by Mallock;
The victims had been moved not once, but twice.
There was the attack location, which the CSIs had identified by residual blood traces. Then there were the beds where the Makeup Artist had arranged the bodies. But there was also a third place; undoubtedly the transitional place, where each victim had visibly spent time after having been drained of her blood, but before the macabre final staging.
It made sense to imagine the spot with the perforations in the floor was where the killer had engaged in his sexual activities with the victims—but in that case, the CSIs would have found traces of sperm, and they hadn’t found anything—anywhere—but a scant few hairs and epithelial cells.
So, what had he really done? What had he forced his victims to endure? What game had he played, here in this very spot?
Mallock couldn’t linger at the crime scene. He had dinner plans at six-thirty; a sort of pseudo–New Year’s Eve out in the suburbs. He left the house, feverish and exhausted. His head was spinning. Both his heart and his knees were filthy. Once again, the snow seemed to him like a blessing. Three children and their maman played in the street, laughing and throwing snowballs.
He looked up at the sky. He didn’t pray, but that was not because he didn’t believe in the wise man in the heavens. He was sure the bearded divinity had seen everything. Why did he stay silent? It might have been fatigue or imagination, but it seemed to Amédée as if the flakes were rising from the ground toward the sky, as if to cling to the edges of the clouds that would take them far away from this cursed place.
The world wasn’t evil. It was simply indifferent.
12.
Friday, December 31st
The next day, to top off the end of the year combined with a ferocious migraine, Mallock had a meeting with the emperor of the autopsy, the king of the bone saw, the lord of the stiffs; his friend, the forensic pathologist Bernard Barnabé Mordome. At first glance, Mordome resembled nothing so much as the traditional image of a butcher: big and fat, with a face flushed pink by rosacea and large, strong hands. But just so the comparison wouldn’t be too easy, he also had a head of silvery curls and an aquiline hooked nose topped with a pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses, which gave him a dignified look—as did the almost-palpable intelligence that radiated from his face, and the impressive spirituality of his gaze. You don’t rub shoulders with death on a daily basis without your spirit undergoing some mutations.
The previous night, as he often did, Amédée had dined with his friends in Senlis, on the outskirts of Paris. Mallock, Michel, Claude, Gérald, and company gathered regularly near the small square where so many swashbuckler movies had been filmed. He’d gotten home late. The northern highway was deserted and, entering Saint-Denis, at the big curve that swerved left at a ninety-degree angle, just after the sign warning drivers to slow down, he had seen broken windows, a strange light, and obscene graffiti on the front of a factory. A break-in? He’d thought for a second about alerting his colleagues, and then forgotten. When he got home, he’d gone straight to the bottom of his whiskey bottle.
This morning he was paying the price.
The IML, or Institut Médico-Légal de Paris5, a large red-brick building, looked as inviting as always. Mallock had to show his ID before entering the holy of holies, Mordome’s department.
“Should I come with you?” asked the receptionist.
“No thanks. I know the way.”
He went through the storage room, with its enormous scales and compartments refrigerated to thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. After the autopsy and the taking of samples for histological testing, bodies were stored in other drawers kept at four below zero. He arrived in the autopsy room without encountering another living soul.
The room was brightly lit by projection lamps attached to the ceiling and by bluish fluorescent cylindrical bulbs. The tiled walls also had a steel-blue tint. Mordome had explained to him once that this kind of light was necessary in order to see, besides the purplish areas in inclined parts or the lighter spots due to pressure, overall changes in corpses’ color, which indicated various pathological states. The room’s five white faience tables, each equipped with running water and suction systems, contained neither bodies nor the slightest trace of blood.
Mallock cleared his throat.
His son had been brought here and placed on one of these tables. A ballet of scalpels had danced across his skull. What had been done to his body? To chase the image away, Amédée contemplated the various neatly arranged instruments. Mordome had given him lessons back when the superintendent had begun to be passionately interested in forensic medicine—so now, to distract himself, he recited the names of the different instruments under his breath, like a prayer:
“Granat callipers, anthropometric compasses, mallets, Rowe pliers, gouge, rugine, forceps, stripper, Mayo or Sims scissors . . . ”
As he named them, he picked the tools up and put them back down. Their metallic clinking accompanied his litany. The image of Thomas’s body came back, his torso charred and open.
His son’s death had left him without a choice. Either he would die of sadness, or he would abandon emotion. He had hesitated, but nature had made the decision for him. For a long time his life had gone on without joy or pain, like a river subdued between oppressive banks. His feelings had been wiped clean, like pharaonic faces scoured away by the hot breath of tourists, or beautiful ancient tomb slabs ruined by the idiotic scuffing of their sandals.
He began again.
“Tongue retractor. Halstead. Backhaus scope.”
He kept on with his silent recitation, not making a single mistake. On the final word, two tears escaped and fell on the shining steel of a syndesmotic hook.
He wiped them away carefully with his tie just as his phone rang.
“What are you doing? I’m waiting for you.” It was Mordome.
“But I’m here. I’m in the big room, from last time.”
