Free The First Fingerprint by Xavier-Marie Bonnot Page B

are in Marseille?”
    â€œO.K. … But it was the first time one stopped at the bakery at 6:00 in the morning, just when we were opening. If he was a friend of my brother’s, he’d have known that he was hardly ever at the bakery. Especially not at 6:00 in the morning! And his motorbike was red, just like in the papers. Plus he kept his helmet on, like he didn’t want to be recognized. He just had the visor up. He had little blue eyes and bushy eyebrows.”
    What was Bérengère Luccioni doing there, telling him about a red motorbike she’d seen in the papers? Gangland members never came to the police just by chance. It might cost them too much.
    A Zephyr 1100. Of the most recent gangland killings—a record eleven in the past year—most had been carried out by hitmen on motorbikes. As usual, the local police had investigated nothing, and so found nothing. Apart from a burned-out motorbike, a photo of which had been published in
La Provence
. Bérengère was right; it had been a Zephyr, and according to the boys in the lab it had been red.
    â€œDo you remember which day this happened?”
    â€œThat’s hard to say. I think it was sometime the week before I went to Corsica, but the exact day … Maybe it will come back to me. I went to buy my tickets on the 24th, and I took the boat on the 26th … And it was before then, maybe July 20 or 21.”
    â€œA week before you left!”
    â€œYes, around then, I’m sure of it.”
    De Palma took a long look at the young woman. She was more relaxed now, and becoming prettier and prettier. There was another rustle of Lycra.
    â€œMademoiselle Luccioni, thank you for this information. I think it’s of the highest importance. Now, if you don’t mind, we’ll go over the whole thing again from the beginning, O.K.?”
    He jotted down her story in his exercise book. When he came to the date of the event, he wrote the 20th because she remembered then that it had been her father’s birthday. He asked her for a detailed description of her mysterious customer.
    â€œHe was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. He must have been about one meter eighty tall. With broad shoulders. And blue eyes. He seemed very calm … I dunno! He spoke with a strong accent.”
    â€œI’ll be straight with you, Bérengère. There’s no official investigation into your brother’s death. The state prosecutor refused to take up the case. Franck was no angel—you saw him in prison often enough to know that! And you know too that he drowned in a diving accident. The forensic surgeon was sure of this. I realize that this is very hard for you, but that’s the way it is. You have to trust us on that score.”
    Bérengère looked down. She probably knew far more about herbrother than she was letting on, but she was not going to give anything away. Not there, in any case. Maybe later. Time would tell …
    She was a gangland girl, and hard too, despite her appearances. She was the sort of person whose character has been forged in prison visiting rooms. De Palma knew her father well. He had arrested him twenty years earlier, when he was with the drug squad. It had taken them a very long time to nail him in his laboratory just outside a tiny village in the Alps. It had been a painstaking investigation, with years of effort and plenty of patience following Luccioni in his little white Renault 4 along the twisting roads of the Alpine valleys, against the backdrop of a Bavarian picture postcard.
    Jo Luccioni came and went with no apparent purpose. He drove at a pensioner’s speed, half in a dream, but with his eyes darting in all directions, while his two hounds (the only weapons he ever possessed) sat dribbling on the back seat of his old banger. If all was well, he would be off to stock up on chemicals, the carbonate and various acids required for the transformation of morphine. Those who needed the