“That sounds great. But why can’t
you
go and get it? You’re right there in Taziac.”
Mazarelle sighed. Though he’d a good heart, young Duboit had some authority issues that needed tending to. There was this curious
father-son element that had crept into their relationship. Maybe it was partially his own fault because he’d never had a son. Or a daughter either, for that matter.
“Just do it, Bernard. Do it for me. Okay?” He’d no desire to rub salt in Béchoux’s wounds by personally showing up to take the defeated captain’s sword. Duboit was still whining like a teenager forbidden to use the family car when Mazarelle hung up.
14
COMMISSARIAT DE POLICE,
BERGERAC
W
hile waiting in his office for Béchoux’s report, Mazarelle spent the time setting up his special task force, a small handpicked team of cops who were at home with homicide and whom he knew he could rely on, especially Roger Vignon from Bordeaux and Jérôme Bandu from Périgueux. Vignon was a solid detail man, expert on computers and a whiz at electronic research and surveillance. Bandu was a rock. He had a reputation for great courage and the medals to prove it. With barrel-chested Bandu, what you saw was what you got. His face had two expressions: tough and tougher. A guy like that might come in handy in a case as violent as this one. For DNA and most other lab work the inspector planned to use La Police Technique et Scientifique at Toulouse, one of the five regional police technical and scientific facilities in France. It had been a good morning’s work, he thought. Now where the hell was the report?
When Duboit finally ambled in just before noon, Mazarelle’s face was not a welcome mat. “He was busy,” Duboit was quick to explain. “Then their copy machine got jammed. I had to wait.”
“So did I. Give me that.”
Mazarelle dove into Béchoux’s report with an eagerness that impressed the young cop. He hadn’t seen the inspector so interested in anything other than his sick wife since he first came to work there.
The report said:
At 8:12 on the morning of the 25th, Gendarme Bruno Leduc received a 17 emergency police call from Georgette Chambouvard,
who works part-time as a cleaning woman at L’Ermitage, a house located on the road from the quarry near the intersection with D14, not far from the village. She reported finding the dead body of one of her employers, Monsieur Reece—a vacationing American—on the floor in the kitchen. She said he had been murdered.
Gendarmes Leduc and Sigala responded. Inside the house, they discovered the body of a fully clothed man in his fifties on the kitchen floor. His hands were tied behind his back with blue plastic tape. His throat was cut and he had what looked to be multiple stab wounds in his chest. There was a great deal of blood all over the kitchen. They reported finding a wine bottle, ashes, scraps of food, and pieces of broken glass on the floor.
At first, there seemed to be no one else in the house. But when they entered the nearby bedroom, they came upon another body in a pool of blood on one of the twin beds. This time it was a middle-aged woman. She was bound—hands and feet—and gagged with the same sort of blue tape, and her throat had been cut many times. Both her legs were sliced just below the calves. She was wearing a white cotton dress and did not seem to have been sexually attacked. Except for the victim, the room appeared normal.
Nothing in the rest of the house seemed out of the ordinary until they went upstairs and found a third body in the tower. Another well-dressed middle-aged woman also bound and gagged with blue tape, her throat slit open several times and her calves slashed in exactly the same way.
The gendarmes examined the suitcases in the house, which they found in their rooms (the Reeces’ suitcases downstairs, the Phillipses’ in the tower) and identified their owners as Benjamin and Judith Reece from New York and Schuyler and Ann Marie Phillips from Montreal. They were also able to acquire the three victims’ passports. The passport of Monsieur Phillips appears to be missing, but it should be noted that they did find the return plane tickets for all four.
As to the murder weapon or weapons—a bloody knife of
some sort—none was discovered, although the house and grounds were searched carefully.
The crime scene has been frozen and experts from the Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale have gone over it. I have included their photographs herein. Other results will be made available to you as received. The victims’ suitcases, passports, plane tickets, papers, and medications have been collected and placed under seal. The cadavers, as property of the case, have been removed and sent to Bergerac for autopsies and identification.
