Corus and the Case of the Chaos

by Mark Hazard

  “You’re really pissed about this aren’t you?”

  “Man, when I grew up in Mercer, you smelled Somali food cooking, saw old women carrying small livestock on their backs. I even once saw a Vietnamese man tightrope walk along the power lines so he didn’t have to walk in the snow.”

  Corus looked over at Chu.

  “Ok, so I embellished the last one, but the place had character. Now it’s all interspersed with high-rise condos and smoothie shops.”

  “I thought you loved smoothies.”

  “I know. Actually, that sounds really good. There is a Jamba Juice in like a mile. Can we stop?”

  They sat at the Tacoma crime lab in a waiting room that reminded Corus too much of a doctor’s office. Chu slurped at his goji berry and watermelon smoothie while flipping through the pages of an US Weekly. Corus took a sip of his chocolate banana smoothie. He’d gone into the Jamba Juice with absolutely no intention of getting a smoothie. Hell, he’d lived his whole life with no intention of getting a smoothie. He was ashamed to admit that something in the pretty, fresh-faced smoothie girl’s demeanor had made him feel like drinking fruity yogurt through a straw. Her vitality and joy, though the naïve boon of youth, convinced him nonetheless to cling to positivity for as long as his smoothie lasted. Moments like these concerned him far more than the vending machine episode.

  A young, skinny fellow in a white lab coat pushed open a wide door and called for them. He led them downstairs to his office and sat behind his desk, below a large bulkhead jutting out from the boiler room next door. They entered behind him and sat in the two metal folding chairs on the other side of the desk. The young man quickly snatched a few wrappers off his desk and threw them in the trash.

  “I see you got first pick of the offices,” Corus said.

  “Lieutenant, sir, what can I do for you?” the young man asked nervously.

  Chu looked over at Corus and asked. “Yeah, Lieutenant Corus. What can he do for you?”

  “He’s the Lieutenant,” Corus said pointing to Chu. “I’m Inspector Corus.”

  “Oh, God. I’m so sorry,” the kid stammered.

  Chu shook his head. “Oh okay. So you never heard of a Chinese policeman, huh?”

  “What about Jackie Chan in Rush Hour?” Corus asked, attempting to deflate Chu’s mock anger.

  “Really, I’m so sorry,” the tech insisted, appearing younger by the second. “I love China. I dated a Japanese girl in college. I mean…Asian.” He mouthed further silent apologies and wrung his hands.

  “Right…” Chu said. “Asian.” He slurped at his smoothie while keeping a skeptical eye on him.

  “We’re sorry we didn’t make an appointment,” Corus said.

  “Oh that’s ok. I’m sorry the Lab supervisor isn’t here.”

  “Oh? Then who are you?”

  “I’m Toby, Toby Moikins.”

  “What do you do here?”

  “I help run the ballistics lab.”

  “Help run?” Corus asked.

  “Not like a manager, well kind of.” Toby was obviously flustered, more so than many of the suspects Corus had grilled. “The supervisor is out to get surgery on his shoulder, and they haven’t replaced Sheila yet.”

  Corus and Chu exchanged a glance. “So are you telling me that you are it?”

  “I’m the only one here, yes.”

  Corus pushed his palm into his eye and winced as he rubbed. This was not the help he’d been expecting to find here. He shook his head. This was shaping up to be the most important case of his life. He needed real expertise. Corus calculated how long it would take them to drive to the lab in Seattle, but it was getting late.

  “Okay, Toby.” Corus leaned forward and pressed his hand onto the top of his thigh. “I got a big case, and I think we missed something months ago regarding ballistics. You ever hear about that family that got murdered up in Skokim Pass?”

  “No, but I just started working here this year.”

  “A whole family was gunned down, and we have to set it right. Well, we can’t do that. Not really. We need to find who did it, though. I have questions about bullets.”

  “I know I haven’t been here long, but I graduated from Stanford and got my masters in forensics at Cal Tech. I can answer your questions. I think…” Toby spoke with confidence for the first time, or at least with something approaching it.

