Lucie had hit the road after lunch. The nice manager of the Ten Marmots had whipped her up a splendid risotto that would surely hold her until evening. She wasn’t sorry to be sitting behind the wheel for a few hours: the descent from the glacier had been difficult, including a painful cramp in her calf that had kept her stuck on the ice for an extra five minutes. But the round trip to the summit had been worth it. Lucie was on the trail of something, a prehistoric oddity that lit up a fury of little flashing lights inside her.
As she drove, the mountain reliefs overlapped, the gorges widened until they pushed the Alps into the background. Then came small valleys, steeply inclined fields, and nervous streams. Finally, Lyon, in late afternoon, looked like a black boulder on a lake of hot coals. People were returning home from work, clogging the approach roads to a standstill. A life regulated to the quarter of an inch, in which everyone, once back home, would spend a few hours on spouse, children, or Internet, before going to bed, head swarming with tomorrow’s stock of woes. Lucie tried to keep patient and took advantage of the traffic jam to call her mother. She knew Juliette was out: the little girl had been taking music lessons for the past two years. She asked Marie to give her a kiss and tell her how much Mommy loved her. Was she looking after Klark? She passed on a bit of news, explained merely that she was resolving an old issue, then quickly hung up. It took her another half hour to get out of that traffic sludge and enter the city’s seventh arrondissement.
As Lucie neared her destination, she noticed another message on the screen of her phone. Sharko again, asking for news for at least the fourth time. Vaguely annoyed, she sent back a quick text that all was fine, she was making progress, no further details.
She found a small spot on Rue Curien, near the École Normale. To her left, she could see the Saône, which flowed into the Rhône to form the Presqu’île. The area was bustling with students and filled with modern-design buildings: architecture with receding angles, tinted windows, and pure lines. Unlike Lille, whose brick constructions seemed flat and ruddy, Lyon offered an impression of mastered chaos, in both its relief and its vibrant colors.
During the drive, Lucie had managed to reach the secretary of the Functional Genomics Institute and, still with her cop’s hat on, to score an appointment with Arnaud Fécamp, a member of the research unit that had taken in the bodies from the glacier. The scientist worked on the PALGENE platform, which was one of a kind in Europe and specialized in the analysis of fossil DNA. On the phone, he confirmed what Lucie already suspected: Eva Louts had indeed visited their lab ten days before.
She quickly found René Descartes Square and entered the building, an impressive block of glass and concrete four stories high, hosting various activities related to the life sciences: biology, molecular phylogeny, postnatal development . . . At the far right of the foyer, two fat blue and red intertwined cables rose several yards into the air—the symbol representing the double helix of DNA. Lucie vaguely recalled her biology courses in high school, particularly the four “bases” of that giant helicoidal ladder, formed by the letters G, A, T, C: guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine. Four nitrogenous bases, common to all living creatures, whose complex combinations, which among other things formed genes and chromosomes, could give someone blue eyes, female gender, or a congenital illness. Lucie made out an inscription at the base of that curious construction: DNA HAS BEEN HIDDEN IN OUR CELLS FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS. WE ARE UNRAVELING IT.
Everything was clean, immaculate, flawless. Lucie felt as if she were wandering through a science fiction setting, in which the staff would all be robots. Arnaud Fécamp, luckily, didn’t look like he was held together with nuts and bolts—in fact, he was rather well padded. Squeezed into his lab coat, he was shorter than Lucie and wore his flaming red hair extremely short. Round, smooth face, despite pronounced wrinkles on his forehead. Chubby freckled hands. Hard to guess his age, but Lucie figured a good forty.
“Amélie Courtois?”
“That’s me.”
He shook her hand.
“My boss is in a meeting, so I’ll see to you, if that’s all right. If I’ve understood correctly, you’re looking into the student who came to visit us about a week ago?”
While they went up in a hyperefficient elevator—with a female voice to call out the floors—Lucie explained the reason for her visit: Eva Louts’s murder, her trip to the glacier, her passage through Lyon a few days before . . . Fécamp absorbed the news. His red jowls trembled from the elevator’s vibrations.
“I sincerely hope you find the killer. I didn’t know that student very well, but no one has the right to do such a thing.”
“We hope so too.”
“I often watch old detective movies on TV, Maigret and the like. If thirty-six Quai des Orfèvres is on the case, it must be serious.”
“It is.”
