by Mallock;
“Jesus, Bob. Did they keep the footage? Yes or no?”
“Er—no. It’s that goddamn Information Commissioner’s Office. You know we can’t—”
“Fine,” interrupted Mallock. “Do the best you can. But get back to me with something solid, or stay down there. The cold keeps things fresh.”
Bob turned around to take the Pont Saint-Michel back toward the square—a square which, just a few months later, would witness true horror.3
Back at the department, the big digital clock read 9:39 in the morning. Amédée put a call in to Dublin’s office. Geraldine, his new secretary, picked it up. “I’m sorry, but he won’t be back until the end of the day. Can I do anything for you, Monsieur le Superintendent?”
Mallock asked her if she wouldn’t mind coming to pick up the yellow personal binder that Dublin had left with him. He didn’t want it lying around anymore.
After hanging up, he noticed that RG had left another report on his desk. On a fluorescent pink Post-it note on the top he had written:
“Hi Mallock, this is another little study that I had done confidentially by an independent profiler. I only showed him one case just to be safe, but in my opinion the craziest, most significant cases are bodies ten and eleven. Talk to you soon.”
A second later, Mallock was reviewing the photos of the victims. The one he was looking for was in the file Dublin had loaned him. He opened it and was plunged once again into the same morbid stupefaction it had aroused in him last time.
The photo showed a man of a certain age, undoubtedly a vagrant. His Goya-like face was covered with a long, patchy beard, which his killer had taken the time to comb. His long hair had been subjected to the same treatment. All of his hair had been heavily sprayed so it would stay in a strange arrangement. His face was covered with cosmetics: pink powder on the apples of his cheeks; blue in the hollows of them—but no black kohl lining his eyelids as with the others. This time the Makeup Artist had lined the eyes with red lipstick, creating the dramatic effect of a bloody gaze. The man’s dirty, skeletal body was completely nude, his back arched, laid out across the lap of a woman whose body was seated on a bench. Dressed in Chanel and drenched with perfume, she was adorned with a mass of gold necklaces and brooches. Her pink hands, smothered in rings, were posed atop the exsanguinated body of the poor tramp, who had been stripped of everything, except maybe his head lice.
The report specified that the jewelry had been taken from the previous murder victims, which was proof of the link Grimaud and Mordome had established between the different cases.
The Makeup Artist had covered the tramp’s entire body in three shades of blue, emphasizing the victim’s thinness by focusing on the hollow parts. In addition to his eyes, he had put lipstick on the man’s penis, and the scarlet cock was screaming out its obscene nudity.
Mallock had already seen these photos, but he was stunned by them all over again. This was a descent from the cross as the Renaissance might have painted it; as could be seen in multiple interpretations in prayer books and religious images. But here, it was grotesque. Blasphemous.
He put the photo down and then turned it over before starting to read the report, which was a hopeless attempt at profiling:
This is most likely a man. A psychopath in the full clinical sense of the term. He may very well be an only son. He would be between thirty and forty-five years old. Highly complex, physically ugly, short, or ill-proportioned; he wants to make others suffer the way he has suffered, in reality or fantasy. He lives alone or with one of his parents, father or mother. Whether they are living or dead, they both play the central role in the disturbance to which he is subject.
Same diagnosis if it is a woman, with the addition of a conflict with her own homosexual impulses, consecutive to the preceding. Very importantly, he or she is much too ill not to be already on medication. Due to this, he cannot remain socialized.
I also believe there is a close but highly problematic relationship with the church and religion, concepts of God and the Devil. We’re talking about a true theological conflict here. Suffering and his religious “good deeds” are part of and all-consuming in the obsessive expression of his libido. What we call “retribution” in the Catholic church seems to play a major role in his staging of scenes. Are his victims suffering for his own salvation, or that of all humanity? The double spectacle of the rich woman and the tramp can be read in different ways. The money is the blood of Christ; it gives life. Poverty is a state of death. But wealth is also a curse in terms of reversibility. If rich people have lived thanks to the blood of the poor, the needy man is redemption for humanity. He is Christ. In short, the person responsible for staging this scene belongs to the upper class, which he sees as damnation.
There will have been signs in his early childhood typical of this type of sociopath: cruelty toward animals, pyromania, and bed-wetting. Of course, multiple scenarios and other alternative archetypes may also be imagined. You will find them in order of probability in the next part of my analysis. But, more fundamentally, the crime scene photo you gave me to study leads me to recommend that you look for what we might call a kind of “theological revolutionary.” A man who is beyond tormented, in whom the power of mysticism may also allow him to create a group of followers—even, for example, if we stick to the mystical Christianization of the individual, twelve apostles, recruited to his terrible cause.
Mallock put the document down, thinking. The report confirmed his own impressions—but it also contained useful reminders, like the ideas of necessary medication and abusive religion. And then there was the idea that the killer might be wealthy. Amédée was impressed. With nothing to go on but the snapshot of the well-to-do woman and the tramp, the expert had come up with the theory of a Makeup Artist and his twelve apostles. It was a way of illustrating his suggestions, of course, but the preciseness of the image had particularly struck him.
