They did, Zockinski leading. As Zockinski came through the door, Hill pretended to swing at his head with an invisible pipe. “McElroy gets hit and goes down,” Hill said. “Reeves sees what’s happened but doesn’t shoot. Maybe can’t get in the room fast enough to get a clear shot, maybe he does something dumb and goes to help his partner first.
“Bang,” Hill said, pointing an imaginary gun at Rachel. “You’re dead.”
She obliged by clutching her neck and sitting down on the ground to watch the rest of Hill’s performance play out.
“You’re up again,” Hill said to Zockinski. “Probably reaching for your gun. I shoot you once,” Hill said, pulling the imaginary trigger, “and you’re down.”
Zockinski dropped to the floor, then began to push himself up on his hands. Hill stood over him, his imaginary gun aimed down.
“And bang,” Hill said. Zockinski flopped face-down on the linoleum, then held up his hand. Hill took it in a soldier’s grip and hauled his partner to his feet.
“That works,” Kowalski said, nodding. “Everything fits.”
“How’d he switch from a pipe to a gun?” Santino asked. “It couldn’t have been that long between when he put McElroy on the ground and when Reeves entered the room.”
“There was all kinds of storage in that room,” Rachel replied. “If he was waiting for them, he could have had the gun lying on a nearby shelf.”
“Then why use the pipe at all?” Santino had started to pace. “Why risk having two angry cops in the same room with you?”
“Because he needed to get them both to come into the room with him,” Rachel realized. “He was trying to immobilize the first man who came in, but make sure the second would have time to enter.”
“But why?” Santino asked.
“Because…” Rachel mulled it over. When the answer hit her, she gasped. “Because he was already planning to blow the crime scene!”
“What?!” Zockinski and Santino asked together.
She pushed herself to her feet. “He wanted… I don’t know what he wanted. But he needed to kill them in that room. He couldn’t shoot them out on the street.”
Santino shook his head. “He wanted to blow the scene, he didn’t want to shoot them on the street… Then why go to bother of dragging them to their car and dumping them in the river? If he was worried about getting caught, why not just leave their bodies in the store and blow the whole thing?”
Nobody could answer him.
They were preparing to leave when a woman ran down the hall towards them. She had a vibrant core of orchid purple, and had a large Visitor’s badge affixed to her lapel.
“You’re Sturtevant’s team?” the woman asked, huffing slightly. “Good, I was worried I’d missed you.” She began the handshake rounds, starting with Zockinski and Hill. “You two are the detectives, right? I’m Elissa Smith, from the Firearms and Toolmarks Unit,” he said.
The name of her unit wasn’t familiar. Rachel pinged her badge. “FBI?”
Smith nodded. “They brought me in to consult,” she said. “The MPD has their own ballistics experts, but since this might be connected to Gayle Street…”
“Right.” Rachel understood. There would be less chance of the media calling out conflict of interest over the findings. (Of course, by this same logic, the autopsies should have been performed by one of the FBI’s own medical examiners, but people were complicated, bureaucracies infinitely more so, and nobody in their right mind wanted to drive to Quantico for meetings if they could possibly avoid it. But if they were willing to come to D.C.? Welcome, friend, and enter, indeed.)
Smith had reached Santino, and started pumping his hand in a vise grip. “I’ve wanted to meet an Agent forever,” Smith said. “Is it true that you can reach the Curiosity rover on Mars?”
“Yes,” Rachel said. “But it gives me a hell of a headache.”
The woman’s conversational colors plummeted. “Oh my God,” she said. “I am so sorry—”
“No problem. We get it all the time,” Rachel said, grinning to show she harbored no ill will. She didn’t: she picked her battles. As long as Smith didn’t make the same mistake again, she’d let it go.
“I’m really very sorry,” Smith said again. “Wait, are you... You’re Agent Peng!?”
Rachel nodded.
“Oh, I have got to talk to you after we’re done. Did I miss the autopsy walkthrough?”
“We just finished,” Kowalski replied.
“Oh,” Smith said. Then she asked, “The FTU has some new evidence that might help you look for the shooter. Mind if we go over your findings again?”
Hill froze in yellow-grays and greens, and Kowalski’s conversational colors rolled over themselves in an ugly orange when the rest of them replied no, certainly not, any little bit of information would help. They shuffled themselves back into Kowalski’s autopsy room, picking out their same places against the wall and then squeezing tight to accommodate Smith.
The FBI’s ballistics expert wore a combination of professional blues and curious yellows as she knelt to inspect Reeves. “This is my first time seeing the victims myself,” she explained, peering into the cavity where the front of Reeves’ neck used to be. “The MPD sent me high-res videos, but there’s nothing like a first-hand inspection.
“Your killer was standing so close that the bullets were through-and-throughs,” Smith said, her white mask bobbing up and down as she spoke. “Agent Peng, did you see any fragments or bullet casings at the scene?”
Rachel shook her head. “Nothing, but I did see some disturbances in the dust. He must have cleaned up after himself. There was a bullet stuck in a cinderblock wall, though.”
“They didn’t get a chance to retrieve it,” Smith said. “It was lost in last night’s explosion. They might find it during processing, but I’m not holding my breath.”
Damn. She had hoped that Special Agent Campbell had managed to get the bullet out of the wall before the store was blown.
“So you’ve got no way to determine the make or model of the gun,” Zockinski said.
“Not exactly—Well, okay, yes. Speaking from the perspective of expert testimony? You are correct. There is no way to determine the make or model of the gun. But if the bullet hit the bone, as occurred with McElroy’s shoulder—”
“Oh lord,” Santino sighed, as his colors began to drop into orange annoyance. “Reversed striations are fiction.”
“You’re right, you’re absolutely right,” Smith said quickly. “But we’ve made some progress with metallurgic engineering and imaging.”
“Guys?” Rachel said, her right hand pressed against her forehead.
“Right right right.” Smith thought for a moment, and then tried again. “Have you seen those procedural dramas where the bullet is missing, but the scientists take the impression the bullet left against the bone and reverse it to create a computer model of the bullet?”
“That’s a real thing?” Zockinski asked.
“No, it’s an excuse to use CGI. The science is total bullshit,” Santino said.
“It’s not total bullshit!” Smith protested. “It’s almost total bullshit. There’s enough of a difference to make it useful, even though I’d never stake my reputation to the findings.”
“Are you saying…” Rachel started, then gave up. “What are you saying?”
“She’s claiming that if a bullet comes in contact with bone, it’ll leave an impression which is clear enough to show the mirror image of the bullet.”
“No,” Smith corrected Santino. “I’m saying the impression will look like it’s been pressed in Silly Putty, stretched, distorted, and then chopped up to take out random pieces. What’s left after that can be useful.”
Santino’s conversational colors had become an unpleasant mix of oranges; Rachel had the impression that her partner was full of rotting citrus. Santino’s opinion was not lost on Smith, who sighed, pulled out her smartphone, and called up an image. “Here,” Smith said, hand
ing the phone to Santino. “The shot to McElroy’s back passed through his left shoulder. We took a high-res in situ image of a particular aspect of McElroy’s scapula.”
The others gathered around Santino, leaning over to see for themselves. Rachel picked the image off of the phone, turning it around in her mind as she tried to find why Smith thought it was significant. It meant nothing to her, a goopy smear of red with fragments of white inside.
Smith seemed especially excited about one specific grouping of pixels. “There!” she said, pointing. “You see that?”
Zockinski glanced over at her. “Peng?”
“Got it.” The monitor mounted to the wall above them fizzed in static, then jumped into clarity as Rachel connected Smith’s smartphone to it.
“Oh,” Smith said. “Okay. Okay, that’s better. Okay, you see here?” she said, pointing at the monitor. To Rachel, it looked no different than anything else in the image, but that was specialization for you: education and experience could redefine the entire world. “The size of the wound means this was definitely caused by a .45 caliber. The size and shape of the injuries, in addition to the trace left behind, makes me reasonably confident that the bullets were copper total metal jackets.
