Of Fever and Blood

hand. The bluish blade, razor-sharp, glinted in the barn’s half-light.

“Roman, get another bucket. Hurry.”

Eloise Lombard struggled to free herself. Impossible. She was suspended by her feet beside the previous victim. The skinned face almost pressed against hers.

She began to pray. To Jesus, Buddha-any deity that would hear her pleas. Now only a miracle could save her.

Claude came closer, edging his knife toward her naked stomach. She felt the cold blade on her genitals.

Suddenly, the shrill sound of a bell rang out.

The knife slipped from her skin.

The ringing was so loud, the roof and beams shook; dust and dirt whirled down.

It lasted about ten seconds, then stopped.

The brothers looked at each other, their eyes filled with concern.

The bell blasted once more. Longer this time. Again, the ceiling’s beams shivered under the assault.

Claude took a step back.

Roman’s eyes widened.

“Want me to go check it out?” he asked.

Claude glanced at the hanging girl, then his brother.

“No. You’re too damned stupid. If it’s the cops, you’ll get fucked. I’m going. Here.”

He handed Roman the boning knife.

Then he walked over to an old wooden cupboard, weighed down with tools, and opened the middle drawer. He pulled out a shotgun, then a box of shells.

He rushed to the barn’s doors.

“You stay here, got it? You keep an eye on the little bitch and wait till I get back.”

The bell rang a third time, with even more persistence. Whoever was at the door was running out of patience.

Claude left the barn and headed for the house. Roman scratched his gut, thinking. He turned to the girl hanging before him and, eyeing her slender body, broke into a grin as he traced the curve of her buttocks with his fingers.

Eloise Lombard said nothing. She started to pray again.

4

The woman let go of the doorbell for a few seconds, then went at it again. In the depths of the house, the high-pitched bell rang once more.

Impatient, she shook her head. The tips of her distinctive white hair flowed over the collar of her black jacket. Beneath the leather, her legs were molded into a strict pantsuit.

Standing in the dirt road that led to the farm, Inspector Alexandre Vauvert watched silently. He had agreed to follow his colleague all the way out here, but he was not sure he liked the idea. Over the past years, he had heard a lot about this woman, not all of it positive. One thing everyone agreed on was that Inspector Eva Svarta was the most able profiler the Homicide Unit had seen in a very long time. She specialized in anything even remotely connected with sects, particularly cases involving the occult. People said she really liked nabbing the serial killers, the real ones. She had a reputation for being the best at it. So when the Paris headquarters had ordered her to join his own unit, down south in the city of Toulouse, Vauvert did not have a say.

Anyway, she was the one who had established the connection between the missing girls.

Up until now, he had to admit, she had made no mistakes.

When she had called him at dawn to say she had found a link to the Salaville brothers, he had not argued, either.

The albino inspector rang again.

“What the hell are they doing in there?”

“Maybe they’re not home?” Vauvert suggested.

“Don’t be silly. You saw that their SUV is here. It’s their only vehicle.”

“All the shutters are closed, though.”

“And you don’t find that odd?”

Vauvert sighed.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong. But what can we do? The judge will never sign a warrant without any hard evidence.”

Eva Svarta turned to face him, a grin on her thin lips. She wore the sunglasses that never left her face. People said her eyes were so sensitive, she would go blind in daylight without them. But so much was said about this woman, Vauvert preferred to ignore the gossip.

“We can get all the evidence we need,” she insisted. “All we have to do is go inside.”

“You’re that sure that these guys are involved?”

“More than sure. I can feel this kind of thing.”

“All right then. But maybe they’re somewhere out back, and they just can’t hear us.”

The profiler fumed.

“Are you kidding me? That damned bell, I’m sure you can hear it everywhere on the mountain. I’d like to know what kind of person is paranoid enough to have that kind of system installed in the first place.”

Vauvert let out a groan. As far as he was concerned, it did not prove much. His guess was that most of the roughnecks in the area had that kind of equipment, some probably even more outrageous alarms. He knew for a fact that some of the locals even had wolf traps for any hunters or mushroom pickers who might cross onto their property. But it was their land, after all. They had every right to protect it, and he figured that the folks out here did not harm anyone by living the way they chose to, protecting themselves from tourists and other intruders. Svarta was from the city. She did not understand.

“Either way, there’s no getting away from procedure,” he reminded her. “And so far, we have no evidence. You’re never going to get a warrant without something solid. Maybe first we should try to…”

“It’s them,” she snapped.

Vauvert shrugged, giving up.

“Okay, I’m listening.”

He knew that there was no arguing with the woman, and he did not have the heart for it. Let her do it the way she wanted. He knew how to spot real cops. Eva Svarta was one of them. A predator hunting predators. You could not reason with such a person. He knew that firsthand. He was the same way himself.

He went over what little information they had. Eloise Lombard had disappeared the day before in the early evening, a little more than fifteen hours ago. It was Inspector Svarta who made the connection between this abduction and the other missing-persons cases she’d been working for some weeks already. Five young women in all, ages seventeen to twenty-three, who had gone missing in three southern regions-Aveyron, Ariege, and Tarn. All in the past eight months.

Before she had been handed the cases, the various local police departments had done little more than shelve the reports. They had found no evidence indicating actual kidnapping, even though all the girls had similar profiles. SUV tracks had been found in front of the homes of three of the girls, who lived alone, but that did not prove anything. Four-wheel-drive vehicles were more than common in rural areas.

One detail had caught Svarta’s attention. It was an inscription found in the apartment of a young female student who had just moved to the suburbs of Espalion in northern Aveyron. Hers was the second reported disappearance. While everything else appeared tidy in her home, the bathroom mirror had been smashed. On a tile wall of the shower, someone had used lipstick to write:

The local police had paid little attention to it. For them, the scribbling was meaningless and a trivial detail. They completed their investigation as usual, making sure to take photos of all the walls and to list the broken