by Cédric Sire
They had cut—torn?—off every bit of skin, from forehead to neck.
This time, reality cracked. Utter chaos ripped through her mind.
Eloïse felt a hand grabbing the back of her neck.
It was Claude Salaville’s.
3
Her blood froze.
But there was no way she would give up now. She was going to fight as long as she could.
She turned and bit at the hand clutching her.
Howling, the man drew back. A brief respite. But then she saw Roman Salaville. She hadn’t noticed him come in. He lunged at her and wrapped his huge arms around her. His brother planted himself in front of her and slapped her. Once. Twice.
“No!”
“Oh yes,” Roman whispered in her ear. “We have to.”
“No! No!” the girl shrieked in vain.
While the fat man held her tight against himself, Claude put a strap around her ankles. He fastened it with a good yank.
Now she understood what they were going to do to her. That’s why they had abducted her. And it was worse than anything she could have imagined.
Claude slid a butcher’s s-hook into the strap, bruising her ankles, and walked to the barn wall to activate a pulley. A thick rope tightened. All of a sudden Eloïse was hoisted upward. The world turned over, her body upside down. Her hands clawed the air as blood rushed to her head and throbbed in her temples. She could not scream anymore. She was yanked higher and jerked with every turn of the crank.
Having gotten her to the desired height, the man secured the rope, and then returned to her, boning knife in hand. The bluish blade, razor-sharp, glinted in the barn’s half-light.
“Roman, get another bucket. Hurry.”
Eloïse Lombard struggled to free herself. Impossible. She was suspended by her feet beside the previous victim. The skinned face almost pressed against hers.
She began to pray. To Jesus, Buddha—any deity that would hear her pleas. Now only a miracle could save her.
Claude came closer, edging his knife toward her naked stomach. She felt the cold blade on her genitals.
Suddenly, the shrill sound of a bell rang out.
The knife slipped from her skin.
The ringing was so loud, the roof and beams shook; dust and dirt whirled down.
It lasted about ten seconds, then stopped.
The brothers looked at each other, their eyes filled with concern.
The bell blasted once more. Longer this time. Again, the ceiling’s beams shivered under the assault.
Claude took a step back.
Roman’s eyes widened.
“Want me to go check it out?” he asked.
Claude glanced at the hanging girl, then his brother.
“No. You’re too damned stupid. If it’s the cops, you’ll get fucked. I’m going. Here.”
He handed Roman the boning knife.
Then he walked over to an old wooden cupboard, weighed down with tools, and opened the middle drawer. He pulled out a shotgun, then a box of shells.
He rushed to the barn’s doors.
“You stay here, got it? You keep an eye on the little bitch and wait till I get back.”
The bell rang a third time, with even more persistence. Whoever was at the door was running out of patience.
Claude left the barn and headed for the house. Roman scratched his gut, thinking. He turned to the girl hanging before him and, eyeing her slender body, broke into a grin as he traced the curve of her buttocks with his fingers.
Eloïse Lombard said nothing. She started to pray again.
4
The woman let go of the doorbell for a few seconds, then went at it again. In the depths of the house, the high-pitched bell rang once more.
Impatient, she shook her head. The tips of her distinctive white hair flowed over the collar of her black jacket. Beneath the leather, her legs were molded into a strict pantsuit.
Standing in the dirt road that led to the farm, Inspector Alexandre Vauvert watched silently. He had agreed to follow his colleague all the way out here, but he was not sure he liked the idea. Over the past years, he had heard a lot about this woman, not all of it positive. One thing everyone agreed on was that Inspector Eva Svärta was the most able profiler the Homicide Unit had seen in a very long time. She specialized in anything even remotely connected with sects, particularly cases involving the occult. People said she really liked nabbing the serial killers, the real ones. She had a reputation for being the best at it. So when the Paris headquarters had ordered her to join his own unit, down south in the city of Toulouse, Vauvert did not have a say.
Anyway, she was the one who had established the connection between the missing girls.
Up until now, he had to admit, she had made no mistakes.
When she had called him at dawn to say she had found a link to the Salaville brothers, he had not argued, either.
The albino inspector rang again.
“What the hell are they doing in there?”
“Maybe they’re not home?” Vauvert suggested.
“Don’t be silly. You saw that their SUV is here. It’s their only vehicle.”
“All the shutters are closed, though.”
“And you don’t find that odd?”
Vauvert sighed.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong. But what can we do? The judge will never sign a warrant without any hard evidence.”
Eva Svärta turned to face him, a grin on her thin lips. She wore the sunglasses that never left her face. People said her eyes were so sensitive, she would go blind in daylight without them. But so much was said about this woman, Vauvert preferred to ignore the gossip.
“We can get all the evidence we need,” she insisted. “All we have to do is go inside.”
“You’re that sure that these guys are involved?”
“More than sure. I can feel this kind of thing.”
“All right then. But maybe they’re somewhere out back, and they just can’t hear us.”
The profiler fumed.
