Bred to Kill

by Franck Thilliez

Sharko thought of the weaker members of a school of fish. Terney had tried to pass the same message, but from a genetic viewpoint.

  “And yet, you let him continue to see Daniel,” he said.

  “At first I tried to put a stop to their relations. But Daniel was so unhappy, and his seizures got worse. Terney, by communicating through numbers and letters, brought him something important. I think that, deep down, he really loved him. DNA was the key to the lock that kept Daniel prisoner, and Terney gave him that key. So I turned a blind eye, but believe me, I was no fan of Terney’s. Now that he’s gone, I have to admit I’m a bit sad, because I don’t know what will become of Daniel . . .”

  Sharko looked at the young autistic, who got up, set down his pen in a corner, and took a new one from the can. He looked over the shelves and shelves of blank books, most of which would never be filled. In that illogical spiral, he suddenly had an intuition.

  “Has Daniel read The Key and the Lock?”

  “It’s his bedtime reading, so to speak. He looks through it almost every evening, tirelessly . . .”

  Sharko and Levallois exchanged a brief glance, as the director continued:

  “But ‘read’ isn’t exactly the right word, as I’m sure you’ve realized. Naturally, he doesn’t understand the eugenicist sentiments, nor the words themselves. It’s hard to explain briefly how his mind works, but . . . he scans through every book he gets his hands on as a series of letters, so to speak. To oversimplify, let’s say that connections light up in his head, that groupings immediately take on color before his eyes when he’s reading a text. At a glance he could let you know that a given page contains fifty instances of the letter e, without being able to tell you what that page is about.”

  Sharko quietly squeezed his fists.

  “I’d very much like to see that copy.”

  The director nodded.

  “It’s carefully put away in his room, always in the same place. I’ll be right back.”

  He disappeared down the hall.

  “It’s terrifying,” murmured Levallois. “We do nothing but complain, and this kid who’s barely twenty is going to spend the rest of his life here, in this room.”

  “Mental illness is a slow poison.”

  Sharko moved closer to Daniel. The young man’s shoulders hunched a bit tighter when he felt the presence behind him, like a cat on the defensive, but he didn’t stop writing. His right thumb and index finger were deformed, bony. He held the pen the way you hold a screwdriver handle. The inspector would have liked to reassure the young man, rest a hand on his shoulder, give him a little human warmth, but he didn’t.

  Audebert returned. Sharko took the copy of The Key and the Lock and leafed through it attentively. Entire pages contained only DNA sequences, from which Terney derived his theses. There were no marginal notes by Daniel, but Sharko saw that certain pages were dog-eared, more worn than the others. For instance, page 57. At the top was written: “Consider, for instance, the following DNA sequence.” Below it, several hundred A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s succeeded one another to form a series. What amazed the inspector was not that senseless group of letters, but rather the fact that every one of them, without exception, had been underlined by Daniel, just as in volume one of the encyclopedia of life. He showed the page to Vincent Audebert.

  “Can you tell me why he did that?”

  Audebert squinted.

  “I’d never paid attention . . . But . . . He underlines whatever differs from the reference genome. With the computer, he can do research into the genome . . . Perhaps he looked up that sequence on the Genoscope Web site and couldn’t find it? If that was the case, he might well have underlined all of it.”

  Sharko turned more pages. And found it again. Pages 141, 158, 198, 206, 235, then 301 . . . Always prefaced by: “Consider, for instance, the following DNA sequence,” and always underlined. Daniel had been diligent.

  Levallois moved toward volume two, opened it, leafed through a few pages, and shrugged . . .

  “I don’t get it. You say there’s just an occasional difference between individuals. One discrepancy every thousand or two thousand letters. How could Daniel have underlined so many successive differences?”

  “Stéphane Terney might have written completely random sequences, just as examples. Or else . . .”

  The director appeared disturbed. He thought for a few moments, then suddenly snapped his fingers.

  “. . . or else I have another possible explanation.”

