Last Call (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

**MrBallen** (0:00)
In the fall of 2010, a detective was digging through a dresser drawer in a bedroom near Paris, France. He was looking for evidence, and when he pulled open the last drawer, he found five cell phones hidden inside of it. So he powered one of them on, and he first checked the call history and then also the text messages, and then he opened up the Photos app, and he froze. There was this collection of photos on this phone. They were all very similar, and there were just dozens of them, and they all showed the same disturbing thing. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark & Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do. So if that's of interest to you, please take the follow button out to your local park and hop on the seesaw. For a little while, just ride it like you normally would. But at some point when the follow button is in the high position, go ahead and jump off so they smash to the ground. Okay, let's get into today's story.
On the night of October 14th, 2010, a 46-year-old woman named Natalie Vierme was standing behind the counter at the Rose Garden, a bar on the outskirts of Paris, France that she owned. And currently, she was counting that day's earnings from the register when a couple of regulars at a nearby table began shouting at each other. Natalie immediately yelled at them to keep things civil, or she'd have the bartender cut them off. And the argument at that point did die immediately, and Natalie went back to counting the money. Natalie was used to drunks and to rough characters because her bar and the boarding house attached to it that she also owned were full of people like that. Like just last week, Natalie had caught one of her tenants, a very heavy drinker named Bruno Martin, sneaking money out of this cash register. Now she'd banned Bruno from the bar for obvious reasons, but she'd stopped short of kicking him out of the boarding house completely. She knew she'd have to watch him closely, but she just couldn't bring herself to throw him out of the street because he really had nothing else.
As difficult as her tenants and the patrons at her bar could be, Natalie did really care about them. She felt like she was born to be a landlady, and she got real satisfaction out of putting a roof over the heads of people who really needed one, even if they were rowdy and difficult. So even with all the headaches, Natalie wouldn't have traded the Rose Garden or the attached boarding house for anything. So now she shut the cash register and she placed all the money that she had made into a zip-up pouch that she then put into her jacket pocket. Then she looked over at the clock and saw it was 8:30 PM. So she reached for the phone behind the bar and dialed the number for her own apartment.
After a few rings, Natalie's long-term boyfriend answered. He was a 47-year-old man named Mark Detrebek. So Natalie and Mark had been together for 25 years and never got around to having a wedding. But Mark had actually recently begun talking about doing a ceremony to make things official, which caught Natalie off guard because in these 25 years they had been together, Mark had really never shown any real interest in getting married. And so this change in Mark, for the most part, Natalie was actually happy about it. But every now and again, she sort of felt like, why is this happening now? What changed with Mark? But now she told Mark on the phone that she was getting ready to leave work, and she was going to head home now. And he said that he had already eaten and might be asleep when she got there. And Natalie said that was fine, and she would just heat up some leftovers and, you know, see him in the morning.
As she hung up, her bartender, a 47-year-old man named Patrice Chebaye, came out of the storage room, and he was wheeling a keg on a hand truck. Patrice had turned up at the Rose Garden two years ago with practically nothing, and Natalie had given him a cheap room inside of the boarding house and a job behind the bar. And he turned out to be surprisingly reliable. And by now, she thought of him less as an employee and more as a friend. Natalie asked Patrice as he was walking by with his keg if he still wanted a ride to his girlfriend's place that night, because if he did, she was getting ready to leave now. And Patrice said, actually, yes, he did. And he would go grab his stuff right now, and then he put the keg away and he ducked into the back again. A moment later, when he came back out with his coat on, ready to leave, Natalie nodded to him, and then she also checked that the waitress had the keys, and was good to close up when they were gone. And then Natalie grabbed her scarf off the hook by the door and headed out with Patrice right behind her. It was cold outside, so Natalie wrapped that scarf around her neck, and then she and Patrice headed across the parking lot toward her white van.