Bred to Kill (19 page)

“Listen, I'm sorry, but I'm already out of it . . . It's been all over for me for a long time.”

“Nothing's over, because you're here, with me, no matter how bad your pain, or your anger.”

“You have no idea what my anger is like.”

“I can feel it. But don't make me go home without answers. Keep me close to the investigation. Close to you.”

Sharko remained expressionless, hand gripping the mouse, unable to make a decision. Very soon, confronted with this silence, this interminable wait, Lucie felt ill at ease, floating, as if a suit of armor that seemed unbreakable, that had withstood so many blows, had suddenly been shattered by a puff of wind. Slowly she turned and headed for the door, stumbling slightly. Her head was spinning and she saw stars. Fatigue, nerves, the miles she'd traveled since yesterday . . .

“I'm sorry for . . . for bothering you,” she managed to get out. “I just thought you and I . . .”

Sharko leapt from his chair and slammed his hand against the door. He leaned over to hold her up, and she pressed her face into his shoulder, sobbing as if she'd never stop. She was trembling all over, her strength drained, and feeling faint.

 • • • 

When Sharko tucked her into the sofa, she was already asleep, huddled into herself. With a sigh, he slowly caressed her face, devoured by regrets and remorse.

Then he clenched his jaws and went to shut himself up in his room.

 • • • 

He felt as if he'd slept only an hour or two, vacillating between reality and nightmares. Images, voices, insane ideas hovered at the edge of his senses. Knowing that Lucie was so nearby, so fragile, made him feel ill. As if he were reliving his own past, his suffering, all the anguish coiled inside him.

At 7:30 that morning, as he was staring at the ceiling, stretched out on his bed like a corpse at a wake, he got a call from Pascal Robillard.

The lieutenant had found the identity of the man in pajamas.

His name was Daniel Mullier.

Escapee from a group home in the fourteenth arrondissement.

Autistic.

S
harko had gone out quietly, without waking Lucie. Just a quick wash-up in the bathroom, a note scrawled on a piece of paper—that was all. No coffee, no morning radio, no noise. A lingering look at the young woman, a painful urge to crush her against him. He couldn't tell if he wanted to find her there when he got home that evening or never to see her again.

Depressing ride, traffic jams, noise, head full of questions. Not enough sleep, brain already churning. The inspector parked his car in the lot of the Félicité group home. He went to greet Levallois, who was smoking a butt, leaning against the side of his car. His eyes were puffy.

“So how was the autopsy?” the inspector asked.

“Vic tortured for at least two hours, burned with cigarettes in chromosome patterns, then cut for maximum blood loss. He didn't last more than a few seconds. The rest is just forensics that doesn't tell us anything new. I spent a night from hell. Let's hear it for the police!”

The young man seemed to be handling it well enough. Sharko rested a hand on his partner's shoulder and gave it a shake. The two looked up at the tall, Haussmann-style residential facility, separated from the street by a low fence and pleasantly flowering gardens. The fourteenth arrondissement was home to the city's psychiatric institutions, with the renowned Sainte Anne hospital at the head.

“Hear anything about Terney's book?”

“Several biologists were at it all night—they were already familiar with the work. Apart from statistics, math, and various arguments in favor of eugenics, they didn't find anything out of the ordinary so far. But it's a long book and I think it'll take time. They're not sure what they're looking for.”

“Did you say eugenics? In the middle of all that mathematical data?”

“The head of the lab said to come see him if we wanted more info. He was in a piss-poor mood.”

“If we want more info? Terney's last living action was to point to that book—you bet your ass we want more info!”

The man who welcomed Sharko and Levallois was named Vincent Audebert. He was the director of the center, which housed fourteen high-functioning autistic adults who were incapable of living on their own. Given his mental state, Daniel Mullier had been returned to his environment several hours earlier. One thing for certain, he wasn't the guilty party: according to the director, the fourteen patients had just returned from a week's vacation at a center in Brittany and had only been back for two days—well after Stéphane Terney's murder.

Vincent Audebert nodded toward a window on the ground floor.

“Daniel's room looks out on the courtyard. He'd already tried running away once, but that was two or three years ago.”

“What set him off this time?”

“Stéphane Terney had promised to come get him yesterday, to take him to a lecture on DNA. They've known each other for years. Daniel and Terney saw each other two or three times a month. The doctor always kept his promises and Daniel looked forward to these visits. But this time . . .”

He paused for a moment.

