Murderous Mistral

by Cay Rademacher

“Nkoulou is already at his desk when I get there in the morning and he’s still at that perfectly tidy desk when I leave in the evening. He loves rules and regulations, hard work, punctuality. He’d drive even a German mad. A few of us have opened a betting book. If you want, you can join in. Whoever is first to find out if Nkoulou has a girlfriend takes the pot.”

  “A man with no private life. Does he have a social life connected to work, or does he spend all day every day locked in his office?”

  “He goes out shooting, target practice. He was the best shot in his year, allegedly.”

  Blanc felt the metal of the Sig-Sauer SP 2022 stuck in his holster at his back, against all regulations for carrying an official weapon. As a young cop he had shot in panic at a thief doing a runner. The guy had spent a week hovering between life and death. In the end he had come through, and Blanc had gotten his first official praise for neutralizing a sought-after criminal. But he never wanted to go through a week like that again. Never since had he drawn his weapon on duty, and he only went to the shooting range when it was his turn each year to keep in training.

  Tonon directed him through an industrial estate on the outskirts of Gadet, past a swimming pool installation service that had a huge ready-made pool standing up on its side, like some vision in a surreal dream. Then they were driving through fields again, past the straw-covered roof of a pottery stall selling lacquered vases, terrine pots, and little pottery cicadas, then a village. Blanc turned onto route départementale 19 past a cemetery with an ancient chapel leaning to one side. Then, suddenly, several hundred feet below the level of the road, a gray strip appeared, which at first Blanc took to be a wide river: the autoroute. The A7 sliced its way through rocky gray hills, with the route départementale running parallel to the broad asphalt highway for over half a mile, cars, camper vans, and trucks roaring past on their left, leaving black diesel fumes in their wake. Blanc closed the window. It wasn’t just pollution that he smelled, but something rotten. Ripped plastic bags fluttered in the pine branches of the trees shadowing the road to their right, seagulls circling around them.

  “That’s the garbage dump,” Tonon said, clutching a gold medallion hanging around his neck. Blanc gave him a look. “Saint Geneviève, our patron saint,” he explained.

  “Ours?”

  “The patron saint of the gendarmerie. Aren’t you a Catholic?”

  “I managed to turn up at the church on time for my children’s first communion,” Blanc replied. His wife would have had a laugh at that: Geneviève as the patron saint of policemen. His ex-wife, he reminded himself. “Are you afraid of something?” he asked his colleague.

  “I’m afraid of throwing up. I’ve never seen somebody burnt to death before. He might look like a Moroccan mutton méchoui, and that would ruin my appetite.”

  “Do you always think about food?”

  “You have to get your priorities straight.”

  * * *

  Blanc turned through a gate in a ten-foot-high wire fence onto an unsurfaced track. He cursed beneath his breath as an oncoming green garbage truck forced him to one side, into a cloud of diesel, dirt, and dust. Once upon a time, this had probably been a valley between two rocky crags, but the dip was now almost completely full of garbage. Bulldozers were pushing mountains of trash here and there, with seagulls wheeling furiously in the air around them. To either side thick sheets of black plastic bulged out, the edge of an artificial barrier spread along the ground to prevent the dirt sinking down toward the water table. The air stank of rotting vegetables and meat that had gone off.

  “It’s always worse in summer,” Tonon apologized. “Half of the garbage in all Provence gets dumped here.” He nodded toward a patrol car and a motorbike of the highway police parked in between two inconspicuous white delivery trucks with plastic signs behind their windscreens proclaiming TECHNICIENS D’INVESTIGATION CRIMINELLE.

  “Crime scene people from Marseille?”

  “No, from Salon, the nearest unit. They’re good people, take their time. Of course they don’t have as much on their hands as the guys from Marseille.”

  Blanc climbed out and shook hands with the corporal and a young, tanned official from the public prosecutor’s office. They had nothing else to do but stand there in the heat and the stench, watching the crime scene people about their job. They were wearing full-body protective kits with NTECH on the back, booties, gloves, masks. He wondered how they survived in this heat.

