He looked out through the open French doors at the city. The first shadows of evening were starting to settle.
‘And then this mess happens . . . Two Americans killed just like that, right here in Monaco, one of the world’s safest countries. Ironic, eh? Doesn’t it feel a little like a rerun? And now we’ve got a broken-hearted father who has decided to take matters into his own hands. A US Army general who intends to use the same terrorist tactics we’re fighting elsewhere for his own ends. As you can see, we’ve got the makings of another big international fiasco.’
‘So?’ Frank looked at Bolton, impassive.
‘So, you have to catch him, Frank. The killer. You have to. Before Parker does. Before the local police. In spite of the local police, if need be. Washington wants this case to be the pride and glory of America. Whether you like it or not, you have to take off your Elliot Ness shirt and turn into Rambo.’
Frank thought that in different circumstances, he and Bolton could have been great friends. ‘You know I will, Dwight. I’ll do it, but not for any of those reasons. Heads and tails maybe, but we’re only the same coin in the same pocket by accident. I’ll catch the killer, and you can give it any meaning you like. Just one thing.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t say that your meaning has to be mine, too.’
Bolton didn’t say a word. Either he didn’t understand or he understood too well, but that was enough. He stood up and hitched up his trousers. The conversation was over.
‘Okay, Frank. I think we’ve covered everything.’
Frank stood up as well. They shook hands in the waning light of the late spring afternoon. Night would soon fall. Voices and killers in the darkness. And everyone would try to grope his way to a hiding place.
‘Don’t show me out. I know the way. Bye, Frank. Good luck.’
‘Luck’s not a lady tonight. She’s going down kicking and screaming.’
Bolton went to the door and opened it. Malcolm could be seen standing outside as he closed the door behind him.
Frank was alone again. He decided he deserved another beer. He went into the kitchen to get it and sat down on the couch that his guest had occupied.
We’re the same coin . . . Heads or tails, Dwight?
He relaxed and tried to forget Bolton and their meeting. Diplomacy, wars, legal battles. He took a swig of beer and began to do something he had not done in a long time. He called it ‘opening’. When an investigation came to a dead end, he sat down by himself and tried to release his mind, letting all his thoughts free-associate, like a mental puzzle fitting together on its own. His only aim was to give free rein to his unconscious. Lateral thinking in images. Sometimes it brought excellent results. He closed his eyes.
Arianna Parker and Jochen Welder.
The boat, wedged into the dock, the masts listing slightly to the left.
The two of them lying on the bed, their faces skinned, their teeth
uncovered in a scowl without rage.
The voice on the radio.
The writing, red as blood.
I kill . . .
Jean-Loup Verdier. His wide eyes. Harriet’s face.
No, no. Not now!
The voice on the radio again.
The music, the cover of the Santana record.
Allen Yoshida.
His head leaning against the car window.
The light-coloured seat with the red writing again.
The man, the knife, the blood.
The video.
The man in black and Allen Yoshida.
The photos of the room without them.
The video. The photos. The video. The photos. The vid-
Suddenly, with an involuntary jump, Frank Ottobre found himself standing in front of the couch. It was such a tiny detail that his mind had recorded it and filed it away as if it was of no importance.
He had to go over to headquarters immediately and check on what he had remembered. Maybe it was just an impression, but he grasped at that scrap of hope. If he had a thousand fingers, he would have crossed them all.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The sun was setting as Frank reached police headquarters on Rue Notari. He had walked there from Parc Saint-Roman, slipping through the early evening crowds on the streets without even noticing them. He was on edge. When he was chasing a criminal, he always felt that same anxiety. That frenzy. An inner voice pushing him to run faster. Now that the investigation was at a dead end and their leads had gone nowhere, he had a small gleam of inspiration. There was something shining just below the surface and Frank couldn’t wait to dive down and see whether it was a real light or just a mirage.
