For a moment, Sharko couldn’t believe his eyes.
She was there, really there, in his kitchen.
Lucie Henebelle.
The cop stood frozen for an instant at the door of his apartment. The sofa, the living room table, the television, and the rest of the furniture had all been moved around. A large green plant had pride of place on a pedestal table in the corner, and there was a pleasant smell of lemon in the air. Sharko walked slowly toward the kitchen, his mind reeling. Lucie gave him a quick smile.
“You like it? I figured it might do you good to change things around a bit. And besides, I needed to keep myself busy while waiting for you to get home. Nerves, the whole thing . . . I . . . I bought the plant at a place near here. I know you like them green and fairly large.”
She set the table as if she were spring-loaded. Her ease at finding the dishes and silverware made it seem as if she’d always lived there.
“I also figured you might be hungry.”
She opened the fridge and pulled out a large serving dish particolored with different foods, along with two bottles of beer.
“I wasn’t sure exactly when you’d be back, so I got Japanese takeout. It’ll be a change from all those noodles you’ve got stacked in your pantry. It looks like the Salvation Army in there. Okay, well, let’s eat and then we can get down to work.”
Sharko looked at her with a tenderness he was unable to hide. He wanted to take a firmer tone, but he didn’t have the strength.
“Get down to work? But . . . Lucie? What are you doing here? I thought you went back home.”
He went over to the window and glanced down at the street. Lucie caught the worry in his eyes.
“Strange as it seems,” she said, “I like being here. Come on, come sit.”
The cop remained frozen, back to the window, arms hanging limply and his head crowded with conflicting emotions. Finally, he undid his jacket and removed his empty holster, which he hung on the coatrack. The detail didn’t pass by Lucie unnoticed.
“What happened to your gun?”
He looked at her, lips pressed tight.
“They . . . they suspended you?”
She understood immediately and ran up to hug him.
“Oh, I don’t believe it . . . and it’s all my fault.”
With a sigh, Sharko caressed her back. He felt so at peace, holding her like this.
“It’s not your fault. I’ve fucked up too many times lately.”
“Yeah, but they know about Vivonne, don’t they?”
Sharko closed his eyes.
“They don’t know anything about Louts’s trip to Montmaison, or about Terney’s theft of the Cro-Magnon.”
“So what’s got you so worried?”
Sharko took a step back and massaged his temples.
“My former boss, Bertrand Manien, has been on my back since the beginning of the investigation and he’s doing everything he can to make my life a living hell. Our meeting in Vivonne must have made him curious. He’s like a tapeworm; he’ll keep digging and find out about the two of us, last year. He’ll realize I wasn’t just interested in Carnot’s past as a murderer. He’ll find out about our relationship, and about the twins.”
Lucie’s heart was pounding.
“I understand—it’s very private and it’s none of their business. But would it really be so bad if they knew, when you get down to it?”
The cop pulled up a chair, collapsed into it, and uncapped his beer. His jacket and shirt were wrinkled from the long day.
“We . . . they found two more bodies today.”
Lucie’s eyes widened.
“Two more bodies? Tell me everything.”
The inspector took a deep breath to let out the tension of the last several hours, while Lucie unwrapped the sushi and little containers of soy sauce.
“So many things have happened . . . Basically, it all revolves around Terney’s book The Key and the Lock. Hidden in the pages are seven genetic fingerprints. It was Daniel, the young autistic at the crime scene, who set us on the right track. Two of those fingerprints are already in the national database. The first belongs to . . . to Clara’s killer.”
He expected to read more surprise in Lucie’s eyes, but she remained calm, merely taking a swallow of beer in turn.
“And the second one?”
Sharko outlined the series of events that had led him to Félix Lambert. The conversation with the local gendarme, Claude Lignac; the visits to the nursery schools; the part about lactose intolerance. Lucie noticed that he was unburdening himself freely, without putting up any barriers, without holding anything back. She felt that the deeper they delved into this blackness, the more she was gradually rediscovering the man she had met the year before. Only his outer shell was dented; inside, he was still the same. He told her of his hunch, talked of the suffering he’d seen in young Lambert’s eyes, of the horrible sense that some evil was gnawing at him from within. The same impression that Grégory Carnot’s psychiatrist had had, before Carnot committed suicide. While he hadn’t seen any upside-down drawings at Lambert’s, Sharko was convinced the two men had suffered from the same mysterious illness.
