by Mallock;
The macchiato arrived.
A little wink at the owner.
A Breton smile.
As RG spoke, Amédée couldn’t help thinking that he would be a terrific recruit for the Fort. He was disciplined and hard-working, going so far as to take the time to study a science that was completely foreign to him, and memorizing some of the most obtuse terminology. Not only that, but the idea of helping Grimaud to overcome his solitude and sadness was not unappealing to the big sentimental lug that was Mallock.
“I don’t know if you already know this,” “Father Raymond” continued, “but what is now pompously called ‘chemical submission’ is an ancient practice. Datura powder9 was used by a group of eighteenth-century bad guys calling themselves the ‘Beguilers.’ It happened here in Paris. They would politely offer tobacco that was mixed with Datura, and then they robbed their victims. Even back then, Datura had the double effect of causing unconsciousness and anterograde amnesia.”10
Mallock looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, Raymond, I’ve got to run. The troops are waiting for me. Have you looked for suppliers?”
“Of course; we’ve done the rounds of ‘purveyors’ and other ‘prescribers.’ Who had the ability to manufacture this mixture? Are we talking about a lab technician in a pharmaceutical company? A doctor in a hospital, or even just a nurse?”
“Well?”
“Now it’s a matter of time and patience. If you don’t want to draw any attention to yourself, you calmly collect active molecules, and boom, it’s done. Anyone working in the medical industry could do it. None of the components are too strictly regulated except the ones that are categorized as kappa-opioid receptors, opiates, and parasympatholytics. But even then, a person could get his hands on them.”
“None of this helps us very much.”
RG scratched his superb white goatee violently. “Sorry, Mallock. I wish I had better news for you. But we can at least say that a person who isn’t in the medical field, and has no knowledge of chemistry, would have a very hard time manufacturing this cocktail. That narrows it down a little bit at least, doesn’t it?”
He was right. It was a small victory. Amédée put a ten-euro bill on the table, thanked his colleague warmly, and promised to keep him “up to speed” before disappearing once again into the snow.
By the time he arrived at the Fort, drank a coffee, swallowed an assortment of pills for his migraine and his back, drank another coffee, and read his emails while sucking anti-heartburn tablets, it was eleven o’clock. Ken, Jules, and Julie breezed into his office, followed immediately by Bob and Francis. Even though he hated it, Mallock was showered with wishes for “a happy and healthy New Year,” as well as the traditional jokes about how ineffective the previous year’s wishes had been. It didn’t matter; they all loved being together. It was an odd atmosphere, somewhere between a family reunion and the briefing of commandos before an armed attack on enemy territory.
“They’ve found the solution to your . . . ahem, ecclesiastical puzzle,” announced Ken triumphantly.
Julie, who was undoubtedly the reason the riddle had been solved, couldn’t resist ribbing Mallock a bit. “See, boss, you should always send us on a mission on vacation, to an island, if possible. It revives all our dead brain cells. The grey matter, I mean.” Even as she teased her superintendent, Julie’s expression was affectionate.
“I see you’ve also proceeded with the standard trade-in of other cells,” retorted Mallock. “Parisian squamous cells and keratinocytes.”
Jules and Julie were both attractive and tanned, and it was a pleasure to look at them. She was a slim, petite brunette; he tall, blond, and solidly built. Beneath his inner-city wrestler’s appearance the latter had the heart and soul—if not the manners—of a gentleman. Julie was a woman of rare refinement and intelligence combined with strong moral fiber. Jules was even-tempered, while Julie could be moody. Her Corsican roots and close, strict family explained the latter, while his gentle Béarnese parents accounted for the former. They both had the same deep-blue eyes and the same short-cropped hair.
Even as he harangued his team on a daily basis, Amédée lived in perpetual fear that something would happen to them. None of the five, except possibly Julie, knew how much their mercurial and visionary superintendent cared about them. Mallock the Rock, inflexible and upright, had a heart as mushy as a caramel at high noon in the Gobi desert. The big softie couldn’t keep himself from smiling, despite the seriousness of the moment, because it was rare to see them all together, and because he had a major announcement for them. He chuckled in anticipation.
