At three o’clock, even though he didn’t need a warrant to proceed with the arrest, Mallock put in a call to Judge Humbert. Hoping to avoid giving a detailed summary of the investigation, he began the conversation by announcing:
“We’ve got the Makeup Artist. It’s a female.”
But it was obvious that the judge wanted to know everything. Did he have a journalist to tip off? Amédée managed to sidestep the request by promising to call him back as soon as the arrest had been made.
By four-fifteen everything was prepared to go and take the suspect into custody. Everyone was ready . . . except Mallock. Even though he had no personal doubts about the organization of the arrest, his intuition was screaming at him to delay it. Though he hadn’t sensed anything, he who had rubbed elbows so often and so intimately with the investigation, there had to be another explanation for the wall of proof that had built up so suddenly. Maybe she was connected in one way or another, even innocently, to these crimes. He couldn’t deny that anymore; doing so was pointless and no one would understand it, not even Mallock himself. The time for action was now, and—all things considered—it was better if it were Superintendent Mallock, her Amédée, who did the dirty deed.
Accompanied by a special armored police van crammed full of officers, the beginnings of a migraine, and four lieutenants, Amédée went to Amélie’s house. He parked his car on the Rue de Rivoli and heaved a huge sigh of sadness and stress.
The fucking stations of the cross.
Which one had he gotten to, exactly? The crown of thorns?
The killer nurse lived above the pharmacy in the little square.
He entered, and barked without any other greeting: “Amélie Maurel, which floor?”
“Fourth,” babbled the pharmacist, surprised at this lack of courtesy from her usually polite customer.
“Which way do I go?”
“Uh—go back outside, and it’s the green door on the right. On the left, I mean, when you’re facing the display window.”
This at least earned the woman a “thank you,” which was a minimal bit of civility from Mallock, who was usually more than kind.
They climbed the stairs and he rang the doorbell, slightly out of breath. He had never been to her apartment, and never imagined he’d see it for the first time under this kind of circumstance. After several fruitless tries, it seemed clear that she wasn’t at home. But he had to be sure. The locksmith they had brought with them opened the door, which was secured with a simple twenty-year-old lock; no dead bolt, no armor shielding. Kind of odd for a paranoid monster. There was no one inside.
“We’ll search the place later,” said Mallock. “Stay here and wait for her. Be discreet. Arrest her quietly if she comes back before I do. Keep in mind that she’s only a suspect; I’m counting on you. I’m going to get my car and run home while we wait. It’s right nearby and I’m taking up unnecessary parking space in the street.”
Mallock fled. He gave himself five minutes to park his beloved car in the private garage, stop by his apartment for some migraine tablets, and return to the little square on foot.
At the bottom of his parking garage, the wonderful smell of mushrooms made him yearn for the seaside or a vacation in the country. He backed his Jaguar into the parking space, cursing his idiotic neighbor, who was edging systematically out of the space assigned to him. He slammed the door of his car and ran toward the exit. The steep slope meant for cars exiting the garage extracted a few grimaces of discomfort from him. The pain brought Amélie back to his mind.
A whole battalion of police officers was waiting to pounce on her.
How could she be the sadistic piece of garbage he’d been hunting with such hate? Would she have had the physical strength to commit the crimes alone? In his heart he didn’t believe it, but the facts weren’t budging. She was an accomplice, at the very least. An accomplice to the murders of children? Impalement? Evisceration? By what hellish miracle? And what about her tenderness? Her incredible sweetness? Mallock knew that he wouldn’t be able to handle all these contradictory feelings for very long before they destroyed him. He decided to double the dose of his antianxiety medication as soon as he got home. It wasn’t really a reasonable thing to do, but the strain was too much. He had to do everything he could to stay calm and able to make decisions. It was just then, as he entered Baudoyer Square, that he had a flash of illumination—but it was so much in Amélie’s favor that he questioned it for a few moments before deciding that he would accept its consequences.
And those consequences were enormous.
In the house in Saint-Mandé during his second visit, he had realized the extent of the murderer’s mania and perfectionism. The killer had managed to move the body three times with enough fastidious cleanliness to fool the police. How could it be conceivable that this same person could be foolish enough to leave a syringe at the murder scene—especially in that specific spot under the corpse’s back, which was nowhere near the place on the body where the blood-draining punctures had been made? It was impossible. Even better, this fact alone put Amélie in the clear. Because this act of concealment bore the obvious signs of being a trap, the trapped person was, de facto, eliminated as a suspect.