The cop standing guard let him in without a word. As he climbed the steps to Nicolas Hulot’s office, Frank wondered if they used his name when they talked about him, or just called him ‘the American’. He walked down the corridor to Hulot’s door. He knocked a couple of times and turned the knob. The office was empty. He stood back a moment, puzzled, then decided to go in. He was feverishly impatient to see if his hunch was true. Nicolas wouldn’t mind.
The file with all the reports and papers on the case was lying on the desk. He opened it and looked for the envelope with the pictures of Allen Yoshida’s house that Froben had brought over after they checked the place. He studied them carefully. He sat down at the desk, picked up the phone, and called the inspector in Nice.
‘Froben?’
‘Yes. Who is it?’
‘Christophe, it’s Frank.’
‘Hi, Americano. How’s it going?’
‘Do I have to answer that?’
‘I read the papers. Is it really so bad?’
‘Yeah, really bad. Which means we’re just relieved it’s not worse.’
‘Great. And what can I do for you in this mess?’
‘Answer a couple of questions.’
‘Shoot.’
‘As far as you know, did anyone touch anything at Allen Yoshida’s place? Maybe accidentally move something before you came and took the photos?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Froben. ‘The maid who discovered the crime didn’t go in. She practically fainted at the sight of all that blood and called security right away. Valmeere, the head of Yoshida’s security team, is a former cop, remember? He knows the rules. No one touched anything, for sure. The photos I gave you are exactly what we found at the house.’
‘Okay, Christophe. Sorry, but I needed to be absolutely sure of that.’
‘Any leads?’
‘I don’t know. I hope so. I have to check one detail but I don’t want to raise a false alarm. Just one more thing . . .’ There was silence on the other end as Froben waited.
‘Do you remember if there were any vinyl LPs in Yoshida’s music collection?’
‘This one I can answer for sure. No, there were not. I can tell you that, because one of my men, who’s into this stuff, mentioned that there was a record player in the sound system but only CDs in the collection. He commented on it.’
‘Great, Froben. I didn’t expect anything less of you.’
‘Okay. I’m here if you need me.’
‘Thanks, Christophe. You’re a great help.’
Frank hung up and was lost in thought for a moment. Now he could find out if that bastard had made one tiny mistake, the first since it had all started. Or if he was the one making the mistake.
He opened the desk drawer. Inside, there was the copy of the video-cassette they had found in Yoshida’s Bentley. Frank knew that Nicolas kept it there with the radio tapes. He took it out of the drawer and slipped it into the VCR. He turned on the equipment and pressed PLAY.
The coloured bars appeared on the screen and the sequence started. If he lived 100 years and watched those images once a day, he would still never get used to them. He saw the man in black wave the dagger in his hand. Frank felt a knot in his stomach and his throat seized up. His rage would not go away until he caught him.
Here we go. We’re almost there . . . He was tem
pted to fast-forward, but was afraid that the detail would elude him. The video finally reached the point he was waiting for. He shouted to himself.
Yes, yes, yes . . .
He paused the image. It was such a tiny detail that he couldn’t have discussed it with anyone, for fear that it might be another false lead. Yet here it was, right in front of his eyes, and it was worth trying to see if it could mean something. Sure, it was so insignificant that it might be nothing. But it was all they had.
He looked carefully at the scene on the monitor before him. The killer was motionless, with the dagger raised over Allen Yoshida. His victim was staring at him, wide-eyed, his arms and legs bound with wire, his mouth covered with tape, a grimace of pain and fear on his face. The man would die anew, whenever someone watched that tape. And from what they knew about him, he deserved his fate each and every time.
Just then, the door opened and Morelli walked into the room. He stopped next to the door, speechless at finding Frank there. But then Frank noticed that Morelli wasn’t surprised, he was embarrassed. Frank felt slightly guilty at the sergeant’s discomfort.
‘Hi, Claude,’ he said. ‘Sorry I burst in, but there was nobody here and I had to check something out right away.’
