Bred to Kill

by Franck Thilliez

  Quick analysis of the situation: impossible to get in from ground level because of the covered porch with its double-glazed glass panels. Upstairs, on the other hand, she spied a half-open window. Crouched over, she ran toward the porch, climbed onto the barrel that collected water from the drainpipe, and within seconds found herself on the Plexiglas roof.

  Near the window, she drew her weapon from her pocket. Everything was whirring around in her head: her illegal presence, the danger, the problems she’d surely have to face if she broke into the house. But what if someone was injured? She hesitated a few seconds, then, pushed by the same force that had always driven her, she slipped inside.

  She pointed her gun at the bed. No one. The room was empty, but the sheets were rumpled. The angles of the room formed opaque cones. Lucie let her eyes adjust to the dark. Two slippers and a bathrobe lay on the floor: Terney could well be somewhere in the house.

  Lucie’s muscles stiffened; her senses snapped to attention. The minuscule creaks of the floorboards beneath her feet sounded amplified. The man hiding between these walls might have murdered a student; he wouldn’t hesitate to eliminate her either.

  She pushed open the door with her fingertips and ventured out of the room. Light filtered in from the streetlamps outside. Opposite her, an aluminum guardrail, twisted in a double helix like a strand of DNA, ran along an open hallway that overlooked the living room below. Lucie heard muffled voices, laughter that faded into the humid air outside. She continued, flat against the wall, listening as she silently crept onward. Below, she spotted an answering machine with its message indicator, the number 7 blinking on it.

  Seven messages . . . Lucie relaxed a bit. So Stéphane Terney probably wasn’t home, and might have been away for some time.

  She inched forward some more. One gigantic room drew her attention. It was like being in the lair of some macabre collector. In the shadows, skeletons in attack posture. Prehistoric fossils in perfect condition, animals of all types and sizes, which she identified as reconstructions of dinosaurs. Under glass were minerals, shells in stone, body parts. Femurs, ulnae, teeth, flint. The doctor had created his own evolution museum.

  A fresco in the back made her stomach tighten. It showed five skeletons. Near them, an inscription on a painted canvas: THE FIVE GREAT APES. She recognized the skeletons of a man and also of a chimpanzee, smaller and squatter and missing the skull and jaws at top.

  With a stiff neck, Lucie turned around and noticed that some floorboards had been ripped up. Beneath them was a hiding place, now empty. Someone had obviously been through it.

  She left the room. Terney was more than a fanatic: he lived and breathed evolution to the point of residing on Rue Darwin.

  An odor suddenly made her freeze. A stench she knew all too well, a mix of rotting flesh and intestinal gas. Her fingers squeezed more tightly around the grip of her Mann. With the toe of her shoe, she pushed open the last door before the stairs and ventured into a cube of darkness. After aiming her gun at the dark corners, she banged her fist on the switch.

  The horrible spectacle appeared all at once.

  A nude body, no doubt Terney himself, was lying on the floor, on its right side, at the foot of a fallen chair. It had been bound with packing tape, hands in front, feet attached to the chair legs. Wide gashes riddled the torso, arms, and calves: black, frozen smiles that had sliced through the flesh. A piece of tape that had acted as a gag was still half stuck to his cheek. The man had fallen from his chair onto his side, but the index fingers of both hands were stretched straight in front of him, as if he’d been trying to point to something. Lucie turned in the direction indicated. A library containing hundreds of volumes, stacked several yards high. A crypt of paper. Which specific book was the victim trying to point out?

  Without approaching, taking care not to disturb anything, Lucie tried to memorize the crime scene, imagine the killer in action. He had unavoidably left something of himself behind, something of his personality in this cold, sinister tomb.

  Terney had been mutilated, tortured methodically, without the killer losing his cool. On the floor were cigarette butts, their ends black with burned tobacco. One of them was still embedded in the corpse’s shoulder, as if the butt had glued itself to his skin. The partly removed gag suggested that Terney had finally talked. What had his torturer been trying to get out of him?

