CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Several gendarmes clustered around her body in the Cimetiere de Clarens.
She possessed the pallor and rigor of death. She was cold to the touch.
She was dead.
She had been moved several paces from where the initial attack had occurred—the location delineated by large fragments of skull. Drag marks were evident in the ground, still soggy from the night’s rainfall. Now the body lay displayed upon the marble slab of a grave. Her clothing was awry, as if disturbed post mortem.
“The cemetery watchman came to secure the gates just after one and noticed a man huddled among the tombstones,” a gendarme told the detective. “Initially he thought it was a grieving villager come to visit a loved one, however he became suspicious due to the man’s movements. He called out to him,
