Bred to Kill

by Franck Thilliez

  Lucie thought of her own experience. Nine years already . . . Most of her memories of that time had faded but certainly not anything connected with the birth of the twins. Lucie recalled her mother’s panic when her water had broken in the dead of night. The race to the hospital, the beep of the monitors in the minutes just before she gave birth. She could see her mother’s face hovering near, their hands seeking each other, in agony, while the doctors and nurses busied themselves around her swollen belly . . . Clara had come out first. Lucie could still hear her shrill little scream as her lungs first inflated. She remembered having sobbed out every tear in her body when the midwife placed the two identical, gluey infants, with their greenish skin, on either side of her chest. A nurse had immediately come over with two tiny name bracelets. She had asked Lucie which one was Clara. The young woman had tipped her head toward the child on the left, the first one out of her womb.

  And today, she was dead, killed by a monster born in this very hospital. Her sister Juliette had almost suffered the same fate.

  That bastard had first seen daylight twenty-three years before.

  Lucie slammed the car door shut, her head buzzing with questions. Why was she standing here, alone and far from home, in front of such a symbolic place, when on practically the same date the previous year she’d been walking into a morgue? Had an invisible evil transformed Carnot into a child-killer? Was he born with some sort of predisposition for murder?

  Squeezing the envelope with the Terney crime scene photos, Lucie headed for reception and flashed her fake police ID, just long enough for the receptionist to register the tricolor motif.

  “Lieutenant Courtois, Paris Homicide. I’d like to speak to the head of your obstetrics department.”

  This kind of introduction, a firm, authoritative voice making a specific request, sliced through hesitations and refusals. All people had to hear was the word “homicide” and they obediently picked up their phones. The receptionist spoke into hers for a few moments, then hung up with an anxious smile.

  “Dr. Blotowski is expecting you in Obstetric Gynecology. His office is on the third floor, last door on the left. You’ll see his name on it.”

  Lucie thanked her and took the stairs, slowly. In nine years, she had never again set foot in a maternity ward.

  After walking down an endless corridor of half-open doors, she entered the office of the chief physician, a man of about thirty-five or forty. He had a shaved head and was wearing a small, neatly trimmed goatee of a handsome light gray that set off his blue eyes. He offered Lucie a chair, briefly introduced himself, and asked what he could do for her.

  Lucie, as Amélie Courtois, had set the envelope with the photos on her knees. She rested her slightly trembling hands on her thighs and spoke in a moderately assured voice.

  “First, I want to know if you knew Stéphane Terney. He was the head of the obstetrics department before you, from 1986 to 1990.”

  “I started here six years ago, after Dr. Philippe, who was Terney’s successor. I know him only by reputation. Despite his controversial opinions and his rather rigid way of thinking, he contributed a lot to this hospital. His work on preeclampsia is highly regarded and serves as the basis for work being done even today throughout France. Is he involved in your investigation?”

  “To some extent, yes. He’s been murdered.”

  The doctor sat back in his chair, mouth agape.

  “Oh, my! How did it happen?”

  “I’ll spare you the details. I came here because on January 4, 1987, a child named Grégory Carnot was born in this hospital under seal of anonymity. I know he was transferred to a public nursery in Reims, where he was adopted at the age of three months. My investigation requires that I remove the anonymity surrounding his birth, and the first thing I need to know is the name of his biological mother. I have to talk with her about the birth and her relations with Dr. Terney. Find out how well they knew each other. And also talk to her about her son.”

  The doctor looked uncomfortable. He began fiddling with a letter opener that he’d taken from a pocket of his white coat.

  “Sealed births are highly protected under French law. Normally speaking, only the child himself, once he reaches maturity, can authorize lifting the seal. He is then given access to a confidential file left by his mother, in which she has provided her identity and whatever information she wished to impart, such as her family history, information about the father, or her reasons for putting the child up for adoption. Those files might just as easily be empty, if the mother doesn’t wish to be found—which, frankly, is often the case. Still, I hope you can understand that I can’t just hand over a sealed file without a court order.”

  Lucie held the doctor’s gaze, nodding at each of his statements.

  “We’ve filed the request, and I can assure you you’ll have your court order in a couple of days. But you know how slowly the wheels of justice can turn, Doctor, and as cops in the field, we can’t always wait. Lives are at stake, and people are suffering. You know what that’s like.”

  “I’d like to help you, but . . .”

  The photos Lucie placed on the desk cut him off midsentence.

  “You wanted to know what happened to Terney. Here’s your answer.”

  The man looked at the photos in horror.

  “How could anyone do such a thing?”

  “Sick people exist everywhere. His killer tortured him for hours, with cigarette burns and knives. As for Grégory Carnot, the poor infant born under seal, he ripped open his own throat in a prison cell last week, with his bare hands. And do you know why he went to prison?”

  “No.”

  “He killed an eight-year-old girl, stabbing her sixteen times, then burned her body beyond recognition. That little girl was my child.”

