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  Lucie murmured into her mother’s back.

  “How am I going to do this, Mom? How am I going to get through this?”

  Marie Henebelle sat on the couch, exhausted.

  “I’ll be here. I’ll always be here.”

  Lucie nodded with a sniffle.

  “The child, on the autopsy table . . . I cursed her, Mom; I cursed her for leaving me in doubt. It’s not my child. Deep inside me, I know it’s not mine. How could one of my little girls end up on one of those? How could . . . how could anyone want to harm them? It just isn’t possible.”

  “I know it isn’t.”

  “I’m sure that monster . . . I’m sure he stood there while . . . while the flames spread. He was watching.”

  “Lucie . . .”

  “Maybe they’ll catch him fast. Maybe he’s got other little girls . . .”

  Marie answered in a resigned voice: the sign, Lucie thought, of an unshakable fatalism.

  “Maybe, Lucie. Maybe.”

  The cop no longer had the strength to talk. In the half darkness, she went to wash her hands and tore open the packet the CSI lab had given her. Each of her movements weighed a ton. Once she’d pulled on the gloves, she came back into the living room. Her gaze met her mother’s, who recoiled, fingers trembling on her lips.

  As an officer of the law, Lucie cautiously slid the swab into her own mouth, delicately moved it around so that its white cotton-wool tip would become saturated with saliva. She wiped her tear-streaked face on her shoulder: nothing could be allowed to contaminate her movements, not even her maternal grief. She knew what she was doing was hateful, unreal: she was seeking in her parental DNA the proof that one of her daughters might be dead.

  Lucie then rubbed the tip of the swab on the spot indicated on the pink FTA card until she’d impregnated it with her DNA; she placed the card in the bag, which she carefully sealed along the wide red self-adhesive strip: “Police seal. Do not open.”

  The sample would go off first thing the next morning to a private laboratory, where it would be stacked up among hundreds of others. Her future—their future—depended on a common molecule that she couldn’t even see. A succession of millions of letters—A, T, G, C—that constituted a unique genetic fingerprint (except in the case of monozygotic twins), which so often had guided investigators and tripped up suspects.

  Despite her beliefs, her hopes, Lucie couldn’t help thinking that she might, soon, have to learn to survive without her little stars. And if that were to happen, how could she possibly keep on living?

  1

  One year later

  Manien’s group, from the Paris Homicide squad, had been first on the scene. The murder had been committed in the Vincennes woods, near the zoo, not far from Daumesnil Lake and only a few miles from Homicide’s own headquarters at 36 Quai des Orfèvres. Blue sky, warm water, but moderate temperatures that early September day. A muted, variable summer, often traversed by torrential rains that allowed the capital to catch its breath.

  A lifeless body had been found by a jogger early that morning. The runner, cell phone in his waist pouch, had first called Emergency. In less than an hour, the information had been relayed by first responders to the Homicide switchboard, before reaching the third floor, Stairway A, and yanking the detectives from their seats.

  Slumped at the wheel of his green Polo, a man of about forty had, at first glance, taken several knife wounds to the thorax. He was still wearing his seatbelt. It was the strange position of his head—chin resting heavily on his chest—that had alerted the jogger. The driver’s-side window was completely lowered.

  Franck Sharko, second in command in the group of four policemen, stayed as close to the front as he could. He walked with a firm step, intent on arriving first at the crime scene. Followed some ten yards back by his boss and two colleagues, he crossed the boundary set up by the two uniforms and approached the vehicle parked in an area surrounded by trees, sheltered from prying eyes.

  The men from Quai des Orfèvres knew the Vincennes woods all too well, especially the areas around the boulevards, popular with prostitutes and transvestites. Still, this particular place, between the zoo and the lake, was a bit more remote and usually quiet—in other words, the ideal spot for an unwitnessed murder.

