First Blood (2 page)

“I need to be alone,” Madeleine told him.

“I’m calling an ambulance, whether you like it or not.”

“Don’t do that, Jonathan. I forbid you. I...”

Her eyes widened. She could barely breathe. She gripped the edge of the sink. In the mirror, she saw a scarlet line appear on her left cheek.

“No, no.”

“Madeleine?”

Blood began to seep from the second wound, the same way it had on her right cheek. Then, as she knew it would, the pain intensified. It exploded. A blinding red flash cut her off from the world.

Madeleine understood that there was nothing she could do.

She closed her eyes, tightened her grip on the sink, and bent over.

When the skin gave way, she let out a shriek.

Police headquarters

9:20 p.m.

Inspector Eva Svärta wore a dangerous smile.

Her obsession was back. Her nightmare. Her secret.

The heels of her boots clicked on the black linoleum stairs as she nodded at fellow officers who were leaving the building or who, like her, were coming back after dinner to finish their reports.

On this January night, there were few people in the hallways of police headquarters: a couple of guys from the drug squad, a handful from homicide, and some chiefs. Eva knew most of the people she passed. She recognized the five o’clock shadows, the tousled hair, and the files under their arms. She surprised the others, newcomers who had not been warned. They looked at her with curiosity. She did not need to profile them to understand what was going through their minds. They were wondering who the strange white-haired woman wearing dress slacks and a leather jacket could be. Why did she have sunglasses on hours after the sun had set? Inspector Svärta looked out of place even here, where she had worked for years.

She smirked when she walked past them, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary.

When she reached her office, she noticed that one of the new recruits, a boy who still had the naive look of a teenager, continued to follow her with his eyes. He was, in fact, contemplating her derriere. He had the cocky look of a young rooster. When he saw that she had noticed, instead of looking away, he grinned and waved.

The temptation was too great.

She removed her glasses with a dramatic gesture and showed him her red albino eyes. The neon lights where harsh but tolerable.

The effect was immediate. A look of nearly comic surprise came over his face. His mouth dropped open, his hand stopped mid-air, and he clearly did not know what to do next.

Eva Svärta smiled, saluted him with her glasses, spun around with a wave of white curls, and slammed the door behind her.

There’s something for you to talk about tonight, little man. The others will be quick to fill you in.

She had carved out some time to herself at the office to focus on a case. It was a case she had been putting together relentlessly for months, snippet by snippet. It was her personal puzzle, her desperate quest, her obsession. She admitted it—it was an obsession.

First, she put her glasses and her thermos of tea on the desk. She then took off her jacket, slipped it on a hanger, and hung it up.

She glanced around, examining her space, making sure that no one had gone through her things. It was an old habit. The files were neatly lined up. The piles of papers were arranged with reassuring meticulousness, just as she had left them. She had insisted on working alone, so the space she had been allotted five years earlier was the smallest on the entire floor. It was under the rafters and windowless. In the winter, icy air from outside seeped in through an air duct. The tiny heater never managed to warm the space sufficiently. Nobody else would have wanted this closet. Eva Svärta, however, felt totally at home here. It was her well-ordered and controlled cocoon. At least nobody bothered her when she holed up here to work on her cases.

Her case. That case.

She sat down in front of the computer and turned on the green lamp at her right. A halo of warm light filled the room.

She had only one report to finish. She would do it later.

She poured herself a cup of tea while the file came up, and the computer connected to the various databases.

Her hand trembled as she placed an amphetamine on her tongue. She swallowed it with a gulp of jasmine-scented liquid.

Case and autopsy reports scrolled across the screen.

They came with pictures. Eva knew them by heart. She had read the reports and examined the images a thousand times.

And she would continue to do so every day until she found what she was looking for.

The drug left a bitter taste in her mouth.

She drank more tea.

