by Ken Goddard
Robbins raised an eyebrow. “You mean like that one over there on table three.”
“That’s right.”
Robbins walked over to the table with a thoughtful expression on his face, examined the deer for a few moments, and then came back to the group.
“My first inclination is to say no, probably not; because whatever projectile caused the wound on that deer appears to have missed the neck bones altogether and simply ripped through its relatively fragile throat. Death probably occurred instantly due to hydrostolic shock. I’ll know more once I take some X-rays; but I wouldn’t think the mushrooming characteristics or the trajectory of a high-powered rifle and large-caliber bullet like this would have been impacted to any significant degree by such a small amount of thin tissue. But then, too, I’m not an expert on the physics of mushrooming bullets; so that’s why I’m giving it to you, along with the vest,” he said with a smile.
Grissom looked at Catherine, who reached into her lab coat pocket and pulled out a small manila envelope. She waited for Grissom to slip on a pair of plastic gloves, and then held it open as he carefully folded the bullet back into the piece of gauze and slipped the entire packet into the envelope.
“I’m going to get this bullet to Bobby right away, along with the vest, the three-oh-eight rifles from the two scenes, and that cartridge case you collected,” Catherine said as she walked over to the stainless steel cart where David was now waiting with a clipboard in hand. “Then I’ll check in on Greg and Sara.”
“Check on Warrick and Nick too, if you don’t mind, and don’t forget to get Wendy looking at the tissue under that bullet,” Grissom said. “I’ve got to get to a meeting with Brass, as soon as I pick up the rest of the evidence.”
“No problem,” Catherine responded as she took the clipboard from Phillips, quickly signed the chain-of-custody form, picked up the tagged vest, and disappeared out the door.
“Everything that’s ready to go is right here,” David said, motioning at the tagged gunshot-residue kit and freshly inked fingerprint card that he’d laid down on the cart surface next to an identical set of materials tagged as being from Enrico Toledano. “I’ll send all the tox samples over to the lab, along with whatever we find in our John Doe victim, as soon as we finish his autopsy.”
“Fine.” Grissom turned back to Robbins. “Anything else you can tell us at this point?”
“Not really.” The pathologist shrugged. “We’ll try to get direction-of-impact measurements on as many of the bullet and pellet impact points as possible, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to tell you much about the direction or sequence of the head wounds on our John Doe.”
“No, I suppose not,” Grissom said as he took a last look at the man’s shattered facial features. “It looks like we may have to depend on a little electronic magic…and possibly even some high school trigonometry, if you can believe it.”
“How’s it going?” Catherine asked as she walked into the crime lab’s primary garage examination area. She observed Sara sitting on a stool in front of the red truck, which was now raised up about a foot off the lab floor on the garage lift. Sara was carefully swabbing the edges of an indented hole in the exterior truck grill immediately adjacent to a long wooden dowel that had been fed through another such hole in the grill and a supposedly matching one in the radiator. A bundle of the four-foot-long dowels lay on the concrete in front of her knees.
From her position some ten feet away from the truck, Catherine could see at least fifteen to twenty other dowels sticking out of the grill, and an equivalent number of used trace metal swab vials on a torn square of butcher paper on the cement floor to the young CSI’s right. It appeared to Catherine that Sara still had several dozen holes to go.
At a deep sink on the opposite side of the garage, Nick was busy scrubbing grease and oil off his hands.
“I think Nick’s made the most progress so far,” Sara said with a sigh as she quickly referenced a crude sketch lying on the concrete floor to her left, marked the swab vial, set it down on the butcher paper next to the others, and then reached down and picked up another dowel. “He managed to get our John Doe’s vehicle off the tow truck, onto the lift, and jacked up to proper inflated-tire height while Greg and I were still reading the manual on the new crane-hoist.”
“Nick volunteered to unload the truck?” Catherine raised a curious eyebrow. Grissom had assigned Nick to far more challenging and much less dirty work.
