Sight Unseen: The Debunkers, #1

By Julie Mornelli and ALFRED BOUDRY

Thirty years ago on Christmas Eve, a family of four vanished into the night, without a trace, on their way to their home in a small village near Cognac, France.

Now, a young American woman wants to find out what happened to them. What are her motives? What is her relationship to the family? Why is the fate of a family from a foreign country so important to her? These are the questions young would-be private detective Beamer Swift will try to answer. His quest will take him from New York to France and other places, on the trail of people who may not be who they appear to be. All along, the young man is assisted from a distance by his French guide Charlotte and his employer Emily Bloodrun, a seasoned and quirky detective with a taste for literary and cinematic references, and a keen analytic mind that complements – and sometimes, counters — her training recruit who’s prompt to rush into things, sometimes with a disastrous result.

Endearing characters, oddball thinkers and a fast-paced intrigue take the reader on a trip to France, Panama and a few other places in a quest for the truth, with twists and turns, and an unexpected ending. As the investigation progresses, both Emily’s and Beamer’s strengths and weaknesses come to light, laying the grounds for their future collaboration, in the next installment of the Debunkers Files Series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adynata
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540179661

Book preview

CHAPTER 2. OUT OF THE WOODS

From: Emily

To: Beamer

Beamer!

You couldn’t stop yourself from dragging me into this, could you? Really, I don’t know which is worse, you calling me Sunshine (to appease my feelings, I guess – Oops! I almost typed appall instead of appeal) or you knowing perfectly well that I won’t be able to resist the temptation.

I won’t even try, dear. I was made for the job. Custom-made.

Silly me. Naughty you. A couple of asses, us!

At least, you can move yours.

And to answer to your absence of query: yes, I am feeling a bit better, thank you. Recovering o-so-slowly.

You may not be aware of it (being as green as you are), but the Chaudiers’ case is a bit of a snipe hunt in our business. Once every 7.33 years on average, something comes up and triggers a new leg of the story.

Or should I say the unstory? As you put it, research all led to a capital NOTHING. If memory serves, I had the Chaudiers’ case to study, somewhere along my second year (no, I won’t tell you what I was studying exactly). It was presented to us as a storybook case of family eradication. I found out later that it was even a regular part of blank exams. A snipe, if I ever saw one.

And guess what? In spite of the dozen teachers and the hundred students who tried to solve the case, no one has ever dug up one bit of solid information. No clue, no mobile, no track, no corpse, no late discovery, nothing at all.

Someone in my class even called it the Null-and-Void Case, suggesting that the Chaudier family never existed in the first place! They wanted to send someone on the spot and ask the Laniers whether they had invented their friends the Chaudiers, to attract attention, perhaps. Fortunately, someone reminded these hotheads that the Chaudiers had been reported missing by Alain’s brother himself, who appeared to be of sane mind and sound body.

Oh, that someone happened to be me, incidentally. Already a pain in everybody’s neck before I even turned twenty.

And then, here you are, grumping about this infamous (or unfamous?) non-determined criminal case, telling me that a Nellie Edelmann came out of the blue, hired you to find out What happened, or at least a substantial, plausible explanation of all this. And she’s paying you for that. Great Scott, Beamer! This is the first thing that really happens in thirty years, and it happens to you. You don’t measure the extent of your luck. And I’m jealous as jealous can be, trust me on that.

There is no beating around the bush, Hon; the lady knows something. She fatally, definitely, irresistibly knows something she’s not telling you; trouble is, it’s not enough to solve the case, so she needs someone to complete the picture.. or to send someone on someone else’s tracks. That means you again, incidentally.

As you say, you couldn’t get a read on her. Well, she may not be bluffing, but I’m already sure she’s playing with you. Which is not cool. (Unless she suffers from facial paralysis, but that’s unlikely. Although, on second thought, maybe she’s just a bad actress – I mean, a heavily botoxed one. As you know, that’s a major hindrance to showing emotions and other human stuff.)

Watch your back, Beamer! Decoys are made by the ton, and therefore highly expendable.

(How many times have I told you that? Okay, you’ve never been backstabbed or even viciously assaulted yet. But once is enough to put you out of order.)

***

A night and a slumber later:

I didn’t see it coming. I had to sleep. Sorry to let you down. Hope things haven’t gotten worse while I dozed off (understatement for visited Hades’ dressing room and got lost in a dark maze before Theseus showed up and rescued me to Light and Outdoor Life). Anyway, I had to re-initialize myself to reconsider the Chaudiers’ story. Needed a new point of view. So now, let me take your email along and react as it goes.

Beamer, you say she (Ms. Edelmann) has a fat wallet; is it not a bit strange? Who, in their right mind, still hauls around with a thick wallet? If she is that filthy rich, why didn’t she pay a translator to provide you with documents in good old English? Does she trust no one? Or is she so absolutely trusting you? (Don’t wag your tail on this.) Or does she expect you to miss some details when you read French in the text (which is not your forte, as I recall)?