Based upon the following:
1. the ferocity of the three murders,
2. the fact that nothing appears to be stolen (note Monsieur Reece’s obviously expensive wristwatch and the gold rings of the two women in the photographs),
3. the sudden disappearance of Monsieur Phillips,
4. Phillips’s use of the antidepressant fluoxetine, along with a number of other prescribed drugs, and
5. my interview of Georgette Chambouvard …
I strongly suspect that this is a crime of the heart. The work of a jealous husband and a sick mind. We have sent out a missing person’s alert for Monsieur Schuyler Phillips on
le réseau Rubis.
When we find Phillips, I believe we will have our murderer.
Except for Béchoux’s signature—with its elaborate Spanish
rúbricas
—Mazarelle found the report unimpressive, long on romantic speculation and hot air, otherwise bare-bones. Not even a mention of Ali Sedak, despite the fact that he too seemed to have disappeared.
Turning to the photographs in the envelope, the inspector laid them out on his desk. The faces contorted in pain, the bound, bloodied bodies twisted like roots. Awful. How could anyone human have done this? Transformed breathing flesh into bloody knots. The ferocity of these killings was as gruesome as anything Mazarelle had ever seen in Paris. It gave him once again that weird mix of excitement, fear, revulsion, and overwhelming anger—the addictive cocktail of feelings that comes from murder.
He wondered how Phillips alone, one man with only a knife, could have controlled three adults. It was possible, he supposed. He’d seen psychos with incredible strength, ordinary-looking people possessed by demons who could hold off a half-dozen officers trying to subdue them. If it were Phillips by himself, he must have gone through the house with the fury of a cyclone. No, on second thought, more like a human neutron bomb that destroys life but leaves property untouched. In any event, it seemed unlikely to Mazarelle that the captain was right, but he’d know more once they’d tracked Phillips down.
15
L’ERMITAGE, TAZIAC
A
s their car groaned up the hill to L’Ermitage, Duboit reassured the inspector once again that he’d replaced the gendarmes guarding the crime scene with two of their own men. Mazarelle feared it was by no means a sure thing. But as they got out of the car, he was pleased to see Thibaud and Lambert. Maybe Bernard was growing up. The two of them sitting in front of the side door goofing off. Better there, at least, than inside tracking through all the rooms and tampering with the evidence. The house was wreathed festively in yellow police tape marking it as a crime scene. Ducking under the tape and approaching the door, Mazarelle nodded at the two men.
“Anything new?”
They shook their heads. Lambert held the door open for him. As Mazarelle pulled on his latex gloves, he asked Bernard, “And yours?”
Duboit fumbled in his pockets as if he expected to find them. Then he looked at Mazarelle sheepishly.
“You’re lucky you didn’t forget your shorts,” griped the inspector. Reaching into his pocket, he produced another pair of latex gloves. “Here, take these. Come on.”
The hallway with its barometer on the wall, antique piano, immaculate tessellated black-and-white tile floor, and vase of dazzling sunflowers was an interior decorator’s notion of country living. Just the way Mazarelle remembered it. Nothing seemed to have been touched.
Preoccupied, he wasn’t even aware of the smell at first. Then it seemed inescapable to him. Though Béchoux’s report said all the
bodies had been removed from the house for autopsy, the queasy, sickeningly sweet odor of death still hung in the air as if oozing out of the walls. An early warning system that set Mazarelle’s stomach churning. Not for the first time he thought how odd it was that he’d chosen to make his living doing something that involved a smell that so repelled him. In a way perhaps this made him a little better at what he did. For eons past, an aversion to the putrid odor of rotting flesh had helped the human species survive. Mazarelle hoped it would continue working as well for him.
“Let’s look at the kitchen.” The inspector led the way inside.
“Merde!”
muttered a stunned Duboit. He stood in the doorway beside his boss, his latex-gloved hands out of sight behind his back. He could feel them shaking. Even with Reece’s body removed, the spattered, congealed blood clung to the walls and windows like death itself. With the windows shut, the close, fetid smell made it difficult to breathe.
