Vauvert put the book down.
“The Dacians are happiest when facing death.”
“Fucking barbarians,” he muttered.
He had read so many pages-and skimmed through so many others-his head was starting to spin. He rubbed his temples, his thoughts still muddled.
“In death they do not die but instead move from one dwelling to a better one.”
He was not sure he understood what that meant.
But that is what he had read-or at least what he thought he had read-in the Salavilles’ barn. He remembered the words perfectly: “Lords of death and resurrection. Leave your dwellings.”
He glanced at the photos on the wall. On one of them, the inscription written in lipstick on the bathroom wall, defied him with its big capital letters:
The books he just read corroborated everything Leroy had told him about. The first European tribes did worship a god of death. His name was Zalmoxis, which meant “Ancient God,” and wolves were his envoys to the world of the dead. Messengers of death, in other words.
“Lords of death and resurrection…”
Thoughts raced through his mind.
The worship of animal spirits was a component of many primal religions, but for the Dacians a truly dark veneration was fundamental. They made the wolf their ideal, the very symbol of their nation.
Their dream was to become one with the wolves so as to triumph over death. To “move from one dwelling to a better one,” as Emperor Trajan had written. The Dacians were eager to take the lives of others in the hope of becoming immortal.
And nowadays? What would happen if serial killers could actually free themselves from life and death?
People like the Salaville brothers, for example?
This was nonsense, of course. This kind of thing just was not possible, Vauvert kept saying to himself over and over again.
“Feast scarlet…”
He kept thinking in the silence of the tiny room. And the more he thought, the more convinced he became that the mysterious killer was actually inspired by this tradition. Whether these myths were actually true or not, she believed them, and that was the important thing. She believed them to the point of trying to resurrect the tradition.
He still had to figure out which ritual she was trying to recreate. The Dacians had many ceremonies, and all of them were gory. On some occasions, the men would pluck out the eyes of their enemies and slash their faces. There were also times when they would decapitate their enemies and display the heads on spikes. Every five years, they asked the gods of death to choose young boys to be used as human sacrifices. They were dropped alive onto a bed of spikes.
With such a catalog of horrors, a psychopath certainly had ample choice.
Pieces of the puzzle. So many pieces. And all of them red.
Vauvert’s vision was blurring.
He craved a smoke.
There was a knock. Detective Leroy stood in the doorway. He entered the office, his face grim.
“What’s going on?”
“Well, I’m not too sure,” Leroy said. “It’s about the AB negative blood we found at Eva’s place. The lab ran a DNA test.”
Vauvert took a slow breath. He had already lived this very moment.
“It is someone we know?”
“In a way. This blood belongs to Barbara Meyer.”
“The Goth victim?”
“Yes, except she’s been dead for more than three days. This is totally crazy. This girl’s blood splashed on Eva’s walls. It’s impossible!”
It was. But it was also the second time this kind of thing had happened. A new piece of the puzzle was falling into place.
Vauvert kept his thoughts to himself.
“Is there anything else?”
“As a matter of fact, there is. I went through the Salaville file again. I found something unsettling.”
“Which is?”
“The list of the psychiatric institutions they were in.”
“Yes? They were in three different ones in fifteen years. Each time, they went in together.”
Leroy raised four fingers.
“We thought there were three. It seems now that we missed a fourth.”
“It’s not in the file?”
“Yes, it’s in the file. But it’s in the appendix. It was their detox treatment. It wasn’t filed in their psych histories. They were in Rodez, at the Raynal Medical Center, to be precise. The reports didn’t mention anything else, so I dug a little deeper in the database, looking for any event we might have recorded related to this institution. And, you know what? There was an incident involving both patients and staff members who had what appeared to be hallucinatory visions.”
“You’re not going to tell me that they were seeing wolves?”
“Yes. Both the patients and several staff members said they saw animals prowling the hallways. The district sent in specialists to check the facility for any toxic emissions that could have caused the hallucinations.”
“Did they find any?”
“Nothing at all. But now it gets even weirder. During the same period, four young female patients went home on weekend leave. They never returned, and they were never found again. Vanished in thin air. Well, except for one: Christine Garnier, twenty-one years old, unemployed. She was found. She had been bound in her own home with her throat slit.”
Vauvert slammed his hand on the desk.
“How come there was no investigation?”
“There was one,” Leroy said. “At the time, all the evidence pointed to her boyfriend, Mario Dupuy, so the police down there nabbed him.”
“Did he confess?”
“They didn’t have a chance to get the confession. He killed himself in his cell. It caused a hell of a scandal. The very next day, the local chief was fired by the region’s chief of police. The chief wanted the case tied up as fast and quietly as possible.”
“You mean they buried it,” Vauvert grunted. “God dammit, why do they always do that?”
Leroy shrugged.
“For them, Dupuy was the man, and I can’t really blame them. I would have assumed the same thing. The couple had a long history of drug abuse. Their apartment was found trashed, the walls splattered with the girl’s blood. Someone had written inscriptions and all sorts of pentagrams all over the place. The officers didn’t look any further. For them, the boy was high and just slaughtered his girlfriend. And actually, after this incident, there were no more disappearances.”
“No further
