“I’m with you!” Walker beamed. “That’s nearly a direct quote, by the way. So, don’t trammel our rights.” He nodded.
“Not quite so fast,” Sachs added coyly. “It’s not the end of the argument.”
“No?”
“The Constitution gives us a lot of rights but it also lets Congress regulate us in a thousand different ways. You need a license to drive a car or fly a plane or sell liquor. You can’t vote until you’re eighteen. Why shouldn’t you have a license to own or shoot a gun? I have no problem with that. And it doesn’t conflict with the Second Amendment at all.”
Walker responded happily, enjoying their argument, “Ah, but of course if we get licenses, then Washington knows where the guns are and they’ll come in the middle of the night and take them away. Don’t we need our weapons to stop them from doing that?”
Sachs riposted, “Washington has nukes. If they want our guns they’ll take our guns.”
Walker nodded. “True, there is that. Now, we’ve been digressing. How can I help you?”
“We recovered a bullet at a crime scene.”
“One of ours, I assume.”
“You’re the only company making a four twenty spitzer boattail, aren’t you?”
“Oh, our new sniper round. And a very fine cartridge it is. Better than the four sixteen, if you ask me. Fast. Oh, fast as a demon.” Then he frowned in apparent confusion. “And the round was involved in a crime?”
“That’s right.”
“We don’t sell to the public. Only government, the army and police SWAT teams. I don’t know how a criminal could have gotten his hands on one — unless he, or she, fell into those categories. Where exactly was the scene?”
“I can’t say at this point.”
“I see. And what do you want to know?”
“Just some information. We’re trying to find the rifle this slug was fired from but not having any luck. We’re assuming they’re custom-made.”
“That’s right. The loads are too big to fire in retooled commercial rifles. Most of the shooters find somebody to make their weapons for them. A few do it themselves.”
“Do you know anyone who does that work?”
He smiled coyly. “I can’t say at this point.”
She laughed. “And that goes for information about customers you’ve sold these bullets to?”
Walker grew serious now. “If somebody had broken into one of our own warehouses—” A nod out the window toward nearby buildings. “—and the rounds were used in a crime, then I’d be happy to help you out. But I can’t give you customer information. We have gag clauses in all our contracts, and in most cases there’re additional national security requirements. To give you information like that would be a crime.” His face grew troubled. “Can you tell me anything about what happened, though? Was it a homicide?”
Sachs debated. “Yes.”
Walker’s face was still. “I’m sorry about that. I truly am. It doesn’t do us any good when somebody misuses our products and something tragic happens.”
But that didn’t mean he was going to help. Walker rose and extended his hand.
She stood too. “Thanks for your time.”
Walker picked up the instructions and screwdriver and walked back to the trike.
Then he smiled and picked up a bolt. “You buy a Harley-Davidson, you know, it comes already assembled.”
“Good luck with that, Mr. Walker. Call me if you can think of anything, please.” She handed him one of her cards — which, she suspected, he’d pitch out before she was halfway to the lobby.
Didn’t matter.
Sachs had everything she needed.
CHAPTER 61
In Rhyme’s dark parlor, redolent of trace materials burned into incriminating evidence by the gas chromatograph, Sachs pulled her jacket off and held up the brochure from Walker Defense.
Ron Pulaski taped it up on a whiteboard. The glitzy piece sat next to the kill order.
“So,” Rhyme said, “what did it look like?”
“Pretty short and hidden between two buildings but I caught a glimpse from Walker’s office. There was a windsock at one end and what looked like a small hangar at the other.”
Sachs’s mission had nothing to do with getting customer information or the names of people fabricating long-range rifles, which Rhyme knew Walker wouldn’t divulge anyway. Her job was to find out as much about the company’s products as she could — more than its preening and ambiguous website offered. And — most important — to find out if it had a length of asphalt or concrete that could be used as an airstrip; Google Earth had not been helpful in that regard.
“Excellent,” Rhyme said.
As for the other products, they too were just what he’d hoped: instruments and devices for guidance, navigation and control systems, in addition to ammunition. “Gyroscopes, GPS sighting systems, synthetic aperture radar, things like that,” Sachs explained.
The criminalist read through the brochure.
He said slowly, “Okay, we have our answer. The case is back on. Barry Shales did kill Robert Moreno. He was just a little farther away from the target than two thousand feet. In fact, he was here in New York when he pulled the trigger.”
Sellitto shook his head. “We should’ve thought better. Shales wasn’t infantry or special forces. He was air force.”
Rhyme’s theory, now supported by Sachs’s legwork, was that Barry Shales was a drone pilot.
“We know his code name is Don Bruns and Bruns was the one who killed Moreno. The data show he was in the NIOS office downtown on the day the man died. He’d have been piloting a drone from some control facility there.” He paused, frowned. “Oh, hell, that’s the ‘Kill Room’ the STO refers to. It’s not the hotel suite where Moreno was shot; it’s the drone cockpit or whatever you call it, where the pilot sits.”
Sachs nodded at the brochure. “Walker makes those bullets, they make gun sights and stabilization and radar and navigation systems. They’ve built or armed a specialized drone that uses a rifle as a weapon.”
Rhyme spat out, “Look at the STO — there’s a period after ‘Kill Room,’ not a comma! ‘Suite twelve hundred’ doesn’t modify it. They’re separate places.” He continued, “Okay, this is all making sense now. What’s the one problem with drone strikes?”
“Collateral damage,” Sachs said.
“Exactly. A missile takes out terrorists but it also kills innocent people. Very bad for America’s image. NIOS contracted with Walker Defense to come up with a drone that minimizes collateral. Using a precision rifle with a very big bullet.”
Sellitto said, “But they fucked up. There was collateral.”
“The Moreno assassination was a fluke,” Rhyme said. “Who could’ve anticipated broken glass would be lethal?”
Sellitto gave a laugh. “You know, Amelia, you were right. This was a million-dollar bullet. Literally. Hell, given what drones cost, it’s probably a ten-million-dollar bullet.”
“How’d you guess?” Nance Laurel asked.
“Guess?” Sachs offered acerbically.
But Rhyme didn’t need any defense. He was delighted with his deduction and was happy to explain:
“Trees. I was thinking of trees. There was poisonwood leaf trace on the bullet. I saw the tree outside the window of the suite. All the branches up to about twenty-five feet or so were cut back — because the hotel didn’t want anyone touching the leaves. That meant the bullet struck Moreno at a very steep downward angle — probably forty-five degrees. That was too acute even for a shooter on the spit to aim high to correct for gravity. It meant the bullet came from the air.