“I don’t think you do.” I look at him, at his gray glasses looking at me. “You already knew this rifle isn’t the one that shot people. You already knew the answers to your questions before you even asked them.”
“And how often do you know what killed somebody before you do the autopsy? How about Rand Bloom? You fished his body out of the pool and saw his stab wound. Did you need to cut him open to figure out that it was an upward thrust and a twist that severed his aorta and took out his heart? Maybe he inhaled a little bit of water with his dying breaths but he wouldn’t have survived an arm-pumping upward stroke like that, military style.”
“I can see Marino shares a lot with you, and I didn’t do Bloom’s autopsy. It wouldn’t have been considered fair and impartial.”
“You were right about what killed him.”
“Yes I was.”
“But that’s not good enough. We have to prove it. And we just did. I’m helping us build a solid case.”
“I suppose what you’re going to prove next is these victims weren’t shot from a ground elevation, not even close.”
“You’re exactly right. They weren’t.” Opening another Pelican case, this one large and sturdy, he lifts out the PGF.
It’s an intimidating black rifle with a wide-bodied computerized tracking scope, and he sets it up on its bipod.
“And by the time we’re done you may rethink your pet theory,” he says.
“Which is?”
“That the powder charge was so light he may as well have thrown it. Not quite but I agree the asshole wanted you to find the bullet with the three engraved on it. You’ve kept that out of the media, right?”
“As far as I know.”
“My worry is three out of what? How many is he planning?”
I envision the seven pennies and I think four to go. Marino, Lucy, Benton and me, and then I don’t think it. I watch Kuster as he begins pushing cartridges into a magazine.
“Wireless enabled,” he says. “Sensors collect all the environmental data, even the Coriolis effect, everything except windage which we have to enter ourselves. It all streams to an iPad which is helpful if you’ve got someone spotting and I assume our killer doesn’t.”
“Our? Let’s not use the language of relationships.”
“The take-home is assholes like this work alone unless it’s something that’s not important or particularly challenging.”
Another open case and he gets out a Swarovski spotting scope. He sets it up on a sturdy Bogen tripod.
“So you can get a good look at what’s going on at sixty-X.” He stares off at Lucy and Marino far downrange, getting smaller in the low sun, shadows spreading from distant trees. “Although I realize you think we’re wasting our time out here playing with guns. Of course if you really thought that, there’s no way in hell you’d be here, am I right?”
“I hope you are.”
“You’re really pissed. I don’t blame you.”
“Maybe I blame myself.”
“Yes. What could you have done to better anticipate? What preventive measures should you have thought of that might protect you and yours?” He loads another magazine with five solid copper rounds. “That’s why I insisted you come here.”
“I wasn’t aware you did the insisting.”
“Well I did. Two people dead on my turf in Morristown first. Now one in your neighborhood and who might be next? I know what I know and you know what you know. Together we know a lot more than anybody else. So tell me why you’re pissed and I’ll tell you why you really are.”
“Because he’s getting away with it.”
“Nope,” Kuster says. “It’s because he’s getting the best of you and your usual tools are failing. Lab science is only as good as the evidence turned in, and if evidence is tampered with and planted then what have you got? You’ve got shit. Like the Remington rifle. No prints on it and DNA will be worthless you’ll find out. Same with the ammo Marino found, same with the jar of pennies. A big fat nothing that takes up everybody’s time and gives the perp the leisure to plan and get in position.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.”
“I know I am and there will be more of the same with whatever happens next.”
“Okay you’ve got my attention.”
“The idea that this killer wanted you to find a bullet? Where’s that from? Not you I have a feeling.”
“Lucy has suggested it as a possibility.”
“She’s subjective.”
“So you think she’s wrong.”
“No I think she’s right. What I also think is she’s wound so tight she’s about to pop,” he says. “Tactical engagement principle number one is if you don’t have a clear and decisive objective the operation becomes disconnected and unfocused.”
I don’t reply. I’m not going to share my misgivings about her, that she’s emotionally involved and not being truthful. She might be disconnected and unfocused, and if not yet that will be next.
“I can help you,” Kuster says.
“I’ll take any help I can get.” I hold his stare and then I say, “Thanks.”
“Everybody can stand to learn a few new things in life, even the Big Chief.” He opens another box of ammo. “I’m going to teach you to think like a sniper, and you know what a sniper is? A hunter, and I’m going to let you look through this hunter’s eyes, through his scope and feel what it’s like to pull the trigger and watch someone die before he hits the ground. Why am I going to do that?”
I get up from my chair and look through the spotting scope, lightweight with a large field of view. I adjust the close-range focus on the eyepiece and at a magnification of sixty Lucy seems right in front of me. She pushes her hair out of her face and she’s squinting in slanted light. It’s that time of day when there’s too much glare to be without sunglasses and it’s too shadowy to wear them. I take mine off and it’s as if Kuster is reading me like a sniper reads his target. He takes his sunglasses off too and I’m surprised by how green his eyes are, almost as green as Lucy’s.
