Everything had suddenly changed.
No chance of going home now.
Just ten days before her death, Eva Louts had been in touch with Grégory Carnot. The man who had destroyed everything.
Sharko downed another cup of coffee. A taste of scorched earth clung to the back of his throat.
Stoked by adrenaline and caffeine, he now paced the nearly deserted corridors of the Homicide unit. At that hour, only a few shadows remained, bent over their urgent cases: the duty officers, the guys from Narc who never left and watched over junkies in their cells, or else the ones who simply didn’t want to go home, devoured as they were by the job.
He went into Robillard’s empty office, the lieutenant who was going through Eva Louts’s computer records: bills, various receipts, subscriptions. Behind him, through the small window, Paris was fading into night. The police station looked out over the city from here, like a bogus promise: Sleep tight, dear citizens, we’re watching over you.
Sharko got down to the task: go back in time, note the possible blips in the victim’s life patterns. In front of him were two stacks of paper: the ones Robillard had already sifted through, and the others. He started reading through the first batch, the ones already analyzed. Very quickly, Sharko raised an eyebrow at photocopies of airplane reservations, issued by an Air France travel agency. On July 16, 2010, a little less than two months earlier, Eva Louts had taken an economy-class flight to Abraham González International Airport in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; she’d stayed five days, with a return dated July 21.
Then, eight days later, on July 29, Louts flew from Orly airport to Manaus, in Brazil. She’d returned from Manaus to Paris on August 5.
Sharko rubbed his chin, lost in thought. Two successive trips to Latin America, before ending up at the primate center. And from what he could tell, these didn’t look like vacations. The inspector knew Juárez by reputation: it was one of the world’s most dangerous cities. The murders of Juárez women had contributed to the dark reputation attached to Mexico’s sixth-largest population center. Between 1993 and 2005, nearly five hundred women had disappeared, and three quarters of them had been found, all killed in the same way: torture, sexual abuse, mutilation, and strangulation. One of the most horrendous criminal cases of all time, never solved.
Why would a twenty-five-year-old biology student want to go there?
Intrigued, Sharko pushed the papers aside and had a look at the bills just beneath them. Lieutenant Robillard had already cross-referenced certain facts: the data showed that in Mexico, Louts had stayed at one hotel, Las Misiones, in the center of town, and had eaten dinner every night in the same place, probably the hotel restaurant.
In Brazil, it was a different story. The student had used her Gold Card on the first day to withdraw a hefty sum of cash from a bank machine in Manaus—more than four thousand reais, or about two thousand euros—then had probably paid her hotel and restaurant bills and other expenses with that money, since there was no computer trace of her presence there.
Robillard had highlighted another curious fact: she was planning another trip to Manaus. The reservation had been made the week before, with departure scheduled for two days later.
Paris–Juárez–Paris, mid-July 2010. Five days in Mexico.
Paris–Manaus–Paris, late July 2010. Seven days in Brazil.
And again, Paris–Manaus–Paris, scheduled for September 8–15, 2010. A trip the student would never take.
Faced with this mystery, Sharko recalled the words of the primatologist Clémentine Jaspar: “Eva confided to me that she was on to something big.”
“Yes, but what, exactly?” the cop said aloud. “Is there even a relation between those trips and your murder?”
He switched on the computer and Googled the map of Brazil. Twenty-five times the size of France, it was separated from Mexico by Central America and Colombia. The cop didn’t know exactly where Manaus was located, but the map showed that it was tucked away in the northern part of the country and was the capital of the state of Amazonas.
Searching further, he discovered that Manaus was situated at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões, just before their waters join to form the Amazon River. A huge city of nearly two million inhabitants, which had long subsisted on rubber and which today was becoming westernized: cars clogging the streets, industry, McDonald’s and Carrefour, commercial port with cargo ships. One of the most popular tourist destinations in Brazil.
Sharko rubbed his eyes. They were burning, but no matter. His curiosity was piqued and he wanted to follow his research, his deductions, to the end. In any case, he probably wouldn’t sleep that night.
He moved on to the other stack, the one Robillard hadn’t yet had time to look through. Again, numbers on bank statements. His eyes slid quickly over the figures. Nothing very useful. Withdrawals, everyday expenses . . . the next sheet, and the next . . . Then, suddenly, a particular line drew his attention: a withdrawal on Eva Louts’s bank card from an ATM in a French town called Montaimont, in the Savoie region . . . Two hundred euros, on Saturday, August 28, 2010, at 9:34 p.m.
The day after her interview with Grégory Carnot.
The cop sat back in his chair, brushing his hair off his forehead. Just after Vivonne, Eva Louts had gone straight to the heart of the Alps. More than four hundred miles. What if the student was on the trail of something—an invisible breath that had driven her from the cities of Latin America to the highest mountains in Europe, when she was merely supposed to be studying lefties and righties from behind a desk? How had a simple study of hand dominance caused her to travel so much, and how had it led to such a violent death? What had pushed her to get close to scum like Carnot? And why was she planning to go back to Brazil?
Carnot. Sharko hated him more than anything in the world, and now, thanks to his investigation, he had the chance to confront him face-to-face. He wanted the murderer for himself, and for himself alone . . .
He clenched his teeth and let the bank statement fall to the floor. Then, with the tip of his shoe, he slid it under a file cabinet.