Lucie remained purposely evasive, by the book. She didn’t want to say too much about the investigation, and in any case she had very little information to impart.
“Tell me about Eva Louts.”
“Like a lot of researchers or students working on evolution, she had come here to see the famous ice men.”
“Do you know in what context?”
“Research into the Neanderthal, I believe. The usual stuff. I don’t think you’ll learn much here, unfortunately.”
Once again, Louts had used the pretext of research into Neanderthal man, perhaps hoping to conceal the real reason for her visit. A cautious girl, thought Lucie, who knew not to draw attention to herself. The door opened onto a long corridor with bluish linoleum. A vague odor of disinfectant floated over everything.
“We can use my boss’s office, if you like. It’ll be more comfortable to talk there.”
“It would be a shame for me to come all the way here and not have a peek at the ice men. I’d really like to see what our supposed ancestors looked like.”
Fécamp paused a few seconds, then gave her a brief smile. His teeth were especially long and white.
“Well, I suppose you’re right—might as well take the opportunity. It’s not every day that you come face-to-face with a thirty-thousand-year-old.”
They turned off into a cloakroom where dozens of shrink-wrapped coveralls were piled up. The scientist handed a pack to Lucie.
“Put this on, it should fit you. We’re going into a white, windowed rectangle more than a thousand square feet, in which the air is filtered five times over, the temperature is kept a constant seventy-two degrees, and the rooms are washed down with bleach several times a day.”
Lucie did as instructed. To make an impression and add to her role as cop, she took her pistol from her jacket.
“Can I keep this? Any metal detectors or things like that?”
Fécamp swallowed, staring at the compact weapon.
“No, go right ahead. Is it loaded?”
“What do you think?”
Lucie stuffed the small semiautomatic in the back pocket of her jeans, along with her cell phone.
“The policeman’s ideal arsenal.” Fécamp sighed. “Pistol and telephone. I hate mobile phones. We’re getting too far ahead of nature and changing our behavior because of those miserable contraptions, and one of these days we’re going to pay the piper.”
The type who likes to spout off life lessons, Lucie thought to herself. Without answering, she pulled on the coveralls and paper overshoes, the latex gloves, and the surgical mask and scrub cap.
“So what exactly is paleogenetics?”
Fécamp seemed to be putting on his protective gear very slowly, with precise, inch-perfect movements that he must have repeated day after day.
“We analyze the genomes of past biodiversity, in other words the cartography of genes from ancient DNA that we get from fossils, which sometimes are several hundred million years old. Thanks to the organic parts of bones and teeth, which resist the effects of time, we can travel back centuries and understand the origins of various species, their filiations. I’ll give you a concrete example. Because of paleogenetics, we now know that more than three thousand years ago, Tutankhamen died from malaria combined with a bone disease. His DNA revealed that he was not in fact the son of Nefertiti, but rather of his father Akhenaton’s sister. Tutankhamen was purely and simply the fruit of incest.”
“The tabloids would’ve eaten that up. And with all this technology, I guess you’re not too far away from bringing back the dinosaurs. You just scrape up the DNA from some fossils, a little cloning, and presto, is that right?”
“Oh, we’re still light-years away from anything like that. Fossil DNA is often extremely degraded and scarcely available. What can you do with a thousand-piece puzzle when you’re missing 990 of the pieces? Each new discovery puts us in front of a real obstacle course. Still, with the ice men, we really hit it lucky, since they were in such remarkably good shape, much better than the Egyptian mummies or Ötzi, the famous sapiens sapiens found near the Italian Dolomites in 1991. The fact that the cave was completely sealed off and largely deprived of oxygen slowed down the proliferation of bacteria and protected them from bad weather and climate changes. DNA is a stable molecule, but it doesn’t last forever. Its degradation begins the moment the individual dies. It breaks up, and some of the letters that compose the genetic information gradually get erased.”
“The famous G, A, T, C.”
“Exactly. The rungs of the ladder get broken. For instance, the sequence T G A A C A on a bit of DNA can become T G G A C A through alteration, and this entirely distorts the genetic code, and therefore its interpretation. The same as with words, which can change meaning entirely when one letter gets erased, like ‘slaughter’ and ‘laughter.’ In particularly unfavorable conditions, a mere ten thousand years is enough to ruin every last molecule of DNA. But in the present case, it was more than we’d ever hoped for.”
Once in their blue coveralls, they proceeded to the laboratory. The entrance door was like the airlock in a submarine.
