The Quest: Countdown to Armageddon: Book 6 (20 page)

     But crime scene bullets aren’t much good unless they can be traced to a specific weapon.

     And to identify the weapon, it must be located. Then it must be fired to obtain bullets to compare with the crime scene samples.

     It would take some doing to get bullets fired from Robbie Benton’s duty rifle to do the comparison with. Frank and Chief Martinez knew that if Robbie was guilty of the shooting and suspected they were on to him, he’d probably dispose of the rifle.

     And that would be easy enough to do. He’d simply bury it, or throw it into the middle of a deep river or lake. He’d damage the trunk of his patrol car by prying it open with a crow bar, then file a report that someone broke into his car as he slept and stole the weapon.

     So Frank and the chief had to somehow get the weapon, test fire it, and return it to the car without Robbie knowing about it.

     And they had to make sure that Robbie had no clue he was a suspect in John Castro’s shooting.

     “I’ve got the perfect idea,” Martinez had told Frank.

     “On the first of every month I sit in on the San Antonio city council meeting to give them the monthly crime stats and any other pertinent information about what’s going on in their police department.

     “I’ve always rewarded one of my officers by taking them along with me on such meetings. They ride to city hall with me in my car. They get to meet the mayor and the city council members. And they get a good civics lesson and see how the city is run.

     “The best part is, they get paid for goofing off for half a day.

     “My officers always seem to enjoy it and view it as a reward, of sorts, because they know I only take the officers who are doing a good job.

     “The first is three days from now. I’ll invite Officer Benton to go with me. And that’ll do two things. First, it’ll convince him that he’s not a suspect in the Castro shooting and Brown murder. After all, if I only invite my best officers to this function, why would I invite a suspected criminal? That should cause him to put his guard down so he doesn’t try to get rid of the weapon.

     “The second thing it’ll do is get him away from his cruiser for about three hours or so. It’ll be parked at the station, in the police garage. Our maintenance people will have a spare key to the trunk. You can get the weapon, test fire it, collect your bullets, and return it without him ever knowing it was gone.”

     Frank had been impressed.

     “That’s a brilliant plan, Mike. You’re damn near as smart as me.”

     “Frank, I love you like a brother, so I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings, but I’m way smarter than you’ll ever be. That’s why you’re working for me, instead of the other way around.”

     “Yeah, whatever. Anyway, if the bullets match up I’m going to arrest your man Benton. Are you gonna be okay with that?”

     Martinez thought hard for several moments, as though trying to find the right words.

     “I’ve got police blue coursing through my veins. I’ve been a cop for so long I wouldn’t know what to do if I had to give it up. It’s literally all I know. I’m closer to my police brothers than I am to my own wife in a lot of ways.

     “So I’m a big believer in the thin blue line, and watching the backs of my fellow officers. I’m the first one to stand up for an officer in trouble. One who does something stupid or makes a mistake.

     “But if Benton is guilty of this, this represents more than a mere mistake or error in judgement. This represents an attack upon my boys in blue. An assault on a good officer by one who’s gone bad.

     “And in that case, my duty isn’t to side with Benton and try to help him crawl out of the mess he’s in.

     “In that case, my duty is to protect the good officers from anyone who would do them harm. Even from another officer.

     “So, yes. If the bullets match up I’ll be okay with you slapping the cuffs on him. However…”

     Frank looked at his friend.

     “Yes?”

     “However, it goes both ways. If we are quick to suspect this man because circumstantial evidence seems to point his way, then we need to be just as quick to clear his name if that evidence doesn’t pan out. I would much rather clear this officer of any wrongdoing than I would like to see him in jail.

     “Even if it means you losing the only suspect you have.”

     “Me too, Mike. I hate to see a cop go bad as much as anyone else. But here’s another question. Are you going to be able to sit next to this guy at the city council meeting and put on a happy face? Knowing how close you are to John Castro and also knowing that Benton might have pulled the trigger? Knowing that you might be sitting next to a brutal sadist who strangled Luther Brown and maybe others we don’t even know about? Will you be able to do that?”

     “Yes. Because at heart I’m an optimistic kind of guy. And I love my boys in blue. And until you find solid evidence he was the one who shot John Castro and murdered Luther Brown, Benton is still one of my boys. And I’ll continue to support him until the evidence tells me to stop.”

-45-

     Frank stood on the sidewalk outside the SAPD parking garage, pacing back and forth and pretending to be waiting for someone.

