Bred to Kill (16 page)

“What did you tell him, exactly?”

“That Eva Louts was interested in the drawing, because she'd seen something like it in a prison. Then there was that business about left-handers, too. Basically, I told him what Tassin probably told you.”

Lucie thought for a moment. A piece of the mystery seemed to be coming into focus. Without knowing it, the redhead had put Louts in mortal danger by alerting Terney. Worried about the young woman's research, the older scientist might have killed her. But countless questions still remained: What had Eva Louts discovered that could have led to her murder? What was so precious about the Cro-Magnon's genome that it justified such an elaborate theft? What secrets did it contain? Did Terney know about Grégory Carnot's drawings? Had the two men met?

Lucie demanded Terney's phone number, which she committed to memory.

Meanwhile, what to do with
these
two clowns? Lucie was as illegitimate as they were. Impersonating a cop and roughing people up with a loaded gun could get her into serious hot water, jeopardize her ability to raise Juliette. At that moment, she realized just how far she'd gone. Still, she tried to play the part to the end.

“I have your names and addresses. We've got an understanding, the three of us. You know how this works. I'm going to go see this Terney, settle my score, and try to keep both your names out of this shit. I said
try
. I especially suggest you don't make any attempts to warn him. The slightest fuckup, and you can be sure you'll be spending the next several years in jail.”

She poked her foot a few times into the researcher's thighs.

“Go on, get out of here! Go back to your lab, analyze your cave bear fangs or whatever it is you do, and make like none of this ever happened.”

Fécamp didn't have to be asked twice. Stumbling a bit, he took off without looking back. Lucie bent down and picked up her medallion, unable to keep from looking at the photo of her daughter before she put it back in her pocket.

Then she backed out the door, closing it softly behind her.

She had just one goal in mind now: find Stéphane Terney.

W
ith Louts's thesis, the dates they'd established, and the conclusions they could draw, Sharko and Levallois had spent the afternoon trying to retrace the student's itinerary in the month before her death and had laid out their findings for Bellanger's team in a cramped office at number 36.

In the summer of 2009, under the direction of her thesis adviser, Olivier Solers, Eva Louts begins a project expected to last several years. One of her aims is to study hand dominance in major primates, especially man. The first year seems to pass without incident.

Then, around June 2010, Louts's relations with her thesis adviser deteriorate. The student withholds information, becomes protective of her discoveries. Striking off on her own, she decides to push her research further and heads for the most violent city in Mexico, Ciudad Juárez. Do violent populations still contain a greater number of left-handers than the average, as they did tens of thousands of years ago? To her dismay, she discovers this is no longer the case. But instead of giving up, she decides to go to Brazil, for reasons that remain obscure but are important enough to keep her there for a week. On her return to France, she doesn't write anything about Brazil in her notebooks. Instead, she requests authorization to meet with violent criminals, all of them left-handed. On August 13, she meets her first prisoner; and on the 27th, she comes face-to-face with Grégory Carnot. On the 28th, the Alps. Less than a week later, she books another flight to Manaus . . .

 • • • 

Now, as he walked with Levallois down Avenue Montaigne, Sharko felt certain of one thing: something had triggered all this. The trip to Brazil had led to Louts's sudden interest in French killers, which had led to Carnot. What had clicked in Louts's head? What had she found in Brazil that had then taken her to the mountaintops?

In front of him, Avenue Montaigne glittered in all its excess. Mercedes lined up in front of luxury boutiques: Cartier, Prada, Gucci, Valentino. To the right was the Seine, and in the background the Eiffel Tower. A postcard view for the rich.

The inspector straightened his caramel-colored tie and tugged on the sleeves of his jacket. He glanced at a shop window, which sent back his reflection. His new haircut, the crew cut he'd always worn, made him happy and gave him back his true cop's face. All he needed now was his former build for the old Sharko to be reborn completely from the ashes.

They walked into number 15, a venerable building as white as a palace. The Drouot auction house was the oldest such establishment in the world. A magical, ephemeral museum, where one could acquire anything the human mind or nature had managed to dream up. Usually, the exhibitions of objects, which related to a theme, a period, or a country, lasted for several days. Each year, eight hundred thousand pieces changed hands in three thousand sales. A business even the economic crisis couldn't affect.

Sharko and Levallois asked to speak to the auctioneer, Ferdinand Ferraud. While waiting, they headed toward the auction rooms, taking the opportunity to peek into that evening's exhibit, “The Story of Time.” Muffled atmosphere, low lighting, churchlike calm. Couples silently wandered arm in arm among the 450 meticulously numbered artworks, which claimed to trace the human epic from its origins to the conquest of space. Levallois walked to a corner labeled “Meteorites,” the center of which was occupied by a fragment weighing one and a half tons. He pondered it with a puzzled eye, just like the other, more elegant visitors who'd come for a final viewing of these objects before possibly acquiring them.

