The Storm Protocol (5 page)

He indicated the mansion and the land.

‘Sorry, don’t mean to pry,’ he added quickly.

‘No problem,’ said Roussel. ‘N
o need to apologise. Put simply, I was born here. When my parents were killed in a boating accident, their will stipulated that the house and estate be sold to pay for my education and welfare for as long as the corresponding trust fund could afford it.’

Guilbeau clapped Roussel on the shoulder.

‘I am truly sorry if I offended you, my friend,’ he said seriously. ‘I genuinely did not know.’

He looked around at the faded splendour of the plantation.

‘But I will say one thing. I think they did you a favour, those parents of yours; these places become an obsession. One chap I know, the estate destroyed his marriage, his family and then bankrupted him; all in the name of what; tradition?’

He paused.

‘No, I think you had a lucky escape, Peeshwank.’

Roussel thought about that statement
, as the older man looked at him earnestly. Was his life any the less self destructive? At least that man had a passion and a drive for something. What did he, Roussel, have? An empty apartment filled with pizza boxes and half fulfilled dreams. He nodded at Guilbeau to let him know he understood and there were no hard feelings.

‘Any left?’
the coroner asked.

‘Any what?’ asked Roussel
blankly.

‘The money; is there any of the money left?’

Roussel grinned at the question.

‘After my education was all paid fo
r, I had enough for a round of tequila,’ he said. ‘The estate was sold at auction and the reserve was low.’

He paused for a second to catch his breath.

‘I don’t particularly care, it educated me after all, but if the executor had held out, he could have got a lot more.’

Who was he kidding? He did care it seemed; a lot more than he would have thought before tonight.

‘Money doesn’t give us riches, Peeshwank,’ said the coroner sagely.

‘Too true, my friend,’ said Roussel.

But he couldn’t shake the feeling, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to; he was home.

They turned to leave
, but a flash of white caught his eye. He gestured to the coroner that he would follow shortly and walked over to the object in question. As he approached the item, he realised that it wasn’t just one, but two new headstones. They were in a relatively uncultivated part of the plot. He tried to identify the unusual emotion that came flooding into his mind, and then realised what it was; jealousy. He was annoyed and affronted. This was his family plot; interlopers were not welcomed.

He took out his small leather-bound notebook. He ignored the first headstone. It was new all right, but he knew exactly who it was and why it was there. Jeremiah Bell had bought the place from his parents, so if he was gone
, it must have a new owner now. He’d had no relatives to leave it to; he had always been just a bitter and twisted old man. Roussel made a note to look into the current ownership of the house.

He dated the next blank page and jotted down the name on the other headstone. He didn’t know why, but he had a feeling that it was important. Or maybe it
was
just plain old jealousy.

He tried to empty his mind of the conflicting personal emotions and wondered briefly if he should call the CID chief and let him know of his personal ties to the place. He dismissed the idea almost as soon as it was formed. He didn’t even know the scale or type of problem he was dealing with. The chief was a reasonable man; he’d understand.

He walked to the exit and closed the gate behind him, trying to use the closing action to stem the flood of his childhood memories.

Initially it didn’t seem to be working; all he could see was a younger and happier version of Charles; running, laughing and playing without a care in the world. All the while
, his eyes were moving, and his mind was trying to focus on the job in hand; scanning the ground in a seemingly random way. He was just about to give up and move on to the house, when he saw them; faint semi-circular patterns in the mud, running in a zigzag pattern across both sides of the drive.

His training clicked in and his mind emptied, concentrating purely on the problem in front of him. He bent down and inspected one of the marks. He noticed the diamond-like pattern; reminiscent of the back of a rattlesnake, and knew immediately what they were; tyre tracks.

He made a quick sketch of the pattern, even though he knew that the forensic team, who were probably already there, would do a much better job than he could. He liked to be thorough though, so he kept walking and scanning and then stopped again a few hundred yards further up. This time it was parallel markings he saw.

He crouched down and compared the pattern to the sketch in his book; it was not to scale and slightly different, but only due to his level of skill as an artist. These were also tyre tracks, and not only that, but made by the same vehicle. His reasoning kicked into overdrive. It was raining heavily last night, so the tracks had to be
pretty new; all traces of other cars seemed to have been washed away by the storm.

There were two other sets, but these were different patterns from the drawing he held in his hand, and at a guess would be the coroner and the forensic team. He thought some more; one set were dead straight, right down the centre of the driveway, while the other set moved randomly from side to side.

An idea struck him; he started moving from one side to the other, and as he did so, he moved his arms as though he was steering a car, and then it became obvious to him. He snapped his notebook shut and continued on his way. He noticed more vegetation broken and flattened on the verge to the right and left; more fuel for his wild driving theory.

He didn’t know why, possibly too much speed, maybe a bit of panic, and a series of over corrections. But he did know one thing; the car those tyres belonged to did not leave in the same way that it had come.

11
th
May 2011 – The morning after the Storm.

God does not suffer presumption in anyone but himself. – Herodotus.

His breath caught in his throat as he saw it; the first glimpse of his childhood home in what seemed like a lifetime. She appeared unchanged in over ten years. It looked like someone had been maintaining the old girl well, but he knew appearances could be deceptive.

He tore his gaze away from the house and focused on the scene. He was a great believer in first impressions. His eyes swept the tableau, imprinting the picture in his mind like a photograph. He saw two body bags on the ground, two fatalities, and wondered what had been going on in this normally sleepy backwater.

He heard footsteps behind him, and turned sharply. A uniformed patrolman was heading towards him, notebook in hand. His head was down and his face was a study in concentration, making Roussel smile.

‘Hey detective,’ he said to Roussel, looking up. ‘What do you need?’

‘Hey Cooper,’ said Roussel. ‘Just give me a rundown on progress to date if you would.’

‘Sure thing,’ he replied
eagerly.

He licked his lips and consulted his notebook.

‘Neighbour called us out to a potential disturbance. Even though it was very stormy, they were adamant that they heard three gunshots in quick succession; their words’

‘Who reported it in?’

The patrolman flicked back through his notebook.

‘A Mrs LaTour, she lives in the house over there.’

Roussel remembered the shouts echoing behind him, as he ran from the orchard with his early morning bounty. He and
Miss
LaTour were very well acquainted, and the old girl would certainly recognise gunshots too.

‘Ok, go on,’ he said.

‘My partner waited in the car at the bottom of the lane. I walked up slowly; I thought it was a wild goose chase to be honest, and then I saw the two bodies here. I didn’t touch anything, and the first thing I did was to ring it in and get the coroner on route. Then I organised the forensic team, and also requested a detective.’

H
e said the last sentence a trifle defensively.

‘
So that’s where I come in,’ responded Roussel with a smile.

‘If you need me for anything else, give me a ring, otherwise we’re heading home.’

‘Yeah no problem,’ said Roussel. ‘Take care of yourself Cooper and thanks; good job!’

As the patrolman turned and walked away, Roussel sought out Guilbeau again. He found him sitting on the tailgate of his car
, enjoying a sneaky cigarette.

‘I thought you’d given up,’ Roussel said indignantly.

‘I have, so don’t tell my wife. I have the odd one, especially on these early morning call-outs.’

He showed off the latex gloves.

‘Hides the smell of the tobacco on your fingers,’ he added with a wink.

‘Throw me one, will you,’ said Roussel, as he pulled on his own gloves.

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ Guilbeau said, tossing over the packet and then the lighter. ‘But I’m learning there’s a lot about you I don’t know, Peeshwank!’

Roussel extracted one of the perfectly cylindrical purveyors of death and ran it under his nose, savouring the smell. Then he inserted the filter end into his mouth and spun the lighter flint with his thumb, dragging deeply into his lungs. He heard the crackling as the pap
er and tobacco mixed with air and ignition was attained.

