The Bouncer (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

MrBallen opens in April 2012 with a local walking into the woods of coastal France to check on a column of smoke, finding only a smoldering bonfire — until he gets close enough to smell what's in it. Then the story rewinds to April 26 and Lionel Varanese, a 39-year-old bouncer who is a fixture of the nightlife in Chambéry, a small city in the Alps, and occasionally picks up bodyguard work for the rich tourists who vacation there. His good friend Mike Booth shows up at the club door angry, carrying an accusation from Philippe Perrier, heir to a world-famous local winery: Philippe's house has been robbed, his safe emptied, and his wife Natalie — with whom Lionel once had a brief fling in a coat-check room — is naming Lionel as the thief. Lionel denies the robbery, and three days later he takes a phone call, tells his nephew Julian he's going out with Mike for a few hours, and never comes home.

Captain Florent Mazarin of the Chambéry police works the disappearance as foul play from the start. Mike claims he spent the night at home with his girlfriend, but she tells Mazarin he wasn't home at all, and Julian swears he saw Mike's car outside the apartment that night. Philippe freely admits to a motive — he knows about the affair — and then shows Mazarin a basement gun room where a two-weapon case sits empty, the guns supposedly taken in the robbery. Natalie arrives at the station in tears, unsteady on prescription medication, insisting the fling meant nothing and that she and Philippe were home all night. Then Marseille police call: a body found less than ten hours after Lionel was last seen, burned over a bonfire with a gunshot wound to the back of the head — the disposal method French drug gangs call a 'barbecue' — and suddenly Mazarin has to weigh a gang execution against his love-triangle suspects.

The break comes from geography and stubbornness. Only two roads connect Chambéry to Marseille, so Mazarin checks toll-booth and gas-station cameras along the route, mostly finding dead cameras and overwritten footage, until one station's recording covers the right window. At 5:43 a.m. on April 30th, a black Volkswagen with a Chambéry-registered plate ending in 73 pulls in, and what Mazarin sees when he zooms in on the passenger seat unravels who did what that night. The episode reconstructs the killing minute by minute before naming names, ends with three convictions, and closes on a genuinely odd coda: the robbery that set the whole story in motion may never have happened at all.