“Got a match, here,” Jose said, moving away from the microscope.
Frank stepped up and bent to the eyepieces.
A blur, silver and dark gray. He fiddled with the eyepieces. The focus sharpened. A vertical line split the image. On either side of the line, were horizontal lines like a compressed bar code. He adjusted a knob. The lines on the left moved down a fraction to match precisely those on the right. He was looking at two bullets. The horizontal lines-silver against dark gray-were the marks left by the grooves in a pistol’s barrel as the bullet passed through.
Calkins’s dry, matter-of-fact voice came in as Frank was still studying the comparisons.
“Slug on the right killed Skeeter Hodges, and…”
Frank looked up from the microscope.
“… I sent it over to the Bureau to run it against Drug-fire.”
“Yeah?”
“They got a match.” Calkins pointed to the microscope. “Like I said, the slug on the right killed Skeeter Friday night.”
Calkins stopped to make certain he’d nailed this fact down with Frank and Jose, then dropped the other shoe.
“The one on the left killed Kevin Gentry.”
“Gentry?” Frank asked. He wasn’t certain he’d heard right. Then he was afraid he had.
“Gentry?” Jose echoed in the background.
“Gentry,” Frank repeated. “Kevin Gentry… Capitol South Metro station… early ’ninety-nine. January?… February?”
“February,” Jose said. “A real shitstorm.”
“A very high-intensity shitstorm.” Calkins slipped into his classroom tutorial voice.
“They did a Three-oh-four-point-one, didn’t they?” Jose asked.
Calkins nodded. “Administrative closure. Zelmer Austin ring a bell? Do you remember the grounds?”
Getting blank looks from Jose and Frank, Calkins frowned. He took the clipboard from under his arm, flipped open the aluminum cover and found a page. “Zelmer Darryl Austin…” he said. “Fifteen April 1999… Eaton Road, Barry Farms… DOA, hit-and-run, Washington Hospital Center.”
Calkins looked up from the clipboard. “Grounds for closing the case were Austin’s track record, and testimony from an informant.”
Jose nodded. “Yeah. Austin… one of Juan Brooks’s enforcers. When Brooks got busted, Austin stayed on with Skeeter Hodges until they fell out.”
Frank took that in, then glanced around the lab. He looked back at Calkins.
“So we have the weapon that killed Gentry showing up. Does that mean Austin didn’t kill Gentry?”
“No,” Calkins said. “All it tells us is that the weapon survived Zelmer Austin.”
Jose shrugged. “Austin knew the business. You make a hit, you don’t keep the weapon. You do, it’s a go-to- jail card. So what we got is a scenario where Austin pops this guy Gentry. Austin dumps the weapon. Austin gets done in with a hit-and-run. Somebody inherits the piece, maybe it changes hands a couple a times. Two years later, somebody uses it to pop Skeeter and Pencil on Bayless Place. And the piece is still out there.”
Calkins began smiling as he listened to Jose’s story. “A precise summary, Detective Phelps. May I help you fill it out?” he asked, the smile turning slightly mischievous.
“Please do, Dr. Calkins. Be my guest.”
“At some time or another, the weapon that killed Kevin Gentry and Skeeter Hodges was in Pencil Crawfurd’s custody.”
Calkins leaned against the edge of the lab counter and watched Frank and Jose exchange puzzled glances.
Frank sighed. “Okay, R.C. We give up.”
Calkins motioned to another microscope, down the counter from the comparison instrument.
“Shell casing from Bayless Place. It had a print on it. A partial, but enough.” He stopped.
“Damn it, R.C., you’re gonna find your car towed, you keep this shit up,” Jose said.
“The print, gentlemen,” Calkins said archly, “is none other than that of Pencil Crawfurd.”
“Pencil…” Frank said, trying to make sense of it.
“Pencil,” Calkins echoed. “Unless he was a contortionist or a magician, he didn’t do the shooting on Bayless Place, but he damn sure loaded the weapon that did the shooting.”
Jose got a grip on it first. “Weapon kills Gentry, shows up two years later, kills Skeeter and wounds Pencil.”
“And Pencil loaded it,” Frank tagged on.
“Obviously,” Calkins said, “the weapon got out of Pencil’s possession sometime after he loaded it.”
“So when’d Pencil load it?” Jose asked.
“Yes,” Frank said, his voice on automatic while his mind tried to make sense of the ballistics. “If Pencil got the weapon after Gentry was killed and loaded it then, that’s one thing. But if he loaded it before Gentry was killed…”
“Just might be,” Jose finished, “that Pencil killed Gentry, then got shot two years later with his own weapon.”
Over Calkins’s shoulder, Frank contemplated the microscope, black and silver and mechanical, crouched smugly on the lab counter, silently mocking him with its riddle.
TEN
You two have a reverse Midas touch-everything you lay a finger on turns to shit.”
Before the three men, on Emerson’s desk, Kevin Walker Gentry’s file.
Gentry’s death had been one of those nightmare events every bureaucrat dreads: the murder of a politically connected victim in a politically symbolic setting. The staff director of the District of Columbia Appropriations Subcommittee, Gentry, had been gunned down virtually on the steps of the House of Representatives. For months, the heat had been intense, unrelenting: the Post, the Times, the Blade, and the City Paper had hounded Mayor Malcolm Burridge, the city council, and the department. Congress had held televised hearings. Clint Eastwood and Martin Sheen had come to town to testify.
“Milton saved Burridge and Emerson’s asses,” Jose was fond of saying. The Gentry flap had vanished overnight, when Milton had finally come up with Zelmer Austin.
Emerson scrubbed his face with both hands. He had the crestfallen expression of a bone-weary man who’d found out he had another hundred miles of rough going in front of him.
“So the Gentry case’s biting us in the ass again.” Emerson’s lips pressed together into a tight, bloodless line. Viciously he slapped the desktop. “Okay! Okay!” He threw himself back into his chair.
For a long time, nobody spoke. Frank and Jose stood in front of the desk. Emerson sat in his chair in an angry, almost catatonic state, staring at the Gentry case jacket.
Frank took in Emerson’s intense glare.
That case jacket’s going to break into flame.
Finally Emerson took a deep breath and brought his hand up to massage the back of his neck. “We had that case closed.”
“Yes.” Frank shook his head, and spoke softly, as though saying it any other way might cause Emerson to shatter. “But… what’s going to be in the papers-”
“What’s that?” Emerson asked, a tight frown signaling that he knew what it was.
“-is that we may not have gotten the person who killed Kevin Gentry.”
“It could still be that Austin killed Gentry.” The hollow, mechanical way Emerson said it didn’t sound like a man convinced. He pointed to Frank and Jose.
“Set up a task force.”
“What?” Frank asked.
