by Mark Hazard
THIRTY-SIX
“Subsonic rounds?” Corus asked.
“Yes, much of the noise from a shot is the sound of a bullet breaking the sound barrier, but almost any round can be loaded less powerfully to reduce muzzle velocity to just under the speed of sound.”
“What speed is that?”
“About 1100 feet per second.”
“What is the normal velocity for 5.56?”
“Around 3000, depending on the load and bullet weight.”
“Wait. Wait.” Corus held his palms to his temples and closed his eyes. He thought through the evidence, watching the crimes play out in his head. “1100 is still deadly though, right?”
“Sure. Of course, if you’re hit right.”
“Like point blank in the head!” Corus moaned the realization. That was why Kirilov had made sure to shoot them all in the head before leaving.
“Then why use 5.56mm, if it’s not going to be as powerful?” Gus asked. “At 1100 feet per second it’s basically just a .22 long rifle round. If your goal was to silence, you could have just used that, been just as deadly. You coulda been quiet as a church mouse with a big silencer on a .22.”
The three of them thought on that. “What if a weapon chambered for 5.56 is all you have?” Corus asked. “Or what if there is some other advantage to shooting 5.56?”
“Much larger magazines for one,” Toby said. “Plus AR-15s and M4s have all those weaver mounts around the stock.” Toby pointed to the gun laying on the table. “You can easily put red dot sights, or scopes, or flashlights or laser sights on it. It’s more accessory-friendly.”
“Or it was just what you’re most comfortable shooting,” Gus said. “Guns are like cars. You can grow attached to a certain style.”
“How do you find a subsonic round?” Corus asked.
“You can make one yourself easy,” Gus said, “if you reload cartridges.”
Toby crossed his arms. “But hold on. Hold on. I don’t think it would even generate enough pressure behind the bullet to run the cycling system on an M4. You could shoot once, but then you’d be manually chambering each round.”
“There’s no way the Bellevue shooting took place that way,” Corus said. “Kirilov had just a few seconds to peel off those rounds.”
“Toby here ain’t thinking out of the box,” Gus said. “He might know ballistics like nobody’s business, but that ain’t the same as knowing firearms. I was talking to a fella down in Texas about subsonic ammo and suppression and all that, and he tells me he rigged his gas feedback system to work just fine on subsonic. He moved the gas return down closer to the receiver. There was less volume in the cycling system, so it needed less gas pressure to operate.”
“So, it can be done,” Corus said.
“Where there is a will, there is a way, my friend.”
“So, he either is a gun nut—err… enthusiast, sorry, or he knows one,” Corus said. “Good. That narrows the search down to…oh, yeah, America.”
“Well, if you want my opinion,” Gus said, sticking his thumbs under the straps of his overalls, “this smacks of personal pride.”
“Makes sense,” Toby said. “Wait a sec. The jacket! Their rounds had no jackets.” Toby looked at their faces, obviously expecting to see them grasp his meaning. “He used unjacketed bullets.”
“Yeah… we knew that already.” Corus said.
“Jackets help a bullet fragment and yaw at high velocity. But at sub-sonic speeds, it would actually hurt the bullet’s ability to fragment and yaw. Yes! He used non-jacketed bullets because they’d be more deadly at slow speed. My God, I can’t wait to get back to the lab and see if they were imbalanced or filed down unevenly to increase tumble and yaw.”
“So, how can we figure out what these subsonic rounds will do?” Corus asked.
“I may be able to help you out with that,” Gus said.
The three men stepped into Gus’s home. Despite the somewhat junkyard like environs, the home was clean and well kept.
Gus showed them a basement room where he stored his personal armory. He was particular to historical weapons, including flint lock and black powder rifles, one of which he claimed had been used in the revolutionary war. “A rifle or musket can literally last forever if it is well cared for. Can’t say that about many things these days.”
He showed them to the next room over, where he kept his reloading equipment. The centerpiece was a green metal tool that sat on the desk looking much like a microscope with a long slot machine lever on the side.
“Reloading is relatively simple. I paid about $250 for this set up back in the 80s. I save so much on ammo that I made that back in a couple of months.”
“How does it work?” Corus asked.
“Well, you start by cleaning your brass real good…” Gus took Corus through the process of reloading a cartridge: replacing the spent primer, reshaping the mouth of the cartridge to receive a bullet, adding the powder and finally pressing in new bullets. He reached for a chart and verified, based on the weight of the bullet how much powder he’d need for the desired sub-sonic velocity.
“Now while I’m pressing a few for us, why don’t you two grab a bite to eat.”
Toby led Corus upstairs and they fixed themselves each a sandwich.
“Your uncle is a pretty cool guy.”
“He is. Thanks. He’s my dad’s older brother.”
“Is your dad like him?”
“God no,” Toby said through a mouthful of bread and meat. “My dad hates guns. He’s an accountant. So’s my mom.”
“So, you are the perfect blend of the two brothers then, huh? You’re a rare breed, a gun nerd.”
“I guess so. I prefer the term projectile aficionado, but saying that just makes me sound more like a nerd, doesn’t it.”
