Bonnet was shaking his head. As if to suggest that she shouldn’t be showing those photos to civilians. But I’d seen enough death that I understood the fascination it held. Her screen was filled with a photo of a recently deceased man lying in a pool of blood. He looked like other dead human beings that I had seen. Maybe some people die peacefully in bed, or in an armchair. Maybe those bodies look composed and calm. As if they just fell asleep. The hectic desperation of sudden violent death leaves the body ungainly, limbs splayed out in the wrong way. No knifed or shot person looks like they’re asleep. Depending upon the ordinance, they might not even look human anymore. This guy was lying on his side, curled protectively around the knife entry wound to his chest. His eyes were open. He looked like a lifeless thing, strange and uncanny.

“Who’s the victim?”

Nazari said, “Afghan documents. Name of Gulam Qayoumi. Legally registered as an asylum seeker in France. Probably on his way up north.”

Bonnet said, “Not his lucky day.”

I flipped through the pictures. There were multiple angles and multiple distances. Nazari had covered the scene pretty well. Close-up shots and medium shots. Wide-angle shots to show context. Like a textbook exercise in crime scene photography, except for the last shots. Because the photos also told a chronological story, like a movie made up of still frames. The last photo looked like it was taken with the phone held down low, as if in secret. It was a shot of the crime scene after the BRI investigators had arrived. Inspector Martaud was standing over the body. Behind her I made out Caro’s enormous silhouette. Bonnet had his back to the camera and was turned at a three-quarters angle towards Martaud and the body. I could make out his face.

The victim, Qayoumi, had made it to his fifties. His head was matted with dense, curly hair that was still mostly dark with a scattering of grey. He wore a collared sky blue shirt and jeans and ankle-length black leather boots. His left arm was pinned beneath him. The right arm ended in a hand placed protectively near the wound area. Qayoumi’s sleeve was pushed up, exposing a tattoo on the inside of his wrist, visible in the close-up shots. Three words, and above the words, a line and three dots above the line. The dots were in a row. I figured the words said something profound in Dari or Pashto, the two main languages in Afghanistan. I spread my fingers on Nazari’s phone screen and enlarged one of the photos with a good angle on the wound.