     And he was, in a sense.

    He was waiting for Chief Martinez’ car to pull from the garage and onto the street, heading toward City Hall a few blocks away.

     In his pocket was a key to a 2001 Crown Victoria, SAPD number 395. Officer Benton’s car.

     He could have signed out the key from the maintenance department after Martinez left with Officer Benton.

     But that would have meant an additional delay. And he wanted to get this task over quickly.

     Frank was still having mixed feelings about Robbie Benton. If he was guilty of shooting John Castro and strangling Luther Brown, he deserved to be put away.

     But Frank, like Martinez, was a member of the blue brotherhood. And no cop wanted to think that one of their own might be a vicious killer.

     As Frank reached the corner of Travis Avenue and turned around to head back, the chief’s unmarked Plymouth Fury pulled out.

     It drove past Frank, and the car’s occupants seemingly didn’t see him at all.

     They seemed to be deeply engaged in conversation.

     Frank took a last drag off a stale cigarette he’d been smoking and found himself wishing that someone would start growing tobacco again.

     He stole into the garage and found Robbie’s cruiser on the second level.

     In the trunk, resting in a steel rack specially made for it, was Robbie’s AR-15 rifle.

     It had a ten round magazine in it, in case firepower was needed in a hurry.

     It wasn’t charged, though, so there wasn’t a bullet in the chamber.

     That would have violated department policy.

     That same department policy required Frank to clear the weapon, just in case. He did so, and left the magazine in the trunk.

     He’d use his own bullets in the lab in case Robbie, like many police officers, counted his ammunition on a regular basis.

     He did take the bullets out of the magazine and count them, though.

     There were only eight bullets.

     But that could be just a coincidence.

     He carried the rifle down the stairs to the basement, where the forensics laboratory was located.

     At the lab, he fired the weapon twice, catching the shells in a thick, gooey gelatin designed to stop bullets without damaging them.

     Then he returned the rifle to Robbie’s car, replaced the magazine, and nested it back into its cradle.

     By the time the Chief and Robbie were in City Council Chambers, listening to the mayor drone on and on about inane matters, Frank was back in the lab and ready to determine once and for all whether Robbie was the man he was seeking.

    Frank’s ballistics skills were indeed rusty, as he’d suspected. And as he’d told the chief.

     But he quickly learned that using a two sided microscope was somewhat akin to riding a bicycle. Once learned, the talent never really went away.

     He used a Reddy Model 210 ballistics comparison microscope that had been around since the early 1970s. It survived the blackout because it was old school. It had no electric or electronic components which would have been fried during the blackout.

     Frank felt comfortable with the piece of equipment because he was old school too. Like a lot of other older people, he was more able to deal with the massive loss of technology the blackout brought about. For the first part of his life, such technology simply didn’t exist, so Frank knew how to do without it.

     A younger police technician who’d always used computer comparison readers to compare bullets wouldn’t have a clue how to do the same process using a microscope.

     But Frank did.

     He removed one of the bullets found at the crime scene and inserted it into a tiny rolling vise on the left side of the microscope. Then he clamped it securely into place. Looking through the microscope, he slowly turned the bullet until he found a very distinctive set of scratch marks. The marks were created by the rifling on the inside of the AR-15’s barrel, which caused the bullet to spin as it left the weapon. A spinning bullet is a bullet that flies truer and is more stable. Without the rifling, the bullet would tumble as it flew, and would likely seldom hit what it was being aimed at.

     Ballistics experts determined long ago that each weapon’s rifling leaves behind very distinctive marks, which are consistent with each bullet it fires. Determining whether two bullets came from the same gun is simply a matter of comparing the scratches, or striations, to see if they are the same.

     Next, Frank took the first of the bullets he’d fired from Robbie’s weapon, which he’d labeled “Sample 1.”

     He mounted it into a second tiny vise on the right side of the microscope and clamped it into place.

     Then, he very slowly turned the second bullet, half hoping the striations would line up.

     And half afraid that they would.

     They lined up perfectly.

     An hour later, Frank finished his work on the bullets. There was no doubt. All four bullets were fired from the same weapon.

     But Frank was a very thorough man, and had been to enough murder trials to know that defense attorneys always try to make light of ballistics tests on bullets.

     When Robbie Benton went to trial, his lawyers would try to convince the jury that ballistics matches are a myth. That sometimes the striations from two different weapons look close enough to be accepted as matches when they really aren’t.

