Tall and gaunt, Alex is as bald as a lightbulb, his white lab coat buttoned up to his stalk of a neck. Rimless glasses with thick lenses make his eyes owlish and he’s a little dingy, almost dusty as if he’s begun adapting to his environment like a moth. Moving slowly, deliberately, he begins placing the femur and other bones into a cream-colored cardboard box. As we reach the next observation window I realize he’s not alone. Ernie Koppel is with him.
“Good,” I say to Lucy as I open the door. “Let’s go ahead and take care of this.”
A toothless skull on a stand stares with empty eyes as we walk inside and I detect a waxy dead smell, vaguely rancid like suet or tallow. The odor never leaves. I can detect it in bones that are centuries old.
“I was about to call you,” I say to Ernie.
“And I was on my way to find you before I head out for the day. Is that your spaceship inside the bay?” he asks Lucy.
“Which spaceship?”
“I bet it’s not as fast as my V-four Toyota.”
“You must be right,” she says, and I find myself searching for the slightest hint of anything unusual from him.
If Ernie is wary of Lucy, I see no sign of it. Alex seems his same self but he’s as obtuse as a stone. I find a Sharpie on a cart of pliers, tweezers, rib cutters, brushes, needles, calipers and saws amid tables of skeletons pieced together like puzzles, male, female, old and young, some skulls robust and rugged, others gracile and small. I sign my initials on the bag of pennies and jot what time it is, twenty past six. Ernie takes the evidence from me, the chain unbroken.
In jeans and a blue-striped shirt, he doesn’t wear a tie unless he’s in court. Already he’s working on his tan, a sun worshipper who spends every long weekend and vacation on the Texas Gulf Coast. Born and raised in Galveston he hasn’t lost his drawl, and his big stature and rugged looks seem incongruous with what he does. Not a cowboy, he’ll tell you, but more like an astronaut exploring the next galaxy of a magnified world where a single-celled diatom is a gem and a dust mite a horror.
“Benton gave me the lowdown on what was on your property this morning and his suspicions about a tumbler,” he says to me and I watch carefully to see if he’s excluding Lucy.
“Obviously the coins have been polished,” I reply. “They’re more than thirty years old.”
He holds up the transparent bag, tilting it, and the pennies catch the light, and he says, “Nineteen-eighty-one. Does that date mean anything to you?”
“It was a bad year.” Lucy looks at her computer again as if she’s searching for something. “John Hinckley Junior shot Reagan in March and six weeks later the pope was shot in Saint Peter’s Square. In August Mark David Chapman was sentenced to prison for murdering John Lennon, and two months later President Anwar Sadat was assassinated during a parade in Cairo. Four shootings the world won’t forget.” She recites information I’m quite sure she already knows, and she might just be pulling Ernie’s leg.
Sometimes it’s impossible to know when she’s being funny, and right now I don’t find anything about this amusing. Her demeanor is peculiar. It’s different. I find her humor angry, maybe hurt, maybe aggressive and spiked with machismo.
“What I remember is Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding. My wife was glued to the TV and all misty eyed.” Alex opens the glass door of a floor-to-ceiling stainless steel cabinet.
“Some fairy tale that turned out to be,” Lucy says.
“You weren’t even around yet.” He picks up the creamy box and I can hear bones shift inside it.
She doesn’t correct him and I don’t either.
“We were just talking about the remains from earlier this week.” Alex places the box inside the cabinet and shuts the door. “From the well on that old farm in North Andover?”
“The stabbing,” I remember.
“A fragment of blade,” Ernie says. “The smallest piece of the tip embedded in the left femur in the area of the upper inner thigh.”
“Which would be what killed her if it transected her femoral artery,” I suggest. “A survival time of minutes at most.”
“We may be able to fracture-match the piece of the blade back to the knife,” Alex says. “Probably no one to prosecute though as old as these remains are. At least fifty years, possibly more.”
They continue discussing sensitive case details in front of Lucy the same way they always have. I don’t blame her for being offended by inflammatory blogs and inappropriate quips but she usually has skin so thick it’s more like armor.
WE LEAVE ALEX ALONE with his bones behind the shut door. Back in the corridor now, Lucy, Ernie and I move out of view. We find a blank area of wall between a storage closet and the locked solid metal door that leads into the mechanical room.
“You must have been choppering.” Ernie indicates Lucy’s flight suit. “When are you going to give me a ride?”
“As soon as I finish reading the instruction manual,” she says.
Ernie looks at me and gets to what he wants me to know. “A .308 caliber 190 grain LRX bullet shot from a .300 Winchester Magnum isn’t something you usually see.”
“LRX?” I ask.
“Designed for long range.” It’s Lucy who answers.
“Solid copper that was polished, and the blue material Luke recovered from brain tissue is a polymer,” he says. “I know this isn’t exactly my department but Liz and I conferred.”
“How many petals?” Lucy asks.
“Four.”
“5R rifling?”
“That’s what Liz said.”
“Are you familiar with Barnes Tipped Triple-Shocks?”
“I’m not a gun nut.”
