“Does the name Robert Grayet mean anything to you?”
“No, not really.”
“And yet it should. He was the department head your ex-husband replaced in Reims. I imagine Terney must have mentioned him. Since his departure for the provinces was the cause of your divorce, right?”
“It’s just that . . . it’s all so far in the past. I really don’t remember. My husband met a lot of people. It’s possible I did hear the name, but I couldn’t possibly tell you under what circumstances.”
Lucie felt the blood rush to her temples, but she did her best to keep calm. She was convinced this woman was hiding the truth and that, despite everything, she was protecting a man she had once loved very deeply.
“Listen to me, Mme. Lecoupet. Your husband was tortured with cigarette burns and mutilated by a cold-blooded monster. I’m here because I’m certain his murder is related to what happened all those years ago, in the maternity hospital in Reims. I’ll lay my cards on the table: a few weeks after he took over the post at Colombe, your ex-husband began treating a patient named Amanda Potier. She died in the delivery room on January 4, 1987, before his eyes.”
Lucie let a few seconds pass, gauging the other’s reaction. Clearly, she hadn’t been aware. The ex-cop continued in a firm, assured tone:
“I don’t believe the two of you separated over career conflicts or geographical distance. I’m certain your husband went to that hospital specifically so he could treat that patient and deliver her child, whatever the cost. Robert Grayet’s resignation was certainly the result of a payoff. That money obviously came from somewhere. So now, I’d appreciate it if you’d can the stock phrases and tell me what really happened. Why was your ex-husband so set on going to Reims?”
The woman put a hand to her face with a long sigh. Then she stood up.
“I have to go to the attic for a moment. Please wait here.”
Once alone, Lucie began pacing back and forth. She felt full of energy and, in a way, proud to be making such progress, alone, far from the beaten path. It proved she was still alive, capable of more than just answering phones in a dead-end call center.
Gaëlle Lecoupet reappeared with a small, transparent, slightly dusty bag in her hands. It contained an old videotape, black and without a label, which she put in the DVD/VHS player. She picked up a remote and walked over to the window looking out on the garden. She gave the double curtains a sharp tug and locked the entrance door.
“I don’t want Léon to see these images . . . He doesn’t even know this tape exists.”
She came back toward Lucie and invited her to sit down. Her jaws were tight, her fingers gripping the remote.
“You’re quite right. I didn’t divorce Stéphane because of my practice or my clients. It had to do with . . . with what he was hiding from me.”
There was a silence. Lucie tried to restart the conversation with the first thought that occurred.
“Would it have anything to do with his interest in eugenics?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I knew about Stéphane’s beliefs before I married him. Besides, at the time I shared some of his ideas.”
Gaëlle Lecoupet caught the look of surprise flashing across Lucie’s face and explained further:
“You mustn’t take eugenicists for monsters or Nazis. There’s nothing evil in pointing out that the welfare system, alcohol, drugs, and an aging population are counter to what nature intended, or that they prevent society from developing properly. It’s just another way of making us face up to our responsibilities and confront the ecological holocaust we’re bringing about.”
She looked tenderly at her cats—some of which, rescued from the streets, were in sad shape—then turned back to Lucie.
“About two years before our divorce, Stéphane began having secret meetings. He claimed he was going to his bridge club, but by chance I found out he was lying. I thought he was having an affair, so I began to follow him—and I discovered that it wasn’t a woman he was seeing, but two men. Two individuals he met several times a month in the stands of the Vincennes Racecourse, near where we were living. My husband wasn’t a gambler, so what was he doing there with two strangers?”
“Do you know who they were?”
“I never found out. Stéphane never left a single trace in writing, no names, nothing. They were most likely scientists like him, or anthropologists.”
“Specialists in other civilizations? What makes you say that?”
“When you see this tape, you’ll understand.”
“And, can you describe these men, what they looked like?”
She shook her head.
“No, it was too far away, too hazy. I always kept my distance, so I never saw them very clearly. Roughly, I’d say that one was dark-haired, average height, normal build, probably my husband’s age, or thereabouts. And the other . . . I’m not sure. Maybe blond. I’m not sure what else to tell you about them. In twenty-five years, people change so much, and memories can fade so quickly. On the other hand, I can tell you about Stéphane, about how different he seemed whenever he came back from the racetrack. About how he started acting mysteriously, spending more and more time locked away in his study.”
“You never asked him about those meetings, what he was up to?”
“No. I wanted to know what it was about. The meetings took place over the course of a year. Stéphane grew increasingly paranoid and forbade anyone from entering his study, even when he was there. And when he left it, he locked the door behind him. I didn’t know where he kept the keys, since he took such care in hiding things. He never left anything to chance.”
Her eyes grew darker and her pupils dilated. The doors of the past opened wide.
“But it often happens that when one doesn’t want things to be seen, they become all the more visible. I knew Stéphane was hiding something in his study, something that mattered greatly to him, and I wanted to know what it was. One time when he was out for the day, I called a locksmith. He easily opened the study door, but in the back of the room was a tall metal cabinet, also locked shut, that Stéphane had bought a few months earlier.”
