Chapter 13
"IT'S DEFINITELY A HUMAN FOOT." The four girls and Rocco were standing around the same table where Andre had been lying, along with Marie and Javert. They had driven down to the morgue in the little Fiat, with Beatrice in the passenger seat holding the foot, and the other three somehow crammed together in the back.
"Stuffed like a hunting trophy?" Rocco asked. He was the only one who had dared to touch it. Even Marissa had been pushed beyond her threshold.
"No." Marie picked the awful thing up nonchalantly to show them the top part. "It's embalmed. Not something we deal with that often. Usually we get them fresh, or badly decomposed."
"Can you tell how recently?"
"Not that easily. This thing," Marie tapped it, "is almost solid. Which would seem to indicate it's been curing for a while. But it would depend."
"Depend on what?" Javert asked.
"The embalming technique. When a corpse is prepared for display at a funeral it will start to decompose in a week or so. But there's a mummified foot from ancient Egypt that's over four thousand years old." She brought up a picture on her phone.
"That looks like a regular foot of someone walking," Rachel said. "Not like this one. This one looks like a ballerina's foot. Up on point."
"Oh yes, Anna was quite the dancer. Haven't you seen our videos with her and Risa showing off their dancing skills? Or Rocco fucking her standing up with one leg up over her head."
"She wouldn't do anal that way though, the way I do," Marissa said. "That's the best."
"What about the tattoo? Could it have been applied after death?" Beatrice was clinging desperately to the hope that it wasn't really Anna's foot. Why? She didn't even like the bitch.
Marie frowned again. "Possibly, but you can see how it's faded, how the skin has healed. I think it was on the foot before." She didn't bother to say before what, and no one wanted to explore the possibilities.
"DNA?"
"Maybe. The embalming process tends to destroy it. I don't have the equipment here. We'd have to send it to Paris."
"The whole foot?"
"Well, yes. I wouldn't know what to take as a sample. I did take an X ray." Marie brought up another picture on her phone. It was definitely a real foot. All the bones were there.
"What's that? Just under the ankle?" Rachel was peering at the image. She knew what feet looked like, with the skin off. Well not people feet, but cows, pigs, chickens. There was something odd about the area above the heel. "A tumor? Maybe she had bone cancer?"
"And they would just chop off the whole foot? Just like that? Doesn't make sense. I'll have them check it out when it gets to Paris."
"Where's Nestor?" Javert asked.
"That's a good question," Rachel answered. "He seems to have vanished."
"I have his phone number." But when the inspector tried it, all that came back was the 'not in service' message.
"Maybe he's on the run."
"On the run? Why?"
"Last night." Rachel paused, dropped her voice to a whisper, "I saw him kill three men. Just like that, in no more than five seconds. With a shish kabob skewer and a log. On the beach."
"You're not making any sense." Javert frowned. "No one has been reported missing. No dead bodies. Well, I take that back. We clean up a body or two every morning. Migrants. We bring them to Marie to process."
And send them over to the pizza parlor?
The thought flashed through Beatrice and it pushed her over the edge. She went dashing for the bathroom.
"That's what these men were," Rachel continued, "but they were wearing some sort of uniform from one of the resorts. Like the guys who clean the pools, or mop the floors." She squinted, trying to visualize the uniform. "Luxor."
"There's no resort with that name here."
"One of them had a gun."
"A gun?"
"Yes a gun. He said he was going to rob us, rape us, maybe kill us. And Nestor just disposed of them, just like that. They were bothering us before, when we were swimming, well not exactly swimming but we were in the water and they were trying to find our stuff on the beach but of course we didn't have anything. We ran out there naked with no cell phones or anything. Not even shoes. Not even his watch."
"What? He left the watch behind?" That was enough to raise Javert's suspicions. "Why would he do that?"
"I asked him to." Rachel gave a little blush. She was not a very good liar, which was one reason she no longer had a boyfriend. Guys needed to be lied to, or their egos collapsed, along with their pricks. And she just couldn't do it, not on a sustained basis. Five minute relationships, at ten euros a minute, that was what she was good for. At least with guys. "We ran out to the point and then we fucked a lot and then did some more stuff in the water, and then these guys came along and started to look for our stuff on the beach which there wasn't any of, and then I told them to fuck their mother and the bastard pulled out a gun and started shooting at us. So we decided it would be safer to swim back. None of those migrants can swim. So we were doing that but then I got really tired so we came in to the beach and there was this orgy going on in the dunes, not that I was interested in fucking but they had food. Shish kabob."
"And wine?" Javert asked. She realized he had his phone out. He was recording all this. A professional. He was used to taking statements from witnesses. Or suspects. Used to teasing out details that might not seem important at the time.
"Wine. Pot too, smell so thick you could get high just being there."
"You're sure it was just pot? Not something stronger?"
"I don't know much about drugs. Not my thing." Although that was not completely true. Another reason she no longer had a boyfriend had to do with drugs, nasty things he would make her try so then he could do nasty things to her. Although that had been useful, hadn't it? Good training. "It might have been opiated? You know, I never got around to asking. Anyway, they had this wonderful shish kabob. So I was just starting to relax and enjoy myself."
"You said they were having an orgy?"
"Yes."
"And they expected you to join in?"
Sodomize me with your tongue
. "What? You want the sordid details? Okay, maybe it was the wine, or the pot, but I got a bit carried away. I was showing off, deep throating the shish kabob stick, so of course one of the guys, he seemed to be the host, wanted me to demonstrate my skills on him and then he wanted me to stick my tongue up his ass and then of course another guy has his prick up mine, but it's all sort of dreamy and relaxing and then these three guys show up again and one of them pulls out his gun and starts making a scene. And then Nestor killed the three of them, just like that."
"Then what?"
"The next thing I knew I was in my own bed and it was ten in the morning."
"Maybe you were hallucinating."
"This guy, it must have been Nestor, showed up with her over his shoulder," Elise said. "She was totally out. And the part about going out to the beach with nothing is true. He was looking for his clothes and stuff to put on before he left."
"It was real! There were other people there, lots of them, at least a dozen."
"Would you recognize them?"
"Maybe the host. Although most of the time I wasn't looking at his face, you know? I can tell you for sure what his butt looks like, or his prick."
"Let's try this." Javert showed her his phone. "He was white?"
"European of some sort. Probably a Brit."
"Okay, pick the face that looks closest." There were a dozen and she picked the one that was about the right shape. Once she did that a dozen popped up with different noses, then eyes, then mouths, and so forth. "That's pretty close."
"Good." Javert tapped the phone again and a dozen penises appeared. All limp.
