Bred to Kill Read Free

little girls . . .”
    Marie answered in a resigned voice: the sign, Lucie thought, of an unshakable fatalism.
    â€œMaybe, Lucie. Maybe.”
    The cop no longer had the strength to talk. In the half darkness, she went to wash her hands and tore open the packet the CSI lab had given her. Each of her movements weighed a ton. Once she’d pulled on the gloves, she came back into the living room. Her gaze met her mother’s, who recoiled, fingers trembling on her lips.
    As an officer of the law, Lucie cautiously slid the swab into her own mouth, delicately moved it around so that its white cotton-wool tip would become saturated with saliva. She wiped her tear-streaked face on her shoulder: nothing could be allowed to contaminate her movements, not even her maternal grief. She knew what she was doing was hateful, unreal: she was seeking in her parental DNA the proof that one of her daughters might be dead.
    Lucie then rubbed the tip of the swab on the spot indicated on the pink FTA card until she’d impregnated it with her DNA; she placed the card in the bag, which she carefully sealed along the wide red self-adhesive strip: “Police seal. Do not open.”
    The sample would go off first thing the next morning to a private laboratory, where it would be stacked up among hundreds of others. Her future—their future—depended on a common molecule that she couldn’t even see. A succession of millions of letters—A, T, G, C—that constituted a unique genetic fingerprint (except in the case of monozygotic twins), which so often had guided investigators and tripped up suspects.
    Despite her beliefs, her hopes, Lucie couldn’t help thinking that she might, soon, have to learn to survive without her little stars. And if that were to happen, how could she possibly keep on living?

1
    One year later
    M anien’s group, from the Paris Homicide squad, had been first on the scene. The murder had been committed in the Vincennes woods, near the zoo, not far from Daumesnil Lake and only a few miles from Homicide’s own headquarters at 36 Quai des Orfèvres. Blue sky, warm water, but moderate temperatures that early September day. A muted, variable summer, often traversed by torrential rains that allowed the capital to catch its breath.
    A lifeless body had been found by a jogger early that morning. The runner, cell phone in his waist pouch, had first called Emergency. In less than an hour, the information had been relayed by first responders to the Homicide switchboard, before reaching the third floor, Stairway A, and yanking the detectives from their seats.
    Slumped at the wheel of his green Polo, a man of about forty had, at first glance, taken several knife wounds to the thorax. He was still wearing his seatbelt. It was the strange position of his head—chin resting heavily on his chest—that had alerted the jogger. The driver’s-side window was completely lowered.
    Franck Sharko, second in command in the group of four policemen, stayed as close to the front as he could. He walked with a firm step, intent on arriving first at the crime scene. Followed some ten yards back by his boss and two colleagues, he crossed the boundary set up by the two uniforms and approached the vehicle parked in an area surrounded by trees, sheltered from prying eyes.
    The men from Quai des Orfèvres knew the Vincennes woods all too well, especially the areas around the boulevards, popular with prostitutes and transvestites. Still, this particular place, between the zoo and the lake, was a bit more remote and usually quiet—in other words, the ideal spot for an unwitnessed murder.
    After pulling on latex gloves, Sharko, wearing jeans that were too big for him, a black T-shirt, and docksiders on the verge of disintegration, thrust his arm through the car’s open window, grabbed the victim by the chin, and wrenched the face toward him. Captain Bertrand Manien, fifty years old, more than