First Blood (18 page)

“Alexandre, I want your squad on this case. But first, what exactly happened to you?”

“It’s a little complicated.”

“Someone told me you were hurt. Is that true?”

“There was someone here when I arrived, a woman.”

He hesitated and then said, “She pushed me. I fell. She ran off. It all happened very quickly. I’ll write up a report.”

Vauvert held out his pack of cigarettes with a smile, defying her to challenge him. She stared at him for a moment, not believing his story, and then took a cigarette between her thin fingers. He held out the lighter and lit her cigarette.

“Thank you,” she said, exhaling.

Then she became all business again. “We have two bodies, the husband and the wife. According to the medical examiner, they’ve been dead for some time, maybe two weeks. They were tied up with wire, and their throats were slit like chickens. Any ideas?”

“Someone is on a punitive expedition, and the body count has just started,” Vauvert said. “Two weeks. You know what that means, don’t you? That coincides with the son-in-law’s disappearance.”

“Pierre Loisel? The businessman who vanished? Do you think it’s vengeance?”

“With what happened to Amandine Beaumont and her son, it gets you thinking, doesn’t it?”

The state attorney nodded. Her eyes shone in the darkness.

“I heard about that accident. A drunk mother who drove into the canal. For a while, people were thinking it was murder.”

“There was no proof,” Vauvert said. “In any case, someone has decided to make things right.”

“If so, then why kill the parents-in-law?”

“No idea,” Vauvert said. “We don’t have enough pieces to the puzzle.”

He avoided any mention of the woman in the white fur coat and what she had said.
I arrived too late.
Too late for what? To save them? To save Pierre, who is perhaps dead somewhere, tied up with wire and drained of his blood?

The state attorney tossed her cigarette butt in the snow.

“Do you feel up to taking on this case, inspector? You don’t look like you’re in good shape.”

“No problem at all.”

“So it’s yours. Keep me posted.”

“Of course.”

He was watching her walk off when his telephone chimed. It was a message from Mira.

“Car rental gave this name: Madeleine Reich.”

Vauvert smiled for the first time that evening.

He had a piece of the puzzle.

One day, they will save your life.

A winter wind blows on the park. Powdery frost covers the stone statues.

The moon slides between the clouds, which are throwing frozen reflections on the windows of the mansion.

The rooms are lifeless, plunged in blue shadows.

Yet there is a presence in this house, in the still furnishings and fixtures.

Calm, deliberate footsteps on the hardwood floor.

He has come for Madeleine.

But Madeleine is no longer there.

The little bitch ran away before he got here. Now he is going through the home, kicking the doors open, digging through the desk, ripping pictures off the walls, and throwing drawers onto the floor.

“Bad Madeleine. How did you know I would come?”

His voice holds dusk, power, and patience. Yet there is also an explosive rage. As soon as he can wrap his fingers around that traitor’s neck...

Another room. More hallways. Overturned furniture. The moon comes out from behind the clouds again and casts shadows of the falling snowflakes on the walls. Tomorrow morning, the yard will again be an immaculate white.

He keeps moving. He examines the remains of Madeleine and Jonathan Reich’s last meal. The sushi is already rotting, giving off a sweet odor.

There is also the smell of blood.

He touches the puddle of blood with his bare finger. There is no risk that his prints are on file. He draws a line down the middle of the plate and brings his finger to his mouth. His tongue shivers.

He has an intense vision.

He hears Madeleine’s screams here, when her wounds opened up again.

Her injuries have reappeared. That is a very good thing. That means that little by little, order is returning. The mistakes of the past are being corrected, one by one.

He smiles in the shadows, showing his teeth, which are filed to a point. He is close. So close now.

His swipes at one of the porcelain plates.

It flies, spins, and crashes to the floor in an explosion of white. Outside, birds fly off, cawing.

“I have waited long enough.”

He climbs the stairs to the next floor, silent and on guard. The smell of blood is an effective guide. It leads to the one thing Madeleine has abandoned. That bitch Madeleine, who probably thinks she has gotten away. At best, she has earned a respite, a short, hopeless respite.

