Bred to Kill (17 page)

L
evallois's powerful frame slammed into Sharko at the corner where the alley met Rue Darwin. The young cop with the oilcan jaw was boiling, his muscles made taut by excitement and the smell of the hunt.

“Somebody got away through the rear gardens! Didn't you see anything?”

Sharko turned back toward the cement wall.

“Dead quiet on my end. Who got away? What's going on?”

Levallois peered in every direction, eyes shining. He turned back to Sharko.

“The window of his room was open. The only place he could've got out was back here. I thought I heard you shout.”

“Some goddamn cat. You sure you saw somebody?”

“I'm not sure of anything. There's something really weird in there. Come have a look . . .”

Levallois turned, took a few running steps, leapt onto the cement parapet, and his body disappeared into the gardens. Alone, Sharko let out a sigh. That had been a close call. By now, Lucie should be far enough away to be out of danger. Regardless, she owed him a serious explanation.

He hurried toward the house. The officers were dragging a man out in handcuffs. He was bellowing at the top of his lungs, in deep, nasal tones, feet flying in every direction; it took no fewer than three burly cops to restrain him. Bellanger, the group chief, watched the young prisoner through dark eyes.

“What's all this bullshit about?” asked Sharko, slightly out of breath.

“No idea. Terney is dead. This guy isn't talking. We found him turning the pages of a book, sitting quietly, while a corpse lay not three yards away.”

“His strange behavior . . . the shouting . . . Mentally handicapped?”

“Very mentally handicapped, I'd say. On the cover of his book is the number 342 in large writing, and the pages are numbered one to three hundred, but they're all blank. The guy has no identification on him, nothing. He's probably the one who came in through the window. He knocked over the metal statue when we tried to get inside. The noise must have frightened him and he hid in a closet next to the crime scene . . .”

Sharko nodded.

“I didn't see anything go by in the gardens. If you ask me, Levallois is chasing a ghost.”

Even shut up inside the police car, they could still hear the young man bellowing. In the neighboring houses, lights went on. People stepped outside.

“I'll hand in my resignation if this guy isn't an escapee from a psych ward or something like that,” said Bellanger. “But why did he come here?”

 • • • 

They entered the house behind the CSI team. Men in hazmat suits poured into every room.

“I'll meet you at the body,” said Sharko. “I want to get a feel for the place first.”

While downstairs Levallois gathered information about the victim over the phone, Sharko drifted from room to room, meeting the somber, perturbed, weary faces of his colleagues. Living room, day room, game room, projection room . . . Everything was orderly to a fault, spotless as an operating theater. According to the initial data, Stéphane Terney was a respected obstetrician and immunologist who practiced in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly. He was sixty-five and obviously fastidious. Even the silverware in the drawer was stacked with military rigor. Surely an occupational hazard: working with pipettes and needles all day, bringing babies into the world, must have demanded a rigorous discipline.

The messages on the answering machine were of various types. Two different women—lovers?—were wondering why they hadn't heard from him. Work colleagues were taking the liberty of calling Terney, who was then finishing a three-week vacation, about some administrative matters.

Sharko went up to the large, open fireplace and squatted down. The techs were retrieving the remains of some videocassettes from the ashes—at least half a dozen at first glance, totally incinerated. The tape itself was no more than ash, and the cases lumps of black plastic. No VCR had been found in the house, but the police had discovered the ripped-up floorboards in Terney's fossil room. The place where he had no doubt kept the VHS tapes hidden. The killer must have burned them.

Sharko then made a quick tour of the large room that housed the private collection of fossils and minerals. There must have been a small fortune's worth. The pieces were well cared for, staged with special lighting. The animals seemed to be facing off against one another.

Next he went and joined Bellanger in the library. Barely older than Levallois, Nicolas Bellanger had all the qualities of a team leader: intelligent, athletic, and ambitious. Relations between him and Sharko were neither good nor bad. They worked together, period.

For his part, Jacques Levallois was closely examining the rows of books that the victim had died pointing at. Paul Chénaix, the medical examiner who had autopsied Eva Louts, stood up and pulled off his gloves. Then he wiped his small, round glasses with a cloth.