“I came by to see how badly shot up the front tires were, and heard Greg and Sara in here arguing with the tow truck driver about whose responsibility it was to get the vic’s truck off his rig and onto the lift,” Nick explained, looking up from the sink with a grin on his face. “I did some summer work at a neighborhood garage when I was a kid, so I know how to work a hoist. And besides, Warrick and I need the front-end impact data to work out our trajectories, and I didn’t want Sara and Greg to end up smushing themselves with the crane and leaving me to clean up the mess.”
“Normally, I’d be insulted by that remark. But right now, I’ll happily trade you one massively perforated grill-slash-radiator, and a dirty job to be negotiated at a later date, for anythingyou’ve got,” Sara said hopefully as she stretched out what looked like a very sore right arm, and then reached for another dowel.
“I can definitely hear Warrick calling my name,” Nick said cheerfully as he waved good-bye and hurried out the door.
“So how’d you get stuck with the front-end work?” Catherine asked. “I thought Gil assigned that fun job to Greg.”
“He did, but while Nick was working on the truck, and Greg was working on the rough sketches, numbering all of the holes and impact points”—Sara pointed to three separate sketches of the truck grill, the radiator, and the front of the engine, all quickly drawn on pieces of butcher paper with a thick marker pen—“I was over at the indoor range, starting to test-fire the shotguns, and I let one slip off my shoulder.”
“Ouch,” Catherine said, wincing sympathetically. “You okay?”
“Just a bad bruise—those twelve-gauge rounds have a wicked recoil—but you know Greg: chivalrous to the core. He heard the range master put out a call over the intercom for an EMT response, came by the range to check on me, and then offered to switch jobs.”
“Two white knights to the rescue within the span of one hour—probably a new record around here,” Catherine commented with a grin.
“Yeah, except I now owe both of them big-time, which probably means I’ll be working the next floater all by myself…and I still have this insane puzzle to figure out.”
“Let me go check in on the others, make sure they’re all doing okay, and then I’ll see if I can give you a hand with this Rubik’s Cube for a while,” Catherine said.
“Which means I’ll owe you, too, right?” Sara said suspiciously.
“Better believe it,” Catherine said with a wink as she headed toward the door. “I’m not real fond of working those floater cases either.”
“Making any progress, guys?” Catherine inquired as she walked into the lab’s small conference room where Warrick and Nick had set up shop with a pair of laptop computers that they’d networked to the lab’s central servers and the three ceiling-mounted projectors, all of which were now displaying replicas of the two laptop screens on the left and right sectors of the far white wall.
The middle sector remained blank.
Both CSIs were hunched over their machines, working quickly to enter data from the truck shooting scene into their linked but very different programs; but both looked up, seemingly grateful for the interruption.
“I’m entering the location-point data into the scene drafting program, and what you’re seeing right now is the basic two-dimensional top view,” Warrick said.
“Why does the truck look like it’s made of building blocks?” Catherine asked.
“That’s just a place-holder right now,” Warrick explained. “I’ll download a standard 3-D figure of an old
Ford truck for where the shooters each made their crucial decisions to shoot or don’t shoot; but, eventually, we’ll substitute a 3-D image of the real thing from Nick’s scene scanner.”
“That’s assuming I can get thirty separate image scans to interlock and agree with each other,” Nick corrected. “Right now that’s looking a little iffy because the program isn’t recognizing all of the individual locator dots correctly.”
“A program glitch…or data overload?” Catherine asked.
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I’ve been using this version for almost two months now, and it’s worked fine on simple scene situations. What we’re asking it to do is a little more complicated in terms of locator points, but not beyond its specs.”
“What about data volume?” Warrick asked, looking up from his laptop.
“That shouldn’t be an issue because I’m actually running the program off the lab’s mainframe, so we’ve got all the crunching power we need,” Nick replied. “And the program seems to recognize non-dotted objects just fine. Here, look.”
