Of Fever and Blood

by Cédric Sire

  “Actually, yes, she drank some of it,” Leroy said. “The witches who surrounded her had convinced her that blood was some sort of elixir for eternal youth. So she took it from young women. She smeared it all over herself. She bathed in it, especially at the end. She took baths in a big tub filled with blood.”

  “That’s absolutely disgusting,” Vauvert muttered.

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “And you think Eva is right, that our killer is actually a woman?”

  Stopping for a red light, Leroy turned to Vauvert, his hands still clutching the wheel.

  “What I think? What I think is that every time Eva profiled someone, she was dead on. So if she thinks our killer is a woman who believes she’s the reincarnation of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, then I agree. Not to mention the blood we found in her place. The blood of a woman. It could very well belong to the killer.”

  Vauvert lost himself in his thoughts as Leroy took off again and drove down Rue de Charonne under the pouring rain.

  He wondered whether he should tell him about the two wolves he had encountered at the Salaville farm. There had been blood there, too. The blood of a man who had been dead for a year already. He decided not to say anything. In any case, they had arrived. Leroy parked on the sidewalk.

  On the other side of the street was a park that was probably filled with sun in the summer. But it looked sinister in this downpour. The rain was falling from the sky in thick gray sheets, causing the gutters to overflow yet again.

  “This is the building. Ninth floor,” Leroy said.

  They got out of the car and ran toward the entrance.

  Two uniformed officers, drinking coffee in the hall, greeted them and let them go in.

  As the elevator rose, Leroy suddenly asked, “You really care for her, don’t you?”

  Vauvert did not know how to answer.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask that kind of question,” Leroy said. “I just want to let you know that if I were you, well, I would have flown anywhere to help her.”

  They reached the ninth floor.

  41

  Blood was spattered on the threshold. Just beyond that was a large, tastefully furnished living room with red walls. There was blood there, too, on the broken mirror. Yellow plastic evidence markers indicated bullet holes in the floor.

  One look was enough for Vauvert to absorb the details. He knew these kinds of scenes only too well. Crime scenes. God dammit, he hated that term and all that it implied. These scenes, they always seemed new, and yet they were always terribly alike. Theaters of tragedy. Vauvert knew what happened to the people involved in such disappearances. They were found eventually, yes. Most often in small pieces in plastic bags.

  He tensed. There was no time to lose.

  “What do we have?” he asked in a grave voice, walking to the center of the living room.

  “Other than the blood? Not much,” Leroy said. “Just a phone number on a piece of paper. That’s what helped us trace down the guy who spent the night with her. But we already interrogated him. He claims he left the apartment shortly before Eva was attacked.”

  “Had the two of them been dating for a while?”

  Leroy gave him a strange look.

  “There’s no the two of them. She didn’t know the guy. Eva is…” He tried to think of an appropriate term. He couldn’t find any. “Eva behaves rather oddly sometimes.”

  Vauvert said nothing. Instead, he took in the place. The apartment was sparsely furnished, but with an obvious taste for cold beauty and luxury. Straight lines. Smooth surfaces. An imposing charcoal-gray couch in the middle of the room. And the tidiness that prevailed here was way beyond organized. It was obsessive. Abstract lithographs were meticulously aligned on the walls. Each object was carefully set in its place. No trace of dust anywhere. It felt unsettling to him. He had always surrounded himself with chaos, as if it were armor.

  He examined the furniture. A bookcase with glass doors displayed old books, all leather-bound, all in perfect condition. Each one exactly the same size. On a small wooden desk there was an ivory-white laptop.

  Leaning over it, Vauvert spotted an image under the sheet of glass that protected the top of the desk. It was a newspaper photo that he recognized instantly. It had run with a story in Le Temps Réel. In the photo, he was talking with Inspector Svärta outside the Salaville farm.

  The knot in his stomach tightened.

  He turned his attention from the desk to the bullet holes in the walls, thinking as fast as he could.