‘I have a very ambivalent relati
onship with cigarettes,’ he began. ‘I can go months, if not years, without the desire to smoke and then suddenly; wham; I’ll spark one up.’

He studied the glowing tip.

‘Like now I suppose. But I could go another year without smoking another.’

‘Wish I had your willpower,’ said Guilbeau, ‘and I expect my wife does too,’ he added sourly. ‘Anyway, you didn’t drag yourself over here to talk about the relative effects of nicotine.’

‘Walk with me,’ Roussel said. ‘Want to get a feel for what you think happened.’

They approached the colonnaded entrance to the house, and Roussel had to suppress the childish desire to run through the front door and straight up to his old room like he used to
.

They passed the second body without stopping; he wanted to take a look at the one closest to the house first. He didn’t know why, but he’d immediately assumed that it was the primary. He had a gut feeling that the first fatality was the key one, and the same gut feeling told him that the first fatality was the one nearest the house.

He never ignored his gut.

They ambled over to the front steps, where a couple of white suited forensic technicians were painstakingly sweeping the area. A cane and wicker garden chair was lying upturned on the ground near the body. There was also the outline of a person drawn on the ground in white spray paint. They studied it in silence for a minute. It looked like an invisible puppet that someone had dropped; limbs splayed everywhere.

Roussel indicated the body bag, and the coroner unzipped the top carefully and pulled the sides back. The face of a young man was revealed, blood spattered and with an alarming looking entry wound in the middle of the forehead.

‘Cause of death?’ asked Roussel, trying to suppress a smile.

‘You’re kidding me right?’ said Guilbeau.

He sighed.

‘Alright, let’s do this by the book, as per usual.’

He paused, as if accessing and then reciting a pre-written speech.

‘Subject is an adult male in his early twenties; Caucasian with very pale skin, so maybe a visitor to the state rather than a local? Cause of death, single GSW to the head; looks like a 9mm, but I’ll confirm. There is a very neat entry wound, but exit wound a different story. Death would have been pretty much instantaneous; there’s not much grey matter left in there to be honest.’

‘Have you got an estimated time of death for me?’

‘Have to verify this, but all indications at present put TOD at about ten pm last night.’

Guilbeau resealed the body bag with a loud zip, and stood up quickly; banging his thighs to get the circulation back into them.

‘Damn this old age,’ he said. ‘It gets to us all in the end.’

He pinched the cigarette between thumb and forefinger and dropped the stub into an evidence bag.

‘Don’t want to contaminate the scene,’ he replied, in answer to Roussel’s unspoken question.

He stuffed it into his pocket.

‘Don’t forget to get rid of your own evidence before you get home,’ said Roussel with a smile.

He tossed a chewing gum to the c
oroner and whistled with admiration as his hand snapped it out of the air.

‘Hey, not bad for an old man,’ he said.

Guilbeau removed the bag containing the butt from his own pocket and as Roussel walked past, he stuffed it into the pocket of Roussel’s jacket, patting it affectionately.

‘Thanks for offering, Peeshwank,’ he said fondly, slipping the gum between his lips.

Roussel waved to one of the forensic technicians, and made a gesture around his foot. The tech looked at him blankly for a few seconds, before comprehension smoothed the lines on his face. Two minutes later, the detective and the coroner had blue elasticised booties over their shoes and were walking up the steps of the veranda. There was a swing seat and a table; nothing else.

Roussel beckoned to one of the technicians. The man ambled over.

‘Can I sit down?’ he asked, feeling very peculiar.

He was asking a stranger whether it was ok
ay to sit down on the veranda of his childhood home. The tech looked at him warily.

‘I’m not asking your permission,’ s
napped Roussel, a little crossly. ‘I’m trying to get a sense of what happened and want to make sure you have processed the swing seat, before I sit on it.’

The man’s face cleared in relief.

‘Ah yes, I see,’ he said. ‘Yep, that’s okay sir, but could you pop into one of these first, just in case.’

He returned in a minute or so with a
white forensic over suit.

