The Crowded Grave

that Todor Felipe Garcia had disappeared from his rented apartment and from his workplace a week earlier.
    “She would have known by then that she was pregnant,” said Isabelle, counting on her fingers. “Poor girl, she must have been frantic with worry about him.”
    She double-clicked on the fourth line on her screen that contained only three asterisks, and a pop-up window appeared.
    “Turn around, Bruno,” she said. “This is an Intel database and I need to punch in my own password.”
    He looked away until she told him to turn back, and the screen was filled with lists of raw surveillance reports, the name of “Todor” highlighted in yellow.
    “Todor, the father, was a Basque militant, sure enough, and we were keeping an eye on him,” she said, clicking on. “Here is young Mademoiselle Lloyd, with whom he began a relationship that summer; she was checked out but nothing known. We even checked on her with the British police, but she was clean.”
    She clicked back again and followed Todor’s trail further. “Known associates,” she said, and sat back in surprise at the length and detail of the list that appeared on her screen. PedroJosé Pikabea, injured in an attack on the Les Pyrénées tavern in Bayonne on March 29, 1985. Pikabea allegedly was a member of ETA. Another associate had been assassinated the next day in St.-Jean-de-Luz, a photojournalist called Xabier Galdeano. Another assassination had taken place in Bayonne on June 26, of yet one more of Todor’s known associates, Santos Blanco Gonzales, and he was also an alleged ETA member.
    “
Mon Dieu
, Bruno, everyone Todor knew was being bumped off that spring and summer, and all of them we suspected were carried out by GAL. You were right to talk about the dirty war, all these killings by Spanish agents, all on French soil. And here’s one more, on September 2, Juan Manuel Otegi, again a suspected ETA militant, killed in St. Jean-Pied-de-Port.”
    Isabelle sat back again and looked at Bruno. “We’ll have to pick up Teddy and interrogate him, find out just how much he knew about his father. And it looks to me as if his father could have been killed by GAL when Teddy was still in the womb, so we’ll have to get the British to go and have a talk with Teddy’s mother.”
    “Teddy should be at Bergerac by now with the rest of the students,” said Bruno. “You’d better get onto the gendarmes, find out who went with them in the bus and get some more gendarmes to the airport to make sure they hold him.”
    Isabelle picked up her phone and made the call.
    “And he was the one who found the unidentified corpse,” she said, turning back to Bruno after asking the general in Périgueux to arrange for gendarmes to meet Teddy at Bergerac and bring him directly back to the château after the explosives check.
    “So the question is, how did Teddy know where to look?” said Bruno. “Somebody must have told him where the body was buried, and that somebody must have known about thekilling of Teddy’s father. So when did Teddy become an archaeologist and get himself onto the team going to exactly that site? Could Horst have been involved in that?”
    “Who apart from Horst and Clothilde knew where they were going to dig?” asked Isabelle.
    “Remember they did a preliminary dig last year, late in the summer. We can find out from Clothilde if Teddy was in that group,” Bruno said. He picked up his phone and called her, keeping his eyes on Isabelle, and then nodding excitedly at Clothilde’s reply before he hung up.
    “Teddy was indeed on the dig last summer, and he knew they’d be digging again,” said Bruno. “But we still don’t know how he knew where to look for the corpse.”
    “Do you think it could be his father’s corpse?” she asked. “The dates would seem to fit.”
    “We aren’t sure of that yet. We’ll need a DNA check on Teddy, but I bet it will be positive.”
    A small buzz came from Isabelle’s laptop, and she clicked into her secure mail window, again asking Bruno to turn away while she entered yet another password to open the message.
    “It’s a reply from the Danish police,” she said. “There is no record of any Danish citizen by the name of Jan Olaf Pedersen being born in 1942, and no record of anyone of that name being born in Kolding. The Danish passport number that Jan had filed for his
carte de séjour
is a false one. And the Danes would be grateful for any more information since they might want to file