Bred to Kill

by Franck Thilliez

  “All right, all right, stop! I’ll talk!”

  Lucie waited a few seconds before lessening the pressure, her face pale. Her head was spinning. She’d been on the verge of pulling the trigger. For real. She had never felt like that, not even in the middle of her darkest cases.

  “Jeezus, you’re fucking nuts!”

  “What’s your connection to the Cro-Magnon mummy?”

  The young man looked broken down. He knew he wasn’t dealing with some average cop, but with a walking time bomb.

  “I took it.”

  “A setup? Were you in league with Fécamp?”

  “He was supposed to get us into the lab, and our job was to make it look like a robbery.”

  “Who was the second attacker?”

  “This guy I know, some kind of computer whiz. He just did what he was told, he doesn’t know anything about it.”

  Lucie stepped back, not taking her eyes off him. Chouart, docile now, didn’t move a hair. She was sure he’d only tell the truth from now on.

  “Was it Fécamp who got in touch with you?”

  “No. Fécamp was just a middleman. The guy who hired us got in touch with him first, before contacting me. Then one night, the three of us met in a park in Villeurbanne to talk over the deal. The contract was simple. Fécamp got a bundle for bringing me to the mummy when the time came, and I got another bundle for stealing it. Ten thousand apiece. I was supposed to recruit somebody else to help me. It was kid’s play. Fécamp had explained everything beforehand: the badge, where the lab was located, the computers containing the files and backups.”

  He nodded toward the researcher.

  “He hates his boss. He creams in his shorts every time he hears that cow complain about the mummy’s disappearance. I think he would have done it for free.”

  “Your employer’s name.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  Lucie took a quick step toward him, threateningly. The man protected his face with both arms. The eagles and snakes of his tattoos stood between him and Lucie.

  “I swear! That’s all I know! I didn’t hear anything more about this business until tonight when this asswipe showed up here, asking if I’d had anything to do with the murder of some student, whatever her name is—fuck me if I’ve ever heard it before! You can ask him!”

  Lucie was sweating heavily; she sponged her forehead with her sleeve. Her nerves were on edge. She needed a trail, a name, some clue to follow. No way was she going to leave here empty-handed. Without hesitating, she leaned over Fécamp and started slapping him, harder and harder.

  “Hey, you, wake up!”

  After a good minute, the scientist emitted a groan, then struggled to open his eyes. His hand went to his head, his fingers turning slightly red. Blood and alcohol. He stared at Lucie in disbelief, then sat up slightly. He dragged himself to the wall and leaned his back against it, legs stretched out. Lucie didn’t leave him time to open his mouth.

  “I’ll give you ten seconds to tell me who paid you to steal the mummy.”

  Fécamp squeezed his lips shut, as if to keep from saying a single word. Lucie kicked the bottleneck toward Chouart.

  “If he doesn’t start talking, cut him.”

  With haggard eyes, Fécamp looked at the tattooed kid and his black-and-blue temple. The young man picked up the sharp piece of broken glass, without real conviction.

  The researcher’s eyes swerved back to Lucie.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Three seconds.”

  Silence. The seconds ticked by. Then the barriers gave way.

  “He . . . he contacted me again about two weeks after the theft . . . to make sure the police investigation wouldn’t go anywhere. I told him the case was cold, that there were no clues . . . His name is Stéphane Terney.”

  Lucie felt a huge surge of relief. This kind of revelation was beyond all hopes.

  “Why did he want the mummy?”

  The researcher shook his head like a guilty child.

  “I don’t know. I swear I don’t know. We met only a couple of times. He was always the one who chose the spot.”

  “So why would he give you his real name, in that case? Wasn’t that pretty risky?”

  “He also gave me his phone number. He wanted me to keep an eye out. I was supposed to call him if anybody came around asking about the aurochs fresco, the Cro-Magnon, or left-handers. And tell him exactly what the visitors were after.”

