ANOTHER KILLER

“I had a look at part of the police file,” Tyrese said. “I know you didn’t ask me to, but I got curious. There was one detail in there that struck me, one I don’t recall coming out in the trial.”

“What?” I asked, intrigued.

““Well, there was blood splatter, blowback from the head wound Tiffany had. But there were some voids in the splatter. One area was on the driver’s side door. There was blood on the outside of Benjamin Middleton’s jacket sleeves but none on the inside. That doesn’t make sense to me if he was facing Tiffany down, aiming the gun at her. There was also splatter on the right side of the bodice part of his jacket, but none on the left. That suggests that Middleton was facing forward in the car. And there was also a long space running down the inside of the driver door, near the middle, where there was no blood splatter. This was in front of where Ben’s body would have been, and there was splatter on either side of it. To me, that suggests that something blocked the splatter.”

“Like another person’s arm reaching in through the window?” I asked, playing out the scene in my mind.

“Exactly,” Tyrese said.

“You said voids, plural,” Mal noted. “What were the others?”

“There was only one other area I noted, and it was on the gun itself. There was a void around the trigger, which you’d expect to find if someone had a finger wrapped around it, but there was also a void along the top of the barrel. In fact, most of the barrel was clean. And Benjamin Middleton had blood on the backs of both of his hands.”

Mal said, “If someone had a hand wrapped around that gun barrel wrestling for it, it might explain the void.”