Bred to Kill

by Franck Thilliez

  She looked at her watch. Eight thirty-five. She had more than an hour to kill before going to work, in a call center near Euralille, barely a mile from her home. Nine-forty-five to six thirty, with a forty-five-minute lunch break at noon. An asinine six-month term contract that consisted of being insulted all day long, but mind-numbing enough to keep Lucie from having to think. The ideal job, under the circumstances.

  She hesitated. Should she sit around in a café and waste a few euros killing time, or go home and walk the young Labrador? She chose the second option: better to avoid unnecessary expenditures. And besides, if she organized her time well in the coming days, she could get back to working out a bit, running with the dog at the Citadelle for half an hour every morning. Getting some oxygen into her mind and muscles would do her a world of good. The roots of her body needed to revive.

  Lucie veered off toward her building, a group of apartments split between permanent residents and students. A building with some character, in the Vauban tradition: dark brick, tidy architecture, solid and without needless flourishes. For a long time, Lucie had considered leaving it all behind. Change city, faces, surroundings. Set the dials at zero. But ultimately, what was the point? Where would she go? On what money? And leaving Lille also meant leaving her mother—something that Lucie, at thirty-eight, felt incapable of doing.

  “Lucie?”

  She stopped in the pathway at the sound of her name. That voice—hard, granitelike, as if from beyond the grave. She turned around and froze. It was he, her former boss at Criminal Investigations in Lille.

  She didn’t hide her amazement.

  “Captain Kashmareck?”

  One year later, and he hadn’t changed a bit. Still the same regulation buzz cut, the same wide mug, the same pit bull jaws. He was wearing black jeans, his indestructible Doc Martens with reinforced toes, a striped blue shirt that gave him a certain elegance. He came toward her; then they felt a bit stupid when she held out her hand while he leaned forward to kiss her cheek. They settled on a handshake and awkward smiles.

  Kashmareck, about ten years her senior, stared at her without opening his mouth. You couldn’t say she was looking in the pink, but the police captain had expected worse. Her blond hair had grown and now fell to the middle of her back. Her slightly sunken cheeks and sharp features brought out her blue eyes, which she hadn’t made up. A pretty, natural-looking woman, who could melt into the workforce crowd without anyone detecting the sorrow of her private story. More or less the same Lucie he’d always known.

  “Can I come in for coffee?”

  “It’s just that . . . I have to be at work soon and . . .”

  “I won’t take long. There’s something important I have to tell you, and I’d rather not do it here.”

  Lucie’s heart contracted, her senses went on alert: the presence of her former police captain was surely no mere coincidence.

  “Is it about Carnot?”

  “Please, let’s go inside.”

  Lucie could have gone to pieces right then and there. Just hearing the name of her daughter’s murderer made her feel sick. She did her best to appear strong and ushered her ex-boss into the small apartment, her brain whirring at top speed. What could he possibly have to tell her? Grégory Carnot had got thirty years, twenty-five of them without parole. The piece of shit was rotting behind the bars of Vivonne Penitentiary, almost four hundred miles away. Was he getting transferred? Married in jail? Writing a book about his miserable life?

  Kashmareck entered the apartment in silence. In the several years they’d worked together, he had never set foot in his subordinate’s home. They had both respected the hierarchical boundaries.

  A young sand-colored Labrador came to say hello. The captain petted it energetically; he liked dogs.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Klark. With two k’s.”

  “Hey, there, Klark. How old?”

  “Almost one.”

  The entry led to a living room containing piles of children’s things: toys, coloring books, clothes, and the kinds of study guides kids get quizzed on over the holidays.

  “Excuse the mess,” said Lucie.

  The captain gazed at these objects with a sorrowful sigh.

  “No need to apologize.”

  On the dresser rested dozens of framed photos. The twins, shoulder to shoulder. Impossible to tell Clara from Juliette without squinting. Lucie had once explained that one of them—he didn’t remember which—had a flaw in her left iris, a small black spot shaped like a vase. Kashmareck clenched his jaws, feeling uneasy. He had seen so many grieving parents come through his office, so much distress on their faces. Was Lucie inflicting this daily confrontation with the photos on herself as a torture, a punishment, or had she resolved to face the tragedy head-on, and so move past it?

  In the kitchen, Lucie turned on the coffeemaker.

  “Before you ask me how I’m doing, I’ll save you the trouble: there is not one second when I don’t think about what happened. Since the tragedy, I’ve crossed to the other side, Captain. I’m now one of those people we used to deal with without really caring: the victims. But victims continue to breathe, and occasionally they might even laugh. Life has to go on. So, I’m doing as well as can be expected.”

  Lucie nodded toward two dolls in a corner of the room, identically dressed and coiffed.

  “And besides, I still have Juliette . . . I have to give her everything I can now.”

  The captain gazed at the dolls, then at Lucie, looking somber. She noticed and thought it best to explain:

  “It’s the two dolls you find shocking, is that it? Two dolls, just one daughter . . .”

  She went to pick one up, carefully straightened its miniature gray vest.

