Bred to Kill (5 page)

F
our CSI techs and the assistant prosecutor who would order the removal of Eva Louts's body had just arrived. Suit and tie for one, coveralls for the others, to preserve the clues of the crime scene as best they could. The center's veterinarian, other investigators, and the boys from the morgue would not be long in coming. Soon around a dozen men would be hustling around the place with a single objective: to find the truth.

While Levallois questioned Hervé Beck, the animal keeper, Sharko and Clémentine Jaspar wandered through narrow dirt alleyways, between colored colonies of monkeys. Around them, leaves shook on the trees, the branches waved. Shrill, exotic cries pierced the dense foliage. Indifferent to the tragedy, the primates went about their morning business: picking nits, harvesting termites from tree trunks, playing with their progeny.

The primatologist stopped at a small artificial belvedere, which allowed them to observe several colonies from above. She rested her elbows on a section of wood, a document folder in her thick, calloused fingers.

“Eva was working on her doctoral thesis. Her subject was the major principles of biological evolution, and particularly laterality—hand dominance—in primates. She was trying to understand why, in humans, for instance, most people are right-handed and not left-handed.”

“Is that why she was studying here, in your center?”

“Yes. She was scheduled to stay until the end of October. She started her project in 2007, but she really started concentrating on hand dominance in late summer 2009. At that point she became interested in the five great primates: men, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Her main job here was to gather statistics and fill charts. Observe the different species, see what hand they used when holding a stick to dig up ants, make tools, or shell nuts. Then draw conclusions.”

Sharko sipped his fourth decaf of the morning.

“Did she work alone?”

“Absolutely. She moved around here like a free electron. A kind, gentle girl who loved animals.”

Jaspar, too, must have loved animals, Sharko thought. She looked at her primates with a special affection in her eyes, as if each one was a child to love.

She handed him the file.

“And now, look at this. Here are the results of her observations since the time she started at the center, three weeks ago. They were on her desk. She probably meant to take them with her before she left yesterday . . .”

Sharko opened the folder.

“What are these results supposed to represent?”

“For each primate in each colony, Eva was supposed to take precise notes about a set of parameters. The repetition of certain gestures for the same individual would presumably prove that individual's hand dominance.”

Sharko opened the folder and looked through the various sheets. The preprinted boxes of the tables were uniformly empty.

“So . . . she wasn't working after all?”

“No. At least, not on the topic her thesis adviser had given her. And yet, she swore the opposite was true. She told me that in three weeks, her work had advanced considerably, and that she'd be able to finish her research on schedule.”

“Why would she come here if she wasn't doing anything?”

“Because her thesis adviser required it, and she would have had him on her back if he knew she wasn't following his directives. Olivier Solers isn't easy on his students, and not one to tolerate deviations. If he'd had it in for her, Eva would have lost any hope of earning her doctorate.”

“So she was ambitious.”

“Very. I already knew her by reputation before she came here. Despite her young age, she had conducted noteworthy studies on laterality in certain birds and fish. The precision and depth of her work got her published in several well-respected scientific journals, which is extremely rare for a student of twenty-five. Eva was brilliant; she was already dreaming of her Nobel Prize.”

Sharko couldn't help smiling. He, the most down-to-earth of men, felt overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of the subjects these researchers studied.

“Forgive me, but . . . I'm having a hard time getting the point of this. What good does it do to know if a fish is right-handed or left-handed? And frankly, I can't quite imagine what a right-handed fish looks like. A monkey, maybe, but not a fish.”

“I understand your confusion. You spend your time hunting down and arresting murderers, you fill prisons. It's concrete.”

“Sad but true.”

“
We're
trying to discover where we come from, the better to understand where we're going. We follow the current of life. And observing species, whether plants, viruses, bacteria, or animals, helps us do that. Laterality in certain fish that live in communities is extremely significant. Have you ever watched the behavior of a school of fish when faced with a predator? They all turn in the same direction, so as to remain united and fend off attacks. They don't think about it and say, ‘Oh, now I have to turn left like my buddies.' No, this social behavior is a true part of their nature, of their genes, if you like. In the case of those fish, lateralization allows for the survival of the fittest, and that's the reason it exists, that it was selected.”