  Lucie nearly felt faint when she heard a muffled noise coming from the back of the room. There was another door.

  The noise occurred again. Boom, boom . . . Something was hitting a wall. Or rather, someone.

  Lucie moved forward, her throat tight. Holding her breath, gun outstretched, she turned the knob and yanked open the door.

  A man in black pajamas was sitting on the floor, a fat book open on his knees. Rocking slightly—hence the noise—he turned the pages, imperturbable, concentrated, not even raising his head. He looked barely twenty years old.

  Lucie didn’t have time to understand or react before dull thuds at the main door froze her in her tracks.

  “Police! Open up!”

  A deep, aggressive voice. Lucie backed away, unnerved. The seated man still didn’t show the slightest reaction, just tirelessly turned his pages. Good Christ, this was incomprehensible! Why didn’t he run? Who was he? Lucie had to think fast. If they caught her here, she was done for. Legs flying, she ran back up to the hallway, knocking over a statue placed at the top of the ramp. She gritted her teeth, unable to catch the object before it went crashing down the stairs with a clatter, without breaking.

  Metal.

  “Stéphane Terney! Open up!”

  More thuds, much louder this time. Voices, shouts. Lucie ran toward the bedroom, unable to breathe. The thuds became a full-scale din: the police were using a battering ram. The entry door slammed open just as Lucie landed feetfirst in the garden. Lungs aching, she dashed into the thickets of branches. It was only a matter of seconds. She didn’t dare look behind her. The cops must have been discovering the body by now, arresting the sitting man, entering each room in tight formation, rushing to the exits. No doubt in less than a minute they’d light up the back gardens with their powerful search beams. She arrived at the high cement wall, threw herself at it like a stone from a slingshot. Her arms hoisted her up and propelled her into the alley. Her landing was hard, but her knees took the shock. The moment she stood up, her right cheek smacked against the cold partition.

  A gun barrel was pressed into her temple.

  “Don’t move!”

  She felt unable to twitch a muscle. A firm fist had yanked her hand behind her back, holding her in an arm lock. She breathed noisily through her nostrils, her mouth twisting. They had trapped her, watching every exit. She was done for, and she immediately thought of little Juliette. She saw prison bars separating their two faces.

  Time seemed to expand, then Lucie suddenly felt the tension relax. The man turned her brusquely around; their eyes met.

  “F-Franck?”

  Sharko’s emaciated face floated in the shadows. In the throbbing lights, he looked like a cop from a detective movie. The face of a guy who’d seen it all. He cast a quick glance behind him and hissed, “Goddammit, Henebelle! What the hell are you doing here?”

  Lucie was panting, unable to catch her breath.

  “He . . . he’s dead . . . tortured . . . There . . . there’s someone in . . . the room . . . in pajamas . . .”

  Sharko lowered his weapon nervously. His eyes darted to the street, then rested on Lucie. In the distance, through the windows of Terney’s house, beams of light began sweeping the darkness. The inspector had to think fast.

  “Did anyone see you?”

  Lucie shook her head, hands on her knees, spitting up a filament of bile.

  He gripped her wrist and squeezed hard.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Let me . . . go . . . p
lease!”

  Sharko didn’t even have to fight against his conscience as a cop. The two of them were the same: shattered, wounded inside, and outside the law. He released his grip.

  “Go on, get going. Go back up the alley and disappear. You’ve got less than five seconds. And especially, don’t call me, don’t leave any trace of our contact, no matter what. I’ll call you.”

  He pushed her so hard that she almost fell. Lucie regained her balance and turned around to thank him with a nod, but he was already far away. She took a huge breath of air and began sprinting, like a fugitive, until she finally disappeared into the shadows of Montmartre.

  22

  Levallois’s powerful frame slammed into Sharko at the corner where the alley met Rue Darwin. The young cop with the oilcan jaw was boiling, his muscles made taut by excitement and the smell of the hunt.

  “Somebody got away through the rear gardens! Didn’t you see anything?”

