In Extremis

by Ken Goddard

  “You mean like this?” Greg asked, holding up the large piece of photo paper, which was now visibly covered with a fine spray of light orange dots.

  “No,” Grissom said, shaking his head, “not like that at all. We’re looking forsignificant deposits of nitrates that would give us an indication of a rifle shot going in a specific direction. What you see there is almost certainly the result of a cloud of gunshot residue flying around the inside of the truck cab, and coming to rest on varying surfaces in a generally random and even manner.”

  “You mean like the seat cover I just tested?” Greg asked.

  “Yes, exactly like the seat cover…which means you’ve got one more piece of cloth left to process,” Grissom said. “Consider this a makeup class.”

  Greg sighed. “I think I’m beginning to believe in karma…it really wasn’t one of Manson’s better shows,” he said as he reached for the crude rectangle of faded, worn, and torn fabric that Grissom and Catherine had cut and pulled from the interior roof of the truck cab.

  In a series of motions that appeared far more hurried than methodical, Greg repeated the steps of the modified Greiss test, finally picked up the resulting piece of vapor-impacted filter paper, and said: “Wow, look at that.”

  “Yes, look at that, indeed,” Grissom said, staring thoughtfully at the bright burst of orange color that seemed to erupt from the lower left corner of the filter paper like a small rising sun.

  “Isn’t that—?” Greg started to say, blinking at the glowing image with his watering eyes.

  “The forward-right-hand corner of the cab roof, suggesting that a shot was fired through the upper-right-hand corner of the windshield from inside the cab,” Grissom finished. “Not where you’d expect the average psychotic drug dealer to be aiming if he was trying to hit someone standing or kneeling on the ground in front of his oncoming truck.”

  “Maybe the truck bounced at the wrong moment…”

  “Possible,” Grissom agreed. “Or we may be seeing evidence of a completely different series of events. I think we need to revisit the truck.”

  Back in the garage bay, the five members of the graveyard CSI team stood in a semicircle around the still-hoisted truck, watching attentively as Grissom hand-sprayed a large piece of chemically impregnated filter paper with a solution of 15 percent acetic acid and then carefully placed the slightly moist paper on the passenger-side floor of the cab interior.

  Then, after placing several layers of dry cheesecloth over the filter paper and adding a few plastic-coated weights to press the entire paper-cloth mass firmly against the cab floor surface, Grissom stepped away from the truck and checked his watch.

  “I think three minutes ought to do it,” he said.

  “Aren’t you going to steam it?” Greg asked. Grissom was making no effort to reach for the plugged-in steam iron sitting on the garage floor next to the opened passenger-side door of the truck.

  “No, I don’t think that’s going to be necessary,” Grissom said. “We can’t force hot acetic acid vapors through the floor, and the chemical reaction works almost as well without the heat if you give it enough time.”

  “Isn’t that sort of…uh…cheating?” the young CSI asked cautiously.

  “Yes and no,” Grissom replied with an amused shrug. “I want you to know how to use the Greiss properly; but I also want you to feel free to consider necessary modifications to the protocols. Modifications, of course, which you would only use after proper and intensive research…and my final approval. Basically, I want you to be thinking like a scientist when you work your scenes, not just collecting and processing evidence like a technician—you don’t need a protocol to function as a forensic scientist. We’re talking about attitude and approach as much as anything else. Sometimes, all you have to do is look at your problem from a different point of view.”

  “Like I should have done about an hour ago,” Catherine interrupted with a distinct edge to her voice. She was now staring at the back side of the damaged rear window with an irritated expression on her face.

  “See something interesting?” Grissom inquired, his right eyebrow rising curiously.

  “Yes, I do,” Catherine responded. “Come back here and take a look.”

  Grissom walked over and stood beside his senior CSI.

  “Oh,” he said, after staring at the rear windowpane for less than thirty seconds.