“Selected? By who—a higher intelligence?”

“Certainly not. All those creationist claims, all that ‘God created Man and all the living creatures on the planet' stuff, has no place in our center, or in any scientific community. No, it was selected by Evolution, with a capital E. Evolution favors the propagation of whatever benefits the spread of genes, the spread of the best genes, and does away with the rest.”

“The famous natural selection, which gets rid of lame ducks.”

“You might say that. Sometimes, when schools of fish veer in one direction, some individuals turn the other way, because they don't have the aptitude to follow the group's behavior. Is that a genetic flaw? ‘Lame ducks,' as you say? Whatever the case, the fact is that they're the ones who die more quickly, by getting themselves eaten, for example, because they aren't well adapted, or weaker than the others. It's one of the expressions of natural selection. In humans, if there had been a real advantage to being left-handed, then we'd probably all be left-handed; we'd function a bit like that school of fish. The problem is that it's not the case, and yet left-handers exist. Why has evolution favored this asymmetry between right-handers and left-handers? And why in such proportions? Why is one human in ten still born left-handed in a world entirely geared toward right-handers? The substance of Eva Louts's thesis was to try to answer those questions.”

Sharko had to admit he'd never wondered about these things: at bottom, he didn't find this kind of scientific navel-gazing very useful. To his mind, there were other things to worry about, much more serious and important things, but to each his own. He turned back to what interested him.

“So Eva Louts came here every day toward the end of the afternoon?”

“Yes, at about five p.m. Around when the center generally closes. She claimed she wanted to work in peace, to observe the primates without disturbing their habits.”

“So, based on these empty tables, she spent her evenings here just to put in a token appearance . . . so that nobody, especially her thesis adviser, would notice the subterfuge.”

“Or else, she spent her time doing something else. I was very surprised when I discovered these empty grids. Why would such a driven girl suddenly start lying? What could possibly have led her to put her entire future at risk?”

“Do you have any ideas?”

“Not really. But she was conducting research into hand dominance in human populations, past and present, and she'd been working on this particular subject for more than a year. She must have looked into some highly diverse areas. Just two or three days ago, she confided to me that she was on to something big.”

“Such as?”

“Unfortunately, I don't know. But she was excited about it. I could see it in her eyes. When she first started her studies, Eva sent her adviser regular reports. Then around June, from what Olivier Solers told me, her reports started becoming more sporadic. This isn't uncommon and at first he didn't think much of it. The thesis adviser wants to hold the reins, and the student wants to shake off his influence, gain some autonomy. But as of mid-July, a month before coming here, Eva refused to send the slightest bit of information to her lab; she began hiding her work, making vague promises about some future colloquium, and guaranteeing that it would be ‘a huge deal' if her research panned out.”

Sharko nervously fingered his empty cup; there was no wastebasket in which to toss it. Mentally, he tried to envision the case from another angle. Louts, through her research, makes new contacts, meets new people. Somehow or other, just like a reporter, she gets hold of something hot and pulls up the drawbridge.

The sound of slamming doors brought him back to the present. In the distance, near the animal housing facility, two guys from the morgue were carting away Louts's corpse on a stretcher. The black plastic body bag looked like charcoal.
To dust you shall return
 . . . Then the men went back inside with the empty stretcher. Clémentine Jaspar brought her fists to her mouth.

“They're going for Shery. Why are they taking her to the morgue?”

“The medical examiner is just going to take a few tissue samples, nothing to worry about.”

Sharko didn't leave her time to feel anxious.

“Did Eva have any boyfriends?”

“The two of us talked about it a bit. It wasn't a priority of hers. Career first. She was pretty solitary, and very ecologically minded. No cell phone, no TV, from what she told me. On top of that, she was very athletic. A fencer who had competed in a number of championships when she was younger. A sound mind in a sound body.”

“Was there anyone she could confide in?”

“I didn't know her that well. But . . . I don't know. You're a policeman, you'll search her place. The results of her research must still be there.”

