Bred to Kill

by Franck Thilliez

  “This is where we found the guy in pajamas. He was shut away in here, with his book. Three hundred meticulously numbered pages, all blank. You ever seen anything like that?”

  “Yeah, lots of times. Just visit any psych ward.”

  Sharko went over to join Levallois. After a moment, he noticed that the books were arranged by subject: science, natural history, geography, then alphabetically within each subject.

  “Terney was anal. If he pointed to this area, it’s maybe because there’s something out of place here. Something that jumps out.”

  Searching through the books in turn, Sharko came upon a group of provocative titles: The Right to End Lives That Aren’t Worth Living, Euthanasia, Solutions to Aging Populations . . . Books on eugenics and racial purity by the dozens. On the right, an entire section was devoted to virology and immunology. None of it very uplifting.

  Levallois slowly climbed down the ladder, eyes scanning the books within his reach. With his gloved hand, he pulled one from its place on the shelf.

  “Bingo! A book about DNA in the middle of the geography section. It’s called The Key and the Lock. And guess what?”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s written by none other than Terney himself.”

  Sharko held out his hand and Levallois gave him the book. On the cover was Leonardo’s famous drawing of a standing nude man inside a circle and a square. Beneath the title, an alluring copy line: “The Hidden Codes of DNA.”

  “They call that Vitruvian man,” the young lieutenant explained. “Turns out a man with arms and legs outstretched can be inscribed in the perfect geometric figures of a circle and a square. Did you know Leonardo was a lefty?”

  “And your point is?”

  “Nothing. Just general culture.”

  Bellanger walked up as Sharko was reading the back cover blurb.

  “What’s it about?”

  “I don’t even understand the synopsis. Listen to this: ‘Why do the numbers twenty-six and thirteen sound and order the major harmonic of the relations between the billions of codons in the entire human genome and the most frequent codon, among the sixty-four possible types? Why, in the three billion bases forming a simple strand of DNA, does each of these codons possess its mirror image? Why does the entire human genome obey the proportions of the golden mean? Intended for specialists and general readers alike, this book will answer the questions you have long been asking about the implacable work of nature in the construction of life.’”

  Bellanger was speechless. Sharko leafed through the first pages.

  “It looks pretty complicated, and technical. There are pages and pages of DNA sequences, mathematical formulas everywhere, graphs, and not much text . . . Why would Terney have pointed us toward this?”

  “It’s in the subtitle: the hidden codes of DNA . . . Think of the X and Y on the corpse’s chest.”

  Bellanger looked through the volume for a while with a somber face, then shoved it into a plastic bag.

  “I’ll get this straight to our biologists in the forensics lab. They can spend all night on it if they have to, but I need to know what kind of shitstorm we’ve walked into here.”

  • • •

  Back at number 36, Sharko approached one of the detention cells. Sitting in a corner, the young man in pajamas was placidly turning his pages one after another. His eyes were bright, shining with an inner glow, as if he were searching for something in those blank pages. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, with matted blond hair and long, bony hands, his thumbs slightly curved outward. His lips were murmuring words that Sharko couldn’t quite make out.

  “Who are you?” asked the cop. “What are you muttering to yourself? What are you looking for?”

  The young man didn’t raise his head. Jaws clenched, Sharko stood up and headed for a small conference room on the third floor. The faces of the people there were chalky, their features drawn. Empty cups and cigarette butts littered the old table. It was one in the morning and nobody felt like talking anymore. Pascal Robillard was distractedly twisting a rubber band; Jacques Levallois couldn’t stop yawning; Nicolas Bellanger gave his final instructions.

  “Priority: find out who this guy in pajamas is. We have to make him talk, figure out what he was doing there. So, Pascal . . . you call the mental hospitals and local police stations; we’re looking for a runaway. You also look into Terney’s background. I want to know who he is, who he worked with, if he had any enemies. Maybe he knew that wacko downstairs, maybe a relation or something. Some younger cousin, a nephew, a kid he’s been treating for some reason. Sharko, you look into his professional and private life. Question his colleagues at the clinic in Neuilly and his friends. Judging from the messages on his machine, he was something of a player. Check into that angle, too. The case is getting deeper, and we’ll need a hand solving it. So as of tomorrow, most of Manien’s team are coming over to work with us full-time, provide some backup and fresh ideas.”

  Sharko clenched his jaws.

  “Aren’t they on the Hurault case?”

  “The Hurault case? It’s gone completely cold. Not the hint of a trail. So the boss put ours at the top of the pile and is allocating us more men.”

  “Manien’s not going to like that.”

  “Like I care.”

  Bellanger turned to Levallois.

  “Jacques, you get on to the autopsy. It starts in an hour. You prepared to go without sleep tonight?”

  The young lieutenant nodded.

  “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

  “Fine. I also gave your cell number to the head of the bio lab for the book about DNA, that Key and Lock thing. Let’s hope he calls you in the middle of the night with good news.”

  “It is the middle of the night.”

  Bellanger managed a brief smile, looked over his troops, then gave the whiteboard behind him a huge swipe with the eraser.

  “Get moving. I’ve still got a ton of paperwork to catch up on before sunrise. See you later.”

  • • •

  Sharko was furious and worried. Sitting at the wheel of his car, he tried to reach Lucie, but no luck. True, it was late, but why the hell wasn’t she answering? Had something happened to her in Montmartre before she could get away? Had she had an accident? He screeched to a halt at a red light he almost hadn’t noticed. The small woman from the North was again dominating his thoughts and driving him crazy.

  As he walked down the hall to his apartment, sore, empty, burdened by dark thoughts, a shadow sitting at his door stood up.

  Lucie Henebelle, cell phone in one hand, Terney’s book in the other, was waiting for him with undisguised impatience. She looked him straight in the eye.

  “Tell me they aren’t on to me.”

  23

  Sharko yanked Lucie inside and locked the door behind them. He pulled her by the wrist to the middle of the living room and rushed over to the kitchen window.

  “Did anyone see you come here? Did you talk to anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you answer my calls?”

  Lucie looked around her. The first time she’d been in this apartment was over a year ago. That night, she’d slept on the couch, and he in his room. While the couch was still there, the pictures of his wife and daughter, so numerous back then, had now disappeared. Not a single trace of his past life; no more decorations or trinkets. Why did Lucie have the cold feeling that this apartment had become lifeless, soulless, as if she were visiting it after the owner’s decease? She looked at Sharko, who was hanging his service weapon on a coatrack, as he’d always done. How many years had he been repeating the same gesture? Despite his crew cut, the bags under his eyes were even puffier, and his features seemed to be crumbling away like cheap plaster. Fatigue was consuming him like a drug.

  Lucie remained standing.

  “I wanted
to tell you about it face-to-face, not on the phone.”

  She fell silent a moment, a catch in her throat. Her hands nervously twisted Terney’s book.

  “I also wanted to thank you for what you did, back there. You put yourself on the line for me. You didn’t have to do that.”

  Sharko went to uncap a beer. At two in the morning, he needed to unwind, and a little alcohol would help. Lucie declined the glass he offered her.

  “What’s done is done,” he answered.

  “So tell me, the guy in pajamas—who is he? Is he the one who killed Terney?”

  “We don’t have a clue for the moment. Given his mental state and his behavior, it’s doubtful he could have committed those tortures. Did he see you?”

  “No.”

  “Now your turn: starting from a trip to the Alps, with no information and no nothing, how did you end up at Terney’s before fifteen guys from Homicide?”

  Lucie sat down on the edge of the sofa and brushed her hair off her forehead. After a day like this and so many miles—walking, driving—her legs could barely support her. Slowly she started telling her story.

  “A few weeks before meeting Carnot, Eva Louts had read an article in a science journal and noticed an upside-down drawing. It was a fresco of aurochs, in a prehistoric cave. A unique incident that didn’t get much attention in the press, and that Louts herself barely thought about at the time. But ten days ago, when she saw Grégory Carnot’s inverted drawing, she immediately rushed to the original cave, so that she could see the aurochs fresco firsthand.”

  Lucie related her findings in an even voice, leaving out no details. She talked about the family of Neanderthals slaughtered by the Cro-Magnon. About how the bodies were transferred to the genome center in Lyon. About the theft of the mummy. About Arnaud Fécamp and how he’d seemed suspect. She told how she’d trailed him through Lyon, how she’d burst into the apartment on Boulevard de la Duchère, then how she’d sped up to Montmartre hoping to piece it all together. As she talked, Sharko had tensed and his features twisted. He bolted up, furious, and glared at Lucie.

  “You could have got yourself killed! What were you thinking?”

  “My daughter was killed. Not me. What matters is that I’m here now and we’re making progress.”

  A silence. Lucie finally stood up and went into the kitchen.

  “Is the beer in the fridge?”

  Sharko nodded. He watched her leave the room, uncap a bottle, and come back. She hadn’t lost any of her cop’s reflexes, was still just as sharp and alert.

  Her voice broke into his thoughts.

  “Did you find any trace of the Cro-Magnon and his genome at Terney’s?”

  “No. No secret lab or any of that stuff. The house was clean. On the other hand, he’d taken a photo of that mummy and hung it in his library, next to paintings of a phoenix and a placenta. As for the genome . . . We didn’t find any computer documents at the vic’s. Probably swiped.”

  “Any info about him?”

  “It’s coming in piece by piece—we’ll sift through it tomorrow. What we know now is that he was an obstetrician, specializing in neonatal abnormalities, and the author of the book you’re holding in your hands. A polymath.”

  “Tell me what you’ve found. How did you end up at the victim’s house?”

  “Go home, Lucie.”

  “You know me better than that, Franck. You know I’m not leaving.”

  Sharko let himself fall onto his chair.

  “Well, in that case, have a seat.”

  Her heart in her throat, Lucie sat down opposite him and emptied a third of the bottle with a grimace. She, too, needed to unwind. The inspector squeezed the narrow bottle in his hands.

  “Okay, here goes.”