“You’ll experience an unpleasant sensation in your ears. The air in the lab is highly pressurized to prevent contaminant DNA from entering. I can’t think of anything more horrible than to spend weeks studying DNA that turned out to be ours! Hence the reason for these sterile garments as well. You sure you want to go on?”
“Of course.”
After the scientist had placed his badge over the sensor, they went in. Lucie felt a pain in her ears, then heard a screeching sound, like the kind a train makes when it enters a tunnel. Four lab technicians, bent over powerful microscopes, were filling pipettes or adjusting DNA sequencers, far too absorbed in their work to notice the newcomers. On the benchtops, which were also protectively wrapped, lay various labeled objects: a tooth from a cave-dwelling bear, some Gallo-Roman amber with an insect carcass, ancient excrements from a Madagascan elephant bird. Passing by a freezer with glass doors, Lucie stopped short.
“A baby mammoth?”
“Good eye. That’s Lyuba. She was found in the Siberian permafrost by a reindeer breeder. She’s forty-two thousand years old.”
“She looks like she could have died yesterday.”
“She’s in an extraordinarily good state of preservation.”
Lucie stood agape before the animal that she had seen only in textbook drawings. This place was like an Ali Baba’s cave of Prehistory. They walked on. Arnaud Fécamp continued his explanations about DNA.
“Usually, we grind up the bones, teeth, or tissues into fine powder, which we then let incubate for several hours in a buffer that facilitates the degradation of undesirable elements, such as limestone or parasitic proteins. Then we’re left with the pure DNA. Since generally it’s broken into too many bits for our machines to analyze, we ‘photocopy’ the fragments in billions of copies, thanks to an amplification technique called PCR, so that we can manipulate them more easily.”
He opened the door.
Lucie felt a slap of icy air on her face.
A refrigeration chamber.
Once inside, she opened her eyes wide and paused for a moment, with a curious feeling in the pit of her stomach. Never would she have imagined such a spectacular case of mummification by cold. Completely nude and wrapped in clear plastic film, the three members of the Neanderthal family were lying next to one another, slightly curled up. The small one was between the male and the female. Behind his empty eye sockets, with his limp, emaciated jaws, he seemed to be screaming. The most impressive part was their prominent brow, their skulls pulled back as if into a hair bun, the face receding from the prominent nose. Their bone structure was massive, with short limbs and squat, stocky bodies. Their teeth showed evident signs of wear, and some of them were broken and black. Lucie went closer, shivering uncontrollably, and leaned toward them. She squinted. On the dead, desiccated bellies, she noticed wide, deep gashes, like furious mouths. Not even the child had been spared.
“Those look like lacerations,” she said questioningly from behind her mask.
The scientist nodded toward another table, to Lucie’s left.
“Yes. That’s the tool the Cro-Magnon used to murder them.”
Lucie felt her muscles stiffen and adrenaline whip her blood.
A triple murder.
This family had been massacred. It now seemed so clear. The wounds had been too numerous, too violent. The slashes howled on the dehydrated skin. Lucie was in the presence of one of humanity’s oldest crimes, an episode of violence from the most distant ages that had come down through the millennia intact.
Fécamp showed her the weapon, which she examined intently. It was about as long as a forearm and extremely sharp.
“It’s a harpoon made of deer antler, with barbs meant for catching and ripping the intestines. It’s incredibly resistant, able to pierce thick layers of hide or blubber. You can imagine its effectiveness. Truly formidable.”
Lucie looked at the finely honed weapon, which seemed to have been fashioned with only one purpose: violent killing. Was this what had led Eva Louts here, and to the criminals in prison? This expression of violence from the past? And yet, supposedly, she wasn’t working on serial killers, or criminals in general, or violence. Just a study of left-handedness, Sharko had assured her.
Disturbed by this ancestral barbarity, Lucie turned around.
“Where’s the Cro-Magnon?”
Arnaud Fécamp flinched, then let out a long sigh.
“He’s been stolen.”
“What?”
“He’s gone, along with all the results of his genome sequencing. There’s nothing left. Not one scrap of data. It’s a disaster—for the first time, we actually possessed an almost complete sequence of the genes of our ancestor from thirty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens. A sequence of A, T, G, C’s that we only had to read in order to take his genetic inventory.”
Lucie folded her arms, shivering with cold. The more she discovered, the deeper the mystery seemed to grow. Questions crowded to her lips.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“We try not to let the information get around. We were very fortunate that the media didn’t latch on to the story.”
