Bred to Kill

by Franck Thilliez

  She preferred not to go too far down that path. With a sigh, she walked into the kitchen. There was a note for her on the table: “Make yourself some coffee. There are still some things of yours in the bedroom closet.” Lucie headed toward the bedroom. The magnificent model railway had been completely dismantled, the rails stuffed haphazardly into plastic trash bags. Not a single decoration or trace of color, bed neatly made, sheets smoothed out, like the room of a dying person. Even the little O-gauge OVA Hornby locomotive with its black car for wood and coal, the one thing that never left Sharko’s possession, was nowhere in sight. A wave of sadness came over her.

  She found her clothes from the previous summer in the back of the closet. They had been scrupulously packaged in cling film, with two tiny mothballs. Sharko was throwing out the trains that had been so dear to him, but he’d kept the clothes of a woman he expected never to see again . . . Maybe he still cared about her after all. Maybe there was still a thin, fragile thread connecting the two of them.

  She took the packet of clothing and was surprised to discover, behind a stack of Sharko’s sweaters, a box of cartridges and a revolver. It was a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. Lucie picked it up. Most cops kept a second weapon at home, normally to use for target practice or because they were collectors. Out of curiosity, she opened the cylinder and shivered when she discovered a single bullet inside. A bullet in the first chamber, that would come roaring from the barrel if one pulled the trigger. Could this have been out of neglect? Given the state Sharko was in, could he have committed such an oversight? She chose not to wonder about the use he might—or intended to—put the gun to, and instead set it back in its place.

  From the package, she took a pair of black jeans, clean underwear, and a short-sleeved tan sweatshirt. Now the bathroom. A piece of paper on the wall documented the cop’s rapid weight loss. He was down to nearly 150 pounds. Lucie’s heart sank. She washed and dressed as quickly as possible in the deathly silence, facing the overly large mirror in which she couldn’t keep herself from imagining Sharko pondering his solitude, every morning, every evening, every night. The ordeal of a driven man, who was trying to live out his sentence to the very end. And if one day it all broke down, the gun would be there to help out. Unable to stand such a thought, she ran out of the bedroom.

  After having a cup of coffee and washing a few dishes, she noticed an envelope next to the computer. She didn’t recall seeing it the night before. Had Sharko put it there in the night? Had he left it for her on purpose?

  She opened it. It contained photos of the Terney murder scene: shots of the library, the museum with its fossils, the three strange paintings hung side by side—Lucie winced at the placenta and the Cro-Magnon mummy—and of course the body itself, photographed from every angle. She made a face. The older man had been tortured to the depths of his flesh. His eyes were staring into nothingness, as if seeking a final answer to the question every victim must ask himself before dying: why?

  After turning on the computer, she opened a browser and typed “Stéphane Terney” into the search box. It yielded a long list of responses, including a lengthy Wikipedia article and several interviews with the scientist. Lucie clicked on the links and was surprised by their wealth of detail. She thought to herself that the Internet could be pretty handy.

  And she started reading.

  • • •

  Stéphane Terney was born on March 8, 1945, in Bordeaux. The insert photo showed him at around age fifty. Dark suit, stringent features, thin, straight lips without the hint of a smile.

  In his youth, Terney is mainly interested in athletics, like his father, who in his day had been the French champion of the 400-meter dash. By dint of intense training, at the age of fourteen young Stéphane competes in the Aquitaine regional championship for the 10K run, racking up competition after competition, but never quite making it into the top three. He soon begins neglecting his studies and, at age sixteen, finds himself enlisted in the army, Fifty-seventh Infantry Regiment, which boasts an excellent team of long-distance runners. Terney impresses his superior officers as a runner, but, with the Algerian War raging across the Mediterranean, they also have him train as a medical orderly. When his training is over, to his dismay, they send him to the city of Oran in the northwest. The dual infiltrations into the city by the Algerian FLN and the paramilitary OAS are provoking outbreaks of violence. Kidnappings, assassinations, and horror reign over both the Muslim and European populations. Terney cares for the wounded as best he can.