  He took back the book and looked through it carefully.

  “Because of Daniel and Stéphane Terney, I had to do a lot of studying up on DNA, to keep up with them. I know which parts of the molecule correspond to such rapid, grouped, and extensive changes in the sequences. They’re called microsatellites.”

  He nodded toward the encyclopedia of life.

  “One day, Daniel will write pages on which hundreds, even thousands of successive letters will be underlined, just like here, before everything becomes normal again. Those will be microsats. Your forensic technicians use them every day in DNA analysis, because they’re like fingerprints. They’re unique to each individual, and they’re always located in the same place in the genome.”

  Sharko and Levallois again looked at each other, amazed.

  “So these microsatellites could serve as genetic fingerprints,” said the inspector.

  The director nodded vigorously.

  “Exactly. Gentlemen, I believe seven different genetic fingerprints have been hidden in this book, in the midst of other, harmless data. Seven barcodes of seven individuals who might exist on this planet.”

  25

  The two cops had rushed into the forensic lab on Quai de l’Horloge. The place was divided into different departments, such as Toxicology, Ballistics, and Document Analysis. A concentration of technology, a labyrinth of machines each more costly than the last, which analyzed blood, cigarette butts, explosives, hair follicles, you name it. Confessions extracted through science.

  Jean-Paul Lemoine, the head of the molecular biology lab, was waiting for them in a narrow office. Age about forty, with short blond, almost gray, hair and heavy eyebrows to match. His job, and that of his team, was to operate huge machines, such as thermal cyclers and sequencers, which copied, cut up, and analyzed bits of DNA.

  He offered the two men a seat, looking a bit embarrassed.

  “Microsatellites . . . Your man is right. They were buried in the mass of information that book contains. We’d probably have found them eventually, but lord knows after how many days, or weeks.”

  He looked at the open book in front of him.

  “In any case, it was clever of him to hide genetic codes in a published book. When it came out, Terney sent unsolicited copies to universities and prominent scientists. A kind of propaganda for eugenics behind a smokescreen of mathematical data.”

  He slid the book toward Sharko.

  “What else can I tell you? The exact procedure we use to establish a genetic profile?”

  “Not really, no. We came here to see if we could start a search for the seven genetic fingerprints in the national database.”

  That had been Sharko’s idea. The French national DNA database, or FNAEG, stored genetic information on everyone who’d been convicted of a sex crime since 1998, and since 2007 they’d been able to add almost every offender that the police had ever brought in for questioning. A match between DNA in the database and DNA found on a crime scene could pinpoint a suspect.

  Lemoine looked skeptical.

  “Uh . . . I’d have to enter the letters of the sequences into the computer by hand—normally it’s all automated. We usually get a saliva sample to analyze, or clothing with sperm on it; we put the sample in the machine and the individual’s barcode comes up. But here, we don’t have any samples, just . . . paper. Look at these pages, you saw as well
as I did: a genetic fingerprint can run up to a thousand letters. It would take hours to enter all that, and that’s assuming there isn’t a single mistake. It would take a huge amount of concentration, and we’d have to do it seven times over. I was already up all night working on this, and I’ve kind of had it.”

  He shrugged sheepishly. He obviously had only one wish right now, and that was to go home.

  “You know, Inspector, the FNAEG contains less than a million and a half genetic profiles of defendants, not even two percent of the French population. That’s French, Inspector, not worldwide. And besides, there’s no guarantee the genetic fingerprints in this book are even real. They could be . . .”

  “People have been killed over this,” Sharko interrupted. “These fingerprints are real, I’d stake my life on it. Terney put them in his book and established a friendship with an idiot savant so that one day, if anything happened to him, people would find out. Even if Daniel Mullier hadn’t been present at the crime scene, it’s obvious we would have found him eventually, one way or another. He was like . . . like a key, meant to open this particular lock. Please—just do it.”