“I’m doing it because I know your type that’s why,” he’s saying. “If you see and intuit what this killer does then you’ll figure him out. You’ll be a lot more clearheaded than Lucy is. I got no doubt about it.”
I follow her with the scope as she tears off a strip of silver duct tape that she attaches to the torso’s chest, running it over the top of the ballistic gelatin head, translucent like an ice cube and slippery-looking, oval with the vague molded features of a male face. I can tell the tape isn’t sticking to it, and she tries another strip, constantly looking around as if someone is looking back. The gelatin is beginning to melt. It won’t be long before it’s viscous like putrid glue.
“Don’t worry.” Kuster is reading me again. “This one’s mostly for the effect because you’re correct. I have a pretty good expectation about what’s going to happen. But again I’m thinking about the jury. We’ll take out jelly man on video—well actually it will be me who does. I’ll set up the camera on a tripod downrange. Two shots at a thousand yards, ten football fields. One reduced velocity round, one normal. I’m going to get him right here.”
He touches the back of his neck at the base of his skull.
“And we’ll see what shape the bullets are in and if they exit the gelatin,” he says. “That’s about as much abuse as Ichabod’s going to be good for. Any other shots we do, and that includes you, we’ll simply go after steel targets, see how the PGF calculates the flight paths. Distance isn’t my big concern. I’m going to warn you right off that based on this”—he indicates the image of the bullet on the iPad—“what seems to suggest as much as a seventy-degree downward angle? We’re talking about a BC that has disturbing implications. That’s the problem we’ve got to solve.”
BC or ballistic coefficient is a mathematical measure of drag, of how well a
bullet cuts through the air.
“Implications of a flight path,” he adds, “that we probably can’t simulate out here unless Lucy is in a mood to let us shoot from her helicopter. We could do that with this thing.” He pats the PGF. “We wouldn’t even need a gyrostabilizer.”
“I wish you wouldn’t suggest an idea like that,” I reply flatly.
“Why not? Someone’s going to.”
“What else has Marino said to you?” I look away from the scope, directly at him as he hunches his shoulder, wiping sweat from his neck and jaw.
“That someone might be trying to set her up. That someone might be trying to send her to prison.”
“Might be?” I’m blinded by sudden anger.
CHAPTER 41
HE LEANS AGAINST THE edge of the bench, digging his sweaty hands into his pockets, looking down at me.
“I’m not the enemy,” Kuster says. “I’m on your side.”
“I wasn’t aware there were sides.” I push down fury I don’t want to feel.
“Let’s just put it this way. If I thought Lucy was a bad guy she wouldn’t be out here on the range with us. But it’s not what I think. It’s what the Feds think and you know what they say in my line of work. A lot of people get caught because they’re obvious and easy. It doesn’t mean they did it.”
“Your line of work?” The heat of my mood begins to simmer down from scalding to a low rolling boil.
I remember the power of my will. I focus on it. I must stay calm.
“Military. Cops. The school of hard knocks,” he says. “I know you’re married to the FBI.”
“Just to one of them.”
“And he’s not who you need to worry about I assume.”
“Has the FBI been in contact with you?” I want to hear him say it.
“Of course. You’d expect that.”
“Benton Wesley? Did you talk to my husband about my niece?”
Kuster slides his hands out of his pockets, sweat dripping off his chin, his eyes like emeralds against his shiny tan skin. “Look, there’s a lot of backstory here that you don’t necessarily know about. Marino’s from Bayonne and I grew up in Trenton. We’ve known each other for a while and have been spending a lot of time together the past six or seven months. You’re probably aware that he reconnected with his high school sweetheart, Beth Eastman. They started dating and then her daughter was shot to death as she was getting out of her car at the Edgewater Ferry. Julie was twenty-eight. She’d just gotten a promotion at Barclays and was engaged.”
“It’s terrible,” I reply. “All of these homicides are. Senseless and cold-blooded.”
“I’ve thought for a while that this killer has personal information about all of you and then things quickly began to escalate about a month ago,” Kuster continues. “Marino said we need to nip matters in the bud, build a case before someone else does. He trusted me because we’re friends and he’s known your niece since she was a kid. He knows her history and could see the writing on the wall. The problem is telling whether a former federal agent, a crack investigator like Lucy Farinelli, discovers details because she can or if it’s because she’s the one who created those details. Like dead-end tweets. Like hacking into your database. Like shooting from an elevation that might suggest a helicopter.”
“Why would she?”
“You’ve heard the story. It’s a predictable one. She’s confronted stressors in her life that have sent her over the edge. I’ve seen it before and so have you.”
“There’s no story.” Another wave of anger rolls over me. “Someone may be implicating Lucy but not enough for it to stick. None of what you’ve described stands up to scrutiny.”
“And people have been sent away for a lot less. They’ve been destroyed. We had a case last year you probably heard about. A farmer’s plowing a field and digs up skeletal remains that turned out to be those of a twenty-year-old girl who disappeared from Brooklyn in 2010. The more he tried to be helpful, to gather information and assist the Feds, the more suspicious they got. Now all he does is talk to his lawyers. He’s bankrupt. He’s a pariah. His wife’s left him. He could end up indicted for something he didn’t do all because he was trying to be a good person. See how it works?”
