Something was written on the wall, just above the mirror.
And now that he was looking at it closely, he found two more words below the mirror:
He lifted his camera to take a series of photos, and as he worked, Eva went back to the main room. Someone had opened the window to let in fresh air. Outside, faint sunlight was penetrating the thick layer of clouds. She could see the light reflected in the windows of the east-facing buildings. The city was beginning to stir. Soon, the streets would be filled with hurrying Parisians.
Among them a killer with the blood of a nineteen-year-old girl on his hands.
She turned around to look at the crime scene.
The forensics team, thankfully reduced to three people-a woman and two men-was getting to work in the apartment, carefully applying aluminum powder in search of fingerprints. Eva doubted they would get any results, but all bases had to be covered.
The key was to work methodically. To avoid distraction.
“So what do we know about the victim?” she asked Leroy.
“For now, not a whole lot,” the detective confessed. “She went to the University of Sorbonne, and she lived here by herself. Her family lives up north. We’re trying to reach them. Garenne’s men have already interrogated the neighbor who found the body. She had only passed her in the stairwell before, and didn’t have much more to tell. There are two more tenants upstairs, but they’re not home right now.”
Eva registered the information.
And dove back into the victim’s identity, projecting herself into the victim’s shoes.
Here she was at home. In her studio apartment overfilled with bookcases, clothes and shoeboxes. She had burned some incense-Spiritual Guide, to be precise. Eva recognized the scent, which lingered in the air, along with the stench. She ran her fingertips on the little shelf sagging under piles of books. Manga, art books, a lot of erotica. Books that had been read and re-read, their edges cracked after too many manipulations and stacked in unlikely piles.
And, among the books, several glass-framed photos.
“So that’s what she looked like?” Leroy said. He let go of a whistle. “She really was pretty.”
In the photos, the girl had the round face of a child, enhanced by retro-looking bangs. And in one of them, she even wore an extremely tight vinyl corset that accentuated the curves of her slender body. A tattoo was visible on her right hip. It was a flock of bats taking flight.
“We know that Barbara enjoyed the Goth style,” Eva said. “You don’t find many parties of that sort in town. If her attacker spotted her in a club, we need to get a list of the places where she was hanging out lately.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Leroy said with a nod.
Eva looked at the incense burner where the sticks of Spiritual Guide had burned. Above it, on the wall, was the Dita Von Teese poster, as well as a poster for a Marilyn Manson concert, faded and partly torn, obviously ripped off a billboard on the street.
The remote control was on the stereo. She grabbed it and pressed play. Clear notes, synthetic and repetitive, punctuated by a minimalist bass, rose from the speakers. A looping, clinical beat. Then came the voice, sepulchral and distorted, almost incomprehensible.
“See you in hell.”
The three forensic scientists stopped what they were doing. They stared at Eva.
“See you in hell. I’m sure we’ll meet again. In hell.”
Eva ignored the eyes on her. Nothing existed but her inner world.
“See you…”
Barbara Meyer’s world.
“…in Hell.”
Carefully following the plastic strip on the floor, she went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed-much to the dismay of the female tech who tried to make her understand that she might be tampering with evidence-and she absorbed herself in the piles of clothing. Bustiers, fishnets, stockings as thin as a second skin and shiny as sin. She leaned forward and grabbed a black vinyl high-heeled boot with laces running up to the knee.
“See you…”
Bringing the boot to her face, pressing it against her skin, she slipped deeper into the victim’s mind.
…in hell.”
She glanced at the trashcan, already knowing that she would find empty bottles of alcohol there. In fact, no fewer than three bottles of Smirnoff.
“Hey, can’t someone turn that noise off?” Deveraux yelled. “Sounds like a fucking horror movie.”
When no one responded, he crossed the room and turned off the stereo himself.
“There!” he sneered. “Seriously, what a fucking racket! I could do better with the saucepans in my kitchen!”
Eva stood up, her eyes elsewhere.
“The victim was waiting for someone. She had a date.”
“What makes you say that?” Leroy asked.
The inspector turned toward him, her white locks falling in front of her sunglasses.
“She’s a girl, Erwan. A very pretty girl attentive to her looks. She spent hours getting dressed and putting on makeup.”
“For her attacker?”
“Or for someone else. But she was definitely waiting for someone. We need to find out if she had a boyfriend.” She spun around and addressed everyone in the room, “Excuse me, has her phone turned up?”
The techs shook their heads.
“Not yet, detective,” one of them said.
“But we’ve got a computer,” another said.
“Can I see it?”
“Of course.” The man picked up a slim gray laptop. “It was under the bed. We haven’t examined it yet.”
“Well then, that’s what we’re going to do right now,” Eva told him as he handed it over.
She set the computer on her lap and opened it with care. Then she turned it on.
As Leroy, Deveraux and the tech gathered around her, the laptop’s screen lit up.
On the desktop’s background was a black-and-white photo that seemed to have been taken in a bar or maybe a nightclub. There was Barbara Meyer, clad in vinyl, kissing another woman on the mouth. The woman seemed a bit older than Barbara. She was dressed in an evening gown with a low neckline that revealed her curvaceous cleavage.
“All right. Little Barbara was into women,” Eva said.
“And she had pretty good taste,” Leroy remarked.
Deveraux was about to add a comment of his own, but he changed his mind when Leroy shot him an icy look. He walked away.
As soon as he was gone, the tech who had found the computer stepped forward and leaned toward the screen. He pointed tentatively at the woman.
“If I may, that woman’s not just anybody.”
Eva looked up at him.
“You know who she is?”
The man nodded, a bit uneasy with the profiler’s dark glasses.
