Of Fever and Blood

by Cédric Sire

  To go puke, maybe?

  God, she so hated that moron.

  She tried to stay focused. It was always the same problem. There were too many people. It interfered with her thinking and brought back her little-girl fears. She tried her best to dispel those intrusions, to concentrate on the victim and her adult work. It was all she knew how to do, and she did it better than anybody else.

  And so, instinctively, the process started. For her, profiling was nothing abstract. She was blessed with a very real sense of empathy, which was a major asset in her line of work. Nevertheless, such a talent, which bordered on the irrational, had always doomed her. Spiteful guys like Deveraux could not comprehend what she did.

  Cops like Deveraux had been taught to consider the facts and the facts alone. They were in a rush to catch the perpetrator, that was all. But Eva put herself in the place of the victim. And at that very moment, a part of her mind that was wordless and imageless, impalpable and universal, started making its way, ever so slowly, into the motionless body of Barbara Meyer. As she slid under the skin and into the very being of the victim, she became both Eva Svärta and Barbara Meyer, who lay there, restrained on that bed. The inspector swallowed before asking, “Any chance this is the weapon used to mutilate the victim?”

  “It’s possible,” the pathologist admitted. “But I can’t confirm anything before the tests are done. Whoever did that to that girl was relentless. At the very least, there must be forty lacerations. I’m going to have to analyze every one of those wounds.”

  Eva took a long look at the victim, the slender legs held by the chains, the ghastly open wounds. Her senses absorbed the smell of the spilled blood, the fragrance of incense that lingered in the air, the bloody streaks on the walls and furniture.

  A maniac who took his sweet time.

  Who was set on finishing the job.

  Exactly like the Salaville brothers.

  The same position, the legs raised, the throat slit to drain the blood. Everything matches their MO.

  “I noticed bruises that seem older,” the pathologist added. “She’s got several of them on her thighs and arms. Maybe she was abused.”

  Eva examined the studio’s décor, thinking. A lot of black, purple and lace. She could see several vinyl corsets, a poster of the famous stripper Dita Von Teese, and books on Japanese bondage carefully lined up on a shelf.

  “No. My guess is that this girl was into fetish. Handcuffs, spankings, that sort of things. That can leave bruises.”

  “A pervert, was she,” Deveraux said from the doorway. “No wonder it got out of hand.”

  Eva turned around and shot him a furious look.

  “This girl is dead, Jean-Luc. If you can’t manage to be useful or to shut your face, go downstairs and help Garenne’s men check the garbage.”

  “You’re not my superior, honey, and screw you too.”

  “Hey, hey,” Leroy said. “Why don’t both of you cut it out? Please.”

  Deveraux huffed before heading back toward the hallway.

  “You dumb…” he mumbled into his beard.

  Eva did not bother trying to hear the rest of what he was saying. She turned to the pathologist, who stared at her, wide-eyed, not daring to intervene.

  “Sorry about that, Pauline. Let’s get back to it.” Her eyes landed on the rings screwed into the ceiling beam, through which the chains were running. “Erwan, you check out this setup? It was already here. All this stuff belongs to the victim. The killer used it, but these were her own toys.”

  “What are you thinking? Crime of passion?” he asked. “A BDSM session gone bad?”

  What am I thinking about? A barn filled with naked bodies. Girls with no faces.

  “No. This kind of brutality isn’t the result of bondage. It’s the work of a highly organized killer. Pauline, do you think…” She hesitated. “Do you think that the victim was drained of her blood intentionally?”

  It came out.

  The pathologist shrugged.

  “Sure looks like it. What’s certain is that a huge quantity of the blood is missing. Look at this.”

  Pauline Chadoutaud pointed at trails on the floor. A heavy object had been dragged through the blood, and, whatever it was, the object was no longer in this room.

  “Some sort of container, right?” Eva asked.

