Nick stood, looked beyond the director’s shoulder.
“Starling, come here, will you?”
The young woman got up instantly, came in.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have called you that, Agent Chandler. Have you met the director? Sir, this is Special Agent Jean Chandler, whom I’ve appointed our case monitor. She’s very good, works like a dog.”
“Starling, eh? I get it. Well, I hope you’re as good as Starling, Starling.”
“So do I, sir,” said Starling, for whom the original Starling was a complete goddess and the primary reason she’d decided on the Bureau for a career.
“I think I know your dad. Arizona? Great cop.”
“He’s the best.”
“Starling, I’m sorry, Agent Chandler.”
“I’m used to it, Mr. Director.”
“Anyhow, any experience with the press?”
“My father and brothers were not disposed to share things with the press.”
“Well, that’s sound principle, most of the time. But sometimes it buys us some time if we can feed the dogs a little something so they fight among themselves and leave us alone for a bit. Hmm, I’m wondering if-”
The phone rang.
“Go ahead, Nick, answer it, this can wait.”
“Yes sir.”
Nick snatched the phone up, glad for the interruption. He knew that having a thing with the press was tricky; you could never outsmart them, and Starling, even if she was working under the director’s guidance, could get tagged as a snitch, never trusted, and it might hurt her career. He didn’t wish that on anybody so young, so bright, so hardworking.
“Memphis.”
“Swagger. I think I’ve got a little something. Should I come over? I don’t know how you want to play it.”
“My idea is, I’d bring the upper management of the investigative team over, plus some of the forensic and ATF loaners. Is that okay? You can talk to the group.”
“Sure, in for a penny, in for a pound.”
“And since he’s here, I might bring the director along.”
“Why not?” said Bob.
“Tell me you have good news.”
“I have news,” Bob said, “and it’s up to you whether it’s good or bad.”
“That doesn’t sound promising.”
“Your people did a great job. Amazing, really, in the time. They only got one little thing wrong.”
“And that is?”
“They got the wrong guy.”
10
He stood at the head of a table with his notes written on a yellow legal pad. Immediately to his right, some very pretty young woman had her own pad, presumably to take what he said down. The others in the room were the executive special agents of the Task Force Sniper investigation, two loaners from ATF, a Bureau ballistics lab guy, one or two junior analysts, an Ohio detective, a Chicago detective, a New York State Police detective, also loaners to represent local interests, Nick as the task force commander, and the director, who had allegedly “been in the area” and wandered in. All basked in the dead institutional light of the overhead fluorescent, which turned them a kind of pale gray-green.
They knew. It was a sullen crew, hostile, not furious but disappointed and ready to fight. No smiles, no eye contact, nothing but sluggish body language, whispers with attitude launching them too loudly into colleagues’ ears, a whole “We’re not impressed” vibration throbbing in the room.
“Folks,” said Nick when the shifting and shuffling and whispering had settled down, “as I’ve told all of you, I wanted to get an outsider’s opinion on our findings, and I asked Mr. Swagger here because he’s a former marine sniper himself. I’m sure he’ll admit that he began with the honest bias to come to a different finding, to exonerate a fellow marine, but I knew that if we convinced him, we were doing pretty good. I guess we haven’t. But I also know that he is the most experienced shooter I’ve ever met, an authentically honorable and dependable man, and I believe he has a certain kind of, uh, ‘gift’ for seeing into shooting dynamics. Not that he’s a court- approved firearms expert, but he’s just got some extra gene for seeing things that other people don’t see. So let’s listen to what he has to say. Bob, why don’t you get started?”
“I should add,” said the director, “and excuse me Nick, I don’t mean to take over your task force, but last year as a consultant to Nick in Tennessee, Mr. Swagger performed with heroic distinction in an undercover capacity. He’s earned the right to muss a few feathers around here, so I expect complete professional respect from everybody. I will be very disappointed if this turns into a yelling match.”
“I won’t do no yelling, I promise,” said Bob. “I can tell there’s disappointment here. I’m not here to criticize or to suggest somebody missed something. I don’t want nobody’s career hurt. I don’t want nothing but the truth. You can also tell from the way I mix them verbs and subjects up, I’m not particularly well educated, and I apologize for that also. If I try to sound like I am, I will just sound even dumber, so generally I won’t make no attempt to speak ‘smart,’ like you’d expect. If I lapse into it and my verbs and subjects start agreeing, give me a kick in the butt.”
