at?”
“I want to know why he did it,” Joe said.
Graves sighed. “Look, I’m sympathetic. But my job isn’t to try to determine why a victim takes his life. My job is to determine how it happened, and give my professional opin
ion as to cause of death. You seem to be looking for something I just can’t help you with.”
Joe rubbed his jaw and thought about it. He had watched Graves carefully as he spoke, looking for a false note, but hadn’t seen or heard one.
“Now, if you’ve looked at everything you wanted to look at . . .” Graves said, not needing to finish his sentence.
“Right,” Joe said, getting his jacket.
Graves was standing at the office door waiting to show Joe out into the hallway when Joe suddenly stopped and picked up the gun in the bag.
“You can’t take that,” Graves said.
“I don’t want it,” Joe said, smiling. “I couldn’t hit anything with it, anyway. But a question just occurred to me.”
Graves arched his eyebrows.
Joe sat back down in the chair and grasped the handgrip through the plastic. He extended his arm, pointed the revolver at the wall, then bent his elbow and wrist and turned the gun back toward himself so the muzzle of the revolver was a few inches from his face.
“Mr. Pickett, what are you doing?” Graves cautioned, stepping back into the hallway and peering around the doorjamb. “That gun is still loaded.”
Joe said, “Look how long the barrel is on this gun. I can barely reach my mouth with it like this, the barrel is so long. This is also a heavy weapon, and it’s real uncomfortable to hold it this way. When you go to fire a gun of this caliber, you really need to brace yourself and lock your arms when you fire, or it’ll kick right out of your hand.
From this position, if I pulled the trigger the bullet would go through the base of my skull straight into the wall behind me and the gun would probably flip out of my hand across the room.”
“Yes . . . but the bullet was lodged in the ceiling.”
“Right,” Joe said. “That’s what puzzles me.”
Graves said nothing.
“But if I turn it like this”—Joe brought his arm down against his chest and turned the gun upside down and aimed upward—“it would be much easier.” He bent his head forward as if to sip from a straw, and the muzzle touched his lips through the thin sheet of plastic. “See what I mean?”
“Yes, I see your point,” Graves said. “But I’d be more comfortable if you put the gun down on the desk.”
Joe ignored the ME’s request. “If I pulled the trigger with the gun in this position, the bullet would go straight up through my brain into the ceiling. It’s braced well enough against me that my body would absorb the kick, and the gun would probably drop away to the floor.”
“Yes.”
“But as you can see, the front sight is pointed down in this position, toward my lower lip, not my upper palate.”
Graves nodded.
Joe looked up. “So how is it that Will killed himself with this gun using such an awkward, uncomfortable position like I showed you a minute ago? Or that the bullet was lodged in the ceiling, not the wall? And why is it that the gun fired with such force that it cut his mouth and knocked his teeth out, but then fell to the floor beside him and wasn’t thrown clear across the table?”
He put the gun down and Dr. Graves stepped back into the room.
“I don’t think I can answer those questions,” the ME said.
“Neither can I,” Joe admitted.
“So what are you driving at?”
“Was the gun dusted for prints?”
“Yes. You can see there is still some powder residue on it.
Will’s fingerprints, and only his fingerprints, were all over the barrel and the cylinder.”
Joe examined the gun and saw the powder gathered in folds of the plastic. “What about the handgrip and the trigger?”
Graves cleared his throat. “We found no fingerprints on either.”
“At all?”
The ME nodded.
“So the gun had been wiped clean?”
“I didn’t say that,” Graves said. “The surface of the trigger itself is grooved, so it wouldn’t hold a print. The handgrip is checkered wood, which isn’t a good surface for lifting latents.”
“But it could have been wiped clean?”
