The section of Paris that looked out onto Quai de la Rapée was dozing peacefully. Small yellowish lights floated in the cabins of the barges. Orange reflections danced on the water, disappeared, formed again elsewhere, in perpetual motion. Despite the apparent calm, a screech of iron and rubber regularly disturbed the tranquility of the place: the few riders of the elevated metro line were being carried toward their homes or heading out to meet Paris by night.
Ten thirty p.m. Jacques Levallois, Nicolas Bellanger, and another officer had just come out of the forensic building. Hidden in the Peugeot several yards away, Sharko and Lucie could clearly make out the red tips of their cigarettes floating in the dark like fireflies.
“They’re with a cop from Major Case,” murmured Sharko. “They were the ones investigating the murders in Fontainebleau and we pulled the rug out from under them. I’ll bet the shit hit the fan over that.”
Under the caress of the streetlamps, the three men talked, yawned, paced back and forth, clearly agitated. After five minutes, they got into their respective cars and drove off. The two ex-cops scrunched down when the headlights swept over them. They gave each other a complicit look, like two misbehaving kids trying not to get caught.
“Look what you make me do,” whispered the old cop. “With you, I feel like a teenager again.”
Lucie was nervously fingering her cell phone. She had called Lille an hour before, but Juliette was already sleeping. Her mother had all but hung up on her, furious at her long absence.
They waited a bit longer, then got out and walked into the night. Sharko had a shoulder bag in which he’d stashed the three sheets with Daniel’s markings. The institute stood before them, a kind of great whale that gobbled up every corpse within a ten-mile radius. The main door opened like a huge maw ready to swallow you whole, to suck you into a belly filled with stiffs of every variety: accidents, suicides, murders. Lucie suddenly stopped walking. Her fists jammed into her sides, and she froze at the building’s austere entrance. Sharko went back toward her.
“Are you sure you’re okay? You’ve barely said a word since before. If it’s still too hard to go into a morgue, just say so.”
Lucie took a deep breath. It was now or never: she had to chase the old images out of her head and work past her suffering. She resumed walking.
“Let’s go.”
“Stick close. And don’t say a word.”
They went through the entrance and immediately the temperature dropped. The thick redbrick walls let nothing filter through, especially not hope. Sharko felt relieved when he recognized the same night watchman he’d often seen in the past: he wouldn’t have to use that stupid fake police ID Lucie had made for him.
“Evening,” he said in a flat voice. “The double autopsy—what room’s it in?”
The man gave Lucie a quick glance, then jerked his head without asking questions.
“Number two.”
“Thanks.”
Side by side, the two ex-detectives entered the shadowy tunnels with their parsimonious lighting. The building was vast, the walk endless. Just then Lucie caught sight of a small square of yellow ahead, the lighted window in the security door, and without warning she was transported one year back. She was in the Carnot house, with the SWAT team. She saw Grégory Carnot flattened to the ground by the cops, while she ran up the stairs, breathless . . .
Suddenly a voice broke through, close to her ear.
“Hey! Hey, Lucie! Are you with us?”
She realized she was leaning against the wall, her forehead in her hands.
“I . . . I’m sorry. Something . . . weird just happened. I saw myself in Carnot’s house, running upstairs to find Juliette.”
Sharko looked at her silently, encouraging her to continue.
“The strange thing is that I have no memory of actually entering the house.”
Her eyes grew troubled.
“The men entered Carnot’s. I got there a bit later, with the second team. They told me to stay downstairs, they kept me from going in. Then one of the officers came back to the entrance, holding Juliette . . .”
Lucie raised her hands to her head, eyes half closed.
“It’s so strange. It’s . . . it’s like there are two different realities.”
Sharko gently took hold of her wrist.
“Come on, I’ll bring you back to the car.”
She resisted.
“No, I’m fine. Let me come with you. Please.”
After a moment, Sharko let go of her wrist. Reluctantly he walked ahead of her, entering the room first.
