“Jesus,” Fielding said, amazed. “It looks like a damn octopus.”
I pulled off latex gloves and replaced them with ones made of a tightly woven cloth, for ammunition like Black Talon was dangerous in the ER and the morgue. It was a bigger threat than a needle stick, and I did not know if Danny had hepatitis or AIDS. I did not want to cut myself on the jagged metal that had killed him so his assailant could end up taking two lives instead of one.
Fielding put on a pair of blue Nitrile gloves, which were sturdier than latex, but not good enough.
“You can wear those for scribing,” I said. “But that’s it.”
“That bad?”
“Yes,” I said, plugging in the autopsy saw. “You wear those and handle this and you’re going to get cut.”
“This doesn’t seem like a carjacking. This seems like someone who was very serious.”
“Believe me,” I raised my voice above the loud whine of the saw, “it doesn’t get any more serious than this.”
The story told by what lay beneath the scalp only got worse. The bullet had shattered the temporal, occipital, parietal and frontal bones of the skull. In fact, had it not lost its energy fragmenting the thick petrous ridge, the twisted claw would have exited, and we would have lost what was a very important piece of evidence. As for the brain, what the Black Talon had done to it was awful. The explosion of gas and shredding caused by copper and lead had plowed a terrible path through the miraculous matter that had made Danny who he was. I rinsed the bullet, then cleaned it thoroughly in a weak solution of Clorox, because body fluids can be infectious and are notorious for oxidizing metal evidence.
At almost noon, I double-bagged it in plastic envelopes and carried it upstairs to the firearms lab, where weapons of every sort were tagged and deposited on countertops, or wrapped in brown paper bags. There were knives to be examined for tool marks, submachine guns and even a sword. Henry Frost, who was new to Richmond but well known in his field, was staring into a computer screen.
“Has Marino been up here?” I asked him as I walked in.
Frost looked up, hazel eyes focusing, as if he had just arrived from some distant place where I had never been. “About two hours ago.” He tapped several keys.
“Then he gave you the cartridge case.” I moved beside his chair.
“I’m working on it now,” he said. “The word is, this case is a number-one priority.”
Frost, I guessed, was about my age and had been divorced at least twice. He was attractive and athletic, with well-proportioned features and short black hair. According to the typical legends people always claimed about their peers, he ran marathons, was an expert in whitewater rafting, and could shoot a fly off an elephant at a hundred paces. What I did know from personal observation was that he loved his trade better than any woman, and there was nothing he would rather talk about than guns.
“You’ve entered the forty-five?” I asked him.
“We don’t know for a fact it’s connected to the crime, do we?” He glanced at me.
“No,” I said. “We don’t know for a fact.” I spotted a chair with wheels close by and pulled it over. “The cartridge case was found about ten feet from where we believe he was shot. In the woods. It’s clean. It looks new. And I’ve got this.” I dipped into a pocket of my lab coat and withdrew the envelope containing the Black Talon bullet.
“Wow,” he said.
“Consistent with a Winchester forty-five?”
“Man alive. There is always a first time.” He opened the envelope and was suddenly excited. “I’ll measure lands and grooves and tell you in a minute whether it’s a forty-five.”
He moved before the comparison microscope and used the Air Gap method to fix the bullet to the stage with wax so he didn’t leave any marks on metal that weren’t already there.
“Okay,” he talked without looking up, “the rifling is to the left, and we’ve got six lands and grooves.” He began measuring with micrometer jaws. “Land impressions are point oh-seven-four. Groove impressions are point one-five-three. I’m going to enter that into the GRC,” he said, referring to the FBI’s computerized General Rifling Characteristics. “Now let’s determine the caliber,” he spoke abstractedly as he typed.
While the computer raced through its databases, Frost checked the bullet with a vernier measuring device. Not surprisingly, what he found was that the caliber of the Black Talon was .45, and then the GRC came back with a list of twelve brands of firearms that could have fired it. All, except Sig Sauer and several Colts, were military pistols.
“What about the cartridge case?” I said. “Do we know anything about it?”
“I’ve got it on live video but I haven’t run it yet.”
He returned to the chair where I had found him when I had first come in and began typing on a workstation connected by modem to an FBI firearms evidence imaging system called DRUGFIRE. The application was part of the massive Crime Analysis Information Network known as CAIN, which Lucy had developed, and the point was to link firearms-related crimes. Succinctly put, I wanted to know if the gun that had killed Danny might have killed or maimed before, especially since the type of ammunition hinted that the assailant was no novice.
The workstation was simple, with its 486 turbo PC connected to a video camera and comparison microscope that made it possible to capture images in real time and in color on a twenty-inch screen. Frost went into another menu and the video display was suddenly filled with a checkerboard of silvery disks representing other .45 cartridge cases, each with unique impressions. The breech face of the Winchester .45 connected to my case was on the top left-hand side, and I could see every mark made by breech block, firing pin, ejector or any other metal part of the gun that had fired the round into Danny’s head.
“Yours has a big drag to the left.” Frost showed me what looked like a tail coming out of the circular dent left by the firing pin. “And there’s this other mark here, also to the left.” He touched the screen with his finger.
