Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  “Is it possible that hidden images might have caused it?”

  The doctor paused a moment to think.

  “You mean subliminal? It’s something to consider.”

  “And…what’s going to happen to Ludovic? Is he…?”

  The doctor stopped walking. They had come to his office.

  “He should regain his sight, little by little. The main thing is to try to understand the origin of his trauma and bring it out in the open. My colleagues in Psych are very good at that, especially using hypnosis. I can give you the contact info for the doctor who’s taken over Mr. Sénéchal’s case, if you like. Try to avoid going to see him before tomorrow afternoon. In the meantime, you can try to make some headway with that film.”

  Lucie jotted down the information and returned to her daughter’s room, her interest piqued by this bizarre story. The traumatic shock, someone rifling through Ludovic’s place, the feeling of malaise during the screening…What was hidden in that film? Who was trying to get hold of it, and why?

  Careful not to make noise, she brushed her teeth in the ridiculous bathroom and put on her pajamas. She stood motionless, staring at herself in the mirror. No, not at herself: at her reflection, this yield of light projected onto objects. Dr. Tournelle was right: the eye discerned only a mass of colors and shapes, but the brain saw a woman of thirty-seven, features drawn from lack of sleep, starved for love and sex. It interpreted each luminous impulse, and tried to relate them all to life experiences.

  Lucie thought of the various close-ups of the girl on the swing, of her face, during the film’s short duration. The blinking eye, the movements of the iris. That feeling of incursion, voyeurism, behind an oval-shaped mask: the eye that takes in light and silently observes…And, especially, of that eyeball sliced in half, the first sequence of the film. She remembered turning away, proof that her brain had reacted violently, that there had indeed been interpretation.

  At that point, her vision of the film changed. The director might have included that first brutal scene not as a pure display of horror, but to make a statement: “Concentrate, look carefully at what I’m about to show you.” Or else: “Do as I’ve done with my scalpel—open your eye…”

  Open your eye…

  In the middle of the night, her cell phone vibrated at the foot of her chair. Lucie did not awake this time; she was much too exhausted.

  The text message read: “Claude Poignet here. Come by late tomorrow morning. Some peculiar things about your film, to say the least.”

  9

  The two Rouen medical examiners and the forensic anthropologist had spent all day and all night on the case. So their examinations were almost complete when Sharko arrived at the ME’s office the next morning, full of questions. Later, back in Nanterre, he’d probably have to immerse himself in the hundreds of pages of technical data that spewed out of these buildings, so he might as well be as informed as possible and get as many explanations as he could.

  Later…He was in no particular hurry to get home, even if it was no great pleasure to wander through this death-haunted complex. Far too many violent incidents and unsolved crimes crowded into his memory. A child found dead at the bottom of the Seine. Prostitutes with their throats cut in seedy hotel rooms. Women and men beaten, lacerated, hacked to pieces, strangled…Dramas that had swept away his life and forced him to run on Zyprexa tablets.

  And yet here he was.

  Before going to see the medical examiner, he let himself be waylaid by the bone and tooth specialist, Dr. Pierre Plaisant. The physician was about to head off for a lecture on Lowenthal’s caries, which were typical of heroin addicts. The two men exchanged a few banalities before getting down to business.

  “The bones had a lot to say for themselves. How should we do this—simple or complicated?”

  Plaisant was tall and thin, around thirty. A brilliant brain beneath a high forehead, smooth as a coated pill. Behind him lay radiographs of the bodies, bone joints gnawed at by X-rays.

  “Either way. Tell me enough to keep me from having to drag around the fifty pages of tech data that Péresse is going to shove at me.”

  The doctor led Sharko to some graduated worktables: stainless steel counters, with sliding rules running crosswise and lengthwise for measuring bones. The four partially reconstituted skeletons each rested on one of them. The room, which looked more like a kitchen than a lab, smelled of dried earth and detergent. The remains had been treated in a bain-marie to remove any soft tissue.

  “The fifth cadaver, the best preserved of the lot, is waiting for you in the autopsy room before going into the fridge.”

  He picked up a pencil and slid it into the anterior nasal spine of the skeleton on the left, the smallest one.

  “The point of the pencil touches the chin. The zygomatics are in front, the face is flat and rounded. No doubt about it, we’ve got an Asiatic. The other four are Caucasian.”

  First bit of good news, the presence of an Asian corpse would help them search through the computer database. Plaisant left the pencil in the stiff’s nose, picked up a sliced skull, set it down on its jaws, and pushed it backward. It began to rock.

  “You always get this rocking motion with men. Women’s skulls don’t move. Brains are too small—” He smiled. “I’m just kidding…” Sharko’s face remained neutral; he was in no mood for jokes. His sleep had been disturbed by traffic noises and the buzzing of a fly he couldn’t swat. The doctor thought better of his attempt at humor and fell serious again.

  “I mainly verified with pelvic bones, which are more reliable. In every ethnicity, the bone that starts at the top of the pubis is taller in women. All our subjects are male.”

  “How old?”

  “I was getting to that. Since they didn’t have any teeth, I based my findings on the joining of the cranial sutures, arthritic degeneration in the vertebras, and especially the sternal border at the fourth rib. It—”

  Sharko suddenly motioned toward the coffeepot.