As Nick keyed additional information into his laptop, a replica of Warrick’s still-crude scene sketch appeared on the middle sector of the far white wall.
“There’s the basic campsite, showing Pine Nut Road, the turnoff, the location of the UCs’ truck, their motorcycles, the fire ring, the camp chairs, and the two large boulders,” Nick said. “Now watch this.”
The CSI double-clicked on the overhead image of the big boulder that Jane Smith used as the “female facilities.”
Instantly, the 2-D top-view image of the large boulder appeared in the middle-wall-sector image of the campsite sketch.
“Okay,” Warrick said, “now I’m going to take a walk around that boulder.”
The middle-wall-sector sketch image suddenly shifted to a 3-D view of the massive rock…and then continued to shift as Warrick took an electronic “tour” around the boulder from about twenty electronic feet away.
“Wow, that looks almost exactly the way it looked at the scene,” Catherine whispered, impressed in spite of herself, “except that—”
“The boulder was actually over here a little more,” Warrick finished as he quickly shifted to the 2-D overhead view, nudged the boulder image over a few electronic feet, and then returned to the 3-D view.
“Yes, exactly,” Catherine nodded. “Wow.”
“Notexactly exactly,” Nick corrected. “But that rock will be located precisely where it belongs on the finished 3-D sketch—along with the truck, the major bullet and pellet impact points, and the position of the six shooters when they first saw the truck and when they shot their weapons—to a plus or minus accuracy of at least one-one-hundredth of an inch…if and when I can get this damned software to work.”
“And that should be real interesting,” Warrick added, “because each of those ‘shooting-locator’ cones has a pole sticking out of it with a locator at the more or less precise height that each weapon was at when the shooters fired—whether standing, kneeling, or prone.”
“So we’ll be able to figure out what the shooters could or could not have seen at the time they fired their weapons,” Catherine said, nodding in understanding.
“Yes, we’ll be able to do that, but only if we can determine one absolutely known reference point of time and vehicle position that we can use to register and correlate all of the other shooting times and places,” Warrick noted.
“And that’s going to be tricky,” Nick added, “because the best data we’ll have to go on will probably be the shotgun-distance determinations. And you know how rough those approximations are going to be, even if Greg and Sara can sort out and calculate the individual patterns in that grill and radiator.”
“So, what are you saying?” Catherine asked, slightly alarmed. “That all the locator points on the sketch—and the truck itself—are going to be high-tech-accurate to a hundredth of an inch; but the actual trucklocation at any particular moment may only be accurate to plus or minus a few inches?”
“Or maybe only plus or minus a few feet,” Warrick said, “depending on what kind of data Greg and Sara can tease out of that grill and radiator.”
“According to my expended count,” Catherine said, reading out of her field notebook, “we’re looking at ten high-base double-ought buck rounds, thirty five-five-six-mil rifle rounds, and a combined total twenty nine-mil and forty-cal pistol rounds…and most likely three thirty-eight special rounds…which pretty well tallies with the remaining ammo in the UCs’ magazines, chambers, and cylinders.”
“Ten high-base buckshot rounds?” Nick winced.
“At least that, and maybe eleven,” Catherine went on. “Mace kept a round in the chamber of his shotgun, but he can’t remember if he put four or five in the magazine. In any case, that all adds up to a minimum of one hundred and seventy-three projectiles potentially hitting the tires, the grill, the windows, and the cab of the subject’s truck…all of which measure between three-tenths and four-tenths of an inch in diameter…and all of which can be very difficult to tell apart—bullet-hole-wise—depending upon the angle of the shot, velocity of the round, vector direction of the ricochets off the frame and engine block, projectile distortions, overlapping impacts, and target-metal fatigue. And that is precisely the situation poor Sara is facing as we speak.”
Nick looked stricken. “We’re not going to be able to get accurate distance determinations from the shotguns, are we?”
“Probably not, unless we conduct trace metal analysis on the edges of each impact hole, to categorize the source projectile,” Warrick predicted. “Sara’s collecting the samples, just in case; but that amount of instrumental work is going to take hours.”