He was still thinking of the twelve embers in his fireplace, and the attack he had suffered. Twelve apostles; twelve accomplices! A nightmare.
He dialed RG’s number. Even if his colleague hadn’t been able to get results, he had definitely had some good flashes of insight. He wanted to make sure Grimaud knew that, because he knew how bad the man felt. Mallock’s keeping him updated would help him get over it. Amédée let the phone ring seven times, but Raymond wasn’t there. He would call him back.
Just then Geraldine, Dublin’s secretary, knocked timidly and poked her head through the door, as if to say, Friend! Don’t shoot! I mean no harm to your planet!
“Come in, Geraldine. Would you like a coffee?”
Visibly intimidated, the secretary stammered a polite refusal, miring herself in a variety of excuses. “I—I don’t . . . my stomach . . . I’ve already had one . . . heartburn . . . ”
She tiptoed toward the desk for her boss’s file. An inveterate old joker, Mallock couldn’t resist standing up suddenly, slapping his desk, and bellowing: “Well, I’m going to have one!”
Geraldine jumped at least a meter backward, emitting a sort of Aaaaarrrgh! that made Mallock roar with laughter. He moved toward her and handed her the file. “Don’t listen to the rumors,” he said. “I only devour secretaries during leap years, and never the ones who work for my boss. That irritates him, and then I don’t get a promotion.”
This managed to coax a smile out of the young woman. “I’ve only just started,” she said.
“And Dublin told you not to upset me, because I’m a pain in the ass,” Mallock finished. The girl nodded uncomfortably. Amédée grinned at her. “That’s one of his favorite jokes when he has a new secretary. It’s kind of like hazing. Nothing nasty.”
“But I have to say that you are just a bit frightening,” she said.
Mallock escorted her to his office door, unable to think of any reply to this observation. Ten minutes later he was still thinking about it. He hated the idea that he mi
ght be frightening—especially to pretty young women.
Focus. Calm down. He treated himself to a few puffs on a lovely heather pipe, which had been a gift from MM—Queen Margot—and stood up to crack the window. The sky outside was dark and mouse-grey, a lowering ceiling made up of thousands of leaden clouds covering the city. Though he was only in a shirt, Amédée realized that he wasn’t really cold. The temperature had risen a bit. As if to confirm his thought, it began to snow. He grabbed the large pair of binoculars that he always kept in the office. He had never stopped learning Paris, looking lovingly around him at all of its splendors, at different times of day and in different seasons, different lighting. He directed his gaze toward the Louvre, one of his favorite spots.
As he let his binoculars glide over the rooftops and the first flakes of snow attempting to settle on them, an idea occurred to him. He knew—even before it happened—that he was about to have one of his flashes. What had he seen that was noteworthy?
The snow was coming down heavily now, a vertical curtain of white marbles. His view was blocked; nothing to be done about that. He set down the binoculars, a smile hovering on his lips despite everything. This kind of weather made him as happy as a little boy.
He suddenly remembered the syringe Ken had found under the body at Saint-Mandé. He began to pace around his office. Why was he thinking of that again now? It must be something he had seen in the distance, near the Louvre. But what? On his thirteenth lap around the room the light clicked on.
The telescopic streetlamps on the Pont du Carrousel!
They needed to search not around, but inside the syringe, on the part of the shank that remained sunk in the body of the instrument. For safety reasons, after the AIDS scare, the needle and the plunger retracted inside the syringe in recent models.
He called the lab. In their urgency, they might overlook it. They had just received it, marked number thirty-four among the items of evidence.
“We’ll do what we have to and call you back.”
His pipe had gone out. Mallock looked at the radiator, wondering if he should relight it.
How many Parisians knew that the Carrousel streetlamps were telescopic, composed of two parts, and that they got taller at night so the bridge would be better lit? Like four gigantic vertical syringes. One day, an eternity ago, the Beaux-Arts students had stuck up hundreds of posters and splattered paint on the upper parts of the lamp posts during the night. Mallock, a uniform cop at the time, still laughed about their expressions the next morning, when they believed all their work had disappeared, not realizing that the streetlamps were almost half again as short. The next night, when the four obelisks had extended again and revealed the students’ handiwork, the cleaners had come with their ladders to clean it all up.
Amédée would never have believed that this student misadventure might help him one day to solve a serial crime.
11.
Thursday afternoon, December 30th
At lunchtime, after checking with Bob, Ken, and Francis on the status of their tasks, Mallock went back toward Saint-Mandé to finish off his observations. Ken had left a copy of the caretaker’s keys on his desk.
Outside, the snow had slowed traffic to a crawl, and it took Amédée a good hour to reach the crime scene. The guard on duty outside the house stopped stamping his frozen feet for warmth and saluted. The back garden was completely white; the house dark and silent. On the staircase leading down to the site of the tragedy, friends and neighbors had left flowers, sympathy notes. A little girl’s doll.
Mallock crossed the square of snow carefully, so as not to slip. The flakes were falling heavily again, trying to cover up the unspeakable. Just then, his mobile phone rang. He stopped in the middle of the garden to answer it.
“Mallock.”
“Yes, hello, this is Chief inspector Camille Sart, Superintendent Grimaud’s right-hand man. You tried to call him?”