  “Precisely. Looks to me like the killer filled it with blood and took it with him.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Eva said. “We need the autopsy today.”

  “Well, I had a feeling you’d say that,” Chadoutaud answered.

  She gestured at her team to come help her.

  The men in white suits set to work. It took them several minutes to free her limbs and place her body in a bag, which they laid on the gurney.

  On the mattress, the imprint of Barbara Meyer’s agony was all that was left. The forensics team gathered the chains and took them away for their analysis.

  The victim’s blood was everywhere, like waves, some brown, some black and some still bright red, shining like diamonds on the walls, the furniture and the floor.

  What the murderer had not taken with him, anyway.

  18

  “So? What do you think?” Leroy asked.

  Eva walked into the apartment’s tiny bathroom.

  “That our killer had a precise and well-oiled modus operandi.” She scanned the room. The makeup next to the sink, all the cosmetics carefully arranged. The shower was sparkling clean. “Come take a look at this, Erwan. He took a shower here before he left. If he did things right, we’ll never find any trace of evidence. He did leave us something, though.”

  As her partner peeked though the doorway, Eva pointed to the shattered mirror. One single blow, right in the middle, had split the glass into thousands of fragments.

  “Oh,” Erwan said. “We’ve seen that before, haven’t we?”

  The inspector nodded.

  “A year ago. Down south,” she said.

  “The two brothers who slaughtered about twenty girls?”

  “Exactly. We’ve got the same MO.”

  “But, those guys were stopped from causing harm, right?”

  The euphemism Leroy used made her smile in spite of herself.

  “Oh yes. I was there when the pathologist cut them open. I can assure you they’re not the ones who butchered this kid.”

  “Then we’ve got a copycat,” Leroy said.

  Eva considered it.

  “Maybe.”

  “You know,” her colleague insisted, “the press gave so much coverage to those Black Mountain Vampires. It might have inspired some other nutcase. Don’t you think?”

  “The media never said anything about the broken mirrors. They didn’t say anything about the inscriptions, either. Look.”

  Leroy directed his attention to where she was pointing.

  Something was written on the wall, just above the mirror.

  And now that he was looking at it closely, he found two more words below the mirror:

  He lifted his camera to take a series of photos, and as he worked, Eva went back to the main room. Someone had opened the window to let in fresh air. Outside, faint sunlight was penetrating the thick layer of clouds. She could see the light reflected in the windows of the east-facing buildings. The city was beginning to stir. Soon, the streets would be filled with hurrying Parisians.

  Among them a killer with the blood of a nineteen-year-old girl on his hands.

  She turned around to look at the crime scene.

  Refocus, get back to the present.

  The forensics team, thankfully reduced to three people—a woman and two men—was getting to work in the apartment, carefully applying aluminum powder in search of fingerprints. Eva doubted they would get any results, but all bases had to be covered.

  The key was to work methodically. To avoid distraction.

  “So what do we know about the victim?” she asked Leroy.

  “For now, not a whole lot,” the detecti
ve confessed. “She went to the University of Sorbonne, and she lived here by herself. Her family lives up north. We’re trying to reach them. Garenne’s men have already interrogated the neighbor who found the body. She had only passed her in the stairwell before, and didn’t have much more to tell. There are two more tenants upstairs, but they’re not home right now.”

  Eva registered the information.

  And dove back into the victim’s identity, projecting herself into the victim’s shoes.

  Here she was at home. In her studio apartment overfilled with bookcases, clothes and shoeboxes. She had burned some incense—Spiritual Guide, to be precise. Eva recognized the scent, which lingered in the air, along with the stench. She ran her fingertips on the little shelf sagging under piles of books. Manga, art books, a lot of erotica. Books that had been read and re-read, their edges cracked after too many manipulations and stacked in unlikely piles.

  And, among the books, several glass-framed photos.

  “So that’s what she looked like?” Leroy said. He let go of a whistle. “She really was pretty.”

