Montmartre at night. Shadows fleeing beneath the tired halos of streetlamps. Narrow alleys set with paving stones. An ogive-shaped landmass rising from the crest of Paris, dissected by countless stairways. A labyrinth of intertwining streets, and at the center its Minotaur: Stéphane Terney.
Lucie had parked her car on Rue Lamarck, near a metro stop whose stairs spiraled into the ground. A few small cafés, still open, absorbed the rare passersby. The air was thick and pasty. Atmosphere of late summer, heavy with humidity, as if a storm could break at any moment. In that damp, the neighborhood felt like a fortress, an islet protected by fog, far from the hubbub of the Champs-Élysées or the Bastille.
To get the address of the man who’d masterminded the theft of Cro-Magnon, Lucie had simply called Information. The Paris region had three people by that name, but the street one of them lived on left little room for doubt.
Rue Darwin.
Charles Darwin . . . The father of the theory of evolution and author of The Origin of Species, Lucie recalled from her biology classes. Odd coincidence.
Since her return from Lyon, she had kept a low profile. After leaving the apartment of the young hood with the broken bottle, she’d immediately gone to find a copy of Stéphane Terney’s book: a fairly specialized tome with lots of charts and graphs. Then, after calling her mother to let her know she’d be home very late, probably not before dawn, she’d gotten back on the highway, without stopping or thinking about anything other than her mission. Foot to the floor, she had only one desire: to stand face-to-face with the man who would surely have to answer for the theft of the mummy, and who could help her understand its puzzling connection to Grégory Carnot.
Walking quickly, she passed by a row of town houses until she stood in front of Terney’s: a whitewashed concrete façade, two stories high, with private garage and a solid metal door that made it look like a giant safe. It was now almost eleven p.m. and no light was filtering through the upstairs windows. Much too late to knock without arousing suspicion. All in all, Lucie knew almost nothing about Terney and had to tread lightly: the man behind the stack of diplomas might be highly dangerous.
Weighing her options, Lucie looked around her, then rushed into an alley a few yards away that sliced through the row of houses. The narrow path provided a shortcut to a parallel street and, better still, access to the balconies and gardens behind the buildings. She just had to scale a high cement wall.
After slipping on her wool gloves, Lucie jumped up, gripped the edge, and, after a few attempts, hoisted herself to the top, though not without scraping her forearms and elbows in the process. A moment later, her body fell heavily onto the grass. She gave out a muffled grunt. Nothing broken, but that little exercise showed her, yet again, how out of shape she’d become.
While the fronts of the houses offered only anonymous façades, the backs expressed their owners’ peculiarities: hanging terraces, hexagonal verandas, Japanese gardens with lush vegetation. A privileged corner of Paris, safe from covetous eyes.
In Rue Darwin, Lucie had counted the buildings between Terney’s house and the alley. After silently crossing through the fourth garden, she gauged that she was at the right place.
Quick analysis of the situation: impossible to get in from ground level because of the covered porch with its double-glazed glass panels. Upstairs, on the other hand, she spied a half-open window. Crouched over, she ran toward the porch, climbed onto the barrel that collected water from the drainpipe, and within seconds found herself on the Plexiglas roof.
Near the window, she drew her weapon from her pocket. Everything was whirring around in her head: her illegal presence, the danger, the problems she’d surely have to face if she broke into the house. But what if someone was injured? She hesitated a few seconds, then, pushed by the same force that had always driven her, she slipped inside.
She pointed her gun at the bed. No one. The room was empty, but the sheets were rumpled. The angles of the room formed opaque cones. Lucie let her eyes adjust to the dark. Two slippers and a bathrobe lay on the floor: Terney could well be somewhere in the house.
Lucie’s muscles stiffened; her senses snapped to attention. The minuscule creaks of the floorboards beneath her feet sounded amplified. The man hiding between these walls might have murdered a student; he wouldn’t hesitate to eliminate her either.
She pushed open the door with her fingertips and ventured out of the room. Light filtered in from the streetlamps outside. Opposite her, an aluminum guardrail, twisted in a double helix like a strand of DNA, ran along an open hallway that overlooked the living room below. Lucie heard muffled voices, laughter that faded into the humid air outside. She continued, flat against the wall, listening as she silently crept onward. Below, she spotted an answering machine with its message indicator, the number 7 blinking on it.
Seven messages . . . Lucie relaxed a bit. So Stéphane Terney probably wasn’t home, and might have been away for some time.
She inched forward some more. One gigantic room drew her attention. It was like being in the lair of some macabre collector. In the shadows, skeletons in attack posture. Prehistoric fossils in perfect condition, animals of all types and sizes, which she identified as reconstructions of dinosaurs. Under glass were minerals, shells in stone, body parts. Femurs, ulnae, teeth, flint. The doctor had created his own evolution museum.
A fresco in the back made her stomach tighten. It showed five skeletons. Near them, an inscription on a painted canvas: THE FIVE GREAT APES. She recognized the skeletons of a man and also of a chimpanzee, smaller and squatter and missing the skull and jaws at top.
With a stiff neck, Lucie turned around and noticed that some floorboards had been ripped up. Beneath them was a hiding place, now empty. Someone had obviously been through it.
