Syndrome E

21

In the tech department of the crime lab, a stone’s throw from the squad house, Lucie held in her hands the enlargements of the film frames discovered in Claude Poignet’s eye sockets. Two glazed, coarse-grained surfaces in black and white. The images were practically identical. You could see, in a slightly skewed position, as if the camera had been knocked over, the hem of a pair of jeans and the toe of a shoe that Lucie hadn’t noticed the first time. The background was lost in shadow, but the feet of a table were visible, as was a wall. The ground was a floor.

“Are these shoes combat boots?”

Lucie was talking to the technician sitting next to her at his computer screen. Julien Marquant, forty-plus, was one of the crime scene photographers. At each homicide, he served up the worst on glossy paper. Some people photographed supermodels; for him, it was cadavers. The heads of suicides splattered open by a .22, drowning victims bloated with water, hangings… Julien was an excellent photographer whose talents would remain hidden in the police files. Given the late hour, he was the person most liable to inform his colleague on the subject.

“Looks like it.”

He showed her the photos he’d taken at the victim’s house. Notably the ones of blood found on the floor of the lab upstairs. Lucie made a connection that now struck her as self-evident:

“It’s his place—Claude Poignet’s. He had cameras, film stock—the movie was shot in his own house. Holy shit…”

“Yes. The two frames we found in his eyes were negatives, so they came from the original master, rather than from a positive print.”

Lucie regretted not having reacted sooner. Poignet had explained all that business about positive and negative prints, originals and copies. Julien Marquant tapped his index finger on the photos.

“You want to know what I think? I think the killers operated the camera. They must have—I don’t know—placed it right next to the victim’s dying body. As if to capture the last images he saw before dying.”

Lucie shivered as she stared at the photos. Poignet’s final seconds of life were in front of her, before her eyes. The poor man had passed away with those very images—those of a stranger wearing combat boots who was watching him die, while the other one strangled him.

“As if… Claude Poignet himself were the camera. The bastards wanted to go inside him.”

“Exactly. You said it yourself—the victim had a processing lab, an old 16 mm camera, and reels of raw stock. The killers used it all. They filmed, then went into the darkroom and soaked the images they wanted in a vat of developer. Then they cut them out and put them in the victim’s eye sockets. The operation is rather technical and must have taken a good hour.”

Lucie pressed her lips tight. These two sick twists weren’t content with just stealing back the film; they’d devised a screenplay worthy of a horror movie, going so far as to leave the police something to go on. Thoughtful, organized individuals, so sure of themselves that they’d taken the chance of lingering at the crime scene to “play.” Lucie laid out her thoughts:

“They’ve very kindly given us two elements. The exact position of the body before he was hanged, and the shoes. Combat boots—which confirms that the fellow who went to Szpilman’s and the one who helped commit Poignet’s murder are one and the same. A soldier, perhaps?”

“Or somebody trying to pass for one. Or neither: anybody can buy combat boots. Especially since they know their way around movies and props. One of them can use a 16 mil camera, take the film out in the darkroom, and develop it. Believe me, if you’re a beginner, you wouldn’t have the first clue how to operate one of those old gizmos.”

“The fingerprint guys didn’t come up with anything in the darkroom, apart from the victim’s prints. We’ll have to send some men back there, this time to look at the equipment, the cameras. The killers surely abandoned some DNA, especially if an eye came in contact with the viewfinder. They must have made some mistakes. You don’t just play around with death like that…”

She gathered up the photos and thanked him. Back in the street, she walked slowly, deep in thought. After the how came the why. Why had the killers left those frames in place of his eyes? What were those sadists trying to say?

Plunged into these psychological reflections, she thought of Sharko, the peculiar fellow she’d met on the sly at Gare du Nord. Would he be able to find the answer, with his experience and years in the trade? Would he do a better job than she with this tough and unusual crime? She was dying to talk to him about this new homicide, to see how he’d handle it from the height of his fifty-odd years.

Following her train of thought, Lucie tried to make links with the Gravenchon case. There, too, the victims had had their eyes removed. A doctor, a professional, according to Sharko. Now they could add the talents of a “filmmaker.” The profile was becoming more refined, even if nothing specific was quite emerging yet. Why steal the eyes? What was their importance to the person taking them? What did he do with them afterward? Did he keep them as trophies? Lucie also remembered the obsession with the retina and the iris in the short film. The slice of the scalpel on the cornea, the blinks of the eyelids… And she recalled Poignet’s remark: “The eye is just a common sponge that soaks up images.”