  After pulling on latex gloves, Sharko, wearing jeans that were too big for him, a black T-shirt, and docksiders on the verge of disintegration, thrust his arm through the car’s open window, grabbed the victim by the chin, and wrenched the face toward him. Captain Bertrand Manien, fifty years old, more than twenty-two of them on the job, rushed up and furiously grabbed Sharko by the collar of his T-shirt.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Sharko gently pushed the corpse’s head back inside the car. He looked at the victim’s bloodstained clothes, dead eyes, and pallid face.

  “I think I know this guy. Don’t you recognize him?”

  Manien was fuming. He jerked the inspector away, as if he were just some delinquent.

  “Correct procedures mean anything to you? Are you shitting me?”

  “Frédéric Hurault . . . That’s it, Frédéric Hurault. He came through our place about ten years ago. I was the one who handled his case at the time, back when you were working for me. Don’t you remember?”

  “What I’m interested in right now is you.”

  Sharko glared at this boss with a lower rank than his. Since his voluntary reassignment to Homicide, he was no longer a chief inspector—other than in the nickname people sarcastically gave him: “How’s it going, Chief Inspector?” No, he was now just a simple police lieutenant. It was the price he’d had to pay to return to the grime of the streets, the slums, the filth of crimes committed for money, after several years in the pristine offices of the Violent Crimes Unit in Nanterre, Behavioral Analysis section. Sharko had asked for this reassignment, even if it meant working with an asswipe like Manien. His request had shocked all his former superiors: demotions were extremely rare in the French police system. As compensation, they’d offered to let him run his own group in Homicide. He’d refused. He wanted to end up the way he’d begun: hedgehopping, a gun in his fist, facing off with the shadows.

  “And do you remember why Hurault was convicted?” he said in a dry voice. “Because he killed two little girls who weren’t even ten years old. His own daughters.”

  Manien pulled out a cigarette, which he lit between two fingers with chewed nails. He was the thin, nervous type, with a face like rolling paper: pale, rough, and taut. He worked a lot, ate little, and laughed even less. A sleazebag for some, a real son of a bitch for others. For Sharko, he was both.

  Manien didn’t mince words: “You’ve really done it now. You’ve been pulling my chain since Day One, and I don’t need any loose cannons on my team. Something’s coming open with Bellanger—Fontès is moving to the islands at the end of the week. Clear out without making a fuss. It’ll be good for you and good for me.”

  Sharko nodded.

  “Amen.”

  Manien puffed greedily on his coffin nail, squinting behind a cloud of smoke that quickly dissipated.

  “Tell me, when’s the last time you got any sleep? More than two hours a night, I mean?”

  Sharko rubbed his forehead. Three deep, perfectly parallel furrows appeared under the graying locks that spilled over his ears. He who, during his entire career as a cop, had always kept his hair short, hadn’t been to the barber in months.

  “How should I know?”

  “You know perfectly well. I didn’t think it was physically possible for anyone to last this long. I always thought you could die from lack of sleep. You’re falling off the deep end, Chief Inspector. You never should have left that desk in Nanterre. You can remember some guy you haven’t seen in ten years, but you’ve got no clue where you misplaced your weapon. So right now, you’re going home and you’re going to sl
eep like there’s no tomorrow. And wait for Bellanger’s call. Go on, now, beat it.”

  Manien walked away with those words. Firm step of a military man. A real bastard, and proud of it. He went off to greet the CSI techs and the procedural expert, who were just arriving with their equipment, paperwork, and serious faces. Always the same, thought Sharko: a bunch of carrion-eating maggots ready to throw themselves on the corpse. Time went by, nothing changed.

  With pinched lips, he stared one last time at the victim, whose pupils were already filming over. Frédéric Hurault had died with amazement deep in his eyes, probably without understanding why. Middle of the night, darkness, not even a lamppost nearby. Someone had knocked on his window and he’d rolled it down. The knife had flashed and struck him in the chest several times. A crime committed in less than twenty seconds, without noise or blood spatter. And without witnesses. Now it was time to gather clues, perform the autopsy, canvass the neighborhood: a tried-and-true routine that helped them solve 95 percent of criminal cases.

