Текст книги "The Kill Room"

Автор книги: Jeffery Deaver

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 32 страниц)

V
THE MILLION DOLLAR BULLET
THURSDAY, MAY 18

CHAPTER 56

You’ve got a tan,” Sellitto said.

“I don’t have a tan.”

“You do. You oughta wear sunscreen, Linc.”

“I don’t have a goddamn tan,” he muttered.

“I think you do,” Thom added.

It was nearly 8 a.m. Thom, Pulaski and Rhyme had arrived from LaGuardia airport late, nearly eleven last night, and the aide had insisted that Rhyme get some sleep immediately. The case could wait till this morning.

There’d been no argument; the criminalist had been exhausted. The dunk in the water had taken its toll. The whole trip had, for that matter. But that didn’t stop Rhyme from summoning Thom the moment he’d awakened at six thirty with the push button call switch beside the bed. (The aide had called the device very Downton Abbey , a reference Rhyme did not get.)

The parlor was humming now, with Sellitto, Cooper and Sachs present. And Ron Pulaski – who did  seem to have a tan – was just walking through the door. Nance Laurel had a court appearance on one of her other cases and would arrive later.

Rhyme was in a new wheelchair, a Merits Vision Select. Gray with red fenders. It had been delivered and assembled yesterday, before Rhyme’s return from the Bahamas. Thom had called their insurance company from Nassau and negotiated a speedy purchase. (“They didn’t know what to say,” the aide reported, “when I gave the reason for the loss as ‘immersion in ten feet of water.’”)

Rhyme had picked this particular model because it was known for off road navigation. His old reticence to be in public had disappeared – largely because of his trip to the Bahamas. He wanted more travel and he wanted to work scenes himself again. That required a chair that would get him to as many places as possible.

The Merits had been pimped out a bit to make allowances for Rhyme’s particular condition – such as the strap for his immobile left arm, a touchpad under his working left ring finger and, of course, a cup holder, big enough for both whiskey tumbler and coffee mug. He was now enjoying the latter beverage through a thick straw. He looked over Sellitto, Sachs and Pulaski, then studied the whiteboard, which contained Sachs’s notations of the investigation in his absence.

“Time’s a wasting.” He nodded at the STO order. “Mr. Rashid is going to meet his maker in a day or two if we don’t do something about it. Let’s see what we have.” He now wheeled back and forth in front of the whiteboards containing the analysis of the evidence Sachs had collected at the IED scene at Java Hut and Lydia Foster’s apartment.

“A blue airplane?” he asked, regarding that notation.

Sachs explained about what Henry Cross had told her. The private jet that seemed to be dogging Moreno around the United States and Central and South America.

“I’ve got one of Captain Myers’s Special Services officers searching but they aren’t having much luck. There’s no database of aircraft by color. If it was sold recently, though, brokers might have sales literature with pictures. He’s still checking.”

“All right. Now, let’s look at what we found in the Bahamas. Number one, the Kill Room.”

Rhyme explained to Sachs and Cooper how unsub 516 or Barry Shales had ruined the scene at the inn, but he had some things, including the preliminary report that the local police had done, along with the photos, which Sachs now taped up on a separate whiteboard, along with the paltry crime scene report that the RBPF had originally prepared.

For the next half hour, Sachs and Cooper carefully unpacked and analyzed the shoes and clothing of the three victims who’d been in suite 1200 on the morning of May 9. Each plastic bag was opened over a large sheet of sterile newsprint, and each item of clothing and the shoes were picked over and scraped for trace.

The shoes of Moreno, his guard and de la Rua produced fibers identical to those in the hotel carpet and dirt that matched samples taken from the sidewalk and grounds in front of the inn. Their clothing contained similar trace as well as elements of recent meals, presumably breakfast; they died before lunch. Cooper found pastry flakes, jam and bits of bacon in the case of Moreno and his guard, and allspice and some indeterminate type of pepper sauce on the reporter’s jacket. Moreno and his guard also had traces of crude oil on their shoes, cuffs and sleeves, probably from their meeting on Monday out of the hotel; there weren’t many refineries in New Providence so maybe they had eaten dinner by the docks. The guard had some trace of cigarette ash on his shirt.