  In the photos, the girl had the round face of a child, enhanced by retro-looking bangs. And in one of them, she even wore an extremely tight vinyl corset that accentuated the curves of her slender body. A tattoo was visible on her right hip. It was a flock of bats taking flight.

  “We know that Barbara enjoyed the Goth style,” Eva said. “You don’t find many parties of that sort in town. If her attacker spotted her in a club, we need to get a list of the places where she was hanging out lately.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Leroy said with a nod.

  Eva looked at the incense burner where the sticks of Spiritual Guide had burned. Above it, on the wall, was the Dita Von Teese poster, as well as a poster for a Marilyn Manson concert, faded and partly torn, obviously ripped off a billboard on the street.

  The remote control was on the stereo. She grabbed it and pressed play. Clear notes, synthetic and repetitive, punctuated by a minimalist bass, rose from the speakers. A looping, clinical beat. Then came the voice, sepulchral and distorted, almost incomprehensible.

  “See you in hell.”

  The three forensic scientists stopped what they were doing. They stared at Eva.

  “See you in hell. I’m sure we’ll meet again. In hell.”

  Eva ignored the eyes on her. Nothing existed but her inner world.

  “See you…”

  Barbara Meyer’s world.

  “…in Hell.”

  Carefully following the plastic strip on the floor, she went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed—much to the dismay of the female tech who tried to make her understand that she might be tampering with evidence—and she absorbed herself in the piles of clothing. Bustiers, fishnets, stockings as thin as a second skin and shiny as sin. She leaned forward and grabbed a black vinyl high-heeled boot with laces running up to the knee.

  “See you…”

  Bringing the boot to her face, pressing it against her skin, she slipped deeper into the victim’s mind.

  …in hell.”

  She glanced at the trashcan, already knowing that she would find empty bottles of alcohol there. In fact, no fewer than three bottles of Smirnoff.

  That’s how she liked to get ready. Listening to music, sipping vodka while deciding what to wear. She must have tried on that one corset, lying on the floor now and covered with blood. Thrown a miniskirt that she’d decided against on the chair over there.

  She’d meticulously gotten dressed.

  But it wasn’t to go out.

  “Hey, can’t someone turn that noise off?” Deveraux yelled. “Sounds like a fucking horror movie.”

  When no one responded, he crossed the room and turned off the stereo himself.

  “There!” he sneered. “Seriously, what a fucking racket! I could do better with the saucepans in my kitchen!”

  Eva stood up, her eyes elsewhere.

  “The victim was waiting for someone. She had a date.”

  “What makes you say that?” Leroy asked.

  The inspector turned toward him, her white locks falling in front of her sunglasses.

  “She’s a girl, Erwan. A very pretty girl attentive to her looks. She spent hours getting dressed and putting on makeup.”

  “For her attacker?”

  “Or for someone else. But she was definitely waiting for someone. We need to find out if she had a boyfriend.” She spun around and addressed everyone in the room, “Excuse me, has her phone turned up?”

  The techs shook their heads.

  “Not yet, detective,” one of them said.

  “But we’ve got a computer,” another said.

  “Can I see it?”

  “Of course.” The man picked up a slim gray laptop. “It was under the bed. We haven’t examined it yet.”

  “Well then, that’s what we’re going to do right now,” Eva told him as he handed it over.

  She set the computer on her lap and opened it with care. Then she turned it on.

  As Leroy, Deveraux and the tech gathered around her, the laptop’s screen lit up.

  On the desktop’s background was a black-and-white photo that seemed to have been taken in a bar or maybe a nightclub. There was Barbara Meyer, clad in vinyl, kissing another woman on the mouth. The woman seemed a bit older than Barbara. She was dressed in an evening gown with a low neckline that revealed her curvaceous cleavage.

  “All right. Little Barbara was into women,” Eva said.

  “And she had pretty good taste,” Leroy remarked.