“Ejector?” I said.
“Nope, I’d say that’s from the firing pin bouncing back.”
“Unusual?”
“Well, I’d just say it’s unique to this weapon,” he replied as he stared. “So we can run this if you want.”
“Let’s.”
He pulled up another screen and entered the information he had, such as the hemispherical shape the firing pin had impressed in the soft metal of the primer, and the direction of twist and parallel striation of the microscopic characteristics of the breech face. We did not enter anything about the bullet I had recovered from Danny’s brain, for we could not prove that the Black Talon and the cartridge case were related, no matter how much we might suspect it. The examination of those two items of evidence was really unrelated, for lands and grooves and firing pin impressions are as different as fingerprints and footwear. All one can hope is that the stories the witnesses tell are the same.
Amazingly, in this case they were. When Frost executed his search, we had to wait only a minute or two before DRUGFIRE let us know that it had several candidates that might match the small, nickel-plated cylinder found ten feet from Danny’s blood.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here.” Frost talked to himself as he positioned the top of the list on his screen. “This is your front runner.” He dragged his finger across the glass. “No contest. This one’s way ahead of the pack.”
“A Sig forty-five P220,” I said, looking at him in astonishment. “The cartridge case is matching with a weapon versus another cartridge case?”
“Yes. Damn if it isn’t. Je-sus Christ.”
“Let me make sure I understand this.” I could not believe what I was seeing. “You wouldn’t have the characteristics of a firearm entered into DRUGFIRE unless that firearm had been turned in to a lab. By the police, for some reason.”
“That’s how it’s done,” Frost agreed as he began to print screens. “This Sig forty-five that’s in the computer is coming up as the sam
e one that fired the cartridge found near Danny Webster’s body. That much we know right this second. What I’ve got to do is pull the actual cartridge case from the test fire done when we originally got the gun.” He stood.
I did not move as I continued staring at the list in DRUGFIRE with its symbols and abbreviations that told us about this pistol. It left recoil and drag marks, or its fingerprints, on the cartridge cases of every round it spent. I thought of Ted Eddings’ stiff body in the cold waters of the Elizabeth River. I thought of Danny dead near a tunnel that no longer led anywhere.
“Then this gun somehow got back out on the street,” I said.
Frost pursed his lips as he opened file drawers. “It would appear that way. But I really don’t know the details of why it was entered into the system to begin with.” Still rooting around, he added, “I believe the police department that originally turned the weapon in to us was Henrico County. Let’s see, where’s CVA5471? We are seriously running out of room in this place.”
“This was submitted last fall.” I noted the date on the computer screen. “September twenty-ninth.”
“Right. That should be the date the form was completed.”
“Do you know why the police turned the gun in?”
“You’d have to call them,” Frost said.
“Let’s get Marino on it now.”
“Good idea.”
I called Marino’s pager as Frost pulled a file folder. Inside was the usual clear plastic envelope that we used to store the thousands of cartridge cases and shotgun shells that came through Virginia’s labs every year.
“Here we go,” he said.
“You have any Sig P220s in here?” I got up, too.
“One. It should be on the rack with the other forty-five auto loads.”
While he mounted his test-fire cartridge case on the microscope’s stage, I walked into a room that was either a nightmare or toy store, depending on your point of view. Walls were pegboards crowded with pistols, revolvers, and Tec-11s and Tec-9s. It was depressing to think how many deaths were represented by the weapons in this one cramped room, and how many of the cases had been mine. The Sig Sauer P220 was black, and looked so much like the nine-millimeter carried by Richmond police that at a glance I could not have told them apart. Of course, on close inspection, the .45 was somewhat bigger, and I suspected its muzzle mark might be different, too.
“Where’s the ink pad?” I asked Frost as he leaned over the microscope, lining up both cartridge cases so he could physically compare them side by side.
“In my top desk drawer,” he said as the telephone rang. “Towards the back.”
I got out the small tin of fingerprint ink and unfolded a snowy clean cotton twill cloth, which I placed on a thin, soft plastic pad. Frost picked up the phone.
“Hey, Bud. We got a hit on DRUGFIRE,” he said, and I knew he was talking to Marino. “Can you run something down?”
He proceeded to tell Marino what he knew. Then Frost said to me as he hung up, “He’s going to check with Henrico even as we speak.”
“Good,” I abstractedly said as I pressed the pistol’s barrel into the ink, and then onto the cloth.
“These are definitely distinctive,” I said right off as I studied several blackened muzzle marks that clearly showed the combat pistol’s front sight blade, recoil guide and shape of the slide.
“You think we could identify that specific type of pistol?” he asked, and he was peering into the microscope again.
“On a contact wound, theoretically, we could,” I said. “The obvious problem is that a forty-five loaded with high-performance ammunition is so incredibly destructive, you aren’t likely to find a good pattern, not on the head.”