Faced with Sharko's silence and evident skepticism, she pointed to the chimpanzees, those great primates she seemed to love more than anything in the world.

“Look at them one more time, Inspector. Look closely, and tell me what you see.”

“What I see? Families. Animals who live in harmony, peacefully.”

“You must also see apes, creatures who are like us.”

“Sorry, I only see primates.”

“But we
are
primates! Chimpanzees are closer to us genetically than they are to gorillas. It's not just that we have similar DNA: a full ninety-eight percent of our DNA
is
chimpanzee DNA.”

Sharko thought about the remark for a few seconds.

“That's a provocative image. When you look at it that way . . .”

“There's nothing provocative about it, it's just the facts. Now, suppose someone took away your ability to speak and put you naked in a cage. You'd be taken for what you are: the third chimpanzee, next to the pygmy chimpanzee and the common African chimpanzee. A chimpanzee almost lacking in fur and who walks erect. The only difference is that none of your cousins knowingly destroys his environment. Our evolutionary advantages, like language and intelligence, our ability to colonize the entire planet, also have a cost in Darwinian currency: we are the animals who can spread the greatest misery. But evolution ‘judged' that these drawbacks were smaller than the benefits gained. For now . . .”

Her voice betrayed both conviction and resignation. She gripped the wooden sill that encircled the belvedere.

“Do you have children, Inspector?”

Sharko nodded, lips pressed tight.

“I had a little girl. Her name was Eloise.”

There was a long silence. Everyone knows what it means to talk about a child in the past tense. Sharko looked at the monkeys one last time, took a deep breath, then finally said, “I'll do everything in my power to find out what happened. I promise you that.”

F
loored by her captain's announcement, Lucie dropped her sugar cube on the kitchen table. She joined both hands over the bridge of her nose and took long breaths.

“Carnot, dead. I can't believe it. How did it happen?”

“He ripped open an artery in his throat with his bare hands.”

“He committed suicide? Why?”

Kashmareck didn't touch his coffee. There was nothing pleasant about delivering this kind of news, but Lucie would have heard sooner or later and he preferred it be from his own lips rather than by phone.

“He had become extremely violent.”

“That I know.”

“It was more than that toward the end. He attacked anyone who came near and almost beat another inmate to death in the exercise yard. Carnot was no stranger to solitary. He was the bane of the guards' existence. Except that this time, they found him lying in his own blood. It must have taken a . . . an incredible amount of willpower to do something like that.”

Lucie stood up and went to look out the window, arms folded as if she were cold. The boulevard, the people walking around carefree.

“When? When did it happen?”

“Two days ago.”

A long silence followed those words. The news had been so brutal that Lucie felt wrapped in a gray fog.

“I don't know if I should feel relieved or not. I wanted so much for him to suffer. Every hour of every day. For him to fully realize the pain he caused.”

“Guys like that don't work the same as you or me, Lucie, you know that better than anyone.”

Oh, yes, she knew that. She had studied them so closely in the past. The sociopaths, the serial killers, the vile refuse who stood way outside the norm. She remembered the days when she was just a police sergeant back in Dunkirk, when she would listen to the waves slapping against the pleasure boats across from her office. The newborn twins babbling in their crib. Days spent dealing with paperwork, when the term “psychopath” was merely an abstraction. The idle hours she spent absorbing books about scum like Carnot. If she had known . . . if only she'd known that the most abject evil can strike anywhere, at any time.

She returned to the table and took a tiny sip of coffee. The black surface was rippling from the way her hand shook. Little by little, talking with her captain was helping loosen the knot in her throat.

“Every night I've tried to imagine how that piece of garbage was spending his days in prison. I imagined him walking, talking, even laughing with the others. I pictured him maybe telling someone how he had stolen my Clara from me, and how he nearly stole Juliette. Each day, I told myself it was a miracle they found Juliette alive, after thirteen days locked up in that room . . .”

The police captain read such tenderness in Lucie's eyes that he didn't dare interrupt. She kept talking, as if her words had remained buried far too long in the depths of her heart.

