Crimes of Winter

by Philippe Georget

  Of course, of course . . .

  He reopened his eyes, took a long breath, and then closed them again.

  This time he was in a small room off the lobby at police headquarters. His telephone was beeping, he felt relief, he was finally going to be able to put an end to the exhausting interview with Marie-Isabelle Casty. He held out his hand to her, she took hers out of her handbag. She had just stuck her hand into the bag. Why? Had the young woman come solely to plead her cause or did she have something to show him? She might have. But he hadn’t been receptive, and she’d changed her mind.

  He felt dizzy. He was out of his mind. No, it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t his intuition but his imagination that was playing tricks on him . . .

  CHAPTER 40

  Sebag stopped his car in front of the red and white barrier that blocked the entrance to the hospital complex. He pressed the button on a voice terminal and gave his name. The barrier immediately went up. He was expected. A young woman assigned to handle the hospital’s communications met him and led him across the campus to the reception building. She had him go into a small room. He sat down and waited.

  The idea that had come to him as he exited the autoroute had matured in his head all evening and part of the night. However, unlike his somber ideas, it had left room for the rest. While thinking about the case, he had been able to take part in the family conversation. In the late evening he had made love to Claire. The vigor he’d put into the act greatly resembled a bestial and elemental marking of territory but the two of them seemed to have found satisfaction in it. Shortly afterward, they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon!” Bastien Gali said as Sebag entered the room. “It’s a nice surprise.”

  He bent over to whisper in his ear: “It’s unbelievably boring here!”

  The nurse who had accompanied Gali left them alone. Sebag went directly to the heart of the matter:

  “How did you find out that Véronique had had lunch again with her former lover?”

  “Aren’t we going to say ‘tu’ to each other anymore?”

  “That will depend on your sincerity. I don’t like people to take me for a fool.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Gali opened his eyes wide; he wanted to seem surprised. But his crossed arms and his body that had sat up straight in the chair were playing a different tune.

  “Of course you understand me,” Sebag went on. “But I’m willing to repeat my question: how did you learn that your wife had seen her colleague again in private?”

  “I snooped on her phone, obviously. I told you that the other day, didn’t I? I even gave you her mobile so that you could look at it, but you didn’t do that. It ought to be possible to find it again if you don’t believe me.”

  “That’s not the problem, I don’t contest the existence of that message. But I think you discovered it only after you’d been informed about that lunch.”

  “After I’d been informed? What do you . . . what do you mean by that?”

  Gali’s eyes widened in exactly the same way as before. His repertory for simulating astonishment was not very diverse.

  “Let’s cut the crap! Before you let me into your house, you burned something in the fireplace.”

  “They were old papers . . . love letters that she’d sent me.”

  “The flames were colored. They weren’t papers but photos.”

  “Oh, right, that’s true . . . I also burned our wedding pictures. I was angry.”

  Gali wasn’t allowing himself to get flustered, but he wasn’t convincing. Sebag put his cards on the table.

  “I think they were photos of Véronique with her colleague. In the restaurant together or kissing, I don’t know, but they were photos that had been sent to you. And the person who made them had also contacted you by telephone. I’ve come to get your mobile.”

  On this last point, Sebag was bluffing: the hospital administration was holding Gali’s telephone, like those of all its patients, and without the owner’s agreement it could hand the phone over to him only when he had obtained the necessary authorization from the judge.

  Gali said nothing more but his eyes spoke for him. They revealed a mixture of discomfort and respect.

  “I’m going to be very clear,” Sebag went on. “Either you collaborate completely, or I’m going to change the indulgent report I wrote on what happened at your house. And then you won’t avoid prison!”

  Bastien bowed his head. If his skull had been transparent, his neurons could have been seen vibrating in all directions. He was ready. Sebag drove the point home.

  “You don’t owe this guy anything, Bastien. By informing you, he was only trying to make you and Véronique unhappy. Especially since he misled you, because your wife didn’t sleep with her lover again. She told you that, she swore it to you, you believed her, and so did I, and we still do, don’t we? I don’t know what this guy’s motives are, but you’re not the first person he spoke to. His revelations have already caused two deaths. And at your place, we barely avoided carnage . . .”

  He moved his chair closer to Bastien’s and put his hand on his shoulder.

  “Come on, tell me the truth. It’ll do you good.”

  Gali looked up at him. He was still delaying, but Gilles knew he had won. Finally Gali talked.

  A week before—in fact, the very day of his fit of rage—he’d found an envelope in his mailbox. It bore no stamp; it had been put in the box directly. This envelope contained three photos of Véronique sitting with her former lover at a table in a restaurant. In one of these pictures, the man had put his hand on her cheek and she was smiling back at him. On the back of the photo there was a handwritten message: “You will soon know how to reach me.”

  Within the following hour, Gali had received an initial SMS whose words remained forever etched on his mind:

  “Your wife is making a fool of you. She’s cheating on you again. Please get rid of the photos and any trace of this call.”

