With regret, Lucie didn’t pick up the cat and instead turned her attention to the crime photos. Dozens of morbid rectangles, enough to make you vomit. Kashmareck was talking to her all the while, pointing to the photos.
“He was tied up, gagged, and hanged, there, from the chandelier hook, using filmstrips. I can’t imagine somebody managing that all by himself. Given the ceiling height, I think there must have been at least two of them. One to lift him up and the other to attach him.”
“Inspector Sharko advanced the hypothesis of two killers for the Gravenchon case. That might confirm that we’re dealing with the same perps.”
The captain pointed his finger toward the armchair.
“We found an empty film can on the cushions. The film they used to hang him with was Good Day for a Hanging, an old western. The victim had collected a hundred westerns in his closets upstairs. Good Day for a Hanging, can you imagine? You have to admit these killers have got some sense of humor.”
Lucie had had only a cup of coffee and felt nauseated. Something the victim had said echoed in her mind: I’ll exit this world with a roll of film in my hands, believe you me. He hadn’t known how true that was. On top of which, her personal problems with her daughter and her mother weren’t making her feel any better. Fortunately, the body had already been removed, which made the crime scene more impersonal, less difficult to stand.
The CSI team had cordoned off the areas of interest. You could walk around the house, but only via the swept paths. On the floor, under the chandelier, spread a pool of blood. Drops had fallen from everywhere like rain, spattering baseboards, tiles, feet of the table.
“Once they’d hanged him, they gutted him like a fish. Then they stuffed him with film, in place of his intestines. The ME was clear on that point: the victim was already dead by then, judging from the petechial hemorrhaging in his eyes. Death by strangulation. We still don’t know if it was from the hanging.”
The cat sidled up to the entry door and meowed to be let out. Lucie opened it for him, then looked at one of the photos. The old man, slit open from neck to pelvis. His entrails spread over the floor, having fallen more than three feet. His eyes were missing. Enucleation, once again. In their place, two little pieces of celluloid stuffed into the sockets, which made him look like he was wearing dark glasses.
“His eyes…”
“Gone.”
Lucie absorbed the blow. One more point in common with Sharko’s case and the bodies in Gravenchon. The importance of the eye, like in the film… It was becoming more and more likely that the same people who had buried the five vics in Normandy had also killed the film restorer. Kashmareck ran a hand through his close-cropped hair and sighed. He grabbed up a sealed bag and held it out to Lucie, who put on latex gloves. Inside the transparent bag were two nearly identical images, cut from the celluloid strip. Lucie knitted her brow and held the rectangles under the light.
“I can’t make out much. It looks like… a close-up at ground level. Have we been able to identify the film these frames came from?”
“Not this time. We’re sending them to our tech guys, who’ll blow them up. We’ll check with film scholars if we have to. They must mean something.”
Lucie stared again at the perforated rectangles.
“Sixteen millimeter. Just like the stolen film.”
With his index finger, the captain pointed to the corpse’s mouth.
“Your business card in his mouth doesn’t bode well. We’ll have to put a team on your building for a few days.”
Lucie shook her head.
“There’s no point. They’re like a pack of wolves. They tracked us, me, Ludovic—they followed in our wake. My lock was sticking yesterday. They probably broke into my place the same way they did at Ludovic’s or here.”
The thought made her shiver. What might have happened if she’d been at home just then?
“Then they finally managed to get their hands on the film, and they wanted us to know. They marked their territory. Now that they’ve got what they wanted, they could just as easily vanish and fall back into oblivion.”
She looked at the CSI technicians bustling about with their tweezers and powders.
“Did they pick up any traces or fingerprints?”
“Just the victim’s. Nothing too definite for the moment. We don’t have much hope for the neighbors; the street’s got too many shops, with ridiculously few residents. Not many people around at night.”
“What’s the estimated time of death?”
“Between midnight and three a.m., from the preliminary findings. The lock was barely forced. The victim wasn’t asleep yet, most likely, because his bed was still made.”
In the living room, everything was still in order, no sign of a struggle. Lucie clearly imagined two beefy giants attacking that defenseless old man. They could easily have taken their film and left. But they’d wanted to “clean up” after themselves, leave no traces, no witnesses. And even grant themselves a little bonus, with their staging like something out of a David Fincher film. Killing someone in cold blood is not easy. You have to control your impulses, fight off everything that society, religion, and conscience forbid. Push away the very foundations of the human spirit. But these two had eliminated, enucleated, and eviscerated a man, even taking time to rummage through his westerns to create an effect. What sort of lunatic was hiding behind this crime? What motive had pushed them to go so far out of bounds?
Lucie went upstairs. The pictures in the stairwell hadn’t moved. The cop avoided looking that woman in the eye, on the photos. Marilyn…
Some cops were poring through the rooms. Lucie glanced into the developing lab. On one shelf were some old cameras, reels, developing chemicals. She then went into the restoration studio, followed by her boss. The chair in front of the Moviola had been knocked over.
“Three in the morning, you said. What could Poignet have discovered to keep him working so late?”
She stood next to the viewer, careful not to penetrate into the area cordoned off by the yellow-and-black police tape. A tech continued to place numbered cards in front of objects and photograph them.
“The time counter on the viewer says zero. They must have rewound the film to take it with them. Poignet must have been studying it carefully.”
Lucie turned to the back of the studio. Ripped-out cables, smashed scanner.
“Shit!”
“What?”
“Claude Poignet was going to digitize the film for me—I was still hoping to find it. But the laptop is gone.”
She snapped her fingers.
“He might have had time to send me the file or a Web link where I could download it. I have to check my e-mail. Do you have Internet access on your phone?”
“It’s the latest iPhone.”
He handed her the device. Lucie sent up a silent prayer that Poignet had sent her the film. She wanted to prolong her journey with the mutilated woman, the girl on the swing; she wanted to go beyond what the images had shown. To dig deeper into the filmmaker’s mind, understand his artistic madness, and maybe his very real madness. She logged in to her account. A few messages from the dating service, but nothing else. The sense of powerlessness washed over her.
“Nothing.” She sighed, and in a pale voice said, “We have to reach out to the Belgians. We have to interrogate the son, make a composite sketch, search Szpilman’s house from top to bottom, and find out where he first came across that film. Trace it to the source. For now, it’s about the only way we’re going to pick up the scent of that goddamn reel.”
“We’ll get on it.”
Her eyes fell on the viewer, on the empty take-up reel, on the little basket with the business cards that the team would soon pack away.