“The firing pin, Your Honor,” he said. “As the young man pointed out, it’s a titanium firing pin, for faster lock time. What he didn’t point out, because he didn’t notice, was that it ain’t four point five-six-five inches long, as the Remington specs call for. No, sir, it’s four point four-six-five inches long. Ain’t no way it’s long enough to reach the primer. Now if you looked real careful, you’d see that a man who knew all about rifles took this little sucker and cut it in two with a file. Then he removed just one tenth of an inch of metal from the pin shaft. Then he welded it together again, and you’d have to measure it with a set of Jap calipers to tell the difference, but the one thing sure as death is that it ain’t long enough to reach the primer. Just by a hair, but close don’t count. It don’t shoot. It don’t go bang. Now why would he do that? If Bob Lee Swagger were a sly man, you might say that at some time in his past when he was shooting for some people, he noticed that somebody had removed one of the spent casings on his handloads and replaced it with another. It bothered him. A small thing, ten cents’ worth of brass, that’s all. But it bothered him. And so later he took out the firing pin and he performed that surgery and then he put it back, because he suspected something strange was going on in his life. And maybe all these months he’s known he had absolute physical proof that he could not have shot the archbishop and the FBI and the government didn’t know diddly. And maybe he used that time to find out who those men are, and what dark deeds they’d done in the past. Your Honor, you may have noticed that on the first day of deer season last month in Arkansas, there was an astonishing number of accidents. Three men killed on one day? Amazing, what with hunting accidents way down these days on account of blaze orange. But you know, Your Honor, sometimes justice happens in strange ways that men and courts can’t quite understand.
“And so who fired the shot that killed Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez? You’ll have to ask Bob Lee Swagger. Maybe he’ll tell you. He won’t tell me. But we do know this. Someone else fired that bullet from another rifle. ’Cause this one don’t work. That’s what the irrefutable evidence says. So, Your Honor, I ask you. Is there a case here? Or are we trying the wrong case?”
The judge asked the two attorneys to stand.
He looked at them both squarely.
“Mr. Kelso,” he finally said, “what are you doing here? You have a murder to solve and you’re nowhere near solving it. You haven’t even started. Bailiff, please release Mr. Swagger. He is free to live his own life now. I’m dismissing all charges. And I think that should do it. I think we can all go home now.”
The reporters exploded out of the courtroom to file the day’s astonishing events. In this ruckus, almost unnoticed, Bob stood, smiled easily, shook Sam Vincent’s hand, then came over to Nick, his bonds at last off.
“You did good, Nick. You can spot for me any day.”
“You did good yourself, old man.”
“Aren’t we a damn team, though? You sure you weren’t a Marine?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Well, you take care now. It was fun.”
“It was.”
Bob Lee walked away, and within seconds, somehow, was gone. It was the sniper’s gift. To disappear, leaving no trace, gone suddenly and totally.
Nick turned to Sally, but instead found himself looking upon the ruined face of Howard D. Utey.
“Howard, you weren’t even close. You didn’t even muss his hair. He just blew you away.” Over Howard’s shoulder, he could see the old man Meachum standing in the shadows, watching. Nick almost called out to him, but Meachum stepped back and he too vanished.
Then he turned to Sally.
“You want to get out of here?”
“Boy, do I.”
“Where to?”
“Oh, I think we could figure something out.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The scandal was a flame. It burned hot and bright and it devoured those who attempted to control it. Howard was unceremoniously retired by a humiliated Federal Bureau of Investigation before the week was over, as were the other three members of the Lancer Committee; the U.S. Attorney’s Office reassigned young Philip Kelso to a far western state, but he refused the assignment, resigned, and went into private practice. The real shocker, however, was Hugh Meachum, dead on the third day after the hearing by coronary aneurysm. His heart simply exploded, as if hit by a bullet.
When he heard, Nick thought: He got them all. Every last one of them.
He was spending a long, glorious week just being with Sally, in her apartment mostly, but with a few other stops, when at last a phone call tracked him down. It was Hap Fencl.
“Quite a mess here, bub.”
“Yeah, well,” said Nick.
“Know where I might find a good, slightly used special agent? We got some snappy cases going down, need a guy with experience.”
“Wasn’t I fired?”
“Oh, Nick, gee, some guy may have had an idea like that, but he’s long gone, and I don’t think you could find anybody in the personnel office who knows where the paperwork went. Nick, seriously. This is where you belong. You were right. Howard was a mistake. They come along, sometimes. But they destroy themselves. It’s a good outfit. Guys like you make it good.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Come on, Nick. Nothing special, just street work, New Orleans, the same salary, back pay. Some guys in Washington want to talk to you about this RamDyne thing, so you may as well get paid for it.”
Nick breathed heavily. He just wanted to be an FBI agent, that was all he’d ever wanted.
“Okay,” he finally said, “see you tomorrow.”
“And Nick. Marry that damned girl, will you?”
“Well, dammit,” he said, “I did. Yesterday.”
“Congrats. See you, partner.”
So Nick went back on duty, and spent his honeymoon in Washington, two weeks of telling his RamDyne story over and over again, as a crack team of hotshots tried to track down the elusive truth. That unit is due to release its report. It will happen any day now, you may be sure of it.
It would have helped matters immensely, of course, if they’d ever found Dr. David Dobbler. But they never did; he was either dead in the fastness of the Ouachitas, or perhaps living by his wits under a new name in some Southern California resort town. Nick always favored the latter explanation.
Of RamDyne, no trace remained. Its staff dispersed, its seedy headquarters languished and is now the location of a small software concern; those who spoke to the FBI were lower-level people, who knew nothing. Colonel Raymond Shreck’s body went unclaimed; it was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, not far from John F. Kennedy’s, because after all, the colonel had won the Silver Star and the DSC in Korea and another Silver and three Bronze Stars in Vietnam. John D. “Jack” Payne was buried in the United States Army cemetery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He, too, had been a hero.
And James Thomas Albright, or Lon Scott, his secrets lost forever, went into a mausoleum outside Danville, where his remains joined those of his father and his mother, which he had had disinterred and brought down from Vermont. He willed his collection of benchrest rifles and shooting memorabilia to the National Rifle Association, and the Tenth Black King now resides in its National Firearms Museum in Washington, D.C., testament to a time when skill with a rifle was the most gentlemanly of all pursuits and men like Art Scott represented their country proudly with Winchester’s best in their hands. The Association had little use for the other effects, including a curious collection of fired 162-grain.264 caliber bullets from some bizarre project or other in the early sixties, found in his safe deposit box. His corporate portfolio, amounting to over seven million dollars, went to the National Association of Quadriplegics.