Bred to Kill (24 page)

Lucie bolted out of her chair, nerves on fire.

“Hold on a second . . .”

She ran to her car and came back with the envelope containing the crime scene photos. She pulled out the one showing the placenta painting and handed it to the nurse.

“Is this what Amanda Potier's placenta looked like?”

Pierrette nodded.

“Precisely. It was as vascularized as that. But . . . where did this come from?”

“From the doctor's house. He asked Amanda to paint it for him. Which means the doctor knew about the ultra-irrigated placenta.”

The nurse handed the photo back to Lucie.

“The whole thing is so strange. Could he have known from the ultrasounds?”

“I think so, yes.”

There was a pause, both of them trying to understand. Lucie also pointed to the painting of the phoenix, just in case, but the nurse had no idea what it could mean.

Pierrette continued her tale:

“You might not believe me, but when . . . when the doctor saw his patient's placenta after the delivery, I saw his eyes shine. As if in . . . fascination. It was very quick, not even a second, but that was the feeling I got.”

She rubbed her forearms.

“Look, I'm telling you the truth, I've got goose bumps. When he saw I'd noticed, he gave me the coldest look I've ever received in my life. As he suctioned, he stared at me without saying a word. And I understood that I had to keep quiet about this . . . And then a minute later, the mother was dead.”

Tonelessly, Pierrette continued her story to the end.

“There was a debriefing several hours after the delivery, with the head of the hospital, Dr. Terney, the anesthesiologist, and the midwife. They drew up a report. Officially, Amanda Potier died of preeclampsia. Terney had all the figures, the test results, the proofs of proteinuria, high blood pressure, even the statistics of how many preeclampsia cases resulted in normal-weight births. The hospital was off the hook. Her parents never wanted to bring suit.”

“And what about you—you never mentioned the placenta?”

Pierrette shook her head, like a child trying to deny her guilt.

“What would that have changed? It was my word against the doctor's. The placenta had been destroyed. And besides, the mother was dead and there hadn't been any medical malpractice. She had bled out without our being able to stop it. I didn't want to complicate matters or jeopardize my career.”

She sighed, looking deflated.

“You want to know what I think, twenty-three years later? The illness that killed Amanda Potier looked like preeclampsia, and it could be diagnosed that way because of certain symptoms, but that's not what it was. And with what you've told me today, I'm convinced that the doctor knew it all along. That horrible painting proves it.”

She got up from her armchair, using her hands as support.

“And now, please excuse me, but I don't think there's any more I can tell you. It's all in the past. It's too late to revive those old ghosts. The doctor is dead, may his soul rest in peace . . .”

“It's never too late. On the contrary, it's in the past that all the answers are hidden.”

Lucie stood up from the sofa in turn. Her trip hadn't been in vain, even if many questions remained unanswered. In any case, she was certain of one thing: slowly but surely, the obstetrician had woven a canvas that led to the birth of a monster.

Even if she was moving forward in a complete haze, Lucie knew that her search for the truth was growing sharper all the time. Amanda Potier, Stéphane Terney, and Robert Grayet, his predecessor at Colombe, were dead, taking their secrets with them. For Lucie, there was only one remaining solution: she had to go see Stéphane Terney's first ex-wife, the one he'd divorced just before his sudden move to Reims.

One of the traces of the past that just might contain a particle of the truth.

S
harko had a clear, and slightly unorthodox, idea in mind: as Eva Louts had done on a larger scale, he was going to make a list of left-handed former pupils in Fontainebleau.

First, he stopped in at City Hall to get the addresses of the local nursery schools: seven in all. Then, taking a deep breath, he headed off to the first address, the Lampain School, located in the east of the city. Lost in his thoughts, he drove through the different neighborhoods without paying much attention to his surroundings. He was thinking of his tortuous investigation and of those horrible murders, but mostly he was thinking of Lucie Henebelle. Had she looked at the photos he'd left for her near the computer? Was she still in his apartment or had she gone home? He couldn't keep from calling her, just to find out.

She answered on the third ring. From the roar in his earpiece, Sharko realized she, too, was in a car. The letdown was immediate.

“It's Franck . . . You're driving. Maybe I should call you back later.”

“It's fine—I've put you on speaker.”

She said nothing further. Why wasn't she talking? Why didn't she ask him how things were progressing?

“Are you on the way to Lille?”