     And Frank had been in trials when some of the juries were actually suckered into believing such rubbish. And he’d seen a couple of killers go free because of it.

     So Frank, being the thorough detective he was, also took the time and trouble to examine the shell casings.

     One of them was missing, of course. Robbie had taken it from the scene and buried it in the woods south of San Antonio. But Frank had the two shells from his test firing and the one found in Robbie’s car. If they matched it would make it that much harder for a defense attorney to discount them.

     Like the bullet striations, each brass casing fired from a particular weapon has its own unique strike mark. Shell casings which are ejected from a weapon after being fired also typically have unique scratch marks which are left behind during the ejection process.

     Each of the three brass casings Frank had, therefore, had unique markings on their ends as well as their housings.

     Again, everything matched up perfectly.

     The defense attorney could still argue that Robbie Benton was framed. That for some reason Frank Woodard had a vendetta against Benton and therefore falsified the evidence.

     But juries expected such claims in a murder trial and tended to give more weight to things they could see, as opposed to things that were claimed.

     Robbie’s defense team would also point out that Robbie’s weapon wasn’t always accessible only to Robbie. Although recent department policy allowed officers to take their cars home at night, that hadn’t always been the case. Before the SAPD mechanics got enough vehicles running for each officer to have his own, they had to share vehicles.

     Even now, when too many vehicles were in the shop for repairs, the SAPD would recall cruisers from officers on their two day breaks so they could be used by others.

     So Robbie’s attorneys could claim that someone else might have been driving Robbie’s cruiser on the day John Castro was shot.

     The SAPD vehicle dispatch supervisor would counter the argument by producing his own records, showing that on the day in question the vehicle was under the control of Officer Benton and he alone.

     The defense would come back and claim that the dispatch supervisor’s records were flawed. That he’d simply made a mistake.

     Charges of manipulation, of incompetence, of malice toward Robbie would be thrown around. The defense would essentially throw anything they could at the wall to see what stuck in an effort to set their client free.

     But that would all come later.

     For now, on this particular day, Frank’s work was done. He was confident when he turned the evidence into the property room that he’d done his work correctly. He’d kept the chains of evidence unbroken. He’d recorded every detail of every examination just as he’d been trained to do.

     He’d done his job.

     He was confident about that.

     Still, as Frank walked out of the property room and up to the temporary office Martinez had given him on the third floor, he felt haggard.

     He felt he’d somehow aged ten years on that particular day.

     As a detective, he should be elated that he’d closed his case. A homicide cop always enjoys putting killers away.

     But a police officer never likes having to admit that one of their own has gone bad. It leaves a sour taste in the mouths of the good officers. The ones who do their jobs right, and with honor, and who lay their lives on the line each and every day for a largely unappreciative public.

     Bad cops give good cops a bad name.

     Frank had but one thing left to do. He regained his composure, then left his office to walk to the fifth floor to meet with Chief Martinez.

     It was time to spoil the chief’s day too.

-46-

     Robbie Benton returned from his meeting with the City Council a little bit bored. He’d expected the session to be a lot more interesting, and what he’d witnessed instead was an endless stream of questions and answers about property lines, building codes and requests to demolish buildings.

     Still, he had a chance to schmooze with the chief and maybe score some points with him. The rumors were flying that the department was going to promote several of its officers to the rank of sergeant.

     If he could land such a promotion, he would outrank John Castro.

     And if he managed to become John’s direct supervisor, that would play well in the eyes of his sweet Hannah. Eventually she had to see that Robbie was a better man than John, and a better man for her.

     He’d been very sloppy to this point.

     It wasn’t just that he’d failed to kill his prey. That was just the start of it.

     Then it was the lost shell casing. He’d still been unable to find it, despite all his searching.

     He failed in his plan to be the first one to visit Hannah after the shooting. He’d wanted to be the one to share the bad news with her.

     The one whose arms she fell into. The one who would hold her closely and console her.

     He’d also failed in his attempt to have the chief assign the case to him.

     Instead, the chief had brought in some blasted outsider. Some kind of super detective from the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office. Some crusty old fool whose glory days were behind him. Some old dude who probably couldn’t solve the simplest case if the evidence was all laid out in front of him.

     That part was fine with Robbie.

     Early on, he’d been afraid of being caught.