After listening carefully, Lucie went to get the small brown envelope containing the photos of Stéphane Terney’s crime scene, the videocassette, and the DVD. She took out the photo of the paintings in the doctor’s library and handed it to Sharko.
“My turn now. I’ve also made some progress on my end.”
With his chopsticks, the inspector lifted a piece of sushi to his mouth, with a hint of a smile. It was the first time Lucie had seen him do that.
“Why am I not surprised?” he asked. “You’re incredible.”
“Mostly, I’m a mother prepared to do anything to get at the truth.”
He looked at the photo while Lucie swallowed a piece of sushi.
“What’s with these hideous paintings again?”
“You were wondering how Terney got Carnot’s genetic fingerprint? He arranged it so that he was the one who delivered him, twenty-three years ago. And he took a huge number of blood tests, from which he was able to establish a DNA profile. It’s as simple as that.”
In turn, she began relating her discoveries since that morning. Reims, Carnot’s birthplace and the city where Terney had practiced medicine. Her visit to Colombe Hospital, Carnot’s full name, and her conversation with the former nurse. The hypervascular placenta, the gleam in the gynecologist’s eye at the moment of birth . . . And finally, her detour to see the doctor’s first wife, who had told her of his odd behavior and given her the videotape.
Sharko handled the black plastic case with a dark look in his eyes.
“We found melted videocassettes in Terney’s fireplace. They’d been hidden under the floorboards. The killer had come looking for them, which is why Terney was tortured. Unfortunately we weren’t able to get anything from them.”
“Those were probably the originals. This is a copy.”
“What’s on it?”
“Possibly the key to this whole case. His wife told me the original had a label on it, with the words ‘Phoenix number one.’”
Sharko ran his finger over the photo.
“Phoenix . . . The bird that’s reborn from its ashes.”
“Exactly. I did some research. The phoenix has the gift of longevity and never dies. He symbolizes the cycles of death and rebirth. Legend has it that, since he didn’t have a female, when he saw his time of death approaching, he ensured his posterity by setting fire to his own nest. He then perished in the flames and a new phoenix was born from the ashes. It’s awful, but I couldn’t help thinking of Amanda Potier and Grégory Carnot. She dies, but the child is born from her womb, after destroying the nest . . .”
“If each of these paintings has a particular meaning,” said Sharko, “we still need to figure out what the photo of the Cro-Magnon is doing there. There’s obviously a reason for it . . . Those three paintings are like Terney showing off his secrets, figuring no one will be able to understand them.”
Lucie picked up the DVD.
“Come see this.”
She went into the living room and slid the disc into the computer.
“Before we start, I should tell you this takes place in the Amazon.”
“The Amazon . . . Eva Louts’s trip. Don’t tell me you’ve figured out what she was doing in Brazil?”
“Not entirely, but I’m getting there. The film lasts ten minutes. Brace yourself.”
Sharko sank into the unwholesome universe of the film. He, too, jumped when the two eyes suddenly snapped open, oozing with fever and disease. So many stabs of the knife added to the shadows, again and again.
When the documentary was over, the inspector got up with a sigh and went back to sit in the kitchen, where he picked up the VHS tape in silence. He turned it over in his hands without looking at it, his eyes seemingly caught in the void. Lucie came up to him.
“What are you thinking about?”
He was shaken.
“We can’t be certain of anything, Lucie. Apart from the Amazon, there’s nothing that ties Eva to those natives. Do you realize that film goes back more than forty years? There’s no clear connection.”
In a troubled silence, he gobbled down sushi after sushi, not even tasting them. Lucie could see how upset he was. She moved into his field of vision.
“Of course we can be certain! It’s too much of a coincidence for them not to be connected. We’ve got all we need to go on, except for one essential detail: the name of that tribe.”
“And what if we knew it? Where would that get us?”
“It would help us understand why Louts wanted to go back there, with all those names and photos from her prison visits. And a bunch of other things as well.”
