INSPECTOR JEAN RIZZO OF Interpol stared down at the dead girl’s face.
It was black and bloated, from the strangulation and from the drugs. Heroin. A huge amount of it. Track marks ran up both her arms, an advancing army of red pinpricks, harbingers of death. Her skirt was pushed up around her hips, her underwear had been removed, and her legs were splayed grotesquely.
“He positioned her after death?”
It wasn’t really a question. Inspector Jean Rizzo knew how this killer operated. But the pathologist nodded anyway.
“Raped?”
“Hard to say. Plenty of vaginal lesions, but in her line of work . . .”
The girl was a prostitute, like all the others. I must stop calling her “the girl.” Jean Rizzo chided himself. He checked his notes. Alissa. Her name was Alissa.
“No semen traces?”
The pathologist shook her head. “No, nothing. No prints, no saliva, no hair. Her nails have been cut. We’ll keep looking, but . . .”
But we won’t find anything. I know.
This was another of the killer’s signatures. He cut the girls’ nails after death, presumably to remove any traces of his DNA if they’d fought back. But there was more to it than that. The guy was a neat freak. He arranged his victims in degrading sexual positions, but he always brushed their hair, cut their nails, and left the crime scenes spotless. He’d been known to make beds and bag up trash. And he always left a Bible next to the corpse.
Today he’d chosen a verse from Romans:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.
Eleven murders, in ten different cities, over nine years. Police forces in six different countries had spent millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours trying to catch this bastard. And where had it gotten them? Nowhere.
Somewhere out there, a fastidious Christian with a grudge against hookers was laughing his sick ass off.
Jean Rizzo stared out of the window. It was a rainy April morning and the view from Alissa Armand’s dingy studio apartment was relentlessly depressing. Alissa lived in an HLM, France’s version of a housing project, in the rough northern Parisian suburb of Corbeil-Essonnes. Unemployment in this neighborhood ran at well over 50 percent, and the wreckage of addiction was everywhere. Beneath Alissa’s window was a litter-strewn courtyard, its gray concrete walls covered in graffiti. A group of bored, angry-looking young men cowered in a doorway out of the rain, smoking weed. In a few hours they’d be onto something stronger, if they could afford it. Or down in the métro, armed with knives, terrorizing their affluent white neighbors to feed their habits.
Jean hummed under his breath. “I love Paris in the springtime . . .”
The pathologist finished her work. Two uniformed gendarmes began moving the corpse.
“Can you believe there are guys who would pay to sleep with that?” one of them said to his buddy as they zipped up the body bag.
“I know. Talk about rough. I’d rather stick my dick in a meat grinder.”
Inspector Jean Rizzo turned on them furiously. “How dare you! Show some respect. She’s a human being. She was a human being. That’s somebody’s sister you’re looking at. Somebody’s daughter.”
“Sir.”
The two men returned to their work. They would save the raised eyebrows for later, once the Interpol busybody had gone. Since when was a little black humor not allowed at a crime scene? And who the hell was Inspector Jean Rizzo anyway?
INTERPOL’S PARIS HEADQUARTERS WERE small and simply furnished but the view was spectacular. From Jean Rizzo’s temporary office, he could see the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance and the white dome of the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre in the foreground. It was all a far cry from Alissa Armand’s squalid, lonely flat.
Jean Rizzo ran his hands through his hair and tried not to let the sadness overwhelm him. A short but handsome man in his early forties, with wavy dark hair, a stocky, boxer’s build and pale gray eyes that glowed like moonstones when he was angry or otherwise emotional, Jean was well liked at Interpol. A workaholic, he was driven not by ambition—few people in the agency were less interested in climbing the greasy pole than Jean Rizzo—but by a genuine zeal for justice, for righting the wrongs of this cruel world.
Addiction had ravaged the Rizzo family. Both Jean’s parents were alcoholics and his mother had died from the disease. Jean passionately believed that addiction was a disease, although growing up in Kerrisdale, an affluent suburb of Vancouver, he encountered few people who shared that view. Jean remembered neighboring families shunning his mother. Céleste Rizzo came from an old French-Canadian family and had been a great beauty in her youth. But drink destroyed her looks as it destroyed everything. When the end came, there was nobody there to help her.
Jean’s father had recovered, but he too died young, of a heart attack at fifty. Jean’s one consolation was that Dennis Rizzo had not lived to see his daughter’s descent into crack-cocaine addiction. Like today’s murdered girl, Jean’s sister, Helene, had turned to prostitution in the last, desperate years of her life. How Jean hated that word: “prostitute.” As if it contained the sum total of a woman’s life: her worth, her personality, her struggles, hopes and fears. Helene had been a warm and wonderful person. Jean Rizzo chose to believe that Alissa Armand, and all this killer’s victims, were warm and wonderful people too.
Jean’s superiors back in Lyon were reluctant to assign him to the Bible Killer case.
“It’s too personal.” Henri Marceau, Jean’s longtime boss and friend, cut to the chase. “You’ll end up torturing yourself and you won’t do a good job. Not without objectivity.”
“I have objectivity,” Jean insisted. “And I can hardly do a worse job than the last guy. Eleven dead girls, Henri. Ten girls! And we’ve got nothing.”