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"You think so? Why?" he challenged her.
"It's the way the paint has been applied. So accurate, so detailed."
"And you think a man is not capable of such finesse?" He sounded insulted.
"A woman might have more practice in putting make-up on," she countered. "And perhaps be able to move around more freely, without being noticed."
"That's for sure," Wyatt agreed, coming down in her favor. "If you're in a dark alleyway and you see another woman coming toward you, you're not going to run for it. Even if she's carrying a can of paint."
“I am telling you, she was grabbed elsewhere and transported there,” Lucien insisted.
Juliette turned to the pathologist. She wanted to know his take on her theory.
"What do you think, Doctor?"
He shrugged. "It's certainly possible, but in terms of strength, he or she would have to be strong fingered to have done the strangulation so fast. In terms of height, the victim is five-foot-four, so the killer would not need to be especially tall.”
“What about moving and carrying her?” Juliette asked, remembering that the three U.S. postmortems had been inconclusive in that regard. Perhaps this one would provide something more substantial.
“There's no evidence from the postmortem that she was moved after death. She might possibly have been, just after death, but if so, then she was moved by someone very strong.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There are no scrape marks, no scuffs, no other areas of bruising, her shoes were still in place, her hairpins were still in place."
Juliette nodded. She saw what the doc was saying. The killer needed to be strong enough to strangle the victims, and might also have had the physical strength to move them after death without dragging or damaging their bodies.
"He, or perhaps she, is ice cold," she muttered, glancing again at that flawless paint job, and thinking of what it would have taken, after committing such a violent crime, and in a public area, to have calmly and accurately applied that golden paint.
Lucien looked at her and for the very first time she saw agreement in his eyes.
"Yes. A cold mind, to have had such a steady hand," he said.
"Are we done here?" Juliette asked. She didn't know if there was any other information to be had. No trace evidence that could lead them directly to the killer, and no real answers. Only a firm conviction that these killers were one and the same person.
"I guess we are," Wyatt said.
As Juliette thanked the doctor and walked to the door, she asked Lucien, “Have her close relatives been questioned?”
She stepped outside the autopsy room, feeling relieved. Of course the question made Lucien feel annoyed.
“Do you think French police are incapable? Yes, we interviewed her father, and her mother. Both are devastated, of course, and pressuring the police for answers.”
“What’s her background? Is she a local?”
“They spent a few years in Paris but then moved away. They only arrived back in the country two days ago and were staying in accommodation set aside for politicians when they travel to Paris for work. She went out on her own. Her mother thinks she was looking for a bakery. She didn’t have her phone with her.”
Juliette nodded. As with the U.S. victims, the background was clearly going to offer no leads. Claudette hadn’t seemed to be setting out to meet anyone, but to find a bakery instead. That was similar to the first three victims. All of them had been killed at night. One had been walking home from work late, one had been a tourist on her way back from dinner in Greenwich Village, and one had been a student, in the area to do a research project.
"We need to cast the net wider and see if this killer has caused trouble in the past," Juliette said. “Can we start with the police reports?”
"What do you want to know from those?" Lucien asked, as they walked into the fresh, cool air of outside.
"I want to see if there are any reports of tourists - particularly Americans – stalking women, or acting suspiciously. That's one angle we can use, if we assume that he’s American and he came here to do another series of kills. A foreigner might be more noticeable, so we might get a lead here that we didn’t have in the U.S.”
“Good call,” Wyatt said approvingly, as Juliette continued. “And the other angle, which I'm sure Sierra is already researching, is the gold paint itself. He must have bought it here, because there’s no way he could have bought it in the States and shipped it over, and it’s not something you could easily take in your luggage. It’s a forbidden substance on flights. Where did he get it from?"
"You're assuming this killer is American, then?" Lucien asked.