In front of his apartment building Mallock saw himself yesterday, in the same place, holding Amélie’s hand. He had to stop the arrest. He was so tense that he tried to unlock his apartment door with the keys to his office—which jammed in the lock, of course, so that he couldn’t turn them or even pull them out. He lost a precious minute extracting them and trying again with the right set of keys.
When he finally burst into his den, an icy breeze made the door slam shut behind him. He must have left a window cracked at the other end of the apartment. That was what he thought, at least, until he reached the kitchen. It wasn’t a window in there but instead the service door, wide open. In a fraction of a second his revolver was in his hand. Never for a moment did he consider that he might have left the door open, or even that there had been a break-in. The air was filled with a smell—and with it came a terrifying certainty. The Makeup Artist—the hate-filled madman who had been haunting his days and his nights—was there, mere feet away from him, hiding in a room, or a corner, or even the service staircase. An image came into his mind of a sweaty little man, flabby if not fat, with tiny hands and a clumsy walk, his face gleaming like an oil-soaked sponge. The vision was horrifying, and Mallock steeled himself to search the rest of the apartment. His difficulty opening the door should have alerted him. Waves of cold sweat poured down his body. His hands were welded to his weapon, his right index finger poised on the trigger. When he finally reached the bedroom, the shock was so overpowering that his heart froze and he couldn’t breathe.
Amélie lay on the floor in the middle of the room. Her face was painted with the Makeup Artist’s grotesque work. Like a nightmarish Ophelia she was immersed in a pool of blood so dark that her body was reflected in it, as if she were levitating in a scarlet abyss.
Mallock mobilized his whole team. They only had a few steps to walk. They stood, stunned, before the spectacle of their suspect, suddenly transformed into a victim. And in the very apartment belonging to their own superintendent!
A young doctor from the coroner’s office arrived a few minutes after the ambulance. He and Mallock knew each other, but Amédée blanked completely on his name. He tried to remember it, just so he could think about something else. Forget what he had seen in his bedroom. Forget that an army of gloved officers was in there now, looking, photographing, touching.
“A word, Superintendent. The young lady seems to have been drugged. She’s lost a lot of blood, but I think she has a chance of pulling through.”
Mallock gaped at him, almost incapable of understanding the words. He squinted and managed to ask, “She isn’t dead?”
“No. She’s comatose, and I had trouble finding a pulse. It’ll take a few hours to analyze the substances she’s absorbed.”
“Get in touch with Professor Mordome. He’ll know which drugs they are; he’s already studied them.”
Only then did Mallock realize just how much of a wreck he was. His hands were shaking. He surprised himself by taking out his lighter to light a cigar he didn’t even have. He was not in a normal state of mind. For him, time virtually froze right there. If he hadn’t suddenly decided to run home, Amélie would be dead. If he hadn’t made the mistake with the keys, there was a very good chance he would have been killed himself. He lowered his head and closed his eyes.
If Amélie survived, destiny would be treating him fairly for once.
The team of paramedics, accompanied by the doctor in charge, carried the stretcher out slowly. Amédée had time to catch a glimpse of the young woman, perfused, intubated, ventilated. Her face was white, smeared with red streaks, her hair soaked with blood. Extradural, subdural, or intracerebral hematoma; contusion? The doctors couldn’t say yet.
It took all Mallock’s courage to go back into his bedroom. He forced himself to squat down and examine the floor. The first thing he saw was miniscule. Laid out in an equilateral triangle were the now-familiar three little marks in the carpet, near where Amélie’s head had lain. A camera tripod?
To get a definitive confirmation, he asked the crime-scene techs to make a cast of the marks in fine elastomer, and then to take tissue, dust, and hair samples inside and around the triangle. He issued an order that the sites of the other murders also be subjected to the same analyses. In the meantime, a squadron of white jumpsuits got to work dusting for fingerprints.
Mallock sat down on the edge of his bed, physically and morally exhausted. Where had he gone wrong? The piece of shit had attacked his Amélie, and he hadn’t seen anything coming. His eyes burned with pain and anger.
As he struggled to regain a bit of composure, he heard a very faint sound like the rustling of wings. Not a pigeon or a crow; more like a butterfly, as if one were trapped somewhere in his apartment, fluttering against windows and curtains, trying to get out.
He soon figured out what the strange noise was.
An army of brushes loaded with granite powder was busily dusting the walls of his apartment in search of handprints.