First Blood (6 page)

Before he found her again.

She got started, ripping off the strips of the veil that were wrapped around her.
A pending death.
She returned to the living room.
It was written, from the beginning.
As she approached the marble staircase, she slipped off her shoes. The floor was cold, hard, reassuring.

A death for a death. Sacrifice is the only currency accepted by the gods.

She climbed the stairs, in no hurry.

She opened the door of their bedroom. As she expected, Jonathan was lying in bed, his back to her. She saw a bottle of sleeping pills on the night table and knew he had tired of asking himself the unanswerable questions. She could tell from his breathing that he was already asleep—the light sleep of cowards.

She could not hold it against him. How was a man supposed to react when he discovered that the wife he loved, the woman he married had never been what she had told him she was? Jonathan did not know. He had decided to flee. He undoubtedly thought that things would be better tomorrow.

Better—that she did not know. But yes, tomorrow would be another day. She no longer had a choice.

In a smooth, silent motion, Madeleine pointed the gun at her husband’s neck and then watched him for a long time.

Jonathan breathed slowly in his medicated sleep.

The shot was deafening. Jonathan’s skull exploded. His brains spread across the bed in a splash of gray and red.

Madeleine, her arm thrown back by the recoil, watched the scarlet pulsations spilling out of her husband’s head, inundating the sheets.

In other circumstances, she would have had an extreme distaste for all the disorder. All that blood and all that it implied, now.

The humiliating wounds had returned.

The daily rituals had been broken.

There was no turning back.

“It was the only solution, Jonathan,” she said.

She straightened up and headed toward the large walk-in closet. Its walls were lined with hundreds of outfits on hangers. She climbed on a footstool and grabbed a suitcase. She did not have much time.

She would cry later.

Les Ruisseaux housing project

The firefighters got the blaze under control finally, after spraying thousands of gallons of water on the building for three and a half hours. The parking was bustling. Crowded. Full of confusion. There was general shock. People were wrapped in blankets to ward off the chill of the night. Teens were talking loudly, gesticulating. They were on edge, getting carried away. Some mothers were crying. The top floors of the building looked as though they had been devastated.

Officers from the homicide and the drug squads were circulating through the crowd, asking questions. They were trying to determine who had made it into the parking lot and who was still missing. The tenants answered their questions with one-syllable words and insults. The officers did not insist and moved along.

For the time being, only Ismael Constantin seemed to have disappeared.

Forming a security line around the perimeter were fifty or so riot police wearing bulletproof vests and carrying shields. They observed the chaos with closed faces. The project kids shot them angry looks.

“The calm before the storm,” Leroy said.

Hunched over the steering wheel, he hit the dash with his palm.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “One of those kids is going to go after a firefighter or a cop, or anyone in the way, and then we’ll have a riot.”

He contemplated his colleagues who were busy at work. Tense faces. He had not yet dared to get out of the car to talk to them.

Officially, neither he nor Eva was supposed to be here.

“Eva, you don’t have anything to say?”

She was sitting next to him and had put her dark glasses back on.

“What do you want me to say? This show is depressing me.”

“Do you want to talk about what happened?”

Eva watched her clenched fists turn white.

“No.”

“Shit,” Leroy said. “I don’t know what to say to get you to understand that I’m worried.”

It was no use. She looked away. People were screaming at each other, their arms crossed. The firefighters were rolling up their hoses, undoing their tanks, and removing their helmets.

“They’ve finished,” she announced.

As if that were a tacit signal, a group of newcomers showed up. These were men in suits who were very sure of themselves, the police higher-ups. Television cameras followed in their wake, microphones held out, flashes going off.

“Of course. The head honcho is here to talk big,” Leroy grumbled. “They must have pulled him out of bed. Do you think he’ll tell the media that everything is under control?”