“I know how it works.” I realize how upset I am. I’m so incensed it’s scary.
“So let me help you catch the bad guy, but you need to sit over here in this chair.” Kuster taps the folding chair in front of the bench he leans against, where the PGF is set up but not loaded. “Easy as pie? I want you to find out for yourself.”
I stay where I am, standing behind the spotting scope on its tripod.
“Muzzle velocity, wind speed, temperature, barometric pressure and the type of bullet. And the nice thing about this baby”—he indicates the PGF—“is it does the math for you as long as you correctly enter your type of ammo and the wind, which right now is variable and minimal but on its way to stronger. Thursday morning in Cambridge around the time Jamal Nari was shot the wind was ten knots gusting at around fifteen out of the north. Now it’s flipped around which is why it’s so damn hot.”
I move the spotting scope, finding the round red metal targets attached by chains to what are called gong stands at distances ranging from one hundred yards to a mile. The last berm I can see is mirage waves in the heat and the target is nothing more than a red pinpoint. I try to settle down inside. The FBI has come close to ruining Benton more than once and now they’ll be happy to ruin Lucy. The anger is huge. It’s not going to move.
It’s my family. You don’t touch my family.
“This shooter clearly knows what he’s doing and picked ammunition accordingly.” Kuster keeps talking. “Some rounds are slippery in the wind but one-ninety LRX is hateful. It will plow on through the volatile air, through flesh, bone, whatever it hits. Massive expansion and the wound channel looks like jelly.”
“What about a subsonic load?”
“I don’t think so. That would be a bullet traveling at less than twelve hundred feet per second. But a lighter load, yes,” he says. “Add that to a big distance and the velocity drops precipitously. The bullet loses kinetic energy. If you plan it just right it stays intact and gets recovered.”
I train the scope back on Marino and Lucy as they secure the ballistic head with more tape, and I can see they’ve used a rubber mallet to drive the steel rod into the dirt, then placed large rocks around it.
“Play out what you think,” I say to Jack Kuster.
“Say one of these leaves the muzzle at 2400 feet per second instead of 2800.” He plucks a cartridge out of a box and holds it up. “In other words, a slightly lighter powder charge. Well that’s going to drop to less than 1150 feet per second at a thousand yards or an energy of less than 558 foot-pounds.”
“And depending on what it hits there could be very little expansion or collateral damage.”
“If it hits something soft like a carcass,” he agrees. “Or ballistic gelatin as opposed to a hard target like metal or in real life bone. In the round you recovered from Jamal Nari’s chest exactly how much bone did it hit?”
“It separated the vertebra and after that tunneled through soft tissue, lodging under the skin.”
“That’s part of the explanation. The other part is where the hell is the bad guy shooting from?”
“Do you know?”
“I don’t.” He pulls a small white towel out of his knapsack and hands it to me. “But what I do know is when we’re done you’re not going to think the same way.”
“And what way is that?”
“Like a scientist. Like a doctor. Like a mother or an aunt. I’m going to teach you how to think like a hunter of human beings.”
“And that feels like what in your experience?”
“It feels like nothing if they had it coming,” he says.
I watch Lucy
and Marino swivel the manikin around, turning its back to us. They’re talking to each other, now walking in our direction along the narrow dirt road that’s barely wide enough for a mule utility cart. Lucy’s eyes don’t stop moving as she talks and continues her scan. I know her better than anyone. She’s worried we’re being stalked and she’s basing her worry on real information.
“You going to try this thing or what?” Kuster taps the folding chair again.
I walk over to the bench. I sit in the chair.
SWEAT STREAMS DOWN MY face and into my eyes. I can’t get comfortable. For someone who has the strong steady hands of a surgeon, I’m shaky as I attempt to center the blue X in the Heads Up Display. The rifle is heavy, at least twenty pounds.
“I don’t think I’m even on the right target,” I admit.
“You’re not. The thousand-yard berm is the big one to the left.” Kuster is standing nearby, acting as my spotter, the rifle’s scope live streaming video to the iPad.
The jelly man was destroyed in two shots. Kuster nailed the area that would have been the back of the neck at the level of C2, at the base of the skull. At a thousand yards the slightly lighter load didn’t exit, there was very little damage and the bullet drop was almost 478 inches, meaning the PGF had to aim more than thirty-nine feet above the target. The heavy load round passed through the jelly head and we didn’t find the bullet. Likely it dug deep into the earth.
The intact bullet that killed Jamal Nari must have been loaded with less powder than usual. If so Lucy is right. It was deliberate. I’m not impressed that she would think of it because I’m too concerned about why she did. She’s with us and she’s not. She’s focusing keenly while her attention is all over the place, her eyes moving constantly, and I recognize the almost imperceptible turns and tilts of her head. Her peripheral vision, her hearing are on high alert. The thought moves through a dark part of my mind, a deep off-limits place. Lucy might know who Copperhead is. Maybe Benton has his own suspicions too and for some reason they won’t tell me.