Bred to Kill (28 page)

Sharko nodded energetically.

“Apart from the sect business, it holds up.”

“Yes. When we look at the bottom line of our two investigations, it does hold up. Terney might not have delivered every one of those babies, but he was in contact with the mothers. He, or those two other fanatics working with him.”

Sharko segued immediately.

“Anything else?”

“Yes, something important. Beginning of 2010, theft of the Cro-Magnon and its genome in Lyon.”

The inspector picked up the photo of the three paintings. He concentrated on the one showing the close-up of the prehistoric man lying on a table.

“Right. What was really behind that theft? We haven't quite figured that out yet.”

“We haven't had time. Maybe now's the moment, since we're on a roll.”

She took out the photos she'd gotten from the genome center in Lyon and laid them on the table.

“Here's a crime scene from thirty thousand years ago. Cro-Magnon, left-handed, age pinpointed between twenty and thirty, slaughters three Neanderthals with a harpoon. Terney stole the Cro-Magnon, then photographed it and mounted the photo in a frame.”

Sharko looked carefully at the photos, one by one.

“I wonder where that mummy is now.”

“Doesn't this crime scene remind you of something?” asked Lucie.

“It's exactly what happened at the Lamberts' the other day.”

“Or what happened with Carnot and Clara a year ago.”

Sharko paused a moment, thinking, then finally said:

“The same inexplicable fury. An explosion of pure violence.”

Lucie nodded.

“And we can assume Terney
didn't
deliver the Cro-Magnon.”

They exchanged brief smiles. Lucie continued:

“Let's look at the seven profiles in the book. For reasons we don't know yet, Terney, in the 1980s, studied a group of children with certain genetic traits in common, including lactose intolerance. Children who are predisposed to violence and begin murdering people when they reach adulthood. At the time, Terney is interested in their blood and DNA. He seems to be looking for something in particular.”

Sharko popped a piece of salmon sushi into his mouth.

“The mythical violence gene?”

“We already talked about that—it doesn't exist.”

“We know that now. But couldn't he have believed in it in the eighties? And regardless, aren't we dealing with some kind of hidden impulse, an outburst of violence that seems to come out of nowhere? It makes you wonder.”

Lucie stared at him for a few seconds before answering.

“To tell you the truth, I have no idea. But . . . let me play this out. So, imagine that the discovery of the cave and that prehistoric massacre comes to Terney's attention. He makes an immediate connection: what if what he was looking for in those seven children—or what he'd noticed, or what he'd artificially induced by giving the pregnant women some kind of medicine—had been
naturally
present in that Cro-Magnon man? So with the help of those guys at the racecourse, or maybe acting alone, he gets in touch with a biologist at the genome center in Lyon, waits until they decode the genome, then steals the data at just the right moment, without leaving a trace.”

Lucie raised her finger, eyes alight.

“Imagine how important this genome is for Terney. Now he's got not only the genetic profile of the seven children, but also the entire, decoded DNA molecule of an ancestor going back more than thirty thousand years. An ancestor who butchered an entire family, and who falls into precisely the same category that Terney seems to be studying.”

“Another of his ‘children,' so to speak.”

“Exactly. This is a major discovery for him, monstrous as it is. Perhaps
the
great discovery of his life.”

“Where are you going with this?”

She looked at the photo of Cro-Magnon in its frame.

“The gynecologist was an extremely cautious man, meticulous, and more than a little paranoid. He always protected his discoveries but left hidden clues, as if he couldn't resist having his little joke on the world: the genetic codes in his book, the phoenix and placenta paintings, and those tapes he kept locked away in his study.”

“And that he stashed under the floorboards in his house.”

“Right. So don't you think he would have preserved the information about the Cro-Magnon genome somewhere? Wouldn't he have protected it like all the rest?”

“That's why his killer took all his computer equipment.”

Lucie shook her head.

“No, no. Terney wouldn't have been satisfied with a simple computer backup. It was too obvious, and too easy to steal. All the virus protection in the world can't keep that stuff safe, and hardware can fail—he was too smart for that. And too extravagant as well.”

“You're thinking of that third picture, is that it? The Cro-Magnon photo?”