  After a moment’s reflection, the scientist set down his empty cup and acquiesced with a faint groan.

  “All right. I’ll try. I’ll need someone to read it to me as I type.”

  He picked up the book and handed it to Sharko, who passed it to Levallois.

  “You’re on. I didn’t sleep last night and my eyes are burning.”

  Levallois grunted. “Do I look like I got much sleep?”

  With a sigh, the lieutenant sat down next to Lemoine.

  “Most of all, there can be no mistakes,” the scientist warned him. “I’ll tell you where to start.” He circled a specific letter. “Okay, begin reading from here. Slowly but steadily.”

  “AATAATAATAATGTCGTC . . .”

  Levallois began reading while Lemoine typed. After about twenty minutes, he breathed a sigh of relief—“Finished!”—and the biologist hit Enter. They waited a few seconds. The first genetic fingerprint was instantly compared with the millions of others stored on secure servers.

  A phrase appeared onscreen: “No matches found.” Disappointment showed on their faces.

  “First fingerprint unknown. It looks like your theory doesn’t pan out, Inspector. Shall we quit?”

  “Keep going.”

  They started up again. Second fingerprint: no match. Coffee, a cigarette for Levallois, a lot of pacing for Sharko. Third fingerprint: no match. Fourth fingerprint . . . purring of the processors, hum of the fan. Lemoine’s eyes widened.

  “I don’t believe it. We’ve got one!”

  Sharko leaped from his chair and rushed across the room. Lemoine read aloud what the screen had brought up. First and last name, date of birth.

  “Grégory Carnot. Born January 1987.”

  Sharko felt as if he’d taken a bullet in the gut. Levallois stared at the screen as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Good Christ, what does that mean?”

  “Do you know him?” asked the scientist.

  The young lieutenant nodded.

  “The girl who was murdered, at the start of this investigation—she went to see him in prison. At least, I think she did.”

  He looked Sharko in the eye.

  “Am I wrong, Franck? Eva Louts did go to see Carnot, didn’t she? He was on that list of prisoners, wasn’t he?”

  Sharko anxiously placed his hand on the other’s shoulder.

  “Go stretch your legs a bit, I’ll take over from here.”

  “Your eyes look like raisins. You can’t make a single mistake. Sure you can do this?”

  “What do you think I am, brain-dead?”

  Levallois got up from his seat. The inspector sat down, eyes glued to Carnot’s genetic profile. Why had Terney hidden the killer’s identity in his book? What was the relation between the two men? He shook his head and concentrated on the letters as if on a crossword puzzle.

  “Shall we?” said the biologist.

  “Let’s get started.”

  Sharko began reciting the rows of letters, meticulously following them with his index finger. Inwardly, he struggled not to slip into distraction. Lemoine typed in silence. The hands of the clock slowly advanced.

  Fifth profile: unknown. Levallois returned with three cups of coffee from the vending machine. Unfortunately, the sixth didn’t yield any results either. The men took a breather. Sharko yawned and rubbed his eyes; Lemoine cracked his knuckles, at wits’ end.

  “Come on, one more, before our brains give out.”

  On the seventh and last profile, the result sent back by the FNAEG exploded in their faces.

  Results found.

  But it gave no name or photo. Lemoine clicked on the link for more details.

  “The record was sealed by the police. It’s a trace that’s been in the system for only three days, unidentified. Which means . . .”

  Sharko sighed, rubbing both hands over his face.

  “. . . that it’s from DNA gathered at a crime scene, but that its owner hasn’t been arrested yet,” he completed. “It also means that the perpetrator has probably committed his first serious crime, since he wasn’t in the database before. I think I know the answer, but can you tell me what sort of crime we’re dealing with here?”

  The biologist answered in a blank voice.

  “Homicide.”