Lucie hesitated, unprepared for his call. Should she tell him the truth and risk having him prevent her from seeing this to the end? Instead, she chose to go on the attack so she could dig a bit deeper, undisturbed.

“Yes. I saw your note on the kitchen table, especially the part about my clothes in the bedroom. Don't worry, they're gone—I've cleaned every trace of me out of your apartment. Sorry about leaving the door unlocked, by the way, but I didn't have a key.”

Sharko thought quickly, with a feeling of doubt. Something was off. Could she so easily have given up, just because of a simple note on a table? She, the Lucie Henebelle he knew? He tried sounding her out:

“How come you left so late?”

“You should have woken me up this morning. It took me a while to remember where I was. What happened last night? I don't remember a thing.”

“You were falling over from exhaustion. So I put you to bed on the couch, like . . . like last year. It's kind of strange, when you think about it, how things repeat themselves. I wouldn't have thought.”

The spaces between their words seemed endless. Sharko felt embarrassed and awkward. He couldn't help asking:

“I did a bit of work last night and I left the computer on. Were you able to find out anything about Stéphane Terney?”

“What was the point? I got your message loud and clear: you're the investigator, you're the one with the resources. I'm nothing in all this.”

Sharko's eyes welled up—and yet, even as his heart bled, he felt a bit relieved.

The GPS signaled that he had reached his destination.

“Well, I'll let you go. I'll call you sometime, if I ever get to the bottom of this case. Good-bye, Lucie.”

“Wait, one last thing: the guy in pajamas . . .”

“He's got nothing to do with it. He's autistic. He and Terney used to spend time together, that's all. Wrong place at the wrong time.”

He hung up sharply, gritting his teeth, without even giving her time to respond. He sat in his car for five minutes, trying to buck up his spirits.

Pushing his disappointment aside, he walked toward the school, a pretty little flower-decked building, with a large recess yard surrounded by a green fence. It radiated youth, innocence, the beginning of life. The front door was locked. Sharko felt feverish. Whenever he got too close to a school, the memory of his daughter Eloise assailed him. He again imagined her among the other children, playing with wooden blocks or running around with her friends.

With a sigh, he rang the intercom and introduced himself. The principal, Justine Brevard, received him in her office. A stout, genial-looking woman of around fifty, who must have inspired the children's trust. Obviously, she had heard about the double murder in the forest, like everyone else in town.

“It's horrible, what happened to those young people. But how can I help you?”

Sharko cleared his throat.

“Well, it's like this . . . We've been able to establish a fairly precise profile of the killer. We think he's between twenty and thirty years old, that he's tall, has a stocky build, lives in this city, and especially that he's left-handed. If I'm not mistaken, teachers normally compile aptitude reports on the pupils in their class, is that right?”

“That's correct. We note down coordination, verbal ability, class participation, and a number of other factors.”

“Including hand dominance? Left- or right-handed?”

A spark flashed in the administrator's eyes.

“I see where you're heading with this. You think your killer attended our school when he was younger, is that it? And that our records might help you identify him?”

“Your school or some other in the city, yes. I'm simply looking for something that must be relatively uncommon in a class of twenty-odd children: boys who are bigger and stronger than the others, and who are also left-handed—that's the most important criterion. I'm interested in the mideighties through early nineties. Would you still have those records?”

She stood up.

“Fortunately, we do. Come with me . . .”

They headed toward a room filled with file cabinets, arranged by year. The director started with the drawer marked 1985 and pulled out various envelopes containing the children's administrative records. The files were even more detailed than he'd hoped. And in each was an identity photo of the child in question.

“We fill out these forms every trimester,” Justine Brevard explained, “to evaluate the child's progress and his or her aptitude in class. See, here's a space for hand dominance. And room for comments about things like health problems, food restrictions, or allergies.”

She wet her index finger and quickly leafed through the records. She pulled one out.

“I have a left-handed girl.”

“You can put that one back. According to the DNA, we know our killer is a male.”

She searched through some more until she got to the end.

“That's it for 1985. Nothing here, apart from that left-handed girl.”

“That's fine—the fewer there are, the better.”

“Let's try the next ones.”

Sharko helped. Together, they gathered all the records for left-handed boys. Each time, there might be one, two, in rare cases three boys in a grade, which yielded about twenty records for the ten years in question.