That brought a laugh, a respite, however brief, in the hostility.
“But it don’t matter how I talk. I’m here to bring experience none of you has, which is as a sniper, a man who’s taken lives in the field and who’s spent too much time thinking about this sort of thing. So let me thank you in advance for your attention, and let me sum up and put cards on the table. Yeah, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong and that Carl Hitchcock didn’t do nothing. He spent the last week of his life, I’m guessing, in a drug-induced coma, and right away you say, ‘How come there’s no drugs in his bloodstream?’ and the reason is, the drug they used was bourbon. There was plenty of that in there. He was an alcoholic and he was pickled forcefully via an arm drip-okay, I don’t know the medicine, maybe it was just pure alcohol-after he was kidnapped. By who? I can’t give you no name. But when I’m done you’ll have a pretty good picture of who the guy is, where he is, and what it’ll take to catch him. So shall we start?”
A few mumbles seemed to acknowledge reluctant assent.
“I begin with the shooting. You noted the shooter was a fellow of some experience. This boy knew what he was doing. Twice he made brain shots through heavy back window auto glass from what looks to be two-hundred-plus yards out. He drilled the actress between the ribs and into her heart. He shot Mitch Greene through the open mouth from a hundred yards out through glass. Carl Hitchcock clearly had the capacity to make those shots. So did his rifle. So did his ammunition. With that rifle and that ammunition and that skill, y’all are thinking, as I did at first, it’s a piece of cake. Cold-bore kill shot. Yes, you could have made the cold-bore kill shot, Nick could have made the kill shot, I could have made the kill shot. But these shots weren’t no cold-bore kill shots. These weren’t bull’s-eyes. These weren’t center-target hits. These, all four of them, were abnormally perfect shots.”
He let that sink in.
“He didn’t hit the target. He didn’t hit the bull’s-eye. He didn’t hit the center of the bull’s-eye. He didn’t hit the X at the center of the bull’s-eye. Four times running, he hit exactly the spot where the two slashes cross to form the X in the center of the bull’s-eye. He hit the exact mathematical center of the target, and you can verify that by checking the locations as figured by the coroners who measured. All four shots are centered right on the goddamned button by measurement.”
Instantly, a hand shot up.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said the New York State Police detective, “but that isn’t what I see at all. What I see is a hole in the ribs to the left of the left breast, a hole in the center of the back of the skull, a hole in the left side of the head two inches above and a little ahead of the left ear, and a hole in the back of the mouth. I give you, maybe, the hole in the center of the back of the head and the mouth shot,
“Good point. However, you’re thinking of the targets as if they’s lying still. You’re thinking of them as two dimensions on a mount and looking for equal measurements top and bottom, right and left. But these was human and they’s in motion. They are dead center, dead bang Fourth of July center, to the body at the angle it was at the time of the shooting. It’s easiest to see on Reilly. Her husband got blasted, right next to her. She turns her head to look at it, pivoting to the left. As she turns longitudinally, her head gets longer. The shooter shoots exactly for the center of the head and at that angle, with the head cranked around forty-five or so degrees to the left, the exact mathematical center is four inches up and one inch in front of the left ear.”
He looked at his notes.
“At a forty-five-degree angle, her head would have been 425 millimeters wide. I called a fellow to run it through the computer. Our asshole put the bullet exactly at 212 millimeters from the extreme furthest point of the skull and 132 millimeters from the crown and 132 millimeters from the jawline. Do you need the figures on Flanders? It’s the same. Dead center side to side and top to bottom, given the angle of the bullet to the target. If he were shooting groups, he would have put those four bullets from varying distances in varying conditions into one hole of about.312 inches. Moreover, the group size, measured from center to center of the four bullet holes, would have been less than one-tenth of an inch. Ain’t no man alive can shoot like that. Only God could.”
He tried to let it sink in but in most cases saw confusion.
“How did he do it?”
He waited for an answer.
“Here’s the funny thing. If you asked him, he wouldn’t know. He wasn’t trying to do it. It was a mistake. If he’d figured it out in advance, he’d have shot less well, just for kills, not for the center of the center. He actually did it by mistake. How?”
No answer.
