Scene of the little girl and the kittens in the grass. She smiled widely, affectionately petting the two animals. Lucie thought of the other film, the hidden film, which at that very moment was nesting in the frames and had lodged in her brain.
“… I’d like to keep them… Oh, too bad… Will you bring them back again?… Sister Marie du Calvaire hated kitties… I love them… Yes, bunnies too. I love bunnies… Hurt them? Why did you say that?… No, never.”
Lucie took notes, picking up on the irony of the statements. Never hurt rabbits, when at that very moment, buried within those very images, she was slaughtering them with eleven other little girls. What could have precipitated such a drastic change? She underscored “Sister Marie du Calvaire” with three red lines. Was the girl in a convent in Montreal? A Catholic school? A place where medicine and religion might coexist?
Next scene, strange: the camera moves closer and farther from the little girl, taunting her. The girl is angry. Her eyes have changed.
“…Leave me alone, I don’t feel like it… I’m sad about Lydia, everybody is sad, and you think it’s funny.” She pushes the camera aside. “Go away!”
“What happened to Lydia?” Lucie noted, drawing a box around the name. The camera turned around the girl to create a dizzying effect. Cut. Following scene: the field.
Caroline Caffey stopped the projection. She swallowed before continuing:
“Nothing more after this, other than screams in the scene with the rabbits. There’s one more thing that might interest you: if you look closely at certain sequences, there are details that I noticed on the little girl’s face. It has changed. In some images she’s missing a front tooth. And even if it doesn’t show very clearly, she acquires red blotches on her skin. Her hair remains the same length. They must have cut it regularly.”
“So she got older between the beginning of the film and the end,” deduced Kashmareck.
“Indeed. This film was not made in a week, but certainly over a period of several months. As it progresses, you feel a growing tension in the girl’s mouth, a tension that seems to correspond to her words. It’s too short and probably too abbreviated to draw valid conclusions, but I get the feeling that her psychological state is deteriorating. No more smiles; her face becomes dull, angry. In certain scenes, even though they’re in bright light, her pupils are dilated.”
Lucie twirled her pen between her fingers. She remembered the absolute fury of the children in the room with the rabbits.
“Drugs… or some kind of medication?”
Caroline nodded.
“Quite likely.”
She shut her memo pad and stood up.
“That’s all I can tell you. I’ll send you a document with my analysis as soon as I can type it up. Gentlemen, miss…”
An exchange of glances with Kashmareck, indicating that she’d wait for him outside. Not a single question about the ongoing case, not the slightest emotion regarding what she’d just seen. A pro. After she left the room, the captain clapped his hands together.
“Think carefully about what she’s just told us. And I believe we can all thank Henebelle for this superb case in the middle of summer.”
Every head turned toward her, and a few bad wisecracks blurted out. Lucie took it all in stride—what else could she do? Kashmareck restored order one last time:
“Okay, everyone clear on what to do?”
Silent nods.
“Get to it, then.”
Lucie remained behind a few moments, alone in front of the computer, facing the little girl halted on her swing. She ran her fingers over the frozen smile. It was as if the child were smiling at her, radiating innocence.
Lost in thought, Lucie’s mind returned to Sharko. She was even getting a bit worried. Why this silence? She looked at her phone. Who was he really, that behavioral analyst she couldn’t stop thinking about? What was his past, his service record? What horrific cases had he dealt with when he was younger? She dialed up the national police administrative office. Her rank granted her access to information on any police officer in France. Past cases, ongoing ones, even superior officers’ comments… The entire CV. Once she had identified herself, she asked for the career highlights of Franck Sharko. Reason? She had to take over one of his cases. Her request would be logged, but too bad.
A few seconds later, she was politely informed that her request could not be granted, with no further explanation. Before hanging up, she asked whether anyone had requested her own file. They answered in the affirmative. The day before yesterday, to be precise, the head of Violent Crimes had: Martin Leclerc.
She hung up with an annoyed pout.
So Sharko and his boss had calmly rifled through her jacket. They knew about her past. And that bastard had made sure not to reveal his.
Go ahead, help yourself.
With a sigh, she raised her eyes back to the little girl on the screen. Someone’s daughter. Montreal. Canada. Today, that unknown girl must have been twice her own age. And perhaps she was still alive, somewhere in the depths of that faraway country, carrying within her all the secrets of this horrendous episode.
28
Michael Lebrun’s voice in Sharko’s phone sounded cold and high-handed.
“Where are you?”
“In a taxi. I’m going to buy some Egyptian whiskey for my boss and a few presents. Tell Nahed not to bother waiting for me at the hotel. I’ll meet her at the police station early this afternoon.”
“No, I’ll meet you there. Noureddine called me. He’s fit to be tied. You’d be well-advised to return the stolen photos to him as quickly as possible. And don’t expect him to open any more doors for you—that’s over.”
“Not a problem. Nothing more to be gained from that file anyway.”
“You can be certain I’ll be informing your superior about this.”
“Please do. He gets off on this kind of thing.”
A pause. Sharko leaned his head against the window. Far to the north, the colors of Cairo grew duller as the taxi approached the trash collectors’ quarter.
“Head feeling better?” asked Lebrun.
“What?”
“You had a headache yesterday.”
“Much better, thanks.”
“No more slipups before your flight this evening, Inspector.”
Sharko thought about the charred face of Atef Abd el-Aal, who was rotting pathetically in the sun.
“There won’t be any slipups. You can trust me.”
“Trust you? I’d sooner trust a rattlesnake.”
Lebrun hung up sharply. Those embassy guys were a sensitive bunch to say the least, attached to their protocols like good little do-bees. No relation to Sharko’s concept of how a cop’s job should be done.
The black taxicab halted in the middle of the road, simply because the road itself had stopped dead. No more pavement, just earth and loose rocks that only a pickup truck or tok-tok could make it through. The osta bil-fitra explained in approximate English that to get to the Salaam Center, you just had to hold your nose and walk straight ahead.
So Sharko started walking—and discovered the unimaginable. He plunged into the beating heart of Cairo’s trash cities. Blue and black garbage bags, swollen with heat and rot, rose so far that they hid the sky. Flocks of kites with dirty feathers flew overhead in precise circles. Heaps of rusted tins and metal drums agglutinated into makeshift shelters. Pigs and goats roamed freely, the way cars might circulate elsewhere. His nose buried in his shirt, Sharko creased his eyes. At the top of the heap, the trash bags began shimmying.
People. People lived in those mountains of refuse.