‘‘Jake… get a message to Johnny for me. Tell him to call me.’’
‘‘Goodbye, Mr. Houseman!’’
‘‘Goodbye, Beth.’’
And they were gone, literally in a cloud of dust.
Well, I hadn’t had much to do that afternoon anyway. But I thought that the whole thing was interesting. She was probably as much a victim as the rest of them that day. I sighed, and got back into my car. ‘‘Political.’’ In a way, I supposed he was right. Somehow, somebody had got in somebody’s way. She’d been checking me out the whole time, just so he could deliver his paranoid little message. And, I said to myself, she’d done it for the man who was watching her for Johnny Marks. If Marks was that interested, maybe we really had overlooked something.
When I got back to the office, I entered ‘‘CIA cleared, along with SEALS,’’ in my case notes.
On July 10th, Hester was back, and she and I interviewed a lady from La Crosse who said she had seen somebody in the park that day. She’d called, and driven all the way, very nervous, and flushed. She was about fifty, plump, and exceptionally nice. We were very polite when we learned that she had been in an area of the park almost six miles from the shootings.
On July 11th, we reexamined the crime-scene photos. We’d had some of them blown up. Nothing. We’d had several others transferred to CD, and tried all sorts of things with our computers, like increasing the red intensity, decreasing the blues, eliminating the greens… I even went to black and white. The problem was, unless we had something we were looking for, something definite, there was no point.
On the 12th, DEA finally sent out Nichols, who talked to us and to Dahl, and to Johansen for a bit. He was really helpful. He seemed to agree with my movement theory, and seemed impressed with that. He said they had nothing that would explain the shooting of Turd. That they’d get on it as soon as they could. Nichols was really helpful. Well, as much as he could be without having anything new to tell us. He said he didn’t know where Marks was either.
Dahl was really angry by now, at nobody in particular. Like so many undercover narcs, he was a little high-strung. And he had energy to burn. He wanted to redo all the interviews Hester and I had just redone, for example. He’d already pored over every narcotics file he could get his hands on, trying to establish various connections into our area, and then had followed them all up. He’d also been working in his undercover mode up around Freiberg and the park area, and had made the acquaintance of Beth Harper and her new boyfriend, Jake.
‘‘She’s just another doper cunt,’’ he said. Then: ‘‘Uh, sorry, Hester.’’
‘‘That’s fine,’’ said Hester. ‘‘She’s not my little sister.’’
‘‘Really, though,’’ he said. ‘‘She’s not stupid, but she just doesn’t want to know, so she doesn’t.’’
‘‘I can understand that,’’ I said. ‘‘Especially at this stage.’’
‘‘The scoop on the street is that it was a gang hit,’’ said Dahl. He adjusted his black Harley sweatband, which matched his black Harley tee shirt. ‘‘We’ve checked that one, haven’t we?’’ He directed that question at Nichols.
Nichols just nodded.
‘‘I mean. I don’t think there’s anybody really connected up there …’’
‘‘They’re not,’’ said the DEA rep.
‘‘It does look a lot like a hit,’’ said Hester. ‘‘An organized hit. It really does.’’ She was wearing tan slacks, a white blouse, and looked like she came from a whole different world than Dahl. Yet, five years before, she’d been in blue jeans, a cutoff denim jacket, and could have passed for his old lady. That’s what she’d worn the first time I saw her, and she could have fooled me.
‘‘That’s it,’’ said the senior DEA agent. ‘‘We can’t come up with an outfit with motive… we really can’t come up with any sort of gang that’s into it at all. Not yet. There will be once it’s harvested and bagged, but not yet. Just some high hopes, so to speak.’’
‘‘And it wasn’t that much of a patch and there’s no war on,’’ said Dahl, ‘‘but the bad guys have been wrong before. They’ve knocked off some pretty unimportant people who just happened to have given the impression they were important.’’
I nodded. I was aware of that sort of thing. ‘‘Not this Howie Phelps,’’ I said. ‘‘He couldn’t even convince himself he was important.’’ I shrugged. ‘‘Besides, if the shooters were involved with the ownership of the patch, they would have known who Howie was anyway.’’
‘‘How about this Marks?’’ asked Hester. ‘‘Boy seems to have a certain air about him.’’