This information went up on the board and Rhyme noted but didn’t dwell on any of it; after all, their killer had been a mile away when he’d fired the bullet. Unsub 516 had been in the hotel but even if he’d snuck into the Kill Room itself, none of that trace remained.

He said, “Now. The autopsy report.”

No surprises here either. Moreno had been killed by a massive gunshot trauma to the chest, and the others by blood loss due to multiple lacerations from the flying glass, of varying sizes, mostly three or four millimeters wide, two to three centimeters long.

Cooper looked over the cigarette butts and the candy wrapper that Poitier’s original crime scene searchers had found in the Kill Room but these yielded nothing helpful. The butts were the same brand as the pack of Marlboros found on the guard’s body, the candy had come from a gift basket for Moreno when he arrived. The fingerprints that Pulaski had lifted, not surprisingly, were negative for hits in any database.

“Let’s move on to the prostitute’s apartment. Annette Bodel.”

Pulaski’d done a good job, collecting plenty of trace from near where the killer had searched, along with samplars to eliminate any that was probably not from him. Cooper examined the items and, occasionally, ran samples through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. He finally announced, “First, we’ve got two stroke fuel.”

These were smaller engines, two strokes, like those in snowmobiles and chain saws, in which the lubricating oil is mixed directly with gasoline.

“Jet Ski maybe,” Rhyme said. “She worked in a dive shop part time. Might not be from our perp but we’ll keep it in mind.”

“And sand,” the tech announced. “Along with seawater residue.” He compared the chemical breakdown of these items with what was on the board for two of the prior scenes. “Yep, it’s virtually the same as what Amelia found at Java Hut.”

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow at this. “Ah, a definitive link between Unsub Five Sixteen and the Bahamas. We know he was in Annette’s apartment and I’m ninety nine percent sure he was the one in the South Cove on May eighth. Now, anything linking him to Lydia Foster?”

Pulaski pointed out, “The brown hair, which is what Corporal Poitier said the man in the South Cove Inn had, the one who was there just before Moreno was killed.”

“It suggests ; it doesn’t prove. Keep going, Mel.”

The tech was staring into the eyepiece of a microscope. “Something odd here. Some membrane, orange. I’ll run part of it through the GC/MS.”

Some minutes later he had the results from the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer.

Cooper read, “DHA, C22:6n 3–docosahexaenoic acid.”

“Fish oil,” Rhyme said, looking at the screen on which the microscopic image was being projected. “And with that membrane, see in the upper right corner? I’d say fish eggs: Roe. Or caviar.”

“Also some C8H8O3,” Cooper said.

“You’ve got me,” Rhyme muttered.

The lookup took thirty seconds. “Vanillin.”

“As in vanilla extract?”

“That’s right.”

“Thom! Thom, get in here. Where the hell are you?”

The aide’s voice drifted into the room. “What do you need?”

“You. Present. Here. In the room.”

Rolling down his sleeves, the aide joined them. “How could I resist such a polite summons?”

Sachs laughed.

Rhyme frowned. “Look over those charts, Thom. Put your culinary skills to work. Tell me what you think about those entries, knowing that the docosahexaenoic acid and the C8H8O3 are, respectively, caviar and vanilla.”

The aide stood for a moment, looking over the charts. His face shifted into a smile. “Familiar…Hold on a minute.” He went to a nearby computer and pulled up the New York Times . He did some browsing. Rhyme couldn’t see exactly what he was looking at. “Well, that’s interesting.”

“Ah, could you share  the interesting part?”

“The other two scenes – Lydia Foster and the Java Hut – have traces of artichoke and licorice, right?”

“Right,” Cooper confirmed.