  “Could you pour me some? I didn’t have breakfast this morning, and the odor in this place is making me nauseous.”

  His momentum interrupted, Plaisant paused in surprise for a few seconds before walking to the far corner of the lab. He spoke with his back turned.

  “We’ve been lucky with our subjects here. The younger they are, the narrower the margin of estimation. After they hit thirty, it gets trickier. To determine ages, we use the pubic symphysis. In a young adult, this part is very rough, with ridges and deep grooves. Then the—”

  “How old?”

  The coffee was dripping, the coffeemaker gurgling. Plaisant came back toward his skeletons.

  “Our men were all between twenty-two and twenty-six at the time of death. As for their height and other anthropometric details, you’ll see all that in the report.”

  Chief Inspector Sharko leaned against the wall. All young, all male. That might have been an important criterion, a crucial element for the killer. Was he of their generation? Did he mix with them? In what context? University, sports club? The cop pointed to a half skull that showed a hole near the occiput surrounded by tiny cracks.

  “Killed by gunshot?”

  The forensic anthropologist picked up a knitting needle.

  “Killed or wounded, though for these four it’s most likely killed. The fifth one was probably just wounded in the shoulder—Dr. Busnel will tell you about that.”

  With his needle, he pointed to the Asian’s spine.

  “This one was shot in the back. His fourth vertebra is shattered from behind. These two were most likely shot and killed from the front. Some ribs are shattered, probably because the bullet ricocheted before finding a vital organ. My colleague in radiography is going to scan them to make a 3-D reconstruction and try to reproduce the entrance and exit points of the projectiles. But it won’t be easy, given their condition. As for the last one…shot right in the head. The bullet didn’t even come out the front.”

  He poured coffee into two c
ups and held one out to Sharko, who stared at the bodies without moving. There was no consistency in the way the men had been eliminated. From behind, from the front, in the head. No ritual: the killings looked scattered, random, whereas the concealment and dehumanization of the bodies displayed great mastery. What could this have been about? An execution? Revenge? Some kind of run-in?

  Sharko took a sip of his java.

  “I don’t suppose you found any bullets?”

  “No. Neither in the organisms nor at the scene. They were all recuperated—sometimes rather brutally. You can tell from the way the ribs were yanked apart on one of the skeletons.”

  Sharko had more or less expected the answer. The killer had given every indication of remarkable follow-through, covering all his tracks. No chance of going through ballistics and following the trail back to the murder weapon.

  “Any projectile fragments at all?”

  Uncoated bullets always left fragments, traces like comets’ tails or snowstorms.

  “Not a thing. Definitely jacketed bullets.”

  That in itself wasn’t really news to Sharko. Most classic munitions were solid alloys, not hollow lead like for certain hunting rifles. The inspector ran a hand over his hair. He wanted something else, a way of following a serious, physical path. Then he remembered that he was there just as an observer. To get a sense of the killer’s psychology and motivations, nothing more. He wouldn’t give in to the demons of fieldwork.

  “When were they killed?”

  “Now that becomes more complicated. Open ground always makes for serious problems with dating. It depends on dampness, depth, pH, and soil composition. The ground was particularly acidic in that spot. Given the condition of these four, I’d say between six months and a year. Impossible to be more precise than that.”

  Might as well have said prehistory.

  “All killed at the same time?”

  “I believe so. The entomologist found just a few domestic fly pupae on each of them, from the first swarm. Which means the bodies were buried a day or two after death. No question they were transported to that place.”

  The intact portion of Sharko’s brain was already processing the data. He’d have to attack the missing persons file from another angle, concentrating on date rather than geography. The anthropologist continued his explanation:

  “I also believe two different individuals worked on the bodies postmortem. One who sliced off the skulls and another who took care of hands and teeth.”

  He handed the inspector a loupe.

  “The skulls were sawed with surgical precision. On the face of it, it looks like a Stryker, or something like it, the kind they use in forensics or surgery. The work is professional. You can see for yourself with the loupe—it shows the characteristic striations.”

  Sharko took the magnifying device and set it on the table without using it.

  “Professional. You mean someone in the field?”

  “Someone who’s used to sawing. The starting point, for instance, meets the end point exactly, and I can guarantee you that’s no easy trick on a circular structure. As to profession, it could range from medical examiner to lumberjack.”

  “Still, I have a hard time imagining a lumberjack going at his oak trees with a surgical saw. And what about the other potential perp?”

  “The teeth were ripped out savagely—there are still bits of root in the recesses. We used tweezers to get them. And for the hands, it looks more like a hatchet. If it had been the same person, he would have been more careful. And he would surely have used his saw.”

  Plaisant glanced at his watch and set his cup down next to the coffeemaker, which he switched off.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to run. You’ll have everything in—”

  “Were the brains removed?”

  “Yes. Otherwise we would have found traces of spinal fluid or dura, which is made of very dense collagen fibers that could have withstood a year underground. They also stole the eyes.”

  “The eyes?”

