Crimes of Winter

by Philippe Georget

  Julie’s laugh was drowned out by the noise of the door flying open. Molina burst into the room.

  “What a fricking crappy day! If I’d wanted to be a scribbler I’d have worked for Social Security, for Christ’s sake! The last time I spent a whole day with my ass glued to a seat, I think I was in middle school. I have lines of writing dancing before my eyes and sores on my butt.”

  “Are you sure it’s not your hemorrhoids?” Gilles said.

  Jacques glanced at Julie. He didn’t like some of his health problems to be mentioned in front of young women.

  “Shut your trap, you jerk!”

  “Otherwise, what did you get out of this day?”

  “Great fatigue.”

  “And lots of annoyance! I understood that. But what else?”

  “Not much, exactly. I found two names of guys who had gotten divorced for serious offenses. You’ll be able to compare them with the perpetrators of the crimes that you must have inventoried, but I’d be surprised if you found anything conclusive.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because divorce proceedings for serious offenses always take a lot of time and so these two divorces were begun months ago, long before our corbeau went into action.”

  “Damn, I hadn’t thought of that. But do you have other names to give me, too?”

  “Yes, of course, I’ve got a list as long as your arm.”

  From the inside pocket of his jacket he took out some wrinkled papers. He unfolded them and held them out to his colleague. The first one was covered with grease spots.

  “I classified everything in order: contested divorces first, obviously, and then divorces by mutual consent. But Joan will have more precise information to give you. He has a cousin and a nephew who work in lawyers’ offices. He’ll have stuff about ongoing proceedings. Of course, we can never say where we got our information!”

  “And where is Joan now?”

  “In Le Soler. He coaches a group of young rugby players every Monday. He told me he’d come by afterward.”

  “That’s nice of him, but I don’t want to hang around here until he’s finished making his kids sweat! I’ve put in a hard day’s work, too, I’ve had enough.”

  “Call him.”

  Sebag punched in Llach’s number but got his answering machine. He left a message. When he was alone again in his office, he compared his research with Molina’s. One name jumped out at him. A certain Sylvain Crochet. On the one hand, it was a divorce for “definitive severing of marital ties” decreed on December 12 of the last year, and on the other hand, a complaint for assault and battery was filed only two days later. Except that it was Crochet, the husband, who had filed the complaint.

  The case had been handled by one of his colleagues, Estève Cardona, with whom Sebag had recently had problems. He called him and was lucky enough to catch him even though the hour was late.

  “I need information about one of your cases.”

  Cardona remained silent for a long time before answering in an aggressive tone:

  “Are you going to find fault with me again? Do you think my work is as bad as all that?”

  “Not at all, Estève, I promise. It’s just that this case may have a connection with the one I’m working on just now.”

  A heavy silence. The kind that precedes a storm. He had to quickly defuse the situation.

  “I don’t know anything about your case, and I urgently need your help for my investigation.”

  Still no response. OK. After the caress, turn up the heat.

  “This morning Castello made the case I’m dealing with his top priority. I can have him make my request if you prefer it that way.”

  The sigh he heard in his receiver tickled his eardrum

  “Beneath your nice-guy airs you’re a real son of a bitch, Sebag.”

  Cardona put him on hold and two minutes later gave him the information he was asking for. Sylvain Crochet had in fact filed a complaint for assault and battery against his wife’s lover. The fight had taken place in a shopping mall.

  “The complaint was ultimately rejected,” Cardona explained. “It was Crochet who attacked the other guy. But since he’s knee-high to a grasshopper and skinny as a rail, he got the worst of it.”

  Sebag hung up, satisfied. A cuckolded husband who had been humiliated by his ex-wife’s lover after their divorce. That was enough to make somebody mad at the whole world. However, there was one problem: the husband in question was a mechanic, a trade that didn’t really give him access to the kind of information the informer had acquired.

  Nonetheless, Gilles felt he’d just found a fresh lead. At this stage of the investigation, he mustn’t be too particular. Joan Llach called him back a few minutes later. Shouts and the dull thuds of a rugby ball could be heard in the background.

  “It’s not easy to talk with you at the moment, so I’ll make it short. In a little while I’ll give you a list of names and you can look it over tomorrow morning early, if you want. What I can tell you right now is that I’ve identified a potential suspect. He’s a guy who is in the middle of a divorce for cause because he accused his wife of having cheated on him several times. According to what I was told by my cousin, who’s defending him, dialogue with his wife appears to no longer be possible, they’re completely at war with one another. And guess where the guy works?”

  Sebag was tired, and not in the mood to play games.

  “No idea.”

  “He’s a technician with Orange34 and I don’t need to draw you a picture: considering the job he has, he must have access to a large amount of confidential information on customers.”

  Sebag took in this information with a mixture of interest and reservations. In the list of relevant occupations they’d summarily drawn up at that morning’s meeting, no one had thought of a position as a technician with a telecommunications company. However, there was a catch: this implied that all the victims were customers of the same company, and, as he recalled, that was not the case. He nonetheless wrote down the name that Joan gave him. Thus he had a second lead. The day hadn’t been so fruitless after all.

