not give Twigs and George a chance to tell us what they’ve picked up? Five, ten minutes more. Like you say, we’re up to our asses in alligators anyway.’
Friscoe’s shoulders sagged. Defeated, he waved his hand at Twigs. ‘Go ahead, for Chrissake.’
Twigs smiled. ‘Don’t worry about Riley. He’s got seven stiffs down there in the icebox and two of them are John Does. He’ll probably be grateful for any help he can get at this point.’
‘That’s a laugh,’ Friscoe said. ‘Riley ain’t happy unless his caseload looks like the casualty report from World War Two.’
‘May we go ahead?’ Barret asked.
‘Sure, why not?’ said Friscoe. ‘Before this is over we’re all gonna be directing traffic on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho, anyhow.’
‘What do you remember from ballistics training?’ Barret asked.
‘You must be kidding,’ Friscoe said. ‘I been in Vice so long, I can remember when they busted Socrates for pinchin’ little boys on the ass. Keep it basic.’
‘All right. First, the obvious. The weapon was a shotgun, twelve-gauge, judging from the number of pellets in the shot, and I think we both agree that it was sawed-off. Why? Because the shot leaves the barrel at a muzzle velocity of about eleven hundred feet per second. Up to about three feet the shot is contained; the effect is like a single rifle bullet. After that, the pellets begin to spread. If you want the shot to spread faster, the best way to accomplish your purpose is to saw the barrel off. The effect of a sawed-off scattergun is the same at about three feet as the pattern of a normal shotgun at about eight or ten yards. Now, let’s take a look at the scene a minute. Mr. Grimm?’
‘Yes, Mr. Barret.’
The gaunt man took a pencil from his inside pocket and drew the point along his hairline at the forehead. ‘Singed hair along the frontal lobe here. In fact the hair was burned in places. Also some scorched bits of skin embedded in the wall with the pellets that didn’t hit her. The heat from a shotgun blast dissipates very rapidly. So I would say the weapon was three to four feet from the victim’s face when it was fired.
‘Judging from the destruction, the pattern was already wide, seven to eight inches in diameter. Where it hit the wall there it has already spread to ten inches. That’s the kind of dispersal we would normally expect at eight or ten yards. So I would say the gun was fired from the vicinity of the door and that it was sawed off pretty close, maybe eight or nine inches from the firing pin as opposed to a normal barrel length of thirty or thirty-two inches. Mr. Barret?’
‘Thank you, Mr. Grimm. As for the weapon,’ Barret said, ‘if you listen to Sharky’s tape recording you will notice that the two shots came almost simultaneously; in fact they overlap slightly. They are too close together for the weapon to be an automatic or a pump or lever action. So what we got is a sawed-off double-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun and one that was very effectively silenced.’
‘A lupara?’ Livingston asked, and there was surprise in his voice.
‘What’s a lupara?’ Sharky said.
‘It’s Sicilian for a shotgun of this kind. The classic Mafia execution weapon,’ Barret said. ‘Certainly a possibility.’
‘You sayin’ this is a Mafia hit?’ Friscoe said.
‘I’m saying it’s a similar kind of weapon. And I’m also saying that this was no amateur at work. No amateur would have a weapon like that. Certainly not one that was silenced. Besides, this was very well planned.’
‘There’s another thing,’ Twigs said. He knelt and picked up one of the pellets from a plastic bag with a pair of tweezers and held it under Friscoe’s nose.
‘Smell anything?’
‘Yeah,’ Friscoe said, ‘gunpowder.’
‘Anything else?’
Friscoe closed his eyes and sniffed. His forehead wrinkled up. ‘What is that — garlic?’
‘Exactly,’ Twigs said.
‘Don’t tell me,’ Friscoe said, ‘the shotgun had spaghetti for dinner.’
Barret smiled. ‘Perhaps. It is another Mafia trademark. The caporegimi, the Mafia lieutenants, sometimes soaked their bullets in garlic. it infected the wound and also made the wound more painful. It was a tactic used mostly for revenge or official executions. But never in a shotgun. it’s quite strange.’
‘You’re not saying this is some kind of official Mafia hit?’ Friscoe said.
‘I tend to doubt it.’
‘What then?’
‘Maybe it’s part of his m.o.,’ Sharky said.
‘That’s more like it,’ Barret said. ‘A habit. Or perhaps even a trademark.’
‘So he could be an old-time caporegime,’ Livingston said.
Barret nodded.
‘What the hell good is that?’ Friscoe said. ‘So you’ve narrowed the field down to a coupla thousand ace hitmen spread out all over the country. Big deal.’
‘Profiles, dear Barney, profiles,’ Twigs said. ‘A few more details. The projectile was upward. You can tell from the way the shots hit the wall. The victim measures approximately 178 centimetres, that’s about five-ten. Assuming from the other physical evidence that the killer was standing in the doorway, we can draw an imaginary line from the centre of the pattern through the victim’s head to a point where the killer was standing. We can assume he did