“Eyes liquefying, excellent abdominal patch, rigor fully resolved. Not entirely green yet. I'd say he bought it between four and eight days ago. The autopsy will give us a tighter window. We can remove the body.”

Sharko thought over the information. Between the fatigue and the excess coffee, he felt strange: a slight floating sensation, as if he'd had a few glasses of wine. He nonetheless managed to sort things out in his head:

“Eva Louts was murdered three days ago. Terney was killed before that . . . So clearly he wasn't her killer.”

Bellanger looked carefully through the room, spinning slowly around. He was tall and lanky, with eyes black as espresso and tousled brown hair.

“Not to mention that we haven't found the chimpanzee skull in his private collection. The killer first came here, tortured and killed Terney, then took care of Louts, bringing the monkey jaw with him. Say what you will, I can't really see that guy in pajamas committing two murders of this type. From what I hear from the squad room, the fellow's been bumping against things and grunting like an animal. As soon as they gave him back his book, he quieted down. He started turning the blank pages again, without uttering a sound.”

Everything in the room caught Sharko's interest. Row upon row of books stretched to the ceiling. The precious woods, bizarre artworks, and high-tech equipment reeked of wealth, as well as a morbid eccentricity.

“You find anything?” he asked Levallois.

“Nothing yet. Did you see how many books there are? How are we supposed to know what he's pointing at?”

The inspector turned back to the corpse. Burned, mutilated, probably with a knife. The ME had turned the body onto its back. Sharko pointed to the wide, deep gash in his left groin.

“Is that what killed him?”

“Yes. The left external iliac artery was severed. That artery is like a river. The victim fell from his chair, his blood poured out, and he died within seconds.”

“Curious way of doing away with somebody. Maybe the killer has ties to the medical trade. Or in any case, he knows his way around human anatomy. First he wanted to make him suffer. After he finally got him to spill the beans, probably about where the cassettes were hidden, he eliminated him, then took off as Terney was giving up the ghost. Clean, masterful work. Like with Louts, he took his time.”

“There are also nicotine traces on his tongue and gums. The killer must have forced him to smoke those cigarettes so he could burn him.”

The ME pulled back a little and pointed to the torso.

“Look at his chest. All together, the cigarette burns form the letters X and Y . . .”

“X and Y—the signs of male gender, right?”

The examiner nodded.

“Exactly. Of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes we all have, only one pair is different, depending on the sex: XX or XY. All newborns have the X chromosome from the mother, but the father gives them either his X—in which case the child is female—or his Y.”

Sharko pondered. The killer had toyed with his victim, but he had also left them a major clue, whether he meant to or not. Somewhat dubiously, the inspector walked over to three paintings hanging side by side on one of the walls. The first showed a bird in flames against a molten sky: the legendary phoenix. The second seemed to depict a human placenta: a fat, transparent, veined bubble. The blood vessels, in scarlet red, were like bizarre serpents and made the whole thing look like a monstrous spider. The third canvas was actually an enlarged photo of a prehistoric human mummy, completely desiccated and lying on a table as if it were about to be autopsied. The inspector wrinkled his nose at the placenta.

“Either I don't know shit about art, or this guy Terney sure had weird taste.”

Nicolas Bellanger came up. Both the phoenix and the placenta bore the artist's signature: “Amanda P.”

“You know as much as I do. Everything in this house relates to DNA, birth, or biology, even down to the shape of the fixtures. Putting a frame around the photo of some gross mummy, I swear . . . He even lives on Rue Darwin. You can't make this shit up.”

“A fanatic to the end, since he ended up with an X and Y on his chest . . . Nice little wink from his murderer.”

The ME said good night and took off; he still had work to do. Without a word, the men from the morgue slid the corpse into a black bag. The sound of the zipper echoed to the far corner of the room. Now alone with Sharko, Nicolas Bellanger headed toward the small adjacent closet.

“This is where we found the guy in pajamas. He was shut away in here, with his book. Three hundred meticulously numbered pages, all blank. You ever seen anything like that?”

