Cooper looked over the cigarette butts and the candy wrapper that Poitier’s original crime scene searchers had found in the Kill Room but these yielded nothing helpful. The butts were the same brand as the pack of Marlboros found on the guard’s body, the candy had come from a gift basket for Moreno when he arrived. The fingerprints that Pulaski had lifted, not surprisingly, were negative for hits in any database.
“Let’s move on to the prostitute’s apartment. Annette Bodel.”
Pulaski’d done a good job, collecting plenty of trace from near where the killer had searched, along with samplars to eliminate any that was probably not from him. Cooper examined the items and, occasionally, ran samples through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. He finally announced, “First, we’ve got two-stroke fuel.”
These were smaller engines, two-strokes, like those in snowmobiles and chain saws, in which the lubricating oil is mixed directly with gasoline.
“Jet Ski maybe,” Rhyme said. “She worked in a dive shop part-time. Might not be from our perp but we’ll keep it in mind.”
“And sand,” the tech announced. “Along with seawater residue.” He compared the chemical breakdown of these items with what was on the board for two of the prior scenes. “Yep, it’s virtually the same as what Amelia found at Java Hut.”
Rhyme lifted an eyebrow at this. “Ah, a definitive link between Unsub Five Sixteen and the Bahamas. We know he was in Annette’s apartment and I’m ninety-nine percent sure he was the one in the South Cove on May eighth. Now, anything linking him to Lydia Foster?”
Pulaski pointed out, “The brown hair, which is what Corporal Poitier said the man in the South Cove Inn had, the one who was there just before Moreno was killed.”
“It suggests; it doesn’t prove. Keep going, Mel.”
The tech was staring into the eyepiece of a microscope. “Something odd here. Some membrane, orange. I’ll run part of it through the GC/MS.”
Some minutes later he had the results from the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer.
Cooper read, “DHA, C22:6n-3—docosahexaenoic acid.”
“Fish oil,” Rhyme said, looking at the screen on which the microscopic image was being projected. “And with that membrane, see in the upper right corner? I’d say fish eggs: Roe. Or caviar.”
“Also some C8H8O3,” Cooper said.
“You’ve got me,” Rhyme muttered.
The lookup took thirty seconds. “Vanillin.”
“As in vanilla extract?”
“That’s right.”
“Thom! Thom, get in here. Where the hell are you?”
The aide’s voice drifted into the room. “What do you need?”
“You. Present. Here. In the room.”
Rolling down his sleeves, the aide joined them. “How could I resist such a polite summons?”
Sachs laughed.
Rhyme frowned. “Look over those charts, Thom. Put your culinary skills to work. Tell me what you think about those entries, knowing that the docosahexaenoic acid and the C8H8O3 are, respectively, caviar and vanilla.”
The aide stood for a moment, looking over the charts. His face shifted into a smile. “Familiar…Hold on a minute.” He went to a nearby computer and pulled up the New York Times. He did some browsing. Rhyme couldn’t see exactly what he was looking at. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“Ah, could you share the interesting part?”
“The other two scenes — Lydia Foster and the Java Hut — have traces of artichoke and licorice, right?”
“Right,” Cooper confirmed.
He spun the computer for them to look at. “Well, combine those ingredients with caviar and vanilla and you have a real expensive dish that’s served at the Patchwork Goose. There was just an article about it in the Food section recently.”
“Patchwork…the fuck is that?” Sellitto muttered.
Sachs said, “It’s one of the fanciest restaurants in town. They serve seven or eight courses over four hours and pair the wine. They do weird things like cook with liquid nitrogen and butane torches. Not that I’ve ever been, of course.”
“That’s right,” Thom said, nodding at the screen. It appeared to be a recipe. “And that’s one of the dishes: trout served with artichoke cooked in licorice broth and garnished with roe and vanilla mayonnaise. Your perp left traces of those ingredients?”
“That’s right,” Sachs said.
Sellitto asked, “So he works in the restaurant?”
Thom shook his head. “Oh, I doubt it. You’re committed to working six days a week, twelve-hour days at a place like that. He wouldn’t have time to be a professional hit man. And I doubt it’s a customer. I don’t think the ingredients would transfer or last more than a few hours on his clothes. More likely he made the dish at home. From the recipe here.”
“Good, good,” Rhyme whispered. “Now we know Unsub Five Sixteen went to the Bahamas on May fifteenth to kill Annette Bodel, set the IED at Java Hut and killed Lydia Foster. He was probably the one at the South Cove Inn just before Moreno was shot. He was helping Barry Shales prep for the killing.”
Sachs said, “And we know he likes to cook. Maybe he’s a former pro. That could be helpful.”
Cooper lifted his phone and took a call; Rhyme hadn’t heard it ring and wondered if the tech had the unit on vibrate or if he himself was suffering from water on the ear from his swim. Lord knew his eyes still stung.
The crime scene tech thanked the caller and announced, “We ran the bulb of the brown hair that Amelia recovered from Lydia Foster’s. That was the results of the CODIS analysis. Nothing. Whoever the unsub is, he’s not in any criminal DNA databases.”
As Sachs wrote their latest findings on the whiteboard Rhyme said, “Now we’re making some progress. But the key to nailing Metzger is the sniper rifle and the key to the rifle is the bullet. Let’s take a look at it.”
CHAPTER 57
Although people have been eliminating each other with firearms for more than a thousand years, the forensic analysis of guns and bullets is a relatively new science.
In probably the first instance of applying the discipline, investigators in England in the middle of the nineteenth century got a confession from a killer based on matching a bullet with the mold that made it. In 1902 an expert witness (Oliver Wendell Holmes, no less) helped prosecutors convict a suspect by matching a bullet test-fired by the suspect’s gun to the murder slug.
However, it wasn’t until Calvin Goddard, a medical doctor and forensic scientist, published “Forensic Ballistics” in 1925 that the discipline truly took off. Goddard is still known as the father of ballistic science.
Rhyme had three goals in applying the rules Goddard had laid down ninety years ago. First, to identify the bullet. Second, from that information to identify the types of guns that could have fired it. Third, to link this particular bullet to a specific gun of that sort, which could be traced to the shooter, in this case Barry Shales.
The team now turned to the first of these questions. The bullet itself.
Gloved and masked, Sachs opened the plastic bag containing the bullet, a misshapen oblong of copper and lead. She looked it over. “It’s a curious round. Unusual. First, it’s big — three-hundred grain.”
The weight of the projectile fired from the gun — called a slug — is measured in grains. A three-hundred-grain bullet is about three-quarters of an ounce. Most hunting, combat and even sniper rifles fire a bullet that’s much smaller, around 180 grains.
She measured it with a caliber gauge, a flat metal disk with holes of various sizes punched into it. “And a rare caliber. A big one. Four twenty.”