  “And that’s what you did when Eva Louts came to see you. You called him and told him all about her. Her name, and I suppose even where she lived.”

  “Yes, yes . . . I . . . I can’t believe that he . . . was involved in a murder.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a doctor and a respected scientist. Terney’s big specialty is problems relating to pregnancy. He wrote a book that made a huge splash in the scientific community three or four years ago.”

  “What book is that?”

  “It’s called The Key and the Lock. About hidden codes in DNA.”

  This Terney, from the redhead’s description, didn’t really seem the delinquent sort. So why the theft? And why recruit a lookout?

  “What did you tell him, exactly?”

  “That Eva Louts was interested in the drawing, because she’d seen something like it in a prison. Then there was that business about left-handers, too. Basically, I told him what Tassin probably told you.”

  Lucie thought for a moment. A piece of the mystery seemed to be coming into focus. Without knowing it, the redhead had put Louts in mortal danger by alerting Terney. Worried about the young woman’s research, the older scientist might have killed her. But countless questions still remained: What had Eva Louts discovered that could have led to her murder? What was so precious about the Cro-Magnon’s genome that it justified such an elaborate theft? What secrets did it contain? Did Terney know about Grégory Carnot’s drawings? Had the two men met?

  Lucie demanded Terney’s phone number, which she committed to memory.

  Meanwhile, what to do with these two clowns? Lucie was as illegitimate as they were. Impersonating a cop and roughing people up with a loaded gun could get her into serious hot water, jeopardize her ability to raise Juliette. At that moment, she realized just how far she’d gone. Still, she tried to play the part to the end.

  “I have your names and addresses. We’ve got an understanding, the three of us. You know how this works. I’m going to go see this Terney, settle my score, and try to keep both your names out of this shit. I said try. I especially suggest you don’t make any attempts to warn him. The slightest fuckup, and you can be sure you’ll be spending the next several years in jail.”

  She poked her foot a few times into the researcher’s thighs.

  “Go on, get out of here! Go back to your lab, analyze your cave bear fangs or whatever it is you do, and make like none of this ever happened.”

  Fécamp didn’t have to be asked twice. Stumbling a bit, he took off without looking back. Lucie bent down and picked up her medallion, unable to keep from looking at the photo of her daughter before she put it back in her pocket.

  Then she backed out the door, closing it softly behind her.

  She had just one goal in mind now: find Stéphane Terney.

  20

  With Louts’s thesis, the dates they’d established, and the conclusions they could draw, Sharko and Levallois had spent the afternoon trying to retrace the student’s itinerary in the month before her death and had laid out their findings for Bellanger’s team in a cramped office at number 36.

  In the summer of 2009, under the direction of her thesis adviser, Olivier Solers, Eva Louts begins a project expected to last several years. One of her aims is to study hand dominance in major primates, especially man. The first year seems to pass without incident.

&nbs
p; Then, around June 2010, Louts’s relations with her thesis adviser deteriorate. The student withholds information, becomes protective of her discoveries. Striking off on her own, she decides to push her research further and heads for the most violent city in Mexico, Ciudad Juárez. Do violent populations still contain a greater number of left-handers than the average, as they did tens of thousands of years ago? To her dismay, she discovers this is no longer the case. But instead of giving up, she decides to go to Brazil, for reasons that remain obscure but are important enough to keep her there for a week. On her return to France, she doesn’t write anything about Brazil in her notebooks. Instead, she requests authorization to meet with violent criminals, all of them left-handed. On August 13, she meets her first prisoner; and on the 27th, she comes face-to-face with Grégory Carnot. On the 28th, the Alps. Less than a week later, she books another flight to Manaus . . .

  • • •

  Now, as he walked with Levallois down Avenue Montaigne, Sharko felt certain of one thing: something had triggered all this. The trip to Brazil had led to Louts’s sudden interest in French killers, which had led to Carnot. What had clicked in Louts’s head? What had she found in Brazil that had then taken her to the mountaintops?

