never said it was."

She unbuckled her seat belt, and he fondly watched the sparks fly in her eyes. It was one of the things he'd fallen in love with, her sense of fair play and justice. "What are you up to, Princess Ozma?" referring to her alter ego on Saturday and Tuesday trivia nights. He himself was "The Wizard," master of bad card tricks, clever prestidigitation, sly puns, and the most difficult trivia questions on the East Coast, which had garnered The Dark Crystal an award on NewEngland.com.

"I was about to double-check the passages I plan to read when we do our book tour," she said, reaching in her carry-on for the copy of her book that had been sent in December.

"Will you get my book for me, too?" he asked.

"What do I get in return, my Wizard?" she asked saucily.

"A big surprise," and she laughed.

An hour later dinner was served. After years of airline snack packets, they dug in happily when the flight attendant served fragrant, still-steaming plates of chicken marsala, baby carrots in a butter sauce, and sliced potatoes in a cream sauce, with a warm dinner roll and butter on the side and hot coffee. Alex returned only briefly to checking book passages after eating; bored, she pulled out her e-reader, where she was revisiting an old favorite. When finished with his book, he returned to his Kindle. Her eyes flickered toward him. "What are you reading?"

"Biography of Oscar Heinrich, the–"

"Bobby, please," she said, rolling her eyes, "I do know who Edward Oscar Heinrich was. Father of modern forensics."

"Pardon me, Captain Eames," he answered, abashed.

About four-thirty by her Fitbit, he ambled to the rest room, then returned to put up his Kindle and retrieve a sleep mask and earplugs from his carry-on. As tall and stocky as he was, there was still room left in the luxurious business class seat. He patted the armrest. "Join me?"

"Bobby–" she said reprovingly, and made her own visit to the restroom. When she returned, he was masked and leaning back in the big seat, tucked against the right armrest, his left arm open and invitingagainst the seat back. She suppressed a smile, retrieved her own sleep mask, and settled down next to him. He smiled under the mask and curved his arm around her, and, until the flight attendant woke them before final approach, they slept.

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