"That's right," Gideon said, having scored his first point. "People who shoot other people do it that way, right side up; that's why the sight is where it is. But people who shoot themselves do it this way, the way you're doing it. It's possible to do it the other way, but the odds are against it."
"The odds?" said Joly. "Gideon, if that's what you're basing-"
"Give me a chance to finish," Gideon said. "Would you continue, Dr. Roussillot?"
"Continue what?" said Roussillot, who had begun to get up, thinking the demonstration was done.
"You haven't actually shot yourself yet."
"Yes, please shoot yourself, Roussillot," Joly said.
The pathologist sat down again, rearranged the rifle the way it had been before-upside down, butt on the floor, muzzle against his chest-and once more leaned forward to get to the trigger. It was a longer reach than he'd estimated and he had to shift himself to the front of the seat and hunch over the barrel to make it.
"I find that the most natural way would be to do it with my thumb," he observed, "like this. I place my thumb inside the trigger guard. With my other hand I keep the muzzle against my chest. I lean over still a little more and push-"
"Stop," Gideon said. "Hold that position if you can, just like that."
Roussillot froze, except for his eyes, which he screwed up to look at Gideon.
"Okay," Gideon said. "If you fired right now, what path would the pellet take?"
"It's somewhat hard to tell from this position," said Roussillot, "but, frankly, I have no reason to think it would be any different from-"
"No, you're wrong," Joly said excitedly. "I can see. It would enter on a downward path, not an upward one! By heaven, Gideon!"
"Downward?" exclaimed a flabbergasted Roussillot. "But how can that be? The butt rests on the floor, the barrel inclines upward-"
"Yes, yes," Joly said, "but you incline forward and your body is hunched, curved, crouched over the weapon. The path through your body would be slightly downward, I assure you." He looked at Gideon, his piercing eyes alight. "This changes everything. It means-"
"May I straighten up now?" asked Roussillot, his voice a little choked from hunching over.
Gideon put a hand on his shoulder. "Hold it just a second longer if you can, doctor. I want you to see something else. You notice that to reach the trigger you had to rotate-"
"I see!" Joly said, too impatient to let him finish. "By reaching with his right arm he turns his body counterclockwise a few degrees, so that when he pulls the trigger the muzzle is pointing not straight back through his chest at his spine, but slightly right-to-left-which is therefore the path that the projectile would necessarily follow."
"Why, yes, you're right," Roussillot said with dawning appreciation. "I can see that now; it's quite obvious, really. And in the case of a left-handed man it would be reversed. The projectile would travel from left to right.
" But in Bousquet's case," said Joly, "it did neither; it flew straight back." He had forgotten about Roussillot's no-smoking rule and lighted up. Roussillot, engrossed with trajectories, failed to notice.
"That's right," Gideon said. "Add that to the facts that it was angled up, not down, and that the muzzle-stamp was wrong-way-around. Three separate things, and they all point away from suicide."
"And toward homicide," Joly said.
"And so one more lovely theory falls victim to squalid fact," said Roussillot, laughing with satisfaction as he straightened up and propped the rifle back in its corner. "Remarkably done, Professor Oliver."
"Oh, it's not that remarkable, really," said Gideon honestly. "It's just that I happened to be part of a case that was a lot like this a few months ago. The King County medical examiner walked me through it just the way I did with you."
"How wonderful it must be to live in America," Roussillot said. "So many murders, so much to be learnt."
Gideon laughed. "That's one way to look at it."
"And now," said Roussillot, slipping on a pair of plastic gloves and picking up a scalpel, "I think we'd better get started, don't you?"
"Good heavens, look at the time," Joly exclaimed, looking at his watch. "Much to be done, much to be done. Well, I'll leave the two of you to it, then," he said, making for the door. "A policeman's time is not his own."
Chuckling, Roussillot watched him go. "Amazing, isn't it, how chicken-livered they can be when it comes to opening someone up?"
"Amazing," Gideon agreed, looking enviously after the departing Joly.
Roussillot returned to the autopsy table, adjusted the microphone, folded the sheet back down, and flicked on the spotlight above the head of the table. Bousquet's greasy, yellow-gray torso and ruined head jumped into brilliant focus.
"Colleague, would you care to make the first incision?" Roussillot asked with a sweet smile, offering the knife.
"Uh, no, thanks. If it's all the same to you, I'll just watch," Gideon said. "From back here."
"But you said his fingerprints were on the rifle," Julie said, starting up the car.
"They were. But that doesn't mean he was alive at the time."
"It doesn't? Can you do that? Put a dead person's fingerprints on something? And get away with it, I mean?"
"There's no way to tell he was dead, as far as I know, as long as the fingertips have some oil or perspiration on them. Or grease, or blood, or anything else that'll leave a mark, for that matter. This was a set-up, Julie, arranged to look like a suicide. I'm sure of it."
"Wow," she said softly. "But doesn't that mean-" She paused and threw a worried glance at him. Gideon was sprawled in his seat, his head tipped back against the headrest and his legs extended to the extent that the Peugeot would allow. "Gideon, you look utterly washed-out."
"I don't like autopsies. I'm not too keen on dead bodies, in general."
"You're sure in a funny line of work, then."
"I sure am. You think maybe Uncle Bert was right? That I'd have been better off in cost-accounting?"
"No, I don't. Look, why don't you put back the seat and take a nap for a while? Just relax, it'll do you good. You think you're all recovered from the other day, but you're not, trust me. Give those neuroaxons a rest. I'll wake you up when we get to Les Eyzies."
"You know, I just might do that." He adjusted the back of the seat to as close to horizontal as it would go and settled back. The clouds had closed in again and with them had come the rain, a cooler, thinner rain, pattering on the car's roof and running down the windshield in irregular rivulets. He watched them for a while, then closed his eyes to the steady, lulling whish-whish of the wipers.
"Doesn't that mean what?" he said, putting up the seat half-an hour later and finding that they were on the outskirts of Les Eyzies, just crossing the little bridge over the Vezere.
"Feeling better?"
"A lot better," he said truthfully, the sights, smells, and sounds of the autopsy having receded. "You started to ask me something before: 'Doesn't that mean…?'"
It took her a moment to remember. "Oh, yes, I was thinking that if the suicide was a set-up, then how do we know that the business with the ring wasn't a set-up too?"
"That's exactly what I believe it was. I don't think it came off during a struggle, I think it was planted there. I don't think Bousquet killed Jacques at all. I don't think he killed anyone."
"But how would they have gotten hold of his ring?"
"Easy. They just took it off his cold, dead finger. You see, I think Bousquet was probably killed before Jacques was-which, may I point out, would have made it particularly hard for him to murder him.