“The moment I shut my eyelids, I saw Carnot's beady little black eyes, the wretched hair plastered over his forehead, his huge body . . . You can't imagine how much time his face spent spinning around in my head. All those days, all those nights, when I could practically feel his breath down my neck. You can't imagine the hell I went through, from the moment they identified the body of one of my girls to when they found the other one alive. Seven days of hell, seven days when I didn't know if it was Clara or Juliette. Seven days when I imagined everything possible, and they shot me full of medications to keep me going and . . . to keep me from going crazy.”

“Lucie . . .”

“And she was alive. Dear God, my precious little Juliette was alive when I went into Carnot's house with the other cops. It was so . . . unhoped for, so extraordinary. I was so happy, even though my other daughter had been found burned beyond recognition only a week earlier. Happy, even though the worst possible tragedy had punched me in the face . . .”

Lucie slammed her fist on the table; her fingers clenched the tablecloth.

“Sixteen stab wounds, Captain! He killed Clara in his car just a hundred yards from the beach, stabbed her sixteen times in some kind of violent frenzy, and then he calmly drove for sixty miles before dropping her in the forest. He poured gasoline on her, lit it, spent long minutes watching while Juliette was screaming in the trunk. Then he headed off again, shut the surviving twin up in his house, didn't touch her, gave her food and water. As if nothing had happened. When they arrested him at his home, there was still blood on the steering wheel. He hadn't even bothered washing it off. Why? What caused all that?”

Lucie was stirring the spoon around her cup, even though the sugar was still on the table.

“Now that he's dead, he's deprived me of the most important thing: answers. Just some goddamn answers.”

Kashmareck was hesitant about pursuing the conversation. He should never have come here and revived this horror. But since she was staring at him intently, waiting for his reaction, he replied:

“You never would have got any. That kind of behavior is inexplicable, it's not even human. One thing for certain is that Carnot hadn't really been in his right mind for the past year, and apparently it was getting worse. His bouts of violence were totally unpredictable. According to the prison shrink, Carnot could be gentle as a lamb, and the next second he'd go for your throat.”

The captain sighed, and seemed to be weighing each word.

“I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I know you'd find out sooner or later. The shrink had requested a psychiatric reevaluation, because his patient's behavior had so many earmarks of mental defect.”

He saw Lucie react; she was on the verge of a breakdown. He grabbed her wrist and held it against the table.

“Between you and me, it's a good thing that piece of shit is dead. It's a good thing, Lucie.”

Lucie shook her head. She jerked her hand away from the captain's grasp.

“Mental defect? What do you mean, mental defect? What kind?”

Kashmareck reached into the inner pocket of his light jacket, taking out a packet of photos that he set on the table.

“This kind.”

Lucie picked up the photos and studied them. She squinted.

“What is this nonsense?”

“It's something he drew on a wall of his cell, with colored markers he borrowed from the prison art room.”

The photo showed a magnificent landscape: sun setting in the water, radiant boulders, birds in the sky, sailboats.

But the drawing, which began about a yard off the floor, had been done upside down.

Lucie turned the photo in all directions. The police captain took a large swallow of coffee. The taste stuck in his throat.

“Weird, isn't it? It's as if Carnot had hung himself from the ceiling like a bat and started to draw. Apparently he'd begun making drawings like this since shortly before he landed in jail.”

“Why did he draw upside down?”

“He didn't just draw upside down. He also said he saw the world upside down, more and more often. According to him, it lasted for a few minutes, sometimes more, as if he'd put on special glasses that flopped images from the real world. When that happened, he'd lose his balance and often keel over.”

“Pure ravings . . .”

“You said it. His psychiatrist naturally thought they might be hallucinations. Perhaps even . . .”

“Schizophrenia?”

The captain nodded.

“Carnot was twenty-three. It's not uncommon for psychiatric illnesses to become manifest or be developed in prison, especially around that age.”

Lucie let the photos fall from her hands. They scattered over the tabletop.

“Are you telling me he might have had a mental disease?”

She squeezed her lips tight, clenched her fists. Her entire body felt like screaming.

“I refuse to let the cause of my child's death be pushed off on some miserable shrink's suppositions. Carnot was responsible for his actions. He knew what he was doing.”