“As for applying reversed striations… Well, we didn’t find anything clean. The bullet was traveling too fast to leave any significant imprint. That in and of itself is telling—almost every .45 leaves some kind of reversed mark.”
“Except the marks might as well be made by sandpaper traveling at a thousand miles an hour. While spinning.” Santino said. “It’s useless.”
“In a court of law? Yeah, definitely. But I’m going to tell you to look for someone carrying a relatively new M1911, one that’s been fired about five hundred to a thousand times. That’ll be the model of .45 with enough wear in the barrel to rub down some of the factory striations, but one that hasn’t been professionally cleaned and permanently rescratched yet. It’s the only .45 that comes out of production with a barrel that smooth.”
“Fuck,” Rachel and Hill both said.
“What?” Zockinski asked.
“The Marines recently switched over to the Close Quarter Battle Pistol for its elite units. It’s a custom version of the 1911,” Rachel explained. “It’s gotten really popular with other Special Forces units, too, so the 1911s have gotten a bump in demand.”
“And civilians like it,” Smith said. “So it might not be a newly-manufactured gun. It could be a collector’s piece. The basic design of the 1911 hasn’t changed too much in the past hundred years.
“Or,” she added as an afterthought, “it might be an older gun with the barrel swapped out. It’s highly customizable.”
Santino looked ready to choke her. “So we’re looking for a .45 caliber gun, which is probably one of the most popular models out there, and it could be new, but it also could be a century old?”
Rachel jabbed her partner in his side. “Take a walk, dear.”
“None of that is science!” he hissed at her. He glowered at Smith, his colors churning as he tried to find a polite response, then stormed out of the room without another word.
Smith took it in stride. “Forensic ballistics is as much about proving negatives as positives,” she said. “Drives the purists absolutely nuts. Just don’t rub it in that I helped you narrow down all of the handguns in the D.C. area to a specific category of M1911s.”
Rachel laughed. “He’ll figure that out as soon as he calms down.”
They left Kowalski’s autopsy room in a small pack. Kowalski guided them back the way they had come, and left without saying goodbye.
“We’re headed to First,” Zockinski said to her at the elevator. “Now that we have the general manner of death for McElroy and Reeves, we’re gonna see if they need us to help with some real policework.”
“Then you better hurry,” Rachel replied. “You need to find some real police before you get there.”
Zockinski laughed as the elevator door closed on him and Hill.
“Hey, Agent Peng?”
Rachel glanced at Smith as she pushed the down button with her thumb.
“I studied the video, the one where you pulled off those incredible trick shots,” Smith said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Would you be interested in doing a demonstration for the Firearms and Toolmarks Unit? I think we need to update the books because of you.”
“As soon as we wrap up Gayle Street, sure,” Rachel replied. The doors to the second elevator opened, and she waved goodbye to Smith as it whisked her down to the third floor. It wasn’t the first time she had been asked to show off her shooting abilities, and she had expected this sort of request when Smith had wanted to speak with her. Rachel had been at the MPD for less than a year, and she was already renowned for her skill with a gun.
(And for the subsequent frivolous lawsuits. After the video of her shooting a bad guy had gone viral, OACET was inundated with civil suits against Rachel for setting a bad example for idiots with guns. After discussing the first of these suits with Josh, she had let him handle the rest; every time a new one came in, his conversational colors brightened in sheer joy and anticipation. Typically, a single ten-minute call to the plaintiff’s lawyer would resolve the situation and leave Josh in a good mood for the rest of the day. The tears of shysters, he said, were mother’s milk to him.)
She stepped out on the third floor and followed Santino’s cell phone to Jason’s lab. The two of them were dissecting a pair of Santino’s optical smart glasses, and were deep in an amicable argument over how to improve the design. Jason’s computers pressed in on her mind; she swatted them off, in no mood to deal with their half-imagined antagonism, and fell into Jason’s desk chair to wait for the men to finish.