  “It’s all in the written report. The soil found in the ocular cavities showed no presence of liquid, such as vitreous fluids. For the rest, go see Dr. Busnel on the basement level. I’ve been up all night and I’d like to at least take a shower before my lecture, if you don’t mind.”

  The two men parted company in the hallway. Sharko took the stairs, mulling over these revelations. A vague preliminary sketch was taking shape in his head, which led to two divergent paths. On the one hand, the shooting deaths and concealment suggested an execution: the men try to run away or attack; someone shoots them down and makes them disappear very “professionally.” Deep burial, just in itself, is an excellent method, along with fire and acid. On the other hand, there was that business of brains and eyes being removed, which tended to suggest a ritualized, highly controlled undertaking, requiring a cool head and a large dose of sadism. The fact of five cadavers immediately pointed toward a serial killing or mass murder…but with two killers? Something out of the ordinary, in any case. Sharko was keenly aware that he couldn’t afford to leave any stone unturned when it came to the killer’s, or killers’, deep motivations. There existed on this planet individuals who were crazy enough to murder human beings and then devour the contents of their skulls with a spoon.

  The inspector arrived at the morgue. At the back, a door with a peephole opened onto a scialytic lamp. In a forensic institute, it was never hard to find the autopsy room: you just had to follow the stench, which was everywhere and nowhere. When Sharko arrived, Dr. Busnel was rinsing the tiled floor with a shower hose. The Paris cop remained at the threshold, waiting until the other finally noticed him and came forward.

  “Chief Inspector Sharko, from Paris?”

  Sharko held out his hand. A solid exchange of handshakes.

  “I see Inspector Péresse circulated the right information.”

  “You’ve come after everyone else, and I’ll admit I’m not thrilled at having to repeat the same thing over again. I’ve been at this for two days, I’m exhausted, and there are still reports to—”

  Sharko pointed to a fly on the green sheet covering the body.

  “There was a fly in my hotel room as well. Yet it’s refrigerated here. Nothing stops them. I can’t stand insects, especially the flying ones.”

  Busnel noted his annoyance. He moved toward the table and pulled down the sheet.

  “Right. Would you come closer, please, so we can get this done?”

  The inspector looked at the water calmly draining into a trench. He moved forward slowly, as if walking on eggshells.

  “I’m just being careful of my shoes. They’re made of Cordoba leather and—”

  “May we talk about the best-preserved body, if it’s all right with you? I suppose my colleague in anthro already filled you in?”

  “He did, yes.”

  Busnel was a strapping fellow, about six foot three. With his square jaw and flattened nose, he would have fit in easily on a rugby team. Sharko looked down at the stiff. What greeted his eyes was an indescribable entity, a magma of flesh, earth, bones, and ligaments. So dehumanized that it wasn’t even shocking. In his case, too, they’d sawed off the top of the skull.

  The medical examiner indicated the left shoulder.

  “Here’s where he was shot. The bullet exited through the back of the deltoid. A priori, this is not the cause of death. I say a priori because, given the degree of decomp, I have no way of defining precisely what did cause his death.”

  Busnel now showed the bony portion of the arms, wrists, and torso.

  “These areas were skinned.”

  “With what instrument?”

  The doctor walked to a table and lifted a closed beaker. Sharko squinted.

  “Fingernails?”

  “Yes. They were stuck in his flesh. Analysis will confirm, but I believe these were his own nails. Thumb, index, and middle finger of the right hand.”

  “So the poor bastard clawed at his own skin before dying.”


  “Yes. So fiercely and violently that it’s unimaginable. The pain must have been horrendous.”

  More and more, the cop had the impression of swimming in murky waters. These discoveries were more complicated than he’d expected.

  “And…what about the other bodies?”

  “Hard to say, given their condition. I imagine they were also skinned over certain areas, like the shoulders, calves, and back. But not with nails. The marks are clean, regular, and particularly deep. Like the kind made with a knife or cutting tool. Like some moron trying to get rid of a tattoo.”

  He pointed again to the fingernails.

  “You can force anyone to mutilate himself by shoving a gun against his head. The trick is to find out why.”

  “Can I have the photos?”

  “They’re attached to the file. It’s not a pretty picture. Trust me.”

  “I’ve always trusted MEs.”

  The doctor nodded toward a shelf, on which lay a small transparent baggie.

  “There’s also this. A tiny piece of green plastic, found under the skin between the clavicle and the neck.”

  Sharko approached the shelf.

  “Any idea what it’s from?”

  “It’s cylindrical, hollow in the middle. It’s certainly a fragment of the sheath from a subcutaneous catheter, like the kind they use in surgery.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ll check further with a surgeon. But if I remember right, there are a bunch of possibilities. It might be a chemotherapy stent. But they’re also used as a central catheter, to avoid having to stick the patient several times over. The tox screen and cell analysis should tell us a lot. Like if he had a particular illness, such as cancer.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned. The rest has to do with forensic technique, not very important for you. For the next step, I’ve taken psoas samples for the DNA of each subject. Since they shaved their heads, the pubic hairs went to the guys from tox. Their turn to work now. Let’s hope this all gets us some IDs, or else this business threatens to drag on forever and get extremely complicated.”