Free The Returned by Seth Patrick Page B

diner was more run-of-the-mill. The perpetrator had done a bit of a number on the manager, who had, frankly, been lucky to get away without needing stitches on the back of his
head where the glass had hit. Bruno had known more about the manager than Laure did; Alain Hubert had been in trouble with the law many a time, when he was a younger man. With the only witness
leaving the scene before the police got there, there was more than a little suspicion that Hubert had been paid a visit by some old associate. For all the man’s protestations about having
left criminal behaviour behind him long ago, it wouldn’t be a surprise if debt – unofficial and unpaid – had been behind the assault.
    Still, they had CCTV footage, and the town’s security camera system was being used to keep an eye out in case the assailant made an appearance, but surely he was long gone.
    Yet that hadn’t been the end of the mess. The worst of all was still to come.
    A man had been walking his dog through the underpass by the town hall when he came across what he thought was a woman’s corpse hidden in the bushes at the tunnel exit. As second in
command, Laure had gone to the scene, only learning on her arrival that the victim was still alive.
    She had been stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen at least a dozen times, but it was even more disturbing than that: a ragged fragment of human tissue sitting on the skin of the woman’s belly
had been tentatively identified by one of the paramedics.
From the woman’s liver
, he’d said, giving her the information in a whisper away from other ears, because that
paramedic knew about the older cases, seven years before.
    Laure felt herself grow cold. She thought of Julie, then: of that New Year’s night when they had gone their separate ways, Laure heading back to the party, Julie back to her apartment. It
had been the next afternoon before Laure had surfaced, hungover, to the terrible news.
    From the scene of the present stabbing, she called the captain at home once more to inform him of this new discovery, and he told her he would come to the station immediately. Seven years
before, there had been two killings, one survivor, and half a dozen suspects. None of the suspects panned out, but the man who’d been police captain at the time, hounded by the mayor, had
done his own piece of hounding – he and a group of like-minded officers had focused on one of the suspects and had pushed hard. They managed to scrabble together a sloppy case from hearsay
and coincidence, and ran with it until the case fell apart in a mess of litigation. Too close to the victim at the time, Laure had watched it all happen from the sidelines.
    The fallout had been the end of the old captain’s career. The mayor, just as culpable in the eyes of some, had tried to save his position by funding the state-of-the-art CCTV system which
the town had ended up with. Ultimately, though, the only thing that saved him was the fact that the attacks stopped.
    Stopped, and no one was ever brought to book. A big-shot forensic psychologist had come down from Paris and pronounced that the killer had either left the area or was dead, since if he’d
still been around, the killings would have just kept going. The investigation petered out, and the files were left open.
    Back at the station now, Thomas summoned her and Bruno to his office to discuss the attack. She dug out the files from the previous cases, and brought along the photographs of the new victim. As
they laid them all out together, old pictures and new, it was impossible to deny the similarities in the injuries.
    ‘Christ,’ said Thomas. Bruno was just staring.
    ‘Her name is Lucy Clarsen,’ said Laure. ‘She’s been a barmaid at the Lake Pub for the past year.’
    ‘Shit, yes,’ said Bruno. ‘I know who you mean. Alcide’s taken a shine to her.’
    ‘As far as we know,’ said Laure, ‘she has no family in the area, but we’re keeping the identity quiet until