Flesh and Blood (38 page)

She doesn’t budge. It’s as if she didn’t hear him and that’s one of the ways she flirts back. Lucy likes him. What that might mean I don’t know, and for an instant my thoughts return to the missing ring. Janet has left Lucy before and I hope she’s not going to do it again.

“In summary”—Kuster has turned his attention to me—“we can fire test bullets with very little damage, collect them on the spot and get a clear look at the twist, the lands and grooves. All this to say that we can use photos from the ballistics labs and do a prelim comparison with the bullet fired into the trap as we stand out here sweating, and maybe spare ourselves losing hours on distant shots with a rifle we probably already know isn’t the one killing people.”

“The rifle’s bullshit.” Marino is especially full of himself and seems much too happy. “The question is where the hell did it come from?”

“Somebody bought it factory-prepped and planted it,” Lucy says. “There’s nothing customized about it. In other words over the counter.”

“You should be careful talking like you know so much,” Kuster tells her.

Inside the case tagged as evidence is the Remington .308 Marino found inside Rand Bloom’s apartment, a stainless steel barrel, a green and black spiderweb finished stock. He picks it up.

“A 5R milspec barrel with a muzzle brake,” he says, “and a real nice Leupold Mark 4 scope but there’s no fouling. I agree that the damn thing is brand-new. I don’t think it’s ever been fired.”

“Someone knew we’d figure that out in two seconds.” Lucy has wandered to the back of the SUV, reaching inside the open tailgate, pulling the manikin out.

Someone.
I can’t get away from the sensation that she might have an idea who.

“It’s not our gun, I can tell you that already,” Kuster says. “The barrel’s not going to be the same but for court purposes you need more than my word for it. I’ll give you a nice chunk of copper that the jury can pass around.” His gray-tinted glasses watch Lucy lifting out the ice chest, and suddenly he lobs a pair of hearing protectors and she catches them with one hand.

She clamps them above her ears, and Kuster takes the Remington. He reaches into a foam-lined Pelican case and hands me a video camera.

“I need you to record this,” he says. “One thing I know is juries. They like pictures and they like movies. We’ll show them the lengths we’ve gone to, that we didn’t just do the DOPE in an air-conditioned lab.”

I train the camera on him and begin to record as he steps off the raised pad, down to the one at ground level. He slides open the rifle’s bolt, drops in a round, a blue polymer-tipped copper projectile seated in a shiny brass cartridge case. Pushing the bolt home with a sharp click, he lies prone on the grass, resting the butt on a rear sandbag, inserting the opening of the barrel into the end of the pipe closest to him.

“Eyes and ears!” He’s flat on his belly, the stock snuggled up against his shoulder and cheek.

A sharp crack and silence, the low velocity bullet is stopped by the tightly packed fiberfill. It doesn’t even make it six feet to the end cap.

“Hold.” He means to stop recording.

He sits up and takes off his noise-blocking earmuffs. He announces we’re going cold and raises a red flag on a pole just in case any new shooters show up. No one is to fire any weapons right now.

“Lucy?” he says. “I’ll let you and Marino set up Ichabod downrange and we’ll think big, a thousand yards to start with and we can always walk it back if we need to. But I’m thinking this sucker is popping off his prey from a distance. Get the hell on down there while we got God’s acres all to ourselves because we usually get a few knuckleheads at dusk getting ready for the next
Zero Dark Thirty
. Then it’s bye-bye to going downrange unless you want your head blown off.” He says to me, “You didn’t record that, right?”

JACK KUSTER UNSCREWS THE
end cap from the section of pipe and begins pulling out white filler, what looks like a cloud of cotton. I watch him from a folding chair, the heat pressing down heavily as if I’m under hot water. My khaki field clothes seem glued to my skin, my sleeves rolled up and sweat trickles coolly down my arms, chest and back.

A big wad of filler and the bullet shines like a new penny, a little soot at the rear from the fast-burning powder, and Kuster says, “Well hello. Pretty much what I expected.”

I turn my attention to Marino, Lucy and the manikin, a flesh-colored plastic male torso impaled by a shiny rod that at one time was attached to a head and a stand. They grab the ice chest, the large toolbox, hearing protectors parked above their ears. They start moving downrange along the dusty dry path. The sun burns low behind power lines blackly crisscrossing the horizon, no one around, all quiet except the static of traffic we can’t see and then Kuster is standing over me with his hand outstretched.

In his palm is a large copper bullet completely intact including the blue tip as if it’s never been fired. But lands and grooves are deeply etched.

“Kind of tangles your antennas, right? Like it plays a trick on your eyes?” he says.

“Yes it does.”

He slides an iPad out of a backpack, types for a minute and an enlarged photograph appears on the screen, the copper bullet with its four razor-sharp petals recovered under the skin of Jamal Nari’s chest. For a long beat Kuster looks at the image on the display, and he uses a 10X loop to study the bullet he recovered from the trap, picking white fibers off it. He gives the bullet to me and it feels warm and weighty.

“Not even close,” he says. “This one here that you’re holding? It’s definitely not a one-ten twist and I already know from the type of barrel, what’s known as a Rem-Tough, that it’s an eleven point two-five. The upshot, no pun intended, is the firearm we’re looking for isn’t a Remington 700 unless the barrel was swapped out with something like a Krieger. Not to mention the rounds Marino recovered from Bloom’s apartment? They’re not Barnes cases. I’ll write up my report but unless you or Marino have more questions about this particular rifle, I’m satisfied.”

I sit quietly in my folding chair, staring off at the distant figures of Lucy and Marino in the shimmering heat. I feel Kuster contemplating me like a ballistics calculation.

“Try not to show so much enthusiasm,” he says.

“I’ll try harder not to.”

“No discouragement allowed. It’s against shooting range rules.”

“What I’m trying not to feel is it wasn’t a good time to come here and do this. I’m trying not to feel it’s a waste to go through the motions of what will be needed in a trial that may never happen,” I reply without looking at him.

“We’ll get whoever it is.”

“We’re being toyed with. We’re being completely manipulated.”

“I had no idea you were such a fatalist.”

“I’ll also try to stop thinking about who else is going to die while we’re out here playing with guns.”

“I had no idea you were negative and cynical.”

“I don’t know what ideas you might have had.”

“Is it something I did?”

“Not to me.”

“We’re not playing.” He repacks the Remington in the foam cushioning of the black plastic case tagged as evidence. “But I understand your sentiments.”

“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.”