In Extremis

by Ken Goddard

  “Which is great,” the DNA technician said, “because it gave me plenty of time to set up some other tests while the MALDI was warming up.”

  “Yes, David told me about your results,” Grissom said.

  “He did?” A brief look of disappointment flashed across Wendy’s pretty face as she glanced over Grissom’s shoulder and saw Hodges at his workstation, grinning.

  “Yes, and I want you to know that I really appreciate your effort in getting the results out so quickly,” Grissom said, oblivious to the young tech’s brief emotional response. “You may have enabled us to reprioritize our resources over to another case that’s turning out to be far more consequential.”

  “Oh, well, uh…good, I’m glad I was able to help.”

  “You’ll help us a lot more if you can take a quick look at all of those grid trace evidence samples and blood swabs Catherine collected from the cab and bed of the pickup,” Grissom added. “I’m specifically interested in knowing if there’s even the slightest trace of cocaine anywhere in or on that truck…and if there’s any other blood in the truck that didn’t come from our dead subject.”

  “Sure, of course,” Wendy said, managing a reasonable facsimile of a cheerful smile. “I’ll get right on it.” She hurried out the door of the ballistics room in the direction of her DNA lab, pausing only briefly to give Hodges a dirty look.

  Bobby Dawson, a hardened veteran of the internecine relationships and conflicts that seemed to intermittently plague the LVPD crime lab, had grimly observed the entire Wendy-and-David scene without comment.

  “I’m about ready to compare the bullet from Toledano and the one I test-fired through the rifle found in that pickup,” he said calmly. “But before I do that, I want to tell you a few things about that cartridge case you found on the Sheep Range.”

  “Actually, you may want to put that Toledano bullet comparison off until sometime later,” Grissom suggested. “David said you’d already eliminated that casing as not coming from the rifle we found in the truck.”

  “Quite the town crier, isn’t he?” Bobby responded, rolling his eyes. He’d expected nothing less from the self-aggrandizing trace expert once he’d heard what happened with Wendy’s preliminary analysis results; but then, too, he was far less interested in sucking up to Grissom than either of the two younger lab techs.

  “I’m sure he was just trying to be efficient, on behalf of the lab in general,” Grissom offered, finally picking up on the not-so-subtle undertones.

  “Don’t doubt it for a minute,” Bobby said, smiling and shrugging his shoulders agreeably. “But did he tell you what I discovered about that particular cartridge?”

  “Uh, no, actually, he didn’t.”

  “It may not mean much,” Bobby went on, maintaining a professionally calm voice, “but the fact that a three-oh-eight Winchester cartridge isalmost identical to a seven-point-six-two-millimeter NATO round might have some bearing on this case.”

  “How is that?” Grissom asked, genuinely curious.

  “It’s actually a pretty old topic among firearms experts that rattles around the Internet on a pretty regular basis. The chambers of military rifles made for the NATO round are exactly one-point-six-four-five inches long, whereas the chambers of civilian rifles using the three-oh-eight Winchester round are one-point-six-three-two inches long.”

  “And this means something?”

  “It might in this case.” Bobby said. “We’re only talking about a difference of thirteen-thousandths of an inch. But if you were to fire a three-oh-eight Winchester round—especially one that had been reloaded with a different grade of gunpowder than normal—in a rifle chambered for the slightly longer seven-point-six-two NATO round, you could easily get excessive stress on the civilian brass casing, which could result in early head separation of the bullet and some interesting deformation of the cartridge.”

  “And you saw all of that on the casing I found up on the mountain?”

  “That’s correct. The reloaded and thereby upgraded three-oh-eight cartridge you found was almost certainly fired through a seven-point-six-two military rifle. And based on the ejector marks, I’m guessing a specific military sniper rifle; I’ll know more about that after I do a little more research,” Bobby explained. “In general, that would be a foolish thing for an amateur reloader to do, depending upon the age and reliability of the rifle in question. But it might actually be a clever trick for a ballistics expert to play—depending on what he or she wanted the bullet to do, of course.”

  “Are you suggesting a military sniper might have shot Toledano, accidentally or otherwise, on a federal wildlife refuge?”

  “I’m saying it’s an interesting although remote possibility,” Bobby said. “The Army testing range is right next door to the refuge, and it wouldn’t surprise me a whole lot if an exceptionally ballsy trainee—or, who knows, maybe even an instructor—happened to wander out to the Sheep Range in the middle of the night when no one was supposedly looking. It would be a nice place to practice your, uh, ambush techniques, shall we say? Get in a little illicit hunting on the side…maybe something extra to supplement the field MREs?”

  “But why go to the trouble of using a reloaded civilian round when—?” Grissom blinked in sudden understanding. “Ah.”

  “Getting caught shooting off base like that with an Army weapon would be a major no-no, regard-less of your intended target, even if informal permission had been given by your sergeant or commander,” Bobby said. “Probably find yourself walking guard duty on the Korean DMZ for the rest of your career, if there wasn’t a nice war zone available where you could be walking point. So, you really wouldn’t want to advertise your illicit activities out on the Sheep Range, whatever they might be, by using Army-issued ammo.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Grissom agreed.

