Denny's Law

by Elizabeth Gunn

  Glad you like them, Sarah thought. To her they just looked like guts. ‘So he took care of himself,’ she said. ‘But did you get Delaney’s message about the casing he found?’

  ‘Yes. No sign of a slug yet, though. Be good to find one – it would explain why he didn’t bleed more when his attacker did all that whaling on him. I thought I might find a big cancer in here, eating him up, but au contraire, this guy was good for another thirty years easy. So I’m going to go ahead now and look at his brain.’

  He got out the big saw and went to work. Sarah had seen her share of autopsies but she still had to set her jaw to keep from wincing as the saw screamed through bone. When the doctor had the cranium opened he folded the scalp down over the face, made another diagonal cut to create a wedge of skull and lifted it out.

  ‘Hmmm. Well. Plenty of blood in here, huh?’ He suctioned the area dry, cut the arteries and nerves that connected the brain to the body and called a young assistant named Blake to help him lift it out. Even with four hands they had a hard time moving it – the brain was badly damaged and disintegrating into pulp. Looking down at it in the lab dish, Cameron said, ‘Yeah, here’s your answer, I guess.’

  ‘You think there’s a bullet in this brain?’

  ‘Sure looks like it,’ Cameron said. ‘Wow, it is so messed up. Yes, this is a portion of a wound track across the top here. And see, something broke the surface here and then veered off.’

  ‘And ends up where, do you think?’

  ‘Can’t tell yet. It probably made a couple of circuits, ricocheting off bone. I’ll have to slice this whole mass up carefully to find—’

  ‘I don’t think so, Doc,’ his assistant said. ‘Isn’t this it, here’ – he was pointing inside the empty skull – ‘in the brain stem?’

  ‘Well … by damn, I think you’re right.’ The dark-pewter edge of a misshapen bullet poked out through a red-brown mound of protoplasm. ‘Hang on, now,’ Cameron said. His gleaming tweezer flashed and a bloody lump of metal dropped onto a clean tissue by the bowl.

  ‘Pretty badly mangled,’ Sarah said. ‘You think Banjo can make anything of that?’

  ‘Well, we’re sure going to give him a chance to try.’ He wiggled his shoulders. His coral plastic lab gown crackled and his rimless eyeglasses gleamed. The air in the lab actually seemed to effervesce. Cameron might not talk much but it was easy to tell when he was pleased.

  He said, ‘Very well done, Blake.’ His assistant’s cheeks bloomed a nice shade of pink. ‘Now let’s see if I can find an entry wound.’ He adjusted a light and began cleaning the bloody left ear. He swabbed, stooped, squinted, tilted the light again and said something like ‘Schmerz.’ More wiping and muttering till finally he said, ‘Ah.’

  Satisfied again, he showed her a little dike of tissue inside the outer ear mounded aside to make room for the entering bullet. The hole was surprisingly small, hardly more than a pinprick.

  ‘You see it? Good. Now we’ll look inside.’ He cleaned up some more inside the empty crater of the braincase and said, ‘Ooh, yeah.’ He moved over three inches and told Sarah, ‘Stand here. Look right here.’ He pointed with a probe.

  ‘I see it,’ Sarah said, looking at the ragged hole inside the ear, bigger than the hole outside.

  ‘Went right on into the brain here.’ He pointed to the left side of the oozing mass. ‘Yeah, about here, I think. The attacker’s almost certainly right-handed, you might want to know.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Sarah said, and made a note.

  ‘The bullet entered the brain on the left side, just about in the hearing area. Probably made him deaf, then bounced around the cranium a couple of times and buried itself down here in the medulla. By then he didn’t care about being deaf – he was dead. Whole thing took about a second. Maybe two.’

  ‘And happened by the door where we found him?’

  ‘Yes. Trust me, he didn’t do any more walking after the shot.’

  ‘A fatal shot just inside the door, yet the people in the house next door say they never heard gunfire.’

  ‘But how much else was going on? Let’s see, the storm didn’t start till later, did it?’

  ‘No,’ Sarah said, ‘but there was a parade earlier. A marching band and mariachis. And a clown with a limp, they said.’