‘‘Could be,’’ said Dahl. ‘‘Everybody up there thinks he’s important.’’ He thought a second. ‘‘Naw, that’s just because Marks has told ’em so. Anybody with any savvy could spot him for an idiot in a short second. Besides, he sure as hell knew Turd.’’
‘‘And his old lady,’’ said Hester dryly. ‘‘I just don’t see how anybody without savvy could put together a hit like that.’’
‘‘Yup,’’ said Nichols. ‘‘That’s the problem.’’
‘‘The real problem,’’ said Hester, ‘‘is that, as far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no reason for this to have happened at all.’’
We were quiet for a moment.
‘‘A mistake?’’ asked Dahl with a wide grin. ‘‘You can’t be telling me that it was all a well-organized mistake.’’
‘‘No,’’ said Hester. ‘‘It was no mistake. If it was a mistake, Marks wouldn’t rabbit. We just don’t know the reason, that’s all.’’
‘‘We need a motive that works,’’ I said, almost absently.
‘‘We have the motive,’’ said Nichols. ‘‘Dope is the motive, and it sure works. We just gotta get the details right.’’
I took the 13th and 14th off. It was either that or beat some kid to death with the mailbox he’d just knocked over. Saw a movie. Mowed the lawn. Got to see my wife, Sue. I remembered her from my vacation. Just being with her was a help, even though we couldn’t discuss any of the specifics of the case. She knew it was driving me nuts, because I was driving her nuts. Only I wasn’t driving her nuts directly because I was hardly around. We had a nice little reunion.
On the 15th, Hester and I met with Dr. Peters, the forensic pathologist assigned to the case. We met at his office in Cedar Rapids. He’d offered to come to the Nation County Sheriff’s Department, but I told him we could do it as easily at his place. I really didn’t want to get back into routine crap at the office, and this way I could delay it by a day. Besides, he had a really nice office, especially compared with ours.
Peters was really special. Every autopsy I’d ever been at with him in attendance, he had a story with a good point for every single organ he took out of the corpse. He’d make every effort to point out to me every single detail and explain each point. And I hung on his every word. I found we were in complete agreement about what I thought was the most vital part of the relationship between the pathologist and the cop. He narrowed the parameters for us, with anything involving the body and the cause and mechanism of death. We solved the case. He would assist in every way he could, but we had to put it together. ‘‘Quincy,’’ he’d say, ‘‘doesn’t live in Cedar Rapids.’’
Peters worked out of a single-story office-laboratory that was well furnished and well staffed. He wasn’t the only pathologist who worked out of that office, but he was by far the best. You could tell from the attitude of the nurses and secretaries, and from the occasional confirmatory questions coming from the other docs. It was amazing. He’d just think about something he wanted, and there it would be, in the hands of a staff person. From tools of the trade to coffee and rolls. And the worst part was, he didn’t demand that sort of thing. They just wanted to do it for him.
Hester and I were ushered in with just a little fanfare, which pleased us both. Peters met us at the main entrance, and we followed in his wake back to a large conference room. Coffee, rolls,
napkins, sugar, tea, cream… plus two ring binders containing the autopsy records of both Howie Phelps and Bill Kellerman.
‘‘How do you want to start, Carl?’’ Dr. Peters’s way of asking where the problems were.
‘‘Well,’’ I said, fighting off the urge for a second doughnut, ‘‘we have no suspects. Period. So we gotta get to know the people who did this.’’
Peters nodded. ‘‘Let’s do that, then.’’
He opened the autopsy binder for Howie Phelps. Arthur George Phelps, according to the death certificate. ‘‘Turd’’ wasn’t mentioned. The cause of death was listed as ‘‘multiple gunshot wounds, chest, abdomen, and head,’’ with the manner of death simply given as ‘‘homicide.’’ Dr. Peters’s diagrams were there, drawn onto the standard human body outlines-anterior, posterior, left, right, top-with similar views of the skull. The entrance and exit wounds were shown by small round dots in the former, and by larger oblong shaded areas in the case of the latter. Simple, so far.
‘‘Had a little problem with the paths of the bullets,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘I drew lines from the entrance to the exit wounds for each round, and they just didn’t make sense.’’ He grinned. ‘‘Until I discovered that projectile three exited above projectile two. Otherwise, there would have been more than two shooters. But there wasn’t. Three just hit the spinal column more centrally, and was deflected more to the right and up. Almost passed through the channel caused by two, and came out…’’ He looked at his notes. ‘‘… five centimeters above it.’’