“Premium ammo, match grade, a lot of copper. The gold standard,” Lucy says, “and a couple years ago they came out with what some enthusiasts call a long-range BC version of their famous Triple-Shock. Solid copper with a blue polymer ballistic tip that expands on contact into four cutting petals. A clean instant kill and designed for big game hunting at long range.”
“As in lions, tigers and bears.” Ernie eyes her and I can’t tell if he’s suspicious or impressed. “Don’t tell me you’re into hunting.”
“Not animals.” Her odd dry ice humor again.
“Only the two-legged kind and a lot of them have it coming.”
“I don’t start it if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Joking aside,” he says. “I didn’t realize you know so much.”
“I used to be ATF.”
“I’m fine with the alcohol and tobacco part of it. But I’m not a fan of firearms. I thought you were a fire investigator anyway.”
“I’ve been a lot of things.” Lucy is uncharacteristically generous with facts about her past.
Maybe because of the blogs. Maybe because of the snide comments and gossip. She’s asserting herself when that’s not her style and I intuit that she’s in a competition with someone.
“I have my own firing range, do my own gunsmithing and yes I know a lot,” she continues. “This bullet is such a heavy round it usually passes through big game and I’m talking about game a lot bigger than a human being. I’m wondering if the killer has developed a special round with a lighter powder charge load so this one particular bullet would stay in the body and sustain minimal damage.”
“The reason?” I ask.
“Because the person didn’t want it to exit. The person wanted us to find it.”
“Interesting you would say that,” Ernie says. “The pitting from using a tumbler, plus FTIR-detected traces of urea monohydrocholoride, an organic acid salt typical in tarnish removers, probably used to hand-polish.”
“Same things that’s in Flitz,” Lucy says. “It’s very popular with gun enthusiasts.”
“It’s on the frag and the intact bullet,” Ernie says. “But more important there’s so
mething else nobody knows about. Not even Liz. You wouldn’t see it with a typical optical scope because there’s not enough depth of field.”
He examined the frag and bullet with SEM, a scanning electron microscope, and that’s classic Ernie. We share the same work ethic. You find answers when you don’t know what you’re looking for. So you use any means that seems to make a modicum of sense.
“You’ve heard of ballistics fingerprints?” He slides a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket.
“It’s controversial and there’s been a lot of talk about it over the years, yes,” I reply. “To date I’m not sure it’s being done anywhere except in California. A microstamp is etched on a firing pin or some other component of a gun so it will be transferred to a cartridge case. The point is to have a microscopic code that links a spent case with the gun’s serial number.”
“Do we have a cartridge case? Because if so it’s news to me,” Lucy says. “I’ve seen the evidence logged in to the database and what’s being analyzed in the labs.”
“So far no cartridge case has been discovered here or in the New Jersey homicides. The microstamp is homemade and on the actual bullet.” Ernie hands the sheet of paper to me. “Low tech I know but I don’t want this in an email.”
“How could a microstamp end up on a bullet?” I stare at the photos of the intact bullet recovered from Jamal Nari’s chest.
Bright copper, four razor-sharp petals curled back. Then another image, the copper base of the bullet at 150X, so vivid in three dimensions it seems I could hold it in my hand. I know why Ernie is being secretive.
A single digit, the numeral 3, and I can see the microscopic tool marks of the graver that cut into the metal.
“It’s certainly not stamped,” I observe. “And it wasn’t etched by a laser or transferred by a firearm. It was engraved with something very small and precise such as jeweler’s tools.”
“It was definitely engraved. Then it was eradicated and polished over,” Ernie says. “The naked eye and light microscopes can’t see it but SEM can. The engraved number three is gone but the deformation beneath the surface of the metal is still there. What the person deliberately did was bear down with the engraving tool, etch the number three on the base of the copper bullet, then grind it away, tumble, polish and hand-load.”
“Pretty much the same way people eradicate serial numbers from firearms not realizing they aren’t really gone.” Lucy stares at the photograph and her mind is racing, her eyes blazing.
Something about her demeanor is unsettling me in an unfathomable place. I don’t know what it is. But I feel it like a shadow move. As if something huge and evil is far down deep and looking up at me.
“Similar to indented writing that you can find on sheets of paper that were underneath the one someone wrote on,” she is saying.
“I’m of the opinion the killer wanted us to find it,” Ernie says. “But he didn’t want Liz to.”
“How do you figure that?” Lucy seems relieved, as if she just got something she needed as I sense the shadow again as it stirs.
“The engraving wouldn’t be seen with the comparison microscopes used in firearms labs, which is why Liz had no idea,” Ernie says. “I think it’s becoming clear we’re dealing with someone who knows a lot about ballistics and how the analysis is done.”
“And this person knows you’d resort to SEM?” Lucy asks and I detect aggression more strongly.
“Because of the pitting,” he says. “Liz noticed it and asked my opinion. Tumbling cartridge cases is one thing but who tumbles bullets? She saw the snowstorm of pitting under her scope and called me, asking if I could confirm the copper bullets had been polished.”
“But you didn’t tell her about the eradicated engraving.” I fold the piece of paper.