“Of course. But . . . how do we figure it out? I know there's a logic to it somewhere.”

After a moment's reflection, Sharko bounded from his chair and snapped his fingers.

“Good lord, that's it! The key and the lock!”

Lucie frowned.

“What about the key and the lock?”

“I think I've figured it out. Are you ready for a quick trip to Paris?”

 • • • 

Sharko had easily popped the seals on the door to Terney's house. Lucie waited in the street, hidden from sight, watching to make sure no one should catch them unaware. Quickly, he crept upstairs, heading for the library. With his gloved hands, he unhooked the frame with the photo of Cro-Magnon, rolled the picture up, and squeezed it in his hand. Two minutes later, he was back outside.

And heading for the fourteenth arrondissement.

 • • • 

Daniel Mullier was now wearing a tracksuit, but otherwise he had barely moved since the last time. The same box of pens, same lit computer, same Volume 342. Sharko had warned Lucie to prepare for a shock when she saw that strange room, where a man's life came down to several miles of paper. At the threshold, she looked quietly around, while Vincent Audebert, the director, approached Daniel alone. Sharko remained silently in the background.

Audebert entered the autistic's visual field, said a few words to gain his attention, then slid the photo of Cro-Magnon and some blank sheets of paper in front of him. At that point, Daniel interrupted his incomprehensible task. With a slightly awkward movement, he picked up the photo and stared at it fixedly. Slowly, as if the whole thing were following an irrefutable logic, he took a blank sheet of paper without looking away, changed his pen for a red one, and spontaneously began jotting down series of letters.

Audebert discreetly backed away, rubbing his chin with one hand.

“I can't get over it—it worked. The photo is a trigger. Stéphane Terney used Daniel like . . .”

“A living memory,” Sharko completed. “An anonymous autistic, lost inside a rest home. The key to open the lock.”

He and Lucie watched the young man work in silence. The red ballpoint flew over the paper. Daniel was hunched over, concentrated, writing at breakneck speed. After half an hour, the young autistic pushed the sheets and the photo to one side and seamlessly returned to his earlier task.

The director of the home picked up the sheets and handed them to Sharko.

“A DNA sequence,” he whispered, “written from that mummy's photo. Does this mean you have the genetic code that belonged to an actual Cro-Magnon?”

“Seems like it,” answered Sharko. “Does this sequence mean anything to you?”

“How could it? It's just a succession of letters, and this time it doesn't even look like a genetic fingerprint. I'm not well versed enough to know what it means. You'll have to ask a geneticist.”

Lucie also looked carefully at the papers.

“This might be the famous hidden DNA code. The key to this whole business.”

The two ex-detectives thanked the director, who accompanied them to the exit.

“Good-bye, Daniel,” murmured Lucie, who had stayed behind with the young autistic for a few seconds. But Daniel didn't hear, encased in his bubble. Lucie finally left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

Once they were in the parking lot, Sharko stared at the sequences with a worried face.

“We're getting too carried away, Lucie. We've got the data, but . . . what do we do with it? We can't access the case files anymore.”

“Why, because you've been suspended? So what? Listen . . . I know it's serious, I didn't mean it like that, but . . . it shouldn't keep us from moving forward. We can keep going without them. We've got this DNA sequence, the tape from the Amazon, and we can get all of it to the right experts first thing tomorrow morning. A geneticist for the sequence and an anthropologist for the tape.”

“And what if we did, Lucie . . . ?”

“Don't be defeatist, we've got work to do. Félix Lambert and his father are dead, but they had family. We should question his mother about her pregnancy, her time in prenatal care. We try to find out if she was given any medicines, something unusual while she was expecting. If we find a connection with Terney, that'll already be a huge step. Maybe we can even track down those guys from the racecourse. We'll keep moving forward the best we can.”

Lucie looked at the three mysterious sheets of paper.

“I need to know what Phoenix was about. I'll go as far as I have to, with or without you.”

“Would you go all the way into the jungle and risk your life? Just for some answers?”

“Not just for some answers. So I can finish grieving for my daughter.”

The inspector heaved a long sigh.

