First Blood

by S. Cedric

  “Did he tell you what was bothering him?”

  “I think it had to do with his past.”

  “What exactly in his past? Did it have to do with his businesses?”

  “How should I know?” she spit out.

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. She went to get a tissue.

  “Once he told me that he believed in demons, because he had seen them with his own eyes,” she said in a near whisper. “That made me laugh, but he took it badly. We never talked about it again.”

  Vauvert raised an eyebrow.

  “Demons?”

  He remembered Madeleine Reich’s nails on his skin. He felt an irrational fear growing in him. He also had encountered demons.

  “Do you know where he is hiding?”

  The woman shook her head, with little conviction.

  “Of course not. I don’t know,” she said, sniffling. Vauvert knew she was lying.

  “Annie, talk to me.”

  Mrs. Lavigne swallowed hard several times. She blew her nose. Her hands seemed agitated, as though she were trying to grasp something. Finally, she put them on the edge of the sink and looked down.

  “What I do know is that last year he bought some land.”

  “Where?”

  “In the mountains, about thirty miles from here, almost on the Spanish border. It used to be a horse farm, like of lot of places around there. But it was in ruins. And the deed was not in his name.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He had the business buy it. Basically, the shareholders paid for it, except that they will never know about it.” She blew her nose and her braids moved slowly. “I removed the transaction from the books. Mr. Loisel asked me to do it.”

  “So, the property shows up nowhere in company records. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s right. I don’t know why he did it, but it was important for Pierre. I can give you the address. I went there with him. He told me the former owner had a bed and breakfast, so I thought it was a farm. He could have renovated it to make it a second home or something.”

  “But that is not what he did, is it?”

  “Not really. There was nothing to renovate. Everything was falling down, and the only solution was demolishing everything. The place scared me a little. It was so isolated.”

  She opened a drawer and took out a notepad and a pen. She jotted down the address in neat handwriting, tore off the paper, and handed it to the inspector.

  “It’s easy to find. Drive past Valcabrère on the main road. There’s a private road, and the property is at the end of it. I warn you, nobody goes there at this time of year, when it’s so snowy.”

  He read the address and thought it fit what he was looking for. It reminded him of something, but he could not put his finger on what.

  He dug through his memories. Nothing. He did not know anyone in that area. What could it be?

  “Hey,” Annie Lavigne said, “Do you think you’ll be able to save him?”

  Vauvert looked up. She was trying to hide her concern, and he found it touching. Most people would have been thinking only of themselves. All Annie Lavigne was worried about was her lover. It made him think of his ex-wife, who was trying to defend her swindler of a new boyfriend.

  He wished he could reassure her, but he did not know what to say.

  “I’m going to take a look at that land,” was all that he could come up with.

  He left, feeling more uncomfortable than he would have liked. She was as white as a sheet. On his way out, he passed the husband, who had just parked his car. He was tall and balding and dressed in a striped gray suit. A red-haired child wrapped up in a bright red parka surged from the car and ran to the house squealing. The man looked surprised to see Vauvert, who just waved and got in the car.

  He was wondering why that address in the mountains seemed so familiar.

  39

  Paris

  “You’re never going to believe this,” Erwan Leroy said.

  Text scrolled across his computer screen. The database was showing the list of former students who had committed crimes over the last thirty years. Everything was in there—rape, robbery, fraud, and even bar fights—listed, analyzed, and compared.

  On the other side of the room, Eva looked up from her laptop.

  “Did you find something?”

  “One guy killed his son. First-degree murder. I asked a friend to get me his prison records. Calling in a favor. I warn you, this is getting to be really, really shady.”

  Eva rolled her chair over to see the screen. Detective Alazard, who had gone to get some tea from the machine, came in and joined them. She looked at the picture that had just come up.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  The man had a shaved head and intense black eyes. He was wearing a black T-shirt, with a sunburst on the front.

  “This is Guillaume Alban. He was at Mirail the same time as Madeleine Ferrand and Ismael Constantin. He studied history, too, and majored in mythology. That means he was in the same classes as the other two. Like Madeleine Ferrand and Ismael Constantin, he attended for five years, and then he also dropped out. It seems he left the city on the run. He went to Nancy, in Lorraine. He lived there for five years.

  Leroy clicked the mouse on the files that had come up. He continued.

  “Then he was arrested for murdering his eight-month-old child. Alban threw him off the fifth floor. His wife witnessed it all and called the police. Alban was sentenced to twenty-five years. His wife committed suicide.”

  Eva and Perrine said nothing. They were stunned by what they had just heard.

  “So he was sent to the Épinal Prison and was released after serving eighteen years,” Leroy said. “Then he went to live in Guadeloupe. He bought land there. He must have wanted to spend the rest of his life drinking rum and smoking dope on the beach, but get this.”

  “He was murdered,” Eva cut in. She was beginning to understand.

  “Bull’s-eye. Last year.”

  “A fire?”

  Leroy pulled up the report.

