First Blood

by S. Cedric

  “You said the fire started here.”

  “Yes,” the deputy fire chief said, shining his light on the remains. “You see these traces that look like waves on the ground? That was the hottest spot. It tells us that the fire originated here. He was the point of origin. It was an execution.”

  Eva nodded. “Do you think they poured gasoline over him?”

  “Gas or some other accelerant. We’ll know soon enough. It’s true that gas is most common for this kind of case.”

  “What kind of case are you talking about?”

  “You know,” the firefighter sighed. “It looks like someone was settling a score, don’t you think?” He ran his hand across his forehead to wipe off the sweat. “The hoods around here douse people with gasoline when they have a score to settle. They lock them in the trunk of a car, pour gas all over the vehicle and light it up. They call it a barbecue.”

  Leroy walked around the body. The beams from their flashlights danced a macabre ballet on the burned flesh.

  “Do you see a lot of these barbecues?”

  “No, it’s not that common,” N’Guyen said. “I’ve seen three in five years.”

  Eva ran her flashlight along what remained of the body. There was something else about it. “This man had a huge opening in his torso.”

  “You’re right,” Leroy said, feeling sick. “It looks like he’s been cut open.”

  Now the deputy fire chief directed the beam of his flashlight on the body. “Damn. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  Eva looked up at him. “This dude was mutilated before being set on fire. It doesn’t look like the usual gang payback anymore.”

  She looked around the room. Black matter, covered by several inches of water, was splattered all around. A steam radiator had been ripped off the wall and lay in the middle of the floor, an odd island in a charred world.

  “I’m intrigued by this hole in his torso. We’re going to have to find the missing organs.”

  Leroy understood what she meant. “Do you think it’s possible?” he asked. “Do you think the guys who did this took off with pieces of Ismael Constantin like souvenirs?”

  “I’m just saying that we’ll need to check. You never know. But in a gang dispute, I don’t know why his enemies would want to collect, well,...”

  She was looking for the right word.

  Leroy finished her sentence, daring to say it out loud, “Trophies.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Eva said.

  “But you were thinking it.”

  Eva was silent for a few moments. Leroy and N’Guyen looked on as if they were expecting her to analyze the situation. She was not ready for that.

  “This doesn’t add up,” she finally said. “If Constantin was so powerful here, why didn’t any of his men stop this?”

  “I don’t get it,” N’Guyen said. “I thought his soldiers were always around to defend him, no matter what.”

  “But he was alone tonight,” Eva said.

  “That’s what it looks like. Otherwise, his attackers would never have been able to do this to him, right?”

  “Have you inspected the other apartments?”

  “Yes, of course. On this floor, there is only one other apartment. It’s on the other side of the hallway. There’s no one in there.”

  Eva nodded. She remembered very clearly what the young man Sammy had said in the parking lot.

  “We can’t do nothing.”

  Those were his exact words.

  “You already got told.”

  She thought back to the silence that reigned in the building before the fire. It was the same kind of quiet that occurs in a tropical forest before an earthquake or a tidal wave.

  Told what?

  There was something strange about the tenants—in the way they did not look shocked or surprised. Eva was sure that everyone here knew this was going to happen.

  Did he know? She looked at the burned body again. Ismael Constantin, fifty years old, top dog in the projects, the man who literally ran this building. Where were his soldiers?

  She could not let go of the thought. Did Constantin know, as well? Did he expect to die this way? Is that why he called his men in the day before? When Leroy heard the rumors in the cafés, he thought that Constantin was going to meet somebody and that everyone would be there. There had been a meeting, but it was one on one. And it was fatal for the gangster.

  Something else was wrong. Something more serious.

  She did not have time to finish her line of thought. Other people were coming up the stairwell. She could hear them. Then the beams from a dozen or so flashlights pierced the darkness in the apartment.

  “Is someone in there?” It was the voice that Eva would have recognized anywhere.

  It was the voice of Assistant District Attorney Blaise Larusso.

  Every cop’s nightmare.

  She looked at Leroy.

  “This is not our lucky day,” he said.

  12

  “Mr. Larusso!”

  Eva’s mouth went dry.

  Not him, she screamed inside, anybody but him.

  “We found the body,” she added, already on the defensive.

  Several people came into the room. The flashlights blinded her.

  “Good evening, Mr. Larusso,” Leroy said in turn, shielding his eyes with the back of his hand.

  Larusso did not greet them. He simply stared at Leroy from behind his huge glasses, sending a palpable look of disdain.

  It had to be him, tonight, Eva thought. That idiot will keep us off the case just to annoy us, just to prove that it’s his turf, and he is all powerful.

  Fifteen or so people wearing armbands and face masks accompanied Larusso. Eva recognized guys from the drug squad, crime-scene investigators in white coats, and a reserved-looking blond woman. She remembered her name: Pauline Chadoutaud. She was a medical examiner she had worked with several times. They got along fairly well. At least there is one friendly face among the vultures.

