“Why’s that?”
“Because guys like him never stop. They showed me photos of that girl he’d burned between the legs, ages ago. The image is stuck here, in my brain. It wasn’t human…” He sighed. “Mohamed stayed with me a week or so. Let’s see—it must have been around mid-January when he left with just some personal stuff in a bag.”
He fell silent for a few moments.
“I never believed for an instant that he’d do it… and I was right.”
“Do what?”
With a sigh, Akim Abane stood up, opened a drawer, and riffled through some papers. He handed Sharko a slightly crumpled brochure.
The inspector’s heart leaped.
In that fraction of a second, everything became clear.
The brochure vaunted the merits of the Foreign Legion.
He raised his eyes to Lucie, who was also taken aback.
Akim took his seat again, hands joined between his powerful legs.
“One day, Mohamed found that in a magazine, in jail. To hear him tell it, you’d have thought it was a revelation. The military—that’s what he wanted to join. Wipe the slate clean. Change his identity, start from scratch. Yeah, sure…”
He picked up the framed picture, showing him standing next to his brother, and stared at it a long time.
“You stupid shit, what’d you have to go die for?”
Deep inside, Sharko was rejoicing. The Foreign Legion… It fit so perfectly with what they’d discovered in the past few days. Lucie picked up the questioning.
“Do you have any proof that he joined the Legion? Letters, phone calls, anything? Had he bought a train ticket for… the south?”
“Aubagne?” Sharko specified.
The Arab shook his head.
“No, I’m telling you, he never joined. I knew him—he wasn’t capable. Too unstable, and he had a real problem with authority. Can you imagine him over there? I came home from work one day and he’d cleared out. Hadn’t even taken his brochure. Not a good-bye, nothing… I knew someday the cops would come knocking on my door.”
The inspector tightened his jaws, eyes staring at the illustrated ad of a soldier in white kepi, posing proudly with all his medals. It was clear to him that Mohamed Abane had joined the Legion after all, but there wasn’t any direct proof. Even his brother didn’t believe it.
“Do you have any family, a relative or friend your brother might have gone to stay with after he left here?”
“Apart from some real creeps, I can’t think of anyone.”
Sharko continued to think. While everything seemed to be falling in place, there was still a huge piece that didn’t fit: why sever the hands, pull the teeth, and scrape off the tattoos of someone who could simply be identified through DNA? In the Legion, they must have known that Mohamed Abane had a long rap sheet. They might erase the past of their recruits, but they were scrupulous about verifying it first. They clearly would have known the Arab was registered on the national DNA database and would be well aware of the extent of his crimes.
Unless…
Sharko raised his dark eyes toward the photo of the two brothers.
“I have a question that might seem strange… Your identity card didn’t go missing around that time, did it?”
Akim nodded.
“Actually, it did. I must have lost it at work or in the street. How did you guess?”
Sharko didn’t respond. Lucie was just as confused as the bodybuilder. The cop had all the answers he needed, and his conviction had been reinforced. He held his hand out to the Arab and Lucie did the same.
“Some cops from Rouen will be here very soon. They’ll ask a lot of questions and take notes. Don’t be alarmed—it’s just routine.”
Before leaving, with Lucie ahead of him, Sharko turned back toward Akim, who hadn’t moved from his sofa.
“By the way… your brother had a tiny particle of plastic sheathing under his skin, near his neck. Do you know if he’d had an operation?”
“No, no…”
“Any stays in the hospital?”
“I don’t think so. But the truth is, I have no idea.”
“Thank you. I promise that you’ll have answers. The people responsible for this are going to pay. I’m going to see to it personally.”
And he gently closed the door behind him.
39
Lucie and Sharko were sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment in L’Haÿ-les-Roses. They had bought some pastries on the way. She was biting into a croissant, while he had gone for a pain au chocolat, which he dunked meticulously in his coffee. For the first time in several days, clouds of a perfect white fluffed in the sky outside the window. Sharko spoke between two mouthfuls:
“It all fits. Bodies no one can identify—probably foreigners who came to France by whatever means available. That’s often how it works with the Legion.”
Lucie picked up the thread: “The professional way they went about hiding the corpses and removing any identifying marks. The description we got from Luc Szpilman, the combat boots… Soldiers…”
“Not to mention the hair analysis, showing that three of them had quit taking drugs in the weeks before death. It fits perfectly with guys who want to start their lives over, guys you take charge of with an iron hand. Young legionnaires in training. Cadets.”
Sharko shoved in a mouthful of pastry. He seemed in good spirits, almost happy.
“What was that business about the missing ID card?” asked Lucie.
“Simple logic. Mohamed Abane was the classic deviant personality. With a background like his, he could never have gotten into the Legion. Recruiters in Aubagne will overlook practically any crime, except the really serious ones—murder, rape, sex crimes… Abane faked his identity so he could join.”
“By stealing his brother’s card?”
“Sure. All you need to show at the Foreign Legion recruiting station is a valid ID. That’s all. It’s the only link between your past and your future. Mohamed Abane just showed them his brother’s card. The two men looked a lot alike, so the recruiters were fooled and thought they were dealing with a clean record.”
Sharko was beaming. Lucie suddenly saw him as sure of himself, overflowing with vitality. A man who was regaining a taste for the hunt and the field. He drank his coffee, lost in thought.
“It almost all fits…”
“Almost?”
“Almost, yes. I was thinking about the five murdered cadets. There’s nothing worse than the selection process, and especially the ten weeks of drills that come after. Hell on earth. They put you through every kind of physical and psychological torture, until you’re ready to off yourself. It’s easy to imagine one or several recruits fighting back or popping a cork. If we push it a bit further, let’s suppose they run into a serious hitch. An instructor who has no choice but to shoot, because they’ve given these guys real guns. But then, why would they have removed the brains and eyes before burying them?”
He was moving so fast that Lucie had to think for a few moments before answering:
“Because they’re trying to hide much more than just a hitch? Because, behind all this, there’s that diabolical film and those children locked in a room, slaughtering animals?”
“And the girls who were brutally murdered in Africa. Egypt, France, Canada. It’s all related without being related. The real problem is that the Foreign Legion hasn’t set foot in Egypt for more than fifty years. Apart from a similarity in MO, apart from that hysterical phenomenon we suspect, we don’t have any link between the two series of crimes. As for the film, we’re still not sure what it has to do with all this.”
Lucie ran a hand over her face. Nervous exhaustion was weighing more and more heavily on her. Sharko continued to think aloud.