by Lisa Gardner
“I hate riddles,” Rainie said flatly.
But Luke Hayes breathed, with near reverence, “A sabot.”
“Nice work, Officer.”
“What the hell is a sabot doing in a school shooting?” Luke said with a frown.
“What the hell is a sabot?” Rainie asked.
Sanders looked at Luke, who did the honors. “I’ve heard of them for hunting. Basically you take something like plastic and wrap it around a smaller-caliber slug so it will fit in a larger-caliber gun. Then a big gun can fire smaller bullets with greater velocity and mushrooming capacity. You know, for large-game hunting.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Rainie looked at them all as if they’d gone mad. “You mean to tell me that someone is applying techniques for large-game hunting to school grounds?”
“We don’t think this has anything to do with hunting techniques,” Sanders supplied. “The ME is the one who first thought of the possibility, and that’s because she’d read about it once before—in a mob shooting in New Jersey. The other advantage of making a sabot, you see, is that it makes the slug hard to trace. No rifling marks, no matching with a murder weapon. Also, this answers Rainie’s question about why only one shot to the forehead—hardly a sure kill with a .22. Well, the slug was fired by a bigger gun, meaning greater velocity, more force. Whoever we’re looking for isn’t dumb.”
Rainie turned this over in her mind, trying to see how it was done. She spared a glance at Quincy, who had a curious look on his face, as if many things were becoming magically clear. She was happy for him. Personally, between the little scene with George Walker and now this, her temples were pounding and her hand had a tremor she hoped no one would notice.
“How do you make a sabot?” she asked Sanders.
“It’s involved. In this case, ballistics has determined that the .22-caliber slug recovered from Avalon’s body was actually fired from a .38-caliber gun.”
“Danny’s .38 revolver.”
“No. Rifling doesn’t match. Give me a minute, we’ll get to it. Okay, so we have someone, Quincy’s UNSUB, who wants to cover his tracks. He hits upon a great idea. He’ll shoot a .22-caliber slug from a .38 revolver. Given the entry wound and weight of the recovered projectile, everyone will be looking for a .22 semiauto. He’ll never get tied to the crime.
“But how to make a .38 fire a .22-caliber bullet? That’s where the sabot comes in. The UNSUB takes a plastic rod and turns it until it’s the diameter of a .38-caliber bullet. He then cuts the rod to the same length as a .38 slug and—this isn’t child’s play—center-drills the piece of plastic with a .22-caliber hole. He cuts the piece of plastic lengthwise in three equal pieces, then glues the pieces back together at the base. Voilà, he has made a sabot. Now he removes a .22 slug from its casing. Then he simply pushes the slug into the center of the sabot from the top, inserts the entire thing into a .38-caliber casing, and loads a .38-caliber-size bullet into his revolver. Upon being fired from the barrel of the gun, the sabot’s three pieces will fall apart, leaving the .22-caliber projectile to continue on and strike the victim. And the UNSUB ejects the shell casing, then walks away with his .38 revolver, leaving no one the wiser.”
“We’re talking serious thought here,” Rainie said.
“And knowledge of guns. Sabots have been around since the earliest firearms, but it’s not like everyone’s using them.”
“Now that we know what it is, can we trace the bullet?”
“Not the slug,” Sanders said, and got a wicked gleam in his eye. “But you can sure as hell trace the plastic. Ballistics has already reassembled the three pieces and they form a perfect model of a .38 projectile, right down to the rifling marks.”
“Don’t be an ass, Sanders. Tell us what we’ve got.”
The state detective’s face fell. “Yeah, well, that brings me to the bad news. So far the sabot doesn’t match with anything we have. Not with the .38 revolver recovered from Danny or with any other revolvers or slugs whose rifling marks we have on file.”
“DRUGFIRE,” Quincy said.
“Noooo,” Sanders groaned. “Not again!”
“Absolutely,” Rainie overruled him. “Face it, Sanders, you can only check statewide. Through the DRUGFIRE databases, Quincy can cover the whole country for a match with another .38 slug used in a crime. The sabot goes to the fed.”
