AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Wyatt paced up and down, looking at the sightlines and the viewpoints offered by this tall-walled, dark alleyway. Sierra stood quietly, looking at the scene and tapping some information into her phone.
Lucien was still standing there, watching them. Juliette glanced at him, but it was clear he had no intention of offering any help or further information.
"What can you tell us about the area?" Juliette asked Lucien.
Lucien shrugged, as if he were reluctant to answer even this basic question.
"This is an old part of the city," he said. "It is always busy. There are residential apartments on the main street down there, a few hotels, a famous bakery, and some other food shops. It is not the high street, not one of the busiest areas of Paris, but it is well frequented by visitors all the same."
"And how did he follow her here?" Lucien spoke again, staring at her challengingly. "How did he manage to target this woman?"
"I don't think he was looking for her specifically," Juliette said.
Lucien's eyes widened. For a moment, Juliette thought she saw his nostrils flare in anger at being contradicted. It was not a popular point of view. Sierra's eyebrows raised, and Wyatt looked around, surprised.
"A government minister's daughter is murdered. And you think it is not intentional? The country is going to be in an uproar - but no, it was not meant to be?"
"The others, in New York and New Jersey, were ordinary citizens. Not related to each other, or to anyone with a high profile," she said calmly.
"Perhaps it is not even the same killer, then," he said.
Juliette shrugged. "We have to assume it is. The postmortem will tell us more."
She stepped back and took a few photos of the scene on her phone. The body itself had been placed a few yards down the alleyway, but it wasn’t easily visible from the main road.
"Who found the body?" she asked.
"Did you not read the case file?" Lucien snapped.
Juliette nodded. "I read it. I was wondering if there was more information."
"The body was found by a street cleaner, later in the evening, sometime after ten p.m." Lucien said. He seemed to have calmed down a bit, but his voice was still clipped. "He drove the sweeping machine down this alleyway and found her lying there."
Juliette considered whether others might have passed by and, seeing that strange, gold-painted face, wondered if the woman was real at all and simply walked on by. Certainly, it seemed likely that a few people must have passed this way. And that, of course, was the advantage he had, in a busy tourist area, with so many strangers and out-of-towners who didn't know the area and who probably thought that it was a mannequin or sculpture, just one of the strange wonders of Paris.
Juliette stared at the place where the body had been, and shivered.
"We need to figure out how he got away with this," she said. "He was careful enough to paint the woman's entire face in gold. He must have known that it would take time to do it. There must have been some kind of system in place to keep people away."
"I've just walked the alley and looked at the lines of sight," Wyatt said. "Guess I was the first to do that as there wasn't any sign of it in the case file." He sounded smug.
"What did you notice?" Juliette asked, aware that Lucien was seething.
"There's not a good line of sight into and through the alleyway. Go and look. It's got a slight bend in it and it means that nobody passing by would have easily seen what was happening. So he would have been able to work out of plain sight. Maybe he barricaded himself off while he was doing it, or maybe he killed them and painted the faces elsewhere and then moved the victims. You'd have to walk in and be going that way, to notice anything."
"Why did Claudette go down here?" Juliette wondered aloud.
"Perhaps she was followed, and grabbed, or else taken down here." Lucien said. Clearly he was wedded to the theory that she'd been deliberately targeted.
Sierra looked up from her phone. "I've been looking up the area online, seeing where the tourists go that have mapped out their routes, and there are two other parallel streets nearby, both of which have tourist attractions along them. So most tourists would choose other roads."
But once down this alleyway, Goldenface could work undisturbed, thanks to the cover it offered. Why had Claudette walked down it at all, though? Why not choose a busier road?
This was going to be a major stumbling block unless they could figure it out.
"Are there cameras in this area?" she asked.
"There is one all the way up there. At the corner of the main street," Lucien replied.