  The body had been found on the edge of the parking area, behind a great open container used for waste metal. Blanc recognized the skeleton of a sprung mattress and the frame of a bicycle sticking up out of it. The crime scene people had not gone directly over to the body, but were working their way toward it in a curved path from the rear. One of them was taking photographs. Two of the white-clad forms were kneeling down next to what looked like a tree trunk turned to charcoal. Blanc got wind of a smell of a different kind: roast meat, and melted fat.

  “Who found him?” he asked the corporal.

  The policeman nodded toward a figure in green overalls, sitting in the shade of a stunted pine tree, being handed a bottle of water by a very young policewoman. “He’s a garbage truck driver. He’s still getting over the shock.” He smiled sarcastically.

  Blanc said nothing, just walked over to the man, Tonon following him. They both kneeled down next to him. Blanc got out a notebook and a pencil, badly chewed at one end. “Do you mind if I ask a few questions? Or would you prefer I waited a while?” the captain asked.

  The truck driver, a young Arab, shook his head. “Let’s get it over with,” he said, trying bravely to smile.

  “Your name, please?”

  “Mourad Ghoul.”

  “When and how did you come across the body of the victim?”

  “I drive that thing over there.” He pointed to a heavy vehicle with a crane and flat load-carrying area. “Once a week I load up a container with scrap metal and take it to a dealer. I was just fastening the chains to that Dumpster when I…” He searched for the right words. “When I saw … the body. I smelled it first. It was … still smoking.”

  “Was it already totally burnt?”

  “I couldn’t look for long. I ran straight back to the cabin, grabbed my phone, and called the cops. Then I threw up.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “My colleagues had been driving in and out all morning, but they use the rear access ramp. This area is reserved for private individuals to dispose of their trash, but there’s never anyone here this early.”

  “Take it easy,” Blanc said, standing up. He was feeling queasy himself, from the heat, the stench, and his own exhaustion.

  “Sometimes a few idiots meet up here secretly at weekends,” said Tonon, getting back to his feet with remarkable agility for someone of his build. “To play paintball. Illegally.”

  “Paintball, on a garbage dump?”

  “Seems some guys get a kick out of it. Every now and then we raid them and arrest one or two for breach of the peace.”

  “Well, this must have been one hell of a hot paintball.”

  “Maybe somebody saw what happened?”

  “Bien, you can go out a bit later and knock on the doors of some of the guys you’ve arrested in the past. If we’re lucky maybe one of them will have seen something.”

  A scratched white Jeep that clearly had a hole somewhere in its exhaust pipe trundled up. The asthmatic-sounding engine choked to a halt, causing the whole vehicle to shudder. A woman in her midthirties with long brown hair jumped out, her face half hidden behind a pair of huge sunglasses left over from the 1970s.

  Tonon nodded to her and introduced her to Blanc: “Dr. Fontaine Thezan. Médecin légiste at Salon hospital.”

  Blanc shook her hand, noticing the slight but unmistakable odor of marijuana from her hair and T-shirt. He shot a quick glance at his colleague, who didn’t seem to have picked up on it. “We’ll have to wait a bit,” he told her.

  “Looks like I
turned up just in time,” the doctor said, nodding at the crime scene technician, who was pushing up his mask as he came toward her coughing, and said, “All yours, Madame.” Blanc didn’t even get a glance.

  “Hmm, fencer position,” Thezan murmured to herself. “Arms bent due to muscular contraction caused by heat. Charred, blackened skull, facial eruption from extreme temperature.”

  Blanc had spent his most recent working years plowing through bank accounts, letters, and files. He tried to take shallow breaths of the air that reeked of burnt flesh, mixed with the stench of the garbage dump. This damn heat! In front of him lay a body with skin black as coal, its arms curved parallel to each other, the legs too, the face a distorted grimace—it looked less like a human corpse than a shop window mannequin after an arson attack: no hair, no ears, no clothes save for the buckle of a belt on its torso. There was no blood, no recognizable facial traits.

  “You really don’t have to look over my shoulder,” Dr. Thezan said, watching him recoil in horror.