“And what has he done with my computers lately?”
“It’s only been twenty-four hours,” Quincy said mildly.
“I’d have given you updates within twenty-four hours. Hell, I just delivered a sabot to you in fifty-six!”
“Let it go, Sanders,” Rainie told him kindly. “The feds have better toys. It’s a fact of life.”
Luke had a perplexed look on his face. He leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees, and peered at Sanders intently. “You’re saying this person went out of his—or, I guess, her—way to make a special bullet to kill Melissa Avalon. A bullet that couldn’t be traced back to … the person?”
“A bullet that conceivably couldn’t be traced back to him or her. Yes.”
“Why?” Luke asked bluntly. “Danny’s there. Danny’s brought two guns covered in his fingerprints and registered to Danny’s father. What’s with the third weapon? Isn’t that more dangerous? Someone might see this person armed and mention it later. Or maybe something goes wrong and this person ends up dropping the gun, or dropping the sabot, or God knows what. Seems to me that the margin of error is higher with the additional .38.”
They all studied one another. Sanders had brought up the question before. They still didn’t have an answer.
“Symbolism?” Rainie tried after a moment. She glanced at Quincy, the resident expert in criminal behavior. “Maybe there was a personal reason behind the .22 slug as well as a practical one. The person had a reason to kill Melissa Avalon, and the choice of bullet is tied in to that.”
“Christ, it’s not like she was a werewolf and had to be killed with a silver bullet,” Sanders muttered. “A .22 slug is as common as it gets.”
“What about the gun? Maybe the .38 revolver was a special gift from her husband, with the barrel engraved, To the One I Love, which had really touched her heart—until she found out he’d given it to her out of guilt over doing the hokeypokey with another woman.”
“Doing the hokeypokey?” Sanders pressed with a raised brow.
“Fine, fucking. He was fucking another woman. Does that work better—”
“I think we’re missing something,” Quincy said quietly.
Rainie and Sanders shut up. They all turned to him. His face was remarkably composed, but there was a light in Quincy’s eyes Rainie had never seen before. He was excited. He had figured out part of the riddle, and he was thrilled to death.
“Let’s look at the elements of this crime,” Quincy began evenly. “First, our UNSUB utilizes manipulation. He or she identifies a troubled youth—Danny O’Grady—and approaches him, probably first via the Internet but then meets him in person to cement the relationship. This person needs someone like Danny. He learns his buttons, and he begins to push.
“The UNSUB also enjoys complexity. I think Luke and Sanders are correct. Why use a sabot when Danny’s .38 would’ve done? Maybe because he or she could. In all probability, the .22 slug would deform, making it impossible to test and leaving us none the wiser. But in case it didn’t, the UNSUB left another little riddle for the police to solve. Another way for law enforcement to be impressed by his or her skills.
“Which also brings us to the computers. It would appear that the UNSUB has been using Melissa Avalon’s e-mail account to contact Danny. So why erase the school computers? Any correspondence, downloads, et cetera, would only show Danny talking to his teacher. Even if the contents of the e-mails were questionable, Melissa Avalon is dead. How is she going to defend herself? But again, one level of diversion is not enough for our UNSUB. He or she also tampers with the school computers. I’m almost positive now that when data-recover
y agents delve into the hard drives, they will find everything overridden by zeroes. Our UNSUB seems obsessed with being thorough.”
“But what about Danny?” Rainie objected. “Once you’ve introduced another person into a crime, it’s no longer efficient. He’s scared now, sure, but sooner or later he’s bound to talk. That seems like a huge loose end. If the UNSUB really wanted to be untraceable, he or she should’ve acted alone.”
“No.” Quincy vehemently shook his head. “This UNSUB absolutely would not do everything alone. After all, what’s the point of being so ridiculously clever if no one ever learns about it?”