  Deveraux was about to add a comment of his own, but he changed his mind when Leroy shot him an icy look. He walked away.

  As soon as he was gone, the tech who had found the computer stepped forward and leaned toward the screen. He pointed tentatively at the woman.

  “If I may, that woman’s not just anybody.”

  Eva looked up at him.

  “You know who she is?”

  The man nodded, a bit uneasy with the profiler’s dark glasses.

  “Actually, I do. That’s Audrey Desiderio. I recognize her very well. They made her editor in chief of Chick magazine last year. It was a big story in the tabloids.”

  Eva’s perfectly white eyebrows arched.

  “Chick? What’s that?”

  “A rock fashion magazine, teen stuff. My daughter has a subscription. Desiderio is her idol, so to speak. She has a dead-on sense of what’s hot. Well, that is, according to my daughter.”

  “Okay. We’ll need to question her.”

  On the other side of the room, Deveraux’s cell phone played Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”

  He picked up, remained silent for a moment, explained he’d pass it on, and hung up, his face ashen.

  Eva knew that kind of look.

  “A problem?”

  “Audrey Desiderio is dead, too,” Deveraux announced. “The cleaning lady just found her gored to death in the Chick boardroom. She has no face anymore.”

  He turned toward the tech.

  “Your daughter’s going to have to find herself a new idol, buddy.”

  19

  The key fits just fine.

  It turns effortlessly in the lock.

  So far, everything is going as planned.

  The door opens, revealing a magnificent hall no one has set foot in for a good long while.

  Exactly as expected. Better, even.

  One last glance outside to make sure no one is around. But no. The neighborhood is deserted. It is still raining, more timidly now. In the gardens, the wet trees are all glistening. Other houses are nearby. Luxury holiday homes, they are. Their owners must not get out here too often, though. Only now and then, for a vacation or to make love away from the eyes of the city.

  A perfect place, really.

  Slowly, the door is shut. And bolted.

  20

  7:30 a.m.

  When Svärta, Leroy and Deveraux walked into the Chick editorial office
s, they already had a pretty good idea of what to expect.

  The boardroom was at the end of a long hallway. It was a large room with a long window that offered a good view of Avenue d’Italie eight floors down. From here they could also see Place d’Italie, swarming with umbrellas.

  They stepped cautiously into the thickly carpeted boardroom.

  The victim’s body lay stretched on the table. Audrey Desiderio, like Barbara Meyer, had been stripped bare and tied up. Her blood had gushed in torrents from her multiple wounds. It had splashed the floor and spattered the walls and even the ceiling.

  “Shit. It’s exactly the same thing,” Leroy said.

  “No, this is worse,” Eva answered, walking toward the table where the corpse lay.

  Desiderio’s head was drooping off the edge of the table. Her throat was slit from one ear to the other. Above this monstrous gash, there was no face. Just a vermillion cutaway, and empty eye sockets gazing at eternity.

  There was something else.

  Something that Eva had already seen once, the previous year, when she had inspected the crime scene down south. She spotted it the very moment she entered the boardroom. The circle of blood on the floor.

  It had been drawn very carefully all around the table, as though for some pagan ceremony.

  On the window, there was a message in big capital letters:

  Pauline Chadoutaud was already at the scene. The pathologist straightened up when she saw Eva and took off her latex gloves.

  “The work of the same killer. But you didn’t need me to figure that out, right?”

  “Was the same weapon used?”

  “Without a doubt. The cuts here are identical to those on Meyer’s body. And since we haven’t found the weapon, I’d say the killer has taken it with him. It’s not uncommon for a serial killer to have his own murder tools.”

  Eva lowered her eyes to the victim. She could see several perforations in her abdomen and legs. Between her thighs, the genitals were a mess of red meat.

  She winced.

  It has started again. You can deny it all you want, but you know it.

  It’s more than a series of murders. It’s a ritual.

  But what kind of ritual?