“Let's go home. You can polish off the sushi and recharge your batteries. You're going to need it.”

Lucie gratified him with a wide smile.

“So we're on? You're coming with me?”

“I wouldn't be smiling if I were you, Lucie. There's nothing funny about what we're likely to do or find. People have been killed over this.”

He looked at his watch.

“Let's head to the apartment and grab a bit of rest. At ten o'clock, we hit the road again.”

“Ten o'clock? Where are we going?”

“To get some answers at the forensic institute.”

T
he section of Paris that looked out onto Quai de la Rapée was dozing peacefully. Small yellowish lights floated in the cabins of the barges. Orange reflections danced on the water, disappeared, formed again elsewhere, in perpetual motion. Despite the apparent calm, a screech of iron and rubber regularly disturbed the tranquility of the place: the few riders of the elevated metro line were being carried toward their homes or heading out to meet Paris by night.

Ten thirty p.m. Jacques Levallois, Nicolas Bellanger, and another officer had just come out of the forensic building. Hidden in the Peugeot several yards away, Sharko and Lucie could clearly make out the red tips of their cigarettes floating in the dark like fireflies.

“They're with a cop from Major Case,” murmured Sharko. “They were the ones investigating the murders in Fontainebleau and we pulled the rug out from under them. I'll bet the shit hit the fan over
that
.”

Under the caress of the streetlamps, the three men talked, yawned, paced back and forth, clearly agitated. After five minutes, they got into their respective cars and drove off. The two ex-cops scrunched down when the headlights swept over them. They gave each other a complicit look, like two misbehaving kids trying not to get caught.

“Look what you make me do,” whispered the old cop. “With you, I feel like a teenager again.”

Lucie was nervously fingering her cell phone. She had called Lille an hour before, but Juliette was already sleeping. Her mother had all but hung up on her, furious at her long absence.

They waited a bit longer, then got out and walked into the night. Sharko had a shoulder bag in which he'd stashed the three sheets with Daniel's markings. The institute stood before them, a kind of great whale that gobbled up every corpse within a ten-mile radius. The main door opened like a huge maw ready to swallow you whole, to suck you into a belly filled with stiffs of every variety: accidents, suicides, murders. Lucie suddenly stopped walking. Her fists jammed into her sides, and she froze at the building's austere entrance. Sharko went back toward her.

“Are you sure you're okay? You've barely said a word since before. If it's still too hard to go into a morgue, just say so.”

Lucie took a deep breath. It was now or never: she had to chase the old images out of her head and work past her suffering. She resumed walking.

“Let's go.”

“Stick close. And don't say a word.”

They went through the entrance and immediately the temperature dropped. The thick redbrick walls let nothing filter through, especially not hope. Sharko felt relieved when he recognized the same night watchman he'd often seen in the past: he wouldn't have to use that stupid fake police ID Lucie had made for him.

“Evening,” he said in a flat voice. “The double autopsy—what room's it in?”

The man gave Lucie a quick glance, then jerked his head without asking questions.

“Number two.”

“Thanks.”

Side by side, the two ex-detectives entered the shadowy tunnels with their parsimonious lighting. The building was vast, the walk endless. Just then Lucie caught sight of a small square of yellow ahead, the lighted window in the security door, and without warning she was transported one year back. She was in the Carnot house, with the SWAT team. She saw Grégory Carnot flattened to the ground by the cops, while she ran up the stairs, breathless . . .

Suddenly a voice broke through, close to her ear.

“Hey! Hey, Lucie! Are you with us?”

She realized she was leaning against the wall, her forehead in her hands.

“I . . . I'm sorry. Something . . . weird just happened. I saw myself in Carnot's house, running upstairs to find Juliette.”

Sharko looked at her silently, encouraging her to continue.

“The strange thing is that I have no memory of actually entering the house.”

Her eyes grew troubled.

“The men entered Carnot's. I got there a bit later, with the second team. They told me to stay downstairs, they kept me from going in. Then one of the officers came back to the entrance, holding Juliette . . .”

Lucie raised her hands to her head, eyes half closed.

“It's so strange. It's . . . it's like there are two different realities.”

