A woman was standing in the doorway to the refrigerated room. Tall, planted firmly on her feet, wearing square-rimmed glasses. She had put on only a face mask and gloves and was staring at Arnaud Fécamp, whose hands were now joined over his stomach.
“When we get visitors here, I at least expect to be notified.”
Fécamp’s jaws tightened.
“I thought you were in a meeting until late this afternoon and . . .”
“It’s not your job to think, Arnaud.”
The researcher remained frozen for a few seconds, a small vein throbbing in the middle of his forehead. Treated like a dog, thought Lucie. He gave his boss one final look, lips pressed tight, then left the room. Facing the tall, brown-haired woman, Lucie tried to maintain her self-assurance.
“And you are?”
“Ludivine Tassin, the director of this laboratory. But I should be asking who you are.”
“Amélie Courtois, Paris Homicide.”
Tassin stood waiting, hands on hips. Everything about her radiated unpleasant authoritarianism. Lucie ostentatiously pulled her pistol from her pocket, then her cell phone. She displayed the contacts list on the phone’s screen, pressing the buttons with her gloved finger.
“My police ID is back at the hotel, but you can call the Homicide bureau at thirty-six Quai des Orfèvres if you wish. Ask to speak with Chief Inspector Franck Sharko.”
The moment of truth. Lucie felt her heart pounding in her chest. The imposing woman finally backed down.
“That won’t be necessary. Kindly put away your weapon. What exactly is it you’re looking for?”
Lucie explained the reasons for her visit, regaining her footing after the brief exchange.
“What I’d really like to know is what happened in that cave thirty thousand years ago, because I believe it has a bearing on my investigation today.”
“Very well. But let’s get out of this room before we freeze.”
Tassin led the way. Decisive gait: every inch the boss. Arnaud Fécamp was sitting in front of an enormous machine, shoulders slumped. Lucie watched him in silence and noticed, from the reflection in a glass case, that he’d begun staring after her once she’d passed by. The odd look on his face put her ex-cop’s senses on alert.
The two women passed through the airlock and headed to the scientist’s office.
“Your lab tech says he was hit pretty hard, the night of the theft.”
“They didn’t go easy on him, that’s a fact.”
“Is he the one who called the police?”
“From the laboratory. That episode caused us an irreparable loss. We’ll never have another opportunity to find such a well-preserved specimen of Cro-Magnon. When I heard the news, it was as if I’d lost an arm. You cannot imagine how it feels.”
In the office, the director took a packet of photos from a cabinet.
“I went to the glacier the same day the bodies were found. As the sponsoring agency of a national project, we were contacted within hours of the event.”
She looked at the photos she must have seen hundreds of times already, then slid them toward Lucie. Her eyes shone, like those of a pirate with a treasure chest.
“What a magnificent find! The Grail for any researcher who has devoted his life to the study of living things. A complete family of Neanderthals and a Cro-Magnon, in a remarkable state of preservation. It was so incredible that at first we all thought it was a hoax. But the dating process and our analyses left no room for doubt: they were authentic. Look . . .”
Lucie spread out the photos, taken in the very first hours after the discovery. A wide angle showed the three Neanderthals on one side, huddled on the ground, jaws open as if they were screaming. In another corner, the Cro-Magnon sat leaning against the rock, just below the upside-down fresco of the aurochs. Despite the desiccated state of the flesh, the morphological differences between the individuals were glaring. Cro-Magnon had a prominent forehead, as well as a long, straight nose, a flattened face, and a smaller brow: the same characteristics as modern man.
“Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal cohabited for eight thousand years, and the period in which these individuals lived corresponds to the last years of Neanderthal’s existence. What you’re seeing here are pretty much the last representatives of the species. Various clues and careful research have allowed us to reconstruct their final hours . . .”
Lucie listened closely, incredulous. She was about to hear the analysis of a thirty-thousand-year-old crime scene. Modern CSI teams couldn’t have done better.
“First of all, fossil DNA analyses proved that these were indeed a family of Neanderthals: father, mother, and son, whose DNA contained the genetic material of the two creatures next to him. The man was roughly thirty-three years old, which was about the age limit at that time.”
“Young.”
“They reproduced very early, usually between fifteen and twenty. The characteristics of biological evolution being to . . .”
“. . . To perpetuate the genes and ensure the survival of the fittest, if I’ve understood right.”
“Correct. At the time, however, it was rare for an individual to live past the age of seven. Living conditions were brutal, and most illnesses and injuries proved fatal. For each member of this family, we detected traces of rickets, arthritis, dental abscesses, and various bone fractures, and yet they’d somehow managed to survive. They were solidly built. Analysis of pollen fossils found in their intestines showed that it was beech pollen. Combining this result with the isotope analyses, we were able to reconstruct where the family spent much of its life: in the Southern Alps, near the Italian border. We believe they were in migration, perhaps because of the great cold. They had probably taken shelter in that cave to wait out the bad weather . . . and then the intruder came.”
“Cro-Magnon.”
“Yes. Our future modern, civilized man. Homo sapiens sapiens . . .”
Her tone was now tinged with bitterness.
“We don’t know what this isolated individual was doing in that place. Had he spotted footprints in the snow and followed them? Was he also in migration, or perhaps fleeing something? Had he been banished from his village, sentenced to exile? The fact is, he had very little equipment with him, unlike the Neanderthals. Just an itinerant. An outsider.”
