Syndrome E

38

Asnières-sur-Seine. A tidy little town in the outskirts of Paris, with a pretty center and pleasant shops. All around them and to the north, things weren’t so nice. Blacktop replaced nature, the sky was crisscrossed by fat ivory-colored birds taking off from Charles de Gaulle, interminable bars of mouse-gray buildings closed off the horizon. The banlieue in all its splendor. And through the middle of it ran a river.

Sharko and Lucie got off at the Gabriel Péri subway stop and quickly walked westward. Akim Abane, the brother of one of the five corpses from Gravenchon, had no criminal record and worked as a night watchman in a large department store. An upstanding guy, apparently, who lived on the fourth floor of a dark, uninviting apartment complex. At the bottom of the high-rise, Lucie was treated to a few relatively inoffensive whistles from some teenagers perched on a square of grass.

The man who opened up for them had the sharp, dry features of a Mediterranean. A flinty face on a vigorous, muscular body. Someone familiar with weightlifting and bench presses. Sharko made the first move:

“Akim Abane?”

“Who are you?”

To Sharko’s relief, Péresse’s men hadn’t arrived yet. He congratulated himself on his speed and showed his ID. Abane was lounging at home in shorts and a white T-shirt, which bore the legend FONTENAY MARATHON.

“I’d like to ask you some questions about your brother, Mohamed.”

The Arab didn’t budge from the doorway.

“What’s he done now?”

“He’s dead.”

Akim Abane hesitated a moment before balling up his fist and punching the door frame.

“How?”

Sharko kept it brief, sparing him the worst.

“Apparently killed by a gunshot. They found his body buried near a construction site in Seine-Maritime. Can we come in?”

Abane moved aside.

“Seine-Maritime… What the hell was he doing there?”

The man didn’t shed a tear, but the news had shaken him, so much so that he had to sit down on the sofa. The cops invited themselves inside.

“I knew it would end like this someday… Who could have done such a thing?”

“We don’t know yet. Do you have any ideas?”

“I don’t know. He had so many enemies. Here in the housing development, and outside.”

Lucie cast a quick glance around the room. Flat-screen TV, gaming console, running shoes everywhere: too much stuff in too little space. She noticed some photos in a frame. She moved closer, her brows knit.

“Were you twins?”

“No, Mohamed was a year younger than me, and an inch or two taller. But we were just like each other. I mean physically. Otherwise I was nothing like him. Mohamed had a screw loose.”

“When did you see him last?”

Akim Abane stared at the floor, eyes vacant.

“Two or three months after he got out, around New Year’s. Mohamed had come crying to me saying he wanted to change his life, make up for what he’d done. I never believed him. It wasn’t possible.”

New Year’s… So that brought the dating of the skeletons to less than seven months. Sharko already knew the answer to his next question, but he let the brother give it:

“Why’s that?”

“Because guys like him never stop. They showed me photos of that girl he’d burned between the legs, ages ago. The image is stuck here, in my brain. It wasn’t human…” He sighed. “Mohamed stayed with me a week or so. Let’s see—it must have been around mid-January when he left with just some personal stuff in a bag.”

He fell silent for a few moments.

“I never believed for an instant that he’d do it… and I was right.”

“Do what?”

With a sigh, Akim Abane stood up, opened a drawer, and riffled through some papers. He handed Sharko a slightly crumpled brochure.

The inspector’s heart leaped.

In that fraction of a second, everything became clear.

The brochure vaunted the merits of the Foreign Legion.

He raised his eyes to Lucie, who was also taken aback.

Akim took his seat again, hands joined between his powerful legs.

“One day, Mohamed found that in a magazine, in jail. To hear him tell it, you’d have thought it was a revelation. The military—that’s what he wanted to join. Wipe the slate clean. Change his identity, start from scratch. Yeah, sure…”

He picked up the framed picture, showing him standing next to his brother, and stared at it a long time.

“You stupid shit, what’d you have to go die for?”

Deep inside, Sharko was rejoicing. The Foreign Legion… It fit so perfectly with what they’d discovered in the past few days. Lucie picked up the questioning.

“Do you have any proof that he joined the Legion? Letters, phone calls, anything? Had he bought a train ticket for… the south?”

“Aubagne?” Sharko specified.

The Arab shook his head.

“No, I’m telling you, he never joined. I knew him—he wasn’t capable. Too unstable, and he had a real problem with authority. Can you imagine him over there? I came home from work one day and he’d cleared out. Hadn’t even taken his brochure. Not a good-bye, nothing… I knew someday the cops would come knocking on my door.”

The inspector tightened his jaws, eyes staring at the illustrated ad of a soldier in white kepi, posing proudly with all his medals. It was clear to him that Mohamed Abane had joined the Legion after all, but there wasn’t any direct proof. Even his brother didn’t believe it.

“Do you have any family, a relative or friend your brother might have gone to stay with after he left here?”

“Apart from some real creeps, I can’t think of anyone.”

Sharko continued to think. While everything seemed to be falling in place, there was still a huge piece that didn’t fit: why sever the hands, pull the teeth, and scrape off the tattoos of someone who could simply be identified through DNA? In the Legion, they must have known that Mohamed Abane had a long rap sheet. They might erase the past of their recruits, but they were scrupulous about verifying it first. They clearly would have known the Arab was registered on the national DNA database and would be well aware of the extent of his crimes.

Unless…

Sharko raised his dark eyes toward the photo of the two brothers.

“I have a question that might seem strange… Your identity card didn’t go missing around that time, did it?”

Akim nodded.

“Actually, it did. I must have lost it at work or in the street. How did you guess?”

Sharko didn’t respond. Lucie was just as confused as the bodybuilder. The cop had all the answers he needed, and his conviction had been reinforced. He held his hand out to the Arab and Lucie did the same.

“Some cops from Rouen will be here very soon. They’ll ask a lot of questions and take notes. Don’t be alarmed—it’s just routine.”

Before leaving, with Lucie ahead of him, Sharko turned back toward Akim, who hadn’t moved from his sofa.

“By the way… your brother had a tiny particle of plastic sheathing under his skin, near his neck. Do you know if he’d had an operation?”

“No, no…”

“Any stays in the hospital?”

“I don’t think so. But the truth is, I have no idea.”

“Thank you. I promise that you’ll have answers. The people responsible for this are going to pay. I’m going to see to it personally.”

And he gently closed the door behind him.