The Storm Protocol

by Iain Cosgrove

  Chapter 4 – Presumption

  11th 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.’

  He 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 paper and tobacco mixed with air and ignition was attained.

  ‘I have a very ambivalent relationship 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 coroner 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 okay to sit down on the veranda of his childhood home. The tech looked at him warily.

  ‘I’m not asking your permission,’ snapped 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 co
uld 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 himself 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 coroner 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 marks; 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 have a problem with the way your back would be facing me,’ said Guilbeau. ‘If I shoot you from here....’

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

  ‘Then 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.’

  He got up from the chair and moved around to the swing seat. He noticed the initials CR carved into the side of the armrest nearest the house. He patted his pocket surreptitiously; he still had the penknife that had done the deed.

  ‘We know our killer was here in this seat. So the next question becomes, who is Jack Doe, and is he the killer of John Doe and if so, who killed him?’

  ‘That’s three questions,’ said Guilbeau with a smirk, ‘and a lot of Doe’s!’

  Roussel ignored him and headed for the second body. The coroner waited for him at the bottom of the steps before trailing behind.

  ‘So, what can you tell me about this guy?’ asked Roussel.

  The coroner went through the same speech again with a few modifications.

  ‘Subject is an adult male in his early forties; cause of death, single GSW to the head. Again, it 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, same as before, ditto the grey matter.’

  Guilbeau opened the body bag and using his gloved hand, gingerly lifted out and supported the subject’s right arm. As he watched, fascinated, Roussel could see that the hand was practically severed from the body.

  ‘But this is where it gets curious. This is an interesting wound, and not something you see every day,’ said the coroner. ‘Almost point blank GSW to the wrist. This would not have been fatal, unless the subject had been allowed to bleed out, but it seems almost extraneous. Like something you’d see in a punishment shooting, if that makes sense?’

  ‘None of this makes sense,’ said Roussel, massaging his temples.

  He closed his eyes in an effort to concentrate, working to try and clear his head.

  ‘Have you got an estimated time of death for me? Presumably it’s roughly the same as the first victim?’

  ‘Again, I’ll quote that this is purely preliminary, and has to be verified, but all indications point to roughly the same time, yes.’

  Roussel stood stock still for a second. His eyes scanned the ground and suddenly it hit him; the niggling question that his mind had been juggling, since they moved to victim number two. He squatted down on his haunches.

  ‘Look at the ground here,’ he said, pointing to the area around the body. ‘Even allowing for the storm, the wind and rain last night would have eradicated shallower markings. The ground has been seriously churned up here.’

  The confusion on the coroner’s face cleared and he snapped his fingers.

  ‘Signs of a struggle?’ he replied; half question and half statement.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Roussel. ‘And it can’t have been a struggle with victim number one, as he was already dead at the bottom of the steps.’

  He paused.

  ‘Unless he killed this guy, walked back up the steps, sat down with his back to the garden and then shot himself in the head.’

  ‘No gun,’ said Guilbeau.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Roussel.

  ‘There would have been a gun lying next to the body. No firearm has been found.’

  ‘So the person who killed one or both of these men is still out there?’ ventured Rousse
l tentatively, almost as if he was trying to convince himself.

  ‘Could be more than one person, but sure seems that way, Peeshwank.’

  ‘The tyre tracks make more sense now anyway.’

  ‘Tyre tracks?’ asked the coroner blankly.

  ‘There are two sets of tyre marks on the driveway; both made by the same car, or at least the same type of tyre. I was trying to work out why they were so different. Makes sense now.’

  ‘In what way does it make sense?’

  ‘One set of tracks; like the set left by you for instance, go directly down the centre of the drive. This would indicate to me that the driver was going slowly and carefully, especially if the layout and terrain were unfamiliar.’

  He paused for breath, rather than effect.

  ‘But the other set go wildly from one side of the lane to the other. Like someone was driving at speed and over correcting constantly. So, if I was a betting man, I’d say someone drove here carefully, but the same car left in a tearing hurry; does that have any bearing on the case? Your guess is as good as mine?’

  ‘We also haven’t answered the fundamental question?’ said Guilbeau thoughtfully.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Why were they killed?’

  ‘When we can answer that, I think we’ll have found our killer or killers,’ said Roussel.

  Suddenly, he glanced sideways and motioned for quiet. From beneath the white forensic suit, a ringtone started; softly at first, but getting progressively more strident with every ring. Roussel fumbled under the clothing and came up with the phone, just as it stopped. He listed the missed calls; Captain Moreland.

  He dialled the number and gave Guilbeau the sign for ring me. He winked at the coroner and turned away, just as the phone was answered.

  ‘Hey Cap,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to like this one little bit....’

  Chapter 5 – Discovery

  21st February 2009 – Two years before the Storm.

  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust.