The Crowded Grave

Bruno. “You saw that slogan on the wall. We get some of our ducks from Maurice. Do you think …?”
    “Let’s hold our horses until Albert’s sure of what happened,” Bruno said. “We might need a forensic report.”
    “I’m pretty sure right now,” Albert said. “But I’d still like to hear what Jeannot has to say.”
    “Hey,
chef
,” Ahmed called from the side of the wrecked storeroom. “Come look at this.”
    They walked across. Ahmed’s discovery was the scorched and badly bent face of a small clock. Albert bent down to examine it more closely.
    “See that little hole drilled there?” he said, looking at Bruno. “That’s the giveaway. This was the timer. They drill that hole for the contact, and when the minute hand comes around and touches it, boom.”
    As Bruno pulled out his phone and punched in the speed dial for J-J, an all-too-familiar Peugeot pulled into the parking lot and Philippe Delaron appeared, camera in hand.
    “Do you never mind your own camera shop?” asked Bruno, tiredly.
    “
Maman
can do that. I make more money from the papers these days,” Philippe replied. “Great evening last night, Bruno. So what’s this? I heard the siren and went to the station to ask where the trouble was, but it doesn’t look like your usual fire.”
    “It’s not,” said Ahmed before Bruno could stop him. “It was a bomb. Somebody tried to blow the place up with dynamite.”
    “
Bordel
, dynamite? After those attacks on the farms? Somebody’s declared war on foie gras,” said Philippe, snapping away. “Hey, that’s not a bad headline.” Camera around his neck, he turned to Arnaud, pulling a notebook from his pocket. “So what’s this going to do to your business?”
    Meanwhile, Bruno heard the tinny tones of J-J shouting into his phone and quickly stepped away, out of hearing. Philippe knew far too much already. “Sorry, J-J, an interruption. We’ve had an explosion here, looks like dynamite. Nobody hurt, but it was a bomb with a timer. We’re at Gravelle’s foie gras canning plant, the one off the side road by the bridge as you head for Ste. Alvère. There’s an animal rights statement painted on the wall, and the press is here already, talking about a war on foie gras. This is getting serious.”
    “Any sign who did it?”
    “There was nobody here, and it’s quite a way from the nearest house. You might want to give all the students an explosivestest,” Bruno said. “But if they’re all clear we’d better start thinking about the Basques.”
    “Get the press out and seal off the whole area. We’ll need a fingertip search so you’d better call Isabelle. She can get the gendarmes to round up all the students. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Maybe a bit more, I’ll collect that Spanish guy, Carlos, bring him with me. He’s been with the prefect.”
    Before hanging up, J-J said he’d get a bus to take the students to Bergerac airport. “It’s only thirty minutes away, and all the airports have explosives testing gear for their security checks these days.”
    Bruno called Isabelle to report the news and then went to his car for his roll of crime-scene tape, steering Delaron and Arnaud out of the area. He’d barely finished sealing off the scene when Jeannot arrived in a small truck. Albert took him into the wreckage of the showroom, showed him the scraps of mattress and the clock face, and they began sketching likely blast patterns.
    Bruno sat in his van and from memory began calling every house he could think of that might have been close enough to hear the blast. He tried three without success before he remembered Manchon, who ran a couple of taxi-ambulances that took outpatients to the hospitals in Sarlat and Périgueux. He might have been up early, and might even have been close enough to hear something.
    “Didn’t hear a thing, Bruno,” Manchon replied. “But my son said something over breakfast when he came back from his run. He’s training for the Bordeaux marathon and said he heard something that sounded like an explosion just after five. He thought it was the quarry, starting early.”
    Bruno sat back, thinking. He didn’t see the students resorting to dynamite, however many PETA enthusiasts might remain after Kajte’s departure. Nor was it likely that they’dknow how to use it and tamp it down. But somebody certainly wanted to make it look that way.
    He tried to put himself in the shoes of a terrorist group, isolated and trying to put together