After a brief hesitation, he ran after his partner, who was already disappearing into the vegetation. The trees crowded in around him, ferns attacked his ankles, branches twisted against the wall, as if nature were trying somehow to reassert its rights. After moving forward for several minutes, Sharko stood back a bit to get a better view, and managed to make out the top of the house’s western façade.
“Looks like a windowless gable. The perfect spot to get onto the property without being seen.”
Levallois stamped his foot.
“You’re out of your mind! Shit, this guy massacred two kids. We don’t know what sort of monster we’ll come face-to-face with in there. And besides, we . . .”
Sharko walked up to him and looked him in the eye, cutting his diatribe short.
“You can either come with me or stay here feeling sorry for yourself. But in either case, shut your trap, got it?”
The inspector scanned the trees and found a branch low enough to hoist himself up, while keeping the soles of his feet flat against the wall. He wasn’t cut out for this kind of acrobatics anymore, and he made his way up like a disjointed puppet. But it didn’t matter how he went up or how much pain his tired limbs felt: all that counted were results. His jacket covered with greenish smears, his loafers half ruined, he landed in the thick grass with a heavy grunt, then ran to the wall of the house.
Levallois followed several yards behind. He flattened himself against the house next to Sharko, weapon in hand.
Sharko caught his breath. Not a movement around them, save for a few birds in the branches and the trembling leaves. The atmosphere was too calm, too quiet. It didn’t bode well. Sharko rolled quickly onto the next wall, his partner right behind. Ivy brushed over their shoulders. Moving cautiously, he threw a quick glance into the first window he came to. A huge room, very high ceiling, enormous chandelier. No doubt the living room. Sharko heard a noise. He shut his eyes and listened. Bass notes droned through the walls.
“The TV,” whispered Levallois. “Sounds like the volume’s turned up full blast.”
Hunched over, Sig Sauer in his fist, the inspector continued forward and headed toward another window, which looked into the kitchen. Levallois covered their backs, casting quick glances in every direction. He saw the inspector blanch and freeze in his tracks.
“What is it?”
Sharko was looking through the window. His eyes were squinting toward the tile floor.
Their hearts were racing.
“Shit! I don’t believe it . . .”
Inside the house, trails of blood stretched from a chair and into another room. Someone had dragged a badly wounded body; given the shape of the trails, probably by the feet. Breaking out in a sudden sweat, Sharko rushed to the next window.
A dining room. A body lay on the floor, eyes staring at the ceiling. His face was black, covered in dried blood, as were his shredded clothes, no doubt the work of a large knife. The man’s head was bald, with just a few gray hairs. He must have been about fifty.
“Looks like Lambert’s father.”
The two cops flattened against the wall, breathing hard. The situation had just changed. Levallois was white as a sheet.
“We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to call for backup.”
His voice was broken by his anxious breathing. Sharko leaned toward his ear.
“They’ll take ages to get here. There’s a killer hiding in that house. We’re going in. Can you do it?”
Levallois pressed into the ivy, head against the wall. He stared at the sky with round eyes. Then he nodded, lips pressed shut. Silently, Sharko crept toward the door. He pushed down the handle with his elbow. Locked. Then, without a second thought, he took off his jacket and rolled it around his hand and wrist.
“Get ready. We’re going in. You cover the left, I’ll take the right.”
Standing at the window, he gave the glass a sharp rap with the butt of his gun, shattering it with a loud crash. As fast as he could, he cleared away the shards of glass with his protected arm and yanked on the latch inside. Less than ten seconds later, two armed silhouettes tumbled into the dining room. The sounds from the television made the walls shake: evidently a music channel. The house seemed to be holding its breath. The rooms, too large and lifeless, made them feel dizzy. Muscles taut, Levallois vanished briskly into the next room, then reappeared a few seconds later, shaking his head.
Suddenly the two partners froze, holding their breath. They heard the sound of footsteps just above their heads. A heavy movement, regular as a pendulum, that lasted no more than five seconds. Cautiously, they crossed the entrance foyer and moved toward the staircase, Sharko in front. Their feet were suddenly in water, which was oozing slowly from upstairs. Along the oblique walls and on the carpet was a string of bloody handprints.
“Left hands . . . Jesus, what happened here?”
As quietly as he could, the inspector climbed the stairs, keeping his gun aimed at the wall in front of him. His heart sent the blood pounding into his temples. In his alert muscles he could almost feel every vein pulsing, hear his body preparing to meet danger. A vile odor assailed him, a mix of shit, piss, and blood. Entire sections of carpet had been ripped up, and the wood of the steps was saturated with water. It was like advancing into a nightmare.
Upstairs, the cops turned right and went past the bathroom.
The faucet in the sink was turned on full, water flooding everywhere. Dirty clothes floated in the bathtub.
They kept moving. Every door was wide open except the one in back, its handle covered in blood. The bloody handprints led up to it, with no ambiguity. The monster was huddled in his lair.
Waiting.
Panting, Sharko took up position right next to the door, slightly crouched. Holding his breath, he tried to push down the handle with the butt of his gun, but it was locked.