  But there still remained that other 5 percent, whose thousands of case file pages filled the garret offices of Homicide. A handful of especially crafty killers who’d managed to slip through the meshes of the net. They were the hardest to track down; you had to be worthy of arresting them.

  As if to defy authority, Sharko trampled on the crime scene one more time, even allowing himself a quick inspection of the vehicle, then disappeared without a word to anyone. Everyone watched him go with lips pressed tight, except for Manien, who was still shouting.

  No matter. For the moment, Sharko was having a hard time seeing straight and needed to sleep . . .

  • • •

  Middle of the night. Sharko was standing in his bathroom, feet together on a brand-new electronic scale, accurate to a hundredth of an ounce. No mistake or faulty adjustment: it indeed read 154.76 pounds. The same weight as when he was twenty. His stomach muscles had reappeared, along with his solid collarbones. From the height of his six feet and almost one inch, he palpated his unwell body with disgust. On a sheet taped to the wall, he marked a dot at the bottom of a grid drawn several months earlier. A straight downward line representing the evolution of his weight. At this rate, it would soon dip below the sheet and continue down the wall tiles.

  Bare-chested, he went back into his lifeless room. A bed, a closet; in the corner, a pile of disassembled miniature train tracks. The radio alarm whose music he hadn’t heard in an eternity said 3:07.

  Soon it would be time.

  Sitting cross-legged, he positioned himself in the middle of the mattress and waited. His eyelids fluttered. His eyes stared at the glaring red numbers.

  3:08 . . . 3:09 . . . In spite of himself, Sharko began counting down the seconds in his head: fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven . . . A ritual he was powerless to stop, that returned night after night. The hell buried deep within his scorched brain.

  The digital display on the clock changed.

  3:10. The feeling of an explosion, like the end of the world.

  One year and sixteen days earlier, to the minute, his telephone had rung. He hadn’t been sleeping that night, either. He remembered the male voice, from the forensic lab of the CSI unit in Poitiers, delivering the worst news possible. Words from beyond the grave:

  “There’s no doubt about the results. Comparative analysis of Lucie Henebelle’s DNA with that of the burnt victim in the woods came out positive. It’s either Clara or Juliette Henebelle, but we don’t have any way of telling which for the moment. I’m sorry.”

  Wearily, Sharko slid under the sheets and pulled them up to his chin, in the dismal hope of dozing for two, maybe three hours. Just enough to survive on. Only true insomniacs know how long the nights can be, and how loud the phantoms scream. The sounds of the night echoing, the thoughts scorching one’s head . . . To combat this torture, the old cop had tried nearly everything—lying still, synchronous breathing, sleeping pills, even exercise until he was ready to drop from exhaustion—all in vain. His body gave in but not his mind. And he refused to see a shrink. After years of being treated for schizophrenia, he’d had his fill of doctors.

  He closed his eyes and imagined yellow beach balls bobbing lazily atop the waves—his personal soporific imagery. After a while, he finally began feeling the ebb and flow of the sea, the murmur of the wind, the crunch of sand. His limbs went numb, torpor settled over him, he could even hear his heart feeding his exhausted muscles. But, just like every time sleep was about to arrive, the froth of the waves suddenly turned bloodred, tossing the half-crushed beach balls onto the sand, where all that remained were the black shadows of children.

  And he thought about her, again, and always. About Lucie Henebelle, whose image came down to a face, a smile, tears. What had become of her? Sharko had quietly learned that she’d resigned from the force a few days after the killer’s arrest. Had she managed to keep her head above water since then, or had she, like him, sunk deeper into the pit? What were her days like, her nights?

  His swollen heart began pounding faster. Much too fast for any hope of sleep. So Sharko turned over and started again. The waves, the beach balls, the warm sand . . .

  • • •

  On Monday, September 6, his telephone rang at 7:22 a.m., while he was drinking his decaf, alone, in front of a crossword puzzle less than one-third finished. For the clue “God of violence and evil,” he had written “Seth,” then had silently abandoned the game, his mind too distracted. Once he would have finished a puzzle like this in no time flat; but now . . .

