The day after her interview with Grégory Carnot.
The cop sat back in his chair, brushing his hair off his forehead. Just after Vivonne, Eva Louts had gone straight to the heart of the Alps. More than four hundred miles. What if the student was on the trail of something—an invisible breath that had driven her from the cities of Latin America to the highest mountains in Europe, when she was merely supposed to be studying lefties and righties from behind a desk? How had a simple study of hand dominance caused her to travel so much, and how had it led to such a violent death? What had pushed her to get close to scum like Carnot? And why was she planning to go back to Brazil?
Carnot. Sharko hated him more than anything in the world, and now, thanks to his investigation, he had the chance to confront him face-to-face. He wanted the murderer for himself, and for himself alone . . .
He clenched his teeth and let the bank statement fall to the floor. Then, with the tip of his shoe, he slid it under a file cabinet.
10
The sky was the color of mourning.
It was raining when the car with northern plates arrived in Vivonne—rain black as a swarm of flies, which had been hammering the windshield of the Peugeot 206 for a good fifteen miles and gave the illusion of a landscape with no end and no hope.
Lucie had stopped once to down a bitter coffee in a rest area and nibble on a few biscuits.
She looked at her watch. At exactly 4 p.m., they’d be burying a piece of garbage in the town cemetery of Ruffigny, about six miles from Poitiers. The town where Carnot had lived much of his life, going about his simple existence as a factory worker. Lucie wanted to see the ground swallow up the casket; she had a visceral need to see it. Her mother couldn’t understand it. She’d tried everything in the book to keep Lucie from coming to the burial, but too bad.
First, though, she needed some answers, and they were to be found behind these high walls in front of her, with their barbed wire and depressing gray tones. In the ultramodern prison where Grégory Carnot had killed himself.
True to his word, Captain Kashmareck had come through with the pass. At the reception check, where she was relieved of her keys, cell phone, and wallet, a guard pointed Lucie to the prison psychiatric ward. This was a special wing of the complex, its main functions being to detect psychological disturbances and provide the most troubled inmates with treatment. In recent years, the prisons of France had become veritable incubators of mental illness.
In silence, Lucie walked up a corridor lined with clean, modern individual cells, each one occupied by an inmate sprawled on his bed or sitting on the spotless linoleum. A rather calm atmosphere for a place tainted by madness; at most a few murmurs and groans. Indifferent eyes watched her pass; some prisoners dragged themselves to the bars of their cells to check her out and remind themselves what a woman looked like. Whatever their crimes, the circumstances of their imprisonment, they repulsed her. Every one of them, without exception, deserved to rot in hell.
She halted abruptly in front of an empty cell. Her chest tightened. Slowly she approached; her hands gripped the cold iron bars. The upside-down drawing Carnot had made was even more striking in real life than on the photos. It was a good five feet wide. A veritable colored fresco of clocklike precision. The sea, the foam of the waves, the sun . . . Lucie wondered if that filth hadn’t pushed perversity to the point of drawing the beach at Les Sables d’Olonne. The guard shoved his key into the lock of the heavy door in front of him.
“The doctor let him finish his drawing. We’d never seen anything like it here. He didn’t even bend his head over to draw upside down. It was more like . . . natural. Facilities will be here soon to paint it over. We want to forget all about Carnot, the quicker the better.”
He stood waiting. Lucie didn’t move.
“Well, uh, will you follow me, ma’am?”
Lucie spent a few more moments staring into the void, at the floor, clean as a hospital. It was easy to imagine Carnot in there, his monstrous body, his little sadist’s eyes. Easy to see him handling his felt markers, laughing or entertaining himself within these few square feet.
“Did he cry a lot? Did Grégory Carnot cry a lot?”
