by Mallock;
“We give a lot, you know. We listen, we give comfort. And when you go back to the rectory it’s so cold, and you’re all alone. Nobody there to listen to our problems . . . ”
Mallock had stopped listening to him. Another waste of time. Father Bertrant’s sincerity was obvious. He was so visibly mortified and remorseful about his naughty pictures that there could really be no doubt of his innocence in the Makeup Artist case.
There was a banging of chairs.
The little priest, showing extraordinary strength, had seized his chair and thrown it at the window, which shattered. They were on the top floor, and it was immediately clear what he intended to do; too clear, for Mallock. He just managed to grab the priest’s legs, while the rest of his body already dangled outside. His two lieutenants helped him drag the man back onto terra firma.
“I’d die and go to hell before I’d try to take another person’s life! My God! It’s always been my destiny to help people, but now destiny has forsaken me . . . ”
“Now now, none of that, Father,” interrupted Mallock. “Destiny’s a convenient scapegoat. It’s a perfect drawer to put our mistakes in. You’re not the first to use it, and you won’t be the last. When you choose a vocation like yours, you assume responsibility or you step down.”
Mallock had been hesitating, but now he decided to continue the interrogation in spite of everything. When they accused him of murder a second time, the little priest curled in on himself, then straightened up and swore his innocence on the Bible, taking God as his witness. Without a shred of compassion, Ken spread the crime scene photos out in front of him.
“Look at your handiwork, Father. Confess, dammit! We aren’t going to forgive you, so don’t look for it. But your merciful God might still have pity on you, if you repent. Go on, look at them, you bastard!”
This was the signal Mallock was waiting for. There was no question of explaining to Ken—in front of the suspect—what he and Bob had already known for a good half an hour. Out of inertia, disappointment, and fatigue he’d let Ken run wild a bit, just to see what he would do, but now it had gone too far. He ended the interrogation as abruptly as he had started it. It was six o’clock, and Amédée was both discouraged and troubled. How had he taken this little priest for the unthinkable monster he was hunting?
Out of anxiety?
25.
Friday, January 7th
The next morning, the examining magistrate came for the priest. As a public prosecutor, the judge could extend custody to twenty-four hours. In cases of terrorism, drug trafficking, or prostitution, he could draw it out to a full four days.
“You’ll see, I’m not going to hold back in making this guy talk,” he blustered.
Mallock didn’t have the heart to try to discourage Humbert, or save the little priest. He wasn’t intimidated; he was just exhausted. Besides, it was like throwing a bone to a dog. As long as the judge had Bertrant to play with, he’d leave Mallock and his team alone.
Margot called him. She had already left him several messages. “I don’t think I got them,” lied Mallock regretfully. It was easier for him that way, and kinder to her.
He let the silence stretch out between them. It was her move.
“Don’t you have anything for me?” she asked.
He hesitated; then, to show her that he trusted her, he told her about the latest developments in the case, making it clear that the information had to be kept under wraps until he gave her permission to publish it.
“It’s going to be awfully hard to hold my tongue,” she complained.
“Everything worthwhile is difficult,” Mallock countered. Then they talked about other things—but not about Amélie. He didn’t know how to approach the subject, or even if he should.
After he hung up, it took several minutes for the smile Margot’s voice had put on his face to fade away. He worked until around noon with his team, and then decided to go up and see his boss. He felt the need to tell his troubles to someone, and Dublin seemed like the perfect man for the job.
Leaving his office, Mallock glanced out a window in the corridor and saw the little priest getting into the back of a prison van in the courtyard. He was being transferred to the Palais des Toqués, where the judge would try his luck. Mallock felt a profound sense of pity for the figure in black; it represented solitude, and a shattered calling. The man had wanted to do good, in spite of others—and himself. He didn’t deserve what was going to happen to him.
He promised himself he would call the judge and persuade him to go easy on the priest, before pushing open the legendary padded green leather door. Dublin was sitting behind his desk, seeming almost as if he’d been waiting for Mallock. The big boss was thin, with one of those sad gray faces that senior civil servants always develop, like a factory brand. To prove that their hard work has exhausted them, maybe.
Without asking Mallock anything, Dublin pressed the button on his intercom. “Two coffees, Annick, please.” Then he resumed his position, settled deep in his chair. “I don’t really like coffee,” he said. “It’s more the idea of it that pleases me, the concept. The fantasy of coffee, you might even say. What about you?”
Mallock thought for a few seconds before speaking. “No; for me it’s the aromatic strength of coffee, and the flavor. It helps me get the taste of the world out of my mouth.”
Dublin smiled, amused by Amédée’s last remark. His favorite superintendent had a knack for coming up with statements like that. From now on he’d have a greater appreciation for his morning coffee. “So, how are you getting on?” he asked.
“I’m afraid we’re not getting anywhere at all,” Mallock said. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“What about our priest?”
“Wrong track.”
Dublin looked Mallock straight in the eyes, as if searching for confirmation of something. It was there.
“This case is a real nightmare. And let’s be honest; I knew that perfectly well even before I gave you this . . . ”
“Shit-covered stick,” Mallock finished for him.