Eva said nothing. She had seen Deputy Chief Adam from the drug squad in the herd of officials. The man looked pinched in a pinstripe suit that was too small for his broad shoulders. He had walked past their car without seeing them.
Luckily.
Leroy had had words with him two weeks earlier, when they had been taken off the Constantin case. Adam was someone you did not want to cross, not if you wanted to have a decent job in this outfit. Had he seen them, he would have had them forcibly removed from the scene.

But the group had already moved far away from them. Adam wanted to be in the limelight. The deputy chief stepped into the crowd—into the heart of chaos—his face filled with perfected compassion and determination. The cameras did not miss a thing.

Eva watched the burned building and the crowd.

“I’m sorry. I just thought...”

She started grinding her teeth. She could not explain to him what she thought she had seen. She knew it was idiotic.

“Yes?” Leroy said, attentive.

“I thought I recognized someone,” she said, in a thin voice. “I’m truly sorry.”

He shrugged.

“Well, nobody was there.”

“I’m sure someone was there. Even if I don’t understand what happened.”

Leroy shook his head. “Eva, I assure you. There is nothing to understand. Whatever you saw was in your imagination.”

She remained quiet for a while, then exhaled and said, “Maybe.”

“It’s like you’re seeing ghosts,” Leroy said. “It’s not right.”

If only you knew
, she wanted to tell him.
I saw my sister’s ghost for years. Believe me, it was very real. It saved my life.

Leroy added, sounding serious, “It’s making you crazy. It’s about time you talk to someone.”

“You’re the one who is obsessed with this dealer,” she said. “And I doubt that your friend Joseph Adam will ask for your help. If he dismantles this narcotics cartel, he’ll be promoted. He’d kill for that.”

“I wasn’t talking about the Constantin case.”

“What case, then?”

Leroy glared at her. “I’m talking about the case that fills your nights, Eva. Your private investigation that cuts you off from everyone else. It’s always the same. Your little secret.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about,” she said, trying to sound indifferent.

In reality, her pulse was galloping.

“Okay,” Leroy said calmly, choosing his words with care. “I’m talking about the murder of your mother and your twin sister.”

And there they were. It struck her like a jolt of electricity. Nobody had ever talked about it with her at work, much less in private. Her family’s death was taboo. It was her secret flaw, her bottomless pit. She wanted to scream, to slap him. But she remained perfectly still.

“You picked up the Night Scourge case again months ago,” Leroy insisted. “You really think I didn’t know?”

That was the case. Eva didn’t want to hear what he had to say. It wasn’t any of his business. But he kept going.

“You submitted requests for reports from every department. You even blackmailed Clementine at the Criminal Records Office to get the original neighborhood-canvas reports that had never been digitized. And you set up new alerts in the program. Do you have a lead after all these years?”

He glanced at her. This was slippery ground. Eva gave a sly smile.

“Did Clementine tell you that?”

“Yes, well, she...” He cleared his throat. “She talks in bed.”

“Obviously.”

“What I mean to say is...”

“What you mean,” Eva cut in, “is that you are spying on me. I thought I could trust you. Who else knows?”

“
Everyone
knows.”

Another jolt. But Eva remained inscrutable behind her dark glasses.

“Everyone?”

“The whole department. What did you think?”

“Are people talking about it?”

“Of course not. But you lock yourself in your office and obsess over this case. You’re losing it. I can’t lie and pretend it doesn’t matter.”

“You couldn’t understand,” she said.

“That is certainly true. Your mother and your sister were murdered. That is the most horrible thing that could happen to anyone.”

He hesitated, unsure of his position. But he clearly wanted to get things out in the open, once and for all.

“I know you were there. Everyone knows you were there for this horrible crime. You were only six years old, Eva. You couldn’t do anything. You were lucky to get out alive. You have no reason to feel guilty.”

“You think I feel guilty about what happened to my family? Is that your damned psychological analysis?” she asked.

“So that’s not it?”

Eva slowly opened her clenched fist. Her nails had dug into her palm, leaving four red marks on her skin. She closed her fist again.