“No idea, ma’am. Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
Lucie slowly started walking. Through an airlock, the sharp clang of security bolts. Sounds that made you jump, that echoed on all sides, to the far corners of those endless hallways. Administrative offices in a row, all identical, before reaching the one for Francis Duvette, one of the psychiatrists in charge of the prisoners’ mental health. He was a man of around fifty, bald, with sallow skin and sunken cheeks. His workspace was buried under files and papers. Stacks and stacks up to the ceiling—the joys of French bureaucracy. Wearing a tight-fitting lab coat, he greeted Lucie and motioned her toward a chair.
“We’ve never met, Miss Henebelle. I wanted first and foremost to let you know that I was not trying to exonerate my patient from the horror of his crimes. But Grégory Carnot was in mental distress, and it was my duty to find the causes of that distress.”
Lucie nervously readjusted the hem of her suit. Before the tragedy, she had felt great respect for these psychiatrists, doctors, and caseworkers who dedicated their lives to improving those of others, and who were perhaps even more imprisoned than the prisoners themselves. But today, her view had changed: she would have preferred that this type of person didn’t exist.
“What kind of distress?” she asked.
“The kind that schizophrenics can feel when they cycle into delirium. Powerful hallucinations, spontaneous, uncontrolled acts of violence, of the most horrific sort. It was probably why he committed suicide. He’d become too aware of his suffering and was complaining of abominable head pain.”
“Carnot was schizophrenic?”
“I don’t think he was, that’s the strangest part. My patient had no bouts of depersonalization, the feeling that your body is breaking up. He had no hallucinations, didn’t see nonexistent people. The diagnostic I drew up didn’t really correspond to schizophrenia, more like a succession of delirious episodes. Despite everything, I remain convinced that his experiences of ‘seeing the world upside down’ were quite real, not hallucinations. His drawings are too detailed, too meticulous. Try drawing even a simple tree upside down, and you’ll see how hard it is.”
“If they weren’t hallucinations, what were they?”
“I’m not sure. To my knowledge, these symptoms are completely unknown in the medical literature. I was going to take MRIs of his brain activity. There might have been a real organic dysfunction, perhaps in the visual cortex or optic chiasma, the part of the brain where the optic nerves cross. Neurologists have already come across problems like hemianopsia, where the patient sees only half an image, for instance, but never anything like this.”
“Did they do an autopsy?”
“I’m sorry to say they didn’t. There was no question about the suicide. And you know, the rules are a bit different in prison. Carnot had been sentenced to thirty years, twenty-five of them in solitary. He didn’t exist anymore. And his adoptive parents . . . they didn’t request an investigation.”
He took a sheet of paper and sketched a diagram.
“The eye functions like a lens. The image of the outside world as it hits the retina is upside down. Then it’s the brain, in particular the visual cortex, that turns it right side up, in the direction of gravity. It’s quite possible that Carnot’s brain presented a real neurological dysfunction in that regard, which would have begun imperceptibly a little more than a year ago.”
“So before he kidnapped my children.”
“Indeed. He claimed he’d already made upside-down drawings on paper before he committed his acts. But as you know, a sheet of paper can be turned in any direction, so it’s hard to say if he was telling the truth. The fact remains that his headaches were growing wors
e exponentially over the past weeks.”
“And could the . . . the fact that these images were upside down, could that somehow have been related to his acts of violence? His brutality?”
Duvette seemed to be weighing every word.
“You know as much about Carnot’s past as I do, I imagine. Loving adoptive parents, both Catholic. A childhood as normal as any other kid’s. Mediocre student but generally well behaved. No psychiatric history, not many fights. In any case, given his size, no one bothered him much. At thirteen, he was already five foot eleven, a real force of nature. As his birth records are sealed, I wasn’t able to check his biological family’s medical history. That’s the only gap in the file. All we know is that Carnot was lactose intolerant: he couldn’t drink a drop of milk without experiencing intense vomiting and diarrhea. Often other inmates would slip a bit of milk into his food, just for the fun of seeing him suffer.”
“His suffering is the least of my concerns.”