  The obstetrician lowered his eyes and slowly put the photos back down. Lucie had bombarded him with sordid details, and for the first time he appeared disarmed. He threw a sidelong glance at the photo of his own son, next to his computer.

  “I . . . I’m so terribly sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Just help me. The only person who was liable to request that sealed file died on the floor of a jail cell. The sickest kind of killer is lurking in our streets. We’re after him, Doctor, we’re after him, and we can’t afford to wait for some lousy paperwork. So I’m asking you once again to show me that file.”

  Blotowski hesitated for a few more seconds, then picked up the phone.

  “I’m coming down to the archives,” he said in a dry voice.

  He hung up, put the letter opener back in his breast pocket, and stood up.

  “Come with me. Everything’s stored in the basement.”

  With a sigh of relief, Lucie picked up her photos and followed him out. Thanks to a special key that Blotowski inserted in the control panel, the elevator let them out in the basement, where they followed a narrow, neon-lit corridor. Fat pipes ran along the black walls. The ventilation system huffed noisily, as if in a ship’s boiler room.

  Before them spread a veritable labyrinth. People rushed in all directions; lab coats brushed against each other in the dim light.

  They turned a corner, then another. With a different key, Blotowski opened a metal door, which led to the Maternity archives. Like a fish in water, the doctor went straight to the correct row, near the back of the storage area. Large adhesive labels applied to the shelves indicated years and months.

  “Here we are, January 1987. So let’s see . . . letter C.”

  He ran a finger over the layers of document binders until it stopped at one of them.

  “Brachet to Debien. Okay . . . We should be able to find what we need in here. Admissions records, gynecological exams, birth certificate, and notes on the delivery.”

  He took down the binder that contained a number of files, turned several heavy divider sheets, then came to the name he w
as looking for.

  “Here we are. Grégory Arthur Tanael Carnot. Born January 4, 1987.”

  He opened the metal rings and pulled out a fat plastic pouch. Lucie stared at those three given names written on the white label: Grégory Arthur Tanael . . . Why those three, specifically? Had he been named after his father and grandfather? Despite the anonymity, his mother might have used those names to preserve small traces of Carnot’s past, his ancestry. Even if she had then abandoned him, for reasons Lucie wanted to know.

  Inside the pouch was the sealed folder. The doctor put it aside and picked up the medical files. The neon lights lit the old paper in cold, bluish tones.

  The obstetrician read aloud, with evident reluctance.

  “So . . . Mother was admitted to Obstetrics on December 29, 1986. It was indeed Dr. Terney who took charge of her care as soon as she arrived in the hospital. In fact, from what I can tell, he was also her gynecologist and had been seeing her since the fifth month of pregnancy. Moreover . . .”

  He fished through the transparent pouch.

  “Now that’s odd . . . I can’t find the records of her gynecological exams—the sonograms and checkups. They should have been here with the rest.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He leafed through the papers again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

  “No. Nothing here. It could be an oversight. Maybe somebody consulted the files and forgot to put them back. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for old papers like these to get lost in the administrative maze.”

  “Right, it’s not uncommon. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Lucie felt more and more that she was on the right track. Something strange and mysterious was hidden in Stéphane Terney’s past. She nodded at the pouch the doctor was holding.

  “You’ve got the woman’s admission forms, so you must have her name right there without having to open the sealed file.”

  He turned the document toward Lucie. In the spaces for the person’s name, it said simply “Mme. X.”

  “It’s like that throughout. Preservation of anonymity at the mother’s request.”

  Lucie’s jaws tightened. Fortunately there was still the sealed file. A number of questions flew to her lips.

  “Why was she admitted to Obstetrics a whole week before giving birth? Did she have particular problems?”

  Blotowski leafed through the pages. Everything was written down: intravenous drips, medicines administered, blood tests, heart rate, even the name of the nurse assigned to her room. In that regard, there was complete transparency; Stéphane Terney had been aboveboard.

  “From what I read here, Terney diagnosed the patient with preeclampsia. She had to remain under observation. Hence the hospital.”

  Preeclampsia . . . Stéphane Terney’s specialty.

  “What exactly is preeclampsia?”

  “It’s the translation of a vascular insufficiency in the fetoplacental unit. A placenta that is very poor in blood vessels, if you like, which generally causes the infant to be born underweight. It can cause numerous problems for the mother, especially arterial hypertension and proteinuria—in other words too much protein being eliminated in the urine. Most of the time, in the first trimester of pregnancy, the future mother complains of severe headaches and a buzzing in her ears. There are a lot of theories, but not much more: we know how to prevent it today, but we still don’t know what causes it. Dr. Terney did a lot of work in this domain, especially on the genes responsible for preeclampsia and placental vascularization deficiency. Is that a bit clearer?”

  “Yes, a bit.”

  The obstetrician turned the pages.

  “Very well. So . . . Mother’s medical history, not much to report. Other than that she was lactose intolerant.”

  “Like her son.”

  “That makes sense. It’s hereditary.”

  The rustle of pages made a particular sound here—somehow amplified, crystalline.