Paul Chénaix was standing between two empty dissection tables, rinsing the floor with a water jet. Another ME whom the inspector had seen before was sticking labels on tubes and specimen jars. Indifferent, he greeted them with a nod and a tired “Hey.” After at least three hours of autopsies, the two men must have been exhausted.
Chénaix interrupted his rinsing and looked at his watch in surprise.
“Franck? Your boss said you weren’t coming this evening.” He shot a glance at Lucie. “There are more romantic places to bring a date. Are you all right, Miss? You don’t look like you’re feeling too well.”
Lucie walked forward unsteadily and held out her hand.
“I’m feeling fine. I’m . . .”
“A friend and colleague from Lille,” Sharko interrupted.
“Colleague from Lille?”
A thin smile above the man’s perfectly trimmed goatee.
“My first wife came from Lille. I know the city well.”
Sharko quickly changed the subject without giving Lucie time to answer.
“Give me the broad strokes of the Lambert autopsies.”
“Why don’t you ask your coworkers? They were just here.”
Sharko thought quickly. Apparently Bellanger hadn’t let on that he’d been taken off the case.
“And they’re probably on the way home now to see their wives and kids,” said the inspector. “It’ll only take you a few minutes, if you stick to what’s relevant. I need to work on the file tonight. It’s important.”
Chénaix set down his pressure sprayer and called to the other ME.
“I have to go to the morgue for a minute. I’ll be back.”
In his bloodstained scrubs, he headed toward a draining board.
“I’ll bring this with me.”
He picked up a jar filled with a translucent, yellowish liquid. Sharko screwed up his eyes: the container held something that looked like a human brain.
Dr. Chénaix walked in front of them in the hallway. As they headed downstairs, he murmured in Sharko’s ear, “Can I talk in front of her?”
Sharko put a friendly hand on his shoulder.
“There’s something you have to do for me, Paul. Don’t breathe a word of our visit to anyone. Because of a screwup with the paperwork, I’m no longer on the case—I didn’t want to say it in front of your colleague back there.”
Paul Chénaix frowned.
“You’re putting me in an awkward position. This information’s sensitive, and . . .”
“I know. But if anyone really does ask you about it, just tell them I lied to you. I’ll take the heat.”
A brief pause.
“All right.”
Chénaix didn’t ask any more questions; they both knew it was better that way. They arrived at the basement. The medical examiner pressed a switch. Crackling neons, dull lighting. No windows. Hundreds of metal drawers, aligned vertically and horizontally, as if in a macabre library. In a corner were bags full of clothes and shoes that no one knew what to do with; soon they’d be heading for the incinerator. Lucie, lagging slightly behind the two men, folded her arms and rubbed her shoulders. She felt cold.
Chénaix set the jar on a table against a wall, went over to a drawer, and pulled it out, revealing a corpse with slightly bluish skin. It seemed flaccid, more latex than dermis, and the veins were practically bulging through the surface. Every incision, from neck to pubis, had been carefully stitched up: if the family were to claim the body, it had to be presentable. Sharko moved as close as he could, practically pressed into the slide rail. The odor of rotting flesh was strong but still bearable. Chénaix pointed to certain parts of the corpse’s anatomy and explained:
“The father was struck numerous times with a poker. The same weapon was used to perforate his vital organs. Several ribs were broken; the killer showed incredible strength. It was brutal and violent, and it all happened in just a few seconds. For the precise details, the exact location of the wounds and all that, it’ll be in the report I give your chief tomorrow. If you want to read it, you’ll have to work it out with him. Sorry, but no copies can leave this building . . .”
Sharko spent a few more seconds looking at the lacerated body, then nodded.
“I’ll be fine without it. Now the son. He’s the one I’m interested in.”
Chénaix left the drawer as it was and opened the one next to it. Félix Lambert’s face was horribly disfigured but his skin was lighter colored, like pale wax. His powerful body filled the space like a block of ice.
“They look alike,” Sharko noted. “Same nose, same facial shape.”
“Father and son by blood, no doubt about it.”
