Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

of that. I’d been through it all, zooming, highlighting, sharpening, redefining and all I’d found was the brutal assassination of an abbot.
    “Again,” said Chompu.
    He dragged his chair closer to the screen so his nose was barely a sniff away from the carnage. He watched the entire performance one more time from beginning to end. When the skinny dog sang in the final frame, Chompu stood and unclicked the hinges in his neck before walking inside my hut and getting himself a beer.
    “Damn,” he said, “that was beautiful.”
    That was the scariest moment of the morning by far.
    “Beautiful?” I said. “Beautiful? How sick are you to see anything beautiful in that?”
    He took a very masculine swig of his beer and dabbed his lips with a tissue.
    “What do you want me to say?” he asked. “That it was awful and bloody and premeditated and sick?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, of course, ‘yes’. It was all of those things. Nobody in his or her or its right mind would think otherwise. But didn’t you see it? Didn’t you see the composition? The scenery? It was staged. It was a final operatic montage. It was a tour de force of color and spectacle.”
    If I’d been a police officer at that moment and he’d been a run-down resort manager, I would have asked him about his whereabouts on that Saturday afternoon. I even felt uneasy sitting there beside him.
    “What do you think?” he asked.
    “I think it’s lucky you didn’t watch the show beside Major Mana and the Bangkok detectives. You’d be in a cell by now.”
    “But that’s why it’s so much more fun to watch it with you. They’d just have seen it as the documentation of a murder. You and I see it as so much more.”
    “We do?”
    “Of course we do. It’s not just a killing. It’s a climax. It’s a loud, ‘Look what I’ve done, world! See how poetic this murder has been’.”
    “Poetic justice?”
    “Exactly. It all had to be recorded because it’s an artistic image that’s been germinating in the killer’s mind. The cameraman or -woman just needed to match the actual slaughter to the vision. That’s why getting back the camera was so important. It was confirmation that justice had been done according to the divine ordinance.”
    “Man or woman?”
    “What?”
    “You said, ‘cameraman or -woman just needed to match…’”
    “Hmm. Did I?”
    “You know you did. What did you see in those pictures that suggested the killer might be a woman?”
    “Not that it precluded a man, more that it included a woman. The glove.”
    “It was an oven mitt. I assumed he’d worn it to add to the color.”
    “Whereas I assumed it was worn as a disguise. A tight glove or none at all would have immediately given away the size of the hand, the length of the fingers.”
    “That’s all?”
    “I don’t know. If it had been a video recording I would have felt more confident to pass on my gut feeling. There was just something about the grip on the knife, the way the blade was poked rather than thrust, the forensic report that said the wounds had all been comparatively shallow. It all suggests a lack of strength.”
    “Ergo, a woman. Huh! And I thought you were one of us.”
    “And I thought you had to be gay to be prickly.”
    “You do. But once you open up the possibility of the killer being a woman, you’re down to the one suspect. I don’t like that.”
    “The nun? And you like her.”
    “I don’t know her well enough to like her. But I want to believe that all this time in the bush hasn’t completely erased my instincts.”
    “Don’t underestimate the power of love.”
    “Oh, shut up. I suppose I’m going to have to pay another visit to the nun lady. You won’t arrest her just yet, will you?”
    “Based on what? We haven’t seen anything to suggest the killer could have been a woman because we haven’t seen anything. Right?”
    “Right.”
    “And that’s another problem.”
    “What is?”
    “I have to find a way to introduce these pictures into the case without committing you to a three-year jail term for tampering with evidence in a murder inquiry.”
    “Come on. It wasn’t even evidence when I tampered with it.”
    “Even so, you did lie to, ooh, how many was it? Twelve police officers?”
    “Play back the tape. I said nothing of the sort. I just intimated.”
    “Of course you did. You’re basically a very honest person. That’s why I knew you were lying through your teeth. But I doubt Mana will remember it