The City of Blood

by Frédérique Molay

  “And you’ve never wanted to go back to it?”

  “It’s not my husband’s cup of tea, and that suits me.”

  “So you lost both your fiancé and your art. Two parts of yourself. Is there anything left of your twenties?”

  “What business is that of yours?” she asked abruptly.

  “When he disappeared, Jean-Baptiste was surprisingly successful,” Nico said, ignoring her anger. “Both in Paris and in New York. It makes me wonder. People had to be jealous of his success. Without his father, he probably wouldn’t have catapulted to fame quite as easily.”

  “There’s always backstabbing. But I was too young to pay any attention, and Jean-Baptiste had real talent. Nobody denied that. The art critics in New York praised him to heaven.”

  “And you? Nothing in New York or Paris?”

  “I had plenty of time ahead of me. That was what I felt.”

  “But not now?”

  “I just told you that I’m busy with other things.”

  “Did Jean-Baptiste get along with his father?”

  “With Samuel?” Lara Krall asked, puzzled. “He loved him! He wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. His dream was to have a career as rich and brilliant as Samuel’s. He just wanted his father to be proud of him.”

  Nico set the pictures on the table. Lara winced.

  “Who took these pictures of the group?”

  “Daniel Vion. He’s not in any of the pictures, though. He didn’t like being in front of the camera.”

  “Who are the friends around you?”

  “These two are Jérôme Dufour and Michel Géko. To their right are Nathan Sellière and Sophie Bayle. Laurent Mercier and Camille Frot were seeing each other.”

  Nico pulled out the portraits of Jean-Baptiste Cassian. Lara’s eyes grew wide. She started breathing quickly.

  “What’s wrong?” Nico asked.

  “Well… It’s just that… I haven’t seen him since… I put all that behind me, you know.”

  “I understand. Were these taken by Daniel?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen these pictures.”

  “They’re awfully intimate, don’t you think? I even thought you might have been the one who took them,” Nico said pointedly.

  She sat up in her chair.

  “Do you remember the day Jean-Baptiste disappeared?”

  “We were planning to have dinner together at my studio, and he was going to spend the night. I waited, but he never came.”

  “You must have been worried.”

  She shrugged.

  “Had he let you down like that before?” Nico asked. “Did you have reason to believe something was keeping him elsewhere?”

  She pursed her lips.

  “He was seeing someone else, wasn’t he?”

  Lara sighed and looked down.

  “How did you figure it out?” Nico asked.

  “He didn’t seem to be attracted to me the way he was when we met. He wasn’t as excited when we made love. And it was less and less often.”

  “That’s all?”

  “There was one week when he seemed unusually secretive. He was nervous about my seeing him without his shirt on. Then I accidently went into the bathroom when he was there, and I found out why. He had a bite mark on his shoulder!”

  Nico shuddered. A bite on the shoulder. An implicitly sexual act.

  “I was livid. I wanted to know who the woman was.”

  “Which of your friends was he sleeping with? Sophie or Camille? Someone else?”

  “Neither of them! He swore that he could never touch another woman, that I was the only one, and that he loved me. He wanted to marry me. That wasn’t it.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “He said he had tried something else to experience different feelings.”

  “What was this different experience?”

  “A man.” Lara sighed again.

  “A man?”

  “Yes. I thought it was my fault. I wasn’t enough for him.”

  “Who was this man?”

  “Jean-Baptiste didn’t want to tell me. He swore that it was just a one-night stand. He could never have the same kind of love with this person that he had with me.”

  “And that explanation was enough for you?”

  “I was twenty-two years old. I loved him. I wasn’t ready to give up,” she said. Her voice was thick with emotion.

  “I read the police report on his disappearance. There was nothing about this.”

  “It was private.”

  “Did his parents know?”

  “I was the only one. There was no reason Jean-Baptiste would have told them. It didn’t mean anything.”

  “But he disappeared,” Nico said. “Mrs. Weissman, I’m sorry to tell you this. Jean-Baptiste is dead.”

  She was silent. “The skeleton,” she finally said.

  “Jean-Baptiste was murdered and buried in the tableau-piège. We think it’s possible that an argument got out of control.”

  “Are you implying that I might have had something to do with this? I loved him. We were engaged!”

  “But he had an affair, and it was with a man. That would raise questions in any other homicide investigation, don’t you think?”

  “But I had decided to keep his secret. I was ready to forget about it and move on.

  “Still, it was a betrayal.”

  “An artist has to have new experiences.”

  Nico decided not to press the matter.

  “How did he die?” she asked.

  “He was hit on the head with a hammer.”

  “My God! Who would do such a thing?”

  “One of your friends, out of jealousy?”

  “But we were all very close. We were so happy for Jean-Baptiste’s success.”

  “When did you meet Gregory Weissman?”

  “Five years after Jean-Baptiste’s disappearance. He didn’t know Jean-Baptiste or any of our friends.”

  “Very well. I don’t have any other questions right now. But I must ask you not to leave Paris until this crime has been solved. We’ll probably need to bring you in again.”