Sharko noticed a frightening gleam in her ice-blue eyes. He felt she was capable of leaving everything behind and heading into that cursed jungle. He tried to regain control of their conversation; the terrain was much too slippery and dangerous.
“Let’s forget about the tape for the moment and take it all from scratch, piece by piece.”
He grabbed a sheet of paper and a pencil, energized by Lucie’s revelations and almost forgetting that he’d been suspended barely an hour before. The investigation still had him in its clutches, gnawing at him without his being able to resist.
“Let’s put everything in order. So what do we have to work with, exactly? We need a central knot, a hub that the whole investigation turns around.”
“Terney, of course.”
“Right, Terney. Let’s focus on him . . . Let’s try to retrace his steps to get a clearer picture, and find the correspondences between your findings and mine. There are certainly things that will intersect and help shed light on all this. You’re the one who looked into his past, so you go first.”
Lucie paced back and forth, charged like a battery. Sharko took notes as she started talking.
“I get the sense that 1984 is the beginning of the whole story. It was the year Terney met the men at the racetrack. One or both of those individuals is the man who shot the film. Without a doubt, they’re the ones we need to find today, probably about the same age as Terney, since they were already adults in 1966. One of them, or maybe both, is our man.”
“Easy, okay? Let’s not jump to conclusions too quickly. Keep going.”
“Fine. So the men meet a number of times. Terney becomes more reserved, more secretive and mysterious. Then the men give him several videotapes.”
“Why do they give him the tapes?”
“Maybe to show him what they’ve discovered? Make him aware of a . . . I don’t know, some sort of research? Or some monstrous project they want him to be a part of? ‘Phoenix number one’ sounds like an introduction. The birth of something.”
“How did the three men meet in the first place?”
Lucie answered without hesitation.
“Terney was a well-known scientist. The other two must have found him.”
“That sounds plausible. What next?”
“In 1986, Terney gets divorced and leaves for Reims. Right afterward, he enters into contact with Amanda Potier and becomes her gynecologist. In January ’87, he delivers Grégory Carnot, while the mother dies in childbirth. Highly vascularized placenta, which contradicts the diagnosis of preeclampsia. Terney collects samples of the baby’s blood. The blood has his DNA. Is the DNA hiding something? Phoenix?”
“Hold on, just a second . . . There, okay.”
“Nineteen-ninety, Terney returns to Paris. Neuilly clinic. I don’t know a lot about that.”
“They’re looking into it at number thirty-six. Interviewing his colleagues and friends. Unfortunately we won’t have access to the info.”
“We can do without it for now. Let’s move on.”
Sharko nodded.
“Okay, my turn now. Two thousand six, publication of The Key and the Lock, with the help of a young autistic—who by the way is never acknowledged in his book. Terney hides seven genetic fingerprints in it. Carnot, Lambert, and five others who, if they follow the pattern, must also have the same morphological and genetic characteristics.”
He fell silent for a few seconds, then added:
“Most likely seven left-handers, big, strong, and young. Lactose intolerant. Prey to bouts of sudden, extreme violence when they reach adulthood. Even if Terney didn’t deliver every one of them, he probably met them when they were small. In your view, how can seven individuals present such similar characteristics?”
“Genetic manipulation? Seven mothers who unwittingly received special treatments during their pregnancy? Amanda Potier and Terney were close. He treated her as a patient. She was depressed and alone. He could have given her whatever he wanted. What’s to say he didn’t do the same with the other mothers? He or some other doctor? Maybe people he’d met through his lectures on preeclampsia. Why not other eugenicists? Those guys might have gotten together like a little sect.”
Sharko nodded energetically.
“Apart from the sect business, it holds up.”
“Yes. When we look at the bottom line of our two investigations, it does hold up. Terney might not have delivered every one of those babies, but he was in contact with the mothers. He, or those two other fanatics working with him.”
Sharko segued immediately.
“Anything else?”
“Yes, something important. Beginning of 2010, theft of the Cro-Magnon and its genome in Lyon.”
The inspector picked up the photo of the three paintings. He concentrated on the one showing the close-up of the prehistoric man lying on a table.