“Honestly, can you imagine having a meteorite in the middle of your living room?”

“Wouldn't get through the door. On the other hand, nothing like it for cracking somebody's skull open.”

“You got anyone in particular in mind?”

Hands behind his back, Sharko didn't answer and instead headed toward the minerals. Stalactiform malachite, chalcedony geode, spherules of mesolite . . . In the next room, said a poster, stood skeletons of “wooly rhinoceros,” cave bears from the Urals, and especially one, in its entirety, of an adult mammoth. Perfectly staged and lit, with one of its feet resting on a pedestal, the heap of bones was an impressive sight.

“It comes from Russia,” said a voice behind him. “They said you wanted to see me.”

Sharko turned around to find a man in a snug-fitting dark suit, with a red tie and a giraffe's neck. He had been expecting some decrepit old codger, but the auctioneer was young and seemingly in good shape. The cop looked around and pointed to the others in the room.

“You could have gone up to anyone here. Do I look that much like a cop?”

“The receptionist described you as thin with a crew cut and a jacket that's too large for you.”

Sharko showed his ID and introduced Levallois, who had just walked up.

“We're here about a sale that took place last Thursday. It was for mammal skeletons from the . . .”—he took out a flyer he'd gotten at the reception—“from ten thousand
B
.
C
. to the present.”

“‘Noah's Ark.' The show, and the sale, were hugely successful. The Darwin anniversary helped a lot. There's been a resurgence of interest in primitive arts and the return to nature. The fossil market has become so lucrative that it's spawned all kinds of counterfeit traffic, especially from China and Russia.”

“We'd like to see the sales records for that day.”

The auctioneer glanced at his watch and answered without hesitation.

“Fine. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to spare, as this evening's sale is about to begin.”

Ferraud asked them to follow. For once they were dealing with someone who wasn't trying to obstruct their inquiry, who seemed perfectly willing to help. Sharko reflected that he must have been used to visits from the Cultural Property Office or Customs. The traffic in art objects was a booming business.

They took a stairway that afforded them a plunging view of the auction room and provided access to a row of offices. Ferraud entered one of them, opened a locked drawer, and took out a folder. He wet his fingertips.

“What exactly are you looking for?”

Levallois, tired of taking a backseat, gave the answer.

“The name of the person or persons who bought chimpanzee fossils, roughly two thousand years old.”

The other man riffled through the lists with impressive speed. His eyes suddenly focused into a stare. With a half smile, he looked up at the two policemen.

“We've got exactly one piece from that period—you're in luck.”

“Was it bought?”

“Yes.”

The two cops exchanged a rapid glance.

“And I remember the buyer. An avid collector. He left us a check for twelve thousand euros. He bought an example of every great ape we had. Four skeletons of excellent quality, with over twenty percent of their original bones.”

Sharko knit his brow. The auctioneer explained:

“You should know that these fossils aren't really fossils. That mammoth on auction downstairs, for instance, doesn't even have five percent of its original bones. No one would be interested in it in its actual state—it was too mangled and unaesthetic. The rest of its bone structure is synthetic, made by a company in Russia.”

Ferraud circled a name on the sales sheet and handed it to the cops.

“Delivered to his home on Friday morning by our forwarding agents. That really is his address. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

M
ontmartre at night. Shadows fleeing beneath the tired halos of streetlamps. Narrow alleys set with paving stones. An ogive-shaped landmass rising from the crest of Paris, dissected by countless stairways. A labyrinth of intertwining streets, and at the center its Minotaur: Stéphane Terney.

Lucie had parked her car on Rue Lamarck, near a metro stop whose stairs spiraled into the ground. A few small cafés, still open, absorbed the rare passersby. The air was thick and pasty. Atmosphere of late summer, heavy with humidity, as if a storm could break at any moment. In that damp, the neighborhood felt like a fortress, an islet protected by fog, far from the hubbub of the Champs-Élysées or the Bastille.

To get the address of the man who'd masterminded the theft of Cro-Magnon, Lucie had simply called Information. The Paris region had three people by that name, but the street one of them lived on left little room for doubt.

Rue Darwin.

Charles Darwin . . . The father of the theory of evolution and author of
The Origin of Species
, Lucie recalled from her biology classes. Odd coincidence.

