The First Fingerprint (6 page)

De Palma spotted Maxime Vidal staring absently at his glass of mint syrup at the corner of the bar. He walked over to him.

“Did you hear about that business at Cadenet, Michel?”

“What, the woman they found?”

“Yes.”

Maistre stuck his nose between the two of them, spinning the ice in his empty glass.

“Baron, a drought is setting in!”

“We're talking about that Cadenet business.”

“He must have been a complete maniac. They haven't found all the bits!”

The previous day, de Palma had received a call from the Cadenet gendarmerie, who were looking for possible information about a murder in the countryside around Aix. They were still trying to come to terms with the case; they had never seen anything like it before.

“A hunter found her,” he was told. “It's atrocious, absolutely fucking atrocious. How could a human being do something like that?”

The state prosecutor had allocated this investigation to the gendarmerie. So de Palma could do nothing. Yet, he sensed that this murder was just the beginning of a series of murders, or else a repetition of a similar case which had happened in Aubagne a year ago. They hadn't found all the pieces then either, but what interested him most was the gendarmerie's mention of an image of a negative hand. It showed that the killer was a maniac, a cold, precise individual who liked signing and staging his murders. Then there was the lack of material evidence: the gendarmes had not found a single, usable clue on the scene of the crime apart from the traces of tires belonging to a large car, probably a Mercedes. It was something they still had to check out.

Capitaine Anne Moracchini burst into Le Zanzi. She was rubbing her hands to warm them up.

“Michel, did you hear about what happened at Cadenet?” she asked with a tremor.

“Don't talk to me about it! It's been given to the gendarmerie.”

“I've never seen anything like it! They're talking about cannibalism … I thought things like that only happened in America, or in darkest Africa!”

“What have you got against Africans? The world never changes, my lovely, there have always been loonies like that, and there always
will be. The only problem is that there seem to be more and more of them! We've put two of them up for trial in the last year. Not counting the ones we never catch!”

“What's all this about a picture of a hand found beside the body?”

“I've got an idea or two about that. I'll tell you later.”

The hand was a signature. The beginnings of a lead, but what sort of lead? Eventually it would get its author caught. But when?

No-one could answer that question. They would have to wait. De Palma shuddered at the very idea of waiting for the next death, and the next hand. The next autopsy. Then comparing, analyzing and theorizing. The steamroller of the police force: entire days spent cogitating for nothing, waiting for a third corpse, starting all over … Until the killer slipped up. If he did.

It bugged de Palma—it was a matter of pride—the gendarmes had already solved the two finest serial-killer cases so far. They had checkmated the police force, no doubt about it. When he had gone to bed late the previous night, completely exhausted, he had cursed the prosecutor for handing the investigation over to the gendarmerie.

He emerged from his thoughts. Moracchini was talking with Vidal about a case of legal identity. Maistre walked over to him looking mysterious.

“Do you know what happened to me last night, Baron?”

De Palma shook his head and grunted, his mouth working on a particularly resistant olive.

“We got a message …”

Still struggling with his olive, de Palma grunted again.

“A message from the M.L.A., do you know what that stands for, M … L … A …?”

“No.”

“The Marseille Liberation Army …”

“Are you feeling O.K., Jean-Louis? You're with friends here, having a nice quiet drink … So calm down and quit raving!”

“I swear to you, it's true! The message read: ‘We are the M.L.A., the Marseille Liberation Army. We demand the release of Eric Laugier, the Marseille patriot. The people of Marseille are behind us.'”

“After the Corsicans, the Bretons and the Basques, now we have the
M.L.A. … Really, Le Gros, you're so funny. When you've had one too many, you wax amphigorical!”

“What?”

“Amphigorical. It means an intentionally obscure spoken or written style. Gibberish, in another words. It's in the police force handbook. So who is this Laugier?”

“He's the guy from La Plaine who planted some bombs at the National Front's premises two years ago. Remember? You're getting past it too! There was a death. We were on the scene together.”

“So what's the connection between a spotty militant and the Marseille Liberation Army?”