He spun the computer for them to look at. “Well, combine those ingredients with caviar and vanilla and you have a real expensive dish that’s served at the Patchwork Goose. There was just an article about it in the Food section recently.”

“Patchwork…the fuck is that?” Sellitto muttered.

Sachs said, “It’s one of the fanciest restaurants in town. They serve seven or eight courses over four hours and pair the wine. They do weird things like cook with liquid nitrogen and butane torches. Not that I’ve ever been, of course.”

“That’s right,” Thom said, nodding at the screen. It appeared to be a recipe. “And that’s one of the dishes: trout served with artichoke cooked in licorice broth and garnished with roe and vanilla mayonnaise. Your perp left traces of those ingredients?”

“That’s right,” Sachs said.

Sellitto asked, “So he works in the restaurant?”

Thom shook his head. “Oh, I doubt it. You’re committed to working six days a week, twelve hour days at a place like that. He wouldn’t have time to be a professional hit man. And I doubt it’s a customer. I don’t think the ingredients would transfer or last more than a few hours on his clothes. More likely he made the dish at home. From the recipe here.”

“Good, good,” Rhyme whispered. “Now  we know Unsub Five Sixteen went to the Bahamas on May fifteenth to kill Annette Bodel, set the IED at Java Hut and killed Lydia Foster. He was probably the one at the South Cove Inn just before Moreno was shot. He was helping Barry Shales prep for the killing.”

Sachs said, “And we know he likes to cook. Maybe he’s a former pro. That could be helpful.”

Cooper lifted his phone and took a call; Rhyme hadn’t heard it ring and wondered if the tech had the unit on vibrate or if he himself was suffering from water on the ear from his swim. Lord knew his eyes still stung.

The crime scene tech thanked the caller and announced, “We ran the bulb of the brown hair that Amelia recovered from Lydia Foster’s. That was the results of the CODIS analysis. Nothing. Whoever the unsub is, he’s not in any criminal DNA databases.”

As Sachs wrote their latest findings on the whiteboard Rhyme said, “Now we’re making some progress. But the key to nailing Metzger is the sniper rifle and the key to the rifle is the bullet. Let’s take a look at it.”

CHAPTER 57

Although people have been eliminating each other with firearms for more than a thousand years, the forensic analysis of guns and bullets is a relatively new science.

In probably the first instance of applying the discipline, investigators in England in the middle of the nineteenth century got a confession from a killer based on matching a bullet with the mold that made it. In 1902 an expert witness (Oliver Wendell Holmes, no less) helped prosecutors convict a suspect by matching a bullet test fired by the suspect’s gun to the murder slug.

However, it wasn’t until Calvin Goddard, a medical doctor and forensic scientist, published “Forensic Ballistics” in 1925 that the discipline truly took off. Goddard is still known as the father of ballistic science.

Rhyme had three goals in applying the rules Goddard had laid down ninety years ago. First, to identify the bullet. Second, from that information to identify the types of guns that could have fired it. Third, to link this particular bullet to a specific gun of that sort, which could be traced to the shooter, in this case Barry Shales.

The team now turned to the first of these questions. The bullet itself.

Gloved and masked, Sachs opened the plastic bag containing the bullet, a misshapen oblong of copper and lead. She looked it over. “It’s a curious round. Unusual. First, it’s big – three hundred grain.”

The weight of the projectile fired from the gun – called a slug – is measured in grains. A three hundred grain bullet is about three quarters of an ounce. Most hunting, combat and even sniper rifles fire a bullet that’s much smaller, around 180 grains.

She measured it with a caliber gauge, a flat metal disk with holes of various sizes punched into it. “And a rare caliber. A big one. Four twenty.”

Rhyme frowned. “Not four sixteen?” His first thought upon seeing it in the Kill Room. The.416 was a recent innovation in rifle bullets, designed by the famous Barrett Arms. The cartridge was a variation on the.50 round used by snipers around the world. While some countries and states in the U.S. banned the.50 for civilian use, the.416 was still legal most places.

