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Flaubert and Maupassant took pride of place, the Miles Davis portrait, eyes closed, lips pouting, hands framing his face, opposite a reproduction of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ; and finally, the Air France stewardess uniform hanging in the wardrobe by the entrance). Rachel and Jean, struck by the horror of the scene, let him have his turn at experiencing it. Wedged into his black leather armchair, with its clean, sharp lines, the commissaire listened, distant and attentive, as always. Who knows where his mind had wandered. As they finished their report, his eyes clouded over, and he became more serious. He seemed to be contemplating a shadow that was slowly invading his office. A shadow he recognized, whose outline only he could identify. When they told him about the decapitated orchids, and how the heads had been placed in a triangle on the toilet seat, Mercator closed up completely. He dismissed Jean and Rachel with a few impersonal words, among them “report,” “seven o’clock,” “morning,” “inquiry,” “you two,” “you two.” The second time he uttered “you two” he looked them hard in the eye, then left the office in silence.
    There began the Bunker’s descent into nighttime. Hamelot and Kupferstein went for a few Kronenbourgs on the ground floor with the officers who had finished for the evening, then back upstairs to type up a few things. They ordered sushi and some more beers, Asahis. Then their memory began to fade. At 3:00 a.m., Jean won a game of solitaire. Sitting behind him, Rachel listened to “Pissing in a River” by Patti Smith on her pink iPod nano.
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    BEGIN
    In the silent night, the two detectives are sprawled out at opposite ends of the terrace, reclining in fluorescent metal-framed deck chairs. Green for Jean, orange for Rachel. They had encountered overdoses, crimes of passion, ordinary baseness . . . But Laura’s murder is their first experience of true horror. Right now it’s a case of confronting, of plumbing the depths of a soul. This murder must be tamed, nourished, pondered, infiltrated. Then reassessed. They must go beyond any ordinary fascination with evil. They are trying now, under the delicate crescent of the moon in the starlit sky on this night in June. Rachel is dreaming. If we were in love, we’d be scanning the sky for shooting stars . But that’s not how it is, and she has to make do with following the erratic path of a satellite. They think about other things, wandering through the sky before disappearing deep within themselves.
    Jean pictures his mother in her checkered apron, sharp knife in hand, dicing some onions. He’s never had the patience to do it so finely—he just chops them into thick slices and chucks them into the bubbling oil, before breaking them up with a wooden spoon and crushing the garlic straight on top. He can see her almost as if she were standing in front of him, his nurturing mother, and the image continues to move him, albeit less palpably than it did back in the days when he could only just see over the edge of the kitchen counter—did they even call them that in those days? Yes? Jean is rambling, digressing. The word counter has lurched him violently from his childhood kitchen in Brittany to a nightmarish afternoon at Ikea. The moment in his life when he felt the most alone, lost in the midst of families with militant wives commanding their troops as though they were a task force on a mission in Somaliland, mothers-in-law on lookout and fathers trying to regain the upper hand by showering their better halves with endless technical jargon that thwarted any sense of accomplishment. A war of movements and positions that Jean entered, unable to dodge the stray comments loaded with pent-up resentment, more than one of which was enough to poison his superficially tough soul. He had weaved his crazy route through the living rooms, the baby-changing tables, and the office furniture—carbon copy of the