  “But there could be another reason to use a specifically reloaded civilian round—one that was very practical. The shooter might have wanted this bullet to act in a very specific manner,” Bobby said, tapping his gloved finger against the now-unmushroomed projectile lying in the wad of bloodied gauze on his microscope bench.

  “Go on.”

  “I can’t say for sure right at the moment, because I’m still collecting the comparison data, but I’m guessing this bullet is a Nosler Ballistic Tip. It’s specifically designed for deep penetration and maximum stopping power—the kind of projectile you’d want to mount on a high-energy cartridge for serious big-game hunting, if you knew what you were doing. But that doesn’t make much sense in this case.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, first of all, because a reloader who knew his stuff would never use a three-oh-eight high-energy cartridge to take down a little mule deer. It would be a complete overkill…and nothing a reloader would want to talk about with his buddies. And believe me, these reloaders like nothing better than to talk about what they did with one of their hot cartridges.”

  “So you’re not expecting this particular cartridge to be the topic of any fireside chats?” Grissom queried.

  “Absolutely not,” Bobby said firmly. “Either because the load didn’t work as planned, or because it did…That deer in the morgue? Doc Robbins showed me the wound on its neck, and photos of Toledano’s wound they took before the autopsy.”

  “And?”

  “If Toledano’s death was the result of a normal hunting accident that occurred at the relatively short-range distances you and Brass described in your report, this bullet”—Bobby pointed at the peeled-open rifle bullet resting in a bed of bloody gauze next to his comparison scope—“should have either taken the guy’s head off or, at the very least, done a whole lot more damage than I saw in those photos. Something slowed this bullet down and caused it to tumble; but it wasn’t Toledano’s vest, and I really doubt it was just the throat of that deer…unless this bullet was really going slow to begin with.”

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “Maybe another silencer,” Bobby replied. “But I�
��m not talking about a half-baked rig put together by some wannabe gunsmith—like a suppressor that starts coming apart internally after the first shot, like the one Toledano had mounted on his rifle.”

  “Enrico Toledano was using a cheap silencer on his rifle? Why would he want to do something like that?”

  “Probably didn’t know enough about suppressors to realize the one he had was a piece of crap; or, at least, that would be my guess. Do you really want to let a firearms guy start talking about one of his favorite topics?”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Grissom said. “Go on.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Bobby said mischievously. “Okay. First of all, the suppressor on Toledano’s rifle was only attached to the barrel at one point—by a little bit of threading at the end of the muzzle. Any professionally made suppressor is attached to the rifle barrel attwo points. The usual method is to slip the suppressor down the barrel with some kind of snug O-ring mechanism, and then screw it into place at the end of the barrel. That gives you stable alignment all along the bullet path.”

  “Okay…,” Grissom said.

  “And there’s another thing about Toledano’s suppressor system that tells me his manufacturers or suppliers didn’t know what they were doing,” Bobby went on. “The threading on the end of his rifle barrel was machined in the wrong direction.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very much so,” Bobby said, nodding solemnly. “When the spinning bullet leaves the rifle barrel and enters the suppressor baffling, its mass and rotation put a certain degree of torque on the suppressor—only a little bit if the suppressor is properly aligned, but a great deal if it’s not. That is critical for one simple reason: if the muzzle threading is machined in a direction opposite to the spin of the bullet, the torque will tighten the suppressor onto the rifle barrel. But if the threading is machined in the same direction as the bullet spin, each successive shot loosens the suppressor.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a good thing.”

  “No, it’s not,” Bobby said, “especially if the suppressor starts wobbling out of alignment just as the next shot is fired. That’s how you get yourself a faceful of shrapnel. But that wouldn’t have happened in Toledano’s case, because his piece-of-shit suppressor would have come apart internally long before it fell off the end of his rifle.”

  “So where does this leave us?” Grissom asked, truly curious now.

  “I think it’s important to note that this bullet, the one that killed Toledano”—he pointed again at the bullet wrapped in the bloodied gauze—“has no visible damage that you’d expect to see from anything unsymmetrical or poorly aligned. If that bullet was slowed down by a suppressor, it had to have been one that was very carefully machined and crafted; like the ones the Navy SEALS or DELTA teams use.”

  “So we’re back to a military shooter again—somebody from the Army test range wandering into the refuge, and not wanting to get caught by a trophy-hunting poacher?”

  “Hey, I couldn’t even begin to answer that one,” Bobby said, opening his gloved hands out in mock surrender. “But I’ll tell you what: from a ballisticsand a hunting point of view, I think this whole ‘accidental-shooting’ theory is garbage. I don’t necessarily know why, or how, but it is.”

  “Would you be able to tell if this bullet went through a sound suppressor before it hit the deerand Toledano?”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby admitted truthfully. “I’d need to put some serious time in with the SEM to determine something like that.”

  “So, basically, you’d like to do more work on the Toledano shooting…is that what I’m hearing?”

  “Yes, sir, it is,” Bobby said, nodding.

  Grissom sighed. “This really doesn’t help in the sense of reprioritizing our resources.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “What about all those bullet and casing matches we’re going to need in order to reconstruct the truck shooting?”