“No, definitely bigger.” Sachs then examined the round with a microscope, low power. “And it’s a sophisticated design. It’s a hollow point with a plastic tip – a modified spitzer.”

Arms manufacturers began to incorporate aerodynamics into the design of their projectiles around the time, not surprisingly, that airplanes were developed. The spitzer round – from the German word for “pointed bullet”–was developed for long distance rifle shooting. Being so streamlined, it was very accurate; the downside was that it remained intact on striking the target and caused much less damage than a blunt tipped, hollow point round, which would mushroom inside the flesh.

Some bullet manufacturers came up with the idea of grafting a sharp plastic tip onto a hollow point slug. The tip produced the streamlined quality of a spitzer round but broke away upon hitting the target, allowing the projectile to expand.

This was the type of bullet that Barry Shales had used to kill Robert Moreno.

Completing the streamlined design, she added, the slug was a boattail – it narrowed in the rear, just like a racing yacht, to further cut drag as it sped through the air.

She summarized, “It’s big, heavy, accurate as hell.” Nodded at the crime scene photo of Moreno sprawled on the couch in the Kill Room, blood and tissue radiating out behind him. “And devastating.”

She scraped the slug and analyzed some of the ejecta residue – the gas and particles that result when the powder ignites. “The best of the best,” she said. “The primers were Federal 210 match quality, the powder was Hodgdon Extreme Extruded – made to the highest tolerances. This’s your Ferrari of bullets.”

“Who makes it?” This was the important question.

But an Internet search returned very few hits. None of the big manufacturers like Winchester, Remington or Federal offered it and none of the retail ammo sellers stocked the bullet. Sachs, however, found some references to the mysterious round’s existence in some obscure shooting forums and learned that an arms company in New Jersey, Walker Defense Systems, might be the maker. Its website revealed that, though Walker didn’t make rifles, it manufactured a plastic tipped spitzer.420 boattail.

Sachs looked at Rhyme. “They only sell to the army, police…and  the federal government.”

The first goal was satisfied, the ID of the bullet. Now the team turned to finding the type of weapon that had fired it.

“First of all,” Rhyme asked, “what kind of action was it? Bolt, semiauto, three shot burst, full auto? Sachs, what do you think?”

“Snipers never use full auto or bursts – too hard to compensate for repeated recoil over distance. If it was bolt action, he wouldn’t have fired three rounds. If the first one missed, he’d’ve alerted the target, who’d go to cover. Semiauto, I’d vote.”

Sellitto said, “Can’t be that hard to find. There’s gotta be only one or two kinds of guns in the world that’ll fire a slug like that. It’s pretty unique.”

“Pretty  unique,” Rhyme blurted, with a frosting of sarcasm. “Just like being sort of  pregnant.”

“Linc,” Sellitto replied cheerfully, “you ever think about teaching grade school? I’m sure the kids’d love ya.”

Sellitto was right substantively, though, Rhyme knew. The rarer the bullet, the fewer the types of guns that will fire it. This would make it easier to identify the rifle and therefore easier to trace it to Barry Shales.

The two characteristics of a bullet that link it to the weapon that fired it are caliber, which they now knew, and rifling marks.

All modern firearms barrels have spiral troughs cut into them to make the bullet rotate and thus move more accurately to the target. This is known as rifling (even though it applies to pistols too). Gun manufacturers make these troughs – called lands (the raised part) and grooves – in various configurations, depending on the type of gun, the bullet it’s intended to shoot and its purpose. The twist, as it’s called, might spin the bullet clockwise or counter, and will spin it faster or slower depending on how many times the slug revolves in the barrel.

A look at the slug revealed that Barry Shales’s gun spun the slug counterclockwise, once every ten inches.

This was unusual, Rhyme knew; spirals are generally tighter, with the ratio of 1:7 or 1:8.