  “One hell of a fire. His house burned to the ground, and the fire spread to the surrounding sugar-cane fields. They found him inside, tied to a chair with barbed wire. He had been covered in gas and lit on fire. Does that remind you of anything?”

  “Was he mutilated?” Eva asked. “His tongue? His heart?”

  Leroy shook his head.

  “I have no idea. The report doesn’t give any details. That happens in files from the overseas territories. They still write the reports out on paper and use the computer only when they want to. Wait, here is a digitized police report. It says that Alban was tortured, but the rest is vague. The police concluded that it was a mafia hit, and they filed it away.”

  “They must have a Larusso there, too,” Eva said.

  Perrine added, “There’s a detail that bothers me. Where did that guy get the money to buy a place like that? Wouldn’t he have been broke after eighteen years in prison?”

  “Good question,” Leroy said.

  They searched the files for several minutes and then found the information.

  “He was not broke at all. Quite the contrary. He recorded music in prison and made a fortune with it.”

  “That’s possible? You can make music in prison?”

  “If you’re resourceful. Rappers manage to do it all the time. Alban specialized in electronic music. Recording it was fairly easy. All he needed was a computer, and he sold it through specialized sites. Wait, let me look.”

  Windows opened and closed on his screen. Leroy went from one website to another until he found the full list of Alban’s music.

  “Temple of Midnight. That’s the band name Guillaume Alban used for his albums. Here, on this site, it was called extreme dark ambient music. I’ve never heard of that. Have you?”

  “No,” Eva said.

  “My ex used to listen to stuff like that,” Alazard said. “It’s the kind of music that gives you goose bumps
. It’s got layers of bass, screams, repetitive noises, and dark themes. I kept telling him that it sounded like serial-killer music.”

  “You’ve got nice boyfriends,” Leroy said.

  “He had other qualities,” she said with a smirk.

  Eva leaned toward the screen.

  She could not believe what she saw.

  “Pull up the second album. There.”

  Leroy clicked. The jacket took up the whole screen. It was a black-and-white photo of a scrawny baby who was clearly dead. It looked like a concentration camp photo.

  But Eva was not focused on the provocative image, but instead on the title, which appeared in bright red gothic letters: The First Blood.

  “Erwan, download that right away,” she said.

  IV

  The Breakaway

  40

  Leroy needed only a few minutes to find a Russian illegal-download site with the dark name blckmtl4evr, where he could get Guillaume Alban’s Temple of Midnight albums.

  The titles of his three albums were as mysterious and they were gloomy: Goety, The First Blood, and The Devil’s Kiss. Leroy selected the links and entered the codes to prove that he was not a spy robot. The progress bar filled up as the files were transferred onto the police computer.

  Eva bit her lip as she watched the files download.

  It was too much to be a coincidence.

  “We’ve got The First Blood. Launch it.”

  Leroy clicked it and turned up the sound. The picture of the dead child filled up a third of the screen, and the playlist showed two songs, each twenty-two minutes long. The first was called “The First Blood,” and the second was called “The Last Blood.”

  The first one started. At first, they did not hear anything.

  “Shit. There must be a problem with the mp3,” Eva said.

  Then a distant bass started coming through the speakers. Leroy turned the volume all the way up. They could hear moaning. The sound grew, dissipated, and then returned, like breathing or blood flowing through someone’s veins. It was not really a melody—not in the proper sense of the word. It had a stifling otherworldly feel.

  Suddenly, a wave of screams hit them.

  “Shit,” Leroy said, hurrying to lower the volume.

  The sound coming out of the computer was not music. What they were listening to was a dissonant scratching and cracking infrabass noise, with groaning played backward, crying, and more moaning. It was like being in hell with the damned.

  “What’s this crap?” Eva asked.

  “I told you,” Detective Alazard said, “It takes a little getting used to.

  It was ear-splitting and repetitious, almost hypnotic. To make matters worse, its vibrations seemed to enter the body and spread everywhere.

  “That’s the most hideous stuff I have ever heard,” Eva said. “It makes me feel sick.”

  Leroy started to turn it off. But Eva put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Wait. Listen.”

  A voice was rising from the depths.

  “There are words.”

  It was a man’s voice. The dead man—Alban—was mumbling something.

  Leroy turned the sound up again. They listened intently, trying to discern the whispered words through the hissing, looping flow of black chaos.

  “The...first...b...”

  The voice receded and then came back, and the three police officers leaned into the computer to pick up the words that passed for a lyric.

  “The first....blood, of the first born.

  “So my wishes will come true.

  “The precious blood of the first born.”

  Alazard paled and stepped away from the computer.

  “I’ve got to stop. Seriously. It’s too weird. It makes me want to puke.”

  Eva was going to say something, but then she felt her own stomach knot up. Her colleague was right. These sounds were triggering something deep inside her. It was beyond disgust. It was as if the sounds were inside her head and swirling around her brain. She felt dizzy.

  “Okay. You can stop it now.”

  Leroy clicked it off and looked relieved. He was pale, too.

  The stifling feeling lifted as abruptly as it had descended on them.

  “Shit. Those layers of synthesizer music are enough to put us in that kind of state?”