Lucie couldn’t unwind. Her hands kneaded her thighs. Surely because of this prison, the atmosphere of madness and death floating over everything. She, too, had checked the past of the man who had killed her daughter. Born in Reims on January 4, 1987, and given up for adoption; taken in by a local couple, devoutly religious, around thirty years old at the time, who had later moved to the Poitou region because of a job transfer. When he was old enough, Carnot had taken a job in a factory in Poitiers that made ice cream cartons. A regular guy, always on time for work, everybody liked him. Until he committed his atrocity.
Lucie returned to the present, biting the insides of her cheeks. Every time she thought about the killer’s squeaky-clean past, she flew into a rage. She did not want Carnot’s responsibility for his crimes to be reduced in any way. Even dead, she wanted him to bear the weight of his actions, to carry it with him to the shores of hell.
“Even individuals with the nicest childhoods can become sick perverts,” she said sharply. “We’ve seen that enough times. You don’t need any anomalies in the brain or family history. You don’t need to have tortured little furry animals when you were young. Some of those murderers were ideal neighbors, the picture of innocence.”
“I’m well aware of that. But given the situation, I can only tell you what I know. Carnot had episodes of extreme aggressiveness, as well as visual disturbances and loss of balance, accompanied by severe head pain. Recently the two symptoms had been increasing in the same proportion. They might well be related. The brain is a complex machine and there’s still a lot about it we don’t know.”
Resigned, he lifted a thick sheaf of paper and released it like a brick.
“It’s all here in black and white. Carnot was suffering from something, which was getting worse every day, sort of like a cancer. If this had happened on the outside we probably would have had more clues, more sources of information. No doubt Carnot would have been given an MRI and a complete diagnostic workup a long time ago. But you know, in the prison system, everything gets slowed down by this damned paperwork and a crippling shortage of equipment. And now my patient is dead.”
Lucie leaned firmly over the desk.
“Let me ask you straight: do you think Grégory Carnot could have committed such horrors under the influence of some kind of mental disturbance? Do you think, a year after he went to prison, that we can question his responsibility? Do you believe the twelve jurors who judged him responsible for his actions were wrong?”
The man cleared his throat. His eyes left Lucie’s for a moment, then returned and held her gaze.
“No. At the time, he was fully aware of what he was doing.”
Lucie sat back a little in her chair, a hand to her lips. His answer didn’t satisfy her. Limp tone. No conviction. He was lying to avoid challenging the verdict and so that she’d leave mollified—she was sure of it.
“‘At the time’ . . . Are you just saying that to make me feel better? Is that really what you believe?”
He began moving stacks of papers, as if arranging his desk. He was doing everything he could to not meet her gaze.
“Absolutely. I’m telling you exactly what I told the cop who was here this morning. Carnot was responsible.”
Lucie knit her brow.
“A cop was here this morning? When?”
“Not two hours ago. Some cop from the Homicide bureau in Paris. He looked like he hadn’t slept in ages. I’ve got his card here—well, if you can call it a card. More like a piece of cardboard.”
He pulled open his drawer and took out a white rectangle, which he handed to Lucie.
It felt like a kick to the stomach.
On the card, written diagonally in ballpoint across the blank surface, was a name: Franck Sharko.
“Are you all right, Miss Henebelle?”
Lucie handed back the card with trembling fingers. She no longer had Sharko’s number in her cell phone. She had erased it a long time ago, along with any feelings she’d had for the detective. Or so she’d thought. Seeing that name again, here, now, so abruptly, under such circumstances . . .
“Homicide? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
A pause. Lucie couldn’t believe it.
“What did he want? What was Franck Sharko doing here?”
“Do you know him?”
“I used to.”
A curt answer that left no room for further comment. The psychiatrist let it drop and returned to the subject at hand.
“He asked me questions about Eva Louts, a student who had come to visit Grégory Carnot about ten days ago. From what the inspector told me, she’d been murdered.”