  “How old are you?” Chu asked.

  “Twenty-six.”

  Corus tilted his head.

  “Next month…” Toby said weakly.

  Corus and Chu looked at each other again. Chu shrugged. They were both 36, but had been high achievers in their own separate ways. Toby was the low man on the totem pole here, but to have attained a job here fresh out of school, maybe he knew his shit.

  “Okay, Toby. Tell me all you know about head wounds.”

  ELEVEN

  After the fifth or sixth video of a real live human getting their head blown off, Chu had to leave the room. Toby sat with Corus beside him, discussing impact patterns, splatter, entry wound jets and muzzle flash. It was grisly, but fascinating.

  “What you got on Kennedy?” Corus asked.

  Toby smiled and his eyes went wide. “Everything.”

  “What do you think? Two gunners?”

  “Man, you probably don’t want to get me started.”

  “The thing that bothers me most, thinking about Kennedy,” Corus said, “and how it’s still questioned all these decades later, is that it makes me wonder how much we’ve really learned about ballistics in that time.”

  “Honestly, in school, most of the cool kids were all into DNA and fibers and psychological profiling. Ballistics is old school, you’re right. We’ve learned lots, but mostly how to appreciate more environmental variables. For that reason, it’s just a lot of work, a lot of math and not very sexy.”

  Corus nodded. “Okay, so could this have been done with 5.56?” He placed a hand on the photo of David Griffin’s mangled head. “Wouldn’t this amount of damage require a bigger bullet?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “But probably? Bigger bullets do more damage, right?”

  Toby shook his head. Corus narrowed his eyes, puzzled.

  “Come with me,” Toby said.

  Toby led him to a wide room with yellowish walls and strewn with lab equipment. “I could show you a video, but why not just show you the toys in person?”

  Toby stooped and pulled a block of transparent, firm gelatin from a cabinet. Corus poked it. It was solid with only a little give, like a dog’s chew toy, a foot wide and two feet long. Toby walked a few steps and set it down on a stand. He turned back to Corus. “What do you carry?”

  “Nothing right now. Usually the standard 9mm.”

  Toby unlocked a cabinet and brought out a pistol.

  “This is a Luger, 9mm.” Toby loaded it and locked into a vice four feet from the gel. He closed a long, bulletproof glass cover over both the pistol and the gel. They each put on eye and hear protection, and Toby pulled a long nylon strap. The Luger barked and the gel jumped.

  Toby unlocked the case and removed the Luger. “So what is more powerful than a 9-mil?”

  “Well, a .45 ACP for sure,” Corus answered.

  “Okay.” Toby retrieved a fresh block of ballistic gel and set it in place, then went into the same cabinet from which he’d taken the Luger. “Glock 21,” Toby said. He held the pistol aloft for Corus to see. He chambered a fat .45 ACP round also taken from the cabinet, and placed the pistol in the vice, just as before. He closed the case and offered the nylon strap up to Corus. “Want a try?”

  “I think I’d better not fire a pistol indoors for a while.”

  Toby pulled the strap and triggered the Glock. The report was muffled heavily by the case, but was clearly louder than the 9mm.

  Corus stepped closer to the blocks of gel and studied them. It was remarkable how the gel molds had preserved the flight path of the bullets, creating a sort of map of where and
how they’d wrought destruction. Both bullets had followed fairly straight pathways. Starting from the entrance holes, the bullets had left trails of turbulence resembling a turnip, wider at first, then sloping back to a fine line that led to where the bullets had stopped, deep in the gel. Both had clearly been hollow point rounds and had blossomed like flowers in spring upon impact.

  Toby finished locking up and led Corus over to a monitor underneath a glass cabinet, which held a variety of lab supplies. He opened a few windows in the computer screen, then said, “Okay, so check it out.” Toby played a high-speed video of the bullet entering the block of ballistics gel. The bullet caused a huge expansion of the material at first, then shrank to a line the size of the bullet.

  “Was this from us? Just now?”

