The Paris Directive by Gerald Jay

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 curiousfather-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