“I just told you no.”
Good lord, she was just like him. Sharko tried to get a bead on her.
“You’re here because you feel life has overtaken you. In your head, pictures of corpses have replaced the photos of your children, am I right? Turn back, or you’ll end up like me. Alone amid a population that’s slowly wasting away.”
What tragedies had sucked him in and stirred up so many shadows? Lucie recalled the pictures on the news when she’d first seen him, at the pipeline construction site. And that horrible impression he’d left her with: that of a man at the edge of a cliff.
“I’d like to feel sorry for you, but I can’t. Pity isn’t my strong suit.”
“I’m finding your tone a bit blunt. Have you forgotten you’re talking to a chief inspector, Lieutenant?”
“I’m sorry if I—”
She didn’t have time to finish. Her telephone started ringing. Lucie glanced at her watch—the man was a bit early. She snatched up the cell apprehensively. A number with area code 514. She gave Sharko a somber look.
“It’s him. What do I do?”
Sharko held out his hand. Lucie clenched her teeth and slapped the phone into his palm. She swung over to his side to listen in on the conversation. The inspector answered the phone without speaking. The voice at the other end of the line demanded abruptly: “Do you have the information?”
“I’m the profiler you might have seen on TV. The guy with the shirt that should have been green and who’d had it up to here with reporters and the heat. So, about the information, yeah, I’ve got it.”
Lucie and Sharko exchanged a tense glance.
“Prove it.”
“And this I do how? You want me to take a photo of myself and mail it to you? Let’s quit playing hide-and-seek. The lady cop you talked to on the phone is with me. The poor thing pissed away a hundred euros in train fare because of you. Now tell us what you know.”
“You first. This is your last chance, or believe me, I’ll hang up.”
Lucie tapped on Sharko’s shoulder, urging him to accept and soften his tone. The inspector acquiesced, taking care not to reveal too much.
“We discovered five male individuals. Young adults.”
“That much I saw on the Net. You’re not telling me anything.”
“One of them was Asian.”
“When were they killed?”
“Between six months and a year ago. Now you. Why are you so interested in this case?”
There was a palpable tension in the crackling of voices that passed from ear to ear.
“Because I’ve been investigating this for two years.”
Two years… Who was he? A cop? A private detective? And what was he investigating?
“Two years? The corpses were only dug up three days ago, and at worst they’ve been dead for no more than a year. How can you have been investigating for two?”
“Tell me about the bodies. The skulls, for instance.”
Lucie didn’t miss a word. Sharko decided to let out a bit more line: negotiations often required concessions.
“The skulls had been sawed off, very cleanly, with a surgical tool. Someone had removed their eyes, as well as…”
“…their brains.”
He knew. Some guy nearly four thousand miles away knew what was going on. Lucie made the connection with the film: the stolen eyes, the iris-shaped scarring. She murmured something to Sharko. He nodded and spoke into the phone:
“What’s the connection between the bodies in Normandy and Szpilman’s film?”
“The children and the rabbits.”
Lucie strained to remember. She shook her head.
“What children, what rabbits?” asked Sharko. “What do they mean?”
“They’re the key, the start of the whole thing. And you know it.”
“The start of what, for Christ’s sake?”
“What else about the bodies? Any chance of identifying them?”
“No. The killer eliminated any possibility of identification. Hands cut off, teeth pulled. One of the bodies, better preserved than the others, had large areas of skin missing from his arms and thighs, which he’d torn off himself.”
“Do you have any leads?”
Sharko decided to play it coy.
“You’ll have to ask my colleagues. I’m officially on leave. And I’m about to head off for a little ten-day trip to Egypt, near Cairo.”
Lucie threw up her arms, furious. Sharko gave her a wink.
“Cairo… So then, you… No, it couldn’t have gone so fast. You… you’re one of them!”
He hung up. Sharko crushed his mouth against the speaker.
“Hello! Hello!”
A horrible silence. Lucie was virtually glued to his shoulder. Sharko smelled her perfume, felt the dampness of her skin, and couldn’t bring himself to push her away.
It was over. Sharko put the phone back on the table. Lucie stood up, fit to be tied.
“I don’t believe it! Jesus, Inspector! Holidays in Cairo! What are we going to do now?”
The inspector jotted the caller’s number on a corner of his napkin and put it in his pocket.
“We?”
“You, me. Are we playing it solo, or do we eat from the same plate?”
“A chief inspector never eats from the same plate as a lieutenant.”
“Please, Inspector.”
Sharko took a gulp of his beer. Something cool, to clear his mind. The day had been particularly freighted with emotion.
“Okay. You drop the film restorer and get the reel to the lab. You bring your unit up to speed. Let them do a full workup. And have them send me a copy. Have them also get in touch with the Belgians, to check out this Szpilman. We absolutely have to find out who this Canadian was who just hung up on me.”
Lucie nodded, feeling like she was crumbling under the weight of her responsibilities.
“And what about you?”
Sharko hesitated a moment, then began telling her about the telegram sent by a policeman named Mahmoud Abd el-Aal. He told her about the three girls, skulls sawed off just like here in France, and the mutilations. Lucie hung on every word; the case was burrowing deeper under her skin.
“He said, ‘You’re one of them,’” Sharko added. “That confirms that the killer I’m looking for isn’t working alone. There’s the one who cleanly saws off the skulls, and the butcher, the one who chops them up with a cleaver.”
Sharko thought for a few seconds more, then handed her his business card. Lucie did the same. He pocketed it, finished his beer, and stood up.
“I need to go find some bug spray before I turn in. To say that I hate mosquitoes would be an understatement. I hate them more than anything in this world.”
Lucie looked at Sharko’s card, turned it over. It was completely blank.
“But…”
“When you find somebody once, you always find him again. Keep me posted.”
He left the exact amount of the bill on the table and held out his hand. At the moment Lucie went to shake it, he blocked her thumb and slipped his own on top. Lucie clenched her jaw.
“Nicely done, Inspector. One to nothing.”
“Everyone calls me Shark, not Inspector.”
“Forgive me, but—”
“I know, you can’t quite do it. In that case, let’s stick with Inspector. For now.”
He smiled, but Lucie noticed something deeply sad in his dark eyes. Then he turned away and headed off toward Boulevard de Magenta.
“Inspector Shark?”
“What?”
“In Egypt… be careful.”
He nodded, crossed the station, walked through the entrance, and disappeared.
Alone. It was the only word that Lucie retained from their meeting.
A man alone, terribly alone. And wounded. Like her.
She looked at the blank card, which she held in her fingers; she smiled and wrote, diagonally across one side, “Franck Sharko, alias Shark.” For a few seconds her fingers espoused the letters of that name with its harsh, Germanic consonance. Peculiar fellow. Slowly, she pronounced, stretching out each syllable, “Fran-ck Shar-ko.” The Shark.