Francis nodded. “It appears that way, sir.”
“By who?” Buscema asked, and immediately grimaced, realizing it was a stupid question. He waved his hand and then tapped the X-ray. “You’re saying that you found bullet fragments? Is there any way you could be mistaken?” He reached over and took the plastic bag from me, peering closely at the specimen. “It sure as hell is.”
“And even if it’s not from a bullet as such,” Estelle said, “it’s a piece of a projectile that was traveling fast enough to penetrate a considerable distance as it was fragmenting.”
“Did you look at any of those pieces under a stereoscope?” I asked, and when Estelle nodded, I added, “And what did you find?”
“I’m sure the fragments are from a bullet. One of them has what look like rifling marks. Really pretty clear. Eddie agrees.” I glanced at Mitchell, and he nodded soberly.
“Where are the rest?”
“Deputy Abeyta is with Dr. Perrone now, down in Autopsy. He and Eddie were cataloging each fragment as it was found. When I was sure of what we had, I sent Eddie up after you.”
I leaned against one of the polished stainless-steel tables. “So you’re saying that Philip Camp was shot,” I said. If I said it enough times, maybe I’d believe it. “What about Martin Holman?”
Francis shook his head. “Nothing yet. Nothing has shown up in X-ray. Nothing at all.”
“So,” I said, “from the ground?” I stood up and advanced on the X-ray once again. “Nothing else makes sense.”
“It looks like one bullet. It struck Mr. Camp low in the back, just above the pelvis. My guess is that’s where some of the shattering took place. At least two pieces continued on for some distance, stopping where you see them in the X-ray.”
“And if the aorta was opened up, death would have been instantaneous,” Buscema said flatly.
“Just about. Seconds at most.” Francis held his thumb and index finger two inches apart. “You’ve got a tear that long. He wouldn’t have had time to do more than take a couple of breaths. That little piece of brass is like a fragment of a razor blade. Just unzips the artery.”
“He collapses forward, and down the plane goes,” Buscema said. “It fits. Before the passenger has time to realize what’s happening or to lunge for the controls. Bam!”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “Eddie, I want you and Abeyta to put this thing together. Be goddam sure nothing gets misplaced. You get all the fragments and make a composite. I want to know what this goddam thing was. If it was a bullet, I want the caliber, manufacture, grain weight, everything. Rifling twist, everything.”
“Yes, sir,” Mitchell said, and Buscema handed him the plastic bag.
“It had to come from the ground,” I said. “Do you see any other way?”
Buscema shook his head. “There’s no other way that makes sense,” he said. “We need to know where the plane was struck. If a high-velocity rifle bullet punched through the aluminum skin, it wouldn’t be deformed or deflected much. But if it hit frame members, or cables, or the frame of the pilot’s seat, it very easily could be.”
“The entrance hole in the victim’s back was extremely small,” Francis said. “It wasn’t the sort of wound I’d associate with being struck full-on by a high-velocity bullet.”
“So it was a fragment to begin with,” Buscema said, and Francis nodded.
“Then we’ve got three big jobs, Mr. Gastner,” the federal agent said. “One, we need to put that airplane back together and find out just what the hell happened. Reconstruct where and how that bullet hit the airframe. It’s a comparatively small plane, but that’s still going to take time. Does the county have a vacant hangar we can use?”
“We’ll find one.”
“The second thing is to determine what kind of bullet it was. The Bureau has resources that you don’t, so I wouldn’t waste any time before calling them in on this.”
“I’ve already done that,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said.
“Good,” Buscema nodded. “You got the bullet, and we find out where and how it hit the airplane. That leaves just the big one.”
“Who fired it,” I said.
“And why,” Estelle added.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Saying what we had to do was a hell of a lot easier than doing it. What Vincent Buscema wanted first was a telephone, and while he barked orders to whoever was on the other end, I sent Eddie Mitchell down to the airport to secure a hangar.
The vacant hangar was the easy part. The Posadas Municipal Airport had enjoyed a spurt of growth and activity back in the early 1970’s, when Consolidated Mining still believed that ore-rich deposits were available under the rugged slopes of Cat Mesa. Those glory days lasted for about a decade.
Three hangars now stood empty, and Jim Bergin handed over the keys to what he called CMCO-2. The sixty-by-hundred-foot hangar had once housed Consolidated’s Gulf-stream Jet, a couple of executive cars, and the hulks of half a dozen odd pieces of mining equipment that hadn’t made their way to the Consolidated boneyard up on the hill.
The machinery still remained, but there was plenty of floor space, blow-sand streaked, to lay out the torn pieces and chunks of Phil Camp’s Bonanza.
As soon as Buscema was off the telephone, he beckoned Estelle and me and we followed him into one of the doctors’ conference rooms. “First things first,” he said and closed the door. “That crash site has to be secured for the night.”
“We’ll have deputies up there,” I said, “and, I assume, some of your people as well. Everyone will stay on-site.”
He nodded. “Weather looks all right, so that’s a help. You got us a hangar?” I nodded. “Good. Now, here’s the problem. We can’t just pitch stuff into the back of pickup trucks and haul it down to the hangar like loads of trash.”
“I can appreciate that,” I said.
“I’ve got a detailed, low-level aerial photo being processed of the crash site,” Buscema said. “It’s actually a composite.” He framed a long, rectangular space in the air with his hands. “Over the top of that, we lay a clear plastic grid. Each square on the plastic grid gives us a square meter. That way, we can mark where each piece is found on the crash site. Where it comes from.”
“And then it’s tagged, and then it’s moved,” I said.
Buscema nodded. “Exactly. It’s a pisser of a process, but in a case like this, it’s the only way we’re going to make sense of what might have happened. Toss a homicide into an air-crash equation and all kinds of rules change.”
He took a deep breath and stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, regarding the tile floor. “Fortunately,” and he said finally, “this isn’t three hundred tons of shattered Boeing 747 that we’re handling. In comparison, it’s a little pipsqueak of an airplane that won’t take us long to move or to tag. And we’re starting off with a known fact, which helps just a whole hell of a lot. We know, with as much certainty as we know anything in this crazy world, that a bullet from the ground-or maybe from some other, unseen aircraft-took out the pilot. And then the plane scattered over two hundred yards of prairie.”
It was the first time I’d heard anyone mention the possibility of a second aircraft, and I looked at Buscema with surprise. “You really think there might be a second plane?” I asked.
“No, I don’t. Not a remote chance in hell.”
Estelle let out a long sigh. “It could be anything from a youngster firing a wild shot with a hunting rifle to…” She hesitated, searching for the extreme.
“Terrorists shoot down airplanes,” Buscema said. “Or try to.” He shrugged. “But not in the countryside outside of Posadas, New Mexico, I wouldn’t think. Not unless your Philip Camp or Martin Holman were very interesting to someone as targets.”
Holman would have been pleased, I thought, to have someone even briefly entertain the idea that he was something other than a former used-car salesman who had enjoyed a reasonably successful run as sheriff. International conspiracies had a nice ring of intrigue that would have puffed him up with pride.