Paper crinkled under her elbow; she scanned the desk and found a copy of the Washington Post. “A newspaper?” she said, interrupting them. “Jason, please. You’re a cyborg.”
“Some of us still like to read,” he snapped at her without bothering to look up. Santino smacked him lightly across the top of his head; Jason’s colors went red and orange, then turned into a mortified blush. “Oh. Rachel, I’m… I didn’t mean—”
She grinned and blew him a raspberry, then flipped her implant to reading mode to check out the headline. Gayle Street was still front-page news, but it was nearly a week after the bombings: with no new leads, the story had dropped below the fold. At the top was a news article of an upcoming budget hearing, the subhead declaring that they were about to enter a new era of military funding.
Rachel forced herself to read the first few paragraphs; she felt she owed the Army that much. She had hoped for a puff piece but the article was heavy on statistics. Apparently, a series of Congressional hearings were to take place over the following month to evaluate the current status of the military. The reporter was using that new-old argument, the one where the United States was fighting a new type of war with an outdated military infrastructure, and the country was poised on a showdown between what was familiar and what was needed.
No shit, Sherlock, she thought. She wasn’t sure of the exact dollar value of the chip in her head, but she was sure it was a good bit less than an Ohio-class submarine. And, unlike the average submarine, it was actually applicable to a cyberwarfare scenario. As soon as the scientists found a way to remove the need for that pesky human element, the technology used to make her implant would revolutionize the military power structure all over again.
Every once in a while, she was glad the collective had decided to go public.
Rachel dropped the newspaper on Jason’s desk and went to nag the men about lunch.
The three of them hit a sandwich shop. The women behind the counters knew Jason by sight: the younger ones smiled at him. Santino was halfway through his third-rate meatball sub when the conversation turned to Smith’s reverse ballistics analysis. “I can’t believe that woman’s an expert,” he said. “Using distorted data to eliminate possibilities, prove what she wants to prov
e... God! That’s the worst kind of science snake oil.”
Jason put down his sandwich in mid-bite. “What are you, fucking stupid? You and I, we do that all of the time.”
“Bullshit.” Santino scowled.
“Christ, man. You play with computers and this is news to you? Almost every time I process an image, I build new content around existing data.”
“Yeah, but you don’t distort—”
“Of course I distort the data!” Jason sneered. “Half of the time, it’s distorted when I get it, and I’ve got to twist it around again just to figure out what it’s supposed to mean.
“Data’s corrupted,” he added. “Data’s always corrupted to some degree... sometimes by context, sometimes by manipulation. When I’m working on a render, the best method is to look at the results and work my way backwards to see how the pieces fit.”
“You gonna help me out here?” Santino asked Rachel.
“And crash your ass-kicking party?”
“Okay,” Jason said, moving past his orange scorn. “Remember my construct of Gayle Street? That was my end product. I got there by taking pieces of data and extrapolating the rest of the render around it. I’d never take it to fucking court, though—there’s no way I could justify some of the details the computer and I generated! But if you’re involved in the process, and you understand the pieces, you can build a whole picture out of those parts.”
Rachel couldn’t resist. “It’s not your fault if you don’t get it,” she said to Santino. “It’s not as if you’re in a profession where you have to police a scene, or detect small pieces of data—clues, perhaps?—and then put those together to learn the motive for certain events... Maybe use those clues or that motive to find the person who caused those events?”
“Fuck you both very much.”
After lunch, she and Santino said goodbye to Jason and returned to their office at First District Station. There was a plastic penguin on her desk. She ran a light scan across it to take in the details; this one was wearing an excessive amount of safety gear and riding a skateboard. Rachel pulled open her top drawer and dropped it inside. Something squeaked as it landed on a pile of its toy brethren; Zockinski’s work, she was sure. Ever since he had learned her nickname, a new penguin appeared on her desk at least twice a week.
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