“Sure does, but come on, I bet the ladies love it when you tell them you solve crimes.”
“It can help me get a foot in the door, but then they see that I live with my parents and basically just do math…”
“What’s stopping you from getting your own place?”
“I dunno. I like having someone do my laundry and cook for me.”
“Laundry is easy, you’ll find. But cooking, that is a whole art unto itself. I feel you on that one.”
“Are you married Inspector? Can I call you by your first name?”
“Corus works.” He took a bite of his sandwich and said while chewing, “I am married, but it’s sort of long distance now. No one home to cook for me. I’m gaining weight from ordering out all the time.”
Corus had weighed a svelte 174 lbs the day he was discharged from the Army. Now he was a shade over 200, ten of which were from the last year alone.
“If I move into my own place, do you think girls will like me more?” Toby asked.
“Let me put it to you this way. You’ll be taking away one more reason for them not to like you. For you, my friend, there is nowhere to go but up.”
Gus came back upstairs with a fistful of subsonic 5.56 rounds, and they all headed back outside. Gus emptied nineteen rounds into a car door, the same number as Corus had counted on Badcocke’s Mercedes. Of nineteen bullets, five made it through the door.
“Were onto his game,” Corus said. “It all makes so much more sense now. If you fired a regular 5.56 at that wall in the hotel, it wouldn’t have buried itself in the stud in the next room. It would have punched through cleanly or blown that 2x4 to smithereens, even after passing through a little sheetrock.”
“Let’s shoot another dummy,” Toby said.
Gus hit the spot that Toby marked for him, just above the dummy’s left eye. The bullet passed through the skull, but left only a small exit hole, from which fake blood dribbled. In the glass behind it, the bullet had punched a hole roughly the size of the other two, but slightly smaller.
“Just like the head wounds that three of the Griffins and Badcocke had.” Corus nodded to himself. There was only one way David Griffin got half his head blow away. “I
see it now. Gus, I know this is a stupid question, but you don’t happen to have a .45 laying around do you?”
Five minutes later the men were looking at the ruined head of a ballistics dummy laying on the turf. Pieces of skull and gel dangled from around the edges of the craterous wound. Corus looked at the windowpane behind where the dummy had sat. The hole was much larger than the others, and remarkably similar to the hole in the window at Skokim pass.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Chu sat back in his office chair, eyebrows raised. “So there was definitely a second shooter? You sure he couldn’t have just shot with the one gun and then with the other?”
“We know there were definitely two weapons used,” Corus said. He was seated across from Chu, next to Rosen. “David Griffin was shot in the head with a high-caliber weapon, probably a pinwheel or hollow-point round. We think it all went down rather fast. Taking time to switch guns might allow someone to scream. Plus, why would he need to switch guns? The shooter with the 5.56 weapon had only shot six rounds at most when David was shot.”
“How do you figure?”
“There’s no way David Griffin would have just stood there while Kirilov went around finishing his family off. Those were the last three of nine total shots from the 5.56 weapon.”
“There could have been a jam,” Rosen said. “Causing the single shooter to use his side arm.”
“It’s Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is usually right, and the simplest explanation here is that there were two shooters. Shooter A shot the mother and father, and when David got up and came toward them, Shooter B shot him. Then Shooter A shot the younger boy and finished the father and mother off.”
“Like the second one was only there for backup,” Rosen said.
“Perhaps, yes.”
“Like if he was just a computer nerd who didn’t have military experience?” Chu asked.
“If he was carrying the food, he might have set it down or held it while the other shooter rushed in from behind and opened fire.”
“A headshot from fifteen feet is pretty damn good,” Chu said.
“But tactically speaking,” Rosen said, “wouldn’t a more experienced killer aim for center of mass? That’s what the first shooter did.”
“Aiming at a head might have been a rookie move,” Chu said.
“If all you’ve seen is shooting in movies and video games,” Rosen added. “It fits. Kirilov is probably Shooter B.”
Felicia Bowman leaned her head into the doorway of Chu’s office. Her hair swung down like a coppery silk curtain. “You fellas ready?”
Corus and Rosen followed her out, leaving Chu to his paperwork.
Kirilov sat chained to the table in detention room A, wearing a beige shirt and pants, cut much like nurse’s scrubs, that he’d been issued at county lockup.
“Mr. Roundley,” Prosecutor Bowman began, “I am prepared to offer your client a plea deal. In exchange for his help, we will allow him to plead guilty to a single murder in the second degree instead of first. No chance of getting the death penalty with the possibility of parole after most of the sentence is carried out.”
Felicia Bowman turned her gaze to Kirilov. “We are willing to believe that you only killed the boy. We know you were the assistant on this job. Perhaps you were coerced in some way. Give us the person who coerced you into this, Andre. Tell us their name and prevent yourself a date with the needle, or the noose if you prefer.”
Kirilov’s eyes flickered behind his glasses, down to the table, to his arm, to Bowman and back to the table again. Corus noticed a subtle difference in his demeanor. He was thinking. His position had changed fundamentally. It had changed, because Corus had something. Kirilov couldn’t know what, but Corus saw in that little eye-flicker that they were right. The young man looked to Roundley, without turning his head more than an inch.