  On July 5, 1962, civilians armed with guns and knives attack buildings where Europeans live, breaking down apartment doors, opening fire in restaurants, kidnapping, shooting bystanders, or slitting their throats indiscriminately. People are hanged from meat hooks and mutilated, their eyes gouged out: the atrocity seems to know no bounds. Because of the peace accords, the French soldiers hesitate to intervene. When Terney ventures into the streets, it’s as if he’s entered another world. Two images mark him to his very soul. The first is a man sitting against a wall, still alive, holding his entrails in his hands with an odd smile. And the second . . .

  • • •

  Lucie’s hands fluttered as she sat there, feeling uneasy. So many sordid details . . . In his interviews, Terney had shared some extremely private and painful memories, exposing them for all to see. Was it a way of cleansing himself? A need for recognition?

  Taking a deep breath, she read on.

  • • •

  Terney continues patrolling with the troops. Suddenly, he hears wailing from inside one of the houses. At first the orderly thinks it’s a cat, then realizes it must be an infant. He pushes open the door. His combat boots skid on thick, black blood. Opposite him, on the ground, he discovers a dead woman, naked and mutilated. A baby is howling between her legs, lying in a milky puddle on the tile floor. The infant is still attached to its mother by its umbilical cord. With a scream, Terney rushes forward and cuts the lifeline with a pair of scissors. The slimy, blood-covered infant falls abruptly silent and dies within seconds. Soldiers find Terney petrified in a corner, the dead child crushed to his chest.

  One week later, he is back in France, discharged from the military on the grounds of psychological fragility.

  At the age of nineteen, Terney no longer sees the world in the same way. Suddenly, it becomes excruciatingly clear to him how precious human life is and he feels the irrepressible need to accomplish “something important for his fellow citizens.” It’s then that he takes up the study of medicine in earnest. Had this been his true calling all along? Whatever the case, Terney proves to be a brilliant student in Paris, specializing in obstetric gynecology. He wants to treat pregnancies and bring babies into the world.

  From that point on, the mechanism of creation, from fertilization to birth, and all the processes of the female reproductive system fascinate him. Soon, as a complement to his primary studies, he becomes a specialist in the immune system, especially in the behavior of defense mechanisms that ensure the survival of the embryo and the fetus. Why does the immune system, which attacks all foreign bodies and even rejects transplants, allow an organism, half of whose genetic material is from an outside entity (the father), to develop in the maternal womb? What secrets of evolution allow for in vivo birth, actually inside the human being?

  Terney becomes a fanatic about the great questions of life and builds a dual career: one as an obstetric gynecologist, the other as a researcher. By the time he’s thirty, he is already publishing heavily in the scientific journals. In 1982, at the age of thirty-seven, he becomes one of the world’s leading experts in preeclampsia, a gestational hypertension that can affect women during pregnancy. A mysterious, unexplained condition that affects 5 percent of women and generally results in the baby being born weak and underweight.

  • • •

  Lucie yawned and stretched. Various links took her to related entries on immunology, preeclampsia, obstetrics . . . Muc
h more informative than a police report. She got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. A glance out the kitchen window. She could see the ash trees in Parc de la Roseraie, where Sharko liked to take walks. Did he still spend an hour or two there every week, sitting on his favorite wooden bench? Did he still go every Wednesday to visit his family’s gravesite? She wondered—and found she really wanted to know if he did. In the distance, wrapped in gray fog, she could make out the minuscule Eiffel Tower and the infinite sea of buildings.

  Lucie wandered back into the living room. Terney seemed to be a brilliant individual who had found his life’s purpose in the chaos of the Algerian War. But what profound scars had the violence left in him? What did he feel whenever he brought a baby into the world? Was it like treating an inner wound? Redressing the world’s injustices?