Among those records, Sharko looked carefully at the faces, the body type, the height, using the class and identity photos. He came across blond and brown-haired boys, curly-haired boys, boys with glasses, shy or self-confident, of different sizes, planted in the midst of their classmates. Some, frail or small, didn't correspond to the image the inspector had of the killer, but could they be eliminated even so? Wasn't it possible that they could have sprouted up later in childhood? So many years between then and now. Facing this reality, the cop understood that the task would be harder than he'd thought. And besides, when he got down to it, he couldn't know for sure. The killer might well have lived in Fontainebleau for only a few years and grown up somewhere else. He wasn't at all sure his hunch would pan out. Nevertheless, he asked for a photocopy of all the records he had in hand, thanked the director, and left the establishment feeling a bit down.

The one positive point: it had only taken about a half hour.

Sitting in his car, Sharko tried to refine his selection, to favor certain profiles among all those left-handers. He chose the biggest, strongest boys. He refined it further: some of the children would now be thirty, which might be a bit old for going to dance clubs. Given this, he made another pile. But even then, he was still holding nine records. Kids of four or five, all smiling, but otherwise no different from one another. It was impossible to put one profile ahead of another. No demonic looks, no black flames in the eyes. Only innocence shone from these faces.

Discouraged though he was, he pushed on, telling himself that, at worst, Major Case in Versailles could take DNA samples of all these individuals, to compare with the traces left at the crime scene. In certain sensitive cases, they sometimes took mass samples after they'd narrowed it down to a rough grouping. It was expensive, but the truth was worth it.

He visited more schools. Despite outward differences, they all took similar care in storing records, a testament to the national education system. The hours passed; Sharko amassed his photocopied sheets, eliminated as many as he could, put them aside, without any really jumping out at him. He had hoped that a connection would occur in his head, an intuition that would immediately guide him to the right file. But nothing, absolutely nothing . . . These kids were too young, still had their childish faces: puppy fat and happy looks. How could he make out a killer from that? As Levallois had pointed out, our genetic fingerprints aren't displayed on our foreheads.

He stopped in a café for some strong coffee, just as a pick-me-up. After calling his partner, who hadn't made any progress either, he downed a sandwich and dozed off in the front seat of his car. Half an hour later, he woke up and got back on the road, pasty-mouthed.

The Victoire School, second-to-last of the seven.
Maybe a symbolic name
, Sharko thought to himself with a sigh. Intercom, director, introductions, explanation, archives. A circuit he was starting to know by heart, and that was wearing on his nerves.

Once more, the years passed by, the records piled up. Sharko was awestruck by such an even distribution of left-handers in nature: each time, the proportions remained roughly the same. Zero, one, or two lefties per class of twenty: it was so precise, as if nature itself had put these classes together. He remembered what the primatologist had said, the data in Louts's thesis, which predicted that in a few hundred or thousand years, there wouldn't be any more left-handers at all. Certain classes in the nursery schools already attested to that disappearance.

Once again, names, faces, physiognomies paraded by his eyes. As he was mechanically sifting through the records, putting the occasional ones for left-handed boys aside, he felt his heart turn over in his chest.

With trembling fingers, he picked up the record he'd just set aside.

It was from 1992. The boy, born in 1988, would be twenty-two today.

His name was Félix Lambert. Left-handed. Light brown hair, blue eyes, lightly tanned skin, and fairly big, even though some in the class photo were bigger. At first glance, nothing extraordinary. Sharko had already come across physiques like this in earlier records.

And if his gaze hadn't fallen on the space for additional comments, he would simply have put this record with the others, among the potentials.

But in the comments area, someone had written in capital letters: “No milk products. Lactose intolerant.”

Sharko stared at the child's gaze, his toothy smile. He ran his finger over that angelic face.

The cop was almost certain he had, before him, the identity of the man who had killed the hiking couple. The same identity that Stéphane Terney had hidden in the pages of his book, mixed in among long, harmless sequences.

The inspector didn't bother continuing his search and told Levallois to stop his own right away. He thanked the director and ran out of the school building. Five minutes later, he was peeling through the city phone directory, at a corner post office that was about to close its doors. He found two Lamberts in Fontainebleau: Félix and Bernard. Same telephone number. Probably father and son . . .

He picked up his young partner in front of the car rental and sped off with the address before his eyes.

At the end of the road, a killer was waiting.