First Blood (10 page)

She needed coffee—and a cigarette.

She made a pot and sat with a steaming cup at the kitchen table. She took a long, satisfying drag of her cigarette. The telephone rang.

“Eva? Did I wake you?”

It was Erwan Leroy. His voice was scratchy and sleepy.

“I was already up,” she said. “Do you have any news?”

“Yes. The coroner just called. She’s doing the autopsies this morning.”

“Already?”

“
We don’t have a choice. The reporters have jumped on it. It’s all they’re covering on the radio and television. Larusso wants us to speed things along.”

Of course. Larusso wanted them to screw up. A gang score in the projects was nothing but trouble. It was in his interest to get it wrapped up as quickly as possible.

Eva moved her head left and right, cracking her neck. Two hours of sleep would have to do.

“When?”

“Constantin’s autopsy is scheduled for nine. The baby is on for eleven. Are you coming?”

She envisioned the baby in the freezer.

She saw the face of her twin sister, who had been murdered when she was only six. She saw the puzzle of blood that was her life, each murderer she had arrested, and each victim whose death she had avenged. She had never managed to avenge her own family’s death.

She blinked back the tears.

“I’ll be right there.”

Soon.

Toulouse

Four hundred and thirty miles from Paris, Alexandre Vauvert woke up feeling strange.

He had had a dream—another one of those dreams.

He sat on the edge of his bed and stretched. The building heat was on full blast, making the bedroom in his small apartment unbearably hot, even though he was only wearing shorts. He went into the living room, where camouflage netting over the windows gave everything a dull-green tint.

What had he dreamed about? He could remember just one part. There was a road, a white road at dusk. And there were birds in the sky. He was waiting for something—he didn’t know what. And then he had felt the sensation of silky hair. He had touched a vulnerable softness. Alexandre felt his chest tighten. Of course. He had dreamed about her, again—the unattainable one, wrapped up in her problems and in her silence. In her rejection of him.

He had left messages that she never answered. And then he stopped leaving messages. In time, he would stop calling altogether.

Forget her,
he said to himself for the hundredth time, knowing that, once again, he would not.
Good God, forget the woman. That’s what’s best for you. Seriously, it’s not meant to be. Understood?

He opened a window to let some air in. A freezing January wind blew against his bare chest. It felt good. He tightened his powerful pectorals against the cold and lit his first cigarette of the day as he looked over the landscape of city rooftops, which were white with snow. Pale wisps of smoke escaped from the chimneys.

The snow had stopped falling, but the sky was still dark.

Just like his thoughts.

He exhaled smoke through his nose, brooding. Something was not right. Maybe it was the low-lying dark sky, which felt like it was crushing the city, or perhaps it was the dream that had ruined his already scant sleep and left the taste of blood in his mouth. In any case, he felt it deep inside, like a larval fear. But why?

You know why. Your dreams. It’s always your dreams and what they are trying to tell you, what you refuse to face.

He had just put out his cigarette when he realized the pack was empty and started searching the table for another one. He picked up his service weapon. It was an impressive—and technically against the rules—Smith & Wesson that he would never give up. Because he was an inspector and squad leader, nobody could say anything about it. It was even probable that nobody would dare to say anything. He found a new pack under the remote, which had been tossed next to two empty beer cans. He took out a cigarette and lit it.

The day would be long and colorless, he was sure. For months now, he had been doubting his motivation. His recent cases were depressing him more and more. Idiotic restaurant owners settling scores by poisoning each other’s produce and sending several patrons to the hospital. A twenty-four-year-old transsexual, a notorious prostitute, found hanging in his home. Relentless, ordinary violence and despair eating away at the city.

Of course, there was also that new case that had been taking everyone’s attention for nearly two weeks: the disappearance of Pierre Loisel.

Loisel was a well-off businessman who had vanished without the slightest explanation. The police had questioned one witness after another and had gotten nothing but useless answers. In another week or two, they would drop the case. There were no clues, no motives, and no suspects. The case would go cold. It was a foregone conclusion.