‘Not a problem. If you’re looking for Inspector Hulot, he’s in the conference room downstairs. The bigwigs are there, too.’
Frank could smell something fishy. If it was a meeting to go over the investigation and coordinate things, it was strange that they hadn’t told him. He’d always been unobtrusive so as not to step on Hulot’s toes. He’d stayed a step behind and only taken the initiative when asked. He didn’t want to lower anyone’s opinion of the inspector, either that of his superiors or, more important, his subordinates.
Nicolas’s state of mind was another story. Frank had been struck by his outburst over Jean-Loup that morning, but it was perfectly understandable, from a personal and professional point of view. He and Hulot understood each other. They felt each other’s pain. There were no problems between them.
He compared that to the almost furtive visit from Dwight Bolton. The Principality authorities probably saw things the same way Bolton did, but from the opposite viewpoint. Now that the US government had intervened, Frank’s presence there was no longer a personal favour, a gentlemen’s agreement. It was official.
Frank shrugged. He had absolutely no intention of becoming mixed up in diplomatic relations. He didn’t give a damn. All he wanted to do was catch the killer, lock him in jail, and throw away the key. He didn’t care who took the credit.
‘I’m going downstairs. You coming?’ said Morelli, recovering from his earlier moment of awkwardness.
‘Think I should?’
‘I know they called you a couple of times but the line was busy.’
That was possible. He had been on the phone with Cooper for quite a while and had turned off his cell phone when Bolton arrived. He didn’t use it much anyway. It was almost always in a drawer in the apartment.
Frank got up from the desk, picked up the photos and removed the videotape from the VCR. He took them with him. ‘Can we look at this downstairs?’
‘We’ve got everything you need.’
They left the office and walked in silence down the stairs. Frank’s expression was hard as stone.
The large conference room was painted in two different shades of grey. There were a number of people sitting around a long, rectangular table. Nicolas Hulot, Dr Cluny, the Sûreté chief Roncaille and a couple of other people Frank didn’t know.
There was a moment of silence at his appearance and the fishy smell grew stronger. It was the classic pause of someone caught red-handed. Frank figured that this was their home and they had the right to have all the meetings they wanted, with or without him. But the tension confirmed his suspicions. Nicolas glanced around, embarrassed, unable to look him in the eye, just like Morelli a few minutes earlier. Hulot probably had other reasons as well. In Frank’s absence, he must have been soundly reprimanded for the negative results of the investigation so far.
Roncaille collected himself first. He stood up and took a few steps in Frank’s direction.
‘Ah, Frank, here you are. Come in and sit down. We were just doing a little summing up before you got here. I don’t think you know Alain Durand, the attorney general, who is personally involved in the case.’
He pointed to a short man with a few, sparse blonde curls and tiny, deep-set eyes behind rimless glasses, sitting at the head of the table. He was wearing an elegant grey suit that did not give him the air of importance he probably thought it did. Durand nodded slightly.
‘And Sergeant Gottet of the Computer Crime Unit . . .’
The man on Durand’s right nodded unmistakably. He was a young man, tanned with dark hair. He probably worked out in his spare time and lay on the beach all summer and a sunbed in the winter. He looked more like a yuppie than a cop.
Roncaille turned to the men he had just introduced. ‘This is Frank Ottobre, FBI special agent. He has joined the Principality police for the “No One” case.’
Frank went to sit down next to Dr Cluny on the left-hand side of the table, almost directly opposite Nicolas. He sought his gaze, but Nicolas continued to look somewhere under the table, as if he had lost something.
‘Okay,’ Roncaille said, returning to his seat, ‘I think we can go on now. Frank, we were about to hear Dr Cluny’s report on the tapes.’
Now it was Frank who nodded silently. Cluny pushed his chair closer to the table and opened his file of notes.