“Enough,” she said.

“No,” Leroy insisted. “We’ll have to talk about it one day or another. You’re always high. You don’t sleep anymore. Alexandre called me again. He’s worried about you.”

“What’s Alexandre got to do with it?”

“He’s crazy in love with you. You know that. And you’ve been playing him for months.”

“I’m not playing anyone.”

“That’s what you think. Your problems are not going to go away just because you dig a moat around yourself.”

She stared at the cracked windshield for a while. Her throat was dry, her thoughts confused. She wanted this conversation to stop. She wanted it all to stop.

“We have other things to worry about,” she said, teeth clenched.

“I went over the Scourge file,” Leroy said, ignoring her.

Once again, a fist in her gut.

She looked at her partner. He was young and was obviously tired, but Erwan Leroy had exceptional strength of character.

“Why did you do that?” she asked.

“To understand. To try to understand. The case is closed, Eva. The guy has disappeared. He stopped killing after your family. There were no more victims. That was twenty-five years ago. The monster who did that has to be dead now. You have to accept that.”

Eva shook her head. Her face, illuminated in the flashing lights outside, was as hard as a statue. She was a white marble goddess.

“He is still alive,” she whispered.

“No,” Leroy said. “You have no way of knowing that.”

Eva did not answer. He was right. She had no way of knowing that. Yet it was a truth she carried inside her, in every drop of her blood.

Because there was something she had never told anyone.

Something that could have changed the course of this case—and its resolution—if she had revealed it when she was six. If she had not been traumatized by what had happened in that basement, when the man with white hair had slit her sister’s throat in front of her eyes. If she had not repressed that horror deep inside, forgetting it for years.

But the truth was coming back. She dreamed about it every night. She woke up in a cold sweat, her heart nearly bursting. The image of the killer was imprinted in her soul. His smile. His red albino eyes, just like hers.

Yes, she knew who murdered her mother and her sister.

She alone.

She knew that one day, he would return for her.

“I’m sorry to have drawn attention to us,” she said.

Leroy shook his head. “You’re not going to do that to me. You’re not going to change the subject.”

But that was exactly what she intended to do.

“Earlier, the kids’ leader, the one the gang members called Sammy—he seemed to think we were responsible for the fire.”

“That’s right. He let that slip. There’s nothing astonishing about that. These kids were raised hating everything that resembles an institution.

“I agree, but it seemed to me that he had been warned that this could happen. And you heard rumors, too, Erwan. That’s why you asked me to come with you, isn’t it?”

“No, I didn’t hear anything about Constantin dying.”

“Maybe you misinterpreted what you heard. What I think is that the entire neighborhood thought something bad would happen to him.”

She was regaining control already.
Be a cop. Forget that insidious bite of fear.
She adjusted her glasses.

“Have you seen his gang leaders?” she asked.

“No,” Leroy said. “It looks like they were not here tonight.”

“Don’t you find it strange that Constantin ordered his underlings to be scarce on this specific night?”

“What are you suggesting?” Leroy asked.

She pointed to the crowd. She had been observing it for a while now, attentive to the slightest detail. These people were terrified, yes. But there was no real sense of surprise.

“I think you are right. One way or another, these people were warned. Nobody’s television seemed to be on just before the fire started. They were all dressed when they came out. A lot of them even thought to grab blankets, even though it doesn’t look like any of them were sleeping. They all evacuated the building at the same time. And look, even the youngest ones seem to have been briefed. Do you find it unusual that nobody has thrown a stone at the firefighters?”

On the other side of the parking lot, the last firefighters were coming out of the building and were signaling to each other.

“There,” Eva said. “They found something.”

“You think?”

She put on a red police armband.

“Trust me. Do you want back on this case?”

“You know I do,” Leroy said.

“So we need to get over there before Adam and his troops make it up to Constantin’s place. We have a few minutes before the firefighters pass along the information.”