  At the other end of the line, Nicolas Bellanger, his new chief, was asking him to go to the primate research center in Meudon, about two and a half miles from Paris. A woman had just been found dead in a cage, apparently attacked and mutilated by a chimpanzee.

  Sharko hung up sharply. He was nearing the end of his career, and here he was investigating monkeys. He could easily visualize his colleagues sticking him with the dud case. He imagined the sarcastic remarks and mocking looks behind his back, the “Hey, Chief Inspector, you got the hots for a baboon?”

  From the depths of his sorrow, he told himself that he’d sunk awfully low.

  2

  After passing the Meudon Observatory, Sharko sped down a narrow road in the middle of the forest; he was seated next to his new partner on Bellanger’s team, a thirty-year-old named Jacques Levallois. Face like a teacher’s pet, muscular build, Levallois had joined Homicide the previous year, benefiting from excellent scores on his lieutenant’s exam and a boost from his uncle, the deputy chief of Narcotics.

  That morning, the chief inspector wasn’t feeling especially talkative. The two men had never worked together, and Levallois, like everyone else, was well aware of his partner’s turbulent past. The endless manhunts for violent killers, the plunge into the most twisted cases, wife and daughter killed in tragic circumstances several years earlier . . . and that weird illness that had gone off in his head, then just disappeared without saying boo. Levallois looked on him as a real survivor, one of those fallen heroes that you either admire or despise. For the moment, the young lieutenant wasn’t sure which attitude to adopt. One thing for certain, Sharko had been a great investigator.

  Though very near Paris, the place the two cops were driving through seemed cut off from the rest of the world: trees ad infinitum, muted light, overgrown vegetation. A discreet sign read PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER, UMR 6552 EEE.

  “EEE, that’s Ethology-Evolution-Ecology,” Levallois explained to break the ice.

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “To tell the truth, I have no idea.”

  Sharko turned off at a recess and parked in the lot, where there were already a dozen cars belonging to staff and a police Emergency Services vehicle. Located in the middle of the forest, the center looked like a small entrenched camp, protected by tall, solid wood fences squeezed into a circular enclosure.
The entrance was through a gate that at the moment stood wide open. Without a word, the two officers headed into the enclave, toward a group of men and women in mid-conversation at the end of a dirt path.

  There was nothing especially remarkable about the center. All around them, huge man-made environments made it look as if the animals roamed freely, but in reality they were held captive by thin wire mesh, and the tall branches of the trees were covered in green netting. Monkeys of all sizes played or hung by their tails and screeched; clusters of lemurs stared at the two intruders with wide jade-colored eyes. A pale copy of the Amazon rain forest, refitted Parisian-style.

  A woman with brown hair and drawn features came away from the group and approached them. She must have been around fifty, looking vaguely like Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist. Levallois proudly held out his police ID.

  “Paris police, Homicide. I’m Lieutenant Levallois, and this is . . .”

  “Chief Inspector Sharko,” said Sharko.

  They exchanged handshakes. The woman’s was surprisingly firm.

  “Clémentine Jaspar. I run this center. It’s terrible what happened.”

  “One of your monkeys attacked an employee?”

  Jaspar shook her head sadly. A woman in touch with nature, thought Sharko, noticing the cracks on her fingers, her skin tanned by a different sun from the one over France. A wide scar ran along her forearm, the kind a machete might have left.

  “I don’t understand what happened. Shery would never hurt a fly. It’s just not like her to commit such an atrocity.”

  “Shery is . . .”

  “My West African chimpanzee. She’s been with me for years.”

  “Can you show me where it happened?”

  She pointed to a long one-story building, white and modern looking.

  “The animal housing facility and the laboratories are in there. Two men from Emergency Services have already arrived. One is inside and the other . . . I don’t know, he must be walking around the pathways on his phone. Come with me.”