  It was time for him to go home. His stomach tensed. For him, this was the most difficult time of the day. He opened his drawer. Oh, yes . . . he’d thrown the whiskey out. He clicked his thirsty tongue. Too bad! Or rather all the better.

  He put his hands on his desk, leaned back against his chair, and took deep breaths. About twenty of them, very slowly. Alcoholic crutches were a thing of the past. He’d put the hardest part behind him. They were going to make it. A few more breaths and he was convinced of it. The challenge was to stay that way as long as possible.

  At least long enough to have a quiet evening with his family, that would be good.

  Sebag already had his hand on the doorknob when he heard two timid knocks. He opened the door immediately and to his great surprise saw Thierry Lambert.

  “Ah . . . Evening, Gilles. Are you leaving?”

  Sebag had his jacket on and he had already turned up the collar against the tramontane that he had heard coming up during the afternoon.

  “No, I was going to take a leak!”

  Lambert slipped into the room.

  “No problem, I can wait.”

  Gilles sighed and took off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. Lambert stood in front of Jacques’s desk and started to arrange the objects on it. A pen to the right of the blotter, a paper cup in front of the computer, the mouse properly lined up.

  “Are you OK, Thierry?”

  “Yes, how about you?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, no.”

  “But there is! Something’s bothering you, I can see that . . . Sit down and tell me about it.”

  Lambert sat on a corner of Molina’s desk.

  “Nobody can hide anything from you, Gille
s, you’re really very good.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, yeah, after all.”

  Lambert moved the mouse a millimeter. His furrowed brow showed his concern. Sebag looked at his watch. It was late, he was going to have to hurry Thierry along.

  “Did your day at the video-surveillance center go well?”

  Lambert’s lips sketched an embarrassed smile.

  “Yeah, it was fun! At least . . . at first.”

  Sebag sighed noisily and looked at his watch again. Lambert, lost in his thoughts, noticed nothing.

  “And later . . . it was less fun?”

  “Perpignan is a very small town, you know, and when you look at the images for a while you always end up spotting somebody you know. Do you know who Denis Barge is?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a pal of mine who works at the BAC.35 We sometimes go out together. Sometimes just the two of us, or with another pal, sometimes with his wife. She’s good-looking, his wife. Aurélie—that’s her name—is a pretty blonde.”

  Sebag felt a shiver run down his spine.

  “I’m really very concerned,” Lambert added, looking down at his feet. “I saw her on the images, Aurélie, she was kissing some guy. And the guy wasn’t Denis.”

  Sebag held his breath.

  “Such a numbskull, dammit, such a numbskull!” he exclaimed.

  It was so obvious that he should have seen it from the outset but he hadn’t seen anything.

  “Yeah, I know,” Lambert went on. “It wasn’t very smart to follow her like that from one camera to the next, but I couldn’t foresee . . . Now I don’t know what to do, I don’t know whether I should tell Denis about it. You’re right, I’m really a dope!”

  Gilles approached Lambert, scaring him.

  “No, no, Thierry, I’m the one who’s a dope. You . . .”

  He put both hands on Thierry’s cheeks and kissed him on the forehead.

  “You’re a genius!”

  30Le Corbeau (“The Raven”), 1943.

  31A town in central France, about three hundred miles south of Paris.

  32J’aurais pu dire “la personne” plutôt que “l’individu.” Sebag is saying that the use of the feminine noun la personne might have suggested that he was referring to a woman—though la personne can also refer to a male person.

  33Traitement d’antécédents judiciaires, a database created in 2011.

  34A global telecommunications company that is now a subsidiary of France Telecom and the main telephone and Internet provider in France.

  35Brigade anti-criminality, a special unit of the Police national.

  CHAPTER 42

  With his elbows resting on the desk in front of the keyboard and his head leaning forward, he put his fingers on his closed eyelids and then ran them very slowly over his temples. He repeated this massage several times.

  His day at work had exhausted him.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes, sat up. A colleague was waiting to take over from him.

  He leaned on the arms of his chair and got up. The chair’s headrest could be adjusted for height and angle, it had lumbar support, the seat was also adjustable, everything had been designed for maximum comfort. Nonetheless! After a whole day without moving, the body stiffened up.

  He went to the locker room, opened his locker, and took out his sports bag. A little exercise would do him good. The walk to the gym, an hour of exercise, a good shower, and he’d be a new man.

  He strode quickly down the quays along the Basse. The wind was blowing, it was cold. He passed by people without seeing them. He was really very tired. After the guard had been released, he’d decided to slow down. The cops were coming closer. Too dangerous. With his mission suspended for the moment, his mind became freer.

  Freer to think, freer to remember, freer to suffer.

  He placed his badge in front of the electronic reader and opened the door to the gym. He greeted a few faces he recognized before putting on his gym clothes. A quarter of an hour on the stationary bicycle, three exercises for his pecs, four squat repetitions, and a minimal session for his abs.