The cop raised his gun against his cheek and breathed out. He could feel Levallois’s warm breath on the nape of his neck.
“This is the police! Open up and let’s talk.”
Silence. The cops then made out little mewing sounds, like whimpers. They couldn’t tell if they were made by a man or a woman. A victim that Lambert had kept alive?
They gave each other a horrified look. Sharko tried to reason one last time.
“We can help you. You just have to unlock the door and give yourself up quietly. Is there someone in there with you?”
No response.
Sharko waited a moment longer, nerves on full alert. The maniac was probably armed, but no doubt with a knife or he would already have fired. At that point, total silence had fallen over the house. The cop couldn’t stand waiting any longer and decided to go in.
“You wait here. I wouldn’t want to take a pregnant woman’s husband from her.”
“Go fuck yourself. I’m going in with you.”
Sharko nodded. Without a sound, the two cops positioned themselves in front of the door. Levallois aimed his barrel at the lock and fired. An instant later, the inspector gave the door a mighty kick and rushed into the room, his Sig Sauer in front of him.
Immediately he pointed it at the colossus who was standing in a corner, huddled over, fists crushed into his chest. He was alone. His eyes were an intense, feverish yellow, lined by purplish shadows.
He had ripped the skin from his cheeks and was glaring directly at Sharko. Solidly planted on his spread legs, the inspector didn’t flinch. Levallois aimed his gun as well.
“Don’t you dare move!”
Félix Lambert was unarmed. He closed his eyes, biting his fingers until they bled while his face contorted in pain. His gums were raw, his lips dry as parchment. Madness scorched his features. He was baleful, unreal. Shaking violently, he suddenly snapped open his eyes and bolted for the window. Sharko barely had time to cry out as the murderer flew headfirst through the glass.
His body slammed against the ground thirty feet below, without so much as a whimper.
34
Gaëlle Lecoupet pressed Stop and ejected the tape with trembling hands.
“I hadn’t seen it in years. It’s still just as horrible . . .”
Lucie had a hard time coming back to reality. Had she seen that right? The film’s documentary aspect horrified her as much as its content: the veracity of the images and garbled sound track seemed to deny the possibility of trickery or staging. It had actually happened, somewhere in the world, forty years earlier. Something violent had struck those natives in the heart of the jungle, and someone aware of the massacre had come to record it with his movie camera. Someone sadistic enough to film the survivors without lifting a finger to help.
The men at the racetrack . . . the authors of Phoenix no. 1.
Perhaps even the killer or killers Lucie was after.
She heaved a sigh. Since the beginning, this investigation had dredged up only shadows and mysteries, confronted her with her own past, forced her to dig into her deepest reserves of strength to keep going.
Getting hold of herself, Lucie turned to the other woman.
“That village was completely wiped out. It was like, I don’t know . . . some kind of virus, in the middle of nowhere.”
“Yes, probably so. A virus, as you say, or some kind of infection.”
“What do you know about this film?”
Gaëlle Lecoupet pursed her lips and changed the subject.
“You can imagine what happened when Stéphane came home, the day I’d gone into his study. Discovering I’d searched through his cabinet. And me, demanding some sort of explanation about that vile film and those mysterious men that he’d been meeting for months. That day, it all burst apart between us. Stéphane disappeared for several days, taking all his secrets with him, his papers and tapes, without a word of explanation. When he returned from wherever he’d been, it was only to announce that he was moving to Reims and that he wanted a divorce.”
She gave a long sigh, clearly still upset even a quarter of a century later.
“It was as simple and sudden as that. He sacrificed our marriage for . . . for something that obsessed him. I never knew why he buried himself so suddenly in that hospital in Reims. I had imagined, as I told you earlier, that he wanted to get back to his roots. And maybe even get away from all that filth, those strange men who could film such abominations. Now all I have left of him is this old tape.”
Lucie asked again:
“And . . . were you able to get anything from those images? Did you ever try to understand what it was about?”
“Yes, at first. I lent the tape to an anthropologist. He’d never seen anything like it. Given the state of the bodies and the little information he had, he couldn’t tell me what tribe it was. Only the monkeys gave him a reliable indication.”
She rewound the tape and froze the image on one of the primates in close-up.
“Those are white-headed capuchins, which you only find in the Amazon rain forest, near the border of Venezuela and Brazil.”
Lucie suddenly felt as if an abyss had opened at her feet and that, all at once, the plain truth blazed before her eyes. The Amazon . . . where Eva Louts had traveled right after Mexico. And where she was planning to return. Could there still be any doubt? Lucie was convinced the student had left Manaus and headed into the jungle, that she had gone in search of that village and that tribe. It explained the withdrawal of cash, the weeklong trip: an expedition.
Gaëlle Lecoupet pursued her story:
“After that, I stopped searching. It hurt too much. Our sudden breakup and divorce had been painful enough. I wanted to leave all of it behind me and start over. The first thing I did was to put that horrible tape at the bottom of a trunk. I felt profound denial toward what I’d seen, I didn’t want to believe it. Deep down, I didn’t really want to understand what it was about.”