A sponge…

Suddenly excited, Lucie took out her phone, peeled through her contact list, and dialed the number of the medical examiner.

“Doctor? Lucie Henebelle. Is this a bad time?”

“Hold on—let me ask the large black gentleman decomposing on my table… No, he’s fine. What can I do for you, Lucie?”

Lucie smiled; the examiner knew her through and through. Truth to tell, she was a “preferred customer.”

“This probably sounds stupid, but… it’s about something I’ve heard people say, without ever getting a definitive answer: can the eye retain some sort of imprint of what it sees just before death?”

“Excuse me? In what sense?”

“A violent image, for instance. The very last image before the vital functions stop. A cluster of specs of light that could be reconstructed—I don’t know—by analyzing stimulated photoreceptive cells, or parts of the brain that might have preserved the information somewhere?”

A pause. Lucie felt a bit embarrassed, expecting him to burst out laughing at any moment.

“The fantasy of the optogram.”

“What?”

“You’re asking me about the fantasy of the optogram. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, popular opinion decided that a murder, because of its violent and sudden nature, could leave an impression on the dead person’s retina like sensitive film…”

Sensitive film, eye, image… words that had been circling around each other since the beginning of this whole affair.

“Doctors at the time began studying the subject. They thought you could extract a portrait of the criminal from the retina of a corpse. The fantasy of the optogram was that the crime would be directly recorded by the body as the victim was being murdered. In the medical community at the time, this meant taking the eyeball from its socket and removing its crystalline lens, then photographing it to extract tangible proof of the crime. Doctors actually used this method to help the police. And they really arrested people. No doubt innocent people.”

“And… is such a thing as a retinal imprint plausible?”

“No, no, of course not. As the term suggests, it’s remained just a fantasy.”

Lucie asked one last question.

“And what about in 1955? Did they still believe in it?”

“No, they weren’t as backward as all that in 1955, you know.”

“Thanks, Doctor.”

She said good-bye and hung up.

The fantasy of the optogram…

Fantasy or not, the killer or killers meant to draw attention to the image, its power and its relation to the eye. That particular sensory organ must have been important to the killer, symbolic. That incredible instrument was the well that carried light to the brain, the tunnel that conveyed knowledge of the physical world. It was also, aesthetically speaking, the place where cinema began. No eye, no image, and no cinema. The link was tenuous, but it did exist. Lucie now considered the killer a split personality, divided between the medical—the eye as an organ that can be dissected—and the artistic—the eye as medium and bearer of images. Since there were two killers, perhaps each had his own specialty. A doctor and a filmmaker…

Still deep in thought, Lucie stopped at a sandwich shop. Her phone was vibrating. It was Kashmareck. He dispensed with the preliminaries.

“How far have you gotten?”

“I’m just leaving forensics with some news. I’m on my way.”

“Perfect timing. I know it’s late, but we have to go to the Saint-Luc university clinic, near Brussels.”

“Belgium again?”

“Yes. We went through the victim’s phone calls. Among them, Poignet had reached someone named Georges Beckers, who specializes in images and the brain. You gave me his business card. He works in neuromarketing—I didn’t even know there was such a field. Just after he scanned the film, Claude Poignet sent him the URL of the server where he’d stored the copy and asked him to analyze it. We’ve got the digitized film, Lucie. Our tech boys are downloading it. I’m putting a lip-reader on it right now, as well as image specialists. We’re going through it with a fine-toothed comb.”

Lucie gave a silent sigh. The killers had been outsmarted by technology. They had killed someone to preserve their secret, and this secret was now spreading throughout the entire police computer network.

“Did this Beckers discover anything?”

“According to him, old Vlad Szpilman had already been to their research center, with the very same movie, a little more than two years ago. Szpilman was a friend of the former director, who died of a heart attack a few months ago.”

Lucie thought for a moment before answering.

“Vlad Szpilman must have had the same intuition as our restorer did. According to his son, he liked to watch the same film dozens of times over; he had an expert eye. He must have come to suspect that some strange things were hidden in this film. So he had it analyzed. Two years ago is quite a while back, all things considered.”

“Let’s get rolling. Beckers has been alerted, and he’s waiting for us. Okay for you?”

She looked at her watch. A little after eight.

“Let me just run by the hospital. I want to see my daughter and tell her why I can’t fall asleep with her this time.”