She left the room. Terney was more than a fanatic: he lived and breathed evolution to the point of residing on Rue Darwin.
An odor suddenly made her freeze. A stench she knew all too well, a mix of rotting flesh and intestinal gas. Her fingers squeezed more tightly around the grip of her Mann. With the toe of her shoe, she pushed open the last door before the stairs and ventured into a cube of darkness. After aiming her gun at the dark corners, she banged her fist on the switch.
The horrible spectacle appeared all at once.
A nude body, no doubt Terney himself, was lying on the floor, on its right side, at the foot of a fallen chair. It had been bound with packing tape, hands in front, feet attached to the chair legs. Wide gashes riddled the torso, arms, and calves: black, frozen smiles that had sliced through the flesh. A piece of tape that had acted as a gag was still half stuck to his cheek. The man had fallen from his chair onto his side, but the index fingers of both hands were stretched straight in front of him, as if he’d been trying to point to something. Lucie turned in the direction indicated. A library containing hundreds of volumes, stacked several yards high. A crypt of paper. Which specific book was the victim trying to point out?
Without approaching, taking care not to disturb anything, Lucie tried to memorize the crime scene, imagine the killer in action. He had unavoidably left something of himself behind, something of his personality in this cold, sinister tomb.
Terney had been mutilated, tortured methodically, without the killer losing his cool. On the floor were cigarette butts, their ends black with burned tobacco. One of them was still embedded in the corpse’s shoulder, as if the butt had glued itself to his skin. The partly removed gag suggested that Terney had finally talked. What had his torturer been trying to get out of him?
Lucie nearly felt faint when she heard a muffled noise coming from the back of the room. There was another door.
The noise occurred again. Boom, boom . . . Something was hitting a wall. Or rather, someone.
Lucie moved forward, her throat tight. Holding her breath, gun outstretched, she turned the knob and yanked open the door.
A man in black pajamas was sitting on the floor, a fat book open on his knees. Rocking slightly—hence the noise—he turned the pages, imperturbable, concentrated, not even raising his head. He looked barely twenty years old.
Lucie didn’t have time to understand or react before dull thuds at the main door froze her in her tracks.
“Police! Open up!”
A deep, aggressive voice. Lucie backed away, unnerved. The seated man still didn’t show the slightest reaction, just tirelessly turned his pages. Good Christ, this was incomprehensible! Why didn’t he run? Who was he? Lucie had to think fast. If they caught her here, she was done for. Legs flying, she ran back up to the hallway, knocking over a statue placed at the top of the ramp. She gritted her teeth, unable to catch the object before it went crashing down the stairs with a clatter, without breaking.
Metal.
“Stéphane Terney! Open up!”
More thuds, much louder this time. Voices, shouts. Lucie ran toward the bedroom, unable to breathe. The thuds became a full-scale din: the police were using a battering ram. The entry door slammed open just as Lucie landed feetfirst in the garden. Lungs aching, she dashed into the thickets of branches. It was only a matter of seconds. She didn’t dare look behind her. The cops must have been discovering the body by now, arresting the sitting man, entering each room in tight formation, rushing to the exits. No doubt in less than a minute they’d light up the back gardens with their powerful search beams. She arrived at the high cement wall, threw herself at it like a stone from a slingshot. Her arms hoisted her up and propelled her into the alley. Her landing was hard, but her knees took the shock. The moment she stood up, her right cheek smacked against the cold partition.
A gun barrel was pressed into her temple.
“Don’t move!”
She felt unable to twitch a muscle. A firm fist had yanked her hand behind her back, holding her in an arm lock. She breathed noisily through her nostrils, her mouth twisting. They had trapped her, watching every exit. She was done for, and she immediately thought of little Juliette. She saw prison bars separating their two faces.
Time seemed to expand, then Lucie suddenly felt the tension relax. The man turned her brusquely around; their eyes met.
“F-Franck?”
Sharko’s emaciated face floated in the shadows. In the throbbing lights, he looked like a cop from a detective movie. The face of a guy who’d seen it all. He cast a quick glance behind him and hissed, “Goddammit, Henebelle! What the hell are you doing here?”
Lucie was panting, unable to catch her breath.
“He . . . he’s dead . . . tortured . . . There . . . there’s someone in . . . the room . . . in pajamas . . .”
Sharko lowered his weapon nervously. His eyes darted to the street, then rested on Lucie. In the distance, through the windows of Terney’s house, beams of light began sweeping the darkness. The inspector had to think fast.
“Did anyone see you?”
Lucie shook her head, hands on her knees, spitting up a filament of bile.
He gripped her wrist and squeezed hard.
“What are you doing here?”
“Let me . . . go . . . please!”
Sharko didn’t even have to fight against his conscience as a cop. The two of them were the same: shattered, wounded inside, and outside the law. He released his grip.
“Go on, get going. Go back up the alley and disappear. You’ve got less than five seconds. And especially, don’t call me, don’t leave any trace of our contact, no matter what. I’ll call you.”
He pushed her so hard that she almost fell. Lucie regained her balance and turned around to thank him with a nod, but he was already far away. She took a huge breath of air and began sprinting, like a fugitive, until she finally disappeared into the shadows of Montmartre.