     Early on, he’d been terrified he’d left the missing piece of brass at the scene. And that another officer carefully picked it up and turned it in. And that they would somehow match the prints with the fingerprints in his personnel file.

     But when he remembered that the SAPD no longer had any forensics officers, no fingerprint experts, no ballistics experts, he laughed out loud.

     Then, he’d heard vague rumors that the crusty old detective might be looking at one of their own.

     “That’s bullshit,” most of his colleagues were saying. They thought it was impossible that a member of the SAPD might be involved in such a heinous crime. After all, they were closer than most families. And the thought of one brother gunning down another was just too ludicrous to consider.

     While the other officers were scoffing at the outlandish rumor, Robbie just bit his lip and said nothing.

     After that, his paranoia got the best of him. He imagined he was being watched. He had a dream one night that the Chief’s tech geeks got some hidden surveillance cameras to work. And that Internal Affairs was watching every move Robbie made.

     The more logical side of him tried to convince him that was ridiculous. If he’d been under surveillance, they’d have seen him kill Luther Brown.

     And they’d have taken him into custody already.

     That message he’d gotten, saying he needed to report to the Chief’s office immediately, had sent chills up his spine.

     Were they on to him? Was the gig finally up?

     He didn’t want to go. He wanted to run.

     But you didn’t say no when the Chief demanded your presence. And it could be something innocent. Or maybe, just maybe, the Chief wanted to offer him one of those promotions everyone was talking about.

     Robbie had walked into the Chief’s office that day expected to be surrounded by other officers and handcuffed.

     Instead the Chief offered an invitation to go with him to a city council meeting.

     Robbie again laughed out loud, as soon as he left the Chief’s office.

     Chief Martinez considered himself so smart. The feeble old detective he’d brought in from the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office thought he was too.

     But neither of them had a clue that the man who shot John Castro would be hob-knobbing with the city’s leadership.

     Robbie was ecstatic when he walked out of that meeting. As he rode back to the station with the Chief, carrying on small talk, it occurred to him that he must be thought of pretty highly by the upper echelons of the police hierarchy.

     After all, the Chief could have chosen any of his officers to drag to his meeting. And he chose Robbie. And based on what he’d seen in the past, Martinez only chose the up and comers from the ranks to go to such places with him.

     Robbie walked into the parking garage and approached unit 395. As he got closer, he scanned the pavement on the right side of the vehicle closely.

     Then he ran his fingers along the seam between the front passenger door and the right front quarter panel, until a tiny scrap of paper fluttered down to the ground.

     The paper, no more than a quarter of an inch in diameter, had been wedged into the seam just after Robbie parked his vehicle three hours before.

     He moved around to the driver’s side and scanned the pavement again.

     Nothing.

     Once again, he ran his fingers along the seam between the driver’s door and the left front quarter panel.

     Another tiny piece of paper fell out.

     Robbie breathed a sigh of relief. No one had opened either locking door of his unit.

     Perhaps Robbie’s paranoia was getting out of control. Despite all his precautions, he still hadn’t found any indication that anyone was following him, or watching him, or breaking into his car to plant surveillance cameras or bugs.

     He laughed at his own stupidity.

     Then he walked to the rear of his car and stopped dead in his tracks.

     The short hairs on the back of Robbie’s neck stood straight up.

     There, resting on the pavement next to his feet, was a tiny piece of paper, about a quarter of an inch in diameter.

     The same piece of paper that had rested in the bottom seam of his trunk.

     The same piece of paper he’d placed there when he parked the car, so he could tell if someone had been looking through the trunk in his absence.

     The same tiny piece of paper that had drifted down to Frank Woodard’s foot, unnoticed by Frank, when he’d opened the trunk two hours before.

     Suddenly, Robbie was in a panic.

     His paranoia had driven him to place the pieces of paper every time he parked the car. To be truthful, it was a major pain in the ass. But he’d been doing it for two weeks, and wondering each time he returned to the car and found his alarm system intact whether it was worth the effort.

     Even now, the logical and still-rational part of his brain told him that perhaps the paper had just worked itself loose.

     He opened the trunk and peered inside.

    And he knew immediately.

     For despite his bad habits, Robbie was a blessed man in many respects.

     One of the things he was blessed with was an extremely sensitive sense of smell.

     He recognized the scent of burned powder instantly.

     Someone had fired his duty rifle.

     Very recently.

     In a wild panic, he slammed the door closed again and jumped inside the unit.

     He had to get far, far away.

     To a place he could think.