The body is in the bedroom. Jonathan’s inanimate body. It is clear that she left Jonathan there for him. She wanted to show him that she still has tricks up her sleeve, that nothing she has acquired is absolutely necessary.

What an idiot.

The body is lying on the bed in a strange position. The contents of his head have escaped through a hole in the back of the skull and spread across the wall. Death came by surprise, like a bolt of thunder. How typical of Madeleine.

He nears the body, observes it, and feels sorry for the man.

Outside, a wailing ambulance flies down a distant boulevard.

Silence returns, settling in for good this time. The night is a guardian of secrets. It alone can guess what occurs on the edge of human lives.

“Madeleine, Madeleine,” he says in a dusky voice. “It is always so easy to throw you off balance.”

His slender white hand touches Jonathan’s face. His sharp nails cut across Jonathan’s budding beard, lacerating the skin, and leaving black lines.

“Isn’t that right, Jonathan? She was such a bad girl.”

He leans over and opens the body’s mouth. Rigor mortis is wearing off, and the jaw barely resists. He inserts two fingers into the mouth that will never utter a word again.

“Hush,” he says.

He begins to murmur—a soft, repetitive drone. It is a simple, naive chant, spoken in a deep voice, like a litany that he repeats again and again until the air in the room becomes wavy and opens up, and the fabric of reality becomes undone, like a skein of yarn. Then he will follow the thread to its source.

“Tell me what you know, Jonathan. I am the one who speaks to shadows and the glimmer in the shadows that hold no light. Listen to me, and obey me. I want to know everything now.”

The film-covered eyes in Jonathan’s body pop open.

He leans forward and digs deeper in Jonathan’s mouth.

He starts chanting again.

The song of saints and gods.

Little by little, the body’s memories return, streaming through the mouth and into the hand holding the tongue.

The memories are disappointing. It is as if poor Jonathan never knew anything about the fabulous miracle who shared his life. His mind is filled with nothing but ignorance and naive love. His time with Madeleine comes back, little by little, in shining images, like air bubbles rising from the bottom of the sea. The memories are intact and disarmingly simple. A mysterious woman opens a door one evening, and her beauty swallows Jonathan up. He forgets the rest of his life and wants only one thing—to be with her, to belong to her. He sends her red flowers, takes her to fine restaurants, and gives his whole heart to a sublime and triumphant Madeleine. And Jonathan, drowned in his blind love for her, never asks the slightest question. He is too happy to have her, to share nights of lovemaking with her, and to simply be there for her. He jokes about his wife’s silences, about her refusal to share the secrets of her former life, as she calls it. He would never know the things she had to do for her success and for the absolute power she wielded over both friends and enemies.

“What a useless idiot. You don’t know anything. You never understood.”

It does not matter. There are other means.

Love is perhaps blind, but retinas are not.

He raises his voice again in a deeper monotonous chant. It is more insistent. There is no one nearby to hear him, and he grows louder, quickening the pace. The words stand apart, stronger and stronger as he spits them out with increasing violence, like screams of love—or pain—called out in the darkness.

Jonathan died here, in these sticky sheets. When the gunshot threw his head back, his retinas registered the final instants of his life and the first ghosts populating his death.

He is looking for these images deep in what remains of Jonathan.

They are images of Madeleine with a smoking gun in hand. They float by for a second before separating and then melting into the great nothingness.

Madeleine observing him, leaning over him, her lips mumbling something. “It’s the only way, Jonathan.”

Then Madeleine straightens and calmly makes her way across the room to the closet, where she grabs a suitcase from the top shelf. Madeleine takes her time to choose her outfits. She folds them carefully and arranges them neatly in the suitcase. Madeleine has always been disciplined.

She returns to Jonathan.

She smiles at him again, even though he is dead. She does not suspect that his empty pupils are still recording her activities in the room.

Madeleine’s features begin to blur as the death memories break up.