Get off your Mustang, Sally!¹ Ms. Edelmann may be a hottie, but she’s clearly out of your league. Meaning she may not have chosen you at random. In which case, she’s already holding you at the end of her tether. (Which comes out as an interesting double-entendre, on second thoughts.)

Next time you see her, ask her why she chose you. And watch her answer; try not to look at her bust line.

Here is a detail that sounds strange, from my standpoint: reports say that checkbooks and IDs were all accounted for, meaning (I assume), that they were found by the police after the vanishing had been officially pronounced. Question is, how come none of them had their IDs? In France, the carte d’identité has been mandatory for decades or even centuries, and you need to produce it whenever a law enforcer demands it. Granted, the Chaudiers had a short way to go (not even two km as the crow flies) and, were it not for the cold weather, they could have walked there or even cycled. But they had their car; that’s accounted for. Or is it? The Laniers claim that the Chaudiers drove to their place, but no one else actually saw them or the car. The Laniers could have picked them up. During wintertime, it is usual to help one’s neighbors. Especially if you plan to..  mislay them.

At two o’clock in the morning, on Christmas Eve, what with the snow, fog, or black ice, a careful driver will not take a small forest road; not if he cares for his family’s safety. (Did the three year-old have a baby seat? Did that kind of implement exist at the time? I understand they were not popular before the 1990’s, but that doesn’t prevent someone to be careful and out of fashion). He will take the Route Nationale N141, which should have been cleared away and made safe by the powers-that-be, therefore chancing an encounter with a police checkpoint, and he would have had his ID on him, at least his.

Not a very conclusive thread, I’m afraid. Maybe they just never had their IDs on them, that’s all.

Now, will you allow me to mess with you a little bit? I know you will. No choice, pal.

About the DNA samples from the bones recovered in a forest: don’t hold your breath. There’s one chance out of a million that it leads to anything conclusive. And you can’t afford to sit there and wait for the boffins to reach conclusions. (Though, maybe she can afford it..)

You say the case is still open. Are you sure? What is the statute of limitations for this kind of crime in France? And is it one, indeed?

Be that as it may, I’m surprised (and annoyed) that you missed the main flaw in your summary of events. The only explanation is that it’s so plain and obvious.

The lover, dear. Always look out for the lover. This is as basic as walking, by putting one foot in front of the other.

You mention him briefly in a paragraph. Saying he has a rock-solid alibi at the time of the disappearance. What do you mean? He has a 10-day long excuse (from December 24th to January 2nd)? And a friendly army of witnesses? Then you dismiss him as a rather elegant person who just shared pleasant time with an unhappy lady. It was the 1980s, Beamer, not the 1880s!

You don’t mention his name. Do you even know it? You don’t know what has become of him, after the investigation. Now, in thirty years, he had all the time to vanish, change his name half a dozen times, divorce his first wife, adopt Paula’s children under a different name, divorce her as well, then go and build a farm in South Africa or an airport in the middle of Australia or a mineshaft in Siberia, for all we know. He may have erased three or four entire families and buried them in as many deserts!

He’s your main suspect, for Pete’s sake! You need hard data on him, not a nice choice of words.

And how do you know that Nellie Edelmann is younger than thirty? Look at actress Alison Lohman, for instance; in Ridley Scott’s movie Matchstick Men, she played the part of a fourteen-year-old while she was twenty-three. Ellen Page played Juno, sixteen, when she was twenty. And what about Mia Farrow in Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony? Did Miss Edelmann show you her ID? Her Facebook profile? Her DNA? Her tits?

You, men!

Now the accident theory still holds water, although it needs some adjustment. There is a recorded case of a woman (riding shotgun while the husband was driving) who threatened  to throw herself out of the car if he didn’t comply with whatever she wanted him to. When she saw that he’d never do it, she actually jumped, maybe not fully realizing what she was doing. At 60 mph on the highway at rush hour.. she got run over by a truck. The husband found it so hard to believe what she had done that he didn’t brake for a whole mile. In other words, he left no tracks.

One can perfectly imagine the following: after an evening of pent-up tensions, Alain Chaudier threatens Paula that he will wreck the car in the river if she insists on divorcing him. She laughs at him, or worse remains indifferent. Annoyed, Alain swerves menacingly toward the river (while smirking). Children, asleep in the back, may wake up; they don’t get the point. Black ice sends the car skidding, and Alain loses control. The car fishtails then jumps over the bank, dives, breaks through the ice, and sinks. People dead in fifteen seconds flat, maybe less. It’s two in the morning, which leaves seven hours of darkness and cold before sunrise. Waters freeze solid again above the sunken car. No tracks.