  Bastien had immediately called, but he’d gotten an anonymous answering machine. Five minutes later, he received a second SMS as a kind of answer:

  “Is that really what matters? However, her lover’s name is Alain Guibert, and he works with her. But you already knew that. Are you going to continue to let her deceive you this way?”

  Gali had flown into a bitter rage: that was when he had decided to go buy cans of gasoline. On the way back, he had received a last SMS:

  “Don’t forget to erase any trace of my contact with you. Thanks.”

  “I erased the text messages as soon as I got home. I kept the photos a little longer. I showed them to Véronique and I didn’t get rid of them until just before I let you come into the house.”

  “Do you remember the telephone number?”

  “No. But it began with 07, and I think the next number was 15. After that, I don’t know.”

  Sebag consulted his notes. Those figures corresponded to the first ones of Abad’s corbeau’s number. It was a little early to celebrate, but he felt that he was on the right track.

  “You really have no idea who this man is?”

  “No, none. I didn’t try to find out more. He seemed to be very concerned that he remain anonymous.”

  Sebag reflected a moment before going on:

  “You haven’t ever worked for Cantalou?”

  “What kind of question is that? No, never.”

  “Do you play pool?”

  “Poker, sometimes, but never pool.”

  “Where do you play?”

  “At home or at my buddies’ places.”

  “Do you go to the Balto?”

  “What’s that?”

  “A downtown bar. Rue du Maréchal Foch.”

  “No. I don’t think I’ve ever set foot in it.”

  “
OK.”

  Sebag thanked Bastien Gali, who agreed to let him take his mobile. He stopped off at headquarters to pick up Casty’s mobile in the cabinet where people held in police custody deposited their personal belongings, and he gave both the phones to his colleagues on the forensic team. Then he headed for Saint-Cyprien.

  There was still one point that had been neglected.

  Above the Mediterranean, enormous white clouds looked like a snowy mountain range on the horizon. Sebag easily found a parking place opposite the Saint-Cyprien casino. Marie-Isabelle had just left the women’s shelter to take refuge with a friend of her mother’s who lived in an apartment across from the marina.

  “Jacqueline rents it out during the summer and lends it to her children during school vacations. It’s free until February. It’s very helpful to me just now . . .”

  “Your husband has been locked up, you can go home if you want.”

  “My home is our home. Without Jean-Paul, I prefer to stay here.”

  She took him through the small apartment and led him directly to the balcony. She didn’t offer him something to drink, or a seat. She leaned against the railing and lit a cigarette. He took one out in turn.

  “Please excuse my behavior the day before yesterday.”

  Behind the curls of smoke, Marie-Isabelle was looking at him without showing any reaction. Her face was closed. The young woman seemed in fact not to have liked the way she had been treated. He decided he had to make a gesture.

  “You appealed to the man rather than to the cop the day before yesterday. And the man, you see, also had his personal problems: he couldn’t be receptive.”

  Sebag didn’t like misunderstandings and he knew that there had been one, an enormous one, between them. During their preceding conversation, she had used the term “slut.” He didn’t see her that way, not at all, that term reeked too much of machismo to be part of his vocabulary. If he had something to reproach her for, it wasn’t her looseness or libertine inclinations, but rather her individualism. In life, you couldn’t have everything, you had to make choices. In his view, Marie-Isabelle was above all an egoist, and of the worst kind: it was all about her, all about sex, and too bad about the collateral damage. She had chosen to pursue her comfort and pleasure at the risk of causing pain to those whom she claimed to love.

  But he hadn’t come here to reopen that debate.

  “Let me say no more about it,” he added. “It’s the cop who’s getting back to you today. I believe you did not come solely to plead your cause the other day, but also had something you wanted to tell us.”

  Marie-Isabelle Casty didn’t flinch. He was going to have to shake her up.

  “I’m very eager to see the photos that are in the envelope you wanted to give me.”

  The young woman’s eyebrows shot up, betraying her surprise. She put out her cigarette in an ashtray already full of butts and disappeared into the apartment. Shortly afterward, she returned with a white envelope in her hands. Sebag took several photos out of it. Made using a telephoto lens, they showed the young woman with a fairly bald man of around fifty. He was wearing a leather jacket that barely concealed the beginnings of a potbelly and he was leaning on a yellow motorcycle. In one of the pictures, Marie-Isabelle was languidly kissing him. Sebag recognized the place: it was in Canet, close to the Place de la Méditerranée.

  “We had lunch on the terrace. That bastard must have been spying on us for a long time, because that’s the only intimate gesture we made that day. I was always very careful.”

  “Who is the man in the photo?”

  “Do you think that really matters?”

  “Your informer has already had several victims. We’re looking for a connection. It might be women, it might be men . . . At this stage of the investigation, we really don’t know.”

  Marie-Isabelle took a photo and turned it over. As in Abad’s case, there was a handwritten message, promising an imminent phone call. And there was a number.

