The cleaning woman shook her fist, but Aimée was out the door and bidding her adieu before she could do anything else.
“SO YOU’VE joined the big boys now, eh, Serge? Working on a Sunday?” Aimée said, dumping the Baggie on the Institut Medico-Legal’s stainless steel counter. “Congratulations!”
Serge Leaud, with his rosy cheeks and trimmed beard, appeared too dapper to be a pathologist. He looked up from his microscope. “At least I don’t have to run from Belleville to Quai des Orfèvres! They saddled me with the blood inquiries.”
From Leaud’s window, distant pinpricks of light could be seen twinkling on the quai. The muffled clatter of the Metro as it crossed Pont d’Austerlitz reached them in the white-tiled lab. Arctic air-conditioning brought goose bumps to Aimée’s arms.
“Seems I’ll never live down that Luminol case in the Marais,” he said.
“You’re a world authority on Luminol now … why would you want to?” she asked, gesturing around the lab. The high-powered microscopes and microtomes for tissue sectioning were impressive.
“I’d like to see my twins once in a while. My wife says they’ve forgotten how to say Papa.” He grinned, setting down long-handled tweezers. “But something tells me this isn’t a social call.”
Aimée was about to reply when a posse strode into the adjoining waiting room, three big-shouldered men in black suits.
Aimée grabbed a physician’s lab coat, slipped it on, and set the Baggie on a glass specimen tray. “I need your help, Serge.”
The men burst through the lab doors. Only Renseignements Generaux, an intelligence-gathering arm of the Interior Ministry linked to the police, entered the morgue’s lab like that.
“Gentlemen, we’re wrapping up a minor detail before I finish your report….”
“We’ll wait, Dr. Leaud,” interrupted the biggest one. He had a headful of curly red hair and thick lips parted in a smile. “No pressure, you understand, of course. Our report goes to the Quai des Orfèvres.” His grin widened and he glanced pointedly at his wristwatch. “Within the hour, you understand. Priorities. But don’t rush on our account.”
Priorities my derrière, Aimée thought. Leave it to the RG to act as if the rest of the law enforcement world didn’t exist.
“Dr. Leaud, this detail puzzles me,” she said, sticking the glass tray in front of Serge, sliding the specimen from his microscope and ignoring his look of surprise. “These lines. Those striations. Visible more closely under magnification, I suppose.”
One of the RG men cleared his throat. Another tapped his blunt fingers on the windowsill.
She emptied the Baggie onto a fresh petri dish, slipped it under the microscope. “Quick and dirty, doctor, then I’ll leave you to these gentlemen.”
“No need for magnification to see the beveling,” Serge said. “It’s obvious. But to see the powder residue, it’s useful.”
She smiled at the biggest man. “Forgive me, but Dr. Leaud’s extensive background in forensic pathology saves so much time.”
Serge Leaud put his eye to the lens, whether to keep from laughing or to hide his trepidation, she wasn’t sure.
“Interesting,” he said slowly. “Give me a brief description of the recovery scene.”
She did, mentioning the suicide and caliber of the gun.
“Nice fragment of occipital bone,” he said a minute later.
A part of the skull, she remembered that much from her year of premed at the Ecole des Médicines.
“Those lines are part of the lambdoidal suture,” Serge Leaud said.
“Lambdoidal suture?”
“The union between the bones of the cranium, on the side of the skull,” he said. “What’s this?” He pointed to the other items.
“A wallpaper sample I obtained,” she said. “From a wall a meter and a half away from the victim.”
Serge Leaud turned a knob and adjusted the microscope light. He studied a portion of the sample. “There’s the blood mist from the blast. Distinctive spatter and darker stain. Heavier particles follow.”
He looked up at her. “Did you say this was a suicide with a .25 that perforated the skull?”
Aimée nodded.
“You’re telling me a .25-caliber perforated the skull and sent tissue spattering against the wall?”
Aimée shrugged, watching his eyebrows knit.
“Sounds like a contradiction, eh, Dr. Leaud?” the red-haired RG man said. His feet beat a rhythm on the linoleum floor. “More like a .357 or a .44.”
Mentally, she agreed.
“Attends,” Serge said. “There’s internal beveling on the bone.”
“Internal beveling?”
She noticed the RG men had stopped looking bored. Interest flickered in their eyes.
“As the bullet enters the skull it causes a wider fracture on the inside, beveling it,” Leaud said. “There’s a very clear demonstration right here. You can see it with the naked eye.” He pointed to a curved line. “But that’s not all.”
More from that small bone fragment?
“Look at those traces of soot—gunpowder residue deposited on bone,” he said, “right there. That helps with the range of firing. Of course, I can’t say exactly without further tests but it was close range.”
“How close?”
“Within centimeters, I would say.”
Like Jutta Hald.
“Anything you can be sure of?”
“If a .25 did this, then it will snow tiny white chocolate nonpareils on Noël,” Serge Leaud said, pouring the bits back into the Baggie for her. “My twins would like that.”
Aimée could hear the RG men laughing as she hung up the lab coat. Serge’s quick and dirty analysis confirmed her suspicions. She beckoned to him on her way out. He excused himself and met her in the tiled hallway.
“You know, Aimée, I’ll have to write this up,” he said in a low voice. “It’s procedure with suspicious findings. I’ll need more details.”
Good, she wanted Serge to make a report, to spur the police to investigate Figeac’s death.
“Serge, request the autopsy findings on Jutta Hald, a woman murdered at Tour Jean-Sans-Peur. You should see a match with the bone beveling and gunpowder soot. If the same gun didn’t do it, I’ll make it snow nonpareils in your twins’ room. That’s a promise.”
Outside the morgue, couples strolled along the quai, outlined against the fading dusk. Aimée stared at a bateau-mouche on the rippling Seine, black and thick like pudding, wondering what these deaths had to do with her mother.
From Place Mazas, she took Pont Morland past the swaying péniches moored in the canal facing the Bastille. Colored laundry hung from clotheslines, tricycles and pots of geraniums stood on the barge decks. A lone fisherman sat with a camp lantern, his legs dangling over the stone.
Muggy heat still hugged the narrow streets. Not a breath of air stirred. All the way to her apartment, a bridge away on the Ile St. Louis, her uneasiness mounted.
She tried to telephone Etienne Mabry, without success, so she took Miles Davis for a walk, grabbing a baguette and pâtè before the shops closed. After sharing the pâtè with the puppy, she cracked open her tall windows, rested her feet on the top of the balcony grillwork, the Seine visible through her toes, and got to work on her laptop. Miles Davis curled up next to her.
Once online, her fingers flew over the keyboard. Within minutes, she found Haader-Rofmein, the seventies terrorists’ site. A Web page with photos of young people circled around a hookah. Her cousin Sebastian had a hippie coat like that from Istanbul, she remembered. Probably still in his closet.
Aimée leaned over, and clicked to the next Web page.
She saw long-haired men and women clutching Mausers and Russian bazookas. They stood by a cinder-block building. Distant targets showed in what appeared to be desert bleakness. Some wore El Fateh headgear and army fatigues. None looked much over twenty.