Tassin spoke with passion, as if living her story. Lucie had no trouble visualizing the distant scene: the horrific weather conditions, hunched creatures squaring off against the howling wind and snow. Hunters who often died of hunger or cold, if injuries or infections didn’t get them first.
“The fire, the smell of drying meat or freshwater fish, may have attracted him. When he entered the cave, the male Neanderthal stood up and grabbed a weapon. Recent research in paleontology and paleoanthropology has demonstrated that Neanderthal man was not the retarded, grotesque creature we make the butt of our jokes. He buried his dead, played music, and cultivated a certain form of primitive art. We don’t believe he started the fight.”
Tassin pointed to close-ups of the frozen bodies.
“Look here. The three Neanderthals, including the child, show defensive wounds on their forearms. They weren’t taken unaware but were attacked frontally by Cro-Magnon. They were literally massacred, without restraint. Struck again and again with the harpoon. Arms, sides, legs—everything.”
Lucie could imagine the scene: A family gathered around the fire. A shadow approaches. A confrontation, then the slaughter: first the man, then the woman. The terrified child is huddled in a corner. The shadow comes closer, raises its weapon . . . She turned away, shaken by the similarity with her own recurrent nightmares.
“Are you all right, Miss?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. Please go on.”
“For his part, Cro-Magnon showed very few signs of injury. He dominated the fight. And yet Neanderthal was no weakling. Five foot three, a hundred seventy-five pounds of muscle—these were exceptional hunters, very strong, with heavy, powerful limbs, but they were slaughtered by an individual who was taller and much more savage than they. After that comes an episode we’re having difficulty understanding. I’m speaking of the upside-down cave painting.”
“So it’s Cro-Magnon who painted it?”
“Probably after the killings. He used pigments and calmly went about his work while the corpses lay at his feet. I’d never seen such a painting in my life. A pure scientific curiosity. And no one has yet come up with a satisfactory answer.”
“Painted by a left-hander, yet again.”
Tassin cocked her head.
“Eva Louts said the same thing. You seem to have the same reactions as she did.”
“I’m trying to put myself in her head—it helps my investigation.”
“I can confirm that he was left-handed, as indicated by the negative handprints he painted on the cave walls. Cro-Magnon clearly wanted to take possession of the cave. But we think that soon after, the avalanche occurred, which trapped the sapiens inside and quickly froze the bodies, preventing the DNA from being degraded. The layers of ice that were blocking the entrance are exactly the same age as our mummies. Cro-Magnon died either from the cold or from hunger, in the dark, surrounded by the carnage he’d inflicted for a reason we’ll probably never know, but that proves he was already not the peaceful, unwarlike creature that some still maintain. It challenges a fair number of our assumptions and supports the contention that the extinction of Neanderthal was the result of domination by Homo sapiens.”
She sighed, stacking up some papers.
“At least we know who our ancestors were. While many things have evolved, violence is one thing that’s remained unchanged down through the millennia.”
“You mean it’s transmitted genetically? Like the so-called violence gene, passed from father to son?”
The scientist jerked as if she’d been stung.
“The violence gene is a myth, maintained by the deliria of a few individuals. It doesn’t exist.”
Lucie knew something about this violence gene: in the 1950s, scientists had advanced the hypothesis that a number of criminals, particularly violent ones, had an extra Y chromosome. These days, the theory had largely been discredited, as evidenced by Tassin’s reaction. She let it go.
“Did Eva Louts tell you she’d seen an upside-down drawing in a prison cell?”
“She did mention it. It was apparently what brought her to this laboratory. She too wanted to know the information I’ve just given you. What captivated her more than anything was the violence and strangeness of the scene, the apparent lack of logic.”
Lucie thought again of Carnot’s cell, the terror she’d felt when she’d discovered the drawing.
“Things are rarely logical when it comes to crime. And . . . your employee, Arnaud Fécamp, was he present when she told you about the prison drawing?”
“Naturally. We met with her together. Louts was extremely curious. She wanted to know all about the discovery. She even taped our interview. A very thorough investigation. Like yours today.”
Lucie sat back in her chair. Fécamp had lied to her about several things. First the drawings, which he claimed not to know about, then Louts’s interest in this story. Why? What was he hiding? Lucie thought through everything that had happened since she’d arrived at the institute. The scientist had made sure to see her alone, had tried to give her only a quick tour of the place and a few purely technical explanations to dazzle her, then send her on her merry way without even showing her the mummies. Maybe he’d been caught short by a visit from a cop ten days after Louts’s disappearance.
“Arnaud Fécamp told me the results about Cro-Magnon were stolen just before you could start analyzing them, is that right?”
“Sadly, yes. Shortly after the sequencing of his genome.”
“The thieves came just at the right time, so to speak.”
“Or just at the wrong time.”
Lucie didn’t add anything, but an idea was forming in the back of her head. She stood up and shook hands with the laboratory director. Before leaving, she asked one final question.
“What time do your employees usually finish work?”
“They don’t really have a schedule, but usually around seven or seven thirty. Why?”
“Just asking.”
Another hour to wait, concealed in her car. If Fécamp was hiding something, he would probably react.
“One last thing: could you please photocopy those crime scene photos for me, if I can call them that? I’d like to take them with me.”
The woman nodded and did as asked.
When Lucie returned to the hallway a few minutes later, she found she wouldn’t even have to wait until seven o’clock.
Dressed in his street clothes, at the other end of the hall, the chubby little redhead had just vanished into the elevator.
He looked like he was being chased by the devil himself.