In Extremis

by Ken Goddard

  “An unfortunate omission,” Fairfax said, “but not quite the same thing as falsifying a report. Agent Jackson had a lot of issues to deal with during a very short time period immediately following the shooting, not the least of which was the possibility that Paz Lamos was still alive and in the general vicinity of the campsite. All things considered, I think he handled the situation in a satisfactory manner.”

  “So your sniper team—wherever theywere actually located—didn’t fire at the subject in the truck once the shooting commenced? Is that what you’re saying?” Brass pressed.

  “That’s my understanding from Agent Jackson,” Fairfax said, nodding his head firmly. “Given the distance involved—I believe he said they were about four or five hundred yards away—I’m sure it would have been a very dangerous shot to take in the best of conditions, which hardly describes the situation these men were facing. Any one of our UCs could have been hit by an off-target round, and they were well on their way to controlling the situation anyway; so, I really do think Jacksonand the protection team made the right calls.”

  “Five hundred yards isn’t all that long of a shot for an expert marksman,” Brass said, seething.

  “Not if the weather and visibility conditions are favorable,” Fairfax agreed. “In this situation, I gather they were not.”

  “When can we expect to receive their weapons for examination?” Grissom asked.

  “I…uh, don’t see any reason why they should—”

  “Actually,” Brass interrupted, “given the still-open question as to whether or not your SWAT teamdid fire one or more shots in the direction of the campsite, I believe it’simperative that you order the immediate delivery of any firearms in their possession to our lab.”

  “But the search—,” Fairfax started to protest.

  “I don’t think it will be necessary to pull them off the ongoing search for the drugs and Paz Lamos’s men,” Brass said. “Assuming that the search is still ongoing?”

  “Yes, of course it is,” Fairfax said heatedly. “I’m not about to miss out on an opportunity to take these bastards down on account of some poor weather conditions.”

  “Then it should be a simple matter to collect their weapons and issue them new ones—from that reserve arsenal I saw stored in your helicopter—right out in the field,” Brass said. “Five minutes of paperwork and they’re back in business. Simple.”

  Fairfax hesitated.

  “Listen, I do realize this is going to undoubtedly piss them off thoroughly. But I also think it’s critical to this reconstruction that we eliminate those SWAT weapons as being the possible source ofany ballistics evidence related to the subject in the truck,” Brass went on firmly. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want the question to still be dangling in the wind during the hearing, any more than I do. And that’s likely to be an issue after our pathologist testifies as to his findings and conclusions.”

  Fairfax frowned. “I wasn’t aware that your pathologist found any actual physical evidence of a high-velocity rifle bullet hitting the body. I thought the evidence was basically circumstantial.”

  “I’m not aware of anydirect physical evidence either,” Grissom said, getting up and heading toward the door, “but knowing Doc Robbins…”

  Dr. Albert Robbins muttered something under his breath as he reached for his ever-present cane, and then hobbled over to a pair of flat-screen monitors mounted on the far wall of the pathology lab, just above a biohazard-protected computer, keyboard, and mouse pad.

  Grissom and Brass followed the annoyed pathologist at what they presumed was a safe distance.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, or my eyesight,” Robbins replied as he manipulated a rubberized mouse to bring a menu up on the left screen. “And I distinctly remember indicating in my report that there were no discernible bullet fragments in the head wound of your John Doe.”

  “I realize that, Al,” Grissom said with a vaguely apologetic smile. “I was just hoping there might be some barely discernible—or even microscopic—fragments that you hadn’t bothered to report…perhaps because you knew we wouldn’t be able to do anything with them.”

  Robbins favored Grissom with an unimpressed glare. “Is that the best you can do?” he demanded grumpily.

  “It’s been a long night,” Grissom said with a shrug.

  “Yes, it has,” the pathologist agreed as he clicked the mouse twice, and then waited as the digital X-ray appeared on the left flat screen. “Andthat is one of the reasonswhy it’s been a long night.”

