Being accurate made both views hard to dismiss, although the politicians kept trying. Gunther and Allard, the latter of whom had spent his whole career in the state police, didn't bother. They just kept proving, in case after case, that the VBI was there for the overall good as a highly qualified, well-funded support unit that only came into a case by invitation, did its job discreetly and competently, and then disappeared, making sure the credit always went to the host agency. It had been a successful tactic so far, and a small but growing number of former critics had been heard to admit-if only off the record-that maybe VBI wasn't as bad as had been feared. So far.
Allard was sitting at his desk in an office so small it barely allowed for two folding guest chairs. He was gazing with apparent wonderment at some cluttered document on the computer screen, his large, stubby fingers poised over the keyboard as if frozen.
His face lit up as Gunther crossed the threshold.
"Joe. I didn't know you were coming up. Have a seat. You're not hand-delivering bad news, are you?"
Joe sat down, shaking his head. "Nope, no fouls, no errors, and no need to ask forgiveness as far as I know. I'm just up here checking on something at the lab."
Allard raised his eyebrows. There were five VBI outposts across the state, including a unit downstairs, and Bill Allard made it his business to be at least aware of every case they were working on. "From your neck of the woods?"
Gunther waved his concern aside. "No, the Bratt PD had a domestic a couple of days ago-ex-wife shot her husband. But the gun was missing its serial number, so they had the lab run a check. Turns out the same gun was used in an old case of mine."
"No kidding?"
"Yeah. I never solved it. It's bugged me ever since."
"A killing?"
"Didn't start out that way. It was a robbery-assault at a mom-and-pop grocery store. Nobody liked the victim, an old grouch named Oberfeldt, and at first we didn't even bother finding out their life savings had been stolen. The bad old days with a vengeance. The guy wasn't dead; he was just in the hospital-although the word 'just' doesn't do it justice. He was in a coma. But the selectmen were on the rampage for us to clean up the bars and get the kids off the street to make the town more appealing. The case pretty much fell to me on my own."
"What happened?" Allard asked.
A lot, Gunther thought to himself-almost more than he thought he could bear at the time, or bear to remember now.
"Not much," he said instead. "Six months later, old man Oberfeldt died without regaining consciousness. His wife sold the store and left town. I never found out who did it."
"And now the gun's resurfaced," Bill Allard suggested.
"Yup. Three decades later."
Allard let out a low whistle. "Jesus," he said, and then pointed toward the door. "Okay, you've officially proved you have good manners, Joe. Go to the lab and nab yourself some bad guy who's probably using a walker by now. Thanks for stopping in."
The Vermont Forensic Lab took up the entire top floor of the building's longest wing. It was a narrow, cluttered, bizarrely designed layout, clearly never intended for its present use. Old equipment lined the walls of the dark, close central hallway; doors to either side revealed impossibly jam-packed labs or eccentric secondary parallel halls. Half the time Joe couldn't discern if what he was looking at was a storage room or a workplace that only resembled a mad scientist's attic.
Ballistics was housed at the far end, across the corridor from latent prints. None of this was labeled or looked the role, any more than the whole remotely resembled any popular perception of a crime lab. Joe simply knew where to go from past experience. In a state so thinly populated, it was understood that you could figure out how to get somewhere by merely wandering about for a while.
In the old days, when the state police ran things, technicians were officers on rotation. Times had changed. Now the place was a part of Public Safety's Criminal Justice Services-as was VBI, for that matter-and staffed by people qualified enough in their specialties to have earned the lab national accreditation. An honor indeed, given that it appeared to be housed in a condemned high school building.
Malcolm Nash had been in ballistics for over fifteen years, first as an assistant but recently as the man in charge. He was tall, stooped, and energetic, and Gunther thought he'd probably always looked as he did now, and forever would: a somewhat geeky mid-forties. Pure hell in high school, no doubt, but not too bad as time passed.
"Joe Gunther," he said, clearly pleased, as Joe entered the cluttered office. He crossed the room and extended his hand for a shake. "I thought you might show up. Too interesting to resist, right?"
He motioned to a shabby wheeled chair as he perched on the edge of a desk. The room was one of two, this one filled with filing cabinets, a couple of desks, some scientific equipment, and a huge IBIS computer used for bullet and cartridge identification. On semipermanent loan from ATF, it filled a quarter of the floor space like a robot on steroids. The back room, reserved for test firings, contained a cotton box for high velocity rounds, and a water well running down the inside corner of the building, for slower bullets. The latter was a bane to downstairs residents, since any testing resulted in a thunderous explosion reverberating all the way to the basement.
"I read up on that old case of yours," Nash was saying. "Really fascinating. And relevant, too, since I was able to run some newer tests based on your report at the time."
He reached over to a corner of the desk and retrieved a slim file folder. "Klaus Oberfeldt," he read, "aged sixty-seven at time of death. The ME said that he'd been beaten, in part or in whole, with a gun gone missing, which gun had discharged accidentally as a result." He paused and read on. "At least that was the assumption, since the wife heard the shot, the victim had no hole in him, and you found a bullet buried high in the front door casing. Ballistics here took a guess from all that, combined it with the distinctive signature of eight lands and grooves from the recovered bullet, and came up with a.357 Blackhawk revolver, since it had a crucial flaw at the time, where the firing pin rested directly against the cartridge's primer. The hypothesis was that if the gun was used in a fashion where the hammer came in contact with the victim's skull, as in a back-handed return motion, the bullet would go off."
Malcolm Nash looked up suddenly and smiled broadly. "Making my predecessors pretty smart or pretty lucky, since that's exactly how it turned out. I would love to write this up for one of the journals, by the way. Would that be a problem?"
Gunther paused. His own reminiscences of this case were so personal, he had a hard time seeing it in purely objective terms. "No," he allowed. "Assuming we come up with a final chapter."
Nash's eyes widened. "Oh, sure. I wouldn't write about an open case. I was just planning ahead."
"You are sure about the match?" Gunther asked. "I've been told that over time old guns leave different impressions on their bullets."
Nash was dismissive. "That's mostly NRA babble. They don't like the gun control lobby's idea of a bullet and casing record being kept on every factory-fresh gun. In fact, it would take more shooting than you can imagine to alter a gun's impressions. Talk about carpal tunnel-you'd be blazing away every day for years."
He pointed to the IBIS machine. "It's in there if you want proof. Since the beginning of time, this lab used to keep an 'unidentified ammunition file'-literally a chest of tiny drawers with stray bullets in it. That's where yours used to live. Didn't matter where they came from-deer jackings, suicides, murders. If we didn't have a gun to match them to, we kept them just in case."