“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.”
Rhyme frowned. “Not four sixteen?” His first thought upon seeing it in the Kill Room. The.416 was a recent innovation in rifle bullets, designed by the famous Barrett Arms. The cartridge was a variation on the.50 round used by snipers around the world. While some countries and states in the U.S. banned the.50 for civilian use, the.416 was still legal most places.
“No, definitely bigger.” Sachs then examined the round with a microscope, low power. “And it’s a sophisticated design. It’s a hollow point with a plastic tip – a modified spitzer.”
Arms manufacturers began to incorporate aerodynamics into the design of their projectiles around the time, not surprisingly, that airplanes were developed. The spitzer round – from the German word for “pointed bullet”–was developed for long distance rifle shooting. Being so streamlined, it was very accurate; the downside was that it remained intact on striking the target and caused much less damage than a blunt tipped, hollow point round, which would mushroom inside the flesh.
Some bullet manufacturers came up with the idea of grafting a sharp plastic tip onto a hollow point slug. The tip produced the streamlined quality of a spitzer round but broke away upon hitting the target, allowing the projectile to expand.
This was the type of bullet that Barry Shales had used to kill Robert Moreno.
Completing the streamlined design, she added, the slug was a boattail – it narrowed in the rear, just like a racing yacht, to further cut drag as it sped through the air.
She summarized, “It’s big, heavy, accurate as hell.” Nodded at the crime scene photo of Moreno sprawled on the couch in the Kill Room, blood and tissue radiating out behind him. “And devastating.”
She scraped the slug and analyzed some of the ejecta residue – the gas and particles that result when the powder ignites. “The best of the best,” she said. “The primers were Federal 210 match quality, the powder was Hodgdon Extreme Extruded – made to the highest tolerances. This’s your Ferrari of bullets.”
“Who makes it?” This was the important question.
But an Internet search returned very few hits. None of the big manufacturers like Winchester, Remington or Federal offered it and none of the retail ammo sellers stocked the bullet. Sachs, however, found some references to the mysterious round’s existence in some obscure shooting forums and learned that an arms company in New Jersey, Walker Defense Systems, might be the maker. Its website revealed that, though Walker didn’t make rifles, it manufactured a plastic tipped spitzer.420 boattail.
Sachs looked at Rhyme. “They only sell to the army, police…and the federal government.”
The first goal was satisfied, the ID of the bullet. Now the team turned to finding the type of weapon that had fired it.
“First of all,” Rhyme asked, “what kind of action was it? Bolt, semiauto, three shot burst, full auto? Sachs, what do you think?”
“Snipers never use full auto or bursts – too hard to compensate for repeated recoil over distance. If it was bolt action, he wouldn’t have fired three rounds. If the first one missed, he’d’ve alerted the target, who’d go to cover. Semiauto, I’d vote.”
Sellitto said, “Can’t be that hard to find. There’s gotta be only one or two kinds of guns in the world that’ll fire a slug like that. It’s pretty unique.”
“Pretty unique,” Rhyme blurted, with a frosting of sarcasm. “Just like being sort of pregnant.”
“Linc,” Sellitto replied cheerfully, “you ever think about teaching grade school? I’m sure the kids’d love ya.”
Sellitto was right substantively, though, Rhyme knew. The rarer the bullet, the fewer the types of guns that will fire it. This would make it easier to identify the rifle and therefore easier to trace it to Barry Shales.
The two characteristics of a bullet that link it to the weapon that fired it are caliber, which they now knew, and rifling marks.
All modern firearms barrels have spiral troughs cut into them to make the bullet rotate and thus move more accurately to the target. This is known as rifling (even though it applies to pistols too). Gun manufacturers make these troughs – called lands (the raised part) and grooves – in various configurations, depending on the type of gun, the bullet it’s intended to shoot and its purpose. The twist, as it’s called, might spin the bullet clockwise or counter, and will spin it faster or slower depending on how many times the slug revolves in the barrel.
A look at the slug revealed that Barry Shales’s gun spun the slug counterclockwise, once every ten inches.
This was unusual, Rhyme knew; spirals are generally tighter, with the ratio of 1:7 or 1:8.
“Means it’s a long barrel, right?” Rhyme asked Cooper.