Bred to Kill Read Free Page B

maggots ready to throw themselves on the corpse. Time went by, nothing changed.
    With pinched lips, he stared one last time at the victim, whose pupils were already filming over. Frédéric Hurault had died with amazement deep in his eyes, probably without understanding why. Middle of the night, darkness, not even a lamppost nearby. Someone had knocked on his window and he’d rolled it down. The knife had flashed and struck him in the chest several times. A crime committed in less than twenty seconds, without noise or blood spatter. And without witnesses. Now it was time to gather clues, perform the autopsy, canvass the neighborhood: a tried-and-true routine that helped them solve 95 percent of criminal cases.
    But there still remained that other 5 percent, whose thousands of case file pages filled the garret offices of Homicide. A handful of especially crafty killers who’d managed to slip through the meshes of the net. They were the hardest to track down; you had to be worthy of arresting them.
    As if to defy authority, Sharko trampled on the crime scene one more time, even allowing himself a quick inspection of the vehicle, then disappeared without a word to anyone. Everyone watched him go with lips pressed tight, except for Manien, who was still shouting.
    No matter. For the moment, Sharko was having a hard time seeing straight and needed to sleep . . .
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    Middle of the night. Sharko was standing in his bathroom, feet together on a brand-new electronic scale, accurate to a hundredth of an ounce. No mistake or faulty adjustment: it indeed read 154.76 pounds. The same weight as when he was twenty. His stomach muscles had reappeared, along with his solid collarbones. From the height of his six feet and almost one inch, he palpated his unwell body with disgust. On a sheet taped to the wall, he marked a dot at the bottom of a grid drawn several months earlier. A straight downward line representing the evolution of his weight. At this rate, it would soon dip below the sheet and continue down the wall tiles.
    Bare-chested, he went back into his lifeless room. A bed, a closet; in the corner, a pile of disassembled miniature train tracks. The radio alarm whose music he hadn’t heard in an eternity said 3:07.
    Soon it would be time.
    Sitting cross-legged, he positioned himself in the middle of the mattress and waited. His eyelids fluttered. His eyes stared at the glaring red numbers.
    3:08 . . . 3:09 . . . In spite of himself, Sharko began counting down the seconds in his head: fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven . . . A ritual he was powerless to stop, that returned night after night. The hell buried deep within his scorched brain.
    The digital display on the clock changed.
    3:10. The feeling of an explosion, like the end of the world.
    One year and sixteen days earlier, to the minute, his telephone had rung. He hadn’t been sleeping that night, either. He remembered the male voice, from the forensic lab of the CSI unit in Poitiers, delivering the worst news possible. Words from beyond the grave:
    â€œThere’s no doubt about the results. Comparative analysis of Lucie Henebelle’s DNA with that of the burnt victim in the woods came out positive. It’s either Clara or Juliette Henebelle, but we don’t have any way of telling which for the moment. I’m sorry.”
    Wearily, Sharko slid under the sheets and pulled them up to his chin, in the dismal hope of dozing for two, maybe three hours. Just enough to survive on. Only true insomniacs know how long the nights can be, and how loud the phantoms scream. The sounds of the night echoing, the thoughts scorching one’s head . . . To combat this torture, the old cop had tried nearly everything—lying still, synchronous breathing, sleeping pills, even exercise until he was ready to drop from exhaustion—all in vain. His body gave in but not his mind. And he