“Are you kidding me? That damned bell, I’m sure you can hear it everywhere on the mountain. I’d like to know what kind of person is paranoid enough to have that kind of system installed in the first place.”
Vauvert let out a groan. As far as he was concerned, it did not prove much. His guess was that most of the roughnecks in the area had that kind of equipment, some probably even more outrageous alarms. He knew for a fact that some of the locals even had wolf traps for any hunters or mushroom pickers who might cross onto their property. But it was their land, after all. They had every right to protect it, and he figured that the folks out here did not harm anyone by living the way they chose to, protecting themselves from tourists and other intruders. Svärta was from the city. She did not understand.
“Either way, there’s no getting away from procedure,” he reminded her. “And so far, we have no evidence. You’re never going to get a warrant without something solid. Maybe first we should try to…”
“It’s them,” she snapped.
Vauvert shrugged, giving up.
“Okay, I’m listening.”
He knew that there was no arguing with the woman, and he did not have the heart for it. Let her do it the way she wanted. He knew how to spot real cops. Eva Svärta was one of them. A predator hunting predators. You could not reason with such a person. He knew that firsthand. He was the same way himself.
He went over what little information they had. Eloïse Lombard had disappeared the day before in the early evening, a little more than fifteen hours ago. It was Inspector Svärta who made the connection between this abduction and the other missing-persons cases she’d been working for some weeks already. Five young women in all, ages seventeen to twenty-three, who had gone missing in three southern regions—Aveyron, Ariège, and Tarn. All in the past eight months.
Before she had been handed the cases, the various local police departments had done little more than shelve the reports. They had foun
d no evidence indicating actual kidnapping, even though all the girls had similar profiles. SUV tracks had been found in front of the homes of three of the girls, who lived alone, but that did not prove anything. Four-wheel-drive vehicles were more than common in rural areas.
One detail had caught Svärta’s attention. It was an inscription found in the apartment of a young female student who had just moved to the suburbs of Espalion in northern Aveyron. Hers was the second reported disappearance. While everything else appeared tidy in her home, the bathroom mirror had been smashed. On a tile wall of the shower, someone had used lipstick to write:
The local police had paid little attention to it. For them, the scribbling was meaningless and a trivial detail. They completed their investigation as usual, making sure to take photos of all the walls and to list the broken mirror. Their report made its way to the stack of unsolved missing-persons files.
For the Parisian homicide inspector, though, it was nothing to be taken lightly. Those were the names of demonic deities. And they were found in the home of a missing person. There was just no way she could ignore this. She demanded to be kept informed of any other disappearances in that part of the country.
It did not take long. When Amandine Munõz, who lived in Pamiers, over a hundred miles from the other girl, also went missing, no trace of forcible entry was detected. Yet the mirror hanging in her living room was broken.
This time, a permanent marker had been used. The inscription was spread across the bedroom wallpaper:
Eva Svärta did not have the slightest doubt anymore. Something was happening. Something extremely unsettling. In less than a week, she had identified five disappearances under similar circumstances. She asked to be transferred immediately to the Southern Headquarters, to Vauvert’s unit, which was already investigating two of the cases.
This was intuition only, a series of abstract cross checks, based on a purely theoretical behavioral analysis.
But Vauvert had to admit it all made sense. At this point in the game, it was a lead.
He glanced at the large dust-covered SUV parked a bit farther on. The farm’s gate was padlocked, and there was a fence to discourage any visitors. This could possibly be it. To him, it would be a flat-out stroke of luck if her suspicions turned out to be correct, but there was a chance.
One thing was certain. If one of the Salavilles was involved in the case, he had just made a fatal mistake. He had abducted Eloïse Lombard too hastily. Both brothers had records. Both had a history of violence and psychosis, punctuated with stays in mental institutions. Which didn’t necessarily prove anything. Still…
“No matter what, we have to wait for the others,” Vauvert reminded her. “They should be here soon.”
Eva Svärta spun around, swirling her white hair. She punched the doorbell. The horn blasted again.
All the while, Vauvert looked around, surveying his surroundings.
The Pyrenees mountain range, covered with verdant fir trees, rose in the background.
He had to admit that this farm, surrounded by forest, was giving him the creeps. Inspector Svärta was not the only one to have instincts. He knew they were in an ideal spot to hold girls captive without anyone ever noticing. They could scream all they wanted. There were no neighbors to hear them.
And all those shutters shut tight in the middle of the day. That was pretty weird.
Vauvert checked his phone, but there was no signal. The mountains had to be messing up reception. It was impossible to find out where the rest of the unit was. They were probably still a few miles away, winding up the narrow forest road. No one had ever bothered to pave this access road, which looked more like a hiking trail.
From the corner of his eye, he spotted a shadow gliding along the path.
He tensed, his hand sliding to his gun. But no, it must have been his imagination. He carefully scanned the trees lining the road, all of them tall and dark. Beyond them rose the vast forests of the Ariège Mountains. For some reason, he wondered whether there were still wolves around here.
The very thought sent a shiver down his spine.
He shook himself. Wolves? There were no wolves in this area anymore. There hadn’t been for a very long time.