‘‘Sure.’’ Hester half squinted. ‘‘Let’s see, then one shooter was above… but according to the diagram was maybe less than a foot higher?’’
‘‘Close enough,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘The ground measurements place the, oh, geographical I suppose, height of the shooter about five to six inches above the target location. If the shooter was taller, a foot could be right. We only have an angle of a few degrees.’’
‘‘How much taller?’’ I asked.
‘‘Well,’’ chuckled Dr. Peters, ‘‘that’s not an easy one. There’s just such a variety of shapes involved in the human body… but unless the shooter was deformed,’’ he continued, ‘‘I’d say he was probably four inches taller than little Mr. Phelps here.’’
‘‘Ballpark taller?’’ asked Hester.
‘‘Ballpark taller,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘But fairly reliable. The ground there isn’t quite level. Let’s say about fivenine or five-ten.’’ He looked at me. ‘‘And fairly strong.’’
I looked at Dr. Peters with my eyebrows raised, over the top of my reading glasses. He was waiting for that.
‘‘Not much rise from the recoil. First round hits just below and to the right of the victim’s navel, really, and they travel upward and to the shooter’s left. But not much. Last one entered in the torso just below the victim’s right collarbone. Mean distance of about eleven inches, but a rise of about nine.’’ He paused for a second. ‘‘The principal head wound would, initially, appear to have come from above, but I feel that it, along with at least one of the others, was made while the victim’s body was folding at the waist, as it traveled backward. This would place the head slightly down in relation to the trajectories of the bullets. That explains why the round entered about the middle of the forehead, and exited at just about the external occipital protuberance… the bump near the base of the skull,’’ he added hastily.
‘‘All from the first shooter’s POV,’’ stated Hester.
‘‘Right.’’
‘‘Depending on the range…’’
‘‘Depending on the range, Carl. Twenty-seven and some-odd feet.’’
‘‘So the muzzle rose?’’
‘‘Just a few inches.’’
‘‘Full auto?’’ asked Hester, just before I did.
‘‘Absolutely,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘Then the second shooter, probably from that location just behind the first one, and to the right as you look at it, fired at least twice. Once into the lower chest, and once into the head. Hard one to find,’’ he said, smiling, ‘‘but there was just a little notch on the right side of Mr. Phelps’s head, where the skull had been blown apart by the head shot delivered by the first shooter. The second one came in at an angle, and left just about a perfect semicircular notch in the edge of the first wound.’’ He took a sip of coffee. ‘‘Judging from the size of the semicircle, it was probably a 7.62 mm round. Just too big for a 5.56, as far as I’m concerned. Even assuming an angle of some sort…’’
‘‘And just for the record,’’ asked Hester, ‘‘how do we know this?’’
Dr. Peters leaned back in his chair and reached for a doughnut. ‘‘Let me count the ways.’’ He grinned. This really was one of his favorite things.
‘‘First,’’ he said, talking around his first bite of doughnut, ‘‘we have the fact that Phelps’s shotgun was discharged, and in the general direction of the shooter. From the severed leaves that you, Hester, pointed out to me at the scene, we know it was discharged upward but below a forty-five-degree angle.’’ He reached for his coffee cup. ‘‘That tells me that our Mr. Phelps observed either one shooter or something suspicious just before he fired his shotgun. The officer who saw him, and survived, can’t remember, but thinks Phelps carried the shotgun in his right hand, roughly parallel to the ground, when he saw him. If that’s the case, and the shotgun was discharged a few seconds later, it’s reasonable to believe that Phelps probably brought the gun to his waist level before firing.’’ He sipped his coffee. ‘‘If he’d brought it to his shoulder, he probably would have discharged it at a much shallower angle.’’
Logic. Logic and medical knowledge, and physics, and ballistics, and logic again. Peters was really good at this, and I enjoyed just listening to him.