  Pauline Chadoutaud nodded at her. Eva gave her a stiff smile as she waved to Deputy Fire Chief N’Guyen. He was leaving, having been chased away by this new crowd of very serious faces. In seconds, the agents had taken over the apartment and formed a circle around the burned remains. Joseph Adam’s team was there in full force. Adam himself was standing back, near the door. He looked at her in silence, inscrutable under his paper mask. But Eva imagined that he was smirking.

  It was best to face her problems, one by one. She turned to Larusso and said, “Sir.”

  He cut her off, “You’ve got no reason to be here. I haven’t assigned this to the Homicide Unit yet.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Please leave.”

  Eva almost laughed. Larusso was five feet three at the most, and he had a serious inferiority complex. He expressed it by being petty and aggressive. He could wear men’s platform shoes and scream louder than anyone else, but he still looked ridiculously small and scrawny. She had to keep her composure, or she would ruin things.

  “If you could just hear me out,” she tried to say.

  “That’s close to insubordination,” Larusso yelled behind his mask.

  She swallowed. There was a taste of ashes and anger in her mouth.

  In the doorway, Adam still had that smile in his eyes. He would not need to be told twice to chase them away.

  “Is it Constantin?” Larusso barked without looking at the body.

  “We think so, sir,” Leroy responded quickly.

  Larusso turned to him and glared. “I wasn’t asking you.”

  “Yet I answered. Do you have a problem with that?” Leroy said, towering over Larusso a good eight inches. Larusso had to look up at him. His right cheek was twitching.

  “Watch out, kid. You don’t seem to know who you are talking to.”

  “On the contrary,” Leroy said, enunciating each word, “I know very well to whom I am talking.”

  The blood drained from Larusso’s face. “You’re
looking for trouble,” he said.

  Eva tried to come to Leroy’s rescue. “Sir, this is murder with premeditation and no longer just cocaine trafficking,” she said in a voice full of authority. “Ismael Constantin was tortured and gutted like a pig before being set on fire.”

  Larusso’s whole face began twitching. He took off his glasses with an exaggerated gesture and wiped them off. “Classic drug-gang payback,” he said. “We’re not going to be here all night. It’s for the local precinct, not the Criminal Investigation Division. Now get out of here, you two.”

  There was nothing Eva and Leroy could do. They left as Deputy Chief Adam gave them a mocking look.

  “I can’t believe it,” Leroy said in the hallway. “What an asshole.”

  “You can’t win every time,” said Eva, who was just as displeased. “It’s his call. You know we don’t have a say.”

  They stopped on the landing. A member of the CSI team was there, illuminating the hallway with his flashlight.

  “Be careful,” he said. “This wall could collapse.”

  They thanked him and stepped along the hallway carefully. Eva looked at the darkened mass at the end of the hall, where the ceiling had fallen in. The door of the other apartment stood open like an invitation.

  It would be hard to get in but not impossible.

  Eva lifted her flashlight and said, “Constantin owns that apartment too, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go take a look.”

  Eva and Leroy walked down the hallway to the other apartment. As they stepped in, a chunk of burned wood fell from the frame and came apart in a dark, dusty cloud. They both flattened their masks against their faces.

  “Do you really want to go in there?” Leroy asked.

  “I doubt Adam’s team will,” Eva answered.

  In the first room, there were skeletons of furniture and the remains of a flat-screen television.

  “Do you think he lived in this one or in the other?”

  “How do you expect me to know?” Leroy asked.

  “In any case, this place was empty. If anyone had been here, they would have heard the screams next door. Listen.”

  They could hear the pathologist talking with the guys from the drug squad in the first apartment. She was telling them about a missing organ: the heart. That was it. They had stolen Constantin’s heart. Larusso interrupted. The missing heart wasn’t anything significant, he said. And he did not intend to stay much longer, because he had to get up early in the morning.

  “Damned idiot,” Eva mumbled.

  Leroy nodded, swept his eyes across the darkened walls, and stepped around the charred remains of a bed. Then the two of them moved on to the final room. The same flaming hell had destroyed everything here, as well, even part of the exterior wall. A freezing wind struck them.

  “There’s nothing here.”

  “You’re right.”

  They were on their way out, when Eva stopped to look at a door that was propped at a forty-five degree angle against the wall.

  Leroy stopped, too. “What do you see?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “In any case, this door is not like the others. It didn’t burn.”

  Leroy took a closer look. The door, which was now black with soot, had come off its hinges and had slid partway down the burning wall. But it was still intact.

  Eva put her foot on it. The door slid all the way to the floor, creating a powdery cloud.

  “An armored door. The wall burned, but it didn’t.”

  She raised her flashlight, illuminating a tiny room where flakes of ashes danced.

  “What do you think it was protecting?”

  She stepped into the shadowy room. Despite the mask, her throat was on fire. Her eyes were burning, too. She closed them for a minute to let them water.

  “It looks empty, except for this.” Leroy said, pointing to a large rectangular shape.

  “That looks like a freezer, don’t you think?”

  Leroy nodded.

  “In a room behind an armored door?”

  Eva smiled behind her mask. “Maybe he stored his merchandise here?”

  With her hand still in its latex glove, she pulled on the handle. The appliance refused to open.

  “Shit.”

