At one o’clock, Mallock and Bob went down to lunch. Twenty minutes later Ken rolled in, grinning. “How much is the Chief Superintendent willing to pay for some really good news?”
“A croque-monsieur and a half; not a penny more.”
“What a bargain. I’m out of here—hell if I can’t find a more generous superintendent somewhere around here,” Ken retorted, pretending to turn around and leave.
“Talk or you’re fired. Have a seat.”
“Our little priest didn’t lead services on Saturday or Sunday of the Christmas weekend. Not low mass, and not high mass. He just left a note on the church door: Absent due to illness. Does that make our Mallock happy?”
“So-so. It’s only circumstantial.”
“I said I had really good news. Same story on New Year’s Eve. Same note on the door.”
“Now you’re talking. I’ll call the judge and we’ll run out and nab him.”
“What about my sandwich?”
“You can have it when we get back.”
An hour later, up in Fort Mallock, Ken was finally wolfing down his lunch, watching the little priest out of the corner of his eye. As was so often the case, the monster looked harmless on the surface—and yet there was something about him, something macabre, overly fragile and awkward.
Father Bertrant had moist yellow skin and was dressed in a shiny old cassock that had glints of green and wine-red in it. Zinzolin, thought Mallock, remembering Madame Modiano’s autopsy. A pair of gold-framed eyeglasses magnified the man’s close-set gray eyes. His mouth hung open; his upper lip was so thin as to be almost nonexistent. Beneath a bald skull and a smooth forehead his face was incredibly thin; the skin of his cheeks looked like it was being sucked in on either side of his nose by the two deep vertical lines there.
Even though the killer’s personality and the number of murders he had racked up were more than enough reason to take precautions, his weak, sickly outward appearance had dissuaded them. They didn’t think they had anything to fear from this man who looked like he had one foot in the grave. Obviously in a hurry to get on with things, Mallock had simply told the little priest to sit down on an imitation-leather stool in the middle of Ken’s office. He had even been reckless enough to take off the man’s handcuffs, with the ludicrous rationale that this is a clergyman; they don’t commit suicide.
Amédée had decided to let their suspect stew in his own juices for a while. He phoned Jules and Julie and told them to make an exhaustive search of the man’s apartment. Then he left the priest to sweat it out. It was a full hour before he was finally ready to grill the alleged Makeup Artist.
Ken and Bob joined him in his office; they would back Mallock up during what they all expected to be a marathon interrogation. Amédée started out by talking to them about the strategy he planned to use to get what he wanted.
When they went back into Ken’s office, the judge called.
“Where are we with this?”
“Nowhere. I haven’t questioned him yet.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going easy on him.”
“He’s only a suspect, and he’s a man of the cloth. I haven’t . . . ”
“So what? To hell with the goddamn clergy!” retorted the judge, in a fit of radical socialism that Mallock considered particularly inappropriate.
“I’ll keep you posted,” he said simply, holding his temper for once. Better to cut the conversation short than to get into an argument now. In any case, he’d do exactly as he liked. There was no reason to break out the brickbat just yet. Hunting priests had become a national pastime, but Mallock wasn’t going to participate in that kind of execution—unless, of course, it turned out that the little priest was the Makeup Artist. Even though he was no believer in God himself, he knew that the balance between good and evil was infinitely more positive in clergymen than it was in the people who made a sport out of going after them. It wasn’t the former altar boy speaking in Mallock’s head now, but the seasoned cop who had seen them volunteering in the streets and the prisons. Still, Amélie was in a coma, and there had never been anything like these murders before. How would he react if the little priest confessed?
Mallock noticed a group of visitors at the door of the interrogation room. The whole station had come to have a look at this sideshow phenomenon: a serial killing priest.
“Get lost! Ken, close the Fort. I don’t want to see one more asshole in here.”
The interrogation began at four o’clock and finished at five forty-two, when the little priest—without a whole lot of pressure from Mallock’s team—confessed to all his crimes.
Father Bertrant, his mouth dry and his forehead gleaming with sweat, had only lasted five minutes before cracking. Yes, he admitted it. It had been stronger than he was. A diabolical impulse. He had resisted it for a long time, but the Devil had beaten him. As God is my witness. It had all started five years earlier.