“They're a group of agitators. They want to liberate Marseille from French colonialism, from the domination of Paris, that kind of thing … They want to return to the days when Marseille was a republic. It all goes back to the year dot.”

Laugier had set a large amount of explosives in the premises of the National Front on rue Sainte like a real pro. At the time, they had thought that the Corsicans were behind it. A man had been killed during the explosion, a former paratrooper who was also a member of regional counselor Francis Codaccioni's entourage.

A few months ago, Laugier had been tried and sentenced to ten years. Ever since, a group of militants had been campaigning for his liberation, covering the walls of La Plaine and surrounding areas with posters demanding justice, and writing regularly to the President and Prime Minister, either to ask for a pardon, or to insult them, depending on the mood of the writer. Laugier was a new-look terrorist, a shadowy fighter for an unexpected cause, and had become the off-beat martyr of Marseille's independent fighters. The Che Guevara of La Plaine, minus the beard and the cigar.

“I thought Laugier was a good guy,” de Palma said, swallowing a final olive, which turned out just as stubborn as the others; its flesh stuck firmly on to its stone, like a limpet resisting the knife of a starving fisherman. He turned to Dédé.

“Where do you buy your olives?”

“My mother-in-law makes them. It's a time-honored recipe. Just like olives of old!”

“Your mother-in-law isn't a member of the M.L.A. by any chance?”

“The what?”

“Never mind, I'll explain one of these days.”

In the early afternoon, de Palma was alone in his office. He had nothing to do and intended to spend a few hours trying to discover the meaning of the negative hand found beside Hélène Weill's body. It was the basic curiosity of a passionate investigator. A vague idea had occurred to him: he wanted to contact a specialist, someone at the university who would be able to explain the meaning of this drawing. He picked up the phone book and started to flick through it while whistling the opening of the overture of “Aida.”

Commissaire Paulin walked in without knocking. He did that with everyone, to see if his squad was working conscientiously. He found de Palma going through the phone book.

“You know that we have the Internet now. You should try using it,” Paulin remarked reproachfully.

“You never find anything on the Internet, Commissaire. It takes hours just to find the right name, but only two minutes with the phone book. And no-one else knows what you've been up to.”

Paulin was a shabby fifty-something who wore lousy suits and had a pot belly. A pair of small, twitching eyes were framed by specs placed at an acute angle over a hooked nose too big for his narrow skull. It all made him look as insincere as hell. But essentially de Palma did not like him because of his shoes: dated gray moccasins. He could not stand moccasins.

The big boss did not dare ask him what he was up to, as he generally did with his younger officers. He was treating his best soldier well, because this man would help to push through his own future promotion. He just smiled, showing his horsy teeth in the gap between his puffy lips.

“I've got a good customer for you, de Palma. A walker found her body some place—I can't remember where exactly—in the creeks. A preliminary investigation says it was a murder. The prosecutor has appointed us, and I'm giving you the case. Go along to the morgue. Forensics are slicing her up now.”

“I'm on my way,” de Palma said. He stood up slowly, hoping that this would annoy Commissaire Paulin even more. “But there's something I have to point out to you.”

“What?” said Paulin, irritated.

“Normally, the presence of two police officers at an autopsy is obligatory.”

“I know that, de Palma. It's not my fault. There's been a mix up with the municipality … We're in Marseille, and that's the way it goes! Everyone does whatever they want. Anyway, an officer is there to identify her, and the judge has already called by. You know Mattei. He starts work at 8:00 a.m., whether the police are there or not. Take Vidal with you!”

“He's not available.”

Paulin squinted a little, turned on his heel and left with a shrug.

Whenever he had to pay a visit to forensics at Timone, de Palma always felt decidedly off. He did not like this kind of appointment, especially on a Wednesday after Dédé's cooking.

At 3:00 p.m., he walked into the vast Timone teaching hospital complex. In the changing room of the forensics department, as he put on his white coat, gloves, mask and over-shoes, he smelled the awful odor that hung all around.

