Hulot stopped his car at a red light. A woman pushing a pram crossed the street in front of him. To his right, a cyclist in a blue tracksuit was leaning against the traffic light, balancing against the pole so he wouldn’t have to take his feet off the pedals. There was colour and warmth everywhere. The city was full of the promise of summer. Outdoor cafes, the streets full of people, the lively boardwalk along the beach where men, women and children asked only that promises be kept. Everything was as it should be, but not for the two men sitting in the car held at the red light. A presence hovered between them, dark and opaque.
‘Any news from forensics?’ Frank asked.
The red light turned to green. Hulot edged the car forward, suddenly aware that the traffic was backed up right along the coastal road. It would be faster on a bike than in a car.
‘We’ve got the pathologist’s report. They did the autopsy in record time. Some big shot must have put a bomb under them. It’s all confirmed. The girl died by drowning, but there was no seawater in her lungs. That means she died without being able to come up for air. The killer must have surprised her in the water, pulled her down, and drowned her before she could take a breath. They went over the body with a fine-tooth comb. No sign, no trace. They examined it every way they could with all the equipment they’ve got.’
‘What about the guy?’
‘That was different.’ Hulot’s face darkened. ‘He was stabbed with a very sharp-pointed instrument. The wound was made from above. The blade penetrated between the fifth and sixth rib and went straight to the heart, rupturing it. Death was almost instantaneous. The killer must have attacked him outside, on deck where the bloodstains were found. He was taken by surprise, but Jochen Welder was a well-built man. He wasn’t that tall, but taller than most racing drivers. And he was in good shape. Spent a lot of time in the gym. So the attacker must have been in even better shape than he was.’
‘Were the bodies raped?’
‘No,’ said Hulot shaking his head. ‘At least he definitely wasn’t. She had just had intercourse. There were traces of semen in her vagina, but it was probably Welder’s. The DNA test confirmed that at ninety per cent.’
‘That would exclude a sexual motive. At least the usual type.’ Frank’s tone was dry, as if he were talking about a napkin that had survived a fire.
‘As far as prints and other organic traces, they found plenty. We’ll send it all for DNA testing, but I doubt it will lead anywhere.’
They passed Beaulieu and the luxury hotels along the beach. The parking lots were full of shiny cars, left in the peaceful shade of the trees. There were flowering bushes everywhere; a thousand colours in the light of such a beautiful day. Frank let himself be distracted by the red hibiscus blossoms in the garden of a villa. Red. Like blood.
‘So we have nothing,’ he said, bringing his mind back to the car. He moved the air-conditioning vent so that the cold air blew on his face.
‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘Body-type measurements on the prints?’
‘Nothing there either. He’s probably about six feet tall, give or take an inch. Weight about 12st. Like millions of other people.’
‘Athletic, in other words.’
‘Yeah, athletic. And very good with his hands.’
Frank had more questions, but his friend seemed to be reflecting and drawing his own conclusions as he described the facts and Frank did not want to interrupt him.
‘The job he did on the bodies is nothing to sniff at. He’s certainly skilled. It definitely wasn’t his first time. Maybe someone with a medical background?’
‘It’s worth a try. You never know.’ Frank didn’t want to dampen his friend’s hopes. ‘But it would be too obvious. Predictable, I’d say. Unfortunately, in some ways, human anatomy is no different from that of animals. All the guy needed to do was practice on a couple of rabbits and he could do the same thing to a person.’
‘Rabbits, huh? People are like rabbits.’
‘He’s smart, Nicolas. A raving lunatic, but smart and cold-blooded. You need a guy with Freon in his veins to do what he did, send the boat ramming into the harbour and go home whistling a merry tune. He’s taunting us, laughing at us, too.’
‘You mean the music?’
‘Yeah. He hung up with the theme song from A Man and a Woman.’
