by S. Cedric
“What department of the company did he run?”
“Jonathan runs, I mean ran, the legal department. You do understand that it was a key department in a company like ours.”
“Had he been in that position for a long time?”
“Since the company was founded. Mr. and Mrs. Reich have always worked together.”
“And you? How long have you been head of communications?”
“Me? A little more than ten years,” De Bonald said after a quick calculation.
“So you know Mrs. Reich well then?”
The man hesitated. “Honestly, I wouldn’t say I do.”
“Why? Does my question bother you?”
“It doesn’t bother me at all,” he said curtly. “What I mean is that the president was a very private person. We had worked together for years, and yet I was never very close to her. You have to understand that all of Gaia—and I do mean the whole company—relies on her exceptional intelligence. She created the business with her own hands. She’s the one who has made it what it is today. She alone makes all the decisions, absolutely all of them. If something bad were to happen to her—I pray that it doesn’t—I have to be frank with you, that would be the end of Gaia.”
“I see,” Eva said, thoughtfully. “What about you? You’re a deputy director. Don’t you manage Gaia, as well?”
He shook his head.
“Absolutely not. I do a considerable amount of work. I supervise shareholder meetings, I sign contracts around the world, and I spend more time in planes and hotels than I do at home, but Madeleine is Gaia’s nerve center.”
Eva saw his sincerity. He was uncomfortable, but he was being truthful.
She then asked the question that had prompted her to come in person. She wanted to see how he reacted.
“I would like to know if your president is at all interested in magic or the occult.”
Vincent De Bonald’s eyes grew dark.
“What kind of question is that? That is slippery terrain. I don’t want to go there.”
“Yet I am waiting for an answer,” Eva said, standing her ground. “I would like to know if your boss is part of a sect. And if she is, which one?”
“That’s ridiculous. Madeleine is too rational for that. Her only religion is work. She’s not the kind to be interested in the esoteric, believe me.”
Eva smiled.
“And you?”
“What are you trying to say?”
She pointed at the signet ring De Bonald was wearing.
“Don’t lie to me. That is a symbol of the Rose Cross Order you’re wearing, isn’t it?”
The man shrugged and blushed.
“You’re right. So what? I’m a believer, which is harder and harder to be these days. And it’s not a crime.”
“Of course not, as long as you don’t kill anyone.”
The man looked angry.
“You’re not accusing me of something, are you? You’re like all the others who think that brotherhoods like ours are filled with crazy, racist extremists, as if we were the Ku Klux Klan. That’s not true. The Rosicrucian Fellowship is mostly about brotherhood and positive thinking. In many ways, we’re no different from a private club. Forget about those things you see on television about sects and conspiracies.”
Eva studied the man. He seemed to be telling the truth.
“In any case, I know that Madeleine Reich did not frequent any kind of fellowship of this kind, because she told me so herself,” he added.
There was an interesting piece of information.
“You talked about it with her?” Eva asked.
“One time, a number of years ago. She also recognized the symbol. So we talked about it a little. I remember what she said. Her opinion was clear, to say the least. She explained to me that she was a staunch atheist. We never talked about it again. Everyone is free to follow their own path.”
Eva digested the information.
“You don’t think she could have been lying?”
The man’s expression showed true incomprehension.
“Why would she do that? It was no big deal.”
He was thinking.
“Listen, I’m going to give you my opinion. After her child died, I think she turned away from any religion she might have had, because she could not accept that a supreme power could be that cruel.”
Eva tried not to jump out of her seat.
“What are you talking about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you saying that Mrs. Reich had a child? Who died?”
“Well, yes,” De Bonald said. “You didn’t know? It was stillborn a month before term. She was home alone when it happened. She never talked about it, but everyone knew, of course.”
“Her husband wasn’t there?”
“It happened before she met Jonathan. She was still living in Aveyron, and she was single at the time. I shouldn’t be the one to tell you, but people say she didn’t know who the father was. Losing one’s first child is a terrible hardship. Some people never get over it. She and Jonathan never tried to have a baby themselves. I think that partly explains Madeleine’s, well, her inflexibility.”
“Good grief,” Eva said.
“Now that I think about it, it’s ironic that Madeleine founded the company just a few months after the trauma,” Vincent De Bonald said. “I think she channeled all her maternal love into her work. That’s probably why it has been such a spectacular success.”
I won’t do it again. You can tell the others. Never again.
It is the first and last time.
Ismael, it hurts again. I don’t understand why.
37
Back at police headquarters, Eva spent the next hour making phone calls and sending emails. She was tracking down the event in Madeleine Reich’s life that the media had completely missed—as had the police.
First, state health-insurance records showed that Madeleine Reich, who was Madeleine Ferrand at the time, had a complication at childbirth and had been treated for depression.
The child was stillborn.
If you say so, Eva said under her breath.