Rainie went still. She saw comprehension slowly washing over Luke’s and Sanders’s faces, and she knew they had arrived at the same conclusion she had when their eyes suddenly widened in horror.
“You mean … you mean this person wanted someone to admire his efforts?”
“Yes.”
“And if Danny does crack, does one day tell everything …”
“What’s one of the biggest factors we’re already seeing in school shootings? Ego. Boys trying to assert their identity in a crowded world. Confused children who equate being infamous with being famous. Are you kidding? The UNSUB is hoping that someday Danny will crack. Not right away. Our shooter needs time to get out of Dodge. But one day he hopes to pick up the paper and read about a thirteen-year-old boy whose sole line of defense in a triple-homicide case is that the bogeyman made him do it. And all the crime experts will say this proves how today’s youths refuse to take responsibility for their actions, and the legal experts will say this proves how today’s defense attorneys go out of their way to confuse juries with conspiracy theories, and our UNSUB will have a good laugh. Our UNSUB will clip every article on Danny O’Grady’s trial and have a ball.”
“We’re no longer talking a crime of passion, are we?” Rainie asked weakly.
“No. Not at all.”
“But why Melissa Avalon then? The special bullet. The single shot to the forehead. Those are all signs she wasn’t a random victim.”
“Oh, she wasn’t random. The selection process was simply different from what we thought. I should’ve seen it earlier, when everyone kept saying how close Danny was to Miss Avalon and how patient she was with him.”
“I don’t get it—”
“Danny loved her, Rainie. That’s why the UNSUB chose her. Because what better way to demonstrate your control over a troubled child than to make him assist in the murder of the one person who’s been good to him. The only other person he trusted.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Sanders burst out. “No one’s going to turn on someone they like. You want to lead a kid over to the dark side, you play on something he already hates. You know—‘You think your daddy’s an asshole? Well, so was mine. Now, let me tell you what I did about it, little boy.’ ”
Quincy shook his head. “You can do that, Detective, but the bond isn’t as strong—not as strong as our UNSUB needs. In classic indoctrination technique, you get the initiate to turn on the things he loves the most. That’s when you know you have him. In fact, a Canadian serial killer cemented his homicidal partnership with his wife by making her participate in the rape and murder of her own sister. After that, she couldn’t turn against him. That would mean having to face what she’d done. The guilt’s too high.”
“Danny,” Rainie whispered. “Already under suicide watch. Oh my God, the things that must be going on in his mind.”
“He did it? Danny did it?” Luke was rocking back and forth slightly. His face held newly etched lines, and he looked at Quincy almost in agony. “You’re saying Shep’s son killed those girls. And this son of a bitch made him.”
“Yes. I think that’s how it probably happened.”
“Who is this bastard? Can’t you tell us that? Can’t you stick data in some fancy feebie database and give us something practical to work with?” Luke jumped to his feet. The tendons in his neck stood out like cords, and he looked at them all almost wildly.
None of them said anything. Rainie thought of Luke, night after night, sitting in his patrol car outside Shep’s house, determined to protect the O’Gradys’ honor. Little Danny, who played in their office after school. Little Danny, playing shoot-’em-up cops and robbers with Bakersville’s finest. “Bang, bang, bang. Good shooting, Danny. Way to go, kid.”
“One other thought,” Quincy said in the tension-filled attic.
They stared at him, wondering how it could get worse and knowing that it would.
“Murder is like anything else. It has to be learned. The first time is messy, the second time more systematic. These homicides, they’re very sophisticated.”
“Oh shit,” Sanders said.
Rainie closed her eyes.
“This isn’t the first time this person has done it,” Quincy concluded quietly. “I would bet my career on it. And if the UNSUB is using the Internet to identify vulnerable teens … It’s a wide, wide world out there, ladies and gentlemen. God knows where he’ll strike next.”
A phone rang. Sanders flinched in the unsettled silence of the room. Luke recovered first and picked up the receiver. He said yes. He nodded. He said yes again. He took some notes.