Hulot remembered seeing the Lelouch movie years ago, just after he and his wife Céline had started dating. He remembered the love story perfectly and had taken it as a good omen for their future. Frank reminded him of a detail he had not focused on until then.
‘The man in the movie was a racing driver.’
‘Now that you mention it . . . And so was Jochen Welder. But—’
‘Exactly. Not only did he announce on the radio the fact that he was planning to kill, he also hinted who the victim would be! And I don’t think it’s over. He killed and he wants to kill again. We have to stop him – I don’t know how, but we have to. Whatever the cost.’
The car stopped for another red light at the brief descent at the end of Boulevard Carnot. The city of Nice lay before them. Faded and less glamorous, far from the glossy shine of Monte Carlo and its population of wealthy retired people and playboys at a loose end. As he drove towards Place Masséna, Hulot turned to look at Frank in the seat next to him. Frank was staring straight ahead with the rapt expression of Ulysses awaiting the song of the Sirens.
ELEVEN
Nicolas Hulot parked up at the gate of the Auvare Police Department on Rue de Roquebillière. A uniformed policeman standing next to the guardhouse came over to tell them to move from the entrance reserved for police personnel. The inspector showed his badge from the window.
‘Inspector Hulot, Sûreté Publique, Monaco. I have an appointment with Inspector Froben.’
‘Sorry, inspector, I didn’t recognize you.’
‘Could you let him know I’m here?’
‘Right away, sir. Come on in.’
Hulot drove up a few yards and parked on the shady side of the street. Frank got out and looked around. The rectangular buildings were arranged in a checkerboard layout. There was an outdoor stairway at the shorter end of each building, facing out on to the street.
The inspector wondered what all this looked like to an American. Nice was not just a different city but a different world. To Frank, it might as well be another planet, where he understood the language but not the way of thinking. Small houses, small cafes, small people. No American dream, no skyscrapers to destroy. Just small dreams, often faded by the sea air, like the exteriors of the houses. Small dreams, perhaps, but when they were crushed they, too, brought deep despair.
Someone had pasted an anti-globalization poster right in front of the police department. Men fighting so that everyone could be the same, while others fought to keep from losing their identity. Europe, America, China, Asia. They were only coloured shapes on the map, abbreviations on the list of exchange rates, names in dictionaries in libraries. Now there was the Internet, the media, 24-hour news. These were signs of a world that was expanding, or contracting, depending on your point of view. But the only thing that really erased distances was evil. It was present everywhere; it spoke only one language and it always wrote its messages in the same ink.
Frank closed the car door. He was thirty-eight years old with the eyes of an old man who had been denied life’s wisdom. He had a Latino face, darkened further by the shadow of his eyes and hair and the suggestion of a beard. A strong, athletic man. A man who had killed other men, protected by a badge and the justification of being on the right side. Perhaps there was no cure, no antidote for evil. But there were men like Frank, touched by and immunized against evil itself.
The war never ended.
As Hulot locked his car, they saw Inspector Froben of Homicide, who was taking part in the investigation, coming out of the building in front of them and heading in their direction. He flashed Hulot a wide grin, showing off large, regular teeth that illuminated his face
and his rugged features. He had a massive body that filled the jacket of his cheap suit, and the broken nose of someone who’d often climbed through the ropes of a boxing ring. Frank saw confirmation in the tiny scars around his eyebrows.
‘Hi, Nicolas,’ Froben said, shaking Hulot’s hand. His smile grew wider and his grey eyes narrowed, the scars meshing with a web of tiny wrinkles. ‘How’re you doing?’
‘You tell me. In this sea of shit with a storm threatening, I need all the help I can get. This is Frank Ottobre, FBI special agent,’ said Hulot as Froben’s gaze moved to Frank. ‘Very special. His office sent him to join the investigation.’
Froben said nothing, but his eyes showed he was impressed by Frank’s title. He extended his boxer’s hand with its large, strong fingers and grinned again. ‘Christophe Froben, humble inspector of Homicide.’