  “I was all over the bed of this damned truck,” Catherine muttered. “All I had to do was look up…and, of course, think.”

  “Unfortunately, I did precisely the same thing when I was placing the scanner-location circles,” Grissom confessed.

  “What are you two talking about?” Warrick asked.

  “I think Catherine and I just demonstrated that, every now and then, attitude and approach can actually be the source of the problem as opposed to the solution,” Grissom responded with a vaguely amused smile as he checked his watch again, “but first…”

  He walked back over to the open door of the truck, reached in, pulled out the still-moist piece of filter paper, and then held it out for all to see.

  “It looks just like the first ones I did,” Greg said. “Just a mist of falling GSRs, right? No actual pattern?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right,” Grissom said. “Go over to where Catherine is standing and tell me what you see.”

  As Greg did so, the other three CSIs looked at one another, then got up from the table and walked over to join the assembled group.

  Greg stared at the back side of the cracked pane of glass for a good minute before he said: “I’m staring at a piece of plate glass that’s been hit by…uh…lots of projectiles: a whole bunch around the left—the driver’s—side and the one over here in the lower right behind where a passenger would have been sitting.”

  “How do you know it’s plate glass as opposed to tempered glass?”

  “Tempered glass is designed to fracture into small cubic chunks when it breaks, instead of sharp and pointed shards that can be really dangerous in a vehicle accident,” Greg replied. “Come to think of it, aren’t the sideand the rear windows of automobiles all supposed to be made out of tempered glass?”

  “Yes, they are,” Nick interjected, “but it’s real easy to break a rear window in a truck when you’re using it on a farm to haul tools with long handles, and plate glass is a lot cheaper substitute. Not really a smart thing to do, but farmers tend to be pretty conservative with their money.”

  “And fortunately for us, the owner of this truck seems to have been more concerned about his wallet than his safety,” Grissom added.

  “Okay, I can tell that all the projectiles traveled from the front of the truck toward the back…hey, wait a minute—!”

  Greg stared at the multiply cracked pane for a good thirty seconds.

  “Yeah, look, you can see that the projectile that made the hole over here to the right”—he pointed at the irregular inch-sized hole in the lower right side of the windowpane—“hadto have hit the glass panel before all of the other projectiles on the left side…because that first projectile sent out all of those long radial fracture lines…and when the other projectiles hit, you can see where their radial linesstopped dead when they hit one of those first-projectile radial cracks.”

  “And what else can you tell me about that specific first-projectile hole?”

  “Well…I’m guessing you and Catherine couldn’t see that from inside the cab because the inside surface is almost completely covered with blood and splattered brain tissue?”

  “Sadly correct,” Grissom agreed, “but that’s not telling me anything about the hole…or the projectile that made it.”

  “We probably can’t tell much about angle of impact because the front windshield is pretty much destroyed,” Greg said. “I don’t think we could ever put it all back together again, in order to figure out which impact hole was made first.”

  “Probably not, but we shouldn’t need the wind-shield data anyway, because there is some
thing else we can infer from that hole. I trust you and your friends did attend the lecture on velocity of impact?”

  Greg stared at the punctured window for a long moment. Finally he said, “A relatively smaller and higher-velocity bullet produces more radial cracks—but shorter ones—than a relatively larger and slower-velocity bullet, which produces fewer butlonger cracks.”

  “Excellent.” Grissom nodded in approval.

  “Which means”—Greg leaned forward to make a closer examination of the single hole in the glass pane—“this hole was probably made by a pretty high-velocity bullet instead of by a slower one.”

  “It certainly appears that way,” Grissom agreed, “but that’s curious because…” He paused and looked over to the middle of the garage. “Warrick, can you put the 2-D overhead scan of the scene back up on the wall, showing the final position of the truck and all six shooters?

  “Will do.”

  Warrick hurried over to the table and began working his laptop. Moments later, the requested image glowed on the far garage wall.