He knocked on his desk to get their attention. “I’ve got some big news for you. I think I’ve solved—for the most part—the case of the Makeup Artist.”
Silence. Open mouths. Raised eyebrows. Nobody moved.
“Since the very beginning I’ve been asking myself one question. What could he possibly be doing with all that blood? Of course, like you I imagined morbid things, from Bloody Marys to sausage to sorbet.”
“Like you,” he says! Julie Gemoni gazed at him with a smile at the corner of her mouth. She hadn’t, in fact, imagined those things. She admired her boss, but he was a sicko. Ice in his veins. A sausage sorbet?
“And what if all those horrible rituals were only there to hide something more mundane?” Mallock continued. “What if we went back to the main motive for most crimes, the lure of money?”
Quicker than the others as usual, Julie leapt in: “Could they be contract killings? The work of one or more professional killers hiding their activity behind a cloud of smoke . . . or in this case, a curtain of blood. We’d need to review the whole case from a different angle—the settling of scores.”
Mallock smiled at her. “Not a bad thought, but that isn’t it.”
“Have you really figured it out?” Ken was a bit taken aback.
“I’ll give you the short version,” Mallock said. “I went to the EFS11 and called the IRCGN,12 our friends and colleagues across the road. Here’s a little math for you: € 5,000 for one liter, and approximately five liters per person. That gives us around twenty-five thousand euros. What does that tell you?
Stupefied silence.
“Blood trafficking!” gasped Ken. “We hadn’t thought of that, but it’s so obvious! It’s the only thing that was taken.”
“I’m speechless,” said Bob. “It’s unbelievable.”
Julies and Julie stood openmouthed. No one had imagined this kind of scenario for a single second, but now it seemed so clear. “And so typical of our world,” murmured Julie, still in shock.
“A band of vampires,” put in Francis.
“Shit. Unbelievable,” repeated Bob.
“What’s even more unbelievable,” interrupted Amédée, “is that I can still wind you up. No; it’s not blood trafficking, my little chickens. But I had that theory checked, and it could have been. This is all to remind you how necessary it is to keep an open mind. You should have thought of that scenario. Like RG, who, by the way, still can’t talk about the Makeup Artist in the plural. For him this was a single serial killer, period. In a case as important and complicated as this one, we can’t leave any stone unturned. Imagine the mess if we overlook the one theory that could lead us to the culprit, singular or plural, who’s killing hand over fist at this very moment. We’re the last bastion here, kiddies. Us! Look around you; there’s no one else. Shit! It’s up to us to find him. It’s our fucking job, and our fucking responsibility!”
Mallock felt anger rising within him. He knew it was due to his rage at not having been able to prevent the latest murder. This feeling of powerlessness shouldn’t be redirected, much less taken out on his team. He swallowed his exasperation and continued, more calmly:
“Blood and organs are stolen mostly in poor countries. The director of the IRCGN told me on the phone that the last major case involved a group of rabb
is in New Jersey who were buying kidneys to resell them. But here, in our case, stealing blood—and making sure the source wouldn’t talk, every time—would be too dangerous, and not at all profitable.”
Uneasiness. Deep silence.
“Hey now, I’m not the cynical one! It’s the world we live in, my little ones.”
In the face of his chief inspectors’ uncomfortable expressions, Mallock decided to change tack. “Let’s move on to something else. What have you found for me about those mysterious letters? Or the ecclesiastical enigma, as Ken so aptly put it? My chapel?”
“It’ll be ‘Cazenave’ most likely; they were a big-name machine-tool manufacturer in the past. Does that mean anything to you? You’d pass the factory if you took the northern highway. It’s just across from the big stadium. It fits with your AZ and AV. The factory isn’t used anymore, but I contacted the real estate agency in charge of the complex. We can get the keys from them and go have a look at it. But what am I looking for, if it isn’t too indiscreet to ask?”
