Chapter 16
598 Words
Chapter 162005“Just remember,” Dufort said to Perrault and Maron as they gathered in his office before the scheduled press conference. “The press can be very helpful to us. I don’t want you to mind any of the rest of it—just ignore the criticism and the speculations. We need them to get the word out about Amy, to publicize her photos, and then we cross our fingers that someone comes forward with some information we can use.”
“I’ve made a press kit,” said Thérèse. “Some photos and a short write-up they can take with them.”
“Good work,” said Dufort.
“I’ll bet there’ll be bloggers, or citizen reporters, some like to call themselves. Any official way we can shut them down?” asked Maron with an edge of a sneer.
“We don’t want to shut anyone down,” said Dufort. “The more publicity Amy gets, the more it helps our investigation. We want her face to be recognizable. We want to get people thinking, remembering—you know how it can be, sometimes the little bit, the detail no one thinks about at first—sometimes that’s the thing that unravels the whole case.
“So if some villagers or tourists or people from neighboring towns want to write about Amy online, I’m all for it. Bon, are we ready?”
Maron and Perrault nodded, and the whole of the Castillac gendarme force walked outside to the front steps of the station. There was not exactly a crowd waiting for them, only a woman from the regional paper and a handful of villagers.
“You did reach the TV station?” Dufort asked Maron.
“I did. They said they would send someone.” He shrugged.
“Thank you for coming,” Dufort said to the lone reporter. “As you no doubt are aware, a student from L’Institut Degas is missing. Her name is Amy Bennett, and she has not been seen since a week ago Tuesday night.”
“Was she abducted by the same person who took Valérie?” asked the reporter.
“We are concentrating on Amy for the moment,” answered Dufort with an inward sigh. He knew the subject of Valérie was going to come up, that was inevitable. But he did not expect it would be the very first question, right out of the gate.
It felt ridiculous, the three of them standing there, facing no cameras and no reporters save a single middle-aged woman. For something like this to work, you need bodies. Interested bodies. You need some buzz. The villagers had already moved on, and Dufort decided to cut this pathetic press conference short.
“Perrault, would you give—yes, here’s a kit with all the information we can give out—”
Perrault jumped up to hand one over to the reporter, and smiled at her, trying to stay upbeat. Then the gendarmes nodded and said goodbye and filed back into the station.
“Well, that was a waste of time,” said Dufort under his breath. He went into his office and closed the door, and immediately called up the television station to give whichever manager he could get ahold of a piece of his mind.
That done, he called Maron and Perrault into his office. “All right then,” he said. “We’ve got to start looking for the body. As I’ve reminded you before, this cannot be an official investigation, so we’re going to have to do it without looking like we are doing it. I’m going to spend some time in the morning, before I come to the station—I will take everything north of rue Gervais. Perrault, you check your family’s neighborhood, up to rue Tartine. Maron, either ride your bicycle or take the car and look on the outskirts—farm buildings, garages, you know the drill. If anyone asks, make something up.
“We need to find her. I don’t care if you look before work or after, but put the time in every day. We keep looking until we find her, is that understood?”
Perrault and Maron nodded, their expressions grim.
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