Hawking on my wall. If you have a problem with them, you can leave any time.'
There was a sharp pain in my side as Amanda elbowed me.
'Nope, no problem.'
'So, Amanda, how are you? It's been, what, three years?'
'Four,' Amanda corrected. 'Junior year, U.S. Nineteenth
Century Intellectual and Cultural History.'
'What'd I give you in that class?'
'A minus.'
'That'll do. I refuse to put up with students post-graduation unless they've received at least a B plus. So what brings you to our humble university? Not soliciting donations, I hope.'
I laughed. Amanda didn't. Clearly I'd missed a joke.
'So, Mr. Parker,' Agnes said. 'Amanda tells me you're a reporter and you have some questions a woman of my expertise might be able to assist you with. That correct?'
'Yes, ma'am,' I said. Agnes cringed.
'Don't call me ma'am, please. I'd rather die alone surrounded by cats than think I'm a ma'am. Call me Agnes.'
'Right, Agnes. Anyway, you've heard about these murders, right? Athena Paradis, Officer Joe Mauser, Jeffrey Lourdes?'
She shook her head sadly. 'Terrible, terrible things. How someone can murder people who've contributed so much to our society is just shameful and beyond me.'
'The person who committed these crimes, I'm pretty sure they're using a weapon, specifically a rifle, that has some specific cause or reason behind its use. The killer is also using ammunition I've been told is quite out of the ordinary,' I eyed her red hair, the lava lamps. 'Amanda said you were familiar with nineteenth-century weaponry…'
'Shoot,' she said. Then she laughed. 'Get it, shoot? Go on.'
'Right. So my source in the NYPD told me that the bullet used to kill both Athena Paradis and Officer Mauser was a . 44-40 caliber magnum round.'
Agnes bit her lip, furrowed her brow.
'That's a powerful bullet,' she said.
'So I've heard. Is it true that it's an uncommon round?'
'Depends,' she said. 'Hunters use them all the time-. 44-40 bullets have massive stopping power, and just enough accuracy that if you're a decent shot, you'll only need one shot.'
'I've scanned the police reports for every homicide in the five boroughs over the last five years,' I said. 'Three hundred and twelve murders. None of them with magnum rounds.'
'Well, to be honest magnum rounds aren't the kind of ammunition you tend to see these days, at least not around here,' she said.
'What do you mean?'
'Well, the area between the Hudson and East River isn't exactly known for their hunting grounds.' She paused.
'Unless this man is making them.'
'I think he may be,' I said.
'Listen, Mr. Parker…'
'Call me Henry.'
'Right, Parker, I appreciate you coming down here, it flatters me to no end that a former student thinks so highly of me to believe I might be of some assistance on a murder case.
But I'm a college professor. Nothing more, maybe a little less.'
I looked around her office. 'Mrs. Trimble, it's clear you have a passion for these weapons. Now regardless of what that says about you, I'd sure as hell trust someone who has a passion for something over someone who gets paid to do it.
I think Amanda's right. But I'm not a cop, I'm not asking you to help catch a murderer. But I think there's more to this than simple killings. I think this guy has a motive, and I think his gun is a clue to that.'
Agnes took the candy cane from her mouth, tossed it in the garbage. Looked me over. 'You know my father took me to the range when I was a little girl. Had one set up in our backyard.
Picket fence with empty paint cans on it. Only seven-year-old in my town who could shoot paint cans from twenty yards out with a 9 mm with eighty-seven-percent accuracy. I know guns.
I don't like what they can do, but I'm in awe of them.'
'I can see that,' I said. 'And that could be the difference here.'
'Do they know what kind of gun it was fired from?'
'Not specifically,' I said. 'But there are clues. A witness to Jeffrey Lourdes's murder said she got a good look at the weapon. She said it looked old, like she'd seen it in a movie.
It might have had a wood stock. That's as much as I know.'
'Mr. Parker, hundreds of guns fit that description. If that's all you have…'
'Does the phrase 'gun that won the West' mean anything to you?'
Agnes's eyes opened wide. She brought a hand to her mouth, chewed on a fingernail. Suddenly she stood up, started running her finger along the spines of various books on her shelf. She stopped at one. Took it out and laid it on her desk.
She flipped it open. It was text heavy, filled with old photographs and illustrations. She turned to the index, flipped some more, scanned down, then stopped when she found what she was looking for.
'You say you think this rifle bears a significance to the case?' she asked. All the playfulness had left Agnes Trimble's voice. She was working now, the switch I assumed made her so good at her job was now turned on.
'I don't know about the case, but it does to the man committing these crimes. I just need to prove it. I need to know why this gun is so special to him.'
She turned the book around so it faced me.
'Could this be the gun?'
On the page was a photograph of a rifle. It had a wooden stock, like Lourdes's assistant said. Other than that, I didn't know.
'Look here,' Agnes said. 'Rather than a traditional trigger guard, it has a reloading mechanism with only one side attached to the frame. Makes for easy and fast reloading.
These kind of rifles are as common as sequin jumpsuits. You asked about the gun that won the West? Well, here it is.'
The caption beneath the rifle read, Winchester 1873, First
Model Rifle, S/N 27.
It was a beautiful piece of firepower. I examined it.
'At the time, this gun was given the highest production run of any rifle in history,' she said. 'As much as the Winchester won the West, it nearly drowned it in blood as well.'
'Does the Winchester 1873 take. 44-40 magnum rounds?'
Agnes nodded, her fingernail underlining a passage in the text.
The Winchester 1873 lever action rifle was originally chambered for the. 44-40-a bottlenecked cartridge that has acquired legendary status and is often referred to as 'The car tridge that won the West.'
I read the line, wondered if this was the gun the killer was using. The rifle obviously had history, a literal one at that.
But why would somebody in the twenty-first century use a nearly hundred-and-forty-year-old gun?
'So the gun was accurate,' I said to Agnes. 'And fast. But it surely can't match some of the weapons around today.
Hell…Uzis, semiautomatics, Saturday night specials.'
'Yeah, I've seen movies, too. And yes, there are many guns currently on the market that obliterate the necessity of the Winchester. But if this is the gun, and I'm assuming at this point that's a big if, this man is not using it for efficiency or posterity.'
'So why use it?' Amanda said. She was into this, a little too much.