  Toby nodded. “Yep. That was the 9mm.” He pointed over to a small black box set to the side of the shooting case. A high-speed video camera.

  “Holy shit. Play it again.” Corus had of course seen a ballistics test video before, but for some reason being in the room made it all the more fascinating.

  Toby obliged. Corus watched again in wonder as the bullet hit the gel in super-slo-mo and caused it to expand, almost like a balloon being filled with a sudden inrush of air. Except the sides of the block barely moved. At its widest point, the bubble inside the gel reached about five inches in diameter. Then the bubble crashed back down on itself and then re-expanded, again and again.

  “What is that big bubble in the gel? Just air, right?”

  “Yes. Precisely. The cavity created by the bullet actually sucks air in through the entry hole.”

  “Why don’t the outsides of the block balloon out with the bulge in the center?”

  “Because the material toward the center is absorbing all the energy at first. But you can see with each rebound of the cavity the energy transfers more and more to the sides of the block.” It was true. The collapsing and re-expanding bubble eventually began to jiggle and move the whole front end of the block. It had happened too fast. All Corus had seen with the naked eye was a slight bucking and shimmering.

  Next Toby played the video from the .45 caliber pistol. The same sort of scene presented itself, but the widest point in the bubble was a little closer to the entrance and the bullet didn’t travel as far in the end.

  “So which bullet did the most damage?” Toby asked.

  “Well that bubble thing seemed about the same size, but in the 9mm it was longer and re-expanded more times.”

  “That re-expanding and rebounding bubble to which you’re referring is called cavitation. And cavitation is what’s responsible for most of the damage when a bullet passes through the body.”

  “So a 9mm is more powerful than a .45?” There was an air of hurt in Corus’ question. Had he been lied to all these years? It felt like sacrilege or a betrayal of common sense to even ask the question after all his years of using firearms. The 9mm was accurate, and a standard magazine could carry almost twice the rounds as a .45, and that’s why the military and police used it so much. But he’d always taken it as gospel that the .45 had more stopping power than a 9mm.

  “Not necessarily,” Toby said, placating Corus’ confusion and shock. “That’s my point. Here we enter the most difficult and worrisome aspect of ballistics. The real reason my colleagues eschewed it for sexier fields. There are so many variables. That is what psyches people out. Most common conceptions about how bullets harm and kill are wrong. I’ve never served in the military, but a lot of my family and friends have. Seems some very common misunderstandings abound even amongst those who have seen the effect of these weapons close up. Really, sir, it all depends.”

  Lt. Chu peeked his head into the lab room. He looked a little green still. “You guys aren’t still watching those snuff films are you?”

  Corus looked over his shoulder at him. “Chu. You aren’t going to believe what bullets do.”

  They sat and learned at Toby’s knee for the next hour. They may have started off in the drivers seat, but now Toby had their complete and full attention, as he took them through the wild and wicked world of “terminal wound ballistics.” Cavitation, Toby explained didn’t just expand the cavity in the target once. Once the first cavity had opened, it would collapse in on itself with such a force that an area of extreme high pressure would build up at its center and thus explode outward again. It would not enlarge the cavity to the same extent as the first time, but the repeated bouncing would go on for many repetitions until finally coming to rest. All in a fraction of a second.

  “But in Afghanistan, the 9mm didn’t have the stopping power of the .45s the Special Forces guys preferred. Hands down.”

  “Yes,” Toby replied. “Of course it didn’t. That’s partly because of the way the NATO rounds are loaded. The Geneva Conventions do not allow for expanding bullets either. No hollow points. So generally speaking you would be correct.”

  “So the .45 does have better stopping power than a 9mm?” Chu asked. “I’m confused again.”

  “Well,” Toby said, “stopping power is a bit of a myth. People want self-defense or combat rounds that they hope will send their foe flying backward like in the movies. But with all the physics involved, a target can just as easily be propelled forward as backward. If, by stopping, you mean instant incapacitation, that gets complicated too. Instant incapacitation only comes from a brain stem injury. Massive wounds can send a person to the ground, but they might still be able to fire their weapon at you. Even a shot right in the heart won’t prevent your brain from having oxygen for a few seconds.”