‘‘Toxicology,’’ said Dr. Peters, changing gears, ‘‘shows that our man Phelps had some THC in his system. Tests on his blood, brain tissue, urine, liver tissue, spinal fluid, and vitreous fluid indicate THC levels of about…’’ He looked at his file. ‘‘Umm, four hundred ten nanograms per milliliter of 11-nor-9-carboxy-delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol.’’ He took another sip. ‘‘A buzz, more or less, from smoking a joint, but not incapacitated by any means. Perhaps slightly slower reactions and perceptions.’’ He grinned. ‘‘Slower, but happier.’’
‘‘Okay,’’ I said.
‘‘So,’’ he continued, ‘‘Phelps sees the shooter. In time to start bringing his gun up. The shooter and Phelps fire, at nearly the same time. By Johansen’s account the shotgun probably fired first. Phelps was likely startled. He certainly wasn’t sufficiently intoxicated to have it affect his aim to that degree.’’
Another bite of doughnut found its way into my mouth. Chalk it up to enthralled.
‘‘The first shooter, who is now under attack, fires a burst, which hits Howie just about dead center. The combination of the sound, the flash, and the impacts tend to have Howie Phelps thrown back by his own reflexes, assisted by the impact of the rounds.’’ He took a long swig of coffee this time. ‘‘All of which, by the way, struck the victim while he was more or less erect.’’
Aha! Cool.
‘‘And he would have remained erect…?’’ asked Hester.
‘‘Not much longer than a second, if that,’’ said Dr. Peters.
‘‘Five rounds in a second,’’ I said.
‘‘Less than a second, most likely,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘About as fully automatic as you get.’’
‘‘Sure.’’
‘‘And,’’ he said, ‘‘the pattern of the projectile strikes are consistent with full auto. As was the distribution of spent cartridge cases.’’
Hester grinned.
So did Dr. Peters. ‘‘Making Hester correct in her on-scene analysis.’’
‘‘Once again,’’ said Hester.
Dr. Peters barked out a laugh. ‘‘Well, at least, not for the first time.’’
‘‘Let me interject something here,’’ I s
aid.
‘‘Go right ahead,’’ said Dr. Peters.
I told him about my observations at the crime scene. About my theory that the shooters were hunting the cops, and not Howie. About how Howie’s presence had been a factor that was not predictable by either the shooters or the cops, and how Howie had prematurely triggered what I thought was an ambush for the officers.
Dr. Peters thought about that for a second.
‘‘I had a little experience in my Army days with that sort of thing. I think you’re absolutely right. Advancing to contact,’’ he muttered. ‘‘Quite reasonable.’’
I had been browsing the autopsy photographs as Dr. Peters was talking. ‘‘Can you tell the caliber of the rounds from the wounds or debris?’’
‘‘Ah…’’ Dr. Peters reached behind his chair and pulled out a manila envelope that measured something like a yard on a side. He pulled out a series of huge X-ray films. ‘‘Phelps. Let’s get these up to the light,’’ he said, promptly hanging them on a bank of X-ray viewing panels, and flipping the switch. Flash, blink, and we had our X-rays.
‘‘See the debris fields on this one,’’ he asked, ‘‘what we call the ‘snowstorm’ field?’’
I could. There were what appeared to be hundreds of particles scattered in rough fan shapes, widening toward the back of the body. Some were relatively large, most minute. Some were hazy, and I knew that those were very small particles of nearly vaporized bone. One large object caught my eye.
‘‘This,’’ I said, rising half out of my chair and stretching out my hand with my pen extended. ‘‘This looks like part of a jacket.. .’’
‘‘Good eye,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘You overweight people concentrate so well.’’
‘‘Hey!’’ I said. ‘‘You brought the doughnuts!’’
‘‘For your concentration,’’ he said, grinning. ‘‘Works with him every time,’’ he said to Hester.
‘‘I wish he’d had one before he lost his raincoat,’’ she said.
Dr. Peters pushed another doughnut toward me. ‘‘You might need this,’’ he said. ‘‘What that is, is part of a metal jacket from a projectile. Fortuitously, it contains the imprint of the tail of the round. A small, circular impression. It’s at the DCI lab now,’’ he added. ‘‘What was nice about it was that it wasn’t steel. Copper. Seemed to be a ‘boat tail’ round, as the diameter was slightly less than 7.62 mm. Commercial, probably a semijacketed soft point, judging from the jacket and the exit wound, which appears to have been the largest of the group. Which leads to another interesting point…’’
Known Dead ch-2 Page 11
