‘Tell me,’ was all he said to Friele as he slipped under the yellow tape across the front doorway.
‘Homicide. Two.38 calibre wounds, one to the stomach, the other to the head — close range. Victim: Jessica Anne Roche, age thirty-two, married, no children.’ Friele glanced at his notepad only once. ‘Her husband, Adelay Roche, was first to discover her.’
‘At what time?’
‘Twelve twenty-six. Or, at least, that’s the time logged for his 911 call.’
‘And what estimated time for the shooting?’
‘Two hours beforehand, maybe more. Medics found no trace of warmth from her body, and rigor had already set in. Though obviously we’ll know more from the full autopsy.’
‘Obviously. But for now, it doesn’t look like Mr Roche simply shot his wife, then waited half an hour before calling 911?’
‘No, doesn’t look like it.’
‘And where wasthe illustrious Mr Roche tonight?’
‘At a business dinner function.’
‘Okay. First thing to check: time he arrived at the dinner, time he left…’ They’d been edging down the hallway as Friele gave the details, and as the main drawing-room came into view with Adelay Roche at its far end, Coyne turned back to Friele. ‘How’s he been?’ he asked, lowering his voice. ‘Been ranting why aren’t you out there on his wife’s killer’s trail rather than asking him stupid questions? Telling you that you’re useless?’
‘No. He’s been pretty subdued as it happens. Still in shock, I suppose.’
Coyne looked thoughtfully at Roche. It wasn’t a cold night, but he had a blanket draped over his shoulders while a uniformed officer spoke to him, getting fill-in details: neighbours’ names, numbers he could be reached on, other relatives of his wife that would need to be informed. ‘…And would you like us to do that for you, sir?’ Roche looked frail and shaken, answered stiltedly. Real shock, or an act?
Coyne smiled tightly as he turned back to Friele. ‘Obviously that’ll come when he gets to know you better. What else?’
‘Sign of break-in at the side of the house — a window-pane removed and alarm wired through — which appears to support the MO of an intruder who was subsequently disturbed by Jessica Roche. Although the actual shooting took place in the library.’
By the pause, Coyne knew that it was meant to be significant. ‘Any reason for that?’
‘The safe’s there. It looks like maybe he was casing it when he was disturbed.’
‘But hadn’t started to break it?’
‘No.’ Friele’s gaze shifted to the open doorway two doors down on the opposite side, the muted sounds of somebody making dictaphone notes drifting through.
‘Okay. Let’s take a look at her.’ Coyne had specifically asked that the body not be moved until he arrived.
Despite the many corpses Coyne had viewed through the years, it never got easier. One side of Jessica Roche’s face, closest to where the bullet had exited, had half collapsed, her teeth and gums on that side exposed all the more and stained reddy-brown in a rictus grimace. The blood pools by her stomach and head had already congealed to a sticky brown film, the latter carrying faintly glistening fragments of skull and white brain matter. The smell of body waste was strong and pervasive, one disadvantage of the two-hour wait, and hit high in his synapses like an ammonia burst, making him dizzy for a second. He pulled the cover back over the body and straightened up.
He looked towards the forensics officer speaking into a palm-held recorder, now examining dusted patches on the desk; the safe and window-frame had already been done.
‘Any joy on prints?’
The officer shook his head. ‘Not by the looks of it. Probably wearing gloves. No tell-tale clusters on the window where he broke in, at least.’
‘And ballistics?’ Coyne addressed Friele. ‘We got the two bullets?’
‘They found one — the head shot.’ Friele pointed. ‘Deflected through and was found a foot away, embedded in the carpet. The stomach shot looks like it’s still inside her, will have to be retrieved at autopsy.’
Coyne was halfway through a scan of the room, looking for anything significant or out of place, when some excitable voices and movement from the hallway broke his attention.
A patrol-man slightly ahead of his side-kick leant into the library doorway. ‘Lieutenant. Looks like we might have a witness. A woman a hundred yards down the street was out walking her dog, and saw a man leaving the Roche’s house about the time of the shooting.’
Coyne followed the patrolman back along the hallway, and looked towards the woman standing by the three patrol cars beyond the taped-off front gate, their flashing lights reflecting starkly on her face. She’d obviously seen the squad car lights and drifted along to investigate.
‘She get a good look at him?’ Coyne asked.
‘Not sure, sir. We thought it best to leave her for you to question.’
Coyne had interviewed the eye-witness, but her description was far from conclusive: African-American, stocky build, six foot to six-two, maybe more, thirty-plus, maybe forty, wearing a dark-blue or black jacket, maybe dark-grey or brown.
‘The ‘maybes’ had concerned Coyne: her core description was vague enough, could fit ten per cent of African-American adult males, without stretching the boundaries further. And with sixty per cent of New Orleans African-American, they were a million miles from a ‘workable suspect list’, as 6 thDistrict chief, Captain Vincent Campanelli, had demanded on day one of the investigation.
Pat Coyne looked thoughtfully towards his neatly-tended garden beyond the small back verandah, as if it might give him clearer focus on the events of twelve years ago. Strange, he thought: often he could recall the events of that time clearer than things that had happened only months ago.
‘Would she recognize him again, I asked… not sure, she said. I took that as a “No”, but thought: if we narrowed down the list of possible suspects and got a few faces in front of her — we just might get lucky. So we started working things from the other end — putting together a list of house burglars with that MO.’
‘Was Larry Durrant one of those on that list?’
‘No. No, he wasn’t. Mainly because his past MO hadn’t been violent. We were looking at a particularly brutal killing “in the course of” here. Somebody who could kill without raising much sweat. We had half-a-dozen suspects who’d shot and wounded or beaten their targets half to death in past robberies, two that we suspected of killing but had never managed to nail — and two more who’d tied up and tortured their robbery victims. We were spoilt for choice without looking at the likes of Larry Durrant.’
‘So were you surprised when his confession came in?’
‘Purely on a MO level, yeah.’ Coyne shrugged. ‘But then everything else tied in: not only the jacket with the DNA match, but his descriptions of the murder itself. Things that only the killer could possibly have known — particularly the head shot.’
‘Why was that?’
Coyne shrugged with a palm out. ‘Okay, first off it was the one thing that might not fit in with a robbery-gone-wrong theory, more hit-man territory. But that’s also why we held it back from any official releases, press or otherwise — so that we could filter out any false confessions. All we released was that Jessica Roche had been shot twice, apparently while disturbing an intruder. Most people would assume: sudden surprise, blam-blam from five paces, and out. And that’s pretty much what came in.’ Coyne smiled ingenuously. ‘Celebrity murder like that, we actually expected more — but there were six confessions in all. Three were white, one was way off the mark of the eye-witness description, and of course the other two we grilled like all hell. They got all manner of things wrong with internal descriptions of the house, but most tellingly neither of them mentioned the close-up head shot. The only one to describe that was Larry Durrant.’
Coyne was silent for a second, the only sound from a couple of bees hovering by a nearby azalea bush. The muted sounds of the city beyond like a more distant swarm.