Blowback

Chapter Seven

Dominique’s office was small, but unusually well-ordered. Crime prevention posters, calendars, newspaper cuttings, official documents, all were pinned in neat groupings to the yellowing cream-painted walls. Her desk was a paragon of good organisation: in-trays, out-trays, a spotless blotter, a computer screen angled against the wall, and a mouse with mat and keyboard placed side by side in perfect alignment. An empty coffee cup sat on a cardboard coaster. The polished surface of the desk itself was unmarred by unsightly rings or watermarks.

It was, in its own way, a reflection of Dominique herself. Small, but almost perfectly formed. Only now, in the confines of her office, did Enzo realize just how small she was. At least, in comparison to his six feet, two inches. Outdoors they had both been dwarfed by the landscape.

Her chestnut brown hair was pulled over in a side ponytail and pleated, before being drawn back across her head and pinned in place. It was executed with immaculate precision, allowing for the wearing of her hat when necessary. Enzo wondered why she would have gone to such trouble when there was no man in her life. That’s what she’d told him, hadn’t she? That she was single. Or had he misunderstood? He replayed their conversation on the hill from the previous day. No. She had told him she had never known a man who would spend the kind of money on her that would buy a meal at Chez Fraysse. But still, his original impression persisted, emphasised by the lack of a ring on her left hand, and he wondered if it was just his imagination that she had made an effort to present herself more attractively today.

Unlike yesterday, she wore a little make-up. A slight rouge coloring of her lips, and a smudge of blue on the lids of her brown eyes. That touch of color somehow lifted her face out of plainness. The collar of her pale blue blouse was immaculately pressed and turned out over the neck of her darker blue jersey with its white stripe and rank epaulettes. Her black holster seemed very large, resting on slim hips, and her pants were tucked into ankle-length boots. Her eyes were filled with their usual warmth, and her cheeks flushed a little as she rounded her desk to spread out a selection of photographs for him to look at.

“These are the casts we took of the footprints in the buron. You can see how much shallower the treads are on Marc Fraysse’s running shoes. All the other prints seem to have been made by either hiking boots or gumboots.”

She cross-referenced the photographs of the casts, with pictures of the prints left in the mud.

“These are Guy’s prints. And Elisabeth Fraysse’s.” She traced their tracks with the tip of finger. “Madame Fraysse didn’t venture far inside. These are Marc’s prints. They are all over the place, and here’s where they back up against the wall when he was shot. But there doesn’t seem to have been a struggle.”

Enzo looked at the two unidentified casts. “These are both smaller than either Guy’s or Marc’s. Did the Fraysse brothers have particularly large feet?”

“No, they were both average.”

“So either or both of these unidentified sets could have been made by a woman.”

“Or a man with smaller feet. Or a boy. A teenager, maybe. They are only one size smaller.”

Enzo studied them in silence for a long time before Dominique reached for a stapled document of a dozen or more pages.

“The autopsy report,” she said. “You can keep that if you like. I made a copy for you.”

Enzo glanced up to find her big brown eyes examining him closely, and for a moment his stomach flipped over. It was extraordinary how a mutual attraction could be conveyed without a single word. Of course, it was always possible to misread the signals. He smiled. “I really appreciate that, Dominique. Thank you.” He riffled through the pages until he came to the pathologist’s description of the wound.

Dominique pressed close against him so that she could read as he did. And he felt the distant pangs of arousal that her proximity excited. He forced himself to focus.

The wound is centered 6.5 centimetres from the top of the head, and on the midline is an 8 millimetre round defect surrounded by a 3 millimeter-wide collar of abrasion. Surrounding the wound is sparse stippling in a 5 centimetre by 4 centimetre distribution.

“What causes the stippling?” Dominique glanced up at him.

“Bits of gunpowder hitting the skin and causing abrasions. The closer the gun the more dense the stippling. Any more than about two feet, or sixty centimetres, away and there wouldn’t be any.”

“So this was close.”

“Probably about thirty centimetres.” Enzo turned then to the description of the exit wound.

The exit wound was centered 7 centimetres from the top of the head, 1 centimetre to the right of the midline, and measured 1.5 centimetres with no evidence of abrasion, soot, or stippling. As this was a perforating wound, no projectile was recovered from the body. The projectile entered the head through the location described, caused an inward-beveled and comminuted defect of the frontal bone, passed through the left cerebral hemisphere, causing a wide hemorrhagic and disrupted path surrounded by contusion, and exited the occipital bone through an outward-beveled bony defect in the location described. The direction of the projectile was backward, slightly downward, slightly rightward.

“Hmmm.” Enzo re-read it thoughtfully.

“What?”

“The path of the bullet. Someone shooting you would generally raise the gun, at arm’s length, to eye-level. Theirs. For the bullet to have taken a slightly downward path would suggest somebody taller than the victim.”

“Or someone standing on higher ground.”

“As I recall, the interior of the buron was pretty flat.”

She nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“Sadly, however, there is nothing very conclusive in the trajectory, Dominique. Marc Fraysse might have cowered as he raised his hands to protect himself, so that his killer was shooting slightly downwards.”

He turned back a page, to the preliminary description of the body as a whole.

Dominique peered at the report. “What are you looking for now?”

“To see what the pathologist says about the hands.” Almost as he said it, he found the relevant passage.

“Blood blowback on the backs of the hands and fingers,” Dominique said. She was still intimately acquainted with the details of the case. “Blood spatter blowing back from the entry wound was identified on the backs of his hands and fingers, as if he had his hands facing the shooter, raised to shield himself.”

Enzo read through the pathologist’s description for himself. “You said the pathologist still has the pics?”

“Yes.”

“Would there be any chance of acquiring them? Just for a quick look.”

“Sure. I’ll ask.”

He slipped the autopsy report into his satchel. “Did anyone look at his computer?”

“I believe someone from the police scientifique went through it. But it was never brought in for forensic examination.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess no one thought it was relevant. Forensics is not my area of expertise, and the powers that be seemed to think that Fraysse was just the victim of a random crime. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“You think he was murdered for his phone and his knife?”

“Personally, no. That never seemed to me like sufficient motive. But then some people don’t seem to need a motive to kill.” She laughed, a little self-consciously. “Not that I’m any great expert on that either. There aren’t very many murders committed around here.” She looked at him curiously. “What do you think?”

“I think the chances that it was a random killing are almost zero. No one would be waiting up that hill in the hope that someone might pass by with valuables to steal. Marc Fraysse took that route every day. Everyone knew that. So someone was waiting specifically for him. Whether they meant to kill him or not, that’s another matter. But kill him, they did.” He perched on the edge of Dominique’s desk and found her a willing and attentive audience. “The fact is that eighty percent of murder victims know their killer. Of those, sixteen percent are related to their killers. And half have a romantic or social relationship with them. It’s something you have to keep very much in mind when you’re looking at a murder.”

“I thought your specialty was forensic science. The evidence.”

“It is. But in the absence of evidence you have to look for motive, then try and put the two together to nail your killer. In this case, because of lack of evidence, or any other evidence to the contrary, your superiors seem to have been very keen to write off a celebrity murder they couldn’t solve by putting it down to a random killing. That kind of crime is almost impossible to resolve. It’s a face-saver.”

“So you think someone had a reason for wanting to kill him?”

“Or to threaten, or to harm him.”

“Do you have some idea who that might be?”

Enzo smiled and shook his head. “No, I don’t.”

“So where will you begin?”

Enzo gazed thoughtfully from the window, across the square toward the balustraded view of the valley below. “In his computer.”