“Clotilde, his wife, she wouldn’t have gone easily either.” She looked up at me with the hazel and green eyes. A roving headlight beam flashed over them, picking up the color and enhancing. “The table was hacked up of course. By the axe. Raw splintered wood. Like the devil’s dinner or something. It was crazy.”

“Dismembered bodies.”

“Didn’t even look real, to be honest.” Nazari laughed bitterly. “Luckily at some point you stop thinking of them as human. Just a pile of remains. Fresh meat and blood.”

She cried some.

I put a hand on her shoulder and turned her towards me. “Listen. They were already gone when the bad stuff happened. The bad stuff wasn’t for them. It was for you, for us. For those who would find the bodies.”

She spoke softly. “How do you know that? How can you say that with such certainty?”

“I know. I’ve seen it, more than once. People respond differently to killing. Most do it reluctantly. They need to be convinced that it’s the only possible solution to the problem, whatever the problem is. So they harden themselves to the necessity and do it. But they make it as clean and fast as possible. Then there are a small percentage of people who get off on committing violence. Not only criminals but cops and soldiers as well. And when the killing starts these people reveal themselves. Whoever did this is one of those. A pure psychopath. Criminal psychologists have studied them. It’s a performance. They do it for others to see. For those who find the bodies.”

I pulled her towards me and her head fell onto my chest. I put my hand in her hair and held her there. She was crying softly into my shirt. After a while she stopped crying and just leaned against me.

Two cars pulled into the police station parking lot, a black BMW and a marked police car. From where I sat, I could make out the bearded plainclothes cop behind the wheel of the first car, the unmarked black BMW. Grouse jumped out the passenger side. He looked agitated and impatient. Bouncing on the balls of his feet while his partner rolled up the windows and dealt with the ignition key.

I said, “Here come the BRI.”

Nazari looked up and took a moment. “The assholes from Amiens.”

I said, “Do all BRI investigators look so intellectual?”

She laughed. “Did you meet the boss, Martaud? She’s probably overseeing the crime scene.”

“I did. And her sidekick, Caro.”

“Martaud’s more like the profile I’d expect. The others I don’t know. I guess they have qualities.”

“You knew them before all of this?” I asked.

“No. Never saw them before this started.”