‘After analysing the tapes more closely than I could during the radio show,’ the psychiatrist began, ‘I have reached more or less the same conclusions. The subject is extremely complex, a type that I must say I have never encountered before. There are some details in his modus operandi that are totally in keeping with most case histories of serial killers. The single territory, for example. He only operates in the Principality. The fact that he always uses knives, which allow him direct contact with the victim. Moreover, the fact that he removes the skin can be seen as both a ritual fetish and, literally, as overkill. By mutilating the corpse, the killer demonstrates his total control over the person he attacks. Even the quiet period between one murder and the next is part of the general scheme. So, up to here, it all seems normal . . .’
‘But?’ asked Durand, with a deep voice that was disproportionate to his size.
Cluny paused for effect. He removed his glasses and rubbed the base of his nose, something Frank had noticed before. Cluny seemed to have a special ability to keep a crowd’s attention. He replaced his glasses and nodded at Durand.
‘That’s right. Here’s where the “buts” begin. The subject has enormous verbal agility and a capacity for abstraction that is absolutely remarkable, unique in my experience. His definition of himself as “someone and no one” is an excellent example. His imagery is even poetic at times, despite the bitterness. Aside from being highly intelligent, he must have an exceptional cultural background. University studies, the humanities, I’d say. That’s different from the average serial killer, who is usually lower class with little culture or education. They almost always have a very low intelligence quotient. There’s one thing in particular that puzzles me . . .’
Another pause. Frank watched the psychiatrist repeat the pantomime with his glasses and the nose rubbing. Durand cleaned his own glasses in the meantime.
A round of applause, Cluny. Great. We’re all ears but go on. And get yourself some contact lenses, won’t you?
‘The fact that there seems to be a compulsion towards the crime, the murder, during the conversation. Common personal experiences in subjects like this – an oppressive family, a domineering parent or parents, abuse or humiliation and so on – are fairly normal. But there is an attitude that we usually find in cases of split personality, as if the subject were two people at once. Which brings us back to the “someone and no one” mentioned earlier . . .’
To Frank, this was total bullshit. An exercise in style, nothing more. In this particular case, tracing the killer’s psychological profile might be helpful but would not determine anything. The killer was not only a man who took action; he was a thinking man, and he thought a great deal before acting. His thinking was exceptional, and if they wanted to catch him, they had to get beyond his capacity for lucid thought. Frank avoided saying so, however, because he didn’t want his opinion to be mistaken for admiration of the killer.
Durand interrupted, and from what he said, it was immediately evident that he was far from inexperienced. He knew how to run that kind of meeting.
‘Gentlemen, there’s no one here but us. This isn’t a contest. Please share any doubts you have, no matter how negligible. You never know where an idea may come from. I’ll start. What can we say about the killer’s relationship to music?’
Cluny shrugged. ‘That’s another debatable topic. “Someone and no one” again. His passion is obvious. He seems to know a lot about it and love it. It’s a primary refuge for him, a sort of mental retreat. But the fact that he uses it to leave a clue, a hint as to his next victim, is a way of destroying music, using it as a weapon to challenge us. He feels superior, even though it’s based on a sense of inferiority and frustration. Get it? “Someone and no one.”’
Hulot raised his hand.
‘Yes, inspector?’
‘Aside from the psychological motivation, what do you think his practical goal is in removing a particular part of the victim’s anatomy? Let me make myself clear: What does he do with their faces? Why does he need them?’
There was silence in the room. Every one of them had asked himself that question over and over. Now someone was saying it out loud and the silence meant that nobody had an answer.
‘I can only guess, like any of us. Any guess would be valid at the moment.’
‘Could it be that he’s unbearably ugly and is seeking revenge?’ asked Morelli.
‘That’s possible. But keep in mind that a repulsive or even monstrous appearance is fairly conspicuous. Ugliness is something people notice immediately: ugly equals bad. If there were some kind of Frankenstein wandering around, someone would have reported it. Someone like that doesn’t go unobserved—’