“Right. What was really behind that theft? We haven’t quite figured that out yet.”
“We haven’t had time. Maybe now’s the moment, since we’re on a roll.”
She took out the photos she’d gotten from the genome center in Lyon and laid them on the table.
“Here’s a crime scene from thirty thousand years ago. Cro-Magnon, left-handed, age pinpointed between twenty and thirty, slaughters three Neanderthals with a harpoon. Terney stole the Cro-Magnon, then photographed it and mounted the photo in a frame.”
Sharko looked carefully at the photos, one by one.
“I wonder where that mummy is now.”
“Doesn’t this crime scene remind you of something?” asked Lucie.
“It’s exactly what happened at the Lamberts’ the other day.”
“Or what happened with Carnot and Clara a year ago.”
Sharko paused a moment, thinking, then finally said:
“The same inexplicable fury. An explosion of pure violence.”
Lucie nodded.
“And we can assume Terney didn’t deliver the Cro-Magnon.”
They exchanged brief smiles. Lucie continued:
“Let’s look at the seven profiles in the book. For reasons we don’t know yet, Terney, in the 1980s, studied a group of children with certain genetic traits in common, including lactose intolerance. Children who are predisposed to violence and begin murdering people when they reach adulthood. At the time, Terney is interested in their blood and DNA. He seems to be looking for something in particular.”
Sharko popped a piece of salmon sushi into his mouth.
“The mythical violence gene?”
“We already talked about that—it doesn’t exist.”
“We know that now. But couldn’t he have believed in it in the eighties? And regardless, aren’t we dealing with some kind of hidden impulse, an outburst of violence that seems to come out of nowhere? It makes you wonder.”
Lucie stared at him for a few seconds before answering.
“To tell you the truth, I have no idea. But . . . let me play this out. So, imagine that the discovery of the cave and that prehistoric massacre comes to Terney’s attention. He makes an immediate connection: what if what he was looking for in those seven children—or what he’d noticed, or what he’d artificially induced by giving the pregnant women some kind of medicine—had been naturally present in that Cro-Magnon man? So with the help of those guys at the racecourse, or maybe acting alone, he gets in touch with a biologist at the genome center in Lyon, waits until they decode the genome, then steals the data at just the right moment, without leaving a trace.”
Lucie raised her finger, eyes alight.
“Imagine how important this genome is for Terney. Now he’s got not only the genetic profile of the seven children, but also the entire, decoded DNA molecule of an ancestor going back more than thirty thousand years. An ancestor who butchered an entire family, and who falls into precisely the same category that Terney seems to be studying.”
“Another of his ‘children,’ so to speak.”
“Exactly. This is a major discovery for him, monstrous as it is. Perhaps the great discovery of his life.”
“Where are you going with this?”
She looked at the photo of Cro-Magnon in its frame.
“The gynecologist was an extremely cautious man, meticulous, and more than a little paranoid. He always protected his discoveries but left hidden clues, as if he couldn’t resist having his little joke on the world: the genetic codes in his book, the phoenix and placenta paintings, and those tapes he kept locked away in his study.”
“And that he stashed under the floorboards in his house.”
“Right. So don’t you think he would have preserved the information about the Cro-Magnon genome somewhere? Wouldn’t he have protected it like all the rest?”
“That’s why his killer took all his computer equipment.”
Lucie shook her head.
“No, no. Terney wouldn’t have been satisfied with a simple computer backup. It was too obvious, and too easy to steal. All the virus protection in the world can’t keep that stuff safe, and hardware can fail—he was too smart for that. And too extravagant as well.”
“You’re thinking of that third picture, is that it? The Cro-Magnon photo?”
“Of course. But . . . how do we figure it out? I know there’s a logic to it somewhere.”
After a moment’s reflection, Sharko bounded from his chair and snapped his fingers.
“Good lord, that’s it! The key and the lock!”
Lucie frowned.
“What about the key and the lock?”
“I think I’ve figured it out. Are you ready for a quick trip to Paris?”
• • •
Sharko had easily popped the seals on the door to Terney’s house. Lucie waited in the street, hidden from sight, watching to make sure no one should catch them unaware. Quickly, he crept upstairs, heading for the library. With his gloved hands, he unhooked the frame with the photo of Cro-Magnon, rolled the picture up, and squeezed it in his hand. Two minutes later, he was back outside.