“Means it’s a long barrel, right?” Rhyme asked Cooper.

“Yep. Very long. Odd.”

Given the rare caliber and rifling, it would normally be easy to isolate brands of semiautomatic rifles that produced characteristics like that. Ballistics databases correlate all this information and a simple computer search returns the results in seconds.

But nothing was normal about this case.

Sachs looked up from her computer and reported, “Not a single hit. No record of any commercial arms manufacturer making a rifle like that.”

“Is there anything else we can tell about the gun?” Rhyme asked. “Look over the crime scene photos, Moreno’s body. See if that tells us anything.”

The crime scene specialist shoved his glasses up high and rocked back and forth as he regarded the grim pictures. If anybody had insights it would be Mel Cooper. The detective was active in the International Association for Identification, which was nearly a hundred years old, and he had the highest levels of certification you could attain from the IAI, in all areas of specialty: Forensic Art, Footwear and Tire Track Analysis, Forensic Photography/Imaging, Tenprint Fingerprint, and Latent Print – as well as Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, a personal interest of both Cooper and Rhyme.

He could read crime scene photos the way a doctor could an X ray. He now said, “Ah, take a look at that, the spread.” He touched a photo, indicating the blood and bits of flesh and bone on the couch and floor behind it. “He fired from two thousand yards, right?”

“About that,” Rhyme said.

“Amelia, what would the typical velocity of a round that big be?”

She shrugged. “Out of the muzzle at twenty seven hundred feet per second, tops. Speed at impact? I’d say eighteen hundred.”

Cooper shook his head. “That slug was traveling at over three thousand feet a second when it hit Moreno.”

Sachs said, “Really?”

“Positive.”

“Fast. Real fast. Confirms the rifle had a particularly long barrel and means the shell’d be loaded with a lot of powder. Normally a slug that size would have forty or forty two grains of propellant. For that speed, I’d guess twice  as much, and that means a reinforced receiver.”

This was the part of the rifle that held the cartridge for firing. The receiver was thicker than the barrel to withstand the initial pressure of the expanding gases, so that the gun didn’t blow up when the shooter pulled the trigger.

“Any conclusions?”

“Yeah,” Sachs said. “That Barry Shales, or somebody at NIOS, made the gun himself.”

Rhyme grimaced. “So there’s no way to trace a sale of a serial numbered rifle to NIOS or Shales. Hell.”

His third goal, linking the bullet to Shales through his weapon, had just grown considerably more difficult.

Sachs said, “We’re still waiting on Information Services to get back to us on the datamining. Maybe they’ll find a record of Shales buying gun parts or tools.”

Rhyme shrugged. “Well, let’s see what else the slug tells us. Mel, friction ridge?”

Fingerprints actually can survive a bullet’s transit through the air, through a body and sometimes even through a wall.

Provided Barry Shales had touched the bullets with his bare fingers. Which wasn’t the case. Sachs, goggled, was blasting the slug with an alternative light source wand. “None.”

“What about trace?”

Cooper was going over the slug now. “Bits of glass dust from the window.” He then used tweezers to remove some minuscule bits of material. He examined the specimens closely under the microscope. “Vegetation,” Rhyme postulated, looking at the monitor.

“Yes, that’s right,” the tech said. He ran a chemical analysis. “It’s urushiol. A skin irritating allergen.” He looked up. “Poison ivy, sumac?”

“Ah, the poisonwood tree. Outside the window of the Kill Room. The bullet must’ve passed through a leaf before it hit Moreno.”

The tech also found a fiber, identical to those making up Moreno’s shirt, and traces of blood, which matched the activist’s blood in type.

Cooper said, “Aside from that and the ejecta, there’s nothing else on the bullet.”

Rhyme turned his new chair to face the evidence boards. “Ron, if you could update our opus with your fine Catholic school handwriting? I need to optic the big picture,” he added, unable to resist a bit of jargon worthy of their leader in absentia, Captain Bill Myers.