She knew that in the division—and perhaps beyond the division—her colleagues had nicknamed her Robocop because of her idiosyncrasies. The other day, the misogynist ass Jean-Luc Deveraux had called her that in front of everyone, causing a wave of small, knowing smiles. But she could not do anything about it. She was who she was. Her own squad members had never entirely accepted her odd behavior. Her appearance—and particularly her unusual red eyes—frightened them. Her frequent rages reinforced their opinion. Actually, though, she did not mind the nickname. It did have “cop” in it.

Not so long ago, she learned that they also called her “the vampire.” She did not like that name at all. She saw enough bloodsuckers, pedophiles, and psychopaths in her line of work. She spent enough time inside their heads. They were monsters in the dregs of humanity who devoured society from the inside out, like black cancers. She studied them. She drew up their psychological profiles, down to the most sordid detail. She knew what went on in their sick minds. She knew what their hands could do with rope, knives, and innocent human flesh. She saw it every day at crime scenes and on autopsy tables.

I am not like them. I am not like the monsters I hunt.

That is not the blood that runs in my veins.

Not those fantasies.

Never.

More pictures.

Walls covered with blood.

Women’s bodies, slashed and mutilated.

Over several months, she had managed to collect a number of photos of the victims, all of them young women with light-colored hair. They looked eerily similar. Spitting images in death. But other than these shared characteristics, they had little in common. They had come from different cities and had different backgrounds. Nobody knew the motive. Nothing fit. And Eva would go back to square one. She would search for the detail—perhaps some commonality—that they missed in this series of murders. There had to be one.

She had been doing this for months. She had not made any progress, but she refused to give up. Someday a fresh piece of evidence would show up. It had happened in other cases. Yes, one day she would find a useful lead. And she would close this case. Her case.

She looked at photo after photo. There had been fifteen victims in all. Fifteen young women a monster had torn from this world.

The case had gone cold.

The murders had stopped from one day to the next. The killer had never showed up again.

Maybe he was dead. An accident? Natural death? Suicide? Maybe he had been arrested for other crimes, perhaps even in another country. That is what the detectives had ended up thinking. It was plausible, because there were no other victims.

Deep down, though, Eva thought the opposite. The person who committed these crimes was very much alive and out there somewhere.

Even if he had been thrown in prison, he would end up getting out. And he would start again. This kind of killer always started again.

She had to find his trail.

She knew she could do it if she spent enough time. If she kept working on it, she would end up
knowing.

She harbored a strange feeling in her gut, a crazy hope. Maybe it was a fantasy. She knew better than anyone else where fantasies led, but she could not help herself. It was the story of her life, literally. The photos of these innocent victims—two of them at least—held the story of her life.

“One day,” she whispered. “One day, I will find the bastard. I promise you.”

In the dark room, tears welled in her eyes.

“I promise, Mom. I promise, Little Sis. I will avenge you one day.”

There was a knock at the door.

She dried her tears with her hand, quickly closed the window on her screen, and opened a random file. The screen filled with police reports of some gang-related scores being settled in the streets. They were still waiting for ballistics on the Uzi found in an apartment in the fifteenth
arrondissement
. Perfect.

She put her glasses back on.

“Come in,” she said in a perfectly controlled voice.

Detective Erwan Leroy was around thirty, had an athlete’s body and was arguably the best-looking man in the division. But tonight, he had bags under his eyes and week-old stubble. Dirty strands of usually impeccable blond hair stuck out from under a black knit cap.

Eva chuckled to cover up her discomfort. She had never seen Leroy in this state.

“Erwan, come in,” she said, standing up. “You look like crap.”

“What do you expect, angel?” Leroy took off his hat and carefully closed the door before adding, “I wasn’t going undercover in the projects wearing a suit and tie. I went to Les Ruisseaux.”

“Les Ruisseaux?” Eva asked, raising an eyebrow. They had been taken off that case two weeks earlier. The cocaine ring—what Les Ruisseaux was known for—was not their problem anymore. The drug squad had taken over.