  “Okay,” Grissom said, pulling a laser pointer out of his lab coat pocket and aiming it at the wall image, “as you can see here, we have all six shooters positioned relative to the truck’s final stopping point, which we’ll designate the twelve-o’clock position—precisely where state officer Boyington is standing with his shotgun. We also have Refuge Officer Grayson positioned way behind the truck at the seven-o’clock position with his SIG pistol, DEA agent Jackson close up and even with the left-side window of the truck at the nine-o’clock position with another SIG, state officer Mace close up with another twelve-gauge at the eleven-o’clock position, and our dear Miss Smith behind that big boulder with her Glock at the two-o’clock position.”

  “You forgot DEA agent Tallfeather, farther out, at the…oh…roughly ten-thirty position,” Sara pointed out.

  “Oh no, I didn’t forget Agent Tallfeather,” Grissom said, “because he’s the most interesting member of the team right now.”

  “You mean because he was armed with a high-powered rifle?” Nick asked. “What about Grayson, Jackson, and Smith? They all had high-velocity ammo in their pistols.”

  “Yes, they did,” Grissom agreed. “But we can account for all of Officer Grayson’s shots—and he was at the wrong angle, so that probably eliminates him as a possible source for this window shot. And the other two pistol shooters would have had to have been firing at the windshield to make this particular hole in the rear pane. But given the fact that they were all usinghollow-point ammo, it’s pretty likely that the initial impact against the windshield—or even the side window—would have slowed the mushrooming bullets down considerably before they stuck the rear window.”

  “Which basically makes them slower and bigger bullets.” Catherine nodded with a satisfied smile.

  “Yes, which leaves us with Agent Tallfeather as the most likely source of this bullet hole, and possibly the bullet that blew the subject’s head apart—except for one thing.” Grissom turned to observe Greg, who was rapidly thumbing through his scene and evidence examination notes.

  “Except for the accounting of his shots,” Greg said, looking up. “According to his statement, Agent Tallfeather fired six rifle rounds at the tires of the truck—almost immediately after Officers Grayson and Boyington fired their first shots—from the eleven-o’clock position…moved around to his right, where he fired nine rounds at the truck’s engine block…and then emptied the magazine at the driver’s-side door, because by then the subject had disappeared from view.”

  Greg checked his notes again.

  “I don’t know where the bullets went that he shot at the tires,” he went on, “but I did find six expended casings in one general location that was consistent with his reported first shooting position…nine expended casings consistent with his second position…and fifteen expended casings consistent with his third position.”

  “That doesn’t mean the bullets all went in the same direction,” Sara pointed out.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Greg said, nodding in agreement, “but I also found nine bullets, all dented and smashed at the tip, on the ground underneath the engine compartment, looking like they’d all hit something really hard, like an engine block—and there are fifteen bullet holes aligned in one continuous sweep in the driver’s-side door,” he added with a smile as he pointed over to the nearby truck. “See.”

  “Devil’s advocate,” Catherine said. “What if he already had one round in the chamber when he loaded that magazine?”

  Greg frowned. “Why would he carry an automatic rifle with one in the chamber? Wouldn’t that be against the rules?”

  Catherine chuckled.

  “You’re suggesting federal agents don’t have to follow basic rules?” Greg asked.

  “It may be a matter of using conjecture instead of the evidence at hand,” Grissom commented.

  “Wait. Hang on—the M-4 was empty when we took it from Agent Tallfeather, and we only foundthirty expended casings, not thirty-one.”

  The CSIs all looked at one another.

  Catherine finally voiced what everyone was thinking: “Another rifle at the scene, one they didn’t tell us about?”

  “When I interviewed Officer Mace,” Warrick said, “he claimed he felt a bullet whip past his head right after he fired two rounds at roughly the eleven-o’clock position and was moving over to the ten-o’clock position, where he would fire three more rounds.”

  “Which side of his head?” Grissom asked.

  Warrick quickly pulled out his field notebook. “Right side.”