This had been true in Danny’s case, even after I had conjured up my plastic surgery skills to reconstruct the entrance wound as best I could. But as I compared the cloth to diagrams and photographs I had made downstairs in the morgue, I found nothing inconsistent with a Sig P220 being the murder weapon. In fact, I thought I might have matched a sight mark protruding from the margin of the entrance.
“This is our confirmation,” Frost said, adjusting the focus as he continued staring into the comparison microscope.
We both turned at the sound of someone running down the hall.
“You want to see?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” I said as yet another person ran past, keys jingling madly from a belt.
“What the hell?” Frost got up, frowning toward the door.
Voices had gotten louder outside in the hall, and now people were hurrying by, but going the other way. Frost and I stepped outside the lab at the same moment several security guards rushed past, heading for their station. Scientists in lab coats stood in doorways casting about. Everyone was asking everyone else what was going on, when suddenly the fire alarm hammered overhead and red lights in the ceiling flashed.
“What the hell is this, a fire drill?” Frost yelled.
“There isn’t one scheduled.” I held my hands over my ears as people ran.
“Does that mean there’s a fire?” He looked stunned.
I glanced up at sprinkler heads in the ceilings, and said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I ran downstairs and had just pushed through doors into the hall on my floor when a violent white storm of cool halon gas blasted from the ceiling. It sounded as if I were surrounded by huge cymbals being beaten madly with a million sticks as I dashed in and out of rooms. Fielding was gone, and every other office I checked had been evacuated so fast that drawers were left open, and slide displays and microscopes were on. Cool clouds rolled over me, and I had the surreal sensation I was flying through a hurricane in the middle of an air raid. I dashed into the library, the restrooms, and when satisfied that everyone was safely out, I ran down the hall and pushed my way out of the front doors. For a moment, I stood to catch my breath and let my heart slow down.
The procedure for alarms and drills was as rigidly structured as most routines in the state. I knew I would find my staff gathered on the second floor of the Monroe Tower parking deck across Franklin Street. By now, all Consolidated Lab employees should be in their designated spots, except for section chiefs and agency heads, and of those, it seemed, I was the last to leave, except for the director of general services, who was in charge of my building. He was briskly crossing the street in front of me, a hard hat tucked under his arm. When I called out to him, he turned around and squinted as if he did not know me at all.
“What in God’s name is going on?” I asked as I caught up with him and we crossed to the sidewalk.
“What’s going on is you better not have requested anything extra in your budget this year.” He was an old man who was always well dressed and unpleasant. Today he was in a rage.
I stared at the building and saw no smoke as fire trucks screamed and blared several streets away.
“Some jackass tripped the damn deluge system, which doesn’t stop until all the chemicals are dumped.” He glared at me as if I were to blame. “I had the damn thing set on a delay to prevent this very thing.”
“Which wasn’t going to help if there was a chemical fire or explosion in a lab,” I couldn’t resist pointing out, because most of his decisions were about as bad. “You don’t want a thirty-second delay when something like that happens.”
“Well, something like that didn’t happen. Do you have any idea how much this is going to cost?”
I thought of the paperwork on my desk and other important items flung far and wide and possibly damaged. “Why would anyone trip the system?” I asked.
“Look, at the moment I’m about as informed as you are.”
“But thousands of gallons of chemicals have been dumped over all of my offices, and the morgue and the anatomical division.” We climbed stairs, my frustration becoming harder to contain.
“You won’t know it was even there.” He rudely waved off the remark. “It disappears like a vapor.”
“It’s sprayed
all over bodies we are autopsying, including several homicides. Let’s hope a defense attorney never brings that up in court.”
“What you’d better hope is that somehow we can pay for this. To refill those halon tanks, we’re talking several hundred thousand dollars. That’s what ought to make you stay awake at night.”
The second level of the parking deck was crowded with hundreds of state employees on an unexpected break. Ordinarily, drills and false alarms were an invitation to play, and people were in good moods as long as the weather was nice. But no one was relaxed this day. It was cold and gray, and people were talking in excited voices. The director abruptly walked off to speak to one of his henchmen, and I began to look around. I had just spotted my staff when I felt a hand on my arm.
“Geez, what’s the matter?” Marino asked when I jumped. “You got post-traumatic stress syndrome?”
“I’m sure I do,” I said. “Were you in the building?”
“Nope, but not far away. I heard about your full fire alarm on the radio and thought I’d check it out.”
He hitched up his police belt with all its heavy gear, his eyes roaming the crowd. “You mind telling me what the hell’s going on? You finally get a case of spontaneous combustion?”
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on. But what I’ve been told is that someone apparently tripped a false alarm that set off the deluge system throughout the entire building. Why are you here?”
“I see Fielding way over there.” Marino nodded. “And Rose. They’re all together. You look cold as shit.”
“You were just in the area?” I asked, because when he was evasive, I knew something was up.
“I could hear the damn alarm all the way on Broad Street,” he said.
As if on cue, the awful clanging across the street suddenly stopped. I stepped closer to the parking deck wall and looked over the top of it as I worried more about what I would find when all of us were allowed to return to the building. Fire trucks rumbled loudly in parking lots, and firefighters in protective gear were entering through several different doors.
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