As he returned Froben’s powerful handshake, Frank felt that the other man could have broken his fingers if he’d wanted to. He liked him immediately. He embodied both strength and grace at the same time. Frank could imagine him with his children after work, making model ships and handling the fragile parts with surprising delicacy.
‘Any news on the tape?’ Hulot asked, coming straight to the point.
‘I handed it over to Clavert, our best technician. A magician, actually. When I left, he was working on it with his gadgets. Come on, follow me.’
Froben went first and they filed in through the same door he had come out of earlier. He led them down a short hallway flooded with diffused light from a window behind them. Hulot and Frank followed Froben’s broad back that seemed to fill the corridor. He stopped in front of a staircase that led down to the left. Froben gestured a generous sweep of his big mitt.
‘After you.’
They went down two flights of stairs and found themselves in a huge room full of electronic equipment. It was lit by cold neon tubes that supplemented the inadequate light from the basement’s street-level skylights.
A thin young man with a shaved head was sitting at a workbench. He was wearing a white lab coat over a pair of jeans and an untucked plaid shirt. A pair of round glasses with yellow lenses was perched on his nose. The three men stopped behind the swivel chair where he was sitting, handling a potentiometer. He turned to look at them. Hulot wondered whether or not the man risked going blind when he went out into the sun wearing those glasses.
Froben didn’t introduce the newcomers, but the man didn’t seem to mind. Probably, to his way of thinking, if two strangers were there, it was because they were supposed to be.
‘Well, Clavert? What have you got to tell us about the tape?’
‘Not much, inspector,’ the technician said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘No good news. I analysed the recording with everything I’ve got. Nothing. The voice is artificial and there is no way to identify it.’
‘Which means?’
Realizing that not everyone present had his technical knowledge, Clavert backtracked.
‘Every human voice travels along certain frequencies that are part of one’s personal identity. Voices can be identified like fingerprints and the retina. They have a certain number of high, low and medium tones that don’t vary, even if you try to alter your voice, by talking in falsetto, for example. We can visualize these frequencies with special equipment and then reproduce them in a diagram. This is fairly standard kit. They use it in recording studios, for example, to distribute frequencies and keep a song from having too many high or low tones.’
Clavert went over to a Mac computer and moved the mouse. He clicked some icons and a white screen appeared, with parallel lines crossing it horizontally. There were two other jagged lines, one green and one purple, wandering between them.
‘This is the voice of Jean-Loup Verdier, the Radio Monte Carlo deejay,’ the technician said, moving the mouse to point to the green line. ‘I’ve analysed it and this is the phonic pattern.’ He clicked again and the screen turned into a graph highlighting a yellow line that zigzagged over a dark background, caught between parallel blue lines. Clavert pointed at the screen. ‘The blue lines are the frequency. The yellow line is the analysed voice. If you take Verdier’s voice from different points of the recording and overlap them, they match perfectly.’ He looked round to see if his audience were keeping up.
‘This is the other voice.’ Clavert returned to the previous screen, clicking the purple line. The graph appeared again, but this time the yellow line was broken and the field was much smaller. ‘In this case, the caller passed his voice through filters to distort and compress the sound, mixing vocal frequencies and making it unrecognizable. All you have to do is change just one of the filters slightly to get a different graph each time.’
‘Can we analyse the recording to find out the model of the equipment he used?’ Hulot asked. ‘Maybe we could find out who sold it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ the technician said doubtfully. ‘You can buy these machines just about anywhere. There are several brands. Performance varies according to the specification and the brand but they all do basically the same thing. And electronics change all the time so there’s a big second-hand market. All this stuff generally ends up in the hands of home-recording enthusiasts, and almost always without receipts. I really don’t think it’s feasible.’
‘We’ll see what we can do,’ Froben joined in, without seconding Clavert’s pessimism. ‘We’ve got so little solid information that we can’t overlook anything.’