Since her return from Lyon, she had kept a low profile. After leaving the apartment of the young hood with the broken bottle, she'd immediately gone to find a copy of Stéphane Terney's book: a fairly specialized tome with lots of charts and graphs. Then, after calling her mother to let her know she'd be home very late, probably not before dawn, she'd gotten back on the highway, without stopping or thinking about anything other than her mission. Foot to the floor, she had only one desire: to stand face-to-face with the man who would surely have to answer for the theft of the mummy, and who could help her understand its puzzling connection to Grégory Carnot.

Walking quickly, she passed by a row of town houses until she stood in front of Terney's: a whitewashed concrete façade, two stories high, with private garage and a solid metal door that made it look like a giant safe. It was now almost eleven p.m. and no light was filtering through the upstairs windows. Much too late to knock without arousing suspicion. All in all, Lucie knew almost nothing about Terney and had to tread lightly: the man behind the stack of diplomas might be highly dangerous.

Weighing her options, Lucie looked around her, then rushed into an alley a few yards away that sliced through the row of houses. The narrow path provided a shortcut to a parallel street and, better still, access to the balconies and gardens behind the buildings. She just had to scale a high cement wall.

After slipping on her wool gloves, Lucie jumped up, gripped the edge, and, after a few attempts, hoisted herself to the top, though not without scraping her forearms and elbows in the process. A moment later, her body fell heavily onto the grass. She gave out a muffled grunt. Nothing broken, but that little exercise showed her, yet again, how out of shape she'd become.

While the fronts of the houses offered only anonymous façades, the backs expressed their owners' peculiarities: hanging terraces, hexagonal verandas, Japanese gardens with lush vegetation. A privileged corner of Paris, safe from covetous eyes.

In Rue Darwin, Lucie had counted the buildings between Terney's house and the alley. After silently crossing through the fourth garden, she gauged that she was at the right place.

Quick analysis of the situation: impossible to get in from ground level because of the covered porch with its double-glazed glass panels. Upstairs, on the other hand, she spied a half-open window. Crouched over, she ran toward the porch, climbed onto the barrel that collected water from the drainpipe, and within seconds found herself on the Plexiglas roof.

Near the window, she drew her weapon from her pocket. Everything was whirring around in her head: her illegal presence, the danger, the problems she'd surely have to face if she broke into the house. But what if someone was injured? She hesitated a few seconds, then, pushed by the same force that had always driven her, she slipped inside.

She pointed her gun at the bed. No one. The room was empty, but the sheets were rumpled. The angles of the room formed opaque cones. Lucie let her eyes adjust to the dark. Two slippers and a bathrobe lay on the floor: Terney could well be somewhere in the house.

Lucie's muscles stiffened; her senses snapped to attention. The minuscule creaks of the floorboards beneath her feet sounded amplified. The man hiding between these walls might have murdered a student; he wouldn't hesitate to eliminate her either.

She pushed open the door with her fingertips and ventured out of the room. Light filtered in from the streetlamps outside. Opposite her, an aluminum guardrail, twisted in a double helix like a strand of DNA, ran along an open hallway that overlooked the living room below. Lucie heard muffled voices, laughter that faded into the humid air outside. She continued, flat against the wall, listening as she silently crept onward. Below, she spotted an answering machine with its message indicator, the number 7 blinking on it.

Seven messages . . . Lucie relaxed a bit. So Stéphane Terney probably
wasn't
home, and might have been away for some time.

She inched forward some more. One gigantic room drew her attention. It was like being in the lair of some macabre collector. In the shadows, skeletons in attack posture. Prehistoric fossils in perfect condition, animals of all types and sizes, which she identified as reconstructions of dinosaurs. Under glass were minerals, shells in stone, body parts. Femurs, ulnae, teeth, flint. The doctor had created his own evolution museum.

A fresco in the back made her stomach tighten. It showed five skeletons. Near them, an inscription on a painted canvas:
THE FIVE GREAT APES
. She recognized the skeletons of a man and also of a chimpanzee, smaller and squatter and missing the skull and jaws at top.

With a stiff neck, Lucie turned around and noticed that some floorboards had been ripped up. Beneath them was a hiding place, now empty. Someone had obviously been through it.

She left the room. Terney was more than a fanatic: he lived and breathed evolution to the point of residing on Rue Darwin.

An odor suddenly made her freeze. A stench she knew all too well, a mix of rotting flesh and intestinal gas. Her fingers squeezed more tightly around the grip of her Mann. With the toe of her shoe, she pushed open the last door before the stairs and ventured into a cube of darkness. After aiming her gun at the dark corners, she banged her fist on the switch.

The horrible spectacle appeared all at once.

