The First Fingerprint by Xavier-Marie Bonnot Read Free Book Online

yelled thunderously as he served up the rounds of pastis and J&B:
    â€œWatch out, here come the real men!”
    Dédé was the only person who found this funny. De Palma and Maistre let him get on with it. Two Ricards arrived almost at once, along with the landlord’s big, fat, sweaty hand, which they had to shake.
    Dédé had been running Le Zanzi for the past four years. He served on average fifty meals a day and hundreds of drinks, and could get the parking tickets of his friends and family written off in return.
    â€œO.K., boys?”
    â€œAs ever.”
    â€œYou’re looking off-color, Baron. Like you’re miles away.”
    â€œNo, I’m fine … I just had a bad night’s sleep. And I don’t like pastis.”
    â€œSo why do you drink it?”
    â€œTo be like everyone else …”
    Dédé had not yet cleaned the Christmas decorations off the window of Le Zanzi, even though the illustrations were no better than last year’s. With “genuine snow” spray, he had tried to sketch out a tree, then squirted out a Santa and added stars here and there, like jewels. Large, back to front, joined-up writing read:
    â€œSaturday December 20, Grand Lottery at Le Zanzi, big prizes, Xmas hampers, a DVD player to be won …”
    De Palma spotted Maxime Vidal staring absently at his glass of mint syrup at the corner of the bar. He walked over to him.
    â€œDid you hear about that business at Cadenet, Michel?”
    â€œWhat, the woman they found?”
    â€œYes.”
    Maistre stuck his nose between the two of them, spinning the ice in his empty glass.
    â€œBaron, a drought is setting in!”
    â€œWe’re talking about that Cadenet business.”
    â€œHe 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.
    â€œA 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.
    â€œMichel, did you hear about what happened at Cadenet?” she asked with a tremor.
    â€œDon’t talk to me about it! It’s been given to the gendarmerie.”
    â€œI’ve never seen anything like it! They’re talking about cannibalism … I thought things like that only happened in America, or in darkest Africa!”
    â€œWhat have you got against Africans? The world never changes, my lovely, there have always been loonies like that, and there alwayswill 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!”
    â€œWhat’s all this about a picture of a hand found beside the body?”
    â€œI’ve got an idea or two about that. I’ll tell you later.”
    The hand was a signature. The beginnings of a