  “That could have been one of Tallfeather’s bullets,” Nick pointed out. “He was behind Mace and to his right when he claims he started shooting at the truck tires.”

  “But didn’t someone say—or at least imply—that Tallfeather fired all six rounds in one burst?” Sara asked.

  “I found those six expended casings in one pretty tight group—the smallest possible containing circle was something like two feet,” Greg said. “I guess he could have been standing there firing them, one at a time, but I got the impression that all of this shooting happened and then ended pretty quickly…like in a matter of seconds.”

  “So, what do you think, Gil?” Catherine asked. “Are we on the right track?”

  “I think,” Grissom said slowly, “that Brass, Fairfax, and I need to have a serious talk.”

  16

  “…ALL OF WHICH EXPLAINSwhy we now believe there was at least one other shooter at the scene who fired at the truck with a high-powered rifle,” Grissom said as he set the green whiteboard marker down and turned to face the two men seated in his closed office.

  For very different reasons, both Captain Jim Brass and Assistant Special Agent in Charge William Fairfax looked decidedly displeased with this latest evidence briefing.

  “Did you recover that specific bullet?” Fairfax asked after a long moment of silence.

  “No, we haven’t…or, at least, not yet,” Grissom amended.

  “What do you think your chances are?”

  “Probably remote, at best,” Grissom said with a shrug. “We’ll give it a try, after the storm clears; but it’s an awfully big desert out there.”

  “Based on your descriptions, I would think it’s likely that shot came from one of Paz Lamos’s men, dug into a sniper position some distance away from the campsite, trying to protect his boss,” Fairfax offered. “Pretty damned ironic if it turns out that bastard got nailed by one of his own men. And, of course, it also explains the bullet Officer Mace said he felt whip past his head,” he added after a contemplative pause.

  “Yes, it could have been one of Paz Lamos’s men,” Brass agreed. “But during the interviews, I got the distinct impression that none of the UCs were especially concerned about watching their backs during the shooting. I’m not sure I would have felt the same way if a bullet whizzed bymy head.”

  Fairfax started to say something else, and then hesitated. It was clear t
o Grissom that Fairfax’s mind was churning furiously. The belated discovery by the CSI team that the subject in the truck had almost certainly fired his rifle only once—through the roof of the truck, and immediately after getting hit by an incoming round—was turning out to be an inconvenient fact.

  “On the other hand,” Brass went on calmly, “I also distinctly remember that every time I worked a major buy-bust with a team of DEA agents, theyalways put a protective sniper team out on the perimeter to monitor the agents making the exchange.”

  After a few more seconds of silence, Fairfax sighed deeply and then met Brass’s gaze with a sense of ease that jarred Grissom. He was a strong believer in the idea that people—cops especially—ought to look and feel guilty when they got caught lying.

  “I did assign a protective two-man SWAT team to Agent Jackson for his operations,” Fairfax conceded. “But Jackson said they were a considerable distance from the campsite—still working their way toward a good oversight spot, and very much out of position—when the shooting started.”

  “What? You didn’t think that was worth mentioning—you had four DEA agents at a questioned-shooting scene, instead of two?!” Brass demanded, his eyes glaring.

  “Jackson told me these agents were nowhere near the campsite when the shooting occurred, so I never considered them as being ‘at the shooting scene’ or a relevant part of the reconstruction,” Fairfax answered matter-of-factly.

  “Oh, come on,” Brass retorted.

  “Immediately after the shooting ended—when Jackson discovered the coke was not in truck, and he realized that Smith couldn’t make a positive ID on the body—he radioed instructions to the protection team to immediately begin searching the outer perimeter for Paz Lamos and the drugs. Given the time of night, and Lamos’s reputation for extremely violent assaults against law enforcement officers in general, I felt this was a perfectly reasonable precaution.”

  “But also something that Agent Jackson failed to mention during our interview,” Brass said, raising his voice.