  Lara Weissman seemed lost, bereft. Either she was a very good actress, or her life had just taken another unexpected turn. Jean-Baptiste hadn’t just disappeared, hadn’t just left her behind, but had been murdered. He was dead.

  Fifteen minutes later, the chief of the Criminal Investigation Division took the preliminary report, which had been sitting on his desk, over to the prosecutor.

  Lormes flipped through it.

  “Opening an investigation to find the date and exact cause of death seems appropriate. We can’t investigate a specific person for murder, due to the statute of limitations, but lifting the veil on this affair is certainly in order. Jean-Baptiste Cassian’s disappearance has been a mystery all these years and has caused his parents to suffer. I hope we’ll be able to tell them exactly when and how he died. And perhaps the investigation will shed some light on the murderer.”

  “I agree.”

  “Only three days have gone by since the skeleton was discovered, and you’ve determined the probable cause of death and the victim’s identity. Well done, Chief. At this point, some of my colleagues would consider the investigation more or less resolved. No point in finding the murderer or determining the motives. I don’t share that opinion. I believe you’ll be able to get to the bottom of this, and I have faith in the magistrate who’ll make the final decision.”

  Nico left the prosecutor’s office and headed toward Claire Le Marec’s.

  “Where are you with Maurin?”

  “We were putting the finishing touches on the victim’s profile and trying to unearth the trail.”

  “What do you have?” Claire Le Marec asked.

  A deal, Nico said to himself. His mother’s life in exchange for a promise to find Jean-Baptiste Cassian murderer. And that person could possibly be the one who murdered the young man in the Leitner Cylinder. But he couldn
’t tell Le Marec about that.

  “Jean-Baptiste Cassian had cheated on his fiancée with a man before he disappeared. According to Lara Krall, it was a one-time experience, something that he did to expand himself artistically. Nobody else knew.”

  The eighties, the glitzy decade that saw the rise of MTV, consumerism, and a new generation of dance clubs, had also seen the stirrings of public acceptance of gay and lesbian love. Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” were both hits. In 1981, a huge gay-pride parade had taken place in the streets of Paris to press François Mitterrand to lower the age of consent for gays and lesbians. And in 1993, Philadelphia was released. It was the first mainstream Hollywood movie to speak out against homophobia and acknowledge HIV/AIDS. Tom Hanks won an Academy Award for his performance, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” also won an Oscar. Still, many gays and lesbians in the eighties and nineties feared revealing their sexuality to their parents and closest friends. And some were still grappling with the issue of their sexuality. It couldn’t have been easy, Nico thought, for a twenty-two-year-old who had just been thrust into the spotlight alongside his father to admit to himself and others that he was gay.

  “What are you thinking about?” Le Marec asked.

  Nico set the photos of Jean-Baptiste on the table.

  “His lover bit him on the shoulder.”

  “And?”

  The door opened. “We’ve got a problem,” Commander Charlotte Maurin said quietly.

  Someone just turned on the fan.

  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.

  15

  “I have a theory about the killer’s ritual,” Nico said quickly. “The Butcher of Paris—t
hat’s what the reporters are calling him—cuts away part of the left shoulder of his victims because he’s bitten them but doesn’t want to leave any trace evidence.”

  Gathered in his office, Claire Le Marec, Jean-Marie Rost, David Kriven, and Charlotte Maurin were listening.

  “There’s a sexual component to this act,” he added.

  “Have you talked with Dominique Kreiss?” Le Marec asked.

  “I’ve just called her. She’s coming.”

  “Good idea,” Kriven said. Nico stifled a smile. Kreiss had gently suggested that he consider working on his marriage, and even though Kriven had agreed that he loved his wife and would take to heart the psychologist’s advice, he still had a crush on Kreiss. No harm, no foul.

  Kreiss came in, greeted everyone, and took a seat at the table with the others.

  “Bites are most commonly associated with murder and sexual-assault cases,” she began. “We also see it in child-abuse cases. Some well-known serial killers, including Ted Bundy, have bitten their victims. A killer who bites tends to enjoy degrading his victim. He may pick any fleshy part of the body, such as the buttocks or the stomach. A female victim is often bitten on the breast or the inside of her thighs. When it’s a man preying on another man, the biting most frequently occurs on the back, arms, shoulders, face, or scrotum. Fritz Haarmann, also known as the Butcher of Hanover, murdered his male victims by biting them on the neck. Coincidentally, female killers have been known to bite, although it’s not as common. Stephanie Lazurus, a former Los Angeles police detective, bit her ex-lover’s new girlfriend before killing her.”

  “Were the victims in these two new slayings gay?” Kriven asked.

  “Yes, it appears that both of them were,” Maurin said.

  “There’s actually some news about that,” Rost said. “This was online at SOS Homophobia, the antihomophobia association.”

  He pulled a piece of paper out of his folder and put it on the table. Everyone leaned over to read it. “Safety alert—Parc de la Villette—Paris: SOS Homophobia has received reports of knife attacks in the Parc de la Villette and its immediate environs. Two have died. We ask people in the area to be extremely vigilant and to report anything suspicious to authorities. If you’ve been assaulted, call our hotline, or contact us through our website.”