Thrasher nodded. “Of course it would be there, too.”
“This is all very tantalizing,” said Kline. “Could one of you who understands what’s being said take a moment to fill me in?”
“Goose down!” boomed Thrasher as though Kline were hard of hearing.
Kline’s expression of cordial confusion began to freeze over.
Hardwick spoke as the truth dawned on him. “The muffling of the gunshot, combined with the presence of goose down, suggests that the silencing effect might have been produced by wrapping the gun in some sort of quilted material-maybe a ski jacket or a parka.”
“You’re saying that a gun could be silenced just by holding it inside a ski jacket?”
“Not exactly. What I’m saying is that if I held the gun in my hand and wrapped it around and around-especially around the muzzle-with a thick enough quilted material, it’s possible that the report could be reduced to something that might sound like a slap, if you were listening from inside a well-insulated house with the windows closed.”
The explanation seemed to satisfy everyone except Rodriguez. “I’d want to see the results of some tests before buying into that.”
“You don’t think it was an actual silencer?” Kline sounded disappointed.
“It could have been,” said Thrasher. “But then you’d need to explain all those microscopic down particles some other way.”
“So,” said Kline, “the murderer shoots the victim point-blank-”
“Not point-blank,” interjected Thrasher. “Point-blank implies virtual contact between the muzzle and the victim, and there was no evidence of that.”
“From how far, then?”
“Hard to say. There were a few distinct single-point powder burns on the neck, which would put the gun within five feet, but the burns were not numerous enough to form a pattern. The gun may have been even closer, with the powder burns minimized by the material around the muzzle.”
“I don’t suppose you recovered a bullet.” Rodriguez addressed the criticism to a spot in the air between Thrasher and Hardwick.
Gurney’s jaw tightened. He had worked for men like Rodriguez-men who mistook their control obsession for leadership and their negativity for tough-mindedness.
Thrasher responded first. “The bullet missed the vertebrae. There’s not much in the neck tissue itself that could stop it. We have an entry wound and an exit wound-neither one easy to find, by the way, with all the puncture damage inflicted later.” If he was fishing for compliments, thought Gurney, this was a dead pond. Rodriguez shifted his querying gaze to Hardwick, whose tone was again just short of insubordinate.
“We didn’t look for a bullet. We had no reason to believe there was a bullet.”
“Well, now you do.”
“Excellent point, sir,” said Hardwick with a hint of mockery. He pulled out his cell phone and entered a number, walking away from the table. Despite his lowered voice, it was clear that he was talking to an officer at the crime scene and requesting a search for the bullet on a priority basis. When he returned to the table, Kline asked if there was any hope of recovering a bullet fired outdoors.
“Usually not,” said Hardwick. “But in this case there’s a chance. Considering the position of the body, he was probably shot with his back to the house. If it wasn’t deflected in a major way, we might find it in the wood siding.”
Kline nodded slowly. “Okay, then, as I started to say a minute ago, just to get this straight-the murderer shoots the victim at close range, the victim falls to the ground, carotid artery severed, blood spurting from his neck. Then the murderer produces a broken bottle and squats down next to the body and stabs it fourteen times. Is that the picture?” he asked incredulously.
“At least fourteen, possibly more,” said Thrasher. “When they overlap, an accurate count becomes difficult.”
“I understand, but what I’m really getting at is, why?”
“Motive,” said Thrasher, as though the concept were on a scientific par with dream interpretation, “is not my area of expertise. Ask our friends here from BCI.”
Kline turned to Hardwick. “A broken bottle is a weapon of convenience, a weapon of the moment, a barroom substitute for a knife or a gun. Why would a man who already has a loaded gun feel the need to carry a broken bottle, and why would he use it after he had already killed his victim with the gun?”
“To make sure he was dead?” offered Rodriguez.
“Then why not just shoot him again? Why not shoot him in the head? Why not shoot him in the head to begin with? Why in the neck?”
“Maybe he was a lousy shot.”
“From five feet away?” Kline turned back to Thrasher. “Are we sure about the sequence? Shot, then stabbed?”
“Yes, to a reasonable level of professional certainty, as we say in court. The powder burns, although limited, are clear. If the neck area had already been covered with blood from stab wounds at the time of the shot, it is unlikely that distinct burns could have occurred.”
“And you would have found the bullet.” The redhead said this in such a soft, matter-of-fact way that only a few people heard her. Kline was one of them. Gurney was another. He’d been wondering when this point would occur to someone. Hardwick was unreadable but did not appear surprised.
“What do you mean?” asked Kline.
She answered without taking her eyes off her laptop screen. “If he was stabbed fourteen times in the neck as part of the initial assault, with four of the wounds passing completely through, he could hardly have remained standing. And if he was then shot from above while lying on his back, the bullet would have been on the ground underneath him.”
Kline cast her an assessing glance. Unlike Rodriguez, mused Gurney, he was intelligent enough to respect intelligence.
Rodriguez made an effort to retake the reins. “What caliber bullet are we looking for, Doctor?”
Thrasher glared over the top of the half-glasses that were making their way down his long nose. “What do I have to do to get you people to grasp the simplest facts of pathology?”
“I know, I know,” said Rodriguez peevishly, “the flesh is pliable, it shrinks, it expands, you can’t be exact, et cetera, et cetera. But would you say it was closer to a.22 or a.44? Make an educated guess.”
“I’m not paid to guess. Besides, no one remembers for more than five minutes that it was only a guess. What they remember is that the ME said something about a.22 and he turned out to be wrong.” There was a cold gleam of recollection in his eyes, but all he said was, “When you dig the bullet out of the back of the house and give it to ballistics, then you’ll know-”
“Doctor,” interrupted Kline like a little boy questioning Mr. Wizard, “is it possible to estimate the exact interval between the gunshot and the subsequent stabbings?”
The tone of the question seemed to mollify Thrasher. “If the interval between the two were substantial, and both wounds bled, we would find blood in two different stages of coagulation. In this case I would say that that the two types of wounds occurred in close enough sequence to make that sort of comparison impossible. All we can say is that the interval was relatively short, but whether it was ten seconds or ten minutes would be hard to say. That’s a good pathology question, though,” he concluded, distinguishing it from the captain’s question.
The captain’s mouth twitched. “If that’s all you have for us at the moment, Doctor, we won’t keep you. I’ll get the written report no later than one week from today?”
“I believe that’s what I said.” Thrasher picked up his bulging case from the table, nodded to the district attorney with a thin-lipped smile, and left the room.
Chapter 23