  Even the boiling hot shower didn’t relax him.

  When he left the gym, he walked to the bus stop on the Boulevard Wilson. He took a number 9 bus and twenty minutes later he got off not far from his house. He ate alone in the dining room, watching the evening TV news, did the dishes as he listened to Scènes de ménages,36 and then returned to his lair. He booted up his computer, looked over his files—his “current cases”—and changed a few priorities he’d established earlier.

  Around 10 P.M. he went to bed with a book, Claire Favan’s Le Tueur intime.37 He had time to read only a few pages. When he heard the front door open, he quickly turned out the light.

  In the dark, he listened to the sounds of his past life. Keys laid on the table in the foyer, the microwave’s buzzer, the tinkling of a plate in the sink, and then the creak of a step on the stairway, the seventh step at the turning. The rest took place too far away, he could now only imagine it. A faucet turned on, the clatter of a glass and a jar of makeup remover on the tiles around the washbasin in the bathroom, the water of the shower running over a warm body, then the door of the bedroom slamming. Finally, the sheets of a bed being folded back and a mattress groaning.

  It took him a long time to fall asleep.

  36A French television series. The title means “domestic rows.”

  37“The Intimate Killer,” a French crime novel (2011

  CHAPTER 43

  I see that you’ve changed the teams. It’s kind of a boring task, isn’t it?”

  The municipal policeman who had opened the door showed them a friendly face.

  “It’s not always fun for us, either, you know. Enlist, they say: in the police you’ll always see action!”

  Seeing his superior at the other end of the room, he added in a low voice:

  “I’m joking, of course: I love this job!”

  He extended a firm hand to Gilles:

  “Special Agent Laurent Martinez.”

  Then he extended a softer hand to Julie.

  “We’ve already met.”

  “Special agent?” she said with astonishment. “You didn’t tell me that yesterday.”

  “I try to vary my jokes from day to day . . .”

  The Perpignan municipal police video-surveillance room had four walls covered with screens. Each wall displayed sixteen different images transmitted live by the city’s cameras. At their posts in front of a wall, the operators had two computers, a keyboard, and a joystick to aim as they wished the camera they had decided to follow.

  “Look, Johnny is opening his little shop early this morning,” a blond operator remarked, turning to her colleague, a chubby redhead.

  Gilles and Julie could not resist leaning over to look at the computer screen. In a street in the old part of town, a man in his sixties dressed in a cheap tracksuit had leaned his bike against a wall and was waiting in front of a barred window. He took two blue bills out of his pocket. Forty euros. A hand appeared between the bars and whisked away the bills. A few seconds later it held out in return a small package covered with aluminum foil. The old man unfolded the package to examine its contents. The operator zoomed in and a stick of hash became clearly visible.

  “The old guy has been cheated again,” the blonde commented. “There’s not forty euros’ worth there.”

  “Johnny’s experienced: he knows who he can rip off,” the redhead replied before focusing her attention again on her own computers.

  Sebag couldn’t conceal his surprise. The old man had opened his package right across from a camera attached to a building less than five meters away.

  “It looks like he doesn’t realize.”

  “Special Agent” Lau
rent Martinez shrugged.

  “Most people forget that the cameras are there, including certain criminals. The rest don’t give a flying fuck. We’ve mentioned this drug dealing to your colleagues and they’ve asked us to keep an eye on it while they try to determine the source of supply. As for the users, they’re in no danger. We know this old guy. He goes to smoke his joint every afternoon on a bench on the Place de Belgique.”

  A woman came up to them. Svelte, she managed to look elegant in the municipal police force’s uniform, navy blue slacks fitted at the waist and ankles and a sweatshirt of the same color with lighter blue stripes across the chest. The stripes undulated gracefully over her breasts. Chief Brigadier Josiane Masson greeted them with authority. The intent look she gave Julie did not escape Gilles. Clearly, his colleague was well-considered here. Josiane Masson took a paper bag off the redhead’s desk and handed it to the police officers.

  “Chocolate cream puffs. They’ll blow you away. Take all you want, Pauline has already eaten enough of them!”

  Then she led them to the back of the big room where a desk was reserved for them. It also had two computers, a keyboard, and a joystick.

  “I won’t explain how to use this,” she told Sebag. “Julie has already mastered it.”

  The radio crackled in the room.

  “Checking out a group of young people riding scooters without helmets on the Place de la Liberté. Please secure the area.”

  The head of the center left them the package of chocolate cream puffs and headed for the walls of screens. Julie explained to Gilles that every time the police went into action, an operator kept a close eye on the zone and the surrounding area to prevent any disturbance or outside interference. It was routine.

  “So what about us? What are we going to do now?” Julie asked. “We didn’t come back to look at all the recordings . . .”

  “No, but we can’t move in directly, either. This morning Castello met with the adjunct assigned to the city’s security forces. He’s going to send us a complete list of the police officers who work here: their personnel files, vital statistics, possible past problems, etc. We decided to bypass the head of the center to avoid the risk of a leak.”