  Cameron shrugged. ‘Well, there you go,’ he said. ‘A clown with a limp, plenty of squealing.’

  ‘Maybe. In my experience, a gunshot is easy to distinguish from other noises.’

  ‘Because you’re trained to identify it. But how many times have you heard witnesses say, “We thought it was a car backfiring”?’

  FOUR

  Working her way through phone messages the day after the autopsy, Sarah saw one from Firearms Identification and Toolmarks Comparison and skipped ahead to it. Waiting through canned music for a fast-talking techie to answer the phone, Sarah thought, the wait’s longer now than it was when we just called it Ballistics.

  But she didn’t waste any time sighing over the good old days. The state-of-the-art equipment at the new crime lab held the promise of better law enforcement, and who didn’t love that? It was fascinating, though, how quickly criminals found ways around any new edge law enforcement devised. If a section of border ever got closed off completely they brought the drugs for that area in by boat. If there were no ports they’d get airplanes. Or ATVs or camels. Oh, now you like drones, Mr Policeman? Zap, so do we.

  Obviously the word fun had no place in a crime file, but Sarah privately thought the ongoing arms race was what made her job the best game in town. And in that contest Banjo Bailey was a good man to have on your side.

  The firearms’ division’s head chemist and firearms expert got his nickname moonlighting in a bluegrass band. On the stage, Banjo’s costume of red sleeve garters, blue suspenders and white spats took on added authenticity when he let his abundant curly white hair grow. Gradually he added a goatee and a generous mustache curled and waxed on the ends, plus a long white braid that hung down his back under his farmer’s straw hat. None of his costume came with him to his day job, of course, but the hair couldn’t be grown in a day so he wore it matter-of-factly with Dockers and a polo shirt, and his fellow scientists eventually got used to his shtick and quit ragging him about it.

  Getting applauded at night for his funky plucking seemed to relieve whatever stress he encountered in his day job. Banjo Bailey at work in a forensics lab was benevolent and generous, never appearing impatient or overworked. He greeted each new search you brought him with the air of an unusually agreeable child getting handed a shiny new toy.

  ‘We examined that slug the doc took out of your victim,’ he told her when he came on the line, ‘and got some quite good results. You want to come up and talk?’

  She looked at the clock: three o’clock. It wasn’t as handy as when she used to just run upstairs, but the new lab was only ten minutes away in normal traffic.

  Which unfortunately we never have anymore, she thought five minutes later as she took her life in her hands and plunged into the hectic flow on I-10. None of the eighteen-wheelers crushed her as she merged so she got in line and practiced her yoga breaths for four miles. She exhaled happily at the Miracle Mile exit, which she always thought of as making good her escape into Pothole City.

  In two minutes she tensed again to make the tricky U-turn onto the big parking lot full of benches and outdoor art that fronted the West Side station and crime lab.

  ‘OK, lessee now,’ Banjo said, patting his way around his big, crowded bench till he found the work order for her search. ‘Here it is: a slug from the head of that victim you found during the storm, right? Fourth of July must have been quite a day. Did you ever get to the ice cream and sparklers?’

  ‘Missed all the fun – I nearly drowned at the crime scene. Was that a storm or what? I ruined a good pair of shoes and my dry cleaner’s not sure she can save my pants.’

  ‘You got a cleaner who actually cares about your clothes? Lucky Sarah. I got the slu
g in the scope over here.’

  She followed him to a work stand where he waved her onto a comfortable high stool.

  Using a pointer, he directed her attention to the ugly remains of a .22 slug that had bounced around a skull several times. Despite its beat-up condition, he had been able to discern lands and grooves, had test-fired a number of weapons from the lab’s supply and was ready to make a fairly firm ID of the bullet as having been fired by a Taurus semi-auto pistol.

  ‘You familiar with this weapon, Sarah?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Often called “the Dolly’s Gun.” It’s manufactured in Brazil and is a popular choice among wives and girlfriends of big-time macho guys who always carry guns, usually concealed, and want their sweeties to learn to shoot so they’ll be safe when the Big Kahuna’s out of town. I guess I won’t comment on what I think of that idea.’

  ‘What’s the use?’