  Sharko turned back toward the cement wall.

  “Dead quiet on my end. Who got away? What’s going on?”

  Levallois peered in every direction, eyes shining. He turned back to Sharko.

  “The window of his room was open. The only place he could’ve got out was back here. I thought I heard you shout.”

  “Some goddamn cat. You sure you saw somebody?”

  “I’m not sure of anything. There’s something really weird in there. Come have a look . . .”

  Levallois turned, took a few running steps, leapt onto the cement parapet, and his body disappeared into the gardens. Alone, Sharko let out a sigh. That had been a close call. By now, Lucie should be far enough away to be out of danger. Regardless, she owed him a serious explanation.

  He hurried toward the house. The officers were dragging a man out in handcuffs. He was bellowing at the top of his lungs, in deep, nasal tones, feet flying in every direction; it took no fewer than three burly cops to restrain him. Bellanger, the group chief, watched the young prisoner through dark eyes.

  “What’s all this bullshit about?” asked Sharko, slightly out of breath.

  “No idea. Terney is dead. This guy isn’t talking. We found him turning the pages of a book, sitting quietly, while a corpse lay not three yards away.”

  “His strange behavior . . . the shouting . . . Mentally handicapped?”

  “Very mentally handicapped, I’d say. On the cover of his book is the number 342 in large writing, and the pages are numbered one to three hundred, but they’re all blank. The guy has no identification on him, nothing. He’s probably the one who came in through the window. He knocked over the metal statue when we tried to get inside. The noise must have frightened him and he hid in a closet next to the crime scene . . .”

  Sharko nodded.

  “I didn’t see anything go by in the gardens. If you ask me, Levallois is chasing a ghost.”

  Even shut up inside the police car, they could still hear the young man bellowing. In the neighboring houses, lights went on. People stepped outside.

  “I’ll hand in my resignation if this guy isn’t an escapee from a psych ward or something like that,” said Bellanger. “But why did he come here?”

  • • •

  They entered the house behind the CSI team. Men in hazmat suits poured into every room.

  “I’ll meet you at the body,” said Sharko. “I want to get a feel for the place first.”

  While downstairs Levallois gathered information about the victim over the phone, Sharko drifted from room to room, meeting the somber, perturbed, weary faces of his colleagues. Living room, day room, game room, projection room . . . Everything was orderly to a fault, spotless as an operating theater. According to the initial data, Stéphane Terney was a respected obstetrician and immunologist who practiced in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly. He was sixty-five and obviously fastidious. Even the silverware in the drawer was stacked with military rigor. Surely an occupational hazard: working with pipettes and needles all day, bringing babies into the world, must have demanded a rigorous discipline.

  The messages on the answering machine were of various types. Two different women—lovers?—were wondering why they hadn’t heard from him. Work colleagues were taking the liberty of calling Terney, who was then finishing a three-week vacation, about some administrative matters.

  Sharko went up to the large, open fireplace and squatted down. The techs were retrieving the remains of some videocassettes from the ashes—at least half a dozen at first glance, totally incinerated. The tape itself was no more than ash, and the cases lumps of black plastic. No VCR had been found in the house, but the police had discovered the ripped-up floorboards in Terney’s fossil room. The place where he had no doubt kept the VHS tapes hidden. The killer must have burned them.

  Sharko then made a quick tour of the large room that housed the private collection of fossils and minerals. There must have been a small fortune’s worth. The pieces were well cared for, staged with special lighting. The animals seemed to be facing off against one another.

  Next he went and joined Bellanger in the library. Barely older than Levallois, Nicolas Bellanger had all the qualities of a team leader: intelligent, athletic, and ambitious. Relations between him and Sharko were neither good nor bad. They worked together, period.

  For his part, Jacques Levallois was closely examining the rows of books that the victim had died pointing at. Paul Chénaix, the medical examiner who had autopsied Eva Louts, stood up and pulled off his gloves. Then he wiped his small, round glasses with a cloth.