  “It’s just the heat,” the captain replied.

  “You’re not from around here.”

  Blanc decided to ignore the remark. “Can you tell if the victim was burned alive?”

  The pathologist shook her head, nodding toward holes in the charred torso. “I’m assuming those are gunshot wounds,” she said. “The victim is male. I’ll examine his lungs back at the lab, what’s left of them, that is. But I’d be surprised to find any soot in them. I doubt he was still breathing when he was set on fire.”

  Tonon nodded at the dusty ground all around them, being dutifully marked up into numbered sections by the forensics people. “Cartridges, from a Kalashnikov. At least a dozen cases. And to think we’re not allowed to use the firing range anymore, to save money.” He shook his head. “Farid Berrhama was a fighter and drug dealer from Salon, with ambitions to become one of the big shots on the Marseille crime scene. They called him Monsieur Barbecue because if anyone got in his way he would sweep them aside and burn their remains to get rid of any evidence. We never caught him. But one day a Corsican clan spotted him in a brasserie: Eight hit men at once put a dozen bullets in his body. Now it looks like we have a Berrhama copycat on our hands.”

  “A drug dealer feud?” Blanc suggested.

  The lieutenant pointed at the charred corpse. “This guy was probably doing coke or heroin. Or hadn’t paid his bill. Or maybe ratted someone out. Or somebody else wanted to take over his patch. Basically, somebody in Marseille gets taken out by a Kalashnikov every couple of weeks.”

  Blanc cast his mind back to the recent scandal when one of the city’s district mayors had suggested sending in the army to pacify her part of town. There was a wave of outrage, and a lot of sarcastic comments in Paris. Send the army into Marseille! President Sarkozy had made a wave of cuts that included suppressing 350 police jobs in Marseille alone. Nobody had protested about that.

  “There’s enough of him left to get a DNA sample,” Dr. Thezan said. “And his teeth are intact. I can get an idea of his height and age from his bones. I might even be able to work out the color of his hair and eyes, and what he had last eaten. We’ll get an ID on him.”

  “And then the boys from Marseille will take over. I’ll report back to HQ,” Tonon said. He was about to head back to the Renault when he came to a halt. The pathologist had taken hold of the body with her gloved hands and was carefully turning him over when she spotted something gleaming where the neck had lain on the ground. Gold. The remains of a chain, with a medallion. Blanc and the lieutenant bent down, careful not to touch anything. The medallion had a cobra engraved on it, poised to strike, with two tiny rubies set into its eyes.

  “Fucking hell!” Tonon swore. “I know that cobra. We can save ourselves the bother of notifying Marseille. This guy is local.”

  Charges Against a Dead Man

  Blanc waved over the forensics team and showed them the chain and medallion. Then he stood aside and let the specialists do their job. “Sounds as if it’s a fairly unique piece of jewelry if you think it’s enough for a positive ID on the corpse,” he said to Tonon in a low voice.

  His colleague nodded, looking somewhat distracted and glancing back toward the parking lot. “If it’s who I think it is, there should be a motorcycle around here somewhere. He went everywhere on his enduro.” Tonon called a few of the uniformed police officers over. It only took a few minutes before one of them waved an arm to say he had found an old Yamaha half hidden behind one of the other Dumpsters. Blanc had assumed it was being scrapped: The taillight was hanging loose, the fuel tank dented, the forks bent, the headlight shattered, the left mirror missing; other than that it was just a frame attached to a set of handlebars.

  The lieutenant nodded at the bent number plate with the “13” that indicated it was local. “That’s his ride. I know the number by heart.” He called over one of the forensics team, who pulled his mask down over his face again, and told him to check for fingerprints.

  “So, who is it?” Blanc asked.

  “Charles Moréas, and Provence will be a better place without him.”

  “Customer of yours?”

  “Wish he had been,” Tonon sighed. “I’ve been trying to nail this guy for years. The only time we had anything concrete against him was when a speed camera caught him way above the limit on this Yamaha. But even then he didn’t pay the fine. No idea what happened. I imagine the case is still languishing in somebody’s filing cabinet.”