“When he began meeting those men . . .”
“Yes, right around then. I had to know what was inside. So I asked the locksmith to do the same thing on one of the drawers. However, that lock was a lot harder to open, and the stupid locksmith, for all his supposed ‘expertise,’ ended up breaking it. The drawer came open, of course, but I knew Stéphane would immediately realize I’d been through his things. And there was no way to repair the damage. I felt terrible.”
Sadly, she nodded to the VCR.
“In the drawer was a videotape. Surely one of the ones the men at the racetrack had given him.”
“Are you saying there was more than one tape?”
“In the other drawers, yes, I’m certain of it. Unfortunately I was never able to watch them. This tape is a copy I quickly had made, that same day, which I hid before he got home. The original tape had a label on it with the words ‘Phoenix number one,’ which also suggests there were other cassettes.”
At the mention of that odd name, Lucie suddenly recalled the painting of the firebird in Terney’s library, to the left of the placenta. The phoenix . . . She knew she was putting her finger on something huge and unsuspected, but she couldn’t yet grasp its essence.
Gaëlle Lecoupet’s deep voice snapped her out of her thoughts.
“Now, if you’ll allow me, we’re going to watch this. I hope you have a strong stomach.”
Excited by these new discoveries and the connections already forming in her head, Lucie gazed back at her.
“I’m a cop—we’re born that way.”
The woman pressed PLAY.
32
Facing the two viewers, a black screen. Then a time stamp at bottom: “6/9/1966,” and various shades of gray. Leaves, trees. Th
e violence of the jungle. The images parade by in black-and-white. A film of middling quality, probably shot with amateur equipment. Palms, vines, and ferns press in around the person holding the camera. Under his feet, on a slope, grasses creak. In front, a gap opens in the wall of vegetation, revealing huts farther below. Judging from the weak light, it must be evening, or perhaps daybreak. Unless the jungle is so dense that it keeps any light from filtering through.
The camera penetrates downward, advancing over black, humid ground: a square about 150 feet on each side, on which the vegetation tries to encroach. One can hear footsteps, the rustling of trees on either side. The lens focuses on the remains of a fire. Amid the ashes are small, charred bones, stones arranged in a circle, animal skulls.
Lucie briefly rubbed her chin, not taking her eyes off the screen.
“It looks like an abandoned native village.”
“It is indeed a native village, but ‘abandoned’ isn’t entirely accurate. You’ll see in a minute.”
What could she mean? The ex-cop felt her palms grow moist as the film progressed. Onscreen, cries perforate the silence, and the image freezes on the leafy canopy. Not an inch of sky at this point, only foliage, stretching endlessly. About three or four yards overhead, a colony of small monkeys scatters into the branches. The piercing screams are now constant. The camera zooms in to one of the primates, with a dark body and light-colored head. The animal spits in fury and disappears up a vine. Despite the vastness of the place, there reigns an atmosphere of enclosure and oppressiveness. A living prison with chlorophyll bars.
The cameraman finally loses interest in the inquisitive monkeys and moves farther forward, toward a hut. The image jostles to the rhythm of his slow, heavy footfalls. At a glance, the roofs seem to be made of woven palm fronds, and the walls of bamboo stalks tied together with vines. Archaic dwellings, each able to house four or five persons, and straight out of another age. At the entrance, one can suddenly make out a cloud of mosquitoes and flies, giving the impression of a sandstorm.
Lucie recoiled a bit on her sofa, feeling ill at ease. Her eyes prepared to meet horror at any moment.
The person holding the camera enters the hut slowly, like an intruder watching for the slightest movement. All light disappears, black spots flutter about. The sound track is heavy with buzzing. Unconsciously, Lucie scratched her neck.
Masses of insects. She feared the worst.
The beam of a lamp, probably attached under the lens, rips through the darkness.
And the horror appears.
In back, in the ray of light, six bodies, twisted like caterpillars one next to the other. Apparently an entire family of natives, completely naked. A mix of bloated faces, of desiccated eyes teeming with flies and larvae. Blood is leaking from their nostrils, their mouths, their anuses, as if they have exploded internally. Their bellies are swollen, probably with intestinal gas. The cameraman spares no detail, offering endless angles and close-ups. All the corpses have the black hair, callused feet, and leathery skin of ancestral tribes. But they are unrecognizable, consumed by anguish and death.
Lucie felt as if she’d forgotten to breathe. She could easily imagine the stench in that hut, the havoc the heat and humidity wreaked on the putrefying bodies. The frenzy of the fat, green flies said it all.
Suddenly, one of the bodies quivers. The dying figure opens large, dark, sick eyes toward the camera. Lucie jumped and couldn’t keep from crying out. A hand reaches out, begging for help; slim, black fingers clutch the air before the arm falls heavily onto the ground like a dead trunk.
Alive . . . Some of them were still alive.