  “She’s the one who fired, right there?”

  “Yes. Ballistics confirmed that all the bullets came from her Beretta. Besides, our killer has never used firearms so far. It’s not part of his MO.”

  Vauvert walked toward the back of the room, near the archway that led to the bedroom, and stood behind a series of yellow markers.

  “She must have been standing right here when she was attacked. There are traces of her blood on the floor. And…” Raising his arm, he stretched out his index finger and thumb up, simulating a handgun. “It’s also from here that she fired. In that direction, toward the entrance, see? That’s where the attacker must have been standing. Except that we still don’t understand how that person managed to get in.”

  “Same as with the other victims.”

  “Yes.”

  Vauvert looked at the bullet holes. Three in the wall, at least as many through the large mirror, and one or two others in the floor. He thought of his own strange experience at the Salaville farm. Of the panic that overcame him when he faced those wolves that maybe weren’t wolves. Of the way he fired his gun at random, unable to handle the situation.

  “What’s certain is that Eva was scared of something,” he said. “She had to be scared as hell to empty her clip like that.” He paused before asking, “Did we find any blood on the bullets?”

  “None at all,” Leroy said. “The only blood was found on the fragments of the mirrors in the living room and the bedroom. The CSI guys can’t explain how the hell it got there. Or how the blood was even shed, since we didn’t find any trace of epithelial cells, not even a hair, nothing. It just makes no sense.”

  “Well, what really makes no sense is how someone who doesn’t use a gun managed to neutralize someone like Eva so easily. God dammit, I’ve been in the field with her. I’ve seen her in action. And let me tell you, even I would hesitate to come at her.” He looked around the room again. “Besides, she didn’t shoot just anywhere. She shot at the mirrors. So Erwan, you said you know a lot about the Blood Countess’s life? In that story, is there any link with mirrors that you can think of?”

  “Well, like I told you, I spent the night reading a couple of biographies of her, but nothing that would explain it, no. Countess Bathory was obsessed with her own beauty. She was quite insane about it. She had mirrors all over her house. But apart from that detail, I don’t know…”

  “Okay.”

  Vauvert hesitated. Torrents of thought were overwhelming him. Images of red-eyed beasts that escaped his nightmares to leap into reality.

  “And wolves?”

  “What do you mean, wolves?” Leroy asked.

  “Is there any link between the Elizabeth Bathory story and the apparition of wolves?

  The young detective looked at him.

  “Well, yes. She was often compared to a she-wolf. It was also said that she roamed at night with a black wolf.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” Leroy answered. “But actually, you’ve got to understand that this is a part of Hungary’s history that comes from the Dacian people. Theirs is believed to be the first civilization in Europe. They lived all over the Carpathian and Danube areas. The Dacians were fierce warriors who worshipped blood and prayed to a god of death. They were called the wolves because their symbol was a dragon with a wolf’s head.”

  “Like Dracula?”

  “Uh, yes. Vlad Tepes is a well-known example of the Dacian legacy. He ha
d a taste for blood and enjoyed torturing his enemies. By the way, the impalement torture that made him so famous was actually a form of ritual sacrifice. But we’re talking about legends. How could knowing this stuff help us?”

  “I don’t know,” Vauvert admitted as he examined the mirror fragments. “But I have the feeling that there’s something there, something very important. I just don’t understand what it is just yet.” He turned to Leroy. “Tell me more about the link between Countess Bathory and the wolves.”

  “I’m not sure what else to tell you. Just like Vlad Dracula, she had Dacian symbols in her family crest. The crest had three wolf’s teeth and a dragon wrapped around them. The teeth looked roughly like the letter B. Wait.” Leroy pulled a moleskine notebook from his coat pocket. “I like drawing sketches of things. It helps me think. Here, I drew Elizabeth Bathory’s seal. Look.”

  Vauvert took the notebook and studied the drawing. The dragon looked more like a snake biting its own tail. It was encircling three horizontal bars that symbolized the three wolf’s teeth.