Sighing, Vauvert headed to the bathroom. He looked at his square, deeply lined face marked with countless scars. He had never found the time, money, or ego to redo the nose he had broken in a fight twenty years earlier.

He thought he was ugly. There he was, with his aging boxer’s mug, overly imposing size, too-broad shoulders, and eyes red from lack of sleep, and he still dreamed that a woman as beautiful as Eva Svärta would want him.

“What a waste, old man,” he said.

His phone rang, and his bad mood dissipated, as if by magic. It was she. It had to be. She must have read his thoughts. Or perhaps they had really connected in their dreams. Deep down, he knew it was possible. He had doubted it for years. He had refused to see the evidence, but not anymore. There were no coincidences that big. None.

He rushed to answer the phone, which was on the coffee table.

“Yes, hello.”

“Alex?”

“Shit. Virginie.”

He sighed. Hope was a hoax.

“As charming as ever,”
Virginie said, her voice frosty.

His ex-wife had always been the ice queen. That was one of the reasons he had loved her so much so long ago. They had split up, but she had refused to get out of his life.

“What do you want this time?”

“Alex, I know the last time we talked, it didn’t go very well, but I’d like to make peace. I really would.”

He did not answer. She wanted something from him, as usual. Money, probably. He already wanted another cigarette.

“We’re still friends, right? I have a really important favor to ask you. You know I don’t like bothering you unless it’s...”

“No thanks,” he interrupted.

“...it’s really, really...”

He hung up.

He already hated this day.

Paris

Medical Examiner’s Office

The autopsy suite stank of antiseptic, ashes, and death.

The forensic pathologist and medical examiner, Pauline Chadoutaud, was dressed in green scrubs and focused on cutting open Constantin’s skull with an electric saw. She revealed the brain, which looked like oozing, shriveled-up black fruit.

Eva Svärta kept her sunglasses on. They were her only defense against this ghastly spectacle.

She stood ramrod-straight in the rubber boots they had given her. She wore a plastic apron that was too big for her. The humming of the saw was relentless.

She focused on the victim’s body, which was lying on a stainless steel table under powerful, cold lighting that revealed every detail. The body was cracked, fissured, and black as coal. The medical examiner cut it up little by little, cleaning, weighing, and photographing each piece before handing it off to other hands in latex gloves for still more examination.

“I am extracting the encephalon,” Chadoutaud explained, absorbed in the details of her work. “The bone is very damaged. I am, however, still looking for the presence of antemortem trauma.”

There was a ripping—and strangely humid—sound. She removed the two halves of Constantin’s desiccated brain from the crumbling skull. She waited for the medical examiner to continue. The flames had seriously damaged the brain, and there was no information to be gotten from it.

“I’m returning to the mutilations around the mouth,” she explained, picking up long forceps and scissors.

Eva looked at the corpse’s lips—or what was left of them. Constantin’s face seemed to be wearing a black, sewn-up smile.

Whoever did this
really
had sewn up his mouth.

Eva had never seen anything like that before. She tried to take a breath, but the stench got to her even through the mask.

Chadoutaud slipped the forceps under the wire holding the lips together and tried to cut it. The lips crumbled. Leroy had been standing in the back, looking stoic. Now he turned away.

“This man’s mouth is held shut by metal wire, probably fishing wire, that has been sewn through his lips,” the medical examiner explained without any sign of emotion. “The flesh burned, but the wire did not. Cutters, please.”

Her assistant handed over the tool and took away the scissors.

This time, the metal wire gave way. Part of the lower lip fell into the mouth before she could remove all of the binding.

“Well, isn’t that interesting.”

Leroy took a step forward.

“What?”

“This man has no tongue.”

“Was it torn out?”

“Cut or torn, yes. It is too burned to determine what tool was used. All I can say is that the ablation of the tongue was brutal. The mouth appears to have hemorrhaged. I can at least confirm that this man was still alive when his lips were sewn shut.”

Eva stayed as far away as possible while the medical examiner explored the burned flesh. This detachment was crucial. She only wanted to consider the facts. She only wanted to record evidence that would help the investigation. That was unusual for this police officer, whose heightened sense of empathy had served the police force very well over the years. But detachment was the only way she could handle the emotional shock of human dissection.

“Perhaps it’s a message,” Eva said quietly. “They didn’t want him to talk about something.”

“Uh-huh,” Leroy said.

The detective was not faring as well as Eva. He had not managed to detach himself from the scene. He walked around the table, his rubber boots making a sucking noise, while Chadoutaud leaned over the body, cutting into it, removing blackened tissue, digging deeper in the body that once was Ismael Constantin.

“The wound in his chest was caused by a sharp tool resembling cutters. External examination of the organs reveals that the flesh was literally cooked in the heat of the fire. The muscles swelled, and the epidermis came off. I will now completely open the cavity.”

Eva clenched her jaw as the blade of the scalpel opened the body from chin to pubis, revealing more burned, crispy matter. She concentrated on the medical examiner’s fingers as they took hold of the ribs and spread them. She managed to watch her rip out the lungs without shuddering.

Chadoutaud gave the baked and rubbery organs to her assistant while she continued her monologue.

“As mentioned during the preliminary examination, this man is missing an organ in his chest. The heart is not present.”

Leroy stopped pacing. “So they pulled out his damned heart?”

“I would add that the operation was done carelessly. The cutter left deep grooves in the ribs but did not detach the muscles. There are crude traces of tearing. I think it was removed with bare hands.”

The medical examiner looked up. Above the mask and beneath the green cotton cap, her large blue eyes stood out like two spots of sky.

“The good news for him is that he was already dead when they burned him,” she concluded.

“To sum it up, Constantin was tied up with wire,” Leroy said, glancing at the wire that had been removed. “Then whoever did this cut out his tongue, sewed up his mouth, and ripped out his heart?”

“Before they doused him with gas and set him on fire, yes.”

“Does that sound like something a gang would do?”

“In my opinion? These days, anything goes.”

The medical examiner tilted her head and looked at the muscles she had cut up.

“Okay,” she finally said. “I find these mutilations to be surprising. They are impressive, and they must have been very painful. But they don’t indicate the kinds of torture we’re used to seeing. This reminds me of a sacrificial rite.”

“Like the Aztecs used to do?”

“With the heart ripped out, yes. I believe the Aztecs did that. They sacrificed to the sun god.”

“There isn’t much likelihood that an Aztec priest is walking around Paris,” Eva said in a flat tone. “The person who did this had a more pragmatic reason. Maybe he wanted to punish Constantin or make him an example for others.”

“That is possible. All I can tell you is that the killer lacked precision and probably isn’t a medical professional. He did, however, know exactly what he was doing, and he didn’t hesitate at all.”

“He didn’t hesitate to carry off the heart,” Eva said. “We didn’t find it on the crime scene.”

She wondered if that might not be the only reason they had mutilated Constantin—to rip out his vital organ. Psychopathic killers did all kinds of atrocious things. But gangs asserting their turf rights did not.
In either case, why Constantin?

“I wish I could tell you more,” the medical examiner said. She sighed. “The tissues are too damaged. This is just about the best we can do.”

As she spoke, she made new incisions. A dark-brown substance flowed onto the metal table.

Eva remained stony.

Leroy looked at the ceiling.

“There’s one more thing,” the medical examiner said. Attentive again, Pauline Chadoutaud examined the space where a heart had once beaten. Her eyes looked victorious.

“Christophe, can you hand me the forceps, please.”

Her assistant did as he was told. He could not have been more than twenty-five years old. He had a protruding jaw and a military-style crew cut. His sullen look did not invite discussion. For that matter, he had not said a word since the police had arrived.

“What did you find?” Eva asked, stepping closer to the table.

“I don’t know yet. There is some matter in the back of the chest cavity that has not been destroyed by the heat. With tweezers, the medical examiner began removing minuscule black particles. Her assistant held out a receptacle filled with transparent liquid. It began to foam, and the particles brightened as soon as they were dropped in,