“You went back out there without telling us? Are you crazy?”

“As if you’re the one to preach,” Leroy said. “In any case, I was right.”

“Right about what?”

Leroy was so excited, he was wringing his hands like a nervous teenager.

“Things are moving at Constantin’s place. I bet it’ll go down tonight.”

“At Constantin’s place?”

“Yep. His soldiers were stopping by all day. I’m not sure what they were up too, but it’s hot.”

“That doesn’t mean much,” Eva said. “Constantin has spent his life making that housing project an independent entity with its own hierarchy. His underlings are just keeping him posted, that’s all.”

“No, I swear. They were more than routine visits. They looked like they were getting ready for something big. I talked with a few guys. Several times, I heard people say that Constantin was waiting for someone. I bet a month’s salary that it’s happening tonight.”

“Do you have any idea who it is?”

“No, not yet.”

“That’s kind of weak, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely not. Some signs are giveaways. I bet it’s some bigwig, someone from another city or maybe from another country. Do you want to know what I really think?”

Eva was not sure she did, but Leroy could not be stopped now.

“I’m listening,” she said, putting on her best maternal smile.

“So here’s the thing. Our friend Constantin has kept quiet for the past couple of weeks, after the splash our raid made, okay? He knows that we had to drop the case, since we didn’t find any merchandise. That means he either hid it or got rid of it right before we arrived. Everyone is using just-in-time delivery these days. He’s going to have to restock. And then, all of the sudden, he calls in all his street soldiers, and the whole place is bubbling with excitement. Even the kids are keyed up. What do you think of that?”

“First of all, Constantin is not my friend. And second, he has always had one up on us. This time won’t be any different.”

“You’re so negative.”

Eva sat on the edge of her desk. She lowered the sunglasses on her nose, showing her strange blood-red eyes, with pupils considerably dilated from the amphetamines. “I am being realistic, Erwan. And you know how much I’d like to see that scumbag rot in jail. He’s been thumbing his nose at us for years. But he’s untouchable in his own territory.”

It was true. Ismael Constantin, an immigrant from Niger who was now in his fifties, had arrived out of nowhere ten or so years earlier and was supplying half the city with particularly pure blow. That crap was responsible for at least a hundred overdose deaths. Unfortunately, he always evaded arrest. He did not even have a parking ticket. Their most recent attempt two weeks earlier had been a fiasco, like all the other attempts. Two cops had been injured by rocks, and a vehicle had been demolished when someone threw a stove off a balcony. They had found absolutely no trace of drugs. Once again, Constantin had been warned. There had to be a mole. That was the only explanation.

Unable to find the leak, the Criminal Investigation Division team had been removed from the case. The commissioner had been very clear. None of them were allowed to investigate any cases even remotely related to Ismael Constantin.

The higher-ups did not know how pigheaded Leroy was.

The young detective had made it a personal mission. Eva was not in a position to pass judgment. She also investigated cases in secret. But that did not mean she was going to encourage his crusade.

“You’ve got to trust me. We can get him this time. Constantin isn’t expecting it.”

Eva sighed.

“That’s what we thought the last time, Erwan. You know it as well as I do. Some asshole ratted us out. You can be sure that Constantin knew about our operation even before the chief approved it. The same thing will happen this time.”

“You’re right,” Leroy said. “And that is exactly what we are going to avoid.”

“You’re not letting go, are you?”

“Never.”

“You don’t think that Constantin’s men could have recognized you and fed you lies?”

“No risk of that. They weren’t giving me information per se. I was just talking with some guys about this and that and the weather. That’s all. But mostly I listened. I overheard things. Rumors. Whispers. I can assure you that nobody in the division knows, except me.”

“And now me,” Eva said.

“I always choose the sexiest partner. I have my reputation to think about.”

Eva crossed her arms and looked offended.

“Your charm doesn’t work on me,” she responded with a smile that said the opposite.