14

On the Avenue Jean-Jaurès, there was a hostel with a view of the Parc de la Villette. Tourists rarely stayed there for more than two nights. The rooms were small, and the toilets were screwed to the shower stalls. Shoeboxes stacked high, a human hive. It was the kind of place most people were happy to forget. But the guests, the manager, and his employees would remember this day.

Police cars and officers were crowded around the entrance like bees around a pot of honey. An ambulance made a U-turn and drove off as Nico and Maurin got out of their car and walked toward the lobby. Captain Ayoub Mouman took them inside. Forty, married, and the father of three, he was a stalwart member of the force.

“It’s on the fourth floor. Follow me,” he said, starting up the stairs. “They’re already there. The cleaning woman found him. The poor woman must have been terrified. The EMTs just left. There was nothing they could do.”

The officers standing guard let them into the room.

Inside, the scene was stomach-turning. The victim lay on the bed in a pool of blood. What looked like quarts of blood.

“Florian Bonnet. A twenty-year-old student. He was studying philosophy at the Catholic Institute,” Maurin said. “He’s the one who booked the room.”

“His attacker severed his carotid artery,” Moumen said. “He died in less than a minute, like a pig drained of its blood. The same thing.”

Moumen, whose parents had immigrated from Algeria, was a demonstrative and talkative officer, the exact opposite of the soft-spoken Maurin. Nico knew that Moumen often had his colleagues over for dinner, and his wife was known for her elaborate Middle-Eastern dishes and delicacies.

“From the moment he was stabbed, there was no hope for him. The paramedics said you would have had to pinch the artery against the spinal cord to stop the blood. Nobody knows how to do that. Poor kid.”

Police officers were trained to describe the facts as objectively as possible. This allowed them to keep their composure. But reality always tripped them up. Florian Bonnet was lying on his stomach, with his pants and underwear around his ankles. The showerhead, ripped out of the wall and covered with blood, was between his legs.

Nico didn’t need to ask. “He was raped,” he said.

Florian Bonnet was just a kid. His large eyes were still open in shock.

Maurin pointed to a specific spot on his body. “Like the other one,” she said.

There was a deep gash on the victim’s left shoulder.

“We didn’t find the flesh anywhere. He must have taken it with him. Just like with Mathieu Leroy.”

The question hung in the air before Moumen said it out loud. “Think it’s the same man?”

“The location and modus operandi present many similarities,” Nico said. “We need to figure out his motives. I have my ideas, but I’ll need to talk with Professor Vilars. I’ll go with you to the autopsy.”

In the autopsy room, Professor Vilars and her collaborators would begin the external exam with photographs and X-rays. Next, they would record height, weight, and other general measurements; physical characteristics such as eye and hair color; any scars, tattoos, and other markings; and ethnicity. They would look for the presence of lividity and whether it conformed with the position of the body at the time it was discovered. They would search for lesions and other wounds and comment on the state of all the body’s orifices, as well as any posthumous decay—to determine the time of death. After enough blood was drawn for testing and possible countertesting in court, they would make large incisions, hunting for subcutaneous bruising, among other things.

As the autopsy got under way, the usually talkative Captain Ayoub Moumen wasn’t saying a word. Attending this procedure wasn’t something he was doing voluntarily. His boss had sent him without asking his opinion. Nico knew this. The captain had deliberately avoided the morgue since watching the autopsy of a child killed by a drunk driver. Maurin, however, had decided it was time for her officer to come to terms with it.

But Moumen wasn’t the only one who was having trouble. Nico was seeing his own mother’s face superimposed on the lifeless body on the stainless-steel table. He tried to force the vision out of his mind. “Do you think it’s the same guy who killed Mathieu Leroy?” he asked.

“The traces left by the knife blade are similar in both cases,” Vilars replied.

“And the shoulder wound?”

Nico was doing everything he could to concentrate on the victim. Damn, it was hot in here.

“He was very determined to cut away part of the shoulder. This was no accident.”

Moumen swallowed. Otherwise, he was a marble statue.

“Why the shoulder?” Nico asked. His voice was getting hoarse.

“Tell me your theory,” Professor Vilars said. “I’m the chief medical examiner. You’re the sleuths. Let’s each do our job.”

Nico exhaled.

“What if he bit his victims and then wanted to destroy the evidence?” Nico ventured. “A bite could have been useful for a DNA swab or a cast to compare with a suspect’s dental records.”

“You may be onto something,” Vilars said. “The killer could have bitten the man’s shoulder and then cut the whole area away postmortem to leave no traces of evidence.”

Vilars began the internal exam by opening the rib cage. Instead of a Y-incision, she made a single incision from the chin to the pubis. She prepared to dissect the soft tissues and muscles and remove the organs one by one from the tongue to the rectum to analyze any pathologies. The head would be next. Vilars would cut through the hairy scalp. Then the screech of her oscillating saw would fill the room. The examiner would examine the bony structures, the muscular masses, the meninges, the cerebrospinal fluid, and the cerebral arteries before extricating the brain in search of a hematoma or a hemorrhage.

Moumen was as pale as a leek.

“We’ll let you get to work,” Nico finally said. He was worried that his colleague might collapse.

Vilars glanced at the captain and nodded. “You’ve seen the important part. Go ahead. Both of you can leave. I’ll send you the report when I’m done.”

“His parents will have to identify the body,” Nico said.

“I’ll be here.”

“Thank you, Armelle.”

Moumen had already dashed off.