  “Wait.” Leroy put his flashlight in his belt and came in to help. Surrounded by shadows and asphyxiating ashes, they looked like two explorers in a forgotten temple. What was Ismael Constantin’s hidden treasure?

  They pulled together. The freezer started to creak.

  “It’s coming,” Erwan said, straining. “Just a little more.”

  The top came off with a combined crackling and sucking sound. They pushed it up and off to the side. Inside the freezer, the ice had melted. It was now a sickening puddle of water.

  There were no drugs in this hiding place.

  It was worse.

  Leroy paled and stepped back. “Dammit. That’s not what I think it is, is it?”

  Eva stood there. She was paralyzed. She couldn’t swallow.

  “It’s a baby.”

  The corpse at the bottom of the freezer could not have been older than six months. The child was black and had been frozen and stored in this room. For how long?

  Eva leaned over, shining the flashlight at the baby’s head. Next to the body, she saw a plastic bag. It contained a red and gold rectangular object.

  “We need to let the pathologist know,” she said, her voice trembling.

  Leroy left, without saying a word. He made his way out of the devastated apartment, while she examined the small form and the wound in its neck. The person who had slit the throat had nearly cut the baby’s head off.

  Eva was glad she was alone.

  No one would see the tears in her ruby-colored eyes.

  Dreams are places of lucidity, Jonathan. Much more than we dare to admit.

  II

  Superstitions

  It is the first day of class.

  They are undergraduates.

  Enormous speakers amplify the professor’s very high, nearly comical voice. The lecture hall is overheated, even though it is only the beginning of October. Nearly two hundred students are squeezed elbow to elbow into the tiers of the room. Their faces are young, attentive, and shy as they glance around the room. They look either curious or lost. They dig through their bags and crumple papers. There is murmuring, chatting. A girl in the first row coughs. She already has the loose cough of a long-time smoker. Pens scribble, like an army of roaches marching.

  Those who failed last year stand out with their practiced air of detachment and the dirty jokes they shout at each other across the room. It is Greek mythology, with Mr. Parme. For twenty minutes he has been droning on in his unbearably high voice, providing the same information that is in the book he wrote.

  His voice does go with his body. He is as thin as an ascetic, with his sparse gray hair tied in a ponytail. Mr. Parme has a unique sense of style and wears a bright red jacket despite the overwhelming heat. The flashy red looks like a stain of jam on his porcelain-colored shirt. Madeleine thinks he resembles a declining actor or a dance hall singer. He just needs a retro microphone and a scarlet backdrop.

  Madeleine hears almost nothing of the professor’s lecture. It is her first day, and she is taking in all the details around her. She is fresh from her countryside home. In other words, she is finally free. The frontier ahead of her is virgin and exhilarating. She would listen to Mr. Parme’s annoying voice another day.

  For now, she is more interested in her classmates and how improbable the people around her look. Some have dreadlocks, while others have punk Mohawks. Some students from the provinces are wearing gray suits. She never saw so many different kinds of people in her native Aveyron, where dying your hair red was an extreme act of rebellion. Never has she been in such a mixed crowd and seen such diversity.

  She glances at the pimply-faced boy in the Star Wars T-shirt a few rows in front of her. One ro
w down, there are two bleached-blond girls, one wearing a bright-green sweater, the other a canary-yellow jacket with shoulder pads. They are chattering loudly like energized birds. A neighbor asks them to quiet down. The two blonds insult her. Finally, the complainer gives up and moves away. The two girls fascinate Madeleine. They are so self-assured, so happy and inconsiderate, character traits she thinks she will never have.

  But that is not the most interesting thing. No, not at all.

  Madeleine has spotted a boy she likes—a lot.

  He is sitting in the middle of the lecture hall. He is tall, slender, and magnificent. His skin is a coppery black that contrasts with the aspirin-colored pallor of the heavyset red-haired girl next to him. She is spilling out of a pink T-shirt that is a few sizes too small. She has been fanning herself since the beginning of the class.

  The boy’s braids are tied together and hanging down a T-shirt covering his muscular back. He does not seem to be listening to the teacher either. He is not taking notes, but is instead engrossed in a thick book.

  Madeleine wrinkles her nose and coughs. The odor of pot floats in the air. That idiot with the Star Wars T-shirt has lit up a joint. The students around him both chuckle and complain, but nobody can keep him from smoking. The professor keeps cheeping over the microphone as if nothing is going on. He is explaining how serious work is important in his class. He is expecting everyone to attend regularly.

  The boy with the braids continues to read his book.

  And the bell rings. Finally. It is the end of her first mythology class, which she hasn’t listened to. The students get up in joyful chaos and follow each other down the stairs in an animated flow. They leave the lecture hall through the doors on either side of the room.

  Madeleine also gathers her things but takes her time. While the others make their way around her, she arranges her books neatly in her bag and closes her pencil case. Then she snaps her bag closed and swings the strap over her shoulder.

  She stands up, her eyes on the boy.

  She wants to know where he is going. Would he be going to the cafeteria, where so many students head at the end of the day? Or would he go to the library, to another class, or maybe even home?