“The only one I’ve told besides the two of you is Benton.”
“We should leave it at that for now,” I decide.
“What about Marino?”
“Not today but I’ll let him know.”
“Okay by me.” He doesn’t want it leaked, not deliberately or accidentally. “If there’s nothing else?”
“Thank you,” I reply. “Have a good night, Ernie.”
We watch him walk off, the empty corridor curving him around to the elevator in a cloud of soft light.
“He doesn’t know who to trust,” Lucy says.
“He trusts us.”
“What’s happening is personal,” Lucy says decisively. “A sophisticated highly skilled sniper is jerking you around and wants to make sure you know it. The tweets, the pennies, an engraved bullet that he somehow made sure you’d recover, it’s all premeditated and with a goal in mind.”
“You keep saying he.”
“It’s easier. And that’s what people assume.”
“How about you?”
“I’m trying not to assume anything.”
“Who and why? Do you have an idea?” I ask and we’re walking again, passing locker rooms. Ahead is a hand-sanitizing dispenser on the wall.
I stop and squirt some of it in my palms. The anthropology lab always makes me feel dirty. Maybe other things are making me feel dirty too, this conversation for starters.
“I have a feeling Benton might have an idea,” Lucy says.
“But you don’t?” The sharp odor of alcohol penetrates my sinuses as I rub my skin until it’s dry.
“The way he was acting when we were in my lab this afternoon, his questions and evasiveness,” she says and she’s the one being evasive. “He wanted to know for example how effective the most advanced facial recognition software would be if someone has surgically altered his features.”
He wouldn’t mention that unless he thinks it’s someone we know.
What I say is, “It seems the government has been dealing with this for years because of terrorism. Not to mention Border Patrol, the FBI, and Benton would know all about it.”
Someone hideous from our past, it enters my mind. But why would Benton think that?
“The Feds haven’t had much success when it comes to cold hits,” Lucy says. “If a biometric portrait changes then you won’t get an automated match with a scan in an image database or a mug shot repository. And as far as retinal and iris identification go, your typical security camera isn’t going to capture the iris characteristics of someone entering a hotel business center and borrowing a computer. Plus you’d need a scan for comparison.”
Someone we believe is gone. There are names I could come up with but I won’t. I focus on our conversation because I must. I take a deep quiet breath. I try not to feel the darkness and what’s in it. Something is there and Lucy doesn’t want to tell me what it is.
“Did Benton seem to be looking for someone in particular when you were going through these videos?” I ask.
“One always has to consider someone who never got caught or has been released from prison,” she says. “Something like that.”
“Something like that?”
She doesn’t answer me.
“Are you bringing this up to see how I’ll react?” I ask.
“I’m telling you there’s a discussion to be had about familiarity,” Lucy says. “A bullet marked with a three intended for a third victim and whoever is responsible wants us to know there’s more to come, in other words payback,” she says, and I feel myself bristle.
“Seven pennies,” I reply. “What? Four murders to go?”
“When Benton asked me to do a low recon over the Academy of Arts and Sciences this morning he suggested I check the trees. Janet and I didn’t see anyone suspicious, certainly no one who might have had a gun. What was he thinking based on your own observations when you were with him in your backyard?”
“He saw something flash, possibly light reflecting off a camera lens, probably Rand Bloom looking for dirt, looking to embarrass,” I reply. r />
“I don’t think so. Embarrassment can’t happen if you don’t make photographs public. There’s nothing on the Internet.”
“Not yet.”
“A spotting scope,” she says. “It’s more likely whoever left the pennies wanted to watch you find them.”
We stop outside the large-scale X-ray room and I look for Anne.
CHAPTER 27
SHE ISN’T AT HER console and we step inside. I look through the wall of thick lead-lined glass that connects her office to the scanner room but Anne isn’t there either.
The lights are off, the white Somatom CT scanner vaguely illuminated, large bore with a downward tilted table, developed for the military when we went to war with Iraq. Using high-resolution 3-D imaging, we can visualize a body internally before it’s autopsied, and I notice what’s on one of the desk’s displays. Case number CFC979. Gracie Smithers.
“The roof would have been the most likely area if the person was going to get an unobstructed view of your backyard.” Lucy continues talking about what she saw when she overflew the Academy of Arts and Sciences. “I had the camera going.” She refers to the stabilized camera mounted on her helicopter. “And there was no one but we saw evidence that somebody had been up there.”
“Janet was flying with you this morning.” I study oblique and axial images of the airway, sinuses and tracheobronchial tree, noting dark spaces indicating gas and froth that are common in drownings. “Are the two of you doing all right?”
“A section of the roof on the second floor and there was a baseball cap and a jacket we could see when I zoomed in,” Lucy says. “Obviously someone was up there. We’re fine.”
“You have a new Ferrari and aren’t wearing your ring.” Coronal images of the lungs, the distal bronchi are full of fluid, and I click on other images. “You look like you’ve lost weight and your hair needs cutting.”
The maxillary sinuses are also full of fluid and there’s a high-density particulate material in the sphenoid sinus. I find more of it around the vocal cords and in the airway and lungs.