At lunchtime, after checking with Bob, Ken, and Francis on the status of their tasks, Mallock went back toward Saint-Mandé to finish off his observations. Ken had left a copy of the caretaker’s keys on his desk.
Outside, the snow had slowed traffic to a crawl, and it took Amédée a good hour to reach the crime scene. The guard on duty outside the house stopped stamping his frozen feet for warmth and saluted. The back garden was completely white; the house dark and silent. On the staircase leading down to the site of the tragedy, friends and neighbors had left flowers, sympathy notes. A little girl’s doll.
Mallock crossed the square of snow carefully, so as not to slip. The flakes were falling heavily again, trying to cover up the unspeakable. Just then, his mobile phone rang. He stopped in the middle of the garden to answer it.
“Mallock.”
“Yes, hello, this is Chief inspector Camille Sart, Superintendent Grimaud’s right-hand man. You tried to call him?”
“Yes; actually, I wanted to update him a bit on the case. Is he there?”
There was an embarrassed silence. “Well, no. In fact, that’s why I’m calling you. We haven’t heard from him.”
Mallock stood frozen, letting snowflakes settle on him.
“He’s vanished. He’s not married; I don’t know what to do, or whom to call.”
The police, dickhead, thought Mallock. “Call Dublin,” he said instead, “and keep me informed.”
RG had disappeared. The last time Mallock had seen him, he had asked him to finish his investigation concerning the composition of the cocktail of drugs the killer had used. Was there a link? Had the facts taken him too close to the monsters? Raymond had the build to defend himself, but no one is invincible. Mallock stood openmouthed for a few seconds, thinking, before realizing that he was looking increasingly like a snowman built in the middle of the garden.
“I’m waiting for your next move, you bastard,” he murmured.
After shaking himself thoroughly free of snow, he entered the house. Ken had told him that Modiano, the unfortunate head of the family, had been hospitalized. The house was empty and bleak, inhabited only by the filthiness of tragedy, the lingering smells of a double crime. It was intensely cold; the heating had been turned off, and the windows left half-open in the hope that the air might freshen the atmosphere. Mallock walked around the living room, his gaze taking in the many objects of a normal life destroyed. He lit a cigar, as much because it helped him think as to block out the stench of the place.
The idea of breathing in the odor of the dead little girl was unbearable.
He paced back and forth, unable to go up the stairs. He needed to get used to the place. Get himself together. The objects around him were silent. But they had lived with the victims, and they had seen the murderer go by. They had even watched while he committed his monstrous acts. Didn’t they have anything to say? Mallock stared hard at them, as he would have done with recalcitrant witnesses. They were afraid, too, but of what?
He picked up an object, put it down, stroked another one, rested his hand for a long time on the wood of a table, tapped on the walls. He read the names of the films written on the spines of the DVDs and ancient VHS tapes. The titles of all the books on the shelves. Maybe a word would come back to him later. He also tried to work out whether anything might have been stolen. François Modiano hadn’t noticed anything missing, but was he really in a state to be sure about anything at all?
To make sure, Amédée had brought a series of photographs of the inside of the house, taken last year by Madame Modiano for insurance purposes in case of burglary or fire.
An hour later, with the help of the snapshots, Mallock was looking at a photo of what might very well have passed as the principal motive for theft: a tiny Russian icon, ancient and made of gold. On the insurance policy it had been protected with a separate value, because it was worth a lot more than the index. Later, a call to the insurance company would confirm the price of the thing: almost one hundred thousand euros. What if all of these terrible murders had been committed to hide a much more mundane crime?
They would never had looked at it from that angle, as overwhelmed with horror as they were.
Mallock poured himself a large whiskey, somewhat unnerved that there was no one to ask permission from. But he needed it. The idea that had just occurred to him was Machiavellian. What if all these killings were only a . . . diversion?
Upstairs the shutters were closed, and Mallock had to go to the window to open them. He wanted to be able to see everything, down to the smallest detail. In the bedroom, he sat down on the edge of the bed. Normally he would have avoided doing that, but there was only one chair and it was heaped with clothes, and his back was just too painful. He opened his file again, the one he had prepared with the photos and the insurance descriptions, and pulled out the CSI report.
Outside there were occasional footsteps squeaking in the snow, cars creeping by. No children running, no birds squawking. Inside, Mallock carefully read his file without skipping a single line.
When he finally rose, he took a kind of tiny lens out of his pocket, a highly powerful magnifying glass. Then, despite his back, this Parisian Sherlock Holmes got down on all fours. Half an hour later, he did the same thing in the little girl’s bedroom.
There were traces of scratches and perforation marks in the parquet floor. Mallock tested for the possible presence of blood. As always during the tours he made of the crime scene after the investigators had finished, he had brought his own little CSI kit. Provided and updated regularly by his friends at the INPS,4 it included three lamps, one of them ultraviolet; a micro-vacuum, and droppers of oxygenated water. This method, which made the blue of benzidine show up like in the movies, was not very reliable. Fruit juice can also give off dioxygen gas. But combining this with observation under ultraviolet light resulted at least in a chance of not being wrong. In any case, when Mallock returned to Number 36 he would have the lab verify everything. They practiced two methods: one using acid to obtain the elongated violet prisms of hematine hydrochloride; the other searching via spectroscopy for alkaline hemochromogen. Finally, to be absolutely sure that they were indeed dealing with human blood, they would cause antigen-antibody agglutination to occur by adding antihuman serum to the blood, itself diluted in a saline solution.
Hunched down on the floor, Mallock began moving his lamp and Q-tips beneath the window, around the spot where he had noticed the strange perforations that were also present in the little girl’s room. Under the magnifying glass he could see that the holes were recent and that they did not contain blood. Mallock also noticed that they were laid out in a triangle, but he decided not to draw any conclusions from that for the moment—not because he believed this detail was unimportant, but for the opposite reason.
An hour later he rose, aching but satisfied; his samples taken and his head full of new theories.
The victims had been moved not once, but twice.
There was the attack location, which the CSIs had identified by residual blood traces. Then there were the beds where the Makeup Artist had arranged the bodies. But there was also a third place; undoubtedly the transitional place, where each victim had visibly spent time after having been drained of her blood, but before the macabre final staging.
It made sense to imagine the spot with the perforations in the floor was where the killer had engaged in his sexual activities with the victims—but in that case, the CSIs would have found traces of sperm, and they hadn’t found anything—anywhere—but a scant few hairs and epithelial cells.
So, what had he really done? What had he forced his victims to endure? What game had he played, here in this very spot?
Mallock couldn’t linger at the crime scene. He had dinner plans at six-thirty; a sort of pseudo–New Year’s Eve out in the suburbs. He left the house, feverish and exhausted. His head was spinning. Both his heart and his knees were filthy. Once again, the snow seemed to him like a blessing. Three children and their maman played in the street, laughing and throwing snowballs.
He looked up at the sky. He didn’t pray, but that was not because he didn’t believe in the wise man in the heavens. He was sure the bearded divinity had seen everything. Why did he stay silent? It might have been fatigue or imagination, but it seemed to Amédée as if the flakes were rising from the ground toward the sky, as if to cling to the edges of the clouds that would take them far away from this cursed place.
The world wasn’t evil. It was simply indifferent.