  The three men stared at the crisp X-ray image of a terribly shattered human skull.

  “As you can see—for yourselves,” Robbins said with emphasis, gesturing at the vivid 3-D skull image that displayed varying bones, tissues, and depths with distinct shades of black, gray, and white, “there are no discernable metal fragments in that wound path at all. You can see the three lead pellets in the lower jaw and neck, but no bullet fragments.”

  “Is that…normal?” Brass asked, starting to look just as irritable and frustrated as Robbins now.

  “With a hollow-pointed and copper-jacketed bullet, no, that’s not what I would expect,” Robbins said. “With that kind of bullet, you can almost always find a little bit of a trail…usually small copper-jacketing fragments coming off the peeled-back and spinning edges. It doesn’t take much in the way of resistance to tear thin bits of sharp-edged copper loose. Even in that little mule deer”—Robbins manipulated the mouse again, causing a pair of deer-skeleton images to appear on the right flat screen—“you can see a couple of fragments near the exit point of the wound…andthat bullet didn’t hit bone at all.”

  “What about a hardened round?” Brass asked.

  Robbins turned to Brass. “What do you mean by ‘hardened’?”

  “I remember seeing our SWAT team out on the range shooting rifle ammunition with green tips a few months ago,” Brass replied. “When I asked the team commander about them, he said they were ‘hardened’ rounds designed to penetrate body armor and barricade materials. The idea was that you wanted the suspect to go down hard and fast if he had a weapon on a hostage.”

  “Presumably meaning he was willing to risk a lot of collateral damage among the general population—and, of course, do without the enhanced hydrostatic-shock effects of a hollow-point round—knowing he had a marksman capable of putting a bullet in the ten-ring every time. Makes sense, I suppose,” the pathologist said, nodding his head as he stared intently at the left-hand flat screen again.

  “Thank God something around here does,” Brass muttered.

  “So, yes, I’d say that a hardened high-velocity bullet such as the one you described could easily create a wound like we have here,” Robbins went on. “But then my question to you is, how would you prove it…especially if the bullet remained entirely intact after exiting the target?” he asked, turning to stare quizzically at Grissom.

  “We’d have to find the bullet, and work backwards from there,” Grissom replied, “which may not be as impossible as it sounds if…” He paused as he continued to stare at the right flat screen. “What’s this?” he finally asked, pointing to what looked like an enlarged image of an oddly shattered arm bone.

  “Something I haven’t gotten around to putting in a report yet,” Robbins responded. “Thought you might be interested to know that pathologists can make clever interpretations of fracture lines also…just like criminalists.”

  “Fracture lines in a bone?” Brass moved in closer to stare around Grissom’s shoulder at the digital X-ray image.

  “A lone bone is very much like a pane of glass in many respects,” Robbins said. “Here, you can see it better in this image.” A new image appeared on the right screen. “What we have here is a beautiful longitudinal fracture in the right ulna of our John Doe subject—initiated by the impact of a buckshot pellet at the distal end of the bone—that suddenly comes to a halt when it hits a very nicely defined compound fracture right…here.” Robbins pointed a g
loved finger at a jagged break located midway down the length of the forearm bone.

  “And this is interesting because…?” Grissom prodded.

  “It’s interesting,I think, because this particular compound fracture had to have occurred at least ten to fifteen minutes prior to the impact of that buckshot pellet…which, as I recall from your time line of the shooting, is probably a significant event. It takes at least that long for bruising of this nature”—Robbins manipulated the mouse again, and a color photo of the visibly bruised underportion of John Doe’s right forearm appeared on the screen—“to develop. There are ambient temperature and protective-clothing issues involved in the timing, of course, but the underlying process is very simple. This fellow’s heart had to be pumping pretty seriously for bruises like this to form in the area of a tissue-crushing and capillary-rupturing impact. And, if I have the shooting time line correct on this case, his heart would have stopped permanently within a very few seconds of his being hit with double-ought buck pellets from a shotgun.”