“Yeah, lots of times. Just visit any psych ward.”

Sharko went over to join Levallois. After a moment, he noticed that the books were arranged by subject: science, natural history, geography, then alphabetically within each subject.

“Terney was anal. If he pointed to this area, it's maybe because there's something out of place here. Something that jumps out.”

Searching through the books in turn, Sharko came upon a group of provocative titles:
The Right to End Lives That Aren't Worth Living, Euthanasia, Solutions to Aging Populations
 . . . Books on eugenics and racial purity by the dozens. On the right, an entire section was devoted to virology and immunology. None of it very uplifting.

Levallois slowly climbed down the ladder, eyes scanning the books within his reach. With his gloved hand, he pulled one from its place on the shelf.

“Bingo! A book about DNA in the middle of the geography section. It's called
The Key and the Lock
. And guess what?”

“Tell me.”

“It's written by none other than Terney himself.”

Sharko held out his hand and Levallois gave him the book. On the cover was Leonardo's famous drawing of a standing nude man inside a circle and a square. Beneath the title, an alluring copy line: “The Hidden Codes of DNA.”

“They call that Vitruvian man,” the young lieutenant explained. “Turns out a man with arms and legs outstretched can be inscribed in the perfect geometric figures of a circle and a square. Did you know Leonardo was a lefty?”

“And your point is?”

“Nothing. Just general culture.”

Bellanger walked up as Sharko was reading the back cover blurb.

“What's it about?”

“I don't even understand the synopsis. Listen to this: ‘Why do the numbers twenty-six and thirteen sound and order the major harmonic of the relations between the billions of codons in the entire human genome and the most frequent codon, among the sixty-four possible types? Why, in the three billion bases forming a simple strand of DNA, does each of these codons possess its mirror image? Why does the entire human genome obey the proportions of the golden mean? Intended for specialists and general readers alike, this book will answer the questions you have long been asking about the implacable work of nature in the construction of life.'”

Bellanger was speechless. Sharko leafed through the first pages.

“It looks pretty complicated, and technical. There are pages and pages of DNA sequences, mathematical formulas everywhere, graphs, and not much text . . . Why would Terney have pointed us toward
this
?”

“It's in the subtitle: the hidden codes of DNA . . . Think of the X and Y on the corpse's chest.”

Bellanger looked through the volume for a while with a somber face, then shoved it into a plastic bag.

“I'll get this straight to our biologists in the forensics lab. They can spend all night on it if they have to, but I need to know what kind of shitstorm we've walked into here.”

 • • • 

Back at number 36, Sharko approached one of the detention cells. Sitting in a corner, the young man in pajamas was placidly turning his pages one after another. His eyes were bright, shining with an inner glow, as if he were searching for something in those blank pages. He couldn't have been more than twenty, with matted blond hair and long, bony hands, his thumbs slightly curved outward. His lips were murmuring words that Sharko couldn't quite make out.

“Who are you?” asked the cop. “What are you muttering to yourself? What are you looking for?”

The young man didn't raise his head. Jaws clenched, Sharko stood up and headed for a small conference room on the third floor. The faces of the people there were chalky, their features drawn. Empty cups and cigarette butts littered the old table. It was one in the morning and nobody felt like talking anymore. Pascal Robillard was distractedly twisting a rubber band; Jacques Levallois couldn't stop yawning; Nicolas Bellanger gave his final instructions.

“Priority: find out who this guy in pajamas is. We have to make him talk, figure out what he was doing there. So, Pascal . . . you call the mental hospitals and local police stations; we're looking for a runaway. You also look into Terney's background. I want to know who he is, who he worked with, if he had any enemies. Maybe he knew that wacko downstairs, maybe a relation or something. Some younger cousin, a nephew, a kid he's been treating for some reason. Sharko, you look into his professional and private life. Question his colleagues at the clinic in Neuilly and his friends. Judging from the messages on his machine, he was something of a player. Check into that angle, too. The case is getting deeper, and we'll need a hand solving it. So as of tomorrow, most of Manien's team are coming over to work with us full-time, provide some backup and fresh ideas.”