  In front of him, Avenue Montaigne glittered in all its excess. Mercedes lined up in front of luxury boutiques: Cartier, Prada, Gucci, Valentino. To the right was the Seine, and in the background the Eiffel Tower. A postcard view for the rich.

  The inspector straightened his caramel-colored tie and tugged on the sleeves of his jacket. He glanced at a shop window, which sent back his reflection. His new haircut, the crew cut he’d always worn, made him happy and gave him back his true cop’s face. All he needed now was his former build for the old Sharko to be reborn completely from the ashes.

  They walked into number 15, a venerable building as white as a palace. The Drouot auction house was the oldest such establishment in the world. A magical, ephemeral museum, where one could acquire anything the human mind or nature had managed to dream up. Usually, the exhibitions of objects, which related to a theme, a period, or a country, lasted for several days. Each year, eight hundred thousand pieces changed hands in three thousand sales. A business even the economic crisis couldn’t affect.

  Sharko and Levallois asked to speak to the auctioneer, Ferdinand Ferraud. While waiting, they headed toward the auction rooms, taking the opportunity to peek into that evening’s exhibit, “The Story of Time.” Muffled atmosphere, low lighting, churchlike calm. Couples silently wandered arm in arm among the 450 meticulously numbered artworks, which claimed to trace the human epic from its origins to the conquest of space. Levallois walked to a corner labeled “Meteorites,” the center of which was occupied by a fragment weighing one and a half tons. He pondered it with a puzzled eye, just like the other, more elegant visitors who’d come for a final viewing of these objects before possibly acquiring them.

  “Honestly, can you imagine having a meteorite in the middle of your living room?”

  “Wouldn’t get through the door. On the other hand, nothing like it for cracking somebody’s skull open.”

  “You got anyone in particular in mind?”

  Hands behind his back, Sharko didn’t answer and instead headed toward the minerals. Stalactiform malachite, chalcedony geode, spherules of mesolite . . . In the next room, said a poster, stood skeletons of “wooly rhinoceros,” cave bears from the Urals, and especially one, in its entirety, of an adult mammoth. Perfectly staged and lit, with one of its feet resting on a pedestal, the heap of bones was an impressive sight.

  “It comes from Russia,” said a voice behind him. “They said you wanted to see me.”

  Sharko turned around to find a man in a snug-fitting dark suit, with a red tie and a giraffe’s neck. He had been expecting some decrepit old codger, but the auctioneer was young and seemingly in good shape. The cop looked around and pointed to the others in the room.

  “You could have gone up to anyone here. Do I look that much like a cop?”

  “The receptionist described you as thin with a crew cut and a jacket that’s too large for you.”

  Sharko showed his ID and introduced Levallois, who had just walked up.

  “We’re here about a sale that took place last Thursday. It was for mammal skeletons from the . . .”—he took out a flyer he’d gotten at the reception—“from ten thousand B.C. to the present.”

  “‘Noah’s Ark.’ The show, and the sale, were hugely successful. The Darwin anniversary helped a lot. There’s been a resurgence of interest in primitive arts and the return to nature. The fossil market has become so lucrative that it’s spawned all kinds of counterfeit traffic, especially from China and Russia.”

  “We’d like to see the sales records for that day.”

  The auctioneer glanced at his watch and answered without hesitation.

  “Fine. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of time to spare, as this evening’s sale is about to begin.”

  Ferraud asked them to follow. For once they were dealing with someone who wasn’t trying to obstruct their inquiry, who seemed perfectly willing to help. Sharko reflected that he must have been used to visits from the Cultural Property Office or Customs. The traffic in art objects was a booming business.

  They took a stairway that afforded them a plunging view of the auction room and provided access to a row of offices. Ferraud entered one of them, opened a locked drawer, and took out a folder. He wet his fingertips.

  “What exactly are you looking for?”

  Levallois, tired of taking a backseat, gave the answer.

