Ascension Day (35 page)

She froze, a tingle running up her spine. A sound out of place among the other faint noises of the house. A door opening, maybe a window. Somewhere towards the other side of the house.

She held her breath, listening more intently.
Soft rustling, scratching
?
Faint pad of steps towards her, or were they heading along the corridor
? Hard to pick-out clearly as a gust of wind outside rustled the oleander bush close by the drawing-room window.

The door to the hallway was ajar just a few inches. She got up and moved closer to it, trying to hone her hearing to the sounds beyond; fearful now of actually opening it. If somebody was there, the first thing she should be doing is shutting it sharply, locking it, and lunging for the phone to dial 911.

Something there, but very soft, not… she back-stepped sharply, her heart in her throat, as the door started swinging wider open. Although by only a few inches – their grey Persian cat scurrying quickly through.

She reached down and scooped it up. ‘Majestic! It’s only you.’ She hugged it close, feeling her heart still racing against its soft fur. She looked along the corridor to the rec-room with its basket; obviously the door hadn’t been left sufficiently open, as it usually was, and it’d had to scratch and paw the door wider open. ‘But stop sneaking around so will you, you gave me…’

The phone rang in the library. Adelay’s business line; she’d better get it. He’d told her before going out that he was expecting an important call, and had specifically requested that she pass on his number at the function rather than let it go to answer-phone. No point in upsetting him even more. Majestic was abruptly dropped again as she went across the hallway to answer it.

Everything had gone smoothly. Breaking in the side-window and wire-crossing the alarm had taken no more than a few minutes, but then had come the trickiest part: edging three doors down the corridor without being heard.

He glided silently, feet floating an inch above the floor, each step hardly connecting before lifting and gliding again. He was sure he’d made no sound – but then the hackles suddenly rose on his neck as he passed the last but one door and saw the cat staring back at him from the near darkness. Hackles also raised, back hunched, as if it wasn’t sure whether to lunge forward or shrink back.

He swiftly reached out and closed the door, all but the last inch; the sound of it touching home would carry.

He glided silently on, breath held, gently opened the library door and, again, left it open only an inch as he headed towards the leather seat at its far end, sat down and waited.

Four or five minutes until the call came through, he checked from his watch. They’d left more than enough leeway.

 But it felt like a lifetime waiting in the silence of the big house, his own heartbeat almost in time with a ticking-clock in the hallway and, beyond that, the muted sound of pages turning. And when after a few minutes there were some stronger, closer sounds – it made him sit up sharply. Rustling,
scratching
. The cat was trying to paw its way out of the room! 

Movement now too from across the hallway, her getting up to investigate. He slid the silenced .38 from his jacket. He might not even have to wait for the phone call.

A suspended moment, then the sound of the cat scampering across the hallway and her voice riding a sharp intake of breath.

‘
Majestic! It’s only you. But stop sneaking around so will you, you gave me…
’

The phone ringing only a few feet to his side sounded obscenely loud. He took his own intake of breath in anticipation and pointed his gun towards the door.

Lieutenant Coyne of NOPD’s 6
^th
District didn’t arrive on the scene until
2.44 a.m.
, over two hours after the first squad car arrived.

There were a few reasons for that. First, there’d been a reported ‘major’ incident on
Magazine Street
. Started as a simple fender-bender, but the Saturday night specials had quickly come out and first radio reports were that ‘World War Three’ had erupted. Two shop windows were smashed, a passer-by hit in the leg from the stray bullets, and, amazingly, one of the combatants took four bullets and still survived. Second, he didn’t like to arrive on crime scenes too early, felt that it took a while for all the confusion and emotions to settle down and anything clear start to emerge. But in this case there was a third reason: when it came to big-shot or celebrity incidents, Coyne had often found the participants high-handed and difficult; and as shots went, they hardly came any bigger than Adelay Roche.

Hopefully Roche would have vented his worst – whether blubbering or barking that they should be out there chasing his wife’s murderer rather than tramping his best shag-pile – on his assistant, DS Dave Friele, who he’d sent there within minutes of the radio alert coming through, while he stayed to finish things up on
Magazine Street
.

‘Tell me,’ was all he said to Friele as he slipped under the yellow tape across the front doorway.

‘Homicide. Two .38 calibre wounds, one to the stomach, the other to the head – close range. Victim: Jessica Anne Roche, age thirty-two, married, no children.’ Friele glanced at his notepad only once. ‘Her husband, Adelay Roche, was first to discover her.’

‘At what time?’

‘
Twelve twenty-six
. Or, at least, that’s the time logged for his 911 call.’

‘And what estimated time for the shooting?’

‘Two hours beforehand, maybe more. Medics found no trace of warmth from her body, and rigor had already set in. Though obviously we’ll know more from the full autopsy.’

‘Obviously. But for now, it doesn’t look like Mr Roche simply shot his wife, then waited half an hour before calling 911?’

‘No, doesn’t look like it.’

‘And where
was
the illustrious Mr Roche tonight?’

‘At a business dinner function.’