  “He already explained Chu,” Corus said. “The rounds he shot for me were instructive. The 9mm was a high velocity round and the .45 wasn’t. That’s how the 9mm did more damage than the .45.”

  “But if the .45 is bigger,” Chu asked, “doesn’t it make a bigger hole no matter how fast it’s going?”

  “Definitely not.” Toby said. “People think that a bullet hitting you is like getting stabbed through with a spear. A bigger spear leaves a bigger hole right? It has a better chance of hitting a vital area. But a spear can be thrown at perhaps 100 or 150 feet per second at close range. A bullet travels at up to thirty-forty times that. Because bullets are shaped aerodynamically to shed air to the sides, what do you think happens when it hits flesh?”

  “It’s projected to the side?” Corus asked.

  “Exactly. For the most part, the bullet’s forward inertia is vectored off tangentially into the 360 degrees surrounding it, hitting each one of those degrees at a high angle to deflect them outward.”

  “And that’s what causes the ballooning…the cavitation,” Chu asked.

  “You’re getting it,” Toby said. “And what apart from acceleration generally creates cavitation?”

  He pointed helpfully to a formula he had written on the whiteboard he was using to answer their questions. F=MA, Force = Mass x Acceleration

  “Mass,” Corus answered. “So, it’s a combination of the mass of the bullet and the velocity.”

  “Yes, basically. So, we see the great amount of variability. A small round can cause great damage if it can move at higher speeds. And a large round can do rather little if it travels slowly. Now, what else causes larger cavitation and therefore wounds?”

  “The mushrooming effect,” Corus said.

  “Correct. The anterior surface area of the projectile is a factor. It generally causes cavitation that is wider, but also it is shorter because the increased surface area perpendicular to the direction of travel causes…”

  “Deceleration,” Chu said. “A round that mushrooms slows down really fast.”

  “So a non-mushrooming bullet is more likely to pass through the target.” Corus was thinking out loud. He’d already known that instinctively.

  “Yes, and a more streamlined bullet will also leave a longer cavitation. Remember that having the widest cavitation at one point doesn’t necessarily mean the most volume. A bullet that creates a longer, thinner cavitation can still end
up creating the cavitation with the most total volume. Statistically speaking, that is what kills.”

  “But after the width of the human body, a longer cavitation doesn’t really matter,” Chu said.

  Toby laughed. “You are right, but that is another area where it gets tricky! Mr. Corus, in Afghanistan, did you ever have to fire your weapon through a car door or a wall?”

  “Yeah. All the time.”

  “So you see, if we are talking you and me sitting here, and I shoot you, that is an entirely different question than if I am shooting through a wall, or even thick underbrush. This is why people give up on ballistics. It’s too complicated.”

  “So, is there a way of knowing from a wound what caliber bullet caused it?”

  “There are indications,” Toby said. “Finding fragments is of course helpful. Every single scenario has to be assessed individually. There are too many environmental factors. The victim’s physical make up even counts as an environmental factor, but if you are asking, ultimately, could that boy’s head wound be caused by a 5.56 round traveling at 3,000-4,000 feet per second? Yeah, I think that is entirely possible. If you were in Afghanistan, I imagine you saw plenty what the 5.56 is capable of, even if it is highly variable.”

  “How big of a hole would a spent 5.56 round make in a window?”

  “What kind of glass? How thick? What time of year and time of day was it? How long was the barrel of the gun? How fast was the round traveling? Was it stable or tumbling? Was the bullet still neat or mangled?”

  Corus nodded at the floor. It was an eye-opening discussion, but now Corus felt like someone had dumped a beehive in his brain. He needed to let the dust settle.

  “Thank you, Toby. This has been remarkable.” He stood and Chu followed suit. They both shook Toby’s hand.

  “There is more to learn if you want to,” Toby said, obviously enjoying teaching such willing pupils.

  “Don’t worry Tobes. You’ll be seeing us again soon.”