Sharko gently took hold of her wrist.

“Come on, I'll bring you back to the car.”

She resisted.

“No, I'm fine. Let me come with you. Please.”

After a moment, Sharko let go of her wrist. Reluctantly he walked ahead of her, entering the room first.

Paul Chénaix was standing between two empty dissection tables, rinsing the floor with a water jet. Another ME whom the inspector had seen before was sticking labels on tubes and specimen jars. Indifferent, he greeted them with a nod and a tired “Hey.” After at least three hours of autopsies, the two men must have been exhausted.

Chénaix interrupted his rinsing and looked at his watch in surprise.

“Franck? Your boss said you weren't coming this evening.” He shot a glance at Lucie. “There are more romantic places to bring a date. Are you all right, Miss? You don't look like you're feeling too well.”

Lucie walked forward unsteadily and held out her hand.

“I'm feeling fine. I'm . . .”

“A friend and colleague from Lille,” Sharko interrupted.

“Colleague from Lille?”

A thin smile above the man's perfectly trimmed goatee.

“My first wife came from Lille. I know the city well.”

Sharko quickly changed the subject without giving Lucie time to answer.

“Give me the broad strokes of the Lambert autopsies.”

“Why don't you ask your coworkers? They were just here.”

Sharko thought quickly. Apparently Bellanger hadn't let on that he'd been taken off the case.

“And they're probably on the way home now to see their wives and kids,” said the inspector. “It'll only take you a few minutes, if you stick to what's relevant. I need to work on the file tonight. It's important.”

Chénaix set down his pressure sprayer and called to the other ME.

“I have to go to the morgue for a minute. I'll be back.”

In his bloodstained scrubs, he headed toward a draining board.

“I'll bring this with me.”

He picked up a jar filled with a translucent, yellowish liquid. Sharko screwed up his eyes: the container held something that looked like a human brain.

Dr. Chénaix walked in front of them in the hallway. As they headed downstairs, he murmured in Sharko's ear, “Can I talk in front of her?”

Sharko put a friendly hand on his shoulder.

“There's something you have to do for me, Paul. Don't breathe a word of our visit to anyone. Because of a screwup with the paperwork, I'm no longer on the case—I didn't want to say it in front of your colleague back there.”

Paul Chénaix frowned.

“You're putting me in an awkward position. This information's sensitive, and . . .”

“I know. But if anyone really does ask you about it, just tell them I lied to you. I'll take the heat.”

A brief pause.

“All right.”

Chénaix didn't ask any more questions; they both knew it was better that way. They arrived at the basement. The medical examiner pressed a switch. Crackling neons, dull lighting. No windows. Hundreds of metal drawers, aligned vertically and horizontally, as if in a macabre library. In a corner were bags full of clothes and shoes that no one knew what to do with; soon they'd be heading for the incinerator. Lucie, lagging slightly behind the two men, folded her arms and rubbed her shoulders. She felt cold.

Chénaix set the jar on a table against a wall, went over to a drawer, and pulled it out, revealing a corpse with slightly bluish skin. It seemed flaccid, more latex than dermis, and the veins were practically bulging through the surface. Every incision, from neck to pubis, had been carefully stitched up: if the family were to claim the body, it had to be presentable. Sharko moved as close as he could, practically pressed into the slide rail. The odor of rotting flesh was strong but still bearable. Chénaix pointed to certain parts of the corpse's anatomy and explained:

“The father was struck numerous times with a poker. The same weapon was used to perforate his vital organs. Several ribs were broken; the killer showed incredible strength. It was brutal and violent, and it all happened in just a few seconds. For the precise details, the exact location of the wounds and all that, it'll be in the report I give your chief tomorrow. If you want to read it, you'll have to work it out with him. Sorry, but no copies can leave this building . . .”

Sharko spent a few more seconds looking at the lacerated body, then nodded.

“I'll be fine without it. Now the son. He's the one I'm interested in.”

Chénaix left the drawer as it was and opened the one next to it. Félix Lambert's face was horribly disfigured but his skin was lighter colored, like pale wax. His powerful body filled the space like a block of ice.

“They look alike,” Sharko noted. “Same nose, same facial shape.”