  “For Juliette, Clara is still alive. The psychiatrist says it will take time, perhaps years, before Juliette can separate physically from her sister, but she’ll get there eventually. Something is protecting her in her head, a mechanism that makes Clara appear when Juliette needs her.”

  The police captain pulled up a chair and sat down, elbows on the table, clenched fists supporting his chin. He watched Lucie in silence, then briefly glanced around him. Not a single bottle of alcohol, no trace of medications. No sign that she was letting herself go. Dishes washed and put away. A nice lemony smell floating over the room.

  “And what about you, have you gotten any help? From a shrink, I mean?”

  “Yes and no. I saw one at first, but . . . I felt it wasn’t doing any good. The fact is, I don’t remember much about our sessions. I think my mind put up a barrier.”

  She shut herself up in silence. Kashmareck deemed it better to change the subject.

  “We miss you a lot at the squad. It was hard for us, too, you know?”

  “It was hard for everyone.”

  “How are you making out, financially?”

  “I’m okay . . . It’s not hard to find work when you’re prepared to do pretty much anything.”

  After setting a coffee packet in place, Lucie pressed a button. The machine quickly filled two cups. Time was passing; they could hear the hand heavily ticking off the seconds. Eight-fifty. In one hour, the phone calls would start, angry voices would shout, ears would buzz. Lucie sat down in front of the police captain, handed him a cup, and cut to the chase.

  “What’s going on with Carnot?”

  “They found him stone dead in the back of his cell in solitary, completely bled out.”

  4

  Four CSI techs and the assistant prosecutor who would order the removal of Eva Louts’s body had just arrived. Suit and tie for one, coveralls for the others, to preserve the clues of the crime scene as best they could. The center’s veterinarian, other investigators, and the boys from the morgue would not be long in coming. Soon around a dozen men would be hustling around the place with a single objective: to find the
truth.

  While Levallois questioned Hervé Beck, the animal keeper, Sharko and Clémentine Jaspar wandered through narrow dirt alleyways, between colored colonies of monkeys. Around them, leaves shook on the trees, the branches waved. Shrill, exotic cries pierced the dense foliage. Indifferent to the tragedy, the primates went about their morning business: picking nits, harvesting termites from tree trunks, playing with their progeny.

  The primatologist stopped at a small artificial belvedere, which allowed them to observe several colonies from above. She rested her elbows on a section of wood, a document folder in her thick, calloused fingers.

  “Eva was working on her doctoral thesis. Her subject was the major principles of biological evolution, and particularly laterality—hand dominance—in primates. She was trying to understand why, in humans, for instance, most people are right-handed and not left-handed.”

  “Is that why she was studying here, in your center?”

  “Yes. She was scheduled to stay until the end of October. She started her project in 2007, but she really started concentrating on hand dominance in late summer 2009. At that point she became interested in the five great primates: men, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Her main job here was to gather statistics and fill charts. Observe the different species, see what hand they used when holding a stick to dig up ants, make tools, or shell nuts. Then draw conclusions.”

  Sharko sipped his fourth decaf of the morning.

  “Did she work alone?”

  “Absolutely. She moved around here like a free electron. A kind, gentle girl who loved animals.”

  Jaspar, too, must have loved animals, Sharko thought. She looked at her primates with a special affection in her eyes, as if each one was a child to love.

  She handed him the file.

  “And now, look at this. Here are the results of her observations since the time she started at the center, three weeks ago. They were on her desk. She probably meant to take them with her before she left yesterday . . .”

  Sharko opened the folder.

  “What are these results supposed to represent?”

  “For each primate in each colony, Eva was supposed to take precise notes about a set of parameters. The repetition of certain gestures for the same individual would presumably prove that individual’s hand dominance.”

  Sharko opened the folder and looked through the various sheets. The preprinted boxes of the tables were uniformly empty.

  “So . . . she wasn’t working after all?”

  “No. At least, not on the topic her thesis adviser had given her. And yet, she swore the opposite was true. She told me that in three weeks, her work had advanced considerably, and that she’d be able to finish her research on schedule.”

  “Why would she come here if she wasn’t doing anything?”

  “Because her thesis adviser required it, and she would have had him on her back if he knew she wasn’t following his directives. Olivier Solers isn’t easy on his students, and not one to tolerate deviations. If he’d had it in for her, Eva would have lost any hope of earning her doctorate.”

  “So she was ambitious.”

  “Very. I already knew her by reputation before she came here. Despite her young age, she had conducted noteworthy studies on laterality in certain birds and fish. The precision and depth of her work got her published in several well-respected scientific journals, which is extremely rare for a student of twenty-five. Eva was brilliant; she was already dreaming of her Nobel Prize.”

  Sharko couldn’t help smiling. He, the most down-to-earth of men, felt overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of the subjects these researchers studied.

  “Forgive me, but . . . I’m having a hard time getting the point of this. What good does it do to know if a fish is right-handed or left-handed? And frankly, I can’t quite imagine what a right-handed fish looks like. A monkey, maybe, but not a fish.”

  “I understand your confusion. You spend your time hunting down and arresting murderers, you fill prisons. It’s concrete.”

  “Sad but true.”

  “We’re trying to discover where we come from, the better to understand where we’re going. We follow the current of life. And observing species, whether plants, viruses, bacteria, or animals, helps us do that. Laterality in certain fish that live in communities is extremely significant. Have you ever watched the behavior of a school of fish when faced with a predator? They all turn in the same direction, so as to remain united and fend off attacks. They don’t think about it and say, ‘Oh, now I have to turn left like my buddies.’ No, this social behavior is a true part of their nature, of their genes, if you like. In the case of those fish, lateralization allows for the survival of the fittest, and that’s the reason it exists, that it was selected.”

  “Selected? By who—a higher intelligence?”

  “Certainly not. All those creationist claims, all that ‘God created Man and all the living creatures on the planet’ stuff, has no place in our center, or in any scientific community. No, it was selected by Evolution, with a capital E. Evolution favors the propagation of whatever benefits the spread of genes, the spread of the best genes, and does away with the rest.”

  “The famous natural selection, which gets rid of lame ducks.”

  “You might say that. Sometimes, when schools of fish veer in one direction, some individuals turn the other way, because they don’t have the aptitude to follow the group’s behavior. Is that a genetic flaw? ‘Lame ducks,’ as you say? Whatever the case, the fact is that they’re the ones who die more quickly, by getting themselves eaten, for example, because they aren’t well adapted, or weaker than the others. It’s one of the expressions of natural selection. In humans, if there had been a real advantage to being left-handed, then we’d probably all be left-handed; we’d function a bit like that school of fish. The problem is that it’s not the case, and yet left-handers exist. Why has evolution favored this asymmetry between right-handers and left-handers? And why in such proportions? Why is one human in ten still born left-handed in a world entirely geared toward right-handers? The substance of Eva Louts’s thesis was to try to answer those questions.”

  Sharko had to admit he’d never wondered about these things: at bottom, he didn’t find this kind of scientific navel-gazing very useful. To his mind, there were other things to worry about, much more serious and important things, but to each his own. He turned back to what interested him.

  “So Eva Louts came here every day toward the end of the afternoon?”

  “Yes, at about five p.m. Around when the center generally closes. She claimed she wanted to work in peace, to observe the primates without disturbing their habits.”

  “So, based on these empty tables, she spent her evenings here just to put in a token appearance . . . so that nobody, especially her thesis adviser, would notice the subterfuge.”

  “Or else, she spent her time doing something else. I was very surprised when I discovered these empty grids. Why would such a driven girl suddenly start lying? What could possibly have led her to put her entire future at risk?”

  “Do you have any ideas?”

  “Not really. But she was conducting research into hand dominance in human populations, past and present, and she’d been working on this particular subject for more than a year. She must have looked into some highly diverse areas. Just two or three days ago, she confided to me that she was on to something big.”

  “Such as?”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t know. But she was excited about it. I could see it in her eyes. When she first started her studies, Eva sent her adviser regular reports. Then around June, from what Olivier Solers told me, her reports started becoming more sporadic. This isn’t uncommon and at first he didn’t think much of it. The thesis adviser wants to hold the reins, and the student wants to shake off his influence, gain some autonomy. But as of mid-July, a month before com
ing here, Eva refused to send the slightest bit of information to her lab; she began hiding her work, making vague promises about some future colloquium, and guaranteeing that it would be ‘a huge deal’ if her research panned out.”

  Sharko nervously fingered his empty cup; there was no wastebasket in which to toss it. Mentally, he tried to envision the case from another angle. Louts, through her research, makes new contacts, meets new people. Somehow or other, just like a reporter, she gets hold of something hot and pulls up the drawbridge.

  The sound of slamming doors brought him back to the present. In the distance, near the animal housing facility, two guys from the morgue were carting away Louts’s corpse on a stretcher. The black plastic body bag looked like charcoal. To dust you shall return . . . Then the men went back inside with the empty stretcher. Clémentine Jaspar brought her fists to her mouth.

  “They’re going for Shery. Why are they taking her to the morgue?”

  “The medical examiner is just going to take a few tissue samples, nothing to worry about.”

  Sharko didn’t leave her time to feel anxious.

  “Did Eva have any boyfriends?”

  “The two of us talked about it a bit. It wasn’t a priority of hers. Career first. She was pretty solitary, and very ecologically minded. No cell phone, no TV, from what she told me. On top of that, she was very athletic. A fencer who had competed in a number of championships when she was younger. A sound mind in a sound body.”

  “Was there anyone she could confide in?”

  “I didn’t know her that well. But . . . I don’t know. You’re a policeman, you’ll search her place. The results of her research must still be there.”

  Faced with Sharko’s silence and evident skepticism, she pointed to the chimpanzees, those great primates she seemed to love more than anything in the world.

  “Look at them one more time, Inspector. Look closely, and tell me what you see.”