Dublin didn’t contradict him. His hands were shaking.
“Yes. And I’m sorry.”
Amédée felt profoundly discouraged. He’d come here for a morale boost, or maybe a good kick in the pants to get him going again, and here was his boss looking fainthearted—or worse, scared.
Right when the secretary brought in the two coffees, Dublin’s desk clock—a gift from his wife—began striking twelve, and the phone began ringing at the same moment as well. Dublin calmly picked up his cup and took a sip before answering.
It was hard to describe his face during the conversation. In less than two minutes his face went from an anemic pink to pure white, and then turned absolutely green. “We’ll be right there,” he said into the receiver, and hung up.
There was a good twenty seconds of silence before he spoke. Mallock had the patience to wait. After all, he had all the time in the world to be punched in the gut by bad news—and this was most definitely going to be very bad news.
Kathleen Parks, one of the most popular stars in the United States and extremely talented to boot, had decided to spend the New Year holiday in Paris.
She had just been slaughtered by the Makeup Artist in her suite at the Hotel de Crillon.
It was lunchtime, and in the Madeleine-Opéra-Concorde area, even on a normal day, there was no escaping the frantic mob of cars and executives in search of their daily pittance. To top it all off, the news of the actress’s death had spread like a mudslide. Dublin had the foresight to park his car in the underground garage at the Place Vendôme. The entire street of Boissy d’Anglas and the main entrance to the Crillon were jammed with people. It took the two men a full five minutes to fight their way through the crowd and into the hotel. Inside, an army of hysterical journalists thrust microphones and cameras at a group of officials and
relatives still stunned by the news. Mallock and Dublin slipped authoritatively and discreetly toward the elevators.
“Which floor?” Amédée asked one of the police officers on duty, who recognized him.
“Third, Monsieur le Superintendent. The Vendôme suite.”
Once in the third-floor corridor, the two men had to elbow their way through another crowd to reach the room. Dublin quickly ordered everyone to evacuate the premises, except for the hotel manager and the victim’s agent and two bodyguards.
“Please stay at the door and stop e-ve-ry-bo-dy,” he said to the guards, in accented but forceful English.
One of the two giants was particularly shocked. Despite himself, he couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down his cheeks. His whole six-foot-six, two-hundred-and-ninety-pound body trembled. He had been the actress’s bodyguard for more than ten years and was deeply attached to her. He had truly idolized her, and had no doubt ended up convincing himself that she was immortal—both in life and on the screen. She had only been attacked once before, in Detroit, and he’d risked his own life to put the assailant out of commission; an inch-long scar just above his heart bore witness to that. Now he felt like he had failed. Mallock had just enough time to grab the man by the shoulders before he collapsed. His partner, white as a sheet, helped Mallock lay him on a green-velvet damask sofa.
While they waited for the crime scene technicians, Dublin went into the star’s bedroom. From behind, Mallock saw his boss’s shoulders bow. His head lowered, and his long fingers groped for a wall to support him. The Makeup Artist had outdone himself.
At first glance, however, nothing seemed to have been disturbed in the room. Louis XV furniture, heavy curtains and deep-pile carpeting emblazoned with the hotel’s arms, flowers and baskets of fruit—everything was in place and immaculate. The savaged body of the actress, artistically arranged on a silk sheet, was a shocking sight, its eyes, abdomen, and lower belly all wide open as if in a horrible burst of laughter. The Makeup Artist had cut away much of the flesh around her mouth so that the star’s perfect teeth were clearly visible, framed by coral-pink gums. On the floor, at the foot of the bed, her intestines had been coiled into a perfect spiral. Looking at the totally hollowed-out body of Kathleen Parks, Mallock had an image of a shipwreck on some Caribbean beach, or the framework of a wooden boat in dry dock, with its ropes lovingly tied up out of the way by a conscientious fisherman. The finger- and toenails were missing.
“Christ,” Dublin breathed.
Mallock silently agreed. The smell was making his stomach churn. It was a very strong mixture of perfumes, barely touched by the odor of meat and blood. Glancing at the dressing table, he understood. A series of bottles were lined up like overly made-up whores, displaying a rich variety of colors and shapes: Chanel, Dior, Guerlain, Gaultier, Lempicka, Givenchy, Ricci. Gold, pink, blue, mauve. The bottles had only one thing in common—they were empty. The Makeup Artist had gone about his abominable butchery obscured by a dense, intense cloud of perfume.
The victim’s agent and friend had followed them into the bedroom. They stood with arms dangling, sobbing, eyes fixed on the bed, babbling: “Oh my God!” “Jesus!” “Oh, God!” “Fuck!” “Oh my God!” “Holy Christ!” “Oh my God!”
Despite the presence of the crime scene techs and all the instructions he always gave his men for the sacrosanct preservation of traces and clues, Mallock approached the body and covered it with a silk robe. The agent, pulling himself together for a moment, came up to the body as well, intending to close its eyes.
Mallock had to explain to him that her eyelids were gone.
Three crime scene technicians took the temperature of the air in the room, and of different parts of the body. Only then were the windows opened, so the sickening smell could begin to dissipate.