“We could have waited for each other forever. I don’t work there anymore; I’m in the new wing. I’ll send someone for you; otherwise you’ll get lost.”
The famous pathologist knew his Mallock well.
Barnabé’s office was like Grand Central Station.
An assistant was filling out evidence identification forms, while a young woman deftly pressed a stamp into a still-hot wax seal. Another operator in surgical scrubs, cap, booties, and rubber gloves delicately removed debris from under a child’s fingernails, not by scraping the nails but by cutting them one by one. Each sample was then placed in a separate vial, numbered, and signed with the pathologist’s initials.
“Your timing is perfect,” said Mordome. “I’ve just finished the autopsy on the mother. My team is starting with the child. For the adult it’s the usual rundown, with a few lovely innovations. As you’ll have already seen, the mouth was used as a receptacle to contain various amputated parts. The nipples, the eyelids, et cetera. Want to see?”
“No thanks. I trust you.”
“What’s bizarre is that all the pieces were coated with some kind of flour before being placed in the mouth. And, unlike what I thought, they weren’t all cut off with a scalpel like in a surgical excision. Some of them were bitten off. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but the victims were still, if not conscious, at least alive during these amputations. As with the previous murders, this one was drained of its blood using syringes equipped with large-bore needles. The injections were all made in the same part of the body. Twelve injections, as usual. One last detail: at the end of the operation, without a doubt, this piece of shit penetrated the vagina several times with a bladed weapon. Probably a short, wide sword, Japanese-type. He then held the victim upright to drain out the rest of the blood, urine, and other physiological matter. Given the sexual nature of these perversions, I think we’re dealing with a man.”
“That’s not what the psychologists think. We can’t yet rule out t
he hypothesis of an insane woman.”
“That’s your problem.”
“There’s one thing I’d like to clarify. When exactly did he drain their blood?”
“Excellent question. It probably varies. At the very beginning he didn’t even do it, which was worse, because they stayed alive until the very last second. His final act was the sword thrust between the legs. Now, even if he keeps them alive as long as possible, they die of hemorrhagic shock when their blood is drained, so the torture part, where he does his thing on a chemically immobilized body, doesn’t last quite as long, according to my calculations.”
“Okay, but in relation to the application of the makeup, and the rest of the . . . cutting?”
“I believe he starts draining the blood and applies the makeup at the same time. Then the massacre begins.”
Mordome looked exhausted, but Mallock knew the doctor would hate having that pointed out.
“In one of the cases I worked on with Grimaud there was an obvious attempt at impalement. He tried that even before starting to drain the blood. A real butchery.”
Mordome slammed a brown-smeared pair of Leriche surgical pliers into a stainless-steel basin. The noise reverberated in the white faience room.
“Can we have a cup of coffee before we start on the little girl?” asked Mallock, hoping to force his friend to decompress for a few seconds.
“Thanks, but I really don’t have time. We’ll move on to the girl. She was also given some special treatment. As with her mother, she was first injected with the famous chemical submission substance,6 the chef’s specialty. We’ve already identified Pavulon, dexchlorpheniramine, scopolamine, chloral hydrate, and dexedrine hydrochloride. For me, more than anything else, this is his signature. Just like the makeup. It’s what made it possible for me and RG to reattribute certain crimes to him. As you already know, the use of this mixture makes dating more difficult—although I don’t think that’s why he used it; not many people would know it has that effect. The motherfucker—or motherfuckers—wasn’t thinking about anything but immobilizing his victims while at the same time stimulating their hearts and keeping them conscious for as long as possible. Theoretically, in the neurocerebral sense they would unfortunately still have experienced various types of pain. That seems important to him, or them.”
The doctor fell into a silence of contemplation, and of rage. He, like Mallock, thought the reason for the killer’s methods was a simple one: sadism. They were wrong. The Makeup Artist was much crazier than that. And much more dangerous.
“Anyway, to get back to the little girl, the asshole put makeup on her. Same products, same designs. But, for reasons we don’t know yet, he didn’t perform the same sexual amputations on her. Maybe her age? Come on; we’ll go over and have a look.”
Amédée, struggling again, followed Mordome into another room. Three assistants, two men and a woman, had already begun working on the child. What he saw made his stomach flip over. The girl had been turned so that she was lying face-down. Her hair was scalped but still perfect, with its center part and its two braids, undoubtedly styled by her mother on the night of the murder. The incision of the scalp and the occipital region had just been completed, as well as that of the temporal muscle, and the whole had been tipped forward.
Mordome’s assistant was preparing to begin the orofacial autopsy; he was far from finishing and moving on to a semblance of reconstruction. The child had virtually no face left.
“Where are we?” asked Mordome.
The assisting intern took a deep breath before reciting:
“Opening of the longitudinal sinus on the dura mater with scissors. I will then remove the encephalon in a single unit . . . ”
There were a few seconds of silence. Mordome gave the intern a black look.
“Of course,” the young man added quickly, aware that he had forgotten something, “that was after having sawed the skull along a frontal lateral line and obliquely incising the occipital region.”
Amédée forced himself to look at the child. It was impossible to see something like that without being profoundly changed. The head was dismantled into pieces, and the rest of the body was a nameless horror. Why did he feel so obligated not to look away?