  “But you weren’t after him for speeding.”

  “No.” The lieutenant closed his eyes. “We were after him for murder, or at least manslaughter.” He paused, took his time. “Moréas was a loner. Everybody who knew him wished he didn’t. He lived on his own in a dilapidated house in the commune of Caillouteaux.”

  “Part of our area?”

  “ZGN. Moréas is thirty-eight, if my memory serves me. Was, I should say. Nobody really knew how he made his money.”

  “Wife? Kids? Relatives?”

  Tonon just laughed. “He owned a few bits of land. Here and there. Round and about—couple of fields, woodland, a hunting cabin. His parents were farmers, long dead.”

  “Land around here is expensive, so I’ve been told. Maybe he’d sold some of it and lived off the profits?”

  “Moréas? Never. He would drive out on the Yamaha to one of his bits of land and spend the night there out in the open. Any hikers who came across him soon learned to take another route in the future.”

  “He shot at them?”

  “With a hunting rifle.”

  “Surely that was enough to haul him in?”

  “I did. But that was that.” Tonon nodded bitterly at the charred corpse, already being transferred to a stretcher by two undertakers who had just arrived in a gray van. “Some twenty years ago, when I was still a good cop, Moréas was part of a gang that specialized in highway robberies: They had a couple of souped-up cars, went out at night along the little-used local roads, and waited for cars with foreign number plates. Tourists. One of their cars would overtake them, then brake suddenly, forcing them to stop, often causing a fender-bender, which left the tourists angry, confused, and frightened. Before they could get their wits together, the second car would scream up behind them. The guys from both vehicles would drag the tourists out of their cars, steal all their baggage, and roar off. It went on for weeks and we never managed to catch them. Then things went wrong: As they were fleeing the scene they came across one female tourist who had panicked and run off. They ran into her, killed her instantly, and dragged the body along the road. I found traces of her blood. The thugs panicked, hid their own damaged car behind the trees. A few of them fled in the second car, but two of them were left behind. We found them straightaway, and this time we also had the plates of their wrecked car, which enabled us to nail the rest of them, save for one.”

  “Charles Moréas?”

  “One of them told us Moréas had been with them, that he was their boss, and had been at the
wheel of the car that hit their victim. A couple of our guys found him a little later in his hunting cabin and arrested him. He denied everything, and the others we already had in custody said they’d never even seen him before.”

  “Sounds like they had an agreement.”

  “You can say that again. The one who ratted him out was found dead in jail not long after. In the recreation yard, with a knife between his ribs. It was put down to a prison brawl. The culprit was never identified. We were left with nothing to throw at Moréas. This was back in the days before DNA identification. We had to let him walk. I’ve been trying to get something on him ever since. I’ll never forget seeing that tourist’s blood on the tarmac.”

  “Seems like somebody else got to him first.”

  “A guy like Moréas had a lot of enemies. It’s almost a pity we have to go after his killer.”

  * * *

  By the time they were finally on the way back to the gendarmerie headquarters, it was already late morning. Blanc fiddled with the radio. Anything to keep him awake. Tonon was already singing the chorus of “Les Amants de Paris” before he could turn off Radio Nostalgie. Blanc stared through the windshield, unable to cope with a burnt corpse on a garbage dump and a colleague next to him singing Édith Piaf songs. He kept hoping that any moment now he would wake up back in his bed in Paris, with Geneviève next to him. This has to be some dream, he told himself, some crazy dream, just a dream. Merde. But he found himself driving along the route départementale all the way back to the police station in Gadet, without waking up.

  Nkoulou looked like he was suffering from indigestion. “I’ve heard the reports on the radio,” he said. “This was supposed to be a routine case,” he added, as if they had already made a mess of it.

  “It means we don’t have to worry about Moréas anymore,” Tonon said, hoping to cheer the boss up a bit.

  Blanc said nothing. The commandant had given the most spectacular case in weeks to the two officers he trusted least. It had all gone wrong. He could hardly pull them off the case now without taking it over himself.