Free Stonekiller by J. Robert Janes Page B

only that? To open the victim? To partially disembowel her? To split the breasts — such things took some doing with tools such as those. Her assailant must have straddled her during the butchering. Blood would have covered his hands and arms, his face, chest and thighs — it was a man, wasn’t it? Was he naked? Did he remove his clothes first and then bathe in the stream afterwards? Ah, these things I have to ask myself because his clothes, they would have been ruined.’
    â€˜Perhaps it was a man, but,’ said Louis, ‘this we really do not know.’
    â€˜The time of death was last Monday, or perhaps the day before it.’
    â€˜And the primary blow, was it struck with a tool such as this?’
    Louis picked up the handaxe and, gripping it firmly so that it filled his hand, brought it down broadside and hard only to stop just above the desk. The nodule of flint, the boulder, Hermann, it is worked by striking the edge so that the flint spalls inwards and upwards away from the edge you want. This then causes the spalls to radiate out from a summit near the centre of each side so that you have points there that are useful as a hammerstone.’
    The complete tool, then. Axe, chopper, cutter and hammer all in one. Kohler hefted the thing. It weighed about three-quarters of a kilogram, was perhaps at most twelve centimetres by ten by three in thickness. In some places a crude flaking gave a coarsely serrated edge. Other edges were even more crudely worked but all around the top of the tool, where it would have been gripped, there was unworked original nodule, with a white, calcareous encrustation.
    â€˜The wound to the forehead,’ said the coroner. ‘Let us examine it.’
    â€˜Louis.…’
    â€˜Stay here. Examine the tools. Try to figure out if our assailant knew she planned to poison him.’
    â€˜If it was a man.’
    â€˜Yes, yes, of course.’
    Deft with the scalpel and tweezers, Vaudable had managed to peel back the skin of the forehead to reveal the bone beneath. ‘Though the fractures radiate from all around the area of impact, some are longer towards the scalp and chin.’
    The smell was terrible but he paid it no mind.
    â€˜Was it a handaxe or perhaps the vicious downward slash of a walking stick?’ asked St-Cyr, peering closely at the fractures.
    â€˜A walking stick? Ah, no. No. That could have been set aside in any case. No, I think the handaxe just as you have held it. One savage, sudden blow caught her right above the eyes. She fell back. Again she was hit on the head and again. He then fell on her. First the sharp edge of that thing to her throat, then the point of it, the multiple stabbings with the full weight behind them — a right-handed assailant. Material from the dress has been caught in many of the wounds. Then the butchering with other stone tools. Did he have them in a little bag he carried around his loins as a savage might? Did he pause, I ask myself, to select or attempt to select the tool best suited to his purpose? The skin of the left half of the left breast, Jean-Louis, I feel certain a scraper was used to remove the flesh and that is why that portion of the breast hangs only by a flap.’
    Blue-black, green and yellow with tinges of wine red, and suppurating, Madame Ernestine Fillioux lay on her back on the raised stone pallet with the drain at her feet. Maggots had had to be scraped away. Legions of them still fed on her.
    â€˜The sexual organs?’ asked St-Cyr — one had to ask.
    â€˜Violated with a razor-sharp stone. All of the tenderest of places. Pubic hairs have been scraped away. A savage attack, but as I have said, one, I think, of experimentation. It is as if whoever did this needed to try out the tools. Perhaps she knew of them herself and perhaps he laughed as he used them — the mind seeks answers as it probes for truth.’
    â€˜A stonekiller,’ breathed St-Cyr. ‘A film