  She sat down once more and resumed reading, cup in hand.

  • • •

  It is while specializing in DNA and deepening his knowledge of preeclampsia that Terney begins developing his first theories about eugenics. He is often on the road at the time, meeting colleagues in immunology and shrewdly advancing his ideas, citing as his examples such social disorders and health hazards as tuberculosis, syphilis, and alcoholism; birth defects resulting from increasingly late pregnancies; and the overall weakening of humanity’s gene pool. Social welfare programs for the poor, the sick, and the underprivileged become his primary target. He is openly hostile to Christian charity. In his obstetrics practice, where his excellence helps make up for his arrogance, he doesn’t hesitate to recommend abortion to his patients when the pregnancy shows even the slightest risk of abnormality. For the good of all.

  Terney continues to speak in public, hammering away with his examples. In lectures before substantial audiences, he asks his listeners to raise their hands if they have a friend or family member who has been affected by cancer. He tries the same thing with diabetes, and then with sterility. More hands go up. Terney then asks everyone who has raised a hand at least once to do so again. Nearly every hand in the room goes up. Then he hits them with a shocking statement: “Our population is too old and its genetic resources are being depleted. For the first time in history, the health of the current generation—our children—is worse than the generation that preceded it.”

  • • •

  Lucie stopped reading again, struck by that last paragraph. She too would have raised her hand: one of her former colleagues at work was diabetic, and her uncle had died of throat cancer at the age of fifty-two. She also thought about Alzheimer’s and allergies, increasingly common ailments that hadn’t existed fifty years ago.

  Disturbed, she went back to the article.

  • • •

  Terney’s personal life: In 1980, at the age of thirty-three, he falls in love and marries. Six years later, he gets divorced. His wife, Gaëlle Lecoupet, a prominent attorney, does not accompany him to the provinces when he accepts the directorship of the Obstetrics Department in Colombe Hospital, a major maternity hospital about a hundred miles from the capital.

  • • •

  Suddenly, Lucie’s throat tightened.

  The city where Terney had practiced medicine, from 1986 to 1990, hit her like a thunderbolt.

  Reims.

  Where Grégory Carnot was born, in January 1987.

  Dumbstruck, Lucie put a hand to her face. It was just too much of a coincidence. Reims . . . Could Terney have worked in the same hospital where Carnot was born? She snatched up her cell phone and called the public records office in Reims. After being shunted from one administrative office to another, she got the name of Grégory Carnot’s birthplace.

  Colombe Hospital.

  Lucie hung up.

  She realized that she was sitting in a corner of the room, forehead against the wall like a little girl in detention.

  One certainty now drummed on her mind: strange as it seemed, Stéphane Terney must have brought Grégory Carnot into the world in 1987. And twenty-three years later, a criminal investigation was bringing the two men together again. This could not be mere chance. It couldn’t.

  And yet, as much as she puzzled over it, Lucie still couldn’t figure it out. Had Terney been keeping tabs on Carnot all those years? Might he even have arranged to become his mother’s obstetrician? And if so, why?

  Lucie skimmed the rest of the article.

  • • •

  After Reims, Terney more or less fades from public view. He returns to Paris in 1990, marries and divorces several more times, burning through relationships like cigarettes without ever having a child of his own. He practices in a clinic in Neuilly, continues his research into preeclampsia, delves further into immunology, and leaves obstetrics on the back burner. In 2006, he writes his book The Key and the Lock, sending thousands of free copies to schools and targeted individuals, thus reviving for a moment his reputation and eugenicist positions. Then he fades back into anonymity and resumes a perfectly normal practice.

  • • •

  Lucie turned off the computer and looked at the keys to her car, which were on the living room table. She now had the name of a maternity hospital and a birth date. Even if Grégory Carnot’s mother had given birth under seal of anonymity and put him up for adoption, there must have been files, people with whom Terney worked at the time, who might be able to tell her something about the obstetrician, his relationship with Carnot’s mother, the infant, or even the birth itself. Perhaps that cursed child, or his parents, had left a trace in people’s memories? Perhaps the biological mother had left her identity buried in a file?