A nude body, no doubt Terney himself, was lying on the floor, on its right side, at the foot of a fallen chair. It had been bound with packing tape, hands in front, feet attached to the chair legs. Wide gashes riddled the torso, arms, and calves: black, frozen smiles that had sliced through the flesh. A piece of tape that had acted as a gag was still half stuck to his cheek. The man had fallen from his chair onto his side, but the index fingers of both hands were stretched straight in front of him, as if he'd been trying to point to something. Lucie turned in the direction indicated. A library containing hundreds of volumes, stacked several yards high. A crypt of paper. Which specific book was the victim trying to point out?

Without approaching, taking care not to disturb anything, Lucie tried to memorize the crime scene, imagine the killer in action. He had unavoidably left something of himself behind, something of his personality in this cold, sinister tomb.

Terney had been mutilated, tortured methodically, without the killer losing his cool. On the floor were cigarette butts, their ends black with burned tobacco. One of them was still embedded in the corpse's shoulder, as if the butt had glued itself to his skin. The partly removed gag suggested that Terney had finally talked. What had his torturer been trying to get out of him?

Lucie nearly felt faint when she heard a muffled noise coming from the back of the room. There was another door.

The noise occurred again.
Boom, boom
 . . . Something was hitting a wall. Or rather, someone.

Lucie moved forward, her throat tight. Holding her breath, gun outstretched, she turned the knob and yanked open the door.

A man in black pajamas was sitting on the floor, a fat book open on his knees. Rocking slightly—hence the noise—he turned the pages, imperturbable, concentrated, not even raising his head. He looked barely twenty years old.

Lucie didn't have time to understand or react before dull thuds at the main door froze her in her tracks.

“Police! Open up!”

A deep, aggressive voice. Lucie backed away, unnerved. The seated man still didn't show the slightest reaction, just tirelessly turned his pages. Good Christ, this was incomprehensible! Why didn't he run? Who was he? Lucie had to think fast. If they caught her here, she was done for. Legs flying, she ran back up to the hallway, knocking over a statue placed at the top of the ramp. She gritted her teeth, unable to catch the object before it went crashing down the stairs with a clatter, without breaking.

Metal.

“Stéphane Terney! Open up!”

More thuds, much louder this time. Voices, shouts. Lucie ran toward the bedroom, unable to breathe. The thuds became a full-scale din: the police were using a battering ram. The entry door slammed open just as Lucie landed feetfirst in the garden. Lungs aching, she dashed into the thickets of branches. It was only a matter of seconds. She didn't dare look behind her. The cops must have been discovering the body by now, arresting the sitting man, entering each room in tight formation, rushing to the exits. No doubt in less than a minute they'd light up the back gardens with their powerful search beams. She arrived at the high cement wall, threw herself at it like a stone from a slingshot. Her arms hoisted her up and propelled her into the alley. Her landing was hard, but her knees took the shock. The moment she stood up, her right cheek smacked against the cold partition.

A gun barrel was pressed into her temple.

“Don't move!”

She felt unable to twitch a muscle. A firm fist had yanked her hand behind her back, holding her in an arm lock. She breathed noisily through her nostrils, her mouth twisting. They had trapped her, watching every exit. She was done for, and she immediately thought of little Juliette. She saw prison bars separating their two faces.

Time seemed to expand, then Lucie suddenly felt the tension relax. The man turned her brusquely around; their eyes met.

“F-Franck?”

Sharko's emaciated face floated in the shadows. In the throbbing lights, he looked like a cop from a detective movie. The face of a guy who'd seen it all. He cast a quick glance behind him and hissed, “Goddammit, Henebelle! What the hell are you doing here?”

Lucie was panting, unable to catch her breath.

“He . . . he's dead . . . tortured . . . There . . . there's someone in . . . the room . . . in pajamas . . .”

Sharko lowered his weapon nervously. His eyes darted to the street, then rested on Lucie. In the distance, through the windows of Terney's house, beams of light began sweeping the darkness. The inspector had to think fast.

“Did anyone see you?”

Lucie shook her head, hands on her knees, spitting up a filament of bile.

He gripped her wrist and squeezed hard.

“What are you doing here?”

“Let me . . . go . . . please!”

Sharko didn't even have to fight against his conscience as a cop. The two of them were the same: shattered, wounded inside, and outside the law. He released his grip.

“Go on, get going. Go back up the alley and disappear. You've got less than five seconds. And especially, don't call me, don't leave any trace of our contact, no matter what. I'll call
you
.”

He pushed her so hard that she almost fell. Lucie regained her balance and turned around to thank him with a nod, but he was already far away. She took a huge breath of air and began sprinting, like a fugitive, until she finally disappeared into the shadows of Montmartre.