Mallock dodged the question. “Are you sure? It’s a factory?”
“Yeah; right near the La Chapelle metro station. Why?”
La Chapelle. It fit. Amédée couldn’t hold back a small smile. Once again it hadn’t been a vision, but an exaggerated form of deduction. He had passed the factory on his way back from dinner last Friday night. He remembered it now. He’d felt vaguely uncomfortable as he drove past it, suspecting a break-in or some kind of . . . unclean squatter. His mind had registered, drawn on the window of the large brick building, the silhouette of an impaled body and the two broken windows on either side of it, and part of a logo. Those letters and that brief glimpse had come back to him in his waking dream. The second vision he’d had when on the illicit substances had allowed him to connect the Makeup Artist’s first attempt at impalement, the one Mordome had described, to the drawing on the window.
“Okay! Let’s summarize. We’ve got sixteen murders, having in common the makeup on the victims, their specific beauty—see Francis about that; their blood being drained, the use of pancuronium bromide mixed with other curariform drugs to immobilize them, and tortures that we’ve classified as theological and retributive. I’ve verified it for two other crime scenes and I can also confirm now that there are definitely three distinct locations at each murder site. The middle location is used for part of the torture, but most importantly it’s also used for a specific act, and it’s where we find the traces of holes. And yes, I think I figured out the origin of those marks last night. I think they’re made by a tripod. The Makeup Artist takes a series of photos, with painstaking care. Why? It’s your job to find out. One more thing—the file must not leave these premises under any circumstances.”
“‘Retributive’?” asked Jules.
“Retribution is positive or negative. The good are rewarded, the bad are punished; put it that way,” explained Julie.
Mallock nodded in approval before setting Francis’s booklet in front of the pair. “This is a piece of visual interplay involving the victims. It’ll show you what we’ve discovered as a common point.”
Already headed out the door, he called to Ken: “Come on, hurry up; we’re going to have a look at this Cazenave at La Chapelle.”
18.
Monday, January 3rd. Afternoon
Fifteen minutes later they were in Ken’s old green Range Rover, headed through the Pleyel interchange toward Saint-Denis. First exit on the right off the highway, before the big curve leading to Bourget and Roissy. Then double back beneath the underpass.
The building was constructed of red brick. Three floors, with the logo painted in huge letters on the façade, and at the very top, two broken windows flanking a larger one with the profile of an impaled body outlined on it. This was what Mallock had seen as he drove past the other night, and he no longer had any doubt that the Makeup Artist had deliberately prepared these windows to attract attention.
And maybe my attention in particular? Amédée thought suddenly.
But how could he have known that Mallock would pass by here? What did the killer already know about him? One more reason to be paranoid. Why this place? Was it possible that he had chosen it for Mallock, knowing that he regularly drove this route when he went to dinner with his friends in Senlis? Or, even worse, was the superintendent being watched? Maybe the Makeup Artists had even more power than the police feared.
While Amédée tortured himself, Ken struggled with the keys, which gave him the perfect opportunity to use a few choice swear words in pseudo-Japanese—one of the comedy bits that always amused his friends. A dozen onomatopoeias later, he made a satisfied noise and stepped aside to let Mallock pass.
“After you, boss!”
The two men stepped into a lofty 1950s-style entry hall. To the left, behind a wide glass window, was a standard switchboard of the period. In front of them an enormous staircase wound up and off to each side, like a poor man’s Château de Chambord. On the right, an army-green metal door was marked “Workshop.” Ken immediately tried to open it. There was a fresh batch of curses, in French this time, and then the door was finally heaved open by Ken, who was laden with an enormous bunch of keys that must have weighed a good couple of pounds.