‘Okay. First thing to check: time he arrived at the dinner, time he left…’ They’d been edging down the hallway as Friele gave the details, and as the main drawing-room came into view with Adelay Roche at its far end, Coyne turned back to Friele. ‘How’s he been?’ he asked, lowering his voice. ‘Been ranting why aren’t you out there on his wife’s killer’s trail rather than asking him stupid questions? Telling you that you’re useless?’ 

‘No. He’s been pretty subdued as it happens. Still in shock, I suppose.’

Coyne looked thoughtfully at Roche. It wasn’t a cold night, but he had a blanket draped over his shoulders while a uniformed officer spoke to him, getting fill-in details: neighbours’ names, numbers he could be reached on, other relatives of his wife that would need to be informed. ‘…And would you like us to do that for you, sir?’ Roche looked frail and shaken, answered stiltedly.
Real shock, or an act
?

Coyne smiled tightly as he turned back to Friele. ‘Obviously that’ll come when he gets to know you better. What else?’

‘Sign of break-in at the side of the house – a window-pane removed and alarm wired through – which appears to support the MO of an intruder who was subsequently disturbed by Jessica Roche. Although the actual shooting took place in the library.’

By the pause, Coyne knew that it was meant to be significant. ‘Any reason for that?’

‘The safe’s there. It looks like maybe he was casing it when he was disturbed.’

‘But hadn’t started to break it?’

‘No.’ Friele’s gaze shifted to the open doorway two doors down on the opposite side, the muted sounds of somebody making dictaphone notes drifting through. 

‘Okay. Let’s take a look at her.’ Coyne had specifically asked that the body not be moved until he arrived.

Despite the many corpses Coyne had viewed through the years, it never got easier. One side of Jessica Roche’s face, closest to where the bullet had exited, had half collapsed, her teeth and gums on that side exposed all the more and stained reddy-brown in a rictus grimace. The blood pools by her stomach and head had already congealed to a sticky brown film, the latter carrying faintly glistening fragments of skull and white brain matter. The smell of body waste was strong and pervasive, one disadvantage of the two-hour wait, and hit high in his synapses like an ammonia burst, making him dizzy for a second. He pulled the cover back over the body and straightened up.

  He looked towards the forensics officer speaking into a palm-held recorder, now examining dusted patches on the desk; the safe and window-frame had already been done.

‘Any joy on prints?’

The officer shook his head. ‘Not by the looks of it. Probably wearing gloves. No tell-tale clusters on the window where he broke in, at least.’

‘And ballistics?’ Coyne addressed Friele. ‘We got the two bullets?’

‘They found one – the head shot.’ Friele pointed. ‘Deflected through and was found a foot away, embedded in the carpet. The stomach shot looks like it’s still inside her, will have to be retrieved at autopsy.’

Coyne was halfway through a scan of the room, looking for anything significant or out of place, when some excitable voices and movement from the hallway broke his attention.

A patrol-man slightly ahead of his side-kick leant into the library doorway. ‘Lieutenant. Looks like we might have a witness. A woman a hundred yards down the street was out walking her dog, and saw a man leaving the Roche’s house about the time of the shooting.’

Coyne followed the patrolman back along the hallway, and looked towards the woman standing by the three patrol cars beyond the taped-off front gate, their flashing lights reflecting starkly on her face. She’d obviously seen the squad car lights and drifted along to investigate.

‘She get a good look at him?’ Coyne asked.

‘Not sure, sir. We thought it best to leave her for you to question.’

Coyne had interviewed the eye-witness, but her description was far from conclusive: African-American, stocky build, six foot to six-two, maybe more, thirty-plus, maybe forty, wearing a dark-blue or black jacket, maybe dark-grey or brown.

‘The ‘maybes’ had concerned Coyne: her core description was vague enough, could fit ten per cent of African-American adult males, without stretching the boundaries further. And with sixty per cent of New Orleans African-American, they were a million miles from a ‘workable suspect list’, as 6
^th
District chief, Captain Vincent Campanelli, had demanded on day one of the investigation.

Pat Coyne looked thoughtfully towards his neatly-tended garden beyond the small back
verandah
, as if it might give him clearer focus on the events of twelve years ago. Strange, he thought: often he could recall the events of that time clearer than things that had happened only months ago.

‘Would she recognize him again, I asked… not sure, she said. I took that as a “No”, but thought: if we narrowed down the list of possible suspects and got a few faces in front of her – we just might get lucky. So we started working things from the other end – putting together a list of house burglars with that MO.’

‘Was Larry Durrant one of those on that list?’

‘No. No, he wasn’t. Mainly because his past MO hadn’t been violent. We were looking at a particularly brutal killing “in the course of” here. Somebody who could kill without raising much sweat. We had half-a-dozen suspects who’d shot and wounded or beaten their targets half to death in past robberies, two that we suspected of killing but had never managed to nail – and two more who’d tied up and tortured their robbery victims. We were spoilt for choice without looking at the likes of Larry Durrant.’

‘So were you surprised when his confession came in?’

‘Purely on a MO level, yeah.’ Coyne shrugged. ‘But then everything else tied in: not only the jacket with the DNA match, but his descriptions of the murder itself. Things that only the killer could possibly have known – particularly the head shot.’