Lucie threw a quick glance at her neighbor, who was twisting a handkerchief in her hands. She remembered the violence of her nightmare: the charred infant suddenly opening its eyes, just like here. In a daze, she turned back to the film. The horror continued. The cameraman nudges the bodies lightly with the toe of his boot, checking to see if they are alive or dead. An inhuman action. Lucie didn’t regain her breath until he had backed out of the slaughterhouse. Above, the monkeys are still there, oppressive, this time frozen on their branches. It is as if a heavy lid is covering the entire jungle. The respite is short-lived. The other huts contain the same spectacle: massacred families, mixed in with last survivors that the unseen cameraman has filmed and left to die like animals.
The film ends with a wide view of the decimated village: about a dozen huts, their inhabitants dead or dying, abandoned to the jungle shadows.
Blackness.
33
“Tell me about lactose intolerance. Who does it affect, in what proportions, and why?”
While driving, Sharko had called his friend Paul Chénaix, the medical examiner. He wanted information about the causes and frequency of this trait, to make sure he wasn’t heading down the wrong path. He put the phone on speaker for Levallois’s benefit.
The specialist answered after a moment’s pause.
“This goes back to my old studies of medicine and biology, but it was unusual enough for me to remember. At the time, it really threw me. It has to do with natural selection and evolution—you know much about that?”
Sharko and Levallois shot each other a quick glance.
“Do we ever. My partner and I have been in it waist-deep. Go ahead.”
“Fine. So the first thing to know is that lactose is a compound specific to mammals’ milk. The individual difference between tolerating lactose or not is purely genetic. Lactose intolerance occurs in humans after the infant has been weaned from his mother, in other words from the moment they try to make him drink cow’s milk.”
“Nothing unusual so far.”
“Hang on, this is where it gets weird. Lactose tolerance—and I did say ‘tolerance’—is relatively recent in the evolutionary scale. It goes back only about five thousand years and only exists in human populations that domesticated cows in order to consume their milk. In humans, we find the gene that allows us to tolerate lactose in the same geographical regions where cows also have the gene that encourages high levels of milk production.”
“So . . . nature acted both on cows and people, modifying their DNA by creating genes that hadn’t existed before . . .”
As he said this, Sharko was thinking of Louts’s thesis: violence in a population that inscribes the left-handed trait in their DNA. Culture influencing genetics.
“Right you are. Milk gene for the cows, milk tolerance gene for people. If I recall correctly, it’s called coevolution, kind of like an arms race between cow and man: natural selection made it so man, originally a hunter-gatherer who lived exclusively on meat and fruits, could now drink the milk of the cows he domesticated. Because of this, it also made the cows better milk producers. And the more they produced, the more people drank . . . Hence the ‘arms race’ part. It’s pretty amazing, don’t you think?”
“So if I’ve understood you right, it means that people who are lactose intolerant today don’t have this protective gene, because their ancestors didn’t raise cows?”
“That’s it in a nutshell. Intolerant individuals must have descended from ancestors who lived far from areas where milk cows were domesticated. The farther away the cows were, the less these people tolerated milk or developed the gene. When I was a student, the statistics were something like five percent lactose intolerants in Europe and something like ninety-nine percent in China, for example. The fact is, a good seventy percent of the world’s population is still intolerant. Does that pretty much answer it?”
“That’s terrific. Thanks, Paul.”
The inspector hung up. Levallois pursued his own train of thought:
“So tell me if I’ve got this right: Grégory Carnot and Félix Lambert have in common not only their extreme violence and young age, but also deeper genetic factors. Some are obvious, like their size, build, and the fact that they’re left-handed, and some more subtle, like
being lactose intolerant.”
“You’ve got it. I’m not sure what we’re dealing with here, but clearly there’s something to do with medicine and genetics behind all this.”
The car turned off under the foliage. The army of trees closed in around the Peugeot and the sky disappeared. Rows of black trunks rose on either side, revealing only the occasional façades of handsome homes. In the fading light, the inspector navigated by GPS. A bit farther on, he turned onto a narrow road, drove a few more yards, and saw the Lambert house, set back near the tree line at the end of a large, wooded lawn: a superb two-story, nineteenth-century mansion, built from large blocks of white stone with a slate roof. Ivy devoured the façade, forming a second wall of vegetation. Two cars, a sports coupe and a classic Peugeot 207, stood in the driveway.
“They’re here,” the inspector whispered. “Lambert junior and senior. Not exactly destitute, are they?”
“Now’s when we should be calling for backup.”
“I’d like to get a look around the place first.”
The inspector parked farther along, on the side of the road, and came back on foot to about ten yards from the entrance. Entry was protected by a locked gate, and the entire property—which spread over several acres—seemed to be encircled by a brick wall a good ten feet high.
“No way we can buzz the intercom,” the inspector said in a low voice. “We’ll have to use the element of surprise so that Lambert doesn’t ambush us or make a run for it.”
“So how are we going to get in, then?”
“You’re kind of slow on the uptake, aren’t you? Follow me.”
“What? Wait, shouldn’t we call in first? This isn’t . . .”
Sharko began skirting the wall, heading into the dense woods.
“. . . correct procedure,” the young lieutenant muttered between his teeth.
Bred to Kill Page 26