  26

  Lucie is floating just above the ground. Her body glides forward without her feet touching the floor, as if she’s being carried by a divine breath, cold and silent. She tries to turn her head, but a kind of neck brace with huge blinkers holds it firm. Her anxious gaze finally latches on to a small square of light piercing the uniform darkness. A storm rumbles loudly, the earth trembles, and the next second a torrent of heavy objects rains down from the skies. Vases . . . Thousands of identical vases come smashing around her in a din like the end of the world. Oddly, none of the projectiles hits her, as if she were protected by a shield. The invisible breath grows stronger and Lucie’s form slices through the deluge and rises higher off the ground, until it enters the blinding light. She squeezes her eyes shut in pain, until the brightness softens and her vision slowly returns. Now she’s floating above hundreds of autopsy tables, aligned horizontally and vertically. The corpses laid out on them are also all identical. Small, naked, unrecognizable. And charred . . . Their faces are a portrait of agony. As for their bodies . . . an arid land . . .

  At the exact center of all those dead, Lucie notices that one of the children seems to be in a different position: instead of lying alongside its body, its hands are folded over its volcanic chest, with something in them. Lucie shifts her weightless form toward it, gives a slight jerk that enables her to move fluidly and uniformly through the air. She comes closer, while a smell of burning wafts up like a solar flare. Suddenly the child’s eyelids snap open, revealing two black pits of horror. Lucie screams without any sound escaping her mouth. She tries to turn back, but her body continues to glide through the air, inexorably bringing her closer to the abyss of those eyes. She finally sees what the child is holding: a vase, exactly the same as the ones raining down outside. The black eye, the left one, is now as huge as a tornado. Lucie feels incapable of fighting it and lets herself be sucked in. The child holds out the vase to her, which she grasps just as the eye swallows her . . . And she falls, screaming . . .

  • • •

  Lucie started awake in a sweat, a shout on the edge of her lips. At the borderline of consciousness, she opened her eyes. The walls, the ceiling, the minimal decoration . . . For a few seconds, she wondered where she was; then her thoughts gelled. L’Haÿ-les-Roses, Sharko, their late-night conversation . . . followed by a black hole.

  Rumpled clothes . . . disheveled hair . . . socks on the floor . . . She sat up, still shaken.
Not a week went by without all those dead children coming to haunt her. Always the same scenario, every time, leading her irrevocably to an endless free fall into that same eye. She knew the dream was trying to tell her something. The vases probably had something to do with the flaw in Clara’s iris; the improbable rain indicated that she had to open her eyes, pay attention to those vases. But why?

  “Franck? Are you here?”

  No answer. She glanced at her watch. Good lord, almost nine o’clock. She lunged for her cell phone. Messages. Her mother was worried at not hearing from her. She immediately called to reassure her, tell her everything was fine.

  On the phone, she had a hard time finding the right words to explain why she wouldn’t be coming straight home without rousing her mother’s incomprehension, and her anger. In answer to her improvised explanation, harsh words flew from the other end of the line: How could Lucie let herself sink back into the nightmare that had shattered her life? Carnot, that human waste, was dead, dead and buried—why couldn’t she just let him lie? Why did she have to keep chasing ghosts? Where had she spent the night? And so on and so forth. Five minutes of letting her vent.

  Without losing her temper, Lucie asked how Juliette was. Had her mother brought her to school that morning? Was the little girl getting along well with her new classmates?

  Marie answered with a few curt yeses, then hung up.

  Lucie thought to herself that, deep down, her mother was right. She had never been capable of establishing a stable, complete relationship with her daughters. To give them the love of a real mother. Her job as a cop had been both cause and excuse. She needed to miss her girls to really feel her love for them; she wanted to see the absolute worst around her, track down the vilest scum, so that she could come home from work at the end of her tether and realize how lucky she was to have a real family to cherish.

  But since the tragedy, Lucie had had to confront another, less tolerable truth: she had never loved Clara as much as she did now. And when, in her eyes, Juliette became Clara, she gave her all her affection. But when Juliette remained Juliette . . . Sometimes Lucie was filled with love for her, and at other times . . .