‘While I have you, did you also process the chair at the bottom of the steps? I might want to bring it back onto the veranda,’ said Roussel.

‘All clear, sir,’ responded the tech, before excusing himself back to his real work.

As he shrugged h
imself into the garment, Roussel started talking out loud, trying to verbalise the scene for both of them.

‘So
, our victim is lying in a heap at the bottom of the steps,’ he said.

Guilbeau nodded in the affirmative. Roussel screwed up his face in concentration, before continuing.

‘We can probably say with certainty that he was sitting down, judging by the overturned chair.’

The c
oroner nodded once more; again positive.

They circled the table slowly and Roussel pointed out something on the veranda floor; four slight scuff marks arranged in a square
, where the varnish had worn off the planking of the deck. He scampered down the steps and used his hands to get a rough approximation of the distance between the upturned chair legs. Then, keeping his hands apart, he returned and measured the shape. Perfect fit, give or take.

‘So, our chair was here,’ Roussel concluded.

He got down on his hands and knees to study the marks from a closer angle and made another discovery. The two nearest the steps had slight concave indentations in them. He gestured for Guilbeau to come nearer and made a rocking motion with his hands.

‘Whoever was in this chair may have been sitting on it in a very relaxed manner.’

He remembered the way he had sat on the veranda when he was a child; the shouts his mother had made when she’d caught him, and the thud as the front legs of the chair hit terra firma again.

There was a puzzled
expression on the face of the coroner, so Roussel pointed to the metal bar that ran under the table, between the two end panels. They both noticed the muddy marks at the same time; not quite footprints but almost. Roussel gestured the same tech over to take a sample of the dirt.

For the second time that night, he ambled down the stairs. Grabbing the overturned chair, he returned and placed it on the mark
s; definitely a perfect match. He sat in the chair and placed his blue booties on the patches of dirt under the table. He pushed back with his legs and the chair slipped into the concave indentations on the floor, rocking gently backward and forward as he tensed and relaxed his calf muscles. The coroner’s face cleared; now he understood.

‘So, as I said before, if our victim ends up in a heap at the bottom of the steps
, then he must have been sitting here; does that make sense?’

‘I’m tentatively agreeing with you so far,’ said Guilbeau.

‘We seem to be fairly certain that the chair was facing this way; you wouldn’t sit on a chair with your back to the table, would you?’

‘Unless you were
looking at the view,’ said the coroner. ‘But following it through, I think we can discount that in this case, as time of death puts our victim here on the veranda at ten pm; nothing to see at that time of night.’

‘What about the stars?’ asked
Roussel. ‘Where’s your romantic side?’

He hesitated for a few seconds.

‘But wait a minute; aren’t we forgetting about the storm last night? There’s plenty to look at when a southern storm is raging, especially if you are a stranger to the area, and we don’t know where our John Doe is from yet?’

‘Even if I accept all that, I still ha
ve a problem with the way your back would be facing me,’ said Guilbeau. ‘If I shoot you from here....’

The c
oroner sat on the swing seat, made a gun shape with his hand, and pointed it at Roussel.

‘Th
en you’re going to fly down the stairs, especially with a powerful weapon like a 9mm,
but
....’

He elongated the word for emphasis.

‘....the entry and exit wounds wouldn’t match up; they would be back to front.’

He paused.

‘But if I shoot from here....’

He gestured for Roussel to turn the chair around and then walked back down the stairs. He stopped.

‘It can’t have been from here,’ he said with finality. ‘See how I’m pointing up at you. Even if you were facing me, the shot was not point blank, so it would have come from down here, no question. If so, the exit wound would be in the top of the head and not directly out of the back, as it is on our John Doe.’

‘You’re positive about that?’ asked Roussel.

‘As positive as I can be without witnessing it myself.’

‘Ok, so we have John Doe shot and killed as he sat
facing his killer on the veranda. He got as far as sitting down, so must have been known to his assailant. That, or he came across as posing little or no threat.’