Worse yet: keep in mind that Eric Chaudier notified the police on January 2nd. That’s nine days, Beamer. Nine whole, dark, cold, empty, desolate days. The car could have even sunk into the mud and remained out of reach from any living creature. Bodies will be found ten thousand years from now, mummified, and your crime scene will be exhibited in a museum, labelled «  Cultural family burial, end of  the Second Millennium; the wheel symbolizes the unity of the family concept as well as the role and power of the genitor; children were attached by fabric implements to emphasize the leadership of the parents; mother apparently had untied herself before the metal coffin was plunged into sacrificial water; yeah, people, these were truly barbaric times.  »

About the random killing theory: 1980s France was not 2010s France, obviously, and hardly 1980s USA. Civilian death tolls for both countries differ immensely and were not on the same scale at the time. The French have always been more civil (civilized?) than the Americans (at least in their own territory and in non-Napoleonic times). They never invented nor promoted anything close to the Second Amendment. (Maybe they will, one day, when good old Anglo-Saxon insecurity-fueled bogus fears have infested them deeply enough, but that won’t happen before a few more years.)

What I mean is, don’t over-interpret the context; keep your reading grid in focus. It was very unlikely for anyone to erase an entire family at the beginning of the 1980s. The Auriol killings², in 1981, were an exception, not the rule. The whole family of a policeman was shot and the bodies buried away in a cave. But it was a plain case of revenge, linked to the Service d’Action Civique unfamous activities (the murders of two judges, Michel and Renaud, among other things).

Alain Chaudier was a building contractor, which, I admit, is pretty close to gang leader. But is that enough to justify the whole thing? Look for the worm in the apple. Had he made a deal that turned sour with a real criminal mind? In Cognac? Very unlikely. Though you’ll have to ask some old local cops about this.

Now, I feel more pleasantly tickled by the theory where one of the members of the couple plans to kill the other. Usually, in this kind of things, there are two possible scenarios:

– If the man decides to kill, he does everybody in and then blasts himself out of remorse, or vanishes. Messy, sad, useless.. but easy to reconstruct and comprehend. Although my twopence about that is: how come desperate men always attack their own flesh and blood (who already are victims by proxy), instead of attacking the actual persons who dumped, fired, robbed, or wronged them? I mean, is it really easier to kill someone you know and love than someone you loathe and don’t care about? Talk about a perverted situation. This kind of thing speaks volumes about our society (sorry: theirs; I don’t feel concerned).

– When the woman does the killing (which is far less common), she most often does only the husband in, then flees with the children. Way much harder to plan, of course.

Now you know where to start. Remember, the only four existing motives: passion, greed, revenge, opportunity (and its artistic version: randomness). Cognac is not a region devoid of economic interests. France sells alcohol for a living, has done so for millennia, and it’s a bloody huge market. What if Alain Chaudier had signed a contract for a new cooperative facility, involving millions and some unscrupulous people? Or what if he lost a juicy contract to a competitor, who might be his wife’s lover, for all you know?

As you know, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have a loaded gun, and those who..³ Well, you’ll have some digging to do. And you’re on your own for this, Beamer. Because I still have some healing to do (and no Marvin Gaye at hand, I can assure you).

Emily

PS: Last minute before sending message: I hope you will forgive me for my bullying you, Beamer. I’m sorry because I lied at the beginning of this, to be sure you’d quietly read whatever I had to say. I lied because.. I’m not getting any better. The Wound is not exactly healing, and I’m bound for another heavy surgery tomorrow morning. Which means, there’s a thin chance of us meeting in France. Doctor says 40% failure. Fatal failure. We know what that means, don’t we? So leave me alone for two days, Beamer. You have your job cut out for you, anyway. And if I do not reply, it’ll mean you’re on your own. For good.

Forever.

CHAPTER 3. BUT SERIOUSLY, MATE!

From: Beamer

To: Emily

Darling Pretty,

Thank you so much for your kind words of help and encouragement. Nothing but precious, enlightening advice, as always. One should feel so comforted and reassured by you. I especially appreciate the part where you tell me my case is a dud. How very refreshing. And what should I say about you pointing out all the things I missed (so say you) or dismissed? Do you really think I am that daft and hapless?

Seriously.. What’s gotten into you?

Are you pissed off at the fact that I may just get to solve a 30-year-old riddle no one –   not even you of the great mind  – has been able to solve so far? Or is it the fact that, lo and behold, I might make some serious money in the process? Or is it simply that you hate being cooped up, unable to do what it is that you do best, which is precisely what got you where you are at the present time – both mentally and physically? 

I’m sorry, but I have no quick fix for you. All I have to offer is me, or rather my recent case findings. They may entertain you enough for the day, or infuriate you even further. Given your current mood, the latter seems a safe bet.

In any case, you’ll be delighted to learn that I am not a complete fool. I did both fact-checking and background research. Be proud of me.