  “So, ten to fifteen minutesbefore he drove wildly into the campsite and was shot by several apparently surprised undercover officers, our John Doe had some kind of accident…?” Grissom asked.

  “Perhaps he ran into something with the truck?” Robbins suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” Grissom said. “That old pickup was thoroughly dinged and scratched, in addition to being shot full of holes; no question about it. But all of those impact damages—at least all the ones I saw—were clearly older than a few days…or even a few weeks. I saw nothing in the way of external damage to suggest a recent vehicular accident…or at least nothing violent enough to have broken his arm like that.”

  “I agree,” Brass said.

  “Well, that’s good,” Robbins said, “because it helps support my theory that John Doe fell hard against something very solid at least a couple of times right before he died.”

  “A couple of times?”

  “In addition to this pretty clear bit of evidence, I found recent minor fractures—and directly related scrapes and bruising—on both knees, both femurs, and both elbows, as well as several phalangeal dislocations on both hands. It would be difficult to accomplish all of that with one fall—not impossible, but difficult. Oh, and I’m pretty sure his nose was broken, too; but given the massive facial damage he sustained from the bullet, I really can’t prove that. Add all of that to the tears in his clothing, and the grit, dirt, and sand we found in the pockets of his clothing, and I’d say your John Doe fell down something pretty serious—like maybe a rocky cliff or even a significant portion of a mountain—very shortly before he drove off to his death.”

  “Really?” A look of pure satisfaction appeared on Brass’s face, suggesting that his gut instincts were about to be vindicated once again.

  “Sounds like he went through a pretty miserable final hour,” Grissom said absentmindedly. He, too, had a sense that the two supposedly separate shooting scenes at the Desert National Wildlife Range were starting to come together into one strangely related series of events. But the critical connecting pieces hadn’t shown themselves yet.

  “Undoubtedly true,” Robbins agreed, “but probably not as miserable as the last week or so ofthis poor critter’s life.” The pathologist used the mouse one more time to bring a pair of images up on the right screen.

  “The mule deer from the Toledano case?” Grissom’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “I was under the impressionhis life ended pretty abruptly with that bullet through his neck.”

  “As I recall, you’re always the one reminding everybody else that things are not always as they seem,” Robbins said.

  “I…have said that on more than one occasion,” Grissom agreed, “but hey, what’s that?” he asked, pointing to a dark area on the hindquarter portion of the second X-ray.

  “Something that I also found to be quite interesting,” Robbins said as he hobbled over to a nearby table and picked up a stainless steel bowl. “Take a look for yourself.”

  Grissom stared down into the bowl. “Is that the broken-off end of an arrow?”

  Dr. Al Robbins’s grizzled face broke out into a beaming smile.

  “No,” he said with the air of a man who rarely got the best of Grissom, “that is not the broken-off end of an arrow; it’s the broken-off end of a cross-bow bolt.”

  “Doesn’t look like any bolt I’ve ever seen,” Brass commented, staring over Grissom’s shoulder into the bowl.

  “That’s probably because neither of you have ever taken much interest in medieval weapons,” Robbins said with a satisfied smirk. “You’re missing out on some fascinating, albeit extremely violent and gruesome, history—most of it involving hand-to-hand combat with axes, maces, broadswords, and knives. One can only imagine what it would have been like to work as a pathologist during that era.”

  “I’d rather not,” Brass replied with a wince.

  “And in case you were wondering if we humans have improved much over the past centuries, you should know that poor little mule deer,” Robbins went on, gesturing with his head at the small sheet-covered corpse on the distant table, “spent a thoroughly horrible week or two hobbling around the Sheep Range in a great deal of pain, because some idiot shot him in the behind with a crossbow bolt.”

  Brass wandered over to the table, lifted up the sheet, and casually examined the dissected left rear leg and hip of the deer.

  Wendy Simms stopped halfway through the doorway into the pathology lab. “Should I come back later?”

  “Not if you’ve got something for us,” Grissom said, ushering her forward into the lab area as the door swung shut on its pneumatic hinges.

  “Actually, I do have something,” she said. “I finished analyzing all of those blood swabs that Catherine collected from the bed of the truck.” Wendy paused to sort through her notes. “Four of the swabs taken from the right front section of the truck bed—relative to the cab—were definitely human blood. I’m running them through CODIS now, along with a sample from John Doe.”

  “And the other, uh”—Grissom checked his note-book—“twelve samples?”

  “They were all deer…mule deer, specifically,” Wendy replied.

  “Just like the tissue sample you extracted from the bullet taken out of subject Toledano’s neck, correct?”

  “Well, yes and no,” the young DNA technician hedged. “The twelve nonhuman blood swabs from the bed of the truck were all from male mule deer—in fact, three distinct and different deer,” Wendy explained. “But the tissue in the bullet from Toledano’s autopsy was definitely from a female mule deer.”

  “Oh,” Grissom responded with a mild “okay” shrug, making some quick additions to his notebook as Brass walked back to the stainless steel table bearing the mule deer carcass, pulled aside the bloodied sheet, and lifted up one of the mule deer’s rear legs. Then he looked over at Robbins and made a “come over here” gesture with his right hand.

  “I never really cared much for biology as a class subject,” Brass said, as first Robbins and then Grissom and Wendy scrutinized the hapless creature from a new perspective, “but the one useful thing I did learn was how to definitively separate the girls from the boys.”

  Minutes later, Catherine, Warrick, Nick, Sara, and Greg looked up from their work as Grissom burst into the crime lab’s garage.

  “Shut things down here right now, secure your evidence, and pack up your scene gear. We’re leaving in ten minutes,” Grissom directed in a no-nonsense manner that matched the infuriated gleam in his eyes.

  “What’s going on?” Catherine asked, realizing far better than the others that such an emotional outburst from their generally amiable supervisor was both rare and meaningful.

  “We’ve been had,” Grissom muttered, forcing the words through seemingly clenched teeth. “Or, to be more precise,I’ve been had.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Catherine.

  “Somebody rigged the Toledano shooting scene up on the mountain to m
ake it look like a hunting accident,” Grissom explained, forcing himself to slow down, “so we’re all going back out there and do the job that I should have done properly in the first place.”

  “Out there in the storm…now?” Greg stared at Grissom incredulously, unaware that Catherine, Warrick, Nick, and Sara had all started to repack their crime scene equipment and secure their evidence.

  “Yes, Greg, we’re going out there right now,” Grissom said with a degree of calm that didn’t even begin to match the determined look in his eyes, “all of us except for you.”

  “Why not me?”

  “Because I’m sending you back to basics one more time,” Grissom responded with a brief smile.

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?” Greg asked.

  “No, you probably won’t.”

  17

  BRIGHTLY ILLUMINATED IN THE HEADLIGHTSof two CSI vehicles, four LVPD patrol cars, and one Fish & Wildlife Service Refuge truck, the churned-up and abandoned campsite-turned-shooting-scene looked even more eerie and forlorn than it had several hours earlier when a shot-up red pickup truck had been the central feature.

  Without the truck or the UCs’ vehicles and camping equipment for reference, the only recognizable elements that told the CSIs they were in the right place were the two huge boulders that had once served as isolated bathroom facilities for the UCs; the makeshift rock fire ring; and the metal stake Nick had pounded deep into the ground as a reference point for his laser scene scanner, and then forgotten to retrieve.

  As Grissom waited with visible impatience, Catherine, Warrick, Nick, Sara, Refuge Officer Shanna Lakewell, and seven LVPD uniformed officers quickly assembled themselves in a loose circle around the fire ring, which now enclosed a stack of twelve red traffic cones and two tripod-mounted rotating lasers. All thirteen men and women wore heavy waterproof boots and insulated rain gear over their varying field uniforms and jackets. It was still pitch black and raining, but the storm seemed to be subsiding.