They found themselves on the factory floor, where half a century ago teams of specialized laborers had assembled machine tools invented by a mysterious HB, whose portrait could still be seen here and there. Cazenave was one of the many companies pushed to ruin and the unemployment of its workers by the arrival of the forces of progress in 1981. The smell of machine oil still mingled with that of the dust that had built up during the place’s long years of abandonment. Turning to the left, Mallock found himself facing an assembly floor that was much different than the one in his dream. There was actually nothing to see. Beside him, Ken stepped forward, his forehead creased. Mallock caught his sleeve to hold him back.
“Look at the floor. It’s covered with dust, everywhere, except for this one set of footprints.”
“Just one set? No prints coming back out?”
Mallock sighed. “Let’s each grab two pallets. We’ll put them on the floor in front of us and walk on them. We’ll have to look for some other ones. Everyone coming in here has to use them. We’ll have a closer look at these footprints later.”
They began moving awkwardly, bending to pick up the pallets behind them and set them down in front of their feet, stepping onto them, picking up the now-free pallets behind them, and so on and so on. They kept looking around at each step, trying to get a better grasp on the precise nature of the horror that seemed to be waiting for them at the far end of the huge space—maybe a duplication of the drawing of an impaled body on the front window of the building.
The trail of footprints they were following disappeared abruptly, as if the man making them had taken flight. Ken thought of a vampire’s ability to turn into a bat. What new sorcery was this? The spectacle that awaited them pushed that question to the back burner. They continued creeping forward. In the very back of the workshop, in an area lighted by a hole in a wide transom, there finally appeared, bathed in pallid light, the impaled body of a woman.
Just like in Mallock’s dream, or very close to it.
On the edge of a small red lake, surrounded by dust, Ken stopped, his face turned toward the Makeup Artist’s latest work. Turning around, his heart in his mouth, he saw that Mallock, eyes closed, had sat down—or rather, sunk to the floor—at the sight of the sacrifice.
No maniacal dance; no lance made of gold, here in this fucking horrible reality. Machiavellian and rational use had been made, though, of mechanical hoists. The body had been moved using the network of pulleys, rails, and electric motors that covered the ceiling. When the Makeup Artist had finished with his victim, he had raised her into the air until she dangled vertically over the post set upright in the concrete floor. Once she was there he had undoubtedly taken some
photos, and then let her literally plummet from the sky with a scream of terror.
Had he continued to photograph her?
Did he have specific prayers that he intoned at these times? A pact of contrition; a satanic mass; a reading of some diabolical Gospels? Mallock was sure, in any case, that the bastard had felt incredible excitement at seeing the iron rod penetrate between the legs of the poor woman, ripping her flesh. With a wet sound, the bar, after having torn through her internal organs, had risen up between her jaws, breaking her teeth. The body had suddenly stopped moving, impaled from vagina to mouth.
But in this horror, this macabre, disgusting, unbearable, revolting tableau, this scene to make a person weep with sadness and rage, vomit with hatred and repulsion, in this filthy spectacle of perverted obscenity and unspeakable viciousness, there was something beautiful, something horribly erotic.
Mallock, in a trance, opened his eyes to see Ken’s worried face. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said sharply, standing up and refusing the hand Ken held out to assist him.
The martyred woman rose scarlet and hieratic before the two horrified men. Her skin was yellow and waxy. Her partially oxidized blood covered the curves of her belly and breasts. Her body, as taut as a bow, seemed almost like it was part of the steel pike running it through. The metal thrust out of her mouth, in front of her light-blue eyes, which were open and staring at the ceiling. Her thighs, spread apart by the metal bar, were frozen in an impossible position. The bastard had wound a Christmas garland around the corpse from head to feet. Connected to an electrical outlet by a long white cord, its lights blinked weakly. A dark puddle the size of a football field spread across the floor.
For once, Mallock didn’t have to wonder what the Makeup Artist had done with all the blood.
Time passed.
Men came.
They all looked, their eyes raised to heaven, for lack of a better alternative. Many gritted their teeth in anger and disgust. Repulsion. The kind of primal fear you feel when facing cannibal souls.