“So to show his anger, Daniel started counting the number of grains in a two-pound bag of rice. When he gets like that, he shuts himself up in his room and we let him see his ritual to the end, which normally takes him about four hours. There's no other solution.”

“Didn't you notice he was missing last night?”

He rattled a large ring of keys in his pockets and sighed.

“We're not a prison here. There aren't any night rounds or impromptu room searches unless strictly necessary. Daniel got out through his window, climbed the fence, and disappeared into the city. He'd been to Terney's house before; he knew the way.”

“Is there any chance Daniel could talk to us or explain what he might have seen or heard? Could he tell us about his relations with Terney?”

“Absolutely no chance. He doesn't speak and he doesn't write anything other than his series of letters, numbers, and calculations. It's his only language. He doesn't understand his own emotions, let alone those of others. That's why it's so difficult to penetrate the bubble that autistics build around themselves. But Terney was able to do it. He'd managed to establish a kind of communication with Daniel, using mathematics.”

“What form of autism is Daniel suffering from, exactly?”

“One of the most severe forms. I won't go into details, but in general he shows an utter inability to communicate orally, manifests disturbances in his social development, and suffers from extreme withdrawal. Paradoxically, despite all these debilitating handicaps, he also has what's commonly known as savant syndrome. In addition to a phenomenal memory, he has exceptional abilities in the area of statistics and analyzing numbers and letters. It's beyond anything you can imagine. I'll show you the room we fitted out specially for him—one look will tell you more than all my explanations.”

They walked toward the center of the building, which looked like an elementary school. Rows of coat hooks, drawings taped to the walls, empty classrooms with chairs around a circular table. The place gave off an impression of order and cleanliness. The adults must still have been in their rooms, no doubt located in the perpendicular wing. Calm floated over the corridors, like a silky coating of madness.

“How did Terney and Daniel meet?” asked Sharko.

“It was in 2004. The scientist came here. He'd heard about Daniel's ability to analyze huge quantities of letters and numbers. He wanted to meet him because he was thinking of writing a book about DNA, which would involve a lot of statistics. He thought Daniel might be able to assist him by detecting things in the molecule.”

“What sorts of things?”

“Mathematical symmetries, immutable laws that the endless succession of A, G, C, and T's always obeyed. Terney was seeking order in chaos.”

The director opened the door to a large, circular room, painted white and with very high ceilings. Sharko and Levallois gaped in amazement. All around, hundreds, thousands of volumes, each identical to the others, were arranged side by side over numerous shelves. Even Terney's library seemed tiny compared to this. Numbers were inscribed on the spines, in ascending order: 1, 2, 3, 4 . . .

“Those books are just like the one Daniel had at Terney's,” murmured Levallois.

In the middle of the room, Daniel was seated at a desk, an open book in front of him, pen in hand. Opposite him was a jar with dozens of pens, also identical to one another, as well as a lit computer. Daniel didn't give them so much as a glance. He was bent over, absorbed in his task. He was writing, without a pause, with small, quick movements. Looking around, Sharko noticed a piece of red cloth hanging between volumes 341 and 343, to the left. He remembered that Daniel had been found at Terney's with volume 342.

The director indicated the tomes with a sweeping gesture, speaking in a low voice:

“There are exactly five thousand books, each containing three hundred pages. Not one more or less. Terney had them made specially for Daniel. The ones after the scrap of cloth are yet to be filled—in other words, nearly all of them.”

Levallois's eyes widened.

“To be filled? You mean . . . by Daniel? But . . . what's he writing down?”

The director took down the volume marked 1 and opened it.

“He's jotting down the complete genome of modern man . . . The totality of the three billion A's, C's, T's, and G's that compose the DNA of our forty-six chromosomes laid end to end. The great encyclopedia of life. The most powerful manual in the world, which contains, in encrypted form, the construction of our internal workings, the journeys of our ancestors, a set of instructions that the little Champollions present in our organisms have been reading for hundreds of thousands of years, so that they can create the proteins that enable us to live.”

Levallois leafed through the pages, unnerved, almost in a trance. Thousands upon thousands of letters, written in a tiny hand one after the other—AAGTTTACC—on every page of every volume on every shelf.

“You're holding the very beginning of the sequence of chromosome one,” explained the director. “It's been six years since Daniel started, ten hours a day, during which time he's written something like fifty million letters.”

Sharko looked at the infinite succession of paper, the improbable quantity of work still to be done.

“Good lord . . .”