“Yes; actually, I wanted to update him a bit on the case. Is he there?”
There was an embarrassed silence. “Well, no. In fact, that’s why I’m calling you. We haven’t heard from him.”
Mallock stood frozen, letting snowflakes settle on him.
“He’s vanished. He’s not married; I don’t know what to do, or whom to call.”
The police, dickhead, thought Mallock. “Call Dublin,” he said instead, “and keep me informed.”
RG had disappeared. The last time Mallock had seen him, he had asked him to finish his investigation concerning the composition of the cocktail of drugs the killer had used. Was there a link? Had the facts taken him too close to the monsters? Raymond had the build to defend himself, but no one is invincible. Mallock stood openmouthed for a few seconds, thinking, before realizing that he was looking increasingly like a snowman built in the middle of the garden.
“I’m waiting for your next move, you bastard,” he murmured.
After shaking himself thoroughly free of snow, he entered the house. Ken had told him that Modiano, the unfortunate head of the family, had been hospitalized. The house was empty and bleak, inhabited only by the filthiness of tragedy, the lingering smells of a double crime. It was intensely cold; the heating had been turned off, and the windows left half-open in the hope that the air might freshen the atmosphere. Mallock walked around the living room, his gaze taking in the many objects of a normal life destroyed. He lit a cigar, as much because it helped him think as to block out the stench of the place.
The idea of breathing in the odor of the dead little girl was unbearable.
He paced back and forth, unable to go up the stairs. He needed to get used to the place. Get himself together. The objects around him were silent. But they had lived with the victims, and they had seen the murderer go by. They had even watched while he committed his monstrous acts. Didn’t they have anything to say? Mallock stared hard at them, as he would have done with recalcitrant witnesses. They were afraid, too, but of what?
He picked up an object, put it down, stroked another one, rested his hand for a long time on the wood of a table, tapped on the walls. He read the names of the films written on the spines of the DVDs and ancient VHS tapes. The titles of all the books on the shelves. Maybe a word would come back to him later. He also tried to work out whether anything might have been stolen. François Modiano hadn’t noticed anything missing, but was he really in a state to be sure about anything at all?
To make sure, Amédée had brought a series of photographs of the inside of the house, taken last year by Madame Modiano for insurance purposes in case of burglary or fire.
An hour later, with the help of the snapshots, Mallock was looking at a photo of what might very well have passed as the principal motive for theft: a tiny Russian icon, ancient and made of gold. On the insurance policy it had been protected with a separate value, because it was worth a lot more than the index. Later, a call to the insurance company would confirm the price of the thing: almost one hundred thousand euros. What if all of these terrible murders had been committed to hide a much more mundane crime?
They would never had looked at it from that angle, as overwhelmed with horror as they were.
Mallock poured himself a large whiskey, somewhat unnerved that there was no one to ask permission from. But he needed it. The idea that had just occurred to him was Machiavellian. What if all these killings were only a . . . diversion?
Upstairs the shutters were closed, and Mallock had to go to the window to open them. He wanted to be able to see everything, down to the smallest detail. In the bedroom, he sat down on the edge of the bed. Normally he would have avoided doing that, but there was only one chair and it was heaped with clothes, and his back was just too painful. He opened his file again, the one he had prepared with the photos and the insurance descriptions, and pulled out the CSI report.
Outside there were occasional footsteps squeaking in the snow, cars creeping by. No children runn
ing, no birds squawking. Inside, Mallock carefully read his file without skipping a single line.
When he finally rose, he took a kind of tiny lens out of his pocket, a highly powerful magnifying glass. Then, despite his back, this Parisian Sherlock Holmes got down on all fours. Half an hour later, he did the same thing in the little girl’s bedroom.
There were traces of scratches and perforation marks in the parquet floor. Mallock tested for the possible presence of blood. As always during the tours he made of the crime scene after the investigators had finished, he had brought his own little CSI kit. Provided and updated regularly by his friends at the INPS,4 it included three lamps, one of them ultraviolet; a micro-vacuum, and droppers of oxygenated water. This method, which made the blue of benzidine show up like in the movies, was not very reliable. Fruit juice can also give off dioxygen gas. But combining this with observation under ultraviolet light resulted at least in a chance of not being wrong. In any case, when Mallock returned to Number 36 he would have the lab verify everything. They practiced two methods: one using acid to obtain the elongated violet prisms of hematine hydrochloride; the other searching via spectroscopy for alkaline hemochromogen. Finally, to be absolutely sure that they were indeed dealing with human blood, they would cause antigen-antibody agglutination to occur by adding antihuman serum to the blood, itself diluted in a saline solution.
Hunched down on the floor, Mallock began moving his lamp and Q-tips beneath the window, around the spot where he had noticed the strange perforations that were also present in the little girl’s room. Under the magnifying glass he could see that the holes were recent and that they did not contain blood. Mallock also noticed that they were laid out in a triangle, but he decided not to draw any conclusions from that for the moment—not because he believed this detail was unimportant, but for the opposite reason.
An hour later he rose, aching but satisfied; his samples taken and his head full of new theories.