“How did the thief even get in here?”
“With my badge, I’m afraid. Two guys in ski masks attacked me one night as I was leaving. They forced me to come back here and give them access to our findings on the sapiens. They took it all: the hard drives, the backups, the printouts, even the mummy. And when they were through, they pistol whipped me and left me for dead.”
“Isn’t the building under surveillance?”
“We have cameras and alarm systems. The cameras are always on, but some of the alarm systems are deactivated by the badges, so we can have free access to the laboratory when we work here at night. The two men are on the security tapes, but apart from their masks, there’s not much to see.”
“When did this happen?”
“About six months after the cave was discovered. The police came—it’s all in the report.”
“Any leads?”
“None. It remains unsolved.”
Lucie went back to the Neanderthals. Their empty sockets seemed to be staring at her. The child had such small hands. How old could he have been—seven? eight? He looked like a wax effigy, hideous, disfigured by the ravages of time. But like her daughter Clara, he had been murdered. Lucie thought of what the mountain guide had said about Eva Louts’s theory: the genocide of the Neanderthals by Cro-Magnon man.
“Why didn’t the thieves make off with these as well?”
“Perhaps because they aren’t modern man’s ancestors. They don’t have any direct relation to our species, and in that regard their genome is much less interesting. Actually, that’s just a supposition. I really have no idea why they didn’t.”
“Did Eva Louts know about the theft before she came here?”
“No. She was as surprised as you are.”
Lucie paced back and forth, rubbing her shoulders to warm up.
“Forgive me if I still haven’t understood all the subtleties, but . . . why would they steal Cro-Magnon’s genome?”
“It’s absolutely essential to understanding the secrets of life and the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens, our species.”
He approached the mummies and gazed at them with an odd tenderness.
“Don’t you see? We had in our hands the DNA of our genetic forebears. Hundreds of millions of genetic sequences that contain the secrets of prehistoric life. DNA is the fossil map of evolution—like the black box in an airliner. What genes did Cro-Magnon have that we don’t? Which ones mutated during those thousands of years and which remained intact? What was their purpose? Did the mummy carry any known or unknown pathogens which would have given us a glimpse into the health levels of the time, for example, or let us discover ancient viruses, which would also have been fossilized in the DNA? By comparing our genome to Cro-Magnon’s, letter by letter, we would have had a much better understanding of evolution’s grand strategy over the past thirty thousand years.”
Lucie didn’t yet grasp all the fine points of these explanations, but she could appreciate that the scientific import was enormous. She preferred to get back to concrete matters.
“I’d like to try to put myself in Eva Louts’s shoes for a few moments. So she’s here, looking at the Neanderthal mummies. What was her reaction? What was she looking for, exactly?”
Fécamp put his fingers on the plastic, passing over the gaping wounds.
“She was just a student, you know, apparently fascinated by morbid things. It was the extreme violence of the scene that grabbed her, nothing more. The discovery was an excellent opportunity to drag a theory about the disappearance of the Neanderthals back into the spotlight.”
“Their extermination by Cro-Magnon, you mean. The theory Louts was trying to prove.”
Fécamp nodded, then glanced at his watch.
“Yes, but I don’t share her view. I think it’s too simplistic, and an isolated case shouldn’t lead to generalities. Let’s say she came here looking for some good material to shore up her work. Unfortunately I can’t tell you much more than that. She took a few notes, some photos of the wounds and the weapon, as a way of filling out her thesis and getting a good grade. Then she left. That’s all.”
“Did she allude to the upside-down drawings? Did she mention a certain Grégory Carnot? Prisoners? Anything about left-handers?”
Fécamp shook his head.
“As far as I can recall, none of that. Well, it’s very cold in here . . . Will you also need any photos for your investigation?”
Lucie looked sadly at the massacred family, then back at the scientist.
“No, that’ll be all.”
She moved away from the group while the researcher opened the door, then halted in the middle of the room, undecided. She couldn’t just let herself abandon the trail, leave without an answer.
“You’re a researcher into the ancient past. You spend your days reconstructing prehistoric facts. Can you tell me what happened in that cave thirty thousand years ago?”
With a sigh, the scientist walked toward her.
“I’m sorry, but I . . .”
Another voice rose at almost exactly the same moment—female, and harsh.
“I can. But first, may I see your credentials?”