Free Blowback by Peter May

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