Trembling slightly, Lucie had come farther forward. This really was one of the worst places in the entire world. All one found here were dead souls and shattered bodies. There was no aura, no warmth that might have suggested a human presence. She would have liked Sharko to hold her close, comfort her, warm her, but the inspector’s eyes were dark, impenetrable, and entirely preoccupied with the investigation. Noticing her presence, the examiner stepped back a bit to leave her room.
“Cause of death is rupture of the cervical vertebrae. Here again, death was instantaneous, no question.”
“I can confirm that, I had a front-row seat. He threw himself out the window in front of me.”
“But even when the cause is as certain as it is here, protocol still demands we do a complete workup, A to Z. And sometimes we happen on a little pearl, like this time.”
“What do you mean?”
He pointed his finger toward the corpse’s brain. The scalp had been set back in place, but they could still make out the red, regular line left by the Stryker saw.
“In here is where it all happened. When I opened up, I saw that the brain presented with an incredible amount of deterioration around the frontal and prefrontal lobes. It was literally spongy, full of little holes. I’d never seen anything like it.”
He went to get the jar. The whitish mass floated in the liquid.
“Here, look at this . . .”
The two cops could plainly see the damage. The upper portion of the brain looked as if it had been chewed at by hundreds of tiny mice. The sponginess was remarkable.
“What is that?” asked Lucie, horrified.
“It seems to be an infection that gradually deteriorated the brain tissue, until it finally reached this stage. I cut some sections and examined the other part of the brain, the left hemisphere, to get a better sense of what was going on. I think the initial damage goes back months, perhaps even years, starting gradually and eventually getting to this point. Creutzfeldt-Jakob, the famous ‘mad cow’ disease, produces exactly the same spongiform degeneration. But in this case, I can’t find a trace of any known pathogen. The rest of the organism is completely intact.”
Silence enveloped them. Lucie stared at the two corpses with pursed lips. She thought about Grégory Carnot, who had died by ripping out his own throat. Had his brain wasted away like this?
“Do you think Félix Lambert could have killed those two hikers and his father because of this . . . thing?”
“It seems clear to me the two are related. The areas of the brain we consider the seat of emotions were strongly degraded. Almost as if they were invaded. And as I said, over a period of at least several months.”
Lucie blew on her hands. Like it or not, this discovery raised questions about Grégory Carnot’s responsibility for his actions. This disease, with its particular form of degeneration, might have forced him to do what he did, independent of his will or his consciousness. The questions burst forth in her head. How had Félix Lambert contracted this “thing”? Was this what Terney had been so fixated on? And if so, how did it relate to the placenta and reproduction, or the fact that the gynecologist had been interested in Carnot even before his birth? Could certain kinds of medicine or prenatal treatments provoke such horrors in a child? And what did any of it have to do with the jungle?
The ME continued his explanations:
“The emotional centers, when they work right, release serotonin, a neurotransmitter that inhibits aggressive behavior. If something prevents the release of serotonin, the individual reverts to primitive forms of behavior that once allowed him to meet his fundamental needs in order to . . .”
“. . . to survive,” Sharko completed.
The examiner nodded.
“It’s funny you should mention that and that we talked about lactose intolerance this afternoon—it all has to do with evolution, and it reminded me of something I learned when I was in med school.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, nothing, really. It’s too silly. I didn’t even mention it to your colleagues and I . . .”
“No, we’d like to hear.”
He hesitated a few moments, then said:
“Well, to tell you the truth, when I saw this brain today, I wondered how the man could still have been alive, how he could have fed himself or slept. He was living with a fifth of his brain completely shot to hell, which in itself would have knocked any neurologist back on his socks. Then I recalled the case of this guy Phineas Gage, a railway man in the 1800s, in America somewhere—they loved trotting out this story in neurology. What happened was, there was an explosion, and an iron bar went through the top of his skull, through his brain, and out his eye. Much of the left frontal lobe was destroyed, but Gage somehow managed to survive. But the thing was, from this honest, upstanding fellow, he suddenly became vulgar, aggressive, and hot-tempered, though he still retained all his wits and functions.”
Chénaix leaned on the table.
“What’s remarkable about Félix Lambert’s brain is that, at first glance, the spongiform areas seem to have developed only in the neocortex and the limbic system. The reptilian brain, which roughly corresponds to the brainstem located near the back of the neck, was completely unaffected. Gage’s iron bar hadn’t touched that area either.”
“Reptilian brain, limbic system—what’s all that mean in real-people language?”
“What we call triune brain theory is pretty commonly accepted these days. It’s based on the fact that, over the millennia, the evolution of the brain occurred in three phases. In other words, three successive brain structures were superimposed, so to speak, like layers of sediment, to form our big, high-performance brain of today. It would also explain why our skulls are bigger than the first primates’. The first brain, then, the oldest one, is this reptile brain, which is shared by most living species. It’s well protected, buried way down beneath the skull, and it’s the brain structure that’s most resistant to trauma, for example. It’s the one that ensures our survival and responds to primary needs: eating, sleeping, and reproducing. It’s also responsible for certain primitive behaviors, such as hate, fear, and violence. The second brain, the limbic, mainly regulates memory and emotions. And the third, the neocortex, is the most recent; it’s located at the outer layers and deals with intellectual faculties, like language, art, and culture. It’s where thought and consciousness reside.”
Sharko looked closely at the diseased brain, flabbergasted. Concepts related to evolution had come back yet again, even here in the morgue, inside the most fascinating organ of the human system. Could this be just chance, a strange quirk of circumstance?
“So . . . what you’re saying is that this illness eats away at part of the brain, but it leaves our survival faculties intact? And because of this, it unleashes primitive, violent instincts, which normally the other two parts of the brain keep under control?”
“Theoretically speaking, yes. From a pathological and anatomical standpoint, it’s a lot more complicated than that. We know the three brains are interconnected, and that even a tiny lesion in the wrong place, even in the limbic system or the neocortex, can kill you or make you insane. Félix Lambert, sadly for him, might have been lucky to live so long. As for the fact that the affliction—or infection, if you prefer—didn’t touch the reptilian brain, you shouldn’t see that as some kind of indication that the disease is intelligent. I think it was only a matter of time. In any case, given how rapidly the illness was progressing, the man had no chance.”
Lucie and Sharko looked at each other in silence, aware that they were closing in on something monstrous. Eva Louts and Stéphane Terney had been brutally murdered to prevent anyone from retracing this to its source. What was this disease? Had it been injected, transmitted genetically, released into the air?
“You didn’t find anything similar in the father’s brain?” asked Sharko.
“Not a trace. Perfectly healthy specimen. Well, except for the obvious.”
“And could the disease have caused visual disturbances? Like a tendency to draw upside down?”
“Sure. It looks like certain areas around the optic chiasma were also affected. The individual would first have experienced problems with his vision, loss of balance . . . warning signs, before the pain and violence kicked in. If Lambert and Carnot ended up committing suicide, it’s because they couldn’t stand the excruciating pain in their heads. It must have felt like Hiroshima in there.”
Firmly, the ME shoved the two drawers closed. The bodies disappeared, swallowed by the cold shadows. When the metal door slammed, Lucie started and leaned against Sharko. Paul Chénaix finally removed his latex gloves, tossed them in the wastebasket, and rubbed his hands together, before taking a pipe and pouch of tobacco from his pocket.
“The two halves of the brain are going off for a thorough workup, with the various samples. The case has raised a lot of questions, and I hope the lab guys will be able to tell us what we’re dealing with pretty quickly.”
He headed toward the light switch to turn it off, but Sharko intercepted him, a DVD in hand.
“Enjoy your smoke, take your time. But afterward, I’ll need to get your thoughts for just another minute, on a movie. Your medical opinion.”
“A movie? What kind of movie?”
Sharko shot a final glance at the brain slowly rotating in the fluid, barely lit by the neon lights in the hallway. He thought to himself that five other individuals, somewhere in these streets or in the country, alone or in families, were harboring the same time bomb in their skulls, which had probably already begun counting down. Monsters capable of killing their children, their parents, or anyone else they happened to meet.
Time was of the essence.
He felt a shiver run up his spine, and answered:
“The kind that will keep you awake at night.”