Leaving the CSIs to do their job, Mallock and Dublin left the room together and took refuge in a small adjoining sitting room. They were quiet, each of them trying to recover his wits. Mallock was the first to break the silence.
“I need a complete recap of the victim’s activities from the time she touched down on French soil until the tragedy. And as many photos of the premises as we can get, including the crowd, if possible.”
Julie and Jules had just arrived, and Mallock’s request was directed at them.
Just then someone knocked on the door of the room. An extremely well-dressed man and a woman in a suit entered. Mallock heard the man say “FBI,” and was surprised to see Dublin salute as he went to greet them. What was the FBI doing on a French case, and in French territory? Dublin beckoned Mallock over.
“Angelina Allen and Tom Marvin, I’d like you to meet Chief Superintendent Mallock, who’s in charge of this case. If anyone can get us out of this, it’s him.”
Us? Dublin’s use of that word made it clear not only that he knew the newcomers, but that they were in this together.
The woman broke into Mallock’s thoughts by announcing, in perfect French: “We’ve requisitioned a room on the other side of the hall. Let’s go.”
Narrow-featured and tanned, with skin lined by too much sun exposure, she had the kind of brusque authority acquired with time. In spite of that and her drab suit, she was far from lacking charm. She walked down the corridor in front of them, a thick blonde braid reaching to the small of her back. Her calves, balanced on high heels, were muscular. She opened the door to a much smaller suite with no number on the door.
When all four of them were inside, she did something odd. She locked the door behind them. Mallock watched Dublin out of the corner of his eye; he looked exhausted, and very worried.
Tom, the other American, had ivory hair that was almost silver, with glints of blue in it, a pure-white beard, and a thick-lipped mouth like the actor Lee Marvin’s, with whom he also shared a last name and the same drooping eyelids. Not too far away from retirement, he gazed out on the world with the kind of swimming-pool-blue eyes that have seen too much. Mallock suddenly had the feeling that he recognized him, had maybe even worked with him before, possibly when he had been in the United States, on the NAP case? But maybe the feeling was just because of his resemblance to the actor.
The American folded his large frame into a deep armchair, leaving his partner to lay the cards out on the table.
“In the United States we were, and now we are again, in charge of the investigation of the person you call the Makeup Artist. Tom has been on the case from the start. He was part of the very first special task force created at the time and based in Quantico. He’s even largely responsible for the creation of the ViCAP computer system—that’s the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—and for the implementation of the Behavior Sciences Service, which has now been renamed the Investigative Assistance Unit.”
“What do you mean, ‘at the time’?”
The American woman turned, not to Mallock, who had asked the question, but to Dublin. “You haven’t briefed him?” she asked.
The deputy chief sighed. “We’ve had some pretty bad experiences with secrets and confidential information here lately. You called me specifically because the last embargo blew up in our faces. I’ll admit that, at the time and even though I have complete trust in Superintendent Mallock, I had some reservations about disclosing information to anyone. I’ve been pretty traumatized, truthfully,” he apologized, turning to Amédée.
“Am I allowed to know now? Or are you planning to keep treating me like the big dumb idiot?”
Mallock hated being out of the loop, especially when it had to do with one of his cases. Annoyed, he put his question directly to the FBI man, maybe just to piss the other two off.
“Well, Agent Marvin, can you fill me in?”
Tom seemed lost in thoughts that Amédée supposed—incorrectly, as it turned out—had nothing to do with the case. It was Angelina who answered him.
“Have a look at these.”
Mallock took the packet of black-and-white prints she held out to him, but it was several seconds before he actually dropped his gaze to the photos. In that instant, he tried to guess from Angelina’s eyes what she was trying to tell him. There was fear in them, made all the more disturbing by the fact that it was totally suppressed. When he finally looked at the snapshots, he understood it all immediately.
But the truth was much worse than anything his imagination, as fertile as it was, could ever come up with.
In each of the photos, corpses bore the makeup and torn-open legs that were the Makeup Artist’s trademark, screaming out that he was striking on American soil as well. It was the work of the same person; there was no doubt about it. How could he be doing it? He must have two residences, or even two nationalities. Alternating murders would lighten the police pressure on him in each country. In fact, he had actually benefited from the respective embargoes that France and the United States had imposed without consulting each other. Unless there were two separate men, keeping in contact with one another. Two madmen at work on the same atrocities?
The wheels in Mallock’s brain turned at top speed.
Angelina and Tom were quiet, giving him time to look at the pictures. Mallock thought there was a message in their silence, as if they wanted him to understand further, to go even deeper into the unimaginable. He was abruptly struck by the number of photos. He held proof of so very many murders in his hands. How was it possible? How long had this piece of garbage been in operation?
Tom Marvin looked him directly in the eyes and asked him to pay special attention to the oldest photos. Mallock was surprised first by the yellowish appearance of the snapshots; then he stopped at one of them.
A wide-angle shot showing the interior of a typically American apartment featured uniformed police officers standing around a body. The uniforms looked odd, as if they were from a different era. Amédée turned the photo over. “Atlanta. Sharon Delanay. Alleged murderer: Needles. Date: December 28th, 1929.”