Everything was spinning too fast in Lucie’s head. Carnot was dead, but his ghost was still prowling around her. She thought of Franck Sharko. So he was still on the job but had left his position at the Violent Crimes unit and gone back to Homicide . . . Why hadn’t he just quit the whole damn thing, the way he’d promised before the twins were kidnapped? Why this return to the streets, guts, blood, starting over at point zero?
Shaken by the abrupt revelations, Lucie took a deep breath. She had to proceed calmly, methodically, like the cop she once had been.
First she asked questions about the circumstances of the crime. The psychiatrist passed along what the police inspector had told him: Eva Louts, found murdered in a primate research center near Paris. The bite mark on her face, the theft of files from her apartment. The fact that she’d requested meetings with violent criminals in different parts of France. Lucie tried to store away as much information as possible, to link various facts. In spite of her, her ex-cop’s brain had started working at top speed, and certain reflexes were already returning.
“Why? Why did Eva Louts want to meet these criminals?”
“Because they were all left-handed.”
He noticed how deeply his answer had troubled the woman, and explained further:
“Not to say that all criminals are left-handed, obviously, just that Louts had chosen only left-handers. And the most violent ones, who had killed under murky circumstances that they themselves usually couldn’t explain.”
“But . . . but why? What was the point?”
“For her thesis, I presume. When she came here, she wanted to question Carnot in detail, but he wasn’t really up for it, so I acted as intermediary. She wanted to know if his parents were left-handed. If they had made him use his left or right hand when he was a child. And a bunch of other questions that were only meant to establish statistics and form hypotheses. Did you know that most of the time Carnot was right-handed?”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“He ate and drew with his right hand, because his adoptive parents had forced him to be a right-hander, from what Louts told me. Since the dawn of time, being left-handed has always been considered a flaw, a curse or a mark of the devil, especially in the Middle Ages. Carnot was a false righ
ty, made to become one by the education his Catholic parents had given him.”
Lucie was silent a moment, lost in thought.
“And yet . . . he stabbed my daughter with his left hand. Sixteen stab wounds and not a trace of hesitation.”
Duvette stood up and poured them both some coffee in tiny cups. Lucie thought aloud:
“As if the fact of being left-handed was buried deep within him and had never left.”
“Precisely. That was the sort of detail that interested Eva Louts. It’s possible that left-handedness is ultimately genetic, and in certain circumstances there’s nothing education can do about it. I think that’s what the student was looking for when she came here.”
Lucie shook her head, eyes staring into the void.
“None of that sounds like a reason for her murder.”
“No, probably not. But there are two more things I can tell you. The first is that Louts wanted very badly to take away photos of Carnot’s face, supposedly to ‘remember him by’ when it came time to write her thesis. I gave her the mug shots from his file—they weren’t restricted. The second thing—and I don’t know if this has anything to do with left-handedness—but when Louts discovered the upside-down drawing on the wall of his cell, her behavior changed. She started asking me tons of questions about the genesis of the drawing. When had Carnot done it? Why? Was there some explanation? The fresco seemed to excite her.”
“Do you know why?”
“I don’t. But from then on, her attitude toward Grégory Carnot changed. After seeing the drawing, she looked at him with a kind of . . . fascination.”
Lucie shivered. How could anyone be fascinated by such a monster?
“She left without telling me much, and I never saw her again. Today I learned she’s dead. The whole thing is very strange.”
Lucie finished her coffee in silence, floored by these revelations. There was nothing more for her to say or do. She asked a few more routine questions, then thanked Duvette and left the prison. Outside, she collapsed onto the seat of her car and fished out the little semiautomatic pistol that she’d stashed in the glove compartment, next to an old pair of wool mittens and a handful of CDs she never listened to anymore. Handling the weapon did her good. The coldness of the barrel, the reassuring weight of the grip . . .
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