Who was set on finishing the job.
Exactly like the Salaville brothers.
The same position, the legs raised, the throat slit to drain the blood. Everything matches their MO.
“I noticed bruises that seem older,” the pathologist added. “She’s got several of them on her thighs and arms. Maybe she was abused.”
Eva examined the studio’s decor, thinking. A lot of black, purple and lace. She could see several vinyl corsets, a poster of the famous stripper Dita Von Teese, and books on Japanese bondage carefully lined up on a shelf.
“No. My guess is that this girl was into fetish. Handcuffs, spankings, that sort of things. That can leave bruises.”
“A pervert, was she,” Deveraux said from the doorway. “No wonder it got out of hand.”
Eva turned around and shot him a furious look.
“This girl is dead, Jean-Luc. If you can’t manage to be useful or to shut your face, go downstairs and help Garenne’s men check the garbage.”
“You’re not my superior, honey, and screw you too.”
“Hey, hey,” Leroy said. “Why don’t both of you cut it out? Please.”
Deveraux huffed before heading back toward the hallway.
“You dumb…” he mumbled into his beard.
Eva did not bother trying to hear the rest of what he was saying. She turned to the pathologist, who stared at her, wide-eyed, not daring to intervene.
“Sorry about that, Pauline. Let’s get back to it.” Her eyes landed on the rings screwed into the ceiling beam, through which the chains were running. “Erwan, you check out this setup? It was already here. All this stuff belongs to the victim. The killer used it, but these were her own toys.”
“What are you thinking? Crime of passion?” he asked. “A BDSM session gone bad?”
What am I thinking about? A barn filled with naked bodies. Girls with no faces.
“No. This kind of brutality isn’t the result of bondage. It’s the work of a highly organized killer. Pauline, do you think…” She hesitated. “Do you think that the victim was drained of her blood intentionally?”
It came out.
The pathologist shrugged.
“Sure looks like it. What’s certain is that a huge quantity of the blood is missing. Look at this.”
Pauline Chadoutaud pointed at trails on the floor. A heavy object had been dragged through the blood, and, whatever it was, the object was no longer in this room.
“Some sort of container, right?” Eva asked.
“Precisely. Looks to me like the killer filled it with blood and took it with him.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Eva said. “We need the autopsy today.”
“Well, I had a feeling you’d say that,” Chadoutaud answered.
She gestured at her team to come help her.
The men in white suits set to work. It took them several minutes to free her limbs and place her body in a bag, which they laid on the gurney.
On the mattress, the imprint of Barbara Meyer’s agony was all that was left. The forensics team gathered the chains and took them away for their analysis.
The victim’s blood was everywhere, like waves, some brown, some black and some still bright red, shining like diamonds on the walls, the furniture and the floor.
What the murderer had not taken with him, anyway.
18
“So? What do you think?” Leroy asked.
Eva walked into the apartment’s tiny bathroom.
“That our killer had a precise and well-oiled modus operandi.” She scanned the room. The makeup next to the sink, all the cosmetics carefully arranged. The shower was sparkling clean. “Come take a look at this, Erwan. He took a shower here before he left. If he did things right, we’ll never find any trace of evidence. He did leave us something, though.”
As her partner peeked though the doorway, Eva pointed to the shattered mirror. One single blow, right in the middle, had split the glass into thousands of fragments.
“Oh,” Erwan said. “We’ve seen that before, haven’t we?”
The inspector nodded.
“A year ago. Down south,” she said.
“The two brothers who slaughtered about twenty girls?”
“Exactly. We’ve got the same MO.”
“But, those guys were stopped from causing harm, right?”
The euphemism Leroy used made her smile in spite of herself.
“Oh yes. I was there when the pathologist cut them open. I can assure you they’re not the ones who butchered this kid.”
“Then we’ve got a copycat,” Leroy said.
Eva considered it.
“Maybe.”
“You know,” her colleague insisted, “the press gave so much coverage to those Black Mountain Vampires. It might have inspired some other nutcase. Don’t you think?”
“The media never said anything about the broken mirrors. They didn’t say anything about the inscriptions, either. Look.”
Leroy directed his attention to where she was pointing.
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.
Refocus, get back to the present.
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.