“Canada is far away and we’ve got a lot to do here… I’ll have to think about it.”
The inspector’s telephone rang. It was Leclerc. His tone was smooth and direct.
“I’ve got good news and bad news.”
Sharko put his phone on speaker.
“I’m with Lieutenant Henebelle right now.”
“What? At your place?”
“She spent the night at a hotel, and now she’s here listening. Go ahead—what’s the bad news?”
Lucie preferred not to call Sharko on his lie: it was fair enough. The voice boomed in the speaker, serious:
“Good morning, Lieutenant Henebelle.”
“Sir.”
Leclerc cleared his throat.
“I got an answer from the Sûreté in Quebec about Jacques Lacombe. He died in 1956. His charred body was found at his home. It was ruled a household accident. He lived in Montreal.”
Sharko pressed his lips together.
“A household accident… What had he been doing before?”
“The Canadians filled me in on that too. He moved to Washington in 1951, where he worked as a projectionist at a little neighborhood movie theater for two years. In 1953, he went to live in Montreal, where he again worked as a projectionist.”
Sharko thought for a moment.
“None of that jibes with his sudden departure from France, his will to succeed as a filmmaker, or his genius… Especially since in 1955 he made that awful film with the children. There’s more to this. I don’t believe his death was accidental. Nineteen fifty-six was just after he’d shot that film—that’s too much of a coincidence. Who can dig deeper into his past? Who can find out about the circumstances surrounding the fire?”
“Nobody. Who’d want to handle it? The Americans? The Canadians? Us? We’d have to open a new case about something that took place more than fifty years ago, and for there to be an investigation, it’d have to be ruled a homicide. Not to mention all the administrative clearances. No, nothing we can do there.”
Sharko sighed, leaning on the table.
“Fine… so what’s the good news?”
“We just got back the DNA results, and we’ve identified one of the five bodies. The one who was shot in the shoulder and tore his skin off.”
Lucie noticed how brightly the inspector’s eyes shone.
“Who was it?”
“Mohamed Abane, twenty-six. Rap sheet as long as my arm. A real model childhood, with brawls, drugs, theft, racketeering. Finally did ten years for aggravated rape and mutilation.”
“More.”
“His victim, a twenty-year-old woman, almost didn’t make it out alive. His way of thanking her was to cauterize her genitals. Abane was barely sixteen at the time.”
“A real charmer.”
“He was given time off for good behavior. Released from Fresnes eleven months ago.”
Sharko’s fist tightened on the phone. For the first time since the case had begun, they finally had a concrete lead.
“Last known address?”
“He was staying with his brother Akim, in Asnières.”
“Give me the exact address.”
“Péresse already has a team on the way—they’ll be there any minute. Did you think they were going to wait for you? It’s their job, not yours. Get yourself here to the office—I’ve got the beginnings of a list for you: humanitarian organizations present in Cairo in 1994, at the time the girls were murdered.”
“That can wait.”
Sharko hung up. Lucie paced back and forth, hand under her chin.
“What are you churning over, Henebelle?”
“Lacombe died in a fire, one year after making the film. That same year, a copy arrives at the Canadian archives as an anonymous gift. What if Lacombe sensed his life was in danger? What if he’d made several copies of the film and sent them to various archives to preserve his secret, but also to make it go viral? We’ve seen how quickly the film went from hand to hand, collection to collection.”
Sharko nodded. The woman had the knack.
“In his way, Lacombe knew how to safeguard his treasure. By sending it off, simply making sure it existed and could one day be deciphered and understood. Yes, that could be.”
Lucie agreed. One by one, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, even if they couldn’t yet make out the final design. Sharko quickly dialed another number.
“Who are you calling?”
“A former colleague at Number 36 for Abane’s address. Don’t be long in the bathroom. I’ll drop you at the subway in ten minutes and you can get back home.”
Lucie smoothed out her wrinkled sweatshirt.
“The hell you will. I’m coming with you.”
38
Asnières-sur-Seine. A tidy little town in the outskirts of Paris, with a pretty center and pleasant shops. All around them and to the north, things weren’t so nice. Blacktop replaced nature, the sky was crisscrossed by fat ivory-colored birds taking off from Charles de Gaulle, interminable bars of mouse-gray buildings closed off the horizon. The banlieue in all its splendor. And through the middle of it ran a river.
Sharko and Lucie got off at the Gabriel Péri subway stop and quickly walked westward. Akim Abane, the brother of one of the five corpses from Gravenchon, had no criminal record and worked as a night watchman in a large department store. An upstanding guy, apparently, who lived on the fourth floor of a dark, uninviting apartment complex. At the bottom of the high-rise, Lucie was treated to a few relatively inoffensive whistles from some teenagers perched on a square of grass.
The man who opened up for them had the sharp, dry features of a Mediterranean. A flinty face on a vigorous, muscular body. Someone familiar with weightlifting and bench presses. Sharko made the first move:
“Akim Abane?”
“Who are you?”
To Sharko’s relief, Péresse’s men hadn’t arrived yet. He congratulated himself on his speed and showed his ID. Abane was lounging at home in shorts and a white T-shirt, which bore the legend FONTENAY MARATHON.
“I’d like to ask you some questions about your brother, Mohamed.”
The Arab didn’t budge from the doorway.
“What’s he done now?”
“He’s dead.”
Akim Abane hesitated a moment before balling up his fist and punching the door frame.
“How?”
Sharko kept it brief, sparing him the worst.
“Apparently killed by a gunshot. They found his body buried near a construction site in Seine-Maritime. Can we come in?”
Abane moved aside.
“Seine-Maritime… What the hell was he doing there?”
The man didn’t shed a tear, but the news had shaken him, so much so that he had to sit down on the sofa. The cops invited themselves inside.
“I knew it would end like this someday… Who could have done such a thing?”
“We don’t know yet. Do you have any ideas?”
“I don’t know. He had so many enemies. Here in the housing development, and outside.”
Lucie cast a quick glance around the room. Flat-screen TV, gaming console, running shoes everywhere: too much stuff in too little space. She noticed some photos in a frame. She moved closer, her brows knit.
“Were you twins?”
“No, Mohamed was a year younger than me, and an inch or two taller. But we were just like each other. I mean physically. Otherwise I was nothing like him. Mohamed had a screw loose.”
“When did you see him last?”
Akim Abane stared at the floor, eyes vacant.
“Two or three months after he got out, around New Year’s. Mohamed had come crying to me saying he wanted to change his life, make up for what he’d done. I never believed him. It wasn’t possible.”
New Year’s… So that brought the dating of the skeletons to less than seven months. Sharko already knew the answer to his next question, but he let the brother give it: