She’d got him from his middle name. I didn’t want to think how many DLs she’d had to run… and Julius Constantine, for God’s sake? What was his mother, a Roman?
It was the same dude, all right. Right up to the tiny discrepancies in the height and weight fields. (The Feds measured and weighed upon entry to prison… whereas a driver’s license station took your word for it. The DL people got little vanity figures like an inch or two added to height, and pounds shaved off.)
He was forty-nine. Well, the age was about right. At least in our area, the dyed-in-the-wool members of the extreme right tended to be between forty-five and sixtyfive.
A federal arrest and conviction. Interesting. Phony securities was the sort of thing the extreme right sometimes got into to finance their operations. They usually passed it off as a ‘‘defiant gesture’’ directed toward the Feds and the federal monetary and credit system. Sure. Sad part about it was that they tended to foist the stuff off on people who were in financial difficulties, who, in turn, either tried to use it as collateral or were counting on it for their future. People who believed in them.
Driver’s license ‘‘canceled’’ was expected, and another conforming data bit. The extreme right tended to cancel their driver’s licenses as a gesture. Nobody had the right to impose a ‘‘tax’’ for using the ‘‘free roads,’’ you see, and everybody had a God-given ‘‘right’’ to drive. For sure.
A federal conviction… served six months with thirty months suspended. Hmm. Five-sixths of a sentence knocked off spoke of cooperation with the Feds. Large, happy, and profitable cooperation, in fact. Great. I was willing to bet that his compatriots weren’t aware of that… except the others who’d done the same. And, I thought, a man who’d cooperated in the past was a fairly easy mark for the future. As it turned out, that was a bit of a mistake.
Sally hadn’t found out where he’d served his time… not that I was complaining. But it would be of interest to see who else was there at that time. Especially if one of them had an a.k.a. of Gabriel.
Now came the dilemma. God, how I wanted to see the case file on this guy. Who had access to the case file? Well, basically, it was Volont, of course. But it might also be George, who could lose his job over divulging even a part of it. Well, it was going to be a bit warm for George no matter which way he jumped.
I called Hester at home. We deliberated. Hester said she’d check around. Frequently, the federal charge would arise from a state or local investigation. If that had been the case…
Half an hour later, I got a call from Dr. Peters. He had finished the autopsy data on both Bud and Rumsford. I got a yellow pad and sat down to learn.
The information he had on Bud was pretty straightforward. What appeared to be a 7.62 mm round, full- jacketed, had struck him in the right shoulder, transected the lung, and struck the spine, where it took a sharp left, and came out just about the middle of his back, taking almost one whole vertebra with it. The second shot, into his head, appeared to have occurred post-mortem, and had entered from the rear. Most of the skull had disappeared into the yard area, in very small pieces, as the blast had caused quite a bit of rebounding out of the ground. Nearly point-blank, as far as he could tell.
Rumsford was a little bit different. Two rounds, but not quite the same as those that had struck Bud.
‘‘The ones that struck the officer, judging from parts of the jacket and the texture of the cores, were of either Chinese or old Soviet-Warsaw Pact manufacture. The ones that seem to have struck the reporter were possibly just a tad bit lighter, but definitely of much better manufacture. NATO at least, but I’d say something like a really high- quality round, like a Norma.’’
Okay.
Apparently both rounds that hit the reporter had been moving at a pretty good clip. The first one had entered the mediastinum straight through the sternum, at a slight angle from the right, and slightly down. Missing the spine, it took a path just below the heart, raised hell with the plumbing in the left lung, and exited the left rear of the body after nicking the fifth rib.
‘‘Wouldn’t that have knocked him down?’’ I asked.
‘‘At less than twenty yards, not necessarily. It didn’t really hit anything super solid, like the spinal column. That would have rocked him. This just zipped through the breastbone and barely touched a rib. Stopped the heart instantly, of course.’’
Of course. Shock wave.
According to Dr. Peters, the second round came blasting through from a little steeper angle, and going almost straight on. The entrance wound was just about two inches above the first hole. This one struck the heart, pretty well disintegrating it, then hit the spine head-on, split, with a part that skidded to the left and down and exited Rumsford after passing through his liver and intestines, furrowing the inside of his right pelvis, and blowing out through his bladder. In the front, out the front. The other half continued on completely through the spine, and lodged in the muscles of his back.
‘‘This is a powerful weapon here,’’ said Dr. Peters.
No shit.
‘‘You might be looking for a rather longish barrel.’’
Thank you.
‘‘Oh,’’ he added. ‘‘Did you hear these shots?’’
‘‘Oh, yeah,’’ I said, ‘‘I heard ’em.’’
‘‘How far from them were you?’’
‘‘Oh, probably twenty yards.’’
‘‘Were they loud?’’
‘‘Very. I felt the first one, as much as I heard it.’’
‘‘That’s quite strange,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘You know, we examined the half round that lodged in the reporter’s back. It had those strange brushed marks that look like it was fired through a silencer. ..’’
‘‘Boy, I don’t think so, Doc,’’ I said. ‘‘Sounded very loud to me …’’
‘‘Strange,’’ he said. ‘‘Very strange… oh, well…’’
‘‘Same shooter?’’ I asked. ‘‘Rumsford, I mean.’’
‘‘Not sure,’’ he said. ‘‘Could have been, if he was prone for one shot and kneeling for the second. Or it could have been two men using the same ammunition type…’’
That made a lot of sense. The shooter, from a prone position, smacks Rumsford, who just stands there. The shooter rises slightly for a better angle, kneeling. Smacks him again, and sees him topple. Couple of seconds separate the shots.
I’d only been off the phone for an hour when I got a call from Harry over in Conception County, WI. He had preliminaries on the body of Johnny Marks.
Marks had been strangled with a leather belt. Markings from the stitching on the edges of the belt were visible within the main ligature mark, and indicated it had been machine-stitched. Cool. The massive chest wound was, in fact, two holes. It appeared that they had driven the spike through him the first time, just about perpendicular to the beam, and it had pulled out when they propped the beam up. Tearing, front and back, so they had driven it through him a second time, at more of an angle. Spoke volumes for their determination. All that had been post-mortem as well. The damage to his face and other parts, which had appeared to me to be incidental and possibly from a beating, turned out to have been inflicted post-mortem too, likely by the fall from the beam.
‘‘Wanna hear the best part?’’ asked Harry.
‘‘Sure.’’
Chuckle. ‘‘He had splinters in his butt, also post-mortem. From sliding down the beam when the first spike pulled out.’’
Oh, that was the best, all right.
‘‘Oh,’’ he said, laughing so hard to himself that he had difficulty getting it out. ‘‘One more bit…’’
‘‘Sure.’’
‘‘When they were driving the spike, they apparently used a maul. Missed the spike a couple of times.’’ He started to break up again. ‘‘And I get mad when, when I, when I, I hit my thumb…’’
Harry cracks me up too.
Harry still had no solid information for us on a suspect, other than probably a gang member. He did have one fascinating thing. Time of death. ‘‘Been dead about three days,’’ he said. ‘‘Probably done sometime on the 24th.’’
‘‘Any ideas yet as to why?’’ I asked.