He hung up the phone, and there was already something about his face that made Rainie cold.
“That was some bartender in Seaside,” Luke said shortly. “Some guy just walked back into his joint. He’s asking a lot of questions about the shooting. And he’s talking about you, Rainie. He’s talking all about you and how he personally knows you shot your mother fourteen years ago.”
“We got action,” Sanders said crisply. Luke and Quincy nodded, muscles tensing, clearly ready to roll.
Rainie’s reaction was slower in coming.
“Yeah.” She sighed softly. Nodding her head. Thinking of Danny. Thinking of psychopaths. Thinking of that night, all those years ago. “Yeah,” she said with resignation. “Here we go.”
TWENTY-SIX
Friday, May 18, 7:12 P.M.
Dusk blanketed Bakersville. Homeowners flicked on porch lights, scattering pinpricks of silver illumination against the darkening hillsides. Dairy cows clustered under trees for warmth, forming rocky contours as they hunkered down for sleep.
In some houses, parents held their children close, thinking of the schools they had attended in their days and the seeming battlegrounds their children attended now. You don’t want to raise your kids to be afraid. Everyone goes to school. No sense in making a big deal about it. But to button them up each morning, kiss the soft down at the top of their heads, and send them out to their day—unarmed, defenseless, terrified of the kid in the next seat … Oh God, oh God, what has happened to our schools?
In some bars, young men kicked back extra shots, talking about the fucking lawyers who could get anyone off and the dumb-ass juries who cried harder for the murderers than their victims. Ain’t no justice in the world. Ain’t nobody trying to keep our families safe. This kid will probably walk away by the time he’s twenty-one, just like those boys in Arkansas. Doesn’t seem right. Not like those two little girls can magically crawl out of the ground when they come of age. Why should he get better than them just ’cause he’s a kid too? A murderer is a murderer. Don’t do the crime if you can’t serve the time. Yeah, that’s it. The kid’s a killer—let’s make him pay!
In Seaside, Ed Flanders nervously towel-dried beer mug after beer mug and hoped the cops would show up soon.
The man’s own glass was long since emptied. Ed had asked him if he wanted another. The man had declined. Ed suggested buffalo wings. The man said no. Now the man watched TV. Some news-magazine story on how a volunteer group, Cyber Angels, worked to protect unsuspecting Internet users from on-line stalkers. The man wore a strange smile.
Ed rubbed the beer mug harder. Though he wasn’t the type, he was learning to pray.
Seventy miles away, Rainie tore up Route 101 with her lights flashing. Quincy gripped the dash but didn’t say a
word. Sometimes he would glance at her. She always looked away. Sanders and Luke were in a car behind them, Luke at the wheel and having no trouble matching Rainie’s pace.
Sometimes they used to make this run up the winding coastal route just for the hell of it. To keep sharp, they told Shep. Practice their skills. Now those days seemed so far away.
The radio crackled. Suspect was on the move, dispatch relayed. Please advise.
Rainie had to think about it a minute. A crowded bar, a suspect they knew nothing about …
“Don’t make contact. Just follow him,” she said shortly, then annoyed herself by looking at Quincy for confirmation. The FBI agent nodded. She scowled, replaced the receiver, and drove faster.
An hour later they were in town. Dispatch guided them to a small hotel, and just around the corner, tucked behind a grove of trees, they encountered a ring of police cruisers.
“Looks like we found the party,” she muttered.
Quincy nodded. His face appeared calm, but he still had that light in his eyes. He unfurled from her police cruiser like a boxer about to step into the ring, up on his toes and light on his feet. Rainie watched him a moment too long. The lean line of his body. His graceful, self-assured ease.
She felt a sense of doom she couldn’t shake. The night was closing in on her while the others geared up for the chase. Let’s get the stranger, let’s get the evil man in black.
“He’s talking all about you … personally knows you shot your mother fourteen years ago.”
Stranger? She didn’t know anymore. She had bad thoughts about bad things that had happened way too long ago.