“That’s fine; I’ll take over,” said Mordome. “As you can see, she has been disembowelled and sewn back up. Her mouth and eyes have also been sewn shut.”
The pathologist’s voice rasped slightly. He and Mallock shared the same feeling. Beyond disgust and pity, there was a gnawing anger deep within them, so fierce and so tightly controlled that it was becoming physically painful.
Mordome cleared his throat before continuing:
“Taking into account a slight increase of serotonin and a large dosage of histamines in the major wounds, I fear that she was also, if not conscious, at least still alive at the time of evisceration. I note over the whole surface of the body, in the same locations as those on the mother . . . correction, on number 306 . . . various needle punctures. Same arrangement and same number, twelve. These injections served to introduce the product, and then to drain the body of its blood. No liquid was found at the crime scene. The angle of perfusion is the same; that is, twenty degrees in relation to the skin surface.”
Mallock remembered the expression Grimaud had used during their lunch: “This guy is a maniac; a real fucking vampire.”
With a kind of enormous pair of shears plated in stainless steel, and without giving himself time to feel pity, Mordome began cutting the stitches holding the two sides of the abdomen together. With each move, each observation, he talked loudly to make sure everything would be correctly recorded. Because of the importance of this autopsy he had had two video cameras installed. Their red lights meant that everything that happened in this room could be played back, reviewed, and analyzed.
“Resistance is relatively strong,” he continued. “It’s fishing line. Nylon, probably three hundredth, the kind used for carnivorous fish.”
Mordome’s precision made Mallock smile sadly. His friend was a fisherman during his rare moments of leisure.
“The whole has been sewn together forcefully, and the flesh could not always withstand it. The murderer realized this fairly quickly and made deeper, wider stitches beginning at the navel. From this we can deduce that this was an operation he was doing for the first time, unless it was the fragility of the child’s skin that surprised him.”
At that moment he cut the sixth stitch. The flesh tore apart and the abdomen fell open. The little girl’s body split in two like an overfilled balloon, spilling its horrifying contents onto the floor and the feet of the people participating in the autopsy. Mordome murmured fuck under his breath, and a young assistant burst into tears. Mallock stayed immobile, frozen like a pillar of salt. On the ground was a vile mixture of pink and purple viscera and an appalling amount of grains of bran and shreds of newspaper. The odor was unbearable.
“Index and weigh all of that.” Mordome had regained his composure in mere tenths of a second.
At his feet, Amédée recognised an organ that had fallen on the ground: a small heart, half-wrapped in the front page of an issue of Point de vue et images du monde showing a uniformed prince consort whose smile was still visible through a clot of coagulated blood. He was making some kind of gesture with his hand. The words balcony, acclaimed, and, further down, happiness, could still be read.
Fifteen minutes later, everything had been cleaned up. Mordome continued his inspection of the body.
“I’m taking advantage of the fact that the area is completely cleared out to take a sample. Using a scoop about three centimeters in diameter,” he announced to the recording system, “after having incised the bladder and before proceeding with the removal of the pelvic organs, I am extracting a small quantity of urine. You okay?” he asked Mallock, before continuing.
“I don’t know if I want to cry, puke,
or tear that piece of shit to pieces.”
“Do all three. Don’t worry. He’ll end up on this table too.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“I know. Oh! By the way—besides the twelve ceremonial punctures, I’ve found other needle marks, all grouped on the little girl’s thighs. She must have had some kind of daily treatment, probably for diabetes. The urine analysis will confirm that.”
“Did she give herself the shots?”
“Not at her age; it would have been the parents, or maybe a nurse.”
Mordome moved back up to the head and pushed back the scalp with its bangs and two braids. Then, with a pair of long, curved, and very thin scissors, he began cutting the fishing line the Makeup Artist had used to sew the mouth and eyelids shut. The left eye hadn’t been completely stitched. The pathologist gave a gasp. “Finally—some good news!”
He took a sort of pair of tweezers from the tray—Mallock couldn’t remember the name of them—and, carefully, pushed them beneath the inner rim of the eye to draw out a fat little beige worm. Watching it squirm between the tweezers’ points, he announced: “First-stage larva. Probably a bluebottle fly.” He leaned toward Mallock, as if to tell him a secret. “I’m going to give it to Jo.7 She’s an intern, but she’s studied forensic entomology. A brilliant recruit, between you and me. Between the weather data for the three days preceding the discovery of the bodies and the current size of this larva, she should be able to tell when our victims died, almost to the hour. Incubation lasts between twelve and twenty-four hours in the open air. Also, the window was wide open. These charming little critters love to lay their eggs in the mucus membranes of cadavers. Wounds, tongues, eyes, nostrils; they love it all. It’s synchronized like a musical composition. Twenty-four hours later, they transform into mobile larvae, and in seven days the babies reach six centimeters in length. And to give us even more information, when they reach the pupal stage, these little police helpers turn from white to black, with every shade of brown in between. Using a color chart we can determine the exact ages of the creatures. But you already know all of that by heart.”