Mazarelle stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and tried to crawl in after them. He wondered if he was getting too old for this job but shook off the idea, concentrating on the chalk outline of the dead body, the telltale patterns of the victim’s blood. He thought of early pictures of martyred saints with their throats cut or beheaded, the blood pouring freely out of the wounds, spurting high in the air. The focus on their sacrifice. Not here.
He imagined the bound Monsieur Reece, propped up against the sink before the fatal blow. The blood splattered on the kitchen walls in a medium-high-velocity spray pattern had been thrown there by the killer’s knife. Mazarelle sensed the frenzy of an obsessive ego reveling in the act. It seemed to him much too personal and violent a crime to be motivated by greed or politics, unless of course the man he was after was simply mad.
Mazarelle wondered if it was no accident that Reece was driving his friend’s Mercedes when it crashed. The only accident may have been that he’d survived. “It was a miracle Ben wasn’t killed,” Phillips had told him. “A miracle.” Wasn’t that what he called it? In any event, Reece hadn’t escaped this time. Perhaps, as Béchoux said, love and jealousy were at the heart of this case after all. How French, he thought glumly.
“Look there!” Duboit pointed to the set of knives hanging on the bloodstained wall. “Over there. One of them is missing.”
Mazarelle hadn’t noticed the empty holder. “You’re right, Bernard. Good work. It could be what we’re looking for. Now let’s see if we can find it.”
Béchoux’s techies had been all over the room, leaving behind their trail of white powder. He told Bernard to check with Captain Béchoux about fingerprints.
As the inspector opened the cabinets under the sink, he was annoyed to discover a half-filled garbage bag that had obviously been overlooked. Picking gingerly through the coffee grounds, apple cores, and remnants of coq au vin, he removed the crumpled papers and flattened them out. One was a bill from Chez Doucette for 1,047 francs. Dated June 24, it was for three menus and one coq au vin, three Badoit, two bottles of Nuits-Saint-Georges, three crêpes, and a lemon tart. It looked as if on the night of the murders they had all dined at Doucette’s and one of them had brought home leftovers. Either that or …
“What’s that?” Bernard gazed at him expectantly.
“The time they left Chez Doucette—ten fifty-one p.m.”
Not surprisingly, the uniforms had missed a thing or two. Mazarelle told Bernard to check the room thoroughly, see what else he could find. Meanwhile, he said, he was going out to look over the terrace before they went through the rest of the house. He didn’t say that what he really wanted was some fresh air. He had an urgent need to clean out his head, put a pipe in his mouth, get the dizzying smell of death out of his nose.
Lighting up—his wooden match flaring in the summer breeze despite his cupped hands—he remembered the last time he was out here with the four of them. Clearly they were people of wealth able to afford foreign travel and rent luxury cars, houses of distinction. How civilized it had all seemed, how comfortable they were with one another despite their disagreement about the ATM pictures. He’d detected no underlying friction between any of them. But Mazarelle knew well that unlike Maigret, Poirot, or the other literary detectives, observation had never been his strength. Perhaps that was the difference between fiction and the real world. Most often, he found
his intuition much more reliable. Martine had once told him that in some ways he was more like a woman than she was. It was a compliment, she said, and may have meant it. Martine, however, had a wicked sense of humor that on occasion truly surprised him.
Lost in thought, Mazarelle wasn’t prepared for the scream, a sudden, loud, jagged cry that hit his ear like a chain saw. Up on the roof, a huge black crow flapped down on the red tiles and snapped its wings closed like an umbrella. High above in the seamless blue sky, a broad, cottony contrail lazily drifted apart, the plane that made it nowhere to be seen. It was a disappearing act worthy of Phillips. On the other hand, the inspector wondered, why did he leave his car and plane ticket behind? Patience, Mazarelle, patience, he cautioned. All in good time.
It was after he’d gone through the rest of the house with Bernard that the inspector began to consider the possibility of theft more strongly. The bedrooms had not been turned upside down by any means, but it was clear that someone had been through the drawers looking for something. Of course it might have been the gendarmes, but even they wouldn’t have been so sloppy. Mazarelle, who didn’t like to carry his cell phone, asked Bernard for his.