  He recognized the geometric form.

  “That’s the thing the Salavilles drew on their living room wall. Pretty troubling, right? The problem is that right now, none of the elements we have make sense.”

  The giant walked though the archway that separated the living room from the bedroom. The bedroom was huge, unlike bedrooms in most other apartments in Paris. The bed was huge, too. And unmade.

  He inspected the shattered mirror. And there, too, were blood stains. On the mirror only, as though it had bled from inside.

  Through the window, Vauvert could see the small park painted gray in the pouring rain. He took his time, observing the room with great care, the chaise lounge, the nightstand on which rested a translucent Philippe Starck lamp. Then he leaned inside the bathroom to take a quick look. Everything was sparkling, perfectly clean. He thought of his own bathroom, with its shower curtain smeared with sediment, the dirty towels he sometimes let pile up till they overflowed from the hamper.

  “Yes, they do make sense,” he finally said, in a slow voice. “I’m convinced that all these elements have a very clear meaning. We just don’t get it yet, that’s all. And now, something happened that puts it all in perspective.”

  “What happened?”

  Vauvert opened his arms.

  “Come on, this. Eva’s abduction. Until now, our mysterious psychopath, assuming she’s female, didn’t seem to care much who her victims were. What she’s done here is totally new. She broke into this place to kidnap a homicide inspector. And one thing I know is that this is no fucking fluke. No one can overpower a woman like Eva on a simple impulse. This abduction was carefully planned, like the previous ones. Our suspect must have studied Eva. She has followed her, certainly.”

  “Yes, probably,” Leroy said. “So what?”

  “It could be one of two things. The killer could have changed her MO. But we know that this kind of person does not deviate from the ritual, at any price. And that leaves only the second assumption.”

  He walked back into the living room, deep in thought.

  “The second assumption?” Leroy asked, following him.

  “What she’s done here is linked to everything else.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that we’ve been wrong from the beginning and that the lead Eva picked up was the right one. We absolutely have to go over her notes. We don’t have much time to find out where they’ll lead us. Very little time at all. It’s been nine hours already since her abduction.” He took another look at the photo on the desk. He and Eva, in a bubble of calm in the middle of the ant heap. “You were right, you know.”

  “About what?” Leroy asked.

  “I care about her. I care about her very much.”

  Vauvert’s voice cracked.

  42

  Monday, 4:30 p.m.

  Back at eadquarters, Leroy pushed open the door to Eva’s office, and Vauvert gave the tiny room a surprised look.

  “She works in here?”

  “Uh, yes,” Leroy said. “She actually likes it that there’s no light. It’s because of her eyes.”

  For some stupid reason, Vauvert had expected to find a swanky FBI-style office. Certainly not this windowless closet. A green banker’s desk lamp gave the room a pseudo-library look. Of course, everything was perfectly lined up and ordered. Eva’s files were carefully stacked in piles of equal height. Two large maps, one of France and the other of Paris, were hanging on a wall. Red thumbtacks indicated the places where the victims had been found. To the right of those maps, on a cork bulletin board, were photos of Barbara Meyer and Audrey Desiderio. Vauvert recognized the Bathory coat of arms among photos of the esoteric inscriptions found at the crime scenes.

  “All of Eva’s files are here,” Leroy told him. “Just try not to mess things up, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Vauvert muttered.

  He walked over to the desk and put down the books they had bought on the way over. Indo-European Mythology, Wolf Folklore in Europe, and From Zalmoxis to Genghis Khan.

  On one corner of the desk was a stack of photos.

  “That guy, I know him. It’s that pedophile.”

  “Ugo Falgarde,” Leroy responded. “That’s him, all right. Eva, she, Well, she threw him out a window two months ago. It brought the case to a pretty brutal conclusion.”

  “I heard about that. I didn’t know she was the one involved.”