“You could say that. It's an endless task. At this rate, astoundingly fast though he is, even if he worked 365 days a year it would still take him more than a hundred years to finish. We already know he's going to spend the rest of his life doing this—jotting, jotting, jotting . . .”

The two cops looked at each other.

“But why?” asked Sharko.

“Why? Because he has no other way to express himself, no way to channel the flood of energy burning up his brain.”

With a sigh, he nodded toward the computer.

“Daniel posted two different genomes of modern man onscreen, which he got from the Genoscope site. I'll spare you the details, but look how he works: he visualizes the contents of the first genome at the top of the screen, memorizes it, and copies it onto these pages before pressing the
NEXT
button and moving on. The genome stretches across millions of successive screens!”

“Why is he displaying two genomes onscreen, if he's only copying one?”

The director pointed to the underlined letters in the book. There was at least one per page.

“He's not merely recopying the genome. He's also underlining certain letters, each time there's a discrepancy between his reference genome and the other one onscreen.”

“Are you saying there's that little genetic difference between two genomes—between two distinct individuals?”

“Exactly. You share more than 99.9 percent of your DNA with an aborigine in the Australian outback, a black, a Chinese, and a Mongol. Genetically speaking, you're closer to those people than two chimpanzees chosen at random in the jungle. That's why we talk about the human genome and not
genomes
, and that there aren't as many genomes on the Internet as there are humans. In fact, there are only two available, because at the time two projects had been launched simultaneously. The genomes for all humanity are roughly the same, apart from a few small ‘errors' that account for, oh, let's say, differences in eye color. Among the three billion A, T, C, and G bases in the DNA of each of our cells, only three or four million of them are in different places; those are the only differences between one human and the next. Your own genome, Inspector, is practically identical to Daniel's, or to mine, apart from those few underlined letters.”

Sharko was astounded. But he also felt enormous pity for this man, who had his whole life ahead of him and who'd spend it copying what a supercomputer could handle in a mere few seconds.

“What's Terney's book about, exactly? Why did he bring Daniel into it?”

“At first, the book was supposed to deal only with statistics. Stéphane Terney enjoyed using those A, T, C, and G's to make a number of calculations, depending on their placement, their repetition, and the number of them in the DNA chain. For instance, he'd divide the total number of ATA sequences by the number of CCC—we call series of three letters ‘codons'—and come up with remarkable numbers, like thirteen, or seven, whereas we were expecting to find completely random numbers with lots of decimal places. Daniel helped him. Terney even talks about the golden section, about remarkable mathematical series . . . In short, he said that all the magic of nature was expressed in DNA through hidden codes.”

“Hence the drawing of Vitruvian man on the cover. The perfection of humanity, hidden in DNA.”

“Precisely. Personally, I'm rather skeptical of these ‘revelations.' When you go looking for something in such a mass of numbers and letters, you're bound to find it . . .”

He made a face.

“This book should have been no more than a vulgar
Da Vinci Code
of DNA, but I think it was actually just a pretext. Terney really used it to broadcast his ideas about eugenics. To make a case for euthanasia, the systematic abortion of fetuses with abnormalities, the elimination of aging populations, which he considered a virus on the planet. Terney is—or rather, was—for the purity and youth of humanity. As he saw it, certain ‘races,' certain genetic conditions upset the perfect mathematical equilibrium that he'd managed to find in the human genome, with Daniel's help. The ‘intruders,' as he called them, weren't worthy of figuring in the genetic legacy we'd bequeath to our descendants. He used Daniel against people like . . . well, like Daniel. I found his approach reprehensible.”

Sharko thought of the weaker members of a school of fish. Terney had tried to pass the same message, but from a genetic viewpoint.

“And yet, you let him continue to see Daniel,” he said.

“At first I tried to put a stop to their relations. But Daniel was so unhappy, and his seizures got worse. Terney, by communicating through numbers and letters, brought him something important. I think that, deep down, he really loved him. DNA was the key to the lock that kept Daniel prisoner, and Terney gave him that key. So I turned a blind eye, but believe me, I was no fan of Terney's. Now that he's gone, I have to admit I'm a bit sad, because I don't know what will become of Daniel . . .”

Sharko looked at the young autistic, who got up, set down his pen in a corner, and took a new one from the can. He looked over the shelves and shelves of blank books, most of which would never be filled. In that illogical spiral, he suddenly had an intuition.

“Has Daniel read
The Key and the Lock
?”

“It's his bedtime reading, so to speak. He looks through it almost every evening, tirelessly . . .”