One Perfect Shot

Chapter Five

A chunk of misshapen brass and lead lay under the old stereoscopic microscope. I’d picked up the microscope during a garage sale of surplus junk over at the high school years before. Why the microscope was no longer adequate for ninth graders to spy on the critters in swamp water, I didn’t know, but it was just what we needed at times like this.

I fiddled with the sloppy adjustment knob until I had a clear picture. “For sure a jacketed rifle bullet.” The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I realized how dumb that sounded. “As opposed to a handgun of some sort.” I looked some more. “And I can see how the forward portion is mushroomed backward.” With a pencil point, I nudged the slug this way and that under the objective. “I can’t see that it was a flat-nosed bullet. But that’s what you’re guessing, right? Tell me why.”

For a moment Bob Torrez didn’t reply, and I glanced up from the microscope.

“Just a guess.” He looked uncomfortable. “There’s a little bit that isn’t so badly deformed, like it was already yawing a little bit when it hit the glass.”

“Keyholing, they call it?”

“Yes, sir. Not a lot, but some. And the bullet does have a cannalure around it, but that don’t mean shit one way or another. Some manufacturers press crimping cannalures into just about every bullet they make, others just cannalure the bullets meant for tube feeders, where the cartridges have to sit nose to tail.”

“So tell me what we do know,” I said. “What’s this fragment weigh now?”

“Right at 163 grains.”

“That’s where you came up with the 170 figure for the original, then. It could have been 165, maybe 168.”

“Could.”

I sighed and looked at the nasty little chunk some more. “Through glass that already had plenty of age cracks in it, then through a tough part of the skull and a few inches of soft brain. And then comes to a stop. Interesting.”

“What we want is something that narrows this down,” Eduardo said. He’d commanded one of the lab stools-also a reject from the high school-and sat with boots on the bottom rung, arms folded over his gut. He’d taken his turn at the microscope, and had only a shrug to offer.

“The unusual thing is the lack of rifling marks,” Torrez said. “I don’t get it.”

I turned and gazed at him, waiting to see if he intended to elaborate. If there was something about guns and ballistics that Bobby Torrez didn’t get, I hadn’t run across it-at least until now. I looked through the microscope again. The base of the bullet was undamaged, and offered a brass palette for marks, even the most faint. For a quarter of an inch forward from the base, the brass was clean and unblemished, other than some of the straight line scuffing normally expected when a new bullet was pressed down into the shell casing during the manufacturing process, or blown back out of it when the powder ignited. I saw nothing that I would guess to be a sharp rifling cut-certainly not a mark that we could imagine was a spiral track.

Just behind the cannalure, that belt-like grove pressed into the slug’s carcass to give the brass casing something to grip, a scuff mark marred the bullet’s brass surface. Forward of that, the rough mushrooming impact damage began, more on one side than the other.

“How much would smacking through the glass upset the bullet?”

“Don’t know,” Torrez said after a pause. “If the bullet hit at an angle, we could expect a bit of deflection, slow as this was goin’. If it was startin’ to yaw, there’s just no way to predict. The entrance wound in Zipoli’s skull?” I nodded and waited. “It wasn’t regular by any means. Almost twice as long as it was wide, so that bullet was kicked over to one side pretty good.” He held out his hand, then cocked it sharply at the wrist.

“How do you know slow?”

“’Cause if it wasn’t goin’ slow, it’d fragment and be all torn up. High velocity bullets sometimes leave brass all along the wound channel, especially if they hit bone. And if it had been truckin’ right along, it would have blown the back of his skull all over the back window…and then gone on through that, too. We wouldn ‘t be lookin’ at it now.”

“What I guess I meant was how much would the bullet mushroom going through the glass? How soft is that lead up front?”

Torrez shrugged slowly. “Some, I guess. We’d have to try it.”

“Do that,” I said. Eduardo nodded silent agreement. “And we need to work on some theories about why there are no rifling marks.” I turned to the sheriff, who was keeping his own counsel, one index finger hooked over his mouth as if he needed to keep the zipper tight. “What do you think, Eduardo?”

“You know,” he said slowly, “I saw a guy once.” He stopped as if that explained everything, and both Bob and I waited patiently. “I was elk hunting up north, and there’s this big shooting range up there? Just south of Raton. We were camping there, and did some sighting in with our rifles one morning. There was this guy there trying to shoot some targets, and his rifle brass was just blowing up, you know. He’d shoot, and man…” Eduardo’s head shook in wonder. “I looked at the fired casing, and it was split open all along the neck in about five places. Just blown out. You know why?”

“I’m afraid to ask,” I said.

“He had a.300 Weatherby Magnum rifle, you know. A nice gun. And you know what he was shooting in it? He had a box of .270 Weatherby Mag ammo. At a hundred yards, he was getting a group like this.” Eduardo held his arms in a circle a yard across. “That was good enough for him.”

“An idiot,” I said. But Eduardo wasn’t reminiscing just to waste time. “So you’re saying that maybe a.27 caliber bullet skipping out the barrel of a.30 caliber gun wouldn’t be marked up much by the rifling?”

“I wouldn’t think so. I mean why would it be?” The sheriff’s deep shrug was eloquent. “We didn’t recover the bullets he was shooting, but he used up a whole box. I can’t think why they would be marked, can you?”

I looked back at our specimen. “So if this passed out a larger barrel-something larger than.308-it wouldn’t be marked. That’s what we’re saying? I have just one problem with that theory. This bullet,” and I jabbed a finger toward the microscope, “shot a really tight one shot group, Eduardo. Damn tight. Right through the middle of the grader’s windshield, and right through Larry Zipoli. One perfect shot. If that’s what the shooter was aiming at, he sure as hell didn’t have a group the size of a bushel basket.”

Eduardo nodded judiciously and shrugged. “I’m just saying…that’s one way to explain why no rifling marks.”

“I’d like to see that,” I said. “Most of the time, I wouldn’t think the wrong ammunition would even chamber in a gun.”

“That’s true only some of the time,” Bob Torrez said. “But any cartridges that share the same parent case could.” He shrugged. “A.270 is just a necked down.30–06. The ass end of the cartridge case is common to both. A.270 slips right into an ’06.” He almost smiled, hilarity for Bob Torrez. “Not vice versa, though. You can’t put an ’06 into a.270.”

“I’d like a list,” I said. “And a list of theories. I mean, there’s something here. Rifles have rifling, don’t they. That’s why they’re called rifles. Smoothbores that are actually meant to shoot jacketed rifle bullets could be counted on one hand, right?”

“I would think.”

“I want a list,” I repeated.

The sheriff looked at his watch and grimaced.

“And there are some sabots bein’ experimented with,” Torrez offered. He pronounced the word sabeau, and the French sounded odd from a guy for whom slang formed the foundation of his vocabulary. “There’s a nylon sabot that covers the bullet and pulls it out the barrel. That would give you a.25 caliber bullet comin’ out of a.30 caliber gun, or a.22 out of a.30, even. I don’t know anybody who makes one for a.30 caliber bullet out of something bigger, unless it’s something the military is workin’ on.”

“A sabot. That’s high tech, sort of. Uncommon, anyway.” I sighed. “And something to pursue, then,” I said. “Come day light, we need every set of eyes out on Highland. Right now, we have no witnesses, no definitive tracks, no diddly squat.” I stabbed a finger at the specimen under the microscope. “That’s what we have. One God damn bullet.” I looked at Bob Torrez, expecting him to offer up a simple answer that I would believe. He remained silent.