  “He left his telephone number, you won’t have any difficulty.”

  “If it were that simple, we’d already have arrested him. Who is the man with you in the photo?”

  In the port below them, the wind was clacking the sailboats’ lines against their masts. For some people, this metallic sound was like a call to the open sea, to adventure, or to luxury, but for Gilles it was just noise, simple noise. And he wondered if the view of the sea from this apartment would make it worth putting up with all the inconveniences of such a location during the high tourist season, when in addition to the noise of boats in the port there was that of cars in the street, voices on the terraces of cafes, and the music coming from your neighbor’s balcony.

  “Roger Reddah,” Marie-Isabelle sighed. “A childhood friend whom I recently ran into by chance.”

  Then Gilles asked her the same questions he asked Gali regarding Cantalou, pool in general, and the Balto in particular. In each case she answered in the negative.

  “You really have no lead at all for this son of a bitch?”

  “None.”

  “Not the faintest idea?”

  “He’s a bitter or puritanical man, or else a cuckold who’s taking revenge. Probably a little of all three. That still includes lots of people in this area.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Chairs scraped on the worn tile floor of the third-floor conference room at police headquarters. The inspectors were taking their places around the table, one by one: François Ménard, Thierry Lambert, Joan Llach, Julie Sadet, and Jacques Molina. Sebag sat at the right of Superintendent Castello. He noticed Jacques’s smile of satisfaction as well as François’s vexed grimace.

  On leaving the apartment in Saint-Cyprien, Gilles had driven along the marina. It was Saturday, the weather was warm. Couples and families were walking along the quays to admire the yachts and dream rather than make plans. After reflecting for a while to clarify his thoughts, he’d telephoned his boss to tell him about his discoveries.

  “We’re going to go all out on this case,” Castello had concluded. “We can’t allow some wing nut to mess with every household in the department.”

  Sebag and the superintendent had agreed to call a meeting of the team on Sunday.

  “Take a day off,” Castello told him. “And be ready to launch into a week that’s going to be a tough one. I don’t have to tell you that a good marathon runner has to know how to build up his strength before the race.”

  It was silent in the conference room. The lieutenants waited patiently while the superintendent read through his notes one last time. They had all received an e-mail setting forth the main lines of the case; they were on the lookout, attracted by the scent of the prey.

  Castello cleared his throat.

  “On Saturday, Gilles delivered Gali’s and Casty’s telephones to the forensic team. Elsa Moulin spent her Sunday making a quick first examination. The same telephone was used to contact two people: Stéphane Abad and Bastien Gali. On the other hand, in the cases of Didier Valls and Jean-Paul Casty, two different telephones were used. But in every case, the calls were made from the same part of downtown Perpignan. Although we might have still had some doubts, now that’s settled: there was in fact a single informer and that man is already indirectly responsible for a murder, a suicide, a hostage-taking, and assault and battery. So we have to catch him before he adds another tragedy to his record.”

  The hunt was being organized, but Sebag knew that it wouldn’t be very exciting. It wasn’t a bloodhound they needed but rather the exhausting labor of thousands of industrious ants.

  “The problem is that for the moment we don’t have any idea who the informant is. We’ve got a huge amount of work to do.”

  Castello turned to Sebag to ask him to take over. Gilles opened his notebook. He’d done good work that Sunday.

  “I see at least three ways to make our way back to this
guy. First: we find a connection among the victims. The corbeau certainly did not choose his targets at random. So first we have to inventory them.”

  Sebag looked at his colleagues. Llach, Ménard, and Julie were taking notes. Molina was clipping his fingernails and Thierry Lambert was watching a fly cruising around the room. A fly in the middle of the winter . . . the enigma intrigued him.

  “At this point, we know four of his targets, but we can assume that there have been others. Many, many others.”

  The faces all looked up at him. He’d caught their attention. But first he wanted to review the chronology of the facts as he had reconstituted them, which differed from the order in which the police had discovered them.

  “Stéphane Abad killed his wife on December 23, and it was on the same day that Jean-Paul Casty beat his wife. Thus they are the first proven targets. Then we have Didier Valls on December 29 and Bastien Gali on January 2 . . . Each time, the first contact between the informer and his targets goes back to only a few days before the events.”

  “But according to you, there are other cases?” Joan Llach asked impatiently.

  Gilles nodded.

  “We came across these four cases by chance, and it is absolutely improbable that chance gave us an exhaustive list of the corbeau’s crimes. And moreover . . .”

  Sebag joined his hands in front of his mouth.

  “And moreover, that would presuppose that our individual was successful every time.”

  “Successful?” Julie exclaimed. “What do you mean by that?”

  Sebag pointed his joined index fingers toward his colleagues.

  “Watch out, here we’re leaving the facts for simple suppositions. But I think that in fact our corbeau is not acting simply for the pleasure of settling scores with unfaithful women; he’s hoping that his revelations will lead to tragedies.”

  Ménard frowned.