  ‘Precisely. Anyway, these women often have difficulty trying to rack the slide on a semi-auto and the Taurus solves that by having a tilt-up barrel so you can chamber the first round from the front. Here, I brought one out so you can see it.’

  He showed her the action on a PT-22.

  ‘Easy on the wrist, maybe,’ Sarah said, ‘but no opponent’s going to stand around while you load it. So you have to carry it ready to fire?’

  ‘I would certainly suggest that course of action, yes.’

  ‘Where’s the safety?’

  ‘Doesn’t have one. It’s a semi-auto, same as your Glock.’ He showed her how the first half of the trigger pull cocked the hammer and the second half fired the bullet.

  ‘Well, so … it has to use .22 Long Rifles?’

  ‘Yeah, the auto-load mechanism won’t work with shorter ammo. But the tilt-up barrel makes it very attractive to old guys with arthritis who find it hard to rack the slide on the usual semi-auto, and to juveniles just learning to shoot. Also to women – especially the ones with small hands. Any chance your victim was attacked by a woman?’

  ‘It would have to be a most unusual female. They staged a hellacious fight in the house before he got shot.’

  ‘I see. Well, for some reason this tough guy opted for a Taurus. Maybe just because it’s reasonably priced.’

  ‘Are there a lot of them around?’

  ‘It’s a popular weapon but they still all have their anomalies,’ Banjo said. ‘If you find the right gun I’ll be able to ID it.’

  ‘Good, I’ll look forward to that.’ She stared into space briefly, came back and said, ‘A cheap weapon with no criminal record, and all the other signs in the room say that rage was a factor. Doesn’t that sound personal?’

  ‘Or like a really serious grudge fight. Guys in gangs can rub each other the wrong way sometimes, as you know. Remember the Ortegas? The brother who got his dick bit off?’

  ‘Oh, please, now, Banjo …’

  ‘OK, I’m just saying. Let’s not jump to any conclusions yet. Anyway, you haven’t found any next of kin so far, have you?’

  ‘Gossip’s already reaching the lab, huh?’

  ‘It’s what we have to talk about, Sarah.’

  ‘Yup. You heard right, too. We’ve had two detectives canvassing the neighborhood for two days and we can’t find anybody he was even close to. The man lived alone in that house and when he came out of it he rode his bike or drove away in his pickup. Alone, the neighbors say. Nobody reports seeing buddies, girlfriends – no grandkids stopping by to hug grandad’s legs.’

  ‘Well …’ Banjo turned toward the stand where he had the handsome Smith & Wesson revolver clamped under the microscope. ‘On the other hand, this weapon you found … hanging under a string of peppers, was that it? I bet that brightened up the scene for a while, didn’t it?’

  ‘Sure did. Hanging there fully loaded, ready to go to war. Made the victim seem a little less … victimized, for sure.’ She moved over to stand by him. ‘How do you like it?’

  ‘Oh, I like it a lot. But unfortunately it didn’t fire that bullet we were just looking at. Well, of course you know that.’ Head cocked, Banjo regarded the revolver the way a hen looks at a fresh handful of grain. ‘This is really quite an elegant weapon, Sarah.’

  ‘Surprisingly upmarket for the wall it was hanging on,’ Sarah said. ‘And for its presumptive owner. Everything else on the premises was plain and cheap.’

  ‘Nothing cheap about this item,’ Banjo said. ‘Well over eight hundred dollars new, plus tax. If you include the cost of this very nice belt and holster you’re looking at close to a thousand. Worth it, of course, if you value first-rate accuracy and reliability.’

  ‘But not exactly a first-choice weapon for a pro, would you say?’

  ‘Depends what he wants to do. A .22 is not the high-powered weapon most thugs would want but it’s ideally suited for a head shot like the one you’ve been looking at.’

  ‘The shot that didn’t come from this weapon.’

  ‘Kind of curls your toes, doesn’t it? I keep coming back to that, too – the perfect gun hanging right there but it’s not the one this bullet came from. What you said about a pro, though – is that how you’re thinking about this victim now? Delaney said he was a quiet older guy in that old residential neighborhood under Signal Mountain, and you’re saying plain and cheap. Where does pro fit into that?’