  “Eyes liquefying, excellent abdominal patch, rigor fully resolved. Not entirely green yet. I’d say he bought it between four and eight days ago. The autopsy will give us a tighter window. We can remove the body.”

  Sharko thought over the information. Between the fatigue and the excess coffee, he felt strange: a slight floating sensation, as if he’d had a few glasses of wine. He nonetheless managed to sort things out in his head:

  “Eva Louts was murdered three days ago. Terney was killed before that . . . So clearly he wasn’t her killer.”

  Bellanger looked carefully through the room, spinning slowly around. He was tall and lanky, with eyes black as espresso and tousled brown hair.

  “Not to mention that we haven’t found the chimpanzee skull in his private collection. The killer first came here, tortured and killed Terney, then took care of Louts, bringing the monkey jaw with him. Say what you will, I can’t really see that guy in pajamas committing two murders of this type. From what I hear from the squad room, the fellow’s been bumping against things and grunting like an animal. As soon as they gave him back his book, he quieted down. He started turning the blank pages again, without uttering a sound.”

  Everything in the room caught Sharko’s interest. Row upon row of books stretched to the ceiling. The precious woods, bizarre artworks, and high-tech equipment reeked of wealth, as well as a morbid eccentricity.

  “You find anything?” he asked Levallois.

  “Nothing yet. Did you see how many books there are? How are we supposed to know what he’s pointing at?”

  The inspector turned back to the corpse. Burned, mutilated, probably with a knife. The ME had turned the body onto its back. Sharko pointed to the wide, deep gash in his left groin.

  “Is that what killed him?”

  “Yes. The left external iliac artery was severed. That artery is like a river. The victim fell from his chair, his blood poured out, and he died within seconds.”

  “Curious way of doing away with somebody. Maybe the killer has ties to the medical trade. Or in any case, he knows his way around human anatomy. First he wanted to make him suffer. After he finally got him to spill the beans, probably about where the cassettes were hidden, he eliminated him, then took off as Terney was giving up the ghost. Clean, masterful work. Like with Louts, he took his time.”

  “There are also nicotine t
races on his tongue and gums. The killer must have forced him to smoke those cigarettes so he could burn him.”

  The ME pulled back a little and pointed to the torso.

  “Look at his chest. All together, the cigarette burns form the letters X and Y . . .”

  “X and Y—the signs of male gender, right?”

  The examiner nodded.

  “Exactly. Of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes we all have, only one pair is different, depending on the sex: XX or XY. All newborns have the X chromosome from the mother, but the father gives them either his X—in which case the child is female—or his Y.”

  Sharko pondered. The killer had toyed with his victim, but he had also left them a major clue, whether he meant to or not. Somewhat dubiously, the inspector walked over to three paintings hanging side by side on one of the walls. The first showed a bird in flames against a molten sky: the legendary phoenix. The second seemed to depict a human placenta: a fat, transparent, veined bubble. The blood vessels, in scarlet red, were like bizarre serpents and made the whole thing look like a monstrous spider. The third canvas was actually an enlarged photo of a prehistoric human mummy, completely desiccated and lying on a table as if it were about to be autopsied. The inspector wrinkled his nose at the placenta.

  “Either I don’t know shit about art, or this guy Terney sure had weird taste.”

  Nicolas Bellanger came up. Both the phoenix and the placenta bore the artist’s signature: “Amanda P.”

  “You know as much as I do. Everything in this house relates to DNA, birth, or biology, even down to the shape of the fixtures. Putting a frame around the photo of some gross mummy, I swear . . . He even lives on Rue Darwin. You can’t make this shit up.”

  “A fanatic to the end, since he ended up with an X and Y on his chest . . . Nice little wink from his murderer.”

  The ME said good night and took off; he still had work to do. Without a word, the men from the morgue slid the corpse into a black bag. The sound of the zipper echoed to the far corner of the room. Now alone with Sharko, Nicolas Bellanger headed toward the small adjacent closet.