  “It was her, yes. She came very close to losing her job.”

  Very close? It was a miracle she kept her job.

  Vauvert turned to the officer to ask the question that had occupied his mind for so long: “What was done to her that was so bad, Erwan?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “That’s why I’m asking.”

  Leroy hesitated. Then he sat on the edge of the desk.

  “When she was a child, Eva was the victim of a serial killer. I figured you knew that.”

  Vauvert frowned.

  “I didn’t. What happened?”

  “Well, remember that killer they called the Night Scourge?”

  “Vaguely. That’s an old case.”

  “It was twenty-four years ago,” Leroy said. “The Scourge killed fifteen people. All single women. And they were all platinum blondes. Eva’s mother fit the bill.”

  “She was a victim of that killer?”

  “Yes. He followed her home from work, just like he did with the others, and he slit her throat. Victoria Svärta was twenty-six. And she had twin daughters.”

  “Eva has a sister?”

  “She had one. She was the Scourge’s fifteenth and last victim, I don’t know the details, of course. Eva isn’t the type to confide in anyone, and you can imagine that it’s a topic she never brings up. All I know is that on the night Eva’s mother was killed, while the crime scene was crawling with cops, no one could have ever guessed that the killer would stay in the neighborhood.”

  “You mean he came back to the scene?”

  “Exactly. Or maybe he never left in the first place. No one knows why he stayed—or came back. He had never behaved that way before. Victoria Svärta’s daughters were at the babysitter’s house down the street. The woman was supposed to keep the girls until social services took over. The killer sneaked into the house and cut the babysitter’s throat. Then he took the two children into the basement. The monster did all of this a hundred yards from the officers busy looking for evidence. Only Eva survived,”

  “Then, she saw…”

  “Yes,” Leroy said. “She saw everything. Her twin sister was murdered before her eyes. And she was only six.”

  “I had no idea.” Vauvert dropped into the chair. “That’s horrible.”

  “Anyway, now you know,” Leroy said.

  “Yes.”

  Vauvert stared into space, taking it all in.

  “Did we get him? The Night Scourge?”

  “No, he was never caught. He slipped through all the nets
, and he stopped killing after that night. Maybe he finally died, one way or another. Who knows? Or maybe he was busted for something else. It happens. We’ll probably never know who he was.”

  “God dammit. Thanks for telling me, Erwan.”

  “Any time. You would have learned about it sooner or later. Anyway, it explains why she behaves the way she does sometimes,” he said, pointing at the photo of Ugo Falgarde on the desk. “Especially when children are involved.”

  “Yeah. It explains things.”

  Once alone, he grabbed the Falgarde photos and turned them over. He did not want to see the pedophile’s face.

  The victim of a serial killer…

  The human soul could be a sordid fucking puzzle. What he had just heard kept playing in his head.

  Eva is reliving this.

  For the second time, God dammit. There is no justice.

  He turned on the computer and shut his eyes for a few moments. With a puzzling clarity, he could smell Eva’s scent. It filled the room. He could not tell whether he liked this sensation or felt terribly embarrassed.

  Did she spend her nights in here, as he sometimes spent nights in his own office, searching the Internet for leads, new pieces for the ever-renewed puzzle of human cruelty?

  He could not help imagining what Eva had gone through, what she must have felt every time she faced a monster in men’s clothes.

  Then he opened his eyes, aware that time was going by.

  Terribly fast.

  He swore that he would not let his emotions take over.

  He also swore that he would not sleep until he found her.

  One way or the other.

  43

  When Eva comes to, she is still lying on the table.

  She gags, chokes, swallows a long trickle of blood.

  She can’t see anyone in front of her, and for one crazed moment, she imagines that her tormentor has left her, just as another tormentor had once spared her.

  It’s the nightmares that never left her. Memories of another basement, another monster.

  “You’re back,” she hears the woman saying.

  Eva flinches. She tries to turn her head, but the back of her neck hurts.