And heading for the fourteenth arrondissement.
• • •
Daniel Mullier was now wearing a tracksuit, but otherwise he had barely moved since the last time. The same box of pens, same lit computer, same Volume 342. Sharko had warned Lucie to prepare for a shock when she saw that strange room, where a man’s life came down to several miles of paper. At the threshold, she looked quietly around, while Vincent Audebert, the director, approached Daniel alone. Sharko remained silently in the background.
Audebert entered the autistic’s visual field, said a few words to gain his attention, then slid the photo of Cro-Magnon and some blank sheets of paper in front of him. At that point, Daniel interrupted his incomprehensible task. With a slightly awkward movement, he picked up the photo and stared at it fixedly. Slowly, as if the whole thing were following an irrefutable logic, he took a blank sheet of paper without looking away, changed his pen for a red one, and spontaneously began jotting down series of letters.
Audebert discreetly backed away, rubbing his chin with one hand.
“I can’t get over it—it worked. The photo is a trigger. Stéphane Terney used Daniel like . . .”
“A living memory,” Sharko completed. “An anonymous autistic, lost inside a rest home. The key to open the lock.”
He and Lucie watched the young man work in silence. The red ballpoint flew over the paper. Daniel was hunched over, concentrated, writing at breakneck speed. After half an hour, the young autistic pushed the sheets and the photo to one side and seamlessly returned to his earlier task.
The director of the home picked up the sheets and handed them to Sharko.
“A DNA sequence,” he whispered, “written from that mummy’s photo. Does this mean you have the genetic code that belonged to an actual Cro-Magnon?”
“Seems like it,” answered Sharko. “Does this sequence mean anything to you?”
“How could it? It’s just a succession of letters, and this time it doesn’t even look like a genetic fingerprint. I’m not well versed enough to know what it means. You’ll have to ask a geneticist.”
Lucie also looked carefully at the papers.
“This might be the famous hidden DNA code. The key to this whole business.”
The two ex-detectives thanked the director, who accompanied them to the exit.
“Good-bye, Daniel,” murmured Lucie, who had stayed behind with the young autistic for a few seconds. But Daniel didn’t hear, encased in his bubble. Lucie finally left the room, closing the door softly behind her.
Once they were in the parking lot, Sharko stared at the sequences with a worried face.
“We’re getting too carried away, Lucie. We’ve got the data, but . . . what do we do with it? We can’t access the case files anymore.”
“Why, because you’ve been suspended? So what? Listen . . . I know it’s serious, I didn’t mean it like that, but . . . it shouldn’t keep us from moving forward. We can keep going without them. We’ve got this DNA sequence, the tape from the Amazon, and we can get all of it to the right experts first thing tomorrow morning. A geneticist for the sequence and an anthropologist for the tape.”
“And what if we did, Lucie . . . ?”
“Don’t be defeatist, we’ve got work to do. Félix Lambert and his father are dead, but they had family. We should question his mother about her pregnancy, her time in prenatal care. We try to find out if she was given any medicines, something unusual while she was expecting. If we find a connection with Terney, that’ll already be a huge step. Maybe we can even track down those guys from the racecourse. We’ll keep moving forward the best we can.”
Lucie looked at the three mysterious sheets of paper.
“I need to know what Phoenix was about. I’ll go as far as I have to, with or without you.”
“Would you go all the way into the jungle and risk your life? Just for some answers?”
“Not just for some answers. So I can finish grieving for my daughter.”
The inspector heaved a long sigh.
“Let’s go home. You can polish off the sushi and recharge your batteries. You’re going to need it.”
Lucie gratified him with a wide smile.
“So we’re on? You’re coming with me?”
“I wouldn’t be smiling if I were you, Lucie. There’s nothing funny about what we’re likely to do or find. People have been killed over this.”
He looked at his watch.
“Let’s head to the apartment and grab a bit of rest. At ten o’clock, we hit the road again.”
“Ten o’clock? Where are we going?”
“To get some answers at the forensic institute.”