"Right now," Joshua continued, "this is what we have that's solid. The bullets were. 30/06 caliber, soft-nosed, factory made at Hornady. They did not come from the cartridge shells left at the scene. You heard about those, I assume."
"Two of them."
"Did you know that they had been engraved?"
Menden shook his head.
"One said, 'When in the course of human events-', and the other said, 'it becomes necessary-' The engraving was professional, or by an expert amateur. The script mimicked that of the Declaration of Independence. Each phrase started at the bottom of the shell, and went toward the neck."
Menden frowned and drank from his glass again. "But they weren't fired?"
"Of course not. That would add to our evidence, and they weren't willing to let us do that. God only knows where the gun itself is right now. The bottom of the Pacific, maybe. They took the real casings with them and left behind two shiny brass shells with their little warning on them. Their patriotic… signature."
"Their call for revolution."
Weinstein snorted. "They're not revolutionaries. They're agents of the status quo."
"Like you."
The shot arrived and John arranged it in front of him. The waitress studied Joshua as she made change, then walked away.
"I'll ignore that for now, and address it later. We've got more, but not much. The van, alleged to have been used by the shooter, was found ten miles away from the scene, behind a donut shop in Westminster. It had old plates on it, from a wrecking yard, likely-plates that hadn't been used in a decade, since they graced a Volkswagen bug totalled in 1985. Strictly a disposable vehicle. Nobody saw it drive in; nobody saw who picked up the driver and or passengers. There were fingerprints in it and on it, but very few, and those were all partials. We found traces of talc on the wheel and interior door handles, window knobs, shift lever."
"The old latex glove trick."
"Likely. Hair and Fiber back in Quantico got all the samples we collected and worked them hard-nothing interesting, really, nothing that points a finger. We've got corroborative evidence now-things that don't mean much unless we can match them with a suspect. Nothing primary."
"Hair for DNA?"
"You can't get DNA from hair," snapped Weinstein, "only from the tissue that sticks to it. We've got hair. No skin. We've got sixteen different hair samples. A follicle won't convict like a fingerprint or DNA pattern. Old van, plenty of passengers. Two dogs, a parakeet feather and mouse crap down in the floor carpet. The van had four owners before it was stolen from a repair shop. But the repair shop didn't even notice it was gone because it was fixed, left and never paid for. It collected dust out in the yard for two months. We fired down hard on all the people who owned it, all the people who knew the people who owned it, all the people at the shop, you name it."
Joshua Weinstein perused his beer, and forced another sip.
"And?"
"Something gave. I'll get back to that when I need to. Chronology isn't important here. Questions, so far?"
"Why Susan Baum?"
"Left-wing. A Jew. A woman. A world-class afflicter of the comfortable. A brilliant afflicter. She continues to offend a lot of people, right there on the front page of the Orange County Journal, three days a week. Businessmen, Republicans, old-fashioned patriots, churches, hunters, smokers, meat-eaters, drinkers, straights, men, all-boys' Little League teams and boy scouts without gay troop leaders. You know the litany. By some standards, she's the revolutionary. She's also an American citizen exercising her constitutional right to free speech. They tried to kill her for it, and they said as much when they engraved those casings for us."
At this, John Menden looked down at his beer glass and tapped its bottom against the table. "You're sure they weren't after the assistant-Ms… uh… Harris?"
"We worked that possibility," said Weinstein. "And it yielded nothing."
In the moment of silence that followed, even Weinstein seemed to lose his focus. Dumars saw something remote pass across his expression. The memory of Rebecca, she understood, his fiancee, gliding over his mind as quietly as a cloud across the sun. John Menden's face looked mournful, too.
It was Menden who broke the meditation. "Have you had any contact from the shooters? Anyone making a claim to it-a note or a call-anything?"
Weinstein's attention snapped back to the present. "Eighty-six letters, twelve postcards and a hundred and fourteen calls. They surprised me. I knew Orange County was conservative, but I didn't know there was that much hatred, just under the surface. Hatred and fear. Exactly one letter seemed credible to us, the rest were unconnected-we're pretty sure. We've followed up most of them as best we can-most of them aren't signed. The one we take seriously is from some people calling themselves 'The Freedom Ring.' It was computer-generated, on a nice sheet of twenty-five percent cotton bond paper. Here's a photocopy."
Weinstein removed a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. John Menden downed the fresh shot, then pushed his beer and shot glasses out of the way. He flattened the paper against the table.
Rebecca was a mistake and we are sorry. Baum is the tumor we tried to remove.
What happened to Miss Harris can happen to anyone who seeks to abridge our rights.
We will not have the foundations of America torn down by people who prosper under our system, only to disrespect it.
– The Freedom Ring
Menden handed the sheet back to Joshua, who folded it into his coat pocket. "Well, Mr. Weinstein, do you have a suspect, or don't you?"
"We do."
Weinstein looked at Sharon Dumars as he said this, and registered with some satisfaction the astonishment on her face. She ingested the news like a bad taste, then shook back her dark wavy hair with a toss of her head and lifted the beer glass to her mouth with extreme knowingness. She is learning, he thought, but right now her galvanics would send a polygraph into fits.
"But I can't know who it is," said Menden.
Weinstein looked at John, then centered his beer glass before him.
"No," he said. "You can't know that… yet."
Menden shrugged and sat back. "Then why are you here?"
"I'm here, Mr. Menden, because you want to listen to me."
Menden raised his eyebrows in mock exasperation, then let them down again. "Why do I want to listen to you? With this whole world full of people with their stories to tell and their axes to grind, why do I need to hear yours?"
His tone of voice and his eyes were so placid now that Sharon Dumars couldn't tell if Menden was cunning, innocent, or possibly, just plain stupid. The alcohol seemed to fortify his mask.
"Because you were in love with Rebecca, you smug sonofabitch."
Sharon Dumars emitted a tiny breath, then coughed to cover it. She couldn't take her eyes off of Weinstein. His ears-those wonderful Ichabod Crane ears of his-were a molten red now. The poor man was as tumultuous inside as a volcano. And his thirsty dark eyes fixed onto John's face and didn't let go. They seemed to be trying to locate something almost invisibly small. Yet Menden returned the long assessment with a gaze of utter calm. Weinstein was the active, Menden the passive; Weinstein the river, and Menden the rock against which it raged.
"I," Josh continued, "was engaged to her, as you read in the papers. And while I was, you were courting her at the Journal offices, where you both worked. You talked to her, you lunched with her, and later, you entertained her in your home on Sun Valley Drive in Laguna Canyon. You felt something for her that you believed you had never felt for a woman before. You did love her, didn't you? I don't see how you couldn't. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my whole life. It was easier than breathing. I'm not wrong, am I?"