Hulot noticed Frank looking around, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts, as if he already knew all this. Still, the inspector was sure that he had heard every word and was filing it all away. He turned back to Clavert.
‘And what can you tell us about the fact that the phone call didn’t go through the switchboard?’
‘Well, I can’t actually advance a theory about that. I can think of two basic possibilities. All switchboards have numbers that let you through. If you know them, you can avoid the switchboard operators. Radio Monte Carlo certainly isn’t NASA as far as secrecy is concerned, so it wouldn’t be hard for someone to get his hands on the numbers. The second hypothesis is a little more complicated, but it’s not science fiction. Actually, I think it sounds more likely.’
‘And that is?’
‘I made some enquiries,’ Clavert said, leaning back in his chair. ‘The Radio Monte Carlo switchboard, like most stations that run phone-ins, has a computer program with a function that displays the caller’s number, for obvious reasons.’ Again he looked around at the three detectives. ‘When the call came, no number appeared on the display, which means that the person calling had attached an electronic device to the phone that neutralized the switchboard function.’
Hulot shook his head. ‘Is that hard to do?’
‘Anyone who knows electronics and telephones wouldn’t have any problem. Any reasonably competent hacker could do it through the Internet.’
‘Can we find out whether the call came from a land line or a mobile phone?’ Hulot felt like a prisoner with walls everywhere he looked.
‘No, but I’d exclude a mobile. If he used the Web, mobiles are much slower and don’t work as accurately. The person who did all that is too knowledgeable not to be aware of it.’
‘Any more tests you can do on the recording?’
‘Not with the equipment I have. I’m going to send a copy of the DAT to the science lab in Lyons to see if they can get anything out of it.’
‘Good. Top priority,’ Hulot said, resting his hand on Clavert’s shoulder. ‘If Lyons complains, we’ll pressure them.’
Clavert considered the subject closed. He unwrapped a stick of gum and put it in his mouth. There was a moment of silence. The four of them, each in his own way, thought through what had been said. Froben spoke first.
‘Come on, let me get you some coffee.’
He led them up the stairs and turned left at the landing. There was a coffee machine in the corner. Froben took out his card.
‘Coffee, everyone??
?? The other two nodded. The inspector inserted his card, pressed a button, and the machine started to hum.
‘What do you think, Frank?’ Hulot asked the American, who was silently watching the small plastic cup fill with black liquid.
‘We don’t have much,’ Frank said, deciding to voice his thoughts, ‘and any direction we take will lead nowhere. I told you, Nicolas, our man is smart, very smart. There are too many coincidences to think that he simply got lucky. For now, our only connection to this bastard is that phone call. If we’re lucky enough, and if he’s enough of a narcissist, he’ll make others. And if we’re very lucky, he’ll make them to the same person. And if we’re even luckier, he’ll make a mistake. It’s our only hope if we want to catch him and stop him before he kills again.’ He swallowed a mouthful of his coffee and grimaced. ‘I think it’s time to have a serious talk with Jean-Loup Verdier and the people at Radio Monte Carlo. I’m sorry to say this, but for the moment we’re in their hands.’ He drained his cup and threw it into the bin.
They headed towards the exit.
‘I imagine there is already a certain amount of . . . agitation . . . in the Principality,’ Froben said to Hulot.
‘Calling it “agitation” is like calling Mike Tyson “uptight”. Things are at the point of collapse. Monte Carlo is a picture-postcard city, you know that. Image is everything. We spend tons of money to guarantee two things: elegance and safety. And then you get this nut who has elegantly kicked us in the balls. If this doesn’t end soon, heads are going to roll.’ Hulot paused and sighed. ‘Including mine.’
They reached the front door and said goodbye. Froben stood there watching them as they strolled back to their car. His prizefighter’s face showed solidarity, but also relief that he wasn’t in their place.
Once they were inside the car, the inspector turned to look at Frank. It was almost dinnertime, and he realized he was hungry.