  Eva was still feeling very strange. She was almost out of breath.

  “This guy was trying to do magic with music,” she said. “It was like some kind of sound hypnosis.”

  “It gives me the creeps,” Leroy said. I never felt anything like that before.”

  “No wonder someone is ripping the tongues out of these guys,” Alazard said, nervously adjusting her miniskirt.

  41

  Alexandre Vauvert followed the GPS, taking exit number seventeen in the direction of Montréjeau. Then took the main road toward Spain.

  It was not that late, but the winter night had already settled in. Looking like a jagged saw, the Pyrenees were an imposing sight on the horizon. The snow began to fall, and the inspector turned on the windshield wipers.

  That is when he remembered, and tension rose in his chest.

  How could he have forgotten?

  He remembered the winding road through the fields lined with houses that had fences made of odds and ends. Here and there, the high mountains looked like cut-out faces and the shapes of giants lying on the horizon. A voice came back to him.

  “See the profile of the mountains in front of you? It looks like Napoleon’s head, doesn’t it? The peak is called the Emperor’s Nose.”

  It was Damien Mira’s voice, from fifteen years earlier. They were in another car. It was another winter, but it was the same snow-covered landscape. Alexandre Vauvert had just joined the Toulouse police force and was a detective. It was his first homicide. The seasoned cop had taken him along to train him. At the time, Damien Mira was not thin, but he weighed a good forty pounds less than he did today. Vauvert remembered that he was already wearing his huge tortoiseshell glasses.

  “That is where we are going,” Mira had said with a chuckle, “You will be able to say you saw the Emperor’s Nose on your first day.”

  His first day. There was a snowstorm. A bloody murder high in these mountains. He could not have dreamed of a better way to start his career with the unit.

  Vauvert sighed. Had it already been fifteen years? The Emperor’s Nose was still there, and it still looked like that famous Corsican.

  The road started twisting as he passed the empty fields and climbed higher into the mountains. He remembered the horse farm. And mostly, he remembered the owner’s body, with his guts exposed.

  That first crime scene was unforgettable. The man was found hanging in the middle of the stable. All the animals had been poisoned. The culprit had not stopped there. He had cut open the man’s belly and removed his intestines. He was clearly motivated by anger. Vauvert tried to remember the name. Dujardin, maybe. No, it was Dupin. The victim’s name was Elie Dupin.

  For once, the culprit had been easy to identify. A certain Renaud Garnier, who lived in the neighboring village, had just filed a complaint against Dupin. Garnier was a small-time con man who had been charged with bank fraud a number a times. Several times he had wormed money out of Dupin. They were fairly decent sums that he said he would use to play the market, but he had actually spent the money at the casino in Barbazan. When Dupin sued him, Garnier came to confront him, and the fight went south. Garnier murdered his neighbor and then poisoned the horses in a fit of rage. It was the first time Vauvert had seen such violence. It was far from the last.

  In any case, Vauvert felt great satisfaction in arresting that sorry individual. It was a good start. Six months later, even before the trial, Garnier hanged himself in the Seysses Prison showers. Nobody missed him.

  Vauvert had been promoted to inspector not long after. Years later, he was leading a squad. He had not thought back to this story until now.

  The road climbed higher in th
e mountains, along a steep slope covered with evergreens. Wild waterways tumbled into the valley below. Snowflakes falling in a blanket in front of his headlights forced him to take the turns slowly. The windshield wipers were having trouble clearing the snow. Returning to this place felt familiar and strange at the same time.

  He was not surprised that the property had fallen into ruins. After that terrible incident, people had said the place was haunted. The Dupin family never set foot there again. When they decided to sell, there were hardly any offers.

  If Loisel bought it, he did so knowing that nobody would come around snooping. Because there were few cell towers in the mountains, Vauvert checked his phone often and called in as soon as he found reception. He got Mira’s voice mail.

  “Damien, you’ll never guess where I’m going. I think Loisel is hiding out at the Comminges horse farm. Do you remember the Dupin case? I don’t know if I’ll find anything up there, but I’ll never know until I try.”

  He ended the call.

  The road was covered with snow. His tires were skidding on the sharp turns. He had a powerful SUV, but he did not have snow tires.

  Vauvert drove carefully.

  42

  After miles of climbing through the pine trees, he finally reached the property. There was a large gate that had once been red and was now covered with snow. There was also a no-trespassing sign.

  He parked the SUV, keeping the lights on, and got out. His boots sank into four inches of snow. A cold wind stung his face. The night was as black as ink. Even with the headlights, he could not see much beyond ten feet. He remembered that the buildings were not far from the fence at the end of the driveway. But he could not see them in the darkness.

  He approached the gate and saw that the chain and the lock were brand new.

  That was not enough to stop him. He had cutters in the car. He retrieved them, put on gloves, and needed just a few minutes to cut the chain.

  He had some trouble opening the gate because of the snow accumulation.

  When he got it fully open, he saw movement at the end of the lane.

  He froze. Was there someone in the storm watching him?