The Kill Room (25 page)

A
LTHOUGH 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.

“Some mysteries here,” Rhyme said, musing, as he stared at the whiteboards, losing himself in the facts. Half whispering: “Do we like mysteries, rookie?”

“I’d say we do, Lincoln.”

“Ah, right you are. And why?”

“Because they keep us from being, you know, complacent. They make us wonder and when we wonder we discover.”

A smile.

“Now, what do we have, what do we have? First, Unsub Five Sixteen. We’ve got plenty of evidence against him—for the murder of Annette in the Bahamas, the bomb in Java Hut and the murder of Lydia Foster. If—excuse me
when
—we get his ID we can make a solid case against him for explosives and murder.

“Now, the conspiracy case against Shales and Metzger. We can link them—they both work together at NIOS—and we’ve got Shales’s code name, Don Bruns, on the kill order. All we need now is the last piece of the puzzle: proof that Barry Shales was in the Bahamas on May 9. Once we do we’ve got both of them for conspiracy.”

Whispering to himself as he stared at the boards. “Nothing in the physical evidence placing him there. We can prove the unsub was in the South Cove the day before the shooting but not Shales.” He looked toward Sachs. “How’s the datamining coming—is there anything about Shales’s travel history?”

“I’ll call Information Services.” She picked up her mobile.

We don’t need much, Rhyme reflected. A connection could be inferred by the jury—that’s what circumstantial evidence was all about. But there had to be
some
basis for a valid inference. A jury can find a man guilty of DUI hit-and-run, even if he’s found sober and denying the next morning, if a bartender testifies that he downed a dozen beers an hour before the accident and the jury takes that testimony as credible.

Vehicle E-ZPass transponders, credit cards, RFID chips in employee badges, subway MetroCards, TSA records, Customs documents, traffic cameras and security cameras in stores…dozens of sources of information could be used to place suspects at scenes.

He noted that Sachs was jotting quick notes. Good. They’d struck gold, he had a feeling.

Something
would pin Barry Shales to the Bahamas on May 9.

Sellitto was looking at the chart and he echoed Rhyme’s thought. “There’s gotta be something. We know Shales’s the shooter.”

Amelia Sachs disconnected the call and with an uncharacteristically bewildered expression said, “Actually, Lon, no, he’s not.”