She made a call to her captain, Kashmareck, who since the beginning of the investigation had been in touch with the Sûreté in Quebec. She asked him to call them again and request an identity search for Alice Tonquin and Lydia Hocquart.
While waiting for him to call back, she called Patricia Richaud to tell her that she could come get her in a half hour, which would leave her time to put away the files.
In the quiet of the alcove, Lucie let herself fall into her chair and threw her head back. Then she drank the water in her bottle to the last drop.
She had done it. A photo, one simple photo, had brought her back through time and closer to her goal. She thought of Alice, that once nameless girl who now had a name. The little orphan with no father or mother, tossed about from hospital to convent, without bonds, points of reference, anything. Raised in the coldness of a religious institution: prayer at mealtimes, household chores, nights in the dormitory, an austere existence geared toward order and obedience to God. What future could she have had after such disastrous beginnings? How had she grown up? What had happened in that room with the rabbits? From the bottom of her heart, Lucie hoped she would soon have the answers to these questions. All those thoughts, all those faces that tormented her day and night, had to stop. Alice had to reveal her secrets.
The telephone in the room rang twenty-five minutes later, as she was putting away the last files. It was Kashmareck. Lucie picked up and didn’t give him time to speak:
“Tell me you’ve got something!”
From the way he cleared his throat, she immediately understood that it had led to another dead end.
“Yeah, I’ve got something, but it isn’t great. First of all, there’s not a trace of an Alice Tonquin. Neither in Canada nor in France. Oh, the cops at Sûreté have her birth certificate all right, from the hospital in Trois-Rivières where she was born, but not much more than that. They told me it wasn’t uncommon to lose sight of someone back then. With all the moving about between institutions, it was hard to keep track, and files got lost. After 1955, she was probably adopted by a family under another name, like a lot of those kids at the time. If she’s still alive, it’s under an unknown identity.”
“Good lord, everyone seems to know about these mass adoptions except us. And what about her friend, Lydia Hocquart?”
“She died in 1985 in a mental hospital, from a heart attack. She suffered from severe behavioral disorders and her heart just couldn’t take the meds she’d been swallowing all those years.”
“Ask them to send you all the info, and e-mail it to me. What was the name of Lydia’s hospital?”
“Hold on… here it is. Saint Julien Hospital in Saint-Ferdinand d’Halifax.”
“And how long was she there?”
“That, I have no idea. It’s all confidential medical information. You do realize that I’m normally the one who asks the questions?”
Behind Lucie, the door opened. Patricia Richaud silently inspected the environs, making sure everything was in its proper place.
“I’ll call you back,” said Lucie.
She hung up, jaws clenched. Severe behavioral disorders… mental hospital…
The archivist’s throaty voice pulled her from her thoughts.
“Did you find everything you wanted?”
Lucie jumped.
“Uh… yes, yes. I did. I found the name I was looking for, and her last known home, La Charité Hospital in Montreal.”
“The order of the Gray Sisters…”
“I’m sorry?”
“I was just saying that that establishment houses a Roman Catholic religious congregation, whom they still call the Gray Sisters. Their hospital was bought by the University of Montreal—the papers have been full of it these past weeks. By 2011, the sisters will be relocated to Saint Bernard Island, but for now most of them are still living in Ward B of the hospital, refusing to leave the premises. Their archives have already been transported here, which is why you were able to find what you were looking for.”
The Gray Sisters… Just the name gave Lucie gooseflesh. She imagined stony faces, eyes like dull mercury.
“Would it be possible to get the list of the sisters who are still living there?”
Lucie was thinking of Sister Marie du Calvaire. Richaud knit her brow.
“That should be feasible, yes.”
“And can you also tell me what this dark period of your country is about? I’d like to know what happened, exactly.”
The employee remained frozen for a few seconds. She set down a heavy ring of keys on the table and swept her gaze over the piles of papers.
“It all has to do with those thousands of children, miss. An entire generation of little ones sacrificed and tortured. The only trace of it is what remains here, in this room. They called them the Duplessis Orphans.”
She headed for the door.
“I’ll be back with your list.”
45
One o’clock in the morning, French time. Earlier that evening, Sharko had received in his in-box the list of attendees at the SIGN conference in 1994.
The inspector had printed out the document and gone back to his kitchen table, discreetly lit by a small lamp. From the outside, it had to look like he was asleep.
According to the information supplied by the ministry of health, the conference had lasted from March 7 to 14. The select participants had arrived and returned on an airplane specially chartered by the Egyptian government. It wasn’t exactly the VIP tour, but it wasn’t far off.
By a disturbing coincidence, the murders had all taken place between March 10 and 12, in the midst of the conference. According to the profile drawn up early in the investigation, one of the killers had a knowledge of medicine. The use of ketamine, the slicing of the skulls, the enucleation… The problem with this list was that the 217 French men and women in Egypt at that moment—not counting those from the humanitarian aid organizations, a whole other story—all had some notion of medicine, and the term “notion” was putting it mildly. Neurosurgeons, professors of psychiatry, medical students, researchers and department heads, biologists, most of whom had lived at the time in Paris or its environs. The cream of the French research community, individuals who seemed above reproach.
Two hundred seventeen lives—one hundred sixteen men and one hundred and one women—that he had to dissect in detail, on the basis of fifteen-year-old suppositions.
From the moment he held the sheets in his hand, Sharko felt increasingly certain that one of these individuals, aware of the phenomenon of mass hysteria that had afflicted Egypt in 1993, had made the trip a year later, using the conference as a pretext, with the sole aim of slaughtering three innocent girls in order to steal their brains and eyes.
The name of the killer or killers must have been hiding in these papers.
The questions that tormented him, the late hour, Eugenie’s constant visits, and the palpable tension in the apartment prevented him from really concentrating on the list. His head was full of shadows.
Sharko sighed. He finished his mint tea, staring into space. The military, medicine, filmmaking, this business about Syndrome E… The cop knew he was involved in a case that went far beyond the standard manhunt. Something monstrous, the likes of which he’d never seen. And yet he’d confronted his share of monstrosities, more than he could count on both hands.
In the dead of night, his keen senses suddenly focused on the entry door.
An infinitesimal sound of metal pierced the silence in the hallway.
Immediately, Sharko turned off the light and grabbed up his Sig.
Here they were.
Beneath his door, he saw, very briefly, the beam of a flashlight, before everything went black again.