The story seemed plausible so far. The record of the child’s death, which she found online, seemed to check out. It had been signed by a local doctor, who probably was not in practice anymore. He didn’t have a current address or phone number.
The inspector followed her intuition.
She asked for a copy of the certificate, which was not so easy to get. The first people she talked to could not find it, and the next ones refused to send it without a written request. She had to negotiate with a half dozen government workers for nearly an hour before someone agreed to send her the document.
It took just a single phone call—and less than two minutes—to confirm that the document was a crude forgery.
“I’m sorry,” the secretary for the medical association said, after keeping her on hold with Vivaldi in the background. “That certificate doesn’t match anything we have on file.”
“Did you do a search for the doctor? I looked but couldn’t find any address or phone number for him.”
“I’m sure you won’t find either. That name does not correspond to any doctors we’ve ever had on file here.”
Eva thanked the woman and hung up. She had expected this but still could not quite believe it. She had been unable to find him, not because he was no longer in practice, but because he had never existed. No doc had ever pronounced a child dead at Madeleine Ferrand’s house.
She whistled.
“My God, Madeleine, you didn’t do what I think, did you?”
Then she looked for some evidence of a burial in Rodez. There had been one, and the certificate seemed to be perfectly in order. But she would not be taken in twice. If the death certificate was a fake, the burial could be, as well.
But she could not deny the hard evidence. It wasn’t a stillbirth. And no baby had really been buried in Rodez.
Because the body had spent
all that time in Ismael Constantin’s freezer.
The truth was coming into focus.
Madeleine Reich had been pregnant. Yet she had produced a forged certificate that the baby had died just before its term.
A lie. It was a huge lie that has slipped by unnoticed.
But why? To give birth at home alone? Eva had a hard time imagining what a single mother would do—she had never wanted to have children—but she did her best. She imagined herself giving birth alone, at home.
And then?
Was Constantin there when the baby was born?
Which of the two parents had cut its throat? Reich or Constantin? The mother or the father?
WHY?
This question invited another one, the most troubling of them all.
If I did that, Eva thought, if I were she, and I brought a child into the world, and I declared it dead, there could be only one reason..
I was already premeditating its murder.
Even before it was born, I had made my plan.
Eva got up, feeling sick, put on her sunglasses, and left her office.
She had to share her discover. Right away.
She entered Leroy’s office, where she found the detective with Perrine Alazard. They both turned and looked at her, surprised to see her so charged up.
“The frozen baby was Reich’s,” she told them.
“What?” Leroy asked.
“Madeleine Reich, the missing woman from Neuilly-sur-Seine. She had a child fifteen years ago. She declared it a stillbirth and supposedly had it buried. But I would bet my salary that this baby ended up in Constantin’s freezer.”
The two colleagues looked at each other. She realized something was wrong.
“What is it? Did I miss something?”
“We just got the lab results back,” Leroy said. “They don’t fit.”
“What doesn’t fit?”
“The DNA results show that Mrs. Reich was not the baby’s biological mother.”
“Are they sure?”
“Eva, you know how reliable this kind of test is. The frozen baby was not hers. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have a baby at around the same time, but it is not the same one.”
Eva sat down on the edge of the desk.
She needed time to digest this information.
All of her theories had just fallen apart.
But in this case, the evidence was even more troubling.
“I’ll ask to have that stillborn child exhumed,” she said.
“Do you still think we won’t find a body?” Leroy asked.
“I don’t know, Erwan. Maybe the coffin is empty, and the kid is alive somewhere. Maybe the body is there. Or maybe it’s worse than I imagined. Maybe this woman killed her own child, too.”
She looked at the two other officers.
“Then we would have not one, but two infanticides on our hands. Two babies murdered by parents who knew each other, as crazy as it seems.”
She hung her shoulders, demoralized by the place her reasoning was taking her.
Constantin and Reich might have not only committed the worst act a human being can think of, but also discussed, calculated, and planned it.
“So then it would be like the tales of witchcraft in the Middle Ages,” Perrine Alazard said. “It was said that witches sacrificed their first children to the devil. But we don’t know that for sure. It would be crazy if that kind of practice really existed.”
“It is crazy,” Eva said. “But this is what we’re talking about.”
“Human sacrifice,” Alazard said, just as incredulous.
“We need to find out where it all started.”
“I have an idea,” Leroy said.
Eva turned to him.
“What? I’m listening.”
“I looked into their school records, like the chief asked. I found that Constantin and Mrs. Reich did meet—in Toulouse. They attended the same college thirty years ago.”
“What college?”
“Mirail University.
“I know that school,” Eva said. So they studied together?”
“Yes, they majored in history,” Leroy confirmed. “Madeleine Ferrand, our future Mrs. Reich, had just graduated from high school in Rodez. Constantin had just arrived from Niger with his mother. They took the same classes. They spent five years in Toulouse. Now this is where it starts getting strange: they did not finish their degrees.”