At that moment, Mallock’s heart began to race. Confessions always did that to him. But he was surprised by how fast the suspect had cracked this time. He’d been prepared for a long battle, not a KO at the first punch. Yes, he confessed everything—the young women, the stolen photos, all of it—but not rape. He hadn’t touched them sexually, ever, in any way.
“I swear to you, Superintendent, I’ve never done violence to children, never caressed them. You can ask them.”
Mallock thought it was strange to put those two words together, violence and caress.
“Oh, we’ll ask them, Father,” he said. “You can be sure of that.”
The little priest began to make excuses for himself, babbling about having too much love, infinite tenderness, and a carnal temptation of which he had been the first victim.
“I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, just taking a few photos from far away. It was just the solitude . . . it’s not easy, you know . . . celibacy.”
“We aren’t talking about your masturbation habits, or voyeurism. This is a question of murder. Women and children, slaughtered!”
Mallock knew the look of utter astonishment that came over the clergyman’s face, his mouth open and his eyes wide. He recognized it. Second shock. Ken or Francis might believe the little priest was just putting on an act, but all Bob and Mallock had to do was look each other.
“Shit,” muttered Bob into his mustache. This was called experience, and the old redhead had plenty of that.
Just then, Julie called from the rectory to tell Mallock what they had found: a complete photographer’s setup, including equipment for developing and enlarging pictures. There was nothing pedophilic about the priest’s photo collection. It was the work of a voyeur, pure and simple; a repressed admirer of the female form.
“Most of the pictures were taken from far away, with a telephoto lens. Naked women in their bathrooms, mainly. There is a nude snapshot of one of the murdered women, but taken while she was alive. Looks like she’d gotten up in the middle of the night; the picture shows her naked in front of her refrigerator. Sorry, but that’s it. Jules and I will keep poking around just to be absolutely sure, but don’t get your hopes up; this isn’t our guy, unless he’s got another hideout somewhere.”
The little priest had kept on babbling excuses while Mallock was on the phone. The accusation of murder was so ludicrous and unimaginable in his eyes that he had shrugged it aside and picked up his speech of repentance right where he’d left off.
“We give a lot, you know. We listen, we give comfort. And when you go back to the rectory it’s so cold, and you’re all alone. Nobody there to listen to our problems . . . ”
Mallock had stopped listening to him. Another waste of time. Father Bertrant’s sincerity was obvious. He was so visibly mortified and remorseful about his naughty pictures that there could really be no doubt of his innocence in the Makeup Artist case.
There was a banging of chairs.
The little priest, showing extraordinary strength, had seized his chair and thrown it at the window, which shattered. They were on the top floor, and it was immediately clear what he intended to do; too clear, for Mallock. He just managed to grab the priest’s legs, while the rest of his body already dangled outside. His two lieutenants helped him drag the man back onto terra firma.
“I’d die and go to hell before I’d try to take another person’s life! My God! It’s always been my destiny to help people, but now destiny has forsaken me . . . ”
“Now now, none of that, Father,” interrupted Mallock. “Destiny’s a convenient scapegoat. It’s a perfect drawer to put our mistakes in. You’re not the first to use it, and you won’t be the last. When you choose a vocation like yours, you assume responsibility or you step down.”
Mallock had been hesitating, but now he decided to continue the interrogation in spite of everything. When they accused him of murder a second time, the little priest curled in on himself, then straightened up and swore his innocence on the Bible, taking God as his witness. Without a shred of compassion, Ken spread the crime scene photos out in front of him.
“Look at your handiwork, Father. Confess, dammit! We aren’t going to forgive you, so don’t look for it. But your merciful God might still have pity on you, if you repent. Go on, look at them, you bastard!”
This was the signal Mallock was waiting for. There was no question of explaining to Ken—in front of the suspect—what he and Bob had already known for a good half an hour. Out of inertia, disappointment, and fatigue he’d let Ken run wild a bit, just to see what he would do, but now it had gone too far. He ended the interrogation as abruptly as he had started it. It was six o’clock, and Amédée was both discouraged and troubled. How had he taken this little priest for the unthinkable monster he was hunting?
Out of anxiety?