“Father and son by blood, no doubt about it.”

Trembling slightly, Lucie had come farther forward. This really was one of the worst places in the entire world. All one found here were dead souls and shattered bodies. There was no aura, no warmth that might have suggested a human presence. She would have liked Sharko to hold her close, comfort her, warm her, but the inspector's eyes were dark, impenetrable, and entirely preoccupied with the investigation. Noticing her presence, the examiner stepped back a bit to leave her room.

“Cause of death is rupture of the cervical vertebrae. Here again, death was instantaneous, no question.”

“I can confirm that, I had a front-row seat. He threw himself out the window in front of me.”

“But even when the cause is as certain as it is here, protocol still demands we do a complete workup, A to Z. And sometimes we happen on a little pearl, like this time.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed his finger toward the corpse's brain. The scalp had been set back in place, but they could still make out the red, regular line left by the Stryker saw.

“In here is where it all happened. When I opened up, I saw that the brain presented with an incredible amount of deterioration around the frontal and prefrontal lobes. It was literally spongy, full of little holes. I'd never seen anything like it.”

He went to get the jar. The whitish mass floated in the liquid.

“Here, look at this . . .”

The two cops could plainly see the damage. The upper portion of the brain looked as if it had been chewed at by hundreds of tiny mice. The sponginess was remarkable.

“What
is
that?” asked Lucie, horrified.

“It seems to be an infection that gradually deteriorated the brain tissue, until it finally reached this stage. I cut some sections and examined the other part of the brain, the left hemisphere, to get a better sense of what was going on. I think the initial damage goes back months, perhaps even years, starting gradually and eventually getting to this point. Creutzfeldt-Jakob, the famous ‘mad cow' disease, produces exactly the same spongiform degeneration. But in this case, I can't find a trace of any known pathogen. The rest of the organism is completely intact.”

Silence enveloped them. Lucie stared at the two corpses with pursed lips. She thought about Grégory Carnot, who had died by ripping out his own throat. Had
his
brain wasted away like this?

“Do you think Félix Lambert could have killed those two hikers and his father because of this . . . thing?”

“It seems clear to me the two are related. The areas of the brain we consider the seat of emotions were strongly degraded. Almost as if they were invaded. And as I said, over a period of at least several months.”

Lucie blew on her hands. Like it or not, this discovery raised questions about Grégory Carnot's responsibility for his actions. This disease, with its particular form of degeneration, might have forced him to do what he did, independent of his will or his consciousness. The questions burst forth in her head. How had Félix Lambert contracted this “thing”? Was this what Terney had been so fixated on? And if so, how did it relate to the placenta and reproduction, or the fact that the gynecologist had been interested in Carnot even before his birth? Could certain kinds of medicine or prenatal treatments provoke such horrors in a child? And what did any of it have to do with the jungle?

The ME continued his explanations:

“The emotional centers, when they work right, release serotonin, a neurotransmitter that inhibits aggressive behavior. If something prevents the release of serotonin, the individual reverts to primitive forms of behavior that once allowed him to meet his fundamental needs in order to . . .”

“. . . to survive,” Sharko completed.

The examiner nodded.

“It's funny you should mention that and that we talked about lactose intolerance this afternoon—it all has to do with evolution, and it reminded me of something I learned when I was in med school.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, nothing, really. It's too silly. I didn't even mention it to your colleagues and I . . .”

“No, we'd like to hear.”

He hesitated a few moments, then said:

“Well, to tell you the truth, when I saw this brain today, I wondered how the man could still have been alive, how he could have fed himself or slept. He was living with a fifth of his brain completely shot to hell, which in itself would have knocked any neurologist back on his socks. Then I recalled the case of this guy Phineas Gage, a railway man in the 1800s, in America somewhere—they loved trotting out this story in neurology. What happened was, there was an explosion, and an iron bar went through the top of his skull, through his brain, and out his eye. Much of the left frontal lobe was destroyed, but Gage somehow managed to survive. But the thing was, from this honest, upstanding fellow, he suddenly became vulgar, aggressive, and hot-tempered, though he still retained all his wits and functions.”