“What happened?”
“No idea. But something must have happened. They dropped out right before finishing.”
“So close to the end?”
“And they both moved away from the city.”
“That is the year Constantin and his mother moved to Villiers-le-Bel,” Perrine Alazard said.
“Exactly. Madeleine Ferrand moved back to her hometown in Aveyron, where she stayed until that pregnancy,” Leroy said.
Eva nodded. That was a radical change.
She couldn’t help but think about the university.
They studied history.
“It all started there,” she suddenly said. “The roots are there.”
“Do you think they planned it back then?” Alazard asked.
“That’s what we need to find out.”
“Let’s not forget,” Leroy said. “We have a killer on the loose. He assassinated Constantin. He did the same to Jonathan Reich, and he may be torturing Reich’s wife. He may be performing an exorcism.”
Eva nodded, lost in dizzy thoughts.
“Our nutcase has decided to punish them for devil-worshipping crimes.”
“But that implies that he knew them at that time in their lives, too,” Alazard said.
“It could well be that our killer met Constantin and Reich in college,” Leroy said.
“And knew them well enough to be in on their shared secret,” Eva said.
Perrine was looking excited.
“Erwan, can we still get a list of students who were majoring in history back then?”
Leroy nodded.
“That’s easy. I’ll call and ask. I’m sure they keep their records.”
“If our killer was a student, he might have an arrest record in Toulouse. It’s likely that a killer like that would have had a violent past,” Eva said.
“You’re right. As soon as I get the list of names, I’ll run them through the system. Then we might have a lead.”
38
Saint Gaudens
“You’re revolting. Your insinuations are completely ridiculous.”
Annie Lavigne was leaning against her kitchen window. Her cheeks were red, and she was peering at the dark sky. It was dusk, and an icy wind was blowing outside. Smoke from the cellulose factory in Saint Gaudens was rising in an opaque cloud above the jagged crest of the Pyrenees.
“I know perfectly well what I’m saying,” Vauvert said.
He was standing in the kitchen doorway. He had arrived at Annie Lavigne’s home only ten minutes earlier, and they were already in a confrontation. He felt sincerely sorry for her, but he did not have time to lose. He had no intention of going easy on her if she continued to lie to him.
“If you prefer, we could wait for your husband to get home from work with your son. We can talk about it together. What do you think?”
She turned around. She was wearing faded jeans, an off-white shirt, and a white cardigan, along with a gold necklace and earring. Her braided copper-colored hair hung down her back. She was very beautiful. But behind her glasses, she looked worried and angry. She was breathing heavily, and the blush in her cheeks intensified with her anger.
“I think you are a real bastard,” she said slowly, her voice filled with contempt.
“Now, now,” Vauvert said.
“You don’t understand. I love my husband. Neither he nor I have anything to do with Pierre’s disappearance.”
The inspector shrugged.
“I never thought you did, Mrs. Lavigne. I’m talking about the nature of your relationship with Pierre.
”
“He was an excellent boss. I liked him a lot,” she said, a lump forming in her throat. “He takes a real interest in his businesses and doesn’t care how much time he has to spend on the job. That’s why they are doing so well. He comes to see me—to see us—often because he’s a hands-on manager, that’s all. And to hell with you. My private life is none of your business.”
“Listen, Mrs. Lavigne, Vauvert said, looking her in the eye. “If it makes you feel any better, your sex life doesn’t interest me and won’t appear in my report. I didn’t come here to judge you or to get you in trouble. But I need your cooperation. If Pierre Loisel means anything to you, you have a real opportunity to help him. I know that he is hiding somewhere. I just want to know where.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why would he do that?”
“Because he is threatened. It is a question of life and death.”
He watched for the woman’s reaction. It did not take long. She started shaking.
“No, I don’t believe you.”
“Did you see the news this morning? Did you hear about the double murder near Montauban? They were Loisel’s parents-in-law.”
The women’s brown eyes widened behind her glasses. She was clearly panicked.
“They were tortured and murdered,” Vauvert continued. “They were more than seventy years old. Why would anyone have reason to do such harm to them?”
The woman hugged herself, trembling.
“But, I don’t know. It’s insane. It doesn’t make sense.”
Vauvert took a few steps into the kitchen. His eye caught a child’s drawings hanging on the refrigerator. “Look at me, Annie,” he said. “I want you to understand that the person who did this could find you, too, the same way I found you. He could come after you and your family.”
“Would they really do that?” she asked. The blood drained from her face.
Vauvert nodded. He was bluffing a little but not entirely. In any case, he was pleased with himself. When he arrived, he wasn’t sure that this woman knew anything. Now he was sure she knew something. Tears shimmered in her eyes.
“I don’t know what Pierre was afraid of, but yes, he was nervous and irritable.”