  “Well, all of the shooters are pretty much in agreement as to which weapon each of them used, and the number of rounds they fired. So, presumably, the purpose of the reconstruction will be to determine their relative positions and the timing of the shots. That being the case, tentative breech and firing pin impression IDs made by just one examiner will probably tell you all you need to know at the onset; and two of us can always get together to resolve any questioned IDs. I know Catherine’s heading this way with all of the casing and hull evidence. She and I—and maybe Nick, too, if he’s free—could whip those tentatives out pretty quickly if we’re left alone for a while.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Grissom promised, looking distracted again as he headed out the door.

  Bobby Dawson followed Gil Grissom out, coming to a halt beside lab tech David Hodges, who seemed to be making a very determined effort to look busy and distracted as well.

  “How’s it going, bud?” Bobby inquired, slapping his thick hand on David’s thin shoulder.

  “Oh, uh—hey, you’re firearms,” David said, his eyes widening anxiously. “You probably just contaminated my lab coat with GSRs. Now I’m going have to change into a new one.”

  “Tell you what, sport,” Bobby said, leaning down to whisper in the now visibly nervous lab tech’s ear, “you ever try to report my findings—or Wendy’s—to Grissom or any other of the CSIs again, and I’ll personally see to it that you have to change your shorts too.”

  Grissom literally ran into Catherine in the hallway, almost knocking the box of test-fired casings and shotgun hulls out of her hand.

  “What’s the matter?” Catherine asked, staring into her supervisor’s glassy eyes. “You look…distressed…or something?”

  “I just had a ten-minute seminar on sound suppressors from Bobby,” Grissom said quietly, the better part of his mind still clearly elsewhere.

  “Really?” The look on Catherine’s face ranged somewhere between sympathy and dismay—she didn’t think she ever wanted to know that much about anything involving firearms; that was why the crime lab employed technical specialists. “Did you find it…useful?”

  “Actually, I think it was,” Grissom replied, “but now I’m more confused than I was when I went in there, and I’m not really sure I know why.”

  “That’s not very encouraging,” Catherine said, looking down at the box of test-fires in her hands with a sense of impending doom.

  “No, it’s not,” Grissom agreed. “Everything seems to be in flux with these two cases, starting with the very basic question of whether or not they’re related by a common suspect, victim, or evidence.”

  “I suppose, then,” Catherine said cautiously, “what we need is a starting point…one that we can all agree on?”

  A smile of understanding slowly slid across Grissom’s face. “You’re right. That’sprecisely what we need.” He looked around the hallway as if he couldn’t quite remember where anyone or anything was. “Where’s Nick?”

  “I, uh, think he’s still in the conference room with Warrick.”

  “Good,” Grissom said. “I think it’s about time we made better use of his talents.”

  12

  WHENGILGRISSOM ENTEREDthe conference room, he found the crime lab’s computer and audiovisual technician, Archie Johnson, sitting in front of what looked like Nick’s laptop, while Warrick watched over his shoulder.

  “What happened to Nick?” Grissom asked, looking around the room in frustration. “And what are you doing here, Archie? I thought you called in sick.”

  “Well, uh—”

  “Apparently Archie started feeling a whole lot better when he finally realized that young lady we were discussing earlier really didn’t needher computer worked on after all,” Warrick interjected. “Which meant he was off the hook, so to speak.”

  “Oh?” Grissom’s eyebrow rose curiously.

  “It seems the young woman has an even younger brother who does have a computer problem, and apparently wouldn’t mind dating a cute and lovable comp
uter geek,” Warrick added helpfully as he patted Archie on the shoulder.

  ‘Oh,” Grissom said again, only with a much different inflection.

  “Completemisunderstanding,” the computer tech said firmly, finally looking up at Grissom. “Not that I have anything whatsoever against whatever people…uh…want to do with each other,” he added hurriedly. “I was just trying to be…uh…polite and sensitive in my approach, and I guess I wasn’t—”

  “Impolite and insensitive enough?” Grissom’s eyebrow rose again.

  “Next time, try the almost-housebroken Neanderthal approach,” Warrick advised. “It actually works every now and then, with those really special women; and it’s definitely a crowd-pleaser when it doesn’t.”

  “I think we need to have a staff meeting at some point about improper absences,” Grissom remarked.

  “Sorry, Gil. Won’t happen again…but speaking of things working,” Archie said, desperate to get off the current topic, “I did manage to get Nick’s program to respond to the locator dots.”

  “Oh, really? How did you do that?”

  “You’re going to love this, Gil,” Warrick promised as he patted the computer tech’s shoulder again. “Go ahead, Archie, tell him.”

  “I…uh…got the sensor module to…recognize each one of the locator dots on the vehicle and cones, and remember their relative positioning with each other by…changing their color,” Archie said, his face now a bright shade of red.

  “Take a look,” Warrick said as he reached past Archie’s shoulder and hit one of the function keys.

  Instantly, the middle sector of the far wall lit up with a 3-D laser scan image of the scene facing the left side of the truck.

  “Hot pink?” Grissom was not quite sure what else to say.