Despite all his years in the force, de Palma had never got used to the smell of dead flesh mixed with a bouquet of chemicals: phenol, ether, formalin, chloral hydrate … To make themselves understood by police officers, the forensic scientists often translated these strangely named fragrances into everyday terms such as pear, orange, rotten egg or caramel. To the specialists, each odor had its meaning.

“You start out by sniffing a stiff, like a vintage wine. You appreciate its bouquet, then you look at its color, finally you test it …” Dr. Mattei had explained gravely.

De Palma pushed open the door between the changing room and the dissection room. The smell of the rotting corpse grabbed him by the throat. He stopped to swallow back his saliva several times, then gave a friendly wave to the two officers charged with identification and stood beside Mattei. The doctor was not wearing a mask, and was flanked by
two assistants wearing huge goggles, like skiers', except for the color. The trio of specialists was bending over the naked body.

When he saw de Palma's face, Mattei winked at him, and chuckled.

“So, the boys have dropped by. And not just anybody, if you don't mind. The prestigious Commandant de Palma. Sorry, Monsieur, but this isn't a pretty picture. Especially not after Le Zanzi. So step forward. You're going to get your money's worth.”

“Mattei, once again you've started the job before I arrived …”

“No choice, Baron,” he said with a shake of his head. “There are too many corpses in my drawers. Too many scores being settled! I called you three times this morning. No answer. It's your job to sort the situation out. Here, we start work at 8:00 a.m. sharp.”

The doctor was sewing up the woman's thoracic cage. Her flesh was puffy and covered with a fatty translucent liquid, like grease. De Palma saw the chrome-plated steel of the curved needle as it entered and then reemerged from the epidermis which had been bleached by the sea. To save face, he picked up his notebook to write down the doctor's conclusions.

“Christine Autran. Caucasian, female—as you can see for yourself. I'll skip her personal details, you'll find them in the file. We've put her papers in a bag, just as it says in the rulebook.”

De Palma was about to remind this doctor of the dead that it was the job of the police to take care of all that, but he held himself back. This forensic surgeon was as stubborn as a mule, but also the best in the region.

The corpse's face was covered with a blue cloth.

“We hid her face because we were beginning to get fed up with her watching us work. But for you, Michel, we'll make a little effort. Take a look.”

Mattei lifted the cloth. Two empty eye sockets stared dumbly at some point on the gray ceiling. The face had been devoured. All that remained were scraps of flesh, entirely bloodless now. The dead woman had no lips, her mouth was slightly open and her teeth jutted from greenish gums which were disintegrating. Her half-eaten cheeks revealed the depths of her throat. De Palma noticed that her tongue
and a large part of her scalp had disappeared, gobbled up by some carnivorous sea creature. The surgeon showed the police officer the signs of strangulation, two distinct black marks around her neck like a tattooed necklace.

“Apart from the bruising on the body, I don't have much else to tell you. She was strangled, then thrown into the sea. Her abdomen was full of gas, which is why she was floating on the surface … The salt then absorbed the water in her blood, which has a high chlorine content. There's a very weak presence of diatomeae. This tells us that she was thrown in postmortem. The nape of her neck was snapped; cervical vertebrae four and five are broken. She must have been hanged, or something similar. But one thing's certain: someone broke her neck.”

With a well-practiced movement, Mattei turned Christine Autran's head to one side and pointed to the position of the fracture. A brown blotch indicated the fatal wound. The kind of trace the murder squad sees all the time.

The doctor pressed down on the flabby flesh with his index finger, protected by a double layer of surgical gloves, and moved it in small circles. The movement made the half-empty skull emit a slight glugging sound, like a siphon being opened.

“The marine fauna has done its work. I even found some tiny worms from the mediolittoral zone in her thoracic cage. Look at her hands—they were eaten by congers, morays or some other creatures, without big jaws … I can't date the death accurately. But it was at least a month ago, and more likely a good forty days ago! In other words, around the end of November or the beginning of December. Not before.”