  “The birth took place at two thirty-four a.m., in room three. Terney, a midwife, an anesthesiologist, and the nurse treating the patient were present in the delivery room. The doctor noted that Mme. X began having convulsions, her heart rate rapidly increased. Oh, oh my . . .”

  “What?”

  He raised his eyes to Lucie.

  “It says here that Grégory Carnot’s mother died on the delivery table of a catastrophic hemorrhage. To put it plainly, she bled to death.”

  Lucie was unable to hide her disappointment: could this be where her trail ended, in the depths of these archives?

  “And the baby?”

  “Grégory Arthur Tanael Carnot . . . delivered by C-section. Nine pounds fifteen ounces and . . . twenty-one and three-quarter inches? That’s . . . highly unusual. Most babies whose mothers suffer from preeclampsia are born small and frail, precisely because of the lack of blood vessels in the placenta. Still, this kind of situation does occur.”

  “Often?”

  “No, on the contrary. But we still don’t know entirely how preeclampsia works, especially with regard to the interactions between mother and fetus. Genetic predisposition can also play a part. It’s very complicated.”

  Already different from the others at birth, thought Lucie. He kills his mother, and doesn’t fit the preeclampsia statistics . . .

  The physician’s index finger ran down the sheet.

  “Apparently, no particular problems with the baby at delivery. The remarks here are standard for most births.”

  The doctor pulled out the neonatal file, giving it a quick once-over.

  “Growth, checkups . . . everything’s normal. That said, Dr. Terney did order an unusually high number of blood tests for the infant, from what I can tell.”

  “Does it say why?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nothing here. The infant remained in Neonatal for nine days before being sent to the nursery. That’s typical as well.”

  Back into the transparent pouch, from which he took out copies of the birth and death certificates. It made Lucie feel odd to see the two documents side by side. Mother and son, one dying as the other is born.

  “Birth certificate drawn up right after delivery. Mother’s and father’s names left blank, which is common for children born under seal. Just so you know, when the child is adopted, the public records office, which keeps its own copy of the birth record, fills in the blanks with the names of the adoptive parents. But here in the archives, we always keep the original, the one the head physician establishes at delivery.”

  He looked at the next sheet.

  “Death certificate, filled out by Terney as chief physician: ‘Death due to preeclampsia and massive internal hemorrhage.’ Date, time, persons present. It all seems in order.”

  “That’s it? A woman dies in the hospital and there’s no autopsy, no inquest?”

  “Not if the family didn’t request one. Which seems to be the case here, since I’m not finding any other papers. You know, when there’s a death like this, there’s always a debriefing with the chief physician, a medical inquest—and sometimes an autopsy—but only if the cause of death is unexplained. We also look through the prior records to try to understand what happened. Please believe that any death in the hospital, and especially during childbirth, is taken extremely seriously.”

  Lucie crossed her arms, chilled by these revelations. She had the sense that something essential was missing. The human rapport between Terney and his patient, the reasons why the child was abandoned . . .

  The more she thought about it, the more unsettled she felt. She knew the answers were just out of reach, without her being able to grasp them. As her eyes wandered over the folder, she suddenly fixed upon Carnot’s three given names, written on the large label in front.

  “Grégory Arthur Tanael Carnot. My god . . .”

  A long silence, during whi
ch Lucie froze completely. The doctor noticed her consternation.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Lucie could barely recover her voice. Her entire body was on fire.

  “That . . . that name. Who gave it to him?”

  “I assume it was the mother—she must have told them the names she wanted to give the child before the delivery. After the birth, the names would have been entered on the certificate by the obstetrician or the midwife. If she hadn’t given any names, those spaces would have remained empty, and the public records officer would have chosen three first names, the third of which would have acted as the child’s family name. ‘Carnot’ isn’t a first name, so it must have been the mother who provided it . . . Why do you ask?”

  Lucie snatched up the file and pointed her finger at each first letter of the names of her daughter’s killer.

  “His initials form G A T C. The bases of the DNA molecule.”

  The doctor frowned.

  “That’s true. But how could you have noticed that?”

  “Let’s just say . . . I’ve been dealing with that molecule quite a bit lately.”

  Blotowski, raising an eyebrow, took the small, sealed brown envelope from the pouch.

  “Curious coincidence, in any case.”

  “It’s no coincidence. And it wasn’t the mother who chose those names. It was Terney.”

  Blotowski didn’t answer, absorbed in his thoughts. What this woman was telling him was hard to swallow. Lucie nodded at the sealed envelope in his hand.

  “Now will you open it?”

  The specialist undid the seal with his letter opener. Lucie thought to herself that this secrecy business was nominal at best: any staff member with the right key could come in here and pop the seals to discover the mother’s name.

  Blotowski opened the envelope and showed it to Lucie.

  “Empty. The mother preferred to keep her identity secret. I’m sorry.”

  Lucie remained frozen. She couldn’t just go away on such a note of failure. Grégory Carnot was born here. People named in these files had taken care of him, fed him, washed him from the time of his first wail. They had to know things about that child. Just as the doctor was putting the clear plastic pouch back into the binder, she stopped his arm.