She shook her head, eyes lowered. This woman, who had all the trappings of happiness, was still bleeding inside, beneath her elegant exterior.
“I don’t know why I never got rid of it. Maybe I thought someday I’d try to learn the whole truth. But I never did. What good would it have done? It’s all in the past. I’m happy with Léon, and that’s what matters.”
She placed the black plastic cassette in Lucie’s hands.
“You’ve come all this way. You’ll discover the truth, you’ll get to the bottom of it. Keep this cursed tape, do what you like with it, but take it away from here, get it out of this house. I never want to see or hear of it again.”
Lucie nodded, without losing her cop’s instincts.
“Before I go, would you mind burning it onto a DVD for me?”
“Yes, of course.”
Finally, the two women said good-bye. Getting in her car, the ex-cop nodded politely to Léon, put the cassette and the DVD on the passenger seat, and started up, her head buzzing.
• • •
A few miles from Highway A1, Lucie pondered which direction to take. Lille or Paris? Left or right? Her family or the investigation? See Sharko again or forget him completely? Lucie thought of him and sensed she could falter at any moment. All the feelings she thought buried forever were slowly rising to the surface.
Paris to the right, Lille to the left . . . the two extremes of a deep wound.
She made up her mind at the last minute, veering right.
Once more she’d have to go back in time, plunge more deeply into the shadows. One of her daughters had been murdered beneath the sunshine of Les Sables d’Olonne more than a year ago, without her really understanding why.
And today, she knew that it was in the terrifying depths of a jungle, thousands of miles away from home, that the answers might be waiting.
35
The sun had already started sinking through the foliage when police cars screamed up to the isolated property of the Lamberts. CSI van, crime scene photographer, squad cars for the officers. That Thursday evening, in the still summerlike temperatures, the men were on edge: they’d already started the week with horrors enough, and the situation didn’t seem to be getting any better now that there were two new corpses to deal with.
Sharko was sitting against a tree in front of the house, head resting in his hands. The shadows were falling over his face, pressing against him as if to swallow him whole. In silence, he watched the different teams bustle about, the morbid ballet common to all crime scenes.
After the CSI team had finished its meticulous labors, Félix Lambert’s body had been covered in a sheet, then sent off to Forensics, along with his father’s. From the first indications provided by the degree of rigor mortis, Bernard Lambert had been dead at least forty-eight hours. Two days that the father had spent splayed out on the floor of the dining room, soaking in his own blood, with the TV on full blast and water pouring from the sink in the upstairs bathroom.
What had gone through Félix Lambert’s head? What demons had pushed him to commit such horrors?
With a sigh, Sharko stood up. He felt drained, worn down to the bone by too long a day and too twisted a case. Dragging his feet, he joined Levallois and Bellanger, who were arguing bitterly at the entrance door. The tension between them was palpable. The more time went on, the more the men felt the pressure. Marriages would burst asunder, and bars would see policemen with frayed nerves drowning their sorrows.
The team leader finished with Levallois and took the inspector aside, near a fat blue hydrangea bush.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“A little tired, is all. I’ll be fine. I slugged down a thermos of coffee the guys brought; it picked me up a bit. To tell the truth, I haven’t eaten much these past few days.”
“Nor slept, for that matter. You need to get some rest.”
Sharko nodded toward the area cordoned of
f with police tape—the spot where Félix Lambert’s body had lain a few moments before.
“Rest time will come later. Were you able to notify the family?”
“Not yet. We know Lambert’s older sister lives in Paris.”
“What about the mother?”
“Not a trace for the moment. We’re just getting started, and there’s so much to do . . .”
He sighed, looking worn down. Sharko had been in his shoes once upon a time. Leading a squad in the criminal police was nothing but a thicket of hassles, a position in which you got shat on from above and below.
“What do you make of this mess?”
Sharko raised his eyes to the smashed upstairs window.
“I met the son’s eyes before he jumped. I saw something in them I’d never seen in the eyes of any human being before: pure, unadulterated suffering. He was ripping the skin off his own cheeks, and he had pissed on himself, like an animal. Something was tearing him up inside and driving him insane, making him completely disconnected from reality. An evil that drove him to commit unspeakable acts, like the massacres of those hikers and his own father. I don’t know what it’s about, but I’m convinced what we’re looking for is hidden inside him, in his body. Something genetic. And Stéphane Terney knew what it was.”
Silence surrounded them. Nicolas Bellanger rubbed his chin, staring into space.
“In that case, let’s see what the autopsy has to say.”
“When’s it being done?”
His boss didn’t answer immediately. His mind must have felt like a battlefield after a major encounter.
“Uhh . . . Chénaix is starting at eight tonight. First the father and then the son. Some evening.”
The young chief cleared his throat; he seemed preoccupied, ill at ease. Sharko noticed his discomfort and asked what the matter was.
“It’s about Terney’s book,” said Bellanger. “The genetic fingerprints naturally drew our attention to Grégory Carnot, the last prisoner on Eva Louts’s list. So Robillard called Vivonne Penitentiary, and guess what he discovered . . .”
Bred to Kill Page 27