“What’s this ‘we’ stuff?” Nick said. “It’s going to take me all night to resolve this software problem, and you’re not even close to having the 3-D scene correlated with Catherine’s images.”
“What about David?” Catherine asked.
“Grissom’s got him working the GSRs as a first priority,” Warrick replied.
“But I’m sure if you asked, our clever Mr. Hodges would offer to work the trace metal samples with his other hand,” Nick added sarcastically. None of the night-shift CSIs were especially fond of the ass-kissing lab technician.
“What about Wendy?” Catherine said, ignoring the nonserious suggestion. “I’m pretty sure she’s cross-trained on the XRF.”
“She is—she passed her proficiencies last week,” Warrick confirmed, “but Grissom’s got her working the tissue lodged in the bullet that Doc Robbins pulled out of that mob boss’s neck, and all of those blood-splatter and trace swabs you pulled out of the cab and bed of that pickup.”
Catherine frowned. “Wait a minute, what about Archie? Why can’t he help out in here, so that we can kick one of you guys loose?”
“Archie called in sick right before shift change,” Nick replied. “We’ve called him twice—home and cell—but no answer.”
“So you’re suggesting he may not be quite as sick as he proclaimed?”
“My guess is he’s over at the residence of that gorgeous young lady he’s been telling us about, the one who doesn’t seem to be much interested in dating a computer geek, no matter how cute and lovable he might be,” Warrick offered. “I remember him saying something about her having trouble with her computer, and how he might use that as an excuse to go over to her apartment and try to get to know her better.”
“You mean better than that supposedly steady girlfriend he’s always bragging about?” Nick inquired. “Since when do geeks try to expand their horizons with women?”
Warrick shrugged noncommittally.
“Ever the optimist,” Catherine commented, shaking her head. “Do we know this new young lady’s address?”
“No, but I put in a request to patrol to keep an eye out for his car,” Nick said with a smile. “There’s nothing quite like an ornery uniform pounding on the door to put the kibosh on a blossoming relationship.”
&nb
sp; “Spoken like a man with sad but relevant experience?” Warrick smiled sympathetically.
“CSI call-outs can definitely put a damper on a guy’s love life,” Nick agreed as he looked up at Willows with a mischievous gleam in his eye. “On the other hand, not all of us—”
“Please. Don’t even think about commenting onmy love lifeor my free time,” Catherine warned.
The conference room went silent for a long moment.
“This is all going to take hours, if not days. Brass isn’t going to like this…and neither will Gris,” Warrick finally said.
Catherine and Nick nodded glumly in agreement.
“So who’s going to tell them?” Nick finally asked.
The two Level-3 CSIs stared directly at their nominal supervisor.
“Are you suggesting those very few extra dollars that occasionally get added to my paycheck make me the sacrificial messenger?”
The two slightly-lower-paid CSIs looked at each other, then both shrugged and nodded agreeably.
“Thanks, guys,” Catherine muttered, glaring at her cheerfully smiling teammates as she headed for the door.Dammit, she thought.I’m never going to have a day off again, am I?
9
“IUNDERSTAND YOU GUYS WANTEDto see me?” DEA Assistant Special Agent in Charge William Fairfax said as he stepped inside the open doorway to Gil Grissom’s gruesomely appointed office, and observed Grissom and Brass sitting around a small stainless steel examination table.
“Yes, please come in—oh, and you might want to shut the door,” Brass added as he pushed a third chair in the ASAC’s direction.
Fairfax closed the door behind him, sat down in the offered chair, took one look at the two tagged hammerless Smith & Wesson revolvers lying on the exam table, and cocked his head at the two LVPD investigators.
“Am I to assume that one of those weapons belongs to Jane?” he asked.
“At least one,” Brass replied.
“What do you mean by that?” Fairfax demanded, his eyes narrowing dangerously.