Kashmareck nodded without conviction.

“I agree. That's why he was judged guilty and ended his life in prison.”

He could tell she was stunned, overwhelmed, even though she was trying her best to dominate her feelings.

“It's over, Lucie. Crazy or not, it doesn't matter. It doesn't go any farther than this. Tomorrow Carnot will be buried.”

“It doesn't matter? Is that what you think? On the contrary, Captain, nothing could matter more.”

Lucie stood up again and began pacing across the room.

“Grégory Carnot ripped the life from my little girl. If . . . if even the slightest hint of hidden madness had anything to do with that, I want to know.”

“It's too late.”

“That psychiatrist—what is his name?”

The police captain looked at his watch, finished his coffee in one gulp, and stood up.

“I won't keep you any longer. And besides, I have to get to work.”

“His name, Captain!”

The cop heaved a sigh. Shouldn't he have expected this? During the several years they had worked together, Lucie had never backed away from anything. Deep down inside, buried somewhere in her brain, she must still have retained the purest predatory instincts.

“Dr. Duvette.”

“Get me a visitor's pass there. For tomorrow.”

Kashmareck clenched his jaws, then nodded limply.

“I'll do my best, if it'll help you see things straight and set your mind at ease. But you be careful, all right?”

Lucie nodded, her face expressionless, now devoid of feelings. Kashmareck knew that expression so well on the ex-cop's face that it made him shiver.

“I promise.”

“And don't hesitate to come by the squad room whenever you like. We'd all be very happy to see you.”

Lucie smiled politely.

“I'm sorry, Captain. I have to keep all that far away from me from now on. But tell everyone hello for me, and let them know that . . . that I'm okay.”

He nodded and moved to gather his photos, but Lucie snatched them up.

“I'm keeping these, if you don't mind. I'm going to burn them. It's a way of telling myself that all this is almost over. And . . . thank you, Captain.”

He looked at her as he would look at a close friend.

“Romuald. I think we're at the point where you can call me Romuald.”

She accompanied him to the door. Just before leaving, he added:

“If someday you ever want to come back, the door is always open.”

“Good-bye, Captain.”

She closed the door behind him, resting her hand on the knob for a long time.

Back in the kitchen, she used a chair to climb up next to a cabinet and ran her hand over the top. Hidden there were a brown envelope, a Zippo lighter, and a 6.35-mm Mann semiautomatic pistol. A collector's firearm, in perfect working order. She didn't touch it but grabbed up the rest.

In the envelope were two recent photos of Carnot. Front and profile. The brute had a slightly flattened nose, bulging forehead, and eyes sunken in their sockets. Six-foot-five, an ominous face, and the build of a giant.

He ripped open an artery in his throat with his bare hands
. The words were still echoing in Lucie's head. She could perfectly well imagine the horror of the scene, in the depths of the solitary wing. The young colossus lying in his hot, black blood, hands still clutching his neck . . . Did madness really have something to do with all this? What kind of frenzy had seized Carnot that it could drive him to mutilate himself so drastically?

Looking at the photos, Lucie felt only bitterness. Since Clara's death, she couldn't see Carnot as a human being, even if, for some incomprehensible reason, he had spared Juliette. For her, he was nothing but a mistake of nature, a parasite whose only purpose in life had been to cause harm. And try as they might to come up with some sort of explanation, to pass this off as sadism, perversion, uncontrolled impulse, when you got down to it there was no satisfactory answer. Grégory Carnot was different from the rest of the world. Clara and Juliette had had the misfortune to cross his path at that particular moment, the way some people get bitten by a disease-carrying mosquito as they leave the airport. Chance, coincidence. But not madness. No, not madness . . .

The photos of Carnot had already been ripped up and taped together again, several times over. Lucie placed them in the sink, along with the ones showing the upside-down drawings.

“Yes. It's a good thing you're dead. Go burn in hell with all your sins. You are completely responsible for your actions, and you are going to pay.”

She turned the flint on her lighter.

The flame devoured Carnot's face first of all.

Lucie felt no satisfaction or relief.

At most, the vague sensation of spreading ointment on a third-degree burn.