  She had to try, do everything she could to understand what might possibly connect Terney to her daughter’s killer. She could be in Reims in less than two hours.

  Before heading out, Lucie stopped to think. She knew she would run into roadblocks in a place as administratively cautious as a hospital. Merely claiming to be a cop wouldn’t work anymore. She needed a fake police ID. Not a perfect one, just something she could flash at people—who generally didn’t know what they really looked like anyway.

  She had an ID photo in her wallet, and Sharko had an excellent color printer.

  Lucie went back online. There was no shortage of sites for making fake ID’s, “for entertainment purposes only.” Driver’s licenses, diplomas, birth and marriage certificates . . . Fifteen minutes later, the printer spat out the false document on a sheet of white card stock. She had decided to stick with the name Amélie Courtois: better to stay anonymous. Lucie carefully cut out the card, rumpled it slightly to make it look older, glued on the identity photo from her library card, and slipped it behind one of the small, slightly opaque squares of plastic inside her wallet.

  That should see her through the first 10 percent of it. Nerve and experience would handle the other 90.

  Fake ID or no, she had become a cop again, working a parallel space where no one would think to look, not even Sharko. Because no one knew Grégory Carnot as well as she did, it would take them a while to find the link between him and the clinic where Stéphane Terney had practiced more than twenty years ago.

  She picked up the Terney crime scene photos and her jacket and went out, slamming the door behind her.

  She didn’t notice the man sitting at the wheel of his car, parked in front of the building.

  27

  The official Peugeot 407 with Levallois at the wheel had just veered onto Highway A6a, heading toward Fontainebleau. The late-morning traffic was moving easily—a relative notion on the roads around Paris—and the cops didn’t have to turn on the siren to open a passage.

  Before that, Sharko had stopped by number 36 to pass along his discoveries and fob off the day’s assignment—questioning Terney’s friends and coworkers—onto a colleague.

  At present, the two cops were speeding toward La Chapelle-la-Reine, a small town just south of the Fontainebleau forest. They had an appointment with the captain
of the local gendarmerie, Claude Lignac, who had briefly held the bag on a rather sordid case: a double murder in the woods, committed by a killer whose DNA figured in the book Terney had written in 2006. Given the unusual and particularly grisly nature of the crime, the gendarme had been forced to hand over the investigation to the Major Case squad in Versailles.

  Obviously, apart from the officers at 36, no one knew that the genetic code of the man who had committed this double homicide six days ago figured in the pages of a scientific textbook that had come out four years earlier. In order to prevent leaks, especially to the press, the cops were keeping that information strictly confidential. Officially, they were looking into the murder because it might be related to an ongoing case about which, for the moment, they couldn’t give out any details.

  Sharko switched the radio station, landing on “Zombie” by The Cranberries. Levallois smiled at him.

  “You’ve been sprucing yourself up a bit these past few days. New suit, new haircut . . . and you don’t look quite as sad. You got a girl?”

  “Why is everybody asking me that, for Christ’s sake?”

  “They say you’ve had something of a dry patch since your wife died. So I just figured . . .”

  “How about you keep your figuring to yourself.”

  Levallois shrugged.

  “We’re partners. Partners tell each other things. With you, it’s like talking to the lamppost. Nobody really knows what you were up to at Violent Crimes. And why don’t we ever talk about anything but the case? Why don’t you ever ask about . . . about my life, for instance?”

  “Because it’s better that way. The job seeps into your life enough as it is; don’t let your life get into the job. Leave your wife and kids, if you’ve got any, at the door to number thirty-six. You’re better off.”

  “I don’t have any kids yet but . . .” he hesitated, “but my wife is pregnant. We’re having a little girl.”