Lucie passed the photo to Péresse. Kashmareck laid a book on the table.
“Here’s the book the photo came from. It’s about the Ukrainian Holocaust. I found the image on page 47. On the next page, all the bodies of the Jewish women and their children are lying on the ground, each killed by a bullet to the head.”
Sharko leafed through the book and studied the pictures.
“The genocide of Jews,” he said.
He thought of the book he’d read on the plane. A “criminal collective hysteria.” It couldn’t be a simple coincidence. Szpilman was on to something that related to the murdered Egyptian girls.
Kashmareck nervously fingered a cigarette, which he would gladly have smoked then and there. He continued:
“It’s clear that for some reason Vlad Szpilman started spending a lot more time at the library in the last couple of years. He never borrowed any books, so left no traces in the library’s records. The same for his Internet searches. A total ghost.”
Lucie broke in:
“I saw books in his private library, books that the killers made away with. They all dealt with the major historical conflicts. Wars, genocides… and a number on espionage as well. I…”
Lucie tried to remember. She hadn’t paid special attention to the crowded bookshelves.
“I remember names like… I think it was ‘artichoke’?”
“Artichoke,” confirmed Leclerc. “A CIA program to study interrogation techniques. In the 1950s, there were a fair number of experiments, some of them rather unsavory, using hypnosis and various drugs, such as LSD, to induce amnesia or other altered states.”
“The fifties,” Lucie repeated. “And the film dates from 1955. Another coincidence? I have several images from that film stuck in my head, especially the ones of the little girl’s dilated pupils, as if they’d given her drugs. And also the one of the bull stopping dead in front of her. You talked about LSD and hypnosis—could that be it? And besides…”
She undid the elastics on her folder and took out a photo, which she pushed toward Leclerc.
“Here’s a shot of the little girl, taken from the film, before the attack on the rabbits. Compare it with the photo of the German soldier. Look at the expression on their faces, just before they kill.”
Leclerc put the two side by side.
“The same cold-blooded expression.”
“Same look, same hatred, same desire to kill. One about thirty years old, the other barely seven or eight. How could a kid that young have eyes like that?”
Silence. Wearing a somber expression, the head of Violent Crimes passed the pictures around, then walked to the water cooler at the other end of the room to refill his glass and check his cell phone. He returned, trying to look composed, but Sharko could see that all wasn’t well. Something was going on with Kathia.
“Anything else, Captain Kashmareck?”
The cop from Lille shook his head.
“Szpilman’s call record over the past months didn’t give us anything. We think he mainly communicated with the Canadian online. But for the moment, our teams have hit a dead end. The Belgian used a ton of systems that made his communications completely untraceable. And none of his e-mails have yielded anything that seems relevant to this case.”
Leclerc gave a brief nod to thank him, then turned to his chief inspector.
“Your turn. Egypt…”
Sharko cleared his throat and began narrating his adventure abroad. He intentionally neglected to mention the episode with Atef Abd el-Aal in the desert, and instead claimed to have found the lead to the hospitals by questioning someone close to one of the victims. He realized that he was still an amazingly gifted liar.
During his monologue, Lucie watched him carefully. A real mug, this guy, an old-fashioned sort of body, with hands full of little scars, ancient razor nicks around his cheeks and chin, strong temples, and a nose that must have been broken more than once. If he hadn’t been a policeman, he might have been a boxer, a middleweight. Not exactly a perfect specimen, but Lucie thought he had charm, and an inner strength that emanated from his powerful build.
“Those girls had been afflicted with some kind of collective hysteria,” the cop concluded. “And if you look carefully at the film, it’s exactly what happened with the little girls and the rabbits.”
“True enough,” admitted Leclerc. “And what do you make of it?”
All eyes turned to Sharko.
“Let’s recap. Nineteen fifty-four or fifty-five, probably near Montreal, in what looks like a hospital room. Little girls on one side, rabbits on the other. A camera to film the whole business. The phenomenon occurs. The girls start slaughtering the animals in a frenzy. Nineteen ninety-three, Cairo. An inexplicable wave of hysteria strikes all of Egypt, north to south. The information circulates in scientific communities throughout the world. One year later, a killer attacks young girls who’d been affected by the wave in its most aggressive form. Three murders, three brains removed.”
“Not to mention their eyes,” said Lucie.
“Not to mention their eyes… Finally, 2009, or sixteen years later. We unearth five bodies buried about six months or a year earlier. All killed or wounded by gunfire. Bullets in the chest, the head, entry wounds front and back. What does this latter scene suggest?”
Lucie spoke up:
“People trying to flee in all directions? Who were also afflicted with a kind of madness?”
“Or people trying to attack, exactly like the little girls. A quick, sudden attack, with no warning. No choice but to slaughter them and hide the bodies.”
He stood up and leaned against the table, palms perfectly flat.
“Imagine a group of five men. In their twenties, well built, in good physical shape. Mainly former junkies, but they’ve stopped using. They were forced to by circumstance—prison, confinement, disciplinary training. These individuals do not come from easy backgrounds and they all have multiple old fractures, the kind you get in fights. Not to mention their tattoos, which indicate a need to create an identity for yourself, to look tough or like you’re part of a clan. The presence of an Asian underscores the diversity of the group, and suggests that they don’t really know each other. These men are brought together somewhere. They’re watched over by at least two other men, armed with pistols or rifles.”
“Why two?” Péresse interrupted.
“Because of the bullets’ angles of entry and the disparity of the impacts. Front, back… Then there’s a glitch of some kind, something goes wrong. The young guys blow a fuse and start acting violent, out of control. Like the little girls with the rabbits. Like the young Egyptian murder victims. They fall into a collective hysteria.”
Leclerc took a deep breath. “A kind of aggression that puts them in a blind fury. They see red, like… like a raging bull.”
“Yes, that’s exactly right, a raging bull. And yet, if we’re to believe the film, they think they’ve managed to tame the bull. But these men can’t be tamed. They shout at them to stop, but nothing works. So, at a loss, they open fire. The guards have no choice. They kill or wound them. One way or another, our killers—the movie guy, the medical guy—are immediately aware that a kind of hysteria has manifested again. So they show up and, as before, remove the eyes and brains. Then, burial six feet underground.”