Why did the thought suddenly cross his mind?
“We won’t get anywhere like this,” Svärta said, letting go of the doorbell.
An almost palpable silence fell on the farm.
“Don’t you think that’s weird?” he asked. “Listen.”
Svärta looked at him.
“To what?”
“Well, that’s precisely my point. We can’t hear anything.” He gestured at the trees surrounding them. Indeed, there was no sound. No birds singing, nothing at all. “I don’t know much about the countryside, but still… It’s incredibly quiet around here, don’t you think?”
“You said it.”
Vauvert shrugged.
“I know what you have in mind, Eva, but we should wait for the rest of the unit. If you’re right…”
The woman grinned. Her teeth looked like pearls.
“I’m always right. The girl is here. I know it. Every minute that we spend waiting lowers our chances of finding her alive.”
Vauvert mumbled. This woman was a pain in the ass. But she wasn’t totally wrong. And the rest of the unit still wasn’t here.
He saw that she had stopped grinning. Chin raised, nostrils dilated, she looked like a wild animal that had sensed something.
“Eva? What is it?”
The woman turned her sunglasses toward him.
“Can’t you smell it?” she asked, her voice low.
“What is it that I’m supposed to smell?”
“Blood.”
Vauvert breathed in. There was a hint of decay in the air, but the woods were always rife with that kind of organic scent.
“I don’t know. I…”
He stopped. He thought he had seen a shadow pass again.
Like the shadow of a dog?
He absolutely hated dogs.
A dog?
Or was it a wolf?
He turned back to his colleague to chase away these absurd thoughts.
“All right, this place is freaking me out, and I trust your instincts. What do we do now?”
Svärta pointed her chin toward the door.
“We’ve wasted enough time already, don’t you think?
She gave the door a hard kick.
It didn’t budge.
She took a step back and threw herself at the door again.
Some dust fell from the frame, but the door held up.
Vauvert realized that they both used the same methods, all things considered.
“All right. Move aside.” He took three steps back and then, stone-faced, charged the door. As his shoulder hit the wood, the planks cracked and then split like twigs. The door crashed to the floor. “There. For the record, the door was like that when we got here.”
The woman nodded, unable to hold back a grin.
“We’re on the same page, inspector.”
Vauvert drew his gun and stood in the doorway. In front of him was a kind of great hall, where he could make out a huge wooden sideboard in one corner but nothing else. The rest was engulfed in darkness.
“Okay, follow me.”
He stepped in.
Everything happened very quickly.
Eva Svärta cried out.
He understood too late what she meant—to take cover, quick.
He saw the figure at the far end of the hallway.
At the same time, his brain recognized the familiar sound of a shotgun being cocked.
Vauvertfelt every muscle react as the sensation of impending death seized him. He threw himself back, even though he knew he would never be quick enough to get entirely out of the way.
The detonation rang out in the hallway. The glare of the gunshot blinded him, like a burst of sun in pitch dark. He felt the buckshot hit him full blast, pushing the air out of his chest and tossi
ng him back in a spray of red, prickling pain.
Everything went black before he hit the ground.
5
His blackout lasted for just a split second. The moment he hit the ground, the stabbing pain made Vauvert come to.
The man in the house fired once again. Vauvert felt the buckshot whiz by inches above him.
The next moment, Inspector Svärta was retaliating, firing her Beretta multiple times.
Vauvert felt like he was in the middle of a street-gang shootout. He shut his eyes until the flashes of light in his retina began to fade.
The exchange of gunfire didn’t last long. A door slammed inside the house. Their attacker had retreated.
For a few seconds, Vauvert remained on his back, wracked in pain.
Then he cautiously opened his eyes and saw the leather-clad figure of Eva Svärta crouching next to him. She leaned over him, her white hair a silky curtain.
“Good thing I forced you to wear the bullet-proof vest, huh?”
Vauvert didn’t reply. He put his hand on his chest. The vest had saved his life, indeed, but it was rather damaged now, and Vauvert felt blood oozing under his clothes—and razor blade-like sensations all over his chest.
“Holy fucking shit. It tickles.”
“You hurt?”
“Scratches.” He meant it. He had seen worse. “But it always feels weird to get shot,” he added, feeling under his clothes. When he pulled his hand out, it was wet with blood. “Shit.”
The woman rose up like a flame, noiselessly, except for the creak of her leather jacket. She lifted her Beretta and pointed it at the wide open door.
“I’m going in. You go around the house. See if we can catch them in the rear before they get organized.”
“No way we’re splitting up,” Vauvert objected.
The woman had already slipped into the blackness of the house.
He frowned. The damned Parisian. He massaged the back of his left shoulder and tried out his arm. He could move it, and he wasn’t oozing blood anymore. He’d be okay.
He pulled himself to his feet.
6
While some of the things people said about Eva Svärta were untrue, some things were entirely correct. She never bothered denying any of the nonsense people spread about her. Neither did she go to lengths to explain herself. Her status in the Homicide Unit was complicated enough already.