  Sharko filled her in on the broad strokes of his own investigation. Louts’s thesis about hand dominance and its relation to violence. The young woman’s studies of athletes and warlike populations, her trips to Mexico and, as yet unexplained, to Manaus. Her request, on her return from Brazil, to meet with violent French criminals, culminating with Grégory Carnot. He stressed that Brazil seemed to mark a turning point in Louts’s search and that she’d planned to go back. He also explained how the shard of tooth enamel recovered from Louts’s body had led them to Terney, which was where the investigation dead-ended.

  Even though she hadn’t yet absorbed it all and didn’t have all the details, smells, and images that a criminal case can leave in its wake, Lucie let herself be guided by simple deduction:

  “Grégory Carnot, a born left-hander, begins making upside-down drawings around the same time he turns violent. We don’t know anything about his family history. A child abandoned at birth, adopted, no particular health issues apart from lactose intolerance.”

  “That’s a pretty fair recap.”

  “Thirty thousand years before this, a Cro-Magnon man, also left-handed, slaughters an entire family, and also draws upside down. Two people notice the similarities and draw connections between them. First, there’s Stéphane Terney, a Paris doctor, who seems interested in the Cro-Magnon’s genome, and goes so far as to steal the mummy. Then there’s Eva Louts, a student in biology, motivated by her thesis and her discoveries about hand dominance and violence, if I’ve understood right.”

  “So far so good.”

  “Both dead, presumably murdered by the same killer. Which must mean they had something in common . . .”

  “Eva Louts returns from Brazil and immediately goes to see violent, left-handed criminals. She gathers up information about them, photos . . . then plans to return to Brazil . . . as if . . .”

  “As if someone had given her an assignment. Collect the data and bring it back there.”

  “Exactly.”

  Lucie shook Terney’s book in front of her.

  “Left-handers, the Cro-Magnon’s genome, DNA, this book and its hidden codes—it all seems connected.”

  “But we don’t know what that connection is.”

  Lucie took another slug of beer and wiped her lips. She realized she was feeling better. Thoughts were flying, pieces falling into place. Despite everything, they still made a good team.

  “Let’s think. What could possibly give the same characteristics to two individuals born several millennia apart?”

  “DNA? Genes?”

  Lucie nodded emphatically.

  “It’s what’s been coming back over and over since the start of this investigation. There always seems to be some link to that damn DNA molecule. And yet, the director of that research lab in Lyon swore to me that violence does not get transmitted genetically. And besides, it’d be ridiculous to talk about family connections between Carnot and some supposed ancestor hundreds or thousands of generations before him.”

  “Why ridiculous? We weren’t born in a vacuum, and those Cro-Magnons have to be somebody’s ancestors. In any case, I think Terney was on to something. Something that spans the ages, and that the killer didn’t want him to reveal.”

  “The same as Louts . . . Two different paths leading to the same result.”

  “Death.”

  Sharko nodded toward the book.

  “Were you able to look through that?”

  “A little bit. As far as I can tell, it’s basically just a book of recipes. You take human chromosomes, unspool their DNA, and put it end to end. That gives you a series of about three billion repetitions of the letters A, G, T, and C, all lined up, which constitute our genetic heritage, the famous human genome. With that, you make a bunch of calculations and look for coincidences, which you interpret as secret messages . . .”

  “You seem to know a lot about the subject.”

  Lucie gave a brief smile, which faded almost immediately.

  “I know something about it. A year ago, I took my own DNA to compare it with the burned body in the forest.”
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  Sharko sat back in his chair. Lucie spoke slowly. Her words were heavy as bricks.

  “I followed every step that would allow me, from that molecule, to arrive at an identification. I spent days and nights with the lab techs, with face mask and gloves, until the miserable series of A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s from my DNA could be compared with the sample from . . . from . . .”

  “From the little victim in the forest.”

  “Yes. I can describe the process by heart.”

  Sharko tried to look unmoved, to build an invisible wall around him. But little by little, a poison seeped into his veins. He saw the faces of Lucie’s daughters, heard their laughter, felt the sand creak under their small feet. Sounds and smells never fade. That day, on the beach at Les Sables d’Olonne, Sharko had prevented Lucie from accompanying her two girls when they went to get ice cream, because he had something to tell her. It had only taken a minute . . . just one short minute for Clara and Juliette to be kidnapped. The whole thing had been his fault.

  Meanwhile, Lucie was thinking to herself. She finally glanced over at the computer.

  “I’d like to do some research on Stéphane Terney. He wrote a book, he was well-known, there must be a fair amount about him online.”

  Sharko took refuge in his beer. The alcohol flowed noisily, heavily in his throat. His mind was pulled in several directions at once. He tipped his chin toward the clock.

  “It’s almost three in the morning. You’re doing just what you did a year ago. You should get some rest.”

  “You too.”

  Sharko sighed and took the plunge:

  “Are you seeing a shrink? Someone who . . . who can help you get through all this?”

  Lucie clenched her jaws, then, involuntarily, leaned toward Sharko and took his hands. She caressed their boniness, wrapped his slender fingers in hers.

  “And what about you? Do you see how worn-out you look? What happened to you, Franck? I’m the one who should be in this state. I’m the one who . . .”