“I see,” Roundley said. “So you would like my client’s assistance?”
“That’s right,” Bowman said.
“For a murder he took no part in.”
Bowman stayed stock still, standing above the table, boring her eyes into him.
Roundley looked to Kirilov, considering the proposition. “I’ll need a minute with my client.”
The three of them stepped out and huddled by a water cooler.
“You think they’ll blink?” Rosen asked.
“If they don’t,” Bowman said, “we will have to decide to release him or charge him.”
“Son of a bitch.”
A moment later, Roundley opened the door and waved them in.
“So what will it be counselor?” Bowman asked, closing the door.
“My client will testify that he mistakenly received the room service order. He was too embarrassed by his mistake and left the next morning.”
“That’s how you think you’re going to get him off?” Bowman asked. “I honestly expected more of you Phillip.”
Roundley chuckled to himself. “You’re right. You and I could go back and forth on this one. Jury selection would probably win or lose the case, don’t you agree?”
“It could, but I’m excellent at jury selection. We also have witnesses to statements made by your client that link your him to the murder.”
“You have one man. Andrew Garvey.”
Bowman was silent for a moment. “So?”
“In his statement, he said my client made these aforementioned threats at what time?”
“Around 8am the morning after the murders.”
“Tell me, Ms. Prosecuting Attorney, could you pick a jury that would believe his testimony after seeing this?” Roundley laid a photocopy of an airline email receipt on the table.
Bowman picked it up and Corus read over her shoulder. It was for a ticket in the name of Andre Kirilov from Sea-Tac to Newark, New Jersey, round trip, the departing flight leaving at 8:35 am.
“This casts further suspicion on your client,” Bowman said, irritation plain in her voice.
“Tell me, Ms. Bowman, do they have cameras and keep records at airports? You know they do. So you will find that my client entered the doors of Sea-Tac’s ticketing terminal at 7am, checked his bags by 7:08, passed through security by 7:23 and was literally stepping onto the plane at 8am.”
Corus felt his face grow heavy and drop.
“How long would you say that it takes to get from Bellevue to Sea-Tac?” Roundley asked. “A half hour at the least? So that means your Mr. Garvey didn’t just have his time wrong by a little, he was off by at least an hour and a half. So my question for the jury is going to be, if he was that wrong about the time of day, what other details might he be mistaken about?”
Roundley shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Hell, I might even ask the jury why Andrew Garvey, a man who has admitted to conspiring to launder money, who admits to being a criminal, why he might have an interest in displacing blame onto my client who has only a minor citation on his record.”
When Felicia Bowman balled her hands into fists, saying nothing back to him, Corus knew they were toast.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Corus slumped in the chair by the wall in Chu’s office. Rosen stood by the desk and Chu sat on it.
“So what just happened in there?” Rosen asked.
“Roundley exposed his client to greater scrutiny by showing he left the city as soon as possible after the crime,” Chu explained. “But in doing so, he trumped our best play, Garvey. Damn that guy is good.”
“So, what does that mean?” Rosen asked. “Does he want a better deal?”
“He wants us to give up entirely,” Corus said.
“We can prove that Garvey was coerced into helping Miles and Badcocke.” Rosen sat forward and chopped a hand through the air into his hand. “He can tell them about the time Kirilov came into his house at night and threatened him.”
“And Roundley will cast aspersions on Garvey’s character, spinning so it looks like Garvey just wants a scapegoat.”
Silence hung he
avy around them. Chu moved behind his desk and sat in his chair. He put his hands on his head and exhaled lazily. “We came so far. You came so far.”
“We never had him with anything iron-clad,” Corus said. “But I thought we had enough.”
“So, why did Garvey get the time wrong?”
“Who knows,” Corus said. “This is the kind of technicality bullpucky that criminal shark lawyers dream of.”
Rosen waved an arm. “So we have a guy pinned at the scene of the crime, circumstantially pinned to the very room the crime took place in, and he works for the company that the murdered man was funneling money to? And we can’t get a conviction off that?”
“No physical evidence turned up linking Kirilov to the scene,” Chu said. “We searched Kirilov’s last known address and found no weapons, no blood. Nothing.”
“Plus, until the forensic accountants with FinCEN finish their investigation – and that could take months – Andrew Garvey’s testimony is the only proof that URM construction and therefore Kirilov were connected to PacTrust. Potentially, Bowman could get a conviction with Garvey’s now tainted testimony, but she doesn’t want to walk out onto thin ice.
“So we just have to wait?” Rosen asked.
“Our investigation just slowed to the pace of federal bureaucracy,” Chu said.
Rosen was about to speak again, but Felicia Bowman entered the room with a dour look on her face. She put her phone in her satchel. “I’ve been speaking with my assistant counsel and one of our consulting advisors, Kurt Beltran. You’ve met him, Corus.”
Corus nodded.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” she said. “We won’t be pressing any charges until more evidence comes to light that doesn’t depend on the credibility of Andrew Garvey. It’s been just over 48 hours. We can’t hold him any longer without a charge. I am instructing you to release Andre Kirilov from custody.”