bled from inside.
Through the window, Vauvert could see the small park painted gray in the pouring rain. He took his time, observing the room with great care, the chaise lounge, the nightstand on which rested a translucent Philippe Starck lamp. Then he leaned inside the bathroom to take a quick look. Everything was sparkling, perfectly clean. He thought of his own bathroom, with its shower curtain smeared with sediment, the dirty towels he sometimes let pile up till they overflowed from the hamper.
“Yes, they do make sense,” he finally said, in a slow voice. “I’m convinced that all these elements have a very clear meaning. We just don’t get it yet, that’s all. And now, something happened that puts it all in perspective.”
“What happened?”
Vauvert opened his arms.
“Come on, this. Eva’s abduction. Until now, our mysterious psychopath, assuming she’s female, didn’t seem to care much who her victims were. What she’s done here is totally new. She broke into this place to kidnap a homicide inspector. And one thing I know is that this is no fucking fluke. No one can overpower a woman like Eva on a simple impulse. This abduction was carefully planned, like the previous ones. Our suspect must have studied Eva. She has followed her, certainly.”
“Yes, probably,” Leroy said. “So what?”
“It could be one of two things. The killer could have changed her MO. But we know that this kind of person does not deviate from the ritual, at any price. And that leaves only the second assumption.”
He walked back into the living room, deep in thought.
“The second assumption?” Leroy asked, following him.
“What she’s done here is linked to everything else.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that we’ve been wrong from the beginning and that the lead Eva picked up was the right one. We absolutely have to go over her notes. We don’t have much time to find out where they’ll lead us. Very little time at all. It’s been nine hours already since her abduction.” He took another look at the photo on the desk. He and Eva, in a bubble of calm in the middle of the ant heap. “You were right, you know.”
“About what?” Leroy asked.
“I care about her. I care about her very much.”
Vauvert’s voice cracked.
42
Back at eadquarters, Leroy pushed open the door to Eva’s office, and Vauvert gave the tiny room a surprised look.
“She works in here?”
“Uh, yes,” Leroy said. “She actually likes it that there’s no light. It’s because of her eyes.”
For some stupid reason, Vauvert had expected to find a swanky FBI-style office. Certainly not this windowless closet. A green banker’s desk lamp gave the room a pseudo-library look. Of course, everything was perfectly lined up and ordered. Eva’s files were carefully stacked in piles of equal height. Two large maps, one of France and the other of Paris, were hanging on a wall. Red thumbtacks indicated the places where the victims had been found. To the right of those maps, on a cork bulletin board, were photos of Barbara Meyer and Audrey Desiderio. Vauvert recognized the Bathory coat of arms among photos of the esoteric inscriptions found at the crime scenes.
“All of Eva’s files are here,” Leroy told him. “Just try not to mess things up, okay?”
“Yeah,” Vauvert muttered.
He walked over to the desk and put down the books they had bought on the way over.
On one corner of the desk was a stack of photos.
“That guy, I know him. It’s that pedophile.”
“Ugo Falgarde,” Leroy responded. “That’s him, all right. Eva, she, Well, she threw him out a window two months ago. It brought the case to a pretty brutal conclusion.”
“I heard about that. I didn’t know she was the one involved.”
“It was her, yes. She came very close to losing her job.”
Vauvert turned to the officer to ask the question that had occupied his mind for so long: “What was done to her that was so bad, Erwan?”
“You don’t know?”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
Leroy hesitated. Then he sat on the edge of the desk.
“When she was a child, Eva was the victim of a serial killer. I figured you knew that.”
Vauvert frowned.
“I didn’t. What happened?”
“Well, remember that killer they called the Night Scourge?”
“Vaguely. That’s an old case.”
“It was twenty-four years ago,” Leroy said. “The Scourge killed fifteen people. All single women. And they were all platinum blondes. Eva’s mother fit the bill.”
“She was a victim of that killer?”
“Yes. He followed her home from work, just like he did with the others, and he slit her throat. Victoria Svarta was twenty-six. And she had twin daughters.”
“Eva has a sister?”
“She had one. She was the Scourge’s fifteenth and last victim, I don’t know the details, of course. Eva isn’t the type to confide in anyone, and you can imagine that it’s a topic she never brings up. All I know is that on the night Eva’s mother was killed, while the crime scene was crawling with cops, no one could have ever guessed that the killer would stay in the neighborhood.”
“You mean he came back to the scene?”
“Exactly. Or maybe he never left in the first place. No one knows why he stayed-or came back. He had never behaved that way before. Victoria Svarta’s daughters were at the babysitter’s house down the street. The woman was supposed to keep the girls until social services took over. The killer sneaked into the house and cut the babysitter’s throat. Then he took the two children into the basement. The monster did all of this a hundred yards from the officers busy looking for evidence. Only Eva survived,”
“Then, she saw…”
“Yes,” Leroy said. “She saw everything. Her twin sister was murdered before her eyes. And she was only six.”
“I had no idea.” Vauvert dropped into the chair. “That’s horrible.”
“Anyway, now you know,” Leroy said.
“Yes.”
Vauvert stared into space, taking it all in.
“Did we get him? The Night Scourge?”
“No, he was never caught. He slipped through all the nets, and he stopped killing after that night. Maybe he finally died, one way or another. Who knows? Or maybe he was busted for something else. It happens. We’ll probably never know who he was.”
“God dammit. Thanks for telling me, Erwan.”
“Any time. You would have learned about it sooner or later. Anyway, it explains why she behaves the way she does sometimes,” he said, pointing at the photo of Ugo Falgarde on the desk. “Especially when children are