  ‘Something about the way he conducted himself – such a loner. And if he owned this gun he must have been a serious shooter, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Serious on some level. Some people just enter contests, remember. Belong to clubs and go to meets at well-groomed firing ranges.’

  ‘Yeah. In a way this weapon does make you think about an elitist shooter like that. It’s been very well treated, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed. Pristine clean, hasn’t been fired since it was oiled. Nothing to tie it to the crime you’re working on, Sarah, but Delaney asked me to find out if it’s been involved in any other interesting scenes so I’m searching NIBIN, the ATF database.’

  ‘Anything so far?’

  He shook his head. ‘I just put the search online.’

  ‘Isn’t this the twenty-first century? How long can it take for an electronic search?’

  ‘After it gets out of the queue, about thirty seconds.’

  ‘Oh, crap. How many in the queue?’

  ‘Depends on the day and time. If you’re lucky maybe only a few thousand but possibly gazillions. Think about the drive-by shootings, the gang-bangers’ shoot-outs in cities like Baltimore and LA. There are a lot of casings out there – an endless stream of evidence being submitted, often with no suspects in mind but just entered for future reference. They can prioritize, however, when a murder and a suspect need to be tied to each other. I’m not sure I have all the elements I need to get us moved up in the queue but I’m going to try.’

  ‘What would we do without you?’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that. Where else could I work to have this much fun? I’ll be in touch.’

  Sarah rode along with Oscar Cifuentes for a couple of hours the next day to see if she could figure out why he wasn’t coming back with more skinny.

  ‘I thought you said you knew this area well,’ she said.

  ‘I do,’ Oscar said, ‘like the back of my hand. My nana lived in that house all her life,’ he said, pointing. ‘She passed away last year and two of her grandsons live there now. My cousins.’ He sighed. ‘Well, only Miguel is there right now; Chuy is in Pima County. But he’ll be back in a few months.’

  ‘Your cousin’s in jail?’ Sarah was shocked. Oscar always spoke of his family as proud and upright perfect examples of establishment Mexican values.

  ‘It’s a sad thing,’ he said. ‘He can’t break his meth habit and it always gets him in trouble.’

  ‘How does your family feel about that?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, not happy, but … drug trafficking in the Tucson school system is so well established that it has come to be accepted that most families will
lose one or two out of each generation into that sucking swamp.’

  ‘God. Actually, I guess that’s not so far out of line with the national average, is it? I suppose I should be keeping an eye on Denny pretty soon.’

  ‘Your niece that you adopted? How old is she?’

  ‘Eleven. Well, nearly twelve.’

  ‘Well then, it’s not pretty soon, Sarah, it’s already happening with her classmates. Better talk to her.’

  ‘Damn. I was just getting going on menstruation.’

  ‘Menstruation?’ He threw his head back and laughed, enjoying himself. ‘Really, Sarah, where did you grow up?’

  ‘Right here. Well, on a ranch, south of town – east of Sahuarita.’

  ‘I should have guessed that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some of your attitudes are surprisingly … optimistic, for a Tucson cop.’

  ‘Why? Because I expect the best of everybody till they show me otherwise?’

  ‘Yes. Now I’ve offended you and I’m sorry.’ A courteous and rather formal man by nature, always immaculately dressed, Cifuentes had got crosswise with Delaney when he first came into the squad, had barely salvaged his job and since then was so careful and correct he almost made Sarah’s teeth ache. But when she’d asked Leo Tobin if there was some way to put him at ease, he’d said, ‘I wouldn’t try that if I were you, Sarah. I think Delaney enjoys having one person in the section who’s always trying hard to please him.’

  ‘I guess. It just gives me the itch the way he’s always apologizing.’

  But now, suddenly, he didn’t look sorry at all – he was pointing across the street and smiling. ‘There’s where I grew up, that brick house on the corner. That’s my dad in the yard.’ He tapped the horn once and the man trimming the hedge waved his clipper and smiled.

  ‘Not hard to see he’s your father,’ Sarah said.

  ‘I guess we do look alike.’

  ‘Also, his hair stays perfect even while he does yard work.’

  Oscar pulled over to the curb on the wrong side of the street, ran his window down and said, ‘I thought we agreed I would do this job for you on Saturday.’