Detective Lemoine had worked hundreds of homicide cases during his career. Most crime scenes were variations on a theme. There wasn't much that the impeccably-dressed French detective hadn't witnessed, from bodies painted orange to those hidden in the back of a closet, nude and wearing skis.
What he found at the apartment on Rue Royale
was different. The dead woman on the floor, clad in red bra and matching silk
panties, was holding a .38 caliber pistol that had recently been discharged.
But her body, still and cold, was sitting upright, a look of horror on her
petrified face.
"Most peculiar," Lemoine commented,
kneeling to examine the woman.
The blue pallor of her skin led the detective
to believe that the dead woman had been injected with a chemical to instantly
produce rigor mortis.
Odder still, the gun was aimed at the opposite
wall, yet there was no bullet hole in the plaster. This would have been easily
explained if the dead man's body, slumped near the baseboard, had revealed a
bullet wound, but it didn't. The coroner's preliminary finding was death by
cardiac arrest.
There was no trace of blood on the floor. Who
– or what – had the woman shot?
~William Hammett
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