No. It can’t stop there. He grumbles. He needs more. He needs to dig deeper, to press harder. He pushes his fist into Jonathan Reich’s throat. He must know. The information is there, right there, in those final blurry images.

They come back into focus. Madeleine’s eyes and mouth reappear. Yes, Jonathan has seen them. His dead eyes have seen them.

Madeleine mumbling, thinking.

It is impossible to see what she has done, but he can see her lips. Madeleine’s lips moving, whispering, unwittingly betraying her.

All he has to do is read her lips.

Then he will have the answers.

Everything is said. His confidence returns. He grips Jonathan’s tongue and pulls it gently until the muscle gives way. The tongue comes out.

He gets up. His eyes shine in the darkness.

He opens his hand and drops the soft tongue to the floor, where he watches it decompose.

He knows what he has to do.

It takes him less than ten minutes to go to the car and return to the house with a container of gas in one hand and a box of sea salt in the other.

He spreads the salt over the body to remove all evidence, both visible and invisible.

He recites the text. He raises his voice. The tone is different, swollen, as he calls on the forces beyond the veil.

As he splatters gas on the body, the bed, and the furniture, it is no longer a simple litany. It is a joyful, exalted war chant.

Vauvert woke up with a start.

An intense burn on his face.

He sat up quickly, yanking the sheet with him. His hands shot to his eyes. He felt the rough texture of his skin, the sharp angles of his cheekbones, and his crooked nose. There was no pain, no flame. Just sweat.

A dream.

For a minute, though, he had the sensation of being in a huge oven, swallowed up by red howling flames—that was the end of his nightmare.

It’s just a fucking dream.

He heart was pounding.

“Shit,” he said. And then, as if to reassure himself with the sound of his own voice or just because he was alone, he added, “Holy mother fucking shit.”

His apartment was dark. The central heating was as oppressive as ever, but nothing at all like an actual fire.

So why was he smelling gas?

He breathed in. The smell was strong—an odor of gas and burning flesh.

“What exactly is happening to me?”

He got up and checked his apartment. Everything was in order, as much as it would ever be in his apartment. Nothing here was causing the smell. He stood still for a moment, and the odor became weaker.

Then it went away. Totally. Another hallucination.

“What the fuck?”

He sat down on the couch, dug out a cigarette, and turned on the news channel—a frequent balm for his sleepless nights. It offered the standard collection of political scandals and advertising. A cabinet member was accused of having work done on his lavish home on the government’s dime. Gay and lesbian groups were getting ready for a big rights march. There was a brief mention about the transsexual’s suicide.

And flames.

They were tall, voracious flames that crackled under the black sky. A large house surrounded by vast snow-covered grounds was burning. Strangely, there was no commentary to accompany the pictures.

Alexandre Vauvert leaned forward, trying to understand. There had to be a problem with the broadcast, because no one was reporting. All he could hear was crackling and explosions, along with police radios and orders given from a distance.

On the bottom of the screen, the words “Live from Neuilly-sur-Seine” appeared.

A coincidence. It was just a coincidence, wasn’t it? This fire and Neuilly-sur-Seine. He had done a quick check on the mysterious Madeleine Reich before going to bed. It was enough to learn that she headed a huge industrial concern—the Gaia Corporation—and that she lived in Neuilly-sur-Seine, as did a number of other business tycoons.

Was that her house? Could it be possible?

Vauvert lit another cigarette and took a long drag. His dream kept coming back to him, like a ghost hanging around the edges of his mind. Okay. There was a house in flames. There are fires every day. There had even been a big one just the night before in some housing projects outside Paris. He heard about it on the radio. So what? He was still waiting for the sound to return.

“I am reporting to you live from Neuilly-sur-Seine,” the reporter finally said. “Some fifty firefighters are combating a blaze that started just after midnight in this large home near the Parc de la Folie Saint-James. It has been confirmed that it belongs to the president of the Gaia Corporation, but we still don’t know if the owners were inside. It is too early to tell, but a source close to the police has informed us that it looks like arson.