Black Diamond

control?”
    “But what about that fight over closing the sawmill?” the mayor said, speaking loudly above the sound of the helicopter. It sounded as if it were almost overhead.
    “That was how they conned us, don’t you see?” Bruno replied. “Pons wasn’t going to lose a damn thing by it. He already had another sawmill site lined up, and he told me and the baron about his plans to develop the sawmill site here in St. Denis for housing. With his son in the
mairie
granting development approval, he’d have made a fortune.”
    “And on top of all that, the son was providing little Chinese girls,” said Jofflin. “And little boys to blackmail Didier with at the truffle market.” Jofflin was thumbing through a notebook, found the page he wanted and looked up. “Piguin in Siorac is on the list of the dentists we’re checking for the teeth. By the way, we found this in Boniface Pons’s Mercedes. It seems like some sort of local diary.”
    “Give me some gloves,” Bruno said. The mayor handed him a pair of medical gloves from a box on a side table. Bruno slipped them on, took the bag from Jofflin and pulled out what he was sure would be Hercule’s truffle journal. There was no name on the inside cover, but the first page was dated December 1982, and it began: “Three fine
brumales
from the oak behind the hunters’ hide just off the Vergt road, total weight 340 grams.”
    Bruno turned to the last entry, stopping when he saw one of Hercule’s tidy sketches. A lump came into his throat when there was one of Gigi, front paw and tail raised, nose high and sniffing, his eyes fixed on something off the page. There was a gentle caricature of the baron and an account of the wines the three of them had shared at dinner. Beneath that was evidence of a new technology, a GPS reference for a site deep in the woods where Hercule had found truffles. The last entry listed the sale that Bruno had made in Ste. Alvère and a final phrase, “If anyone can get to the bottom of this fraud, it will be Bruno.”
    “This is it,” said Bruno. “Hercule’s journal, the one he left to me in his will.”
    “What was it doing in Pons’s car?” the mayor asked.
    Bruno could hardly hear him for the sound of the helicopter landing on the sports field behind the medical center. He looked out the window as the noise of the engines died, and J-J and the brigadier emerged, stooping under the slowing rotor blades.
    “By being in Pons’s car, it provides the evidence we need that Pons was connected to Hercule’s murder,” Bruno said. “That’s why I have to get to Pons’s house. More evidence will be there. There’ll be a will, with his son as beneficiary. There’llbe paperwork on the truffles trade, and I’ll bet the cash he used at the truffle market came from his Chinese friends. But what I’m really looking for …” Bruno broke off as J-J and the brigadier eased past the baron and Pamela at the door and came into the room.
    “What I’m really looking for,” Bruno repeated, “is evidence that Pons was directly responsible for the murder of Hercule.”
    “I think I can help you there. We’ve established a motive,” said the brigadier. “But should you be up and about?”
    “No, he shouldn’t,” said Fabiola. “But you try stopping him.”
    “What’s the motive?” Bruno asked.
    “Clear the room, J-J,” the brigadier said, and stood silent at the foot of the bed while J-J escorted Fabiola, Jofflin and the others into the hallway outside. He closed the door and leaned against it. The brigadier turned to check the room and nodded his thanks.
    “It’s Hercule’s memoirs, from the safety-deposit box,” he began. “Hercule incriminates Pons not just as a torturer in the Algerian War, but as a crook. Hercule says it all happened at a detention camp called Ameziane, and it was hushed up at the time. He says Pons took bribes from their families to ease up on the torture. He claims Pons would specialize in rounding up children, and then taking money to free them after he’d had his fun with them.”
    “Why did he leave it so long to make this public?” From the back of his mind, Bruno recalled the baron talking of Pons coming back from Algeria with enough money to build a new sawmill. Now he knew where the cash had come from.
    “The typescript was in a sealed envelope in the safety-depositbox, addressed to his
notaire
and marked not to be opened until after his death. The manuscript wasn’t complete,”