  “The name of the person or persons who bought chimpanzee fossils, roughly two thousand years old.”

  The other man riffled through the lists with impressive speed. His eyes suddenly focused into a stare. With a half smile, he looked up at the two policemen.

  “We’ve got exactly one piece from that period—you’re in luck.”

  “Was it bought?”

  “Yes.”

  The two cops exchanged a rapid glance.

  “And I remember the buyer. An avid collector. He left us a check for twelve thousand euros. He bought an example of every great ape we had. Four skeletons of excellent quality, with over twenty percent of their original bones.”

  Sharko knit his brow. The auctioneer explained:

  “You should know that these fossils aren’t really fossils. That mammoth on auction downstairs, for instance, doesn’t even have five percent of its original bones. No one would be interested in it in its actual state—it was too mangled and unaesthetic. The rest of its bone structure is synthetic, made by a company in Russia.”

  Ferraud circled a name on the sales sheet and handed it to the cops.

  “Delivered to his home on Friday morning by our forwarding agents. That really is his address. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  21

  Montmartre at night. Shadows fleeing beneath the tired halos of streetlamps. Narrow alleys set with paving stones. An ogive-shaped landmass rising from the crest of Paris, dissected by countless stairways. A labyrinth of intertwining streets, and at the center its Minotaur: Stéphane Terney.

  Lucie had parked her car on Rue Lamarck, near a metro stop whose stairs spiraled into the ground. A few small cafés, still open, absorbed the rare passersby. The air was thick and pasty. Atmosphere of late summer, heavy with humidity, as if a storm could break at any moment. In that damp, the neighborhood felt like a fortress, an islet protected by fog, far from the hubbub of the Champs-Élysées or the Bastille.

  To get the address of the man who’d masterminded the theft of Cro-Magnon, Lucie had simply called Information. The Paris region had three people by that name, but the street one of them lived on left little room for doubt.

  Rue Darwin.

  Charles Darwin . . . The father of the theory of evolution and author of The Origin of Spe
cies, Lucie recalled from her biology classes. Odd coincidence.

  Since her return from Lyon, she had kept a low profile. After leaving the apartment of the young hood with the broken bottle, she’d immediately gone to find a copy of Stéphane Terney’s book: a fairly specialized tome with lots of charts and graphs. Then, after calling her mother to let her know she’d be home very late, probably not before dawn, she’d gotten back on the highway, without stopping or thinking about anything other than her mission. Foot to the floor, she had only one desire: to stand face-to-face with the man who would surely have to answer for the theft of the mummy, and who could help her understand its puzzling connection to Grégory Carnot.

  Walking quickly, she passed by a row of town houses until she stood in front of Terney’s: a whitewashed concrete façade, two stories high, with private garage and a solid metal door that made it look like a giant safe. It was now almost eleven p.m. and no light was filtering through the upstairs windows. Much too late to knock without arousing suspicion. All in all, Lucie knew almost nothing about Terney and had to tread lightly: the man behind the stack of diplomas might be highly dangerous.

  Weighing her options, Lucie looked around her, then rushed into an alley a few yards away that sliced through the row of houses. The narrow path provided a shortcut to a parallel street and, better still, access to the balconies and gardens behind the buildings. She just had to scale a high cement wall.

  After slipping on her wool gloves, Lucie jumped up, gripped the edge, and, after a few attempts, hoisted herself to the top, though not without scraping her forearms and elbows in the process. A moment later, her body fell heavily onto the grass. She gave out a muffled grunt. Nothing broken, but that little exercise showed her, yet again, how out of shape she’d become.

  While the fronts of the houses offered only anonymous façades, the backs expressed their owners’ peculiarities: hanging terraces, hexagonal verandas, Japanese gardens with lush vegetation. A privileged corner of Paris, safe from covetous eyes.